Today, RFK Jr. has gotten some well-deserved and hopefully heeded headlines by warning Biden and Starmer to NOT assist Ukraine in using long range missiles to attack Russia. “Assist” and not “permit” is the operative word here. Ukraine cannot use these weapons without the hand-on help of western tech and militaries.
Putin has correctly pointed out that reconnaissance and targeting information/data entry, respectively, cannot be performed to use such weapons by Ukraine; that satellite reconnaissance from NATO satellites and missile targeting solutions, can only be done by NATO forces. Putin concludes that such active measures would mean that NATO would be crossing a Russian red line - and it is an understandable one - As were the events following the US-led “color revolution” in 2014. It is worth recalling what Russia has done in response to the existential threats it perceives in the aftermath of that folly. Calling it an “unprovoked” invasion in the Washington Post, does not make it so. Remember the “defensive” Soviet IRBM’s in Cuba in 1962? Sauce for the goose… Russia’s diplomats clearly stated that NATO membership for Ukraine is not acceptable. They acquiesced to the earlier blatant lie that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” following the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact. They warned that the SMO would occur, as a necessary response to this existential threat - an unnecessary provocation - of Ukraine joining NATO.
Since then, the US/NATO have doubled down. Every week, they re-state that Ukraine will join NATO. They have again been warned - explicitly, how such belligerency as targeting the long range missiles for Ukraine will be met. I can only hope the arrogance of the west has not resulted in total willfull blindness. Even as our "leaders’ are daily threatening their own citizens with jail and bankruptcy for mere speech, for “hurting the feelings” of various grievance groups, they are simultaneously unnecessarily jeopardizing the very existence of all civilization They are out of touch with reality, they are ignoring the stark lessons of history; they are clearly insane. There is absolutely no valid reason for this lunacy.
“Feelings” the west protects. Existence - not so much.
One has to feel for poor old RFK Jr, even if one has no confidence in many of his policy prescriptions. (Kamala asks – Policy? What’s a policy?). First, the Democrat Establishment moved heaven & earth to keep RFK Jr’s name off the presidential ballot. And now, after he threw his lot in with President Trump, that same Democrat Establishment is moving heaven & earth to keep his name on the ballot. That’s what they tell us constitutes “democracy”.
For old guys, there is an interesting comparison between today’s proxy war in the Ukraine and the long ago Cuban missile crisis. In both cases, the planet is/was very close to a severe case of Anthropogenic Global Warming, maybe with a dessert course of nuclear winter. In the 1960s, the panic in the air exceeded even such events as the Great Covid Scam. Six decades later, only crazy old coots care. If we ignore reality, will it go away?
@Gavin, oh yes I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, the great trauma of my childhood. We kids could tell the adults were scared shit, this wasn’t some childish fear they could disparage away. I thought of it when 9/11 was perpetrated, I had a six year old child, now it was MY turn to be the grownup. I think we parents then did a little TOO good a job; she and her peers barely remember 9/11.
And @civilwestman , isn’t it incredible? You read about the summer of 1914, you read about the “phony war” before WW II turned deadly—but we don’t realize we’re living one of those periods now.
In my beginning is my end: we boomers knew the Emergency Broadcast System tone would be the last sound we would ever hear.
And it was The Russians we feared! The godless Communists! Our ideological enemy!
But now?
Exactly what are we saving the world from: orthodox Christianity?
It is insane. It makes no sense. It just…can’t happen!
The most serious and yet most laughable event of the last week was the Cheneys throwing their support behind Harris, and the Democrats accepting that help. Every few decades we have a political realignment in this country, and I think the most recent one is pretty close to being complete.
Two of my earliest, foggiest memories: my parents being very, very nervous – that was the Missile Crisis, I’m sure – and then, not long thereafter, their being very upset and glued to the TV – which I do realize was the aftermath of the JFK assassination. Apart from those incidents (and the immediate aftermath of the MLK assassination), my parents were exemplars of Stoic indifference. Or perhaps they were usually really good at disguising it from their normally not so attentive children.
It is only the denial inherent in confirmation bias which allows those who didn’t live through the Cuban missile crisis to sleep at night. Those same people are completely unaware that the US had first installed Thor IRBM’s in Turkey.
