The Ukrainian defensive war is being conducted on a huge scale: longer than WWI and bloodier than most of our American wars combined. We don’t notice or keep score.
But they do. To keep score and award “points” (an effective system, btw), proof of kills requires Ukrainian forces to “document” hits, so we have the snuff reels of doomed, middle-aged Russian soldiers – “Orks” – in their last moments, terrified. It is distasteful, but if it furthers Ukrainian freedom, it is hard to oppose as a plan. War is distasteful.
It chills even my cynical heart. Probably half-starved and terrified, we see their faces as the drones swoop in for their aerial coup de grâce. The many dead are average white proles like me and, as the data show, their ages skew older on both sides. This is not a kiddie war.
Demographic collapse means younger breeding people are more precious. Demographic collapse is a primary reason for the war itself, as evidenced by the stealing of Ukrainian children for “adoption,” and a probable reason for the war because nobody fights for “land” anymore; this isn’t 1900. They fight for people and prestige now.
And you can’t send your breeding population into a meat grinder, so you send the older dudes who have already bred and make their kids fatherless. You make their wives widows at a time in their lives – middle age – when it is unlikely they’ll couple up again, even if there were enough men to go around, which there isn’t.
Further, in Russia, the burden – the meat grinder’s feast – is filled by minorities like the wretched, broke proles of the provinces: Buryatia, Dagestan, Bashkortostan, Yakutia in Siberia, and Krasnodar; poor and indigenous peoples. Some are sprung out of jail, and if they survive the battlefield and return to civilian life, they often remind the locals why they were in jail in the first place as they start murdering and raping. Returned servicemen, maniacs, and criminals are a Thing in Russia.
These are people who don’t matter versus the Moscow–St. Petersburg elites. Even Putin, at a staged TV confab with widows, said of the dead: “They’d just be dead of alcoholism or something else…” in Russian (untranslated by RT). Disposable lives are a hallmark of every era in Russian history, from the Tsars to the USSR to the gangster state of Rossiya.
Russian leaders are wildly generous with the little peoples’ blood in a way that wouldn’t work in a democracy, where lies are called out, lives are precious, and politicians are held accountable. That bright line between accountability and non-accountability is the essence of democracy and the difference between being born Russian or American.
You might be a lovely Russian guy, a family man, my age – 53 – caught up in this imperial madness, and in your last moments on earth you hear the low, terrifying buzz of a drone above you, very interested in you, closing in, and you think: “OH DAMN, THIS IS IT!”
You think about your lovely wife, your beautiful kids, and your dog. And that’s it. That’s your life story: bleeding out in some stupid remote field for a fight you don’t care about but needed the money for. You spun the wheel and you lost, and we watched your last moments: your terrified grimace, flailing arms, and futile panic.
The Ukrainian war and “Palestine” and Iran are identical and represent a division as stark as the old Cold War. Historian Niall Ferguson called this alliance “the axis of ill will”: Russia, the Evil Empire; China, its soon-to-be total master; Hamas; and the Mullahs, who talk to Allah and actually – no kidding – believe Allah talks to them.
All these international hooligans are aligned; they’re friends. They share intelligence, munitions, and drones, even if their alliances aren’t “deep” or intercultural but rather formed for one reason: opposition to us. We are fighting one horrible monster on three fronts.
On the other side are the democracies: USA, Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and little Somaliland (not Somalia), a plucky, sane bastion of the free West in the Horn of Africa. They get it.
And yet campus Nazis, socialists, and “students” (those who learn. Really?) weep and protest every time some Gazan whimpers and Islamist Al Jazeera amplifies their nonsense, channelled as it is to thousands of “charity” accounts out of Nigeria and Bangalore.
Among Gaza’s Islamist extremists, the rhetoric is explicit: the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews are presented as religious imperatives, with some extremist slogans extending hostility to Christians and other non-believers. “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” is one such slogan attributed to extremist Islamist movements. Likewise, calls such as “Kill the infidels wherever you find them” are used by jihadist groups to justify violence. These are extremist ideological positions – not views that can be fairly ascribed to all Gazans.
These three fights are existential, civilizational, and identical in meaning. Which side do you take? If you’ve bought your keffiyeh for the MARCH FOR INTIFADA!! this weekend, consider these countries, their systems, and the way they treat people like you: women, leftists, students, gay people, queer people, loudmouths.
If you can’t visit in real life, do some reading about life for the average Russian, Iranian, or (a self-governing statelet until Oct. 7) Gazan, and how flourishing their lives are under the system their overlords are getting them killed for. You with them? Because, dear young, stupid, pretty, braless protesters, you should know for whom you stand and shout.
Leave a Reply