Ah, war.
Vladimir Putin is threatening with over 150,000 forward deployed troops and armament, an invasion of Ukraine with full backing from Fox News. For anyone not paying attention, this has to sound like a terrible joke. But no, Tucker Carlson and his ilk truly are now siding with Moscow in the growing tensions and threat of war.
Can you imagine if Trump had been successful in stealing the 2020 election and were back in the White House now how this current scenario would be playing out? The U.S. administration would be cheering on Putin to walk in and take over Ukraine, at the least.
With Trump in the White House here, Putin would be free to stick it to NATO and roll his tanks into Ukraine for what would most certainly would have been a horrible massacre of tens of thousands of innocents.
Of course, it could still happen. But the likelihood is a fraction of what it would have been with a different U.S. president right now.
What is mostly overlooked at the prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine now is its most obvious consequence, its human toll.
Americans now have very little experience with war. With the end of Vietnam came an end to the U.S. draft, a deft move by the U.S. war industry proponents to remove the general public from any intimate, sensuous involvement with the horrible business of war that has worked for the last 50 years.
Those who die in wars in the subsequent period have been amazingly detached from the American public consciousness. In this intervening period, all American war participants have gone voluntarily, so to speak, and without any domestic outrage against any war, even the longest in American history that only most recently ended in Afghanistan, the cost of wars on domestic populations, for example, has been by and large overlooked completely.
In Iraq, for example, the loss of life due to the unprovoked U.S. invasion in 2004 was well over half a million civilians, according to Oxfam, a British-based confederation of over 21 non-profit organizations, but with this almost completely covered up here, who cares?
How ironic there was more outrage in the U.S. for the long-overdue decision by the Biden administration to finally end that horrible war than to continue it indefinitely even further. The media narrative in the U.S. continues to be that the U.S. end of that war, involving an airlift of over 120,000 persons from Kabul, was chaotic and ill-advised.
Yet, it was the most amazing operation of its kind on record, It was going almost flawlessly until one, and only one, terrorist attack killed 100 people or more, and that unleashed the massive assault of criticisms that continues.
Obviously, this unfair characterization of the pullout was encouraged by the massive war profiteer industry in the U.S.
But now, America is having to take a look at what another major war initiative may look like, albeit remaining emotionally detached with assurances that no U.S. lives will be placed in harm’s way if the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually occurs.
No American lives, but tens of thousands of human lives of innocent Urkraines.
This prospective Russian invasion has to be viewed with sheer horror, and if it is not, then the emotional life of American citizens will be exposed as horrendously damaged.
The Russian general population will most certainly be outraged far more than we in the U.S. despite the fact the invasion will be the responsibility of its own murderous tyrant.
But such moments are exemplary of the of the incredibly insensitive factors that go into decisions to go to the mass slaughters we call wars. Some wars, of course, are required to suppress pure evil, such as the U.S. civil war and the need to stop Hitler in World War II.
Americans have been remarkably courageous in their efforts to defeat the genocidal evils of slavery and racial discrimination. But there is nothing in the threats of war currently that reflect that in the slightest.
Yet the bloody horrors of war stand at our doorstep nonetheless.
