Illogical cowards say: Czar Putin threatened to nuke us, let’s do what he wants, whatever he wants, this is safer! Logical heroes say: a terrorist threatened to nuke us, let’s arrest him!
“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”…sadi Winston Churchill to those who ephemerally appeased Hitler.
Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, more than 1,000 years ago, conquered Crimea from the Khazars who had invaded and occupied the peninsula a few generations earlier. So the Ukrainians liberated the Greeks! Dorian Greece had settled the area 17 centuries before Hence the Greek names of southern Ukraine: Melitopol (City of honey), Mariupol (city of Mary), etc…
Prince Vladimir then converted to Christianity (from his original Viking faith).
Kievan Rus was the largest state in Europe, and was so democratic, it turned into its undoing when the Mongols invaded: no coherent defense could be mounted as the Mongols picked up one Kievan principality after another, finishing with the annihilation of Kyiv in December 1240. Then Alexander Nevsky, an enthusiastic Mongol collaborator who founded the Kremlin anti-democratic and theocratic doctrine, was made Prince of Kyiv. The Mongols would return to destroy Kyiv again later, and then the Kremlin, for centuries tried all it could to destroy ever more any democratic state in and around present day Ukraine.
Thus this is an old fight: obscurantism and tyranny from Moscow against enlightenment and diversity in Kyiv.
Nowadays, though, with a small planet and nukes all over, democracy can’t afford to lose that fight, because it would be the last it would lose.
Modern tech enables tyranny to become worse than ever. We can’t have tyrant blackmail democracy with nukes. Actually tyrants should have no nukes: hated by their own populations, they have interest to wage foreign wars to justify domestic terror, as the Kremlin did, for 8 centuries.
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The attempted destruction by the Kremlin of a democracy has already lasted a quarter as long as the attempted destruction of democracy in Europe by the Kaiser and his goons in 1914-1918.
“We think now is the right time to intensify our support for Ukraine,” Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, said while on a visit to Washington in 2023. “We can’t allow this to drag on and become a kind of First World War attritional-type stalemate.”
The reason for the length of WWI was that the Kaiser and his goons were able to avoid a full Franco-British blockade in 1914-1917, as crucial goods, typically shipped from the USA, reached Germany through the “neutral” Netherlands and “neutral” Denmark. France and Britain protested in vain: they were not going to issue an ultimatum to their rambunctious, self-obsessed US child.
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When the US belatedly joined its democratic parents, France and Britain in war against the fascist Prussian invader, the blockade became effective. The German military and civilian economy collapsed: by 1918, the French explosive production was more than ten times that of Germany; and the Allied breakthrough in southern Europe deprived Germany of food…
At this point, the genocidal Kremlin tyrant has few friends: India and China informed him that he must not use nukes. So Putin has decided to boost the size of his army and weapon production, the latter rendered possible by a breaching of the blockade (say through the Caucasus mountains).
However, during a long war, tyrants can make friends, or force coups in otherwise unfriendly nations: history is replete with such examples of desperate tyrants going for broke: faced with torturous extinction, they try whatever… and sometimes they score. Putin claims to have achieved an “union” with Belarus. Well, not really, but conveniently Putin’s main opponent in Belarus died… As so many of Putin’s opponents have died recently.
The longer this war goes on, the more dangerous it gets.
And democracy, representative or not, can’t afford not to win it: should thermonuclear tyranny win, the same concept will go for broke, again and again.
Let’s not forget, as the forces of evil known as the WEF, the World Economic Forum, gather at Davos to conspire in plain sight of the entire planet, protected by 5,000 soldiers, that the WEF made Putin one of their masterpieces. Putin even became one of the architects of Davos, as the Kremlin nuclear dictator met very officially with his chairman and founder, Klaus Schwab, his evil name, to plot in plain sight.
Amazingly, so great is Putin’s propaganda control on the Western pseudo-left, pseudo-ecology, and much of the population of failed states, that many deluded souls believe that Putin, that master piece of world plutocracy, is actually an opponent of the world plutocracy.
The credulity, stupidity and venality of many on the left has been amazing consider the French and German supposedly socialist PMs around 2000 CE, making deals with the Kremlin and its agents, such as European pseudo-ecologists… How did that advance socialism, or Europe? Or on the right: consider Brexit, or the invasion of Iraq (which aimed at making fracking profitable and lift the US as the world’s fossil fuel superpower, once again…). Or consider the subprime, zero-interest, and COVID Ponzi scheme… Consider Fauci, financing the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make lethal and hyper contagious bat coroonaviruses, even more so… Biden finally fired him discreetly, and his successor’s discourse is diametrically opposed…
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One may wonder how come 51 (fifty-one) representative democracies are arming Ukraine? … if they are controlled by the world plutocracy? As I hold….
The answer is that those representative oligarchies claim to be democracies, people-powers. So world plutocracy attempted to control them, and achieved great, but not full control: appearances have to be maintained, lest mobs overrun national assemblies…
When the armed people of Ukraine showed their power by repelling 200,000 professional maniac killers of Putin, killing many in the process, the representatives of these representative democracies, who view themselves as really representing democracy, had to get along. Now they are progressively warming up to the realities of war…. When Obama let Putin invade Crimea and then the Donbas, a process was started, as when the world let Japan invade Manchuria in 1931: Japan claimed it was reconstructing China… Representative democracies condemned, 42 to 1 the Japanese army invasion. Japan, one of the League four permanent members (with France, UK, Italy) had to resign.
In retrospect, clearly, what should have been done was to arm China and blockade Japan. By the late 1930s, Japan produced only 7% of the oil it consumed. It imported the rest, with 80% coming from the U.S., mostly California, and 10% from the Dutch East Indies. The USA waited until August 1, 1941 to block the exportation of oil to Japan. By then Japan had killed millions in China and Indochina.
Arming China was done much later and through a Private Military Corporation, the Flying Tigers…
Wisdom teaches to do all of this, to make war, faster. Extending torture and temptation will be bad for all… So let the Ukrainian free Crimea again!
Patrice Ayme
The Greeks colonized Southern Ukraine 16 centuries before Prince Vladimir/Vlodimir freed Crimea from the Khazars, and two millennia before Kremlin Russia arose from being the tax collector of the Mongols:
P/S: The essence of the essay above was banned, censored, vilified and unpublished by the New York Times.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 