90 Seconds Before Midnight
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It is sad how an ongoing humanitarian disaster like the Ukraine War has dragged on long enough to become stale old news even as it continues to pose the possibility of a thermonuclear war. In late January of this year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the "Doomsday Clock" to 90 seconds before midnight -- the closest humanity has ever been to Armageddon.
Americans
for the most part seem oblivious as they obsess over pocketbook
issues and Republican Party driven culture wars - or at least the
media makes it seem that way. Judging from comments on any column
that suggests peace talks regarding Ukraine, most readers of the NY
Times seem convinced that this war must be pursued until the Russians
are driven out of
all of the
Ukraine; furthermore Russian must be bled bone dry and made into a
pathetic pariah state like North Korea and hopefully Vladimir Putin
driven from power. And if any peace accord allows Putin to retain
any part of the Ukraine including the Crimea, it will be perceived by
Putin as victory - and he will soon be back for another bite of Europe.
Are we to believe that Vladimir Putin's ill-equipped demoralized army is a threat equivalent to Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht? Putin wishes that were the case. The 1930's are not the 2020's. In the 1930s fascism was seen by many as the solution to a general social breakdown. Capitalism had crashed. On the left Marxist explanations and solutions were being seriously considered by the intelligentsia. On the right Mussolini's fascism seemed to be rescuing Italy. The German version of fascism, Nazism, was alluring. Even Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh liked it. Nazi Germany was an ascendant power then, post-Soviet Russian is not.
We are all blithely assuming that the Biden Administration knows what they are doing. But it is alarming that so little attention is given to the thin ice that we are skating on. The ex-USSR's thermonuclear armed ICBM arsenal is still intact and their fleet of thermonuclear armed submarines are still out there. Does it make sense to humiliate Putin so badly that he is driven into actually deploying a tactical nuke? What would that mean? It would necessitate an equally serious response from US/NATO (read: Biden). There is general agreement that the invasion of Ukraine was an off-the-charts act of aggression – and that it went badly. How it looks to the over a hundred non aligned countries large and small is another matter. To them the US and wars are synonymous – Korea, Vietnam, Central America, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. It never ends. Of course many of them are no strangers to brutal internecine conflict, border squabbles, terrorism and civil wars.
The point is that Putin must be extricated from his blunder without triggering WW III but also not establishing a precedent of nuclear armed autocrats getting away with cross-border aggression by using us all as a hostages, the ultimate act of terrorism. But it is especially the case with the ex-Soviet Union's massive nuclear arsenal and now presumably the Peoples Republic of China. The question remains does the protection of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) still apply?
But to make matter worse President Biden is now following Donald Trump in blaming our decline in global leadership status on China and vilifying Xi Jinping. Ironically Biden is taking a lead from his loathed predecessor DJ Trump and his foolish neo-mercantilism ("Trade wars are easy to win.") and going a step further and cranking up a brand new Cold War with China. This of course is pushing them into a more defined relationship with Putin's Russia even has they don't approve of Putin's ill-advised and tragic war. Furthermore, the Biden administration believes Xi's China is on brink of imitating Putin's disastrous mistake with respect to their much coveted Taiwan.
Our most influential opinion making apparatuses seem to be fine with all of this. Only the mindless fucks on the political right (MAGA types, Marjorie Taylor Green wackos, etc.), who are knee-jerk opposed to any position the Demos takes on anything, are at all publicly critical. One must revert to rummaging through YouTube to encounter any opinions that divert from our corporate media and Washington Consensus. One has to look up Jeffery Sachs, John Meresherme or Noam Chomsky on You Tube to get any alternative opinion - or any historical context. The core of the problem with Putin's disaster is historical. It goes back to the betrayal of Mikal Gorbachev. Gorbachev was an idealistic reformer who was intent on converting the broken, autocratic socialist experiment, the Soviet Union, into a modern European style social democracy. And importantly he was promised that NATO would not expand eastward. But successive military industrial complex influenced administrations both Republican and Democratic Party did just that with Russian by 2022 almost surrounded on one entire side with nuclear armed NATO members. Putin paranoid, autocratic, nationalistic and ex- KGB believed that Ukraine would soon join. And he had been pecking away at Ukraine for years. He apparently foresaw the Ukraine eventually allowed into the EU as well admission into NATO, a total shrinkage of the Russian Federation's sphere of influence. Some experts believe the invasion could been avoided had Putin been assured that Ukraine would stay neutral and not eventually join NATO.
The real question is at what point does the Ukrainian bloodbath end? What will stop this contest between a seemingly endless supply of morale challenged Russian conscripts fed into a meat grinder vs a highly motivated but limited supply of Ukrainians? All wars eventually end. What will it take to end this one? It's crazy that that question never comes up in our saber rattling media. The media likes provocation – if it bleeds it leads: murders, violent confrontations, economic crises and especially wars where we (or our surrogates) are fighting bad guys. The media runs selling eyeballs (and now mouse clicks) to advertisers. They are unapologetic money making enterprises, ruling class billionaire owned corporations. Education and historical background is for books and college courses not for news channels and 'newspapers' (the few online versions that are left). Context implies analysis which in turn requires some ideological underpinnings. Media likes to provide news bereft of complicating nuance pretending to be objective and free of bias. But the very selection of new items themselves is steeped in subjectivity.
Daily
witnessing the Ukraine War unfold is like watching the grimmest
bloodiest days of WWII unfold in real time. Now aided by the
satellite supported US media we can sit at home eating popcorn
cheering our side and booing the bad guys. This might seem like
simply a modern version gladiatorial entertainment with tanks and
guns instead of swords and shields if it were not for the dark cloud of
a possible thermonuclear doomsday hovering overhead, a
meta-catastrophe of such a grand scale that it would pretty much end
our so-called civilization.
It would make our present slow boil of climate change catastrophe seem like the long lost days of a bygone Eden.