Flight time of a ballistic missile from Ukraine to Moscow is 5 minutes. Unlike the US memory hole, Russians remember the past.
Did you ever see the made-for-TV movie The Missiles of October? Released in 1974. I thought, and still do, think that was very well done.
One memorable line: JFK complaining about his order to remove the missiles in Turkey as they were obsolete and an unnecessary provocation. Something like “When did I ask for those missiles to be removed? Not the first fifty times, just the last.”
(I am aware there have been subsequent movies based on the Missile Crisis but I have not seen them.)
I just looked up,when the Cuban missile crisis was. Oct 1962. So I had just turned 12. I remember that I went to a Halloween party that year dressed as a giant tomato, which seemed like, y’know,asking for it….
I have friends in the US who emigrated from the Soviet Union. They were often told the US might try a nuclear first strike decapitation attack. They were scared of the missiles in Turkey as well. To them, it was “the Turkish missile crisis.” Recall the memory of the disaster of WWII was kept very much alive in the Soviet Union at that time. I was on a tour there in 1980 with The Smithsonian Institution and, even then, I was shocked at the number and size of the memorials. Naturally, we were not told any of this.
As to 1962, I was a brand new college freshman, away from home for the first time. I remember sitting in the coin-operated phone booth in the basement of my dorm crying on the phone to my parents. I was literally terrified that the lights would go out as a signal that the war had started. As I was in Lancaster PA, not a first order target, I didn’t expect a flash of light or blast.
I have to say - given that we are all inured to living for years from crisis to crisis - that I am a bit more jaded when it comes to expecting catastrophe. Nonetheless, now in Pittsburgh, it crosses my mind I might see a flash and feel the Earth move any day, nowadays - just before the end. If our so-called leaders precipitate this, it will have been for nothing. The idea this war is for “democracy” in Ukraine is redundantly preposterous. Not only does their leadership has no such aim. Our “leadership” increasingly practices totalitarianism while calling it “Our Democracy™”. That’s is all they can export.
I was in the USSR in 1986. As you point out, the memory of WWII was kept constantly before them. It was the same in Ukraine which I visited in 2018. The WWII memorial in each little town was the main must-see. And, in East Germany, they never rebuilt the bombed outbuildings until after the wall fell.
In Leningrad, a huge German guy accosted the Intourist Guide when we were visiting some restored site. “I vass HIER!” he brayed. “ Ve deSTWOYED zis place!”
Norris did try to decentralize population to be more resilient to nuclear attack. But, you see, that would have deprived Our Junkie Betters of harvesting the vast ocean of Boomer pussy emerging from small town America.
And there is simply nothing more important than Woody Allen having somewhere to park his car – if you know what I mean.
That reminds me of visiting the Scottish Highlands. In now-deserted glens, there would be a stone cross with the names of all the men who died in WWI – hard to believe that so many men once lived in that now-silent valley.
In the bigger towns, there would be a memorial (often massive) for the many dead of WWI. The (many fewer) WWII dead were often remembered with a little plaque stuck onto the WWI memorial.
I visited the war memorial in Tomsk, Siberia – dramatically massive! – listing the names of the WWII dead and their ages, ranging from teenagers to those in their 60s. I had not realized there had been so many people in Siberia in those days.
The memorials seem to be consistent with the impact of WWII on Russia being as dramatic as that of WWI on Europe. But who will be left to build memorials after “Joe Biden’s” thermonuclear war?
And for the flip side: visiting Belgrade, I saw bombed-out buildings from when NATO bombed them in 1999. When THEY mentioned “the war” it was those bombings they were referring to.
In retrospect I can’t effing believe we got so upset about ‘Ethnic cleansing” of Muslims. We shoulda been on Milsoevich’s side.
Today on Anarchonomicon, a site I usually like, I read an antisemitic rant.or rather, an anti Holocaust rant. Who CARES about 6M Jews? 8M Chinese, millions of ethnic Russians, and 12M ethnic Germans (sez Kukak; I dispute that if she’s talking about the re-patriation) were killed in WW II. There’s no ethnic or religious group that HASN’T experienced a genocide, especially in Eastern Europe. Plus the Jews are now firmly in control of EVERYTHING. Get over it. Yes, FORGET it!
So when I read stuff .like I wrote in the preceding paragraph I hafta ask me: am I just as bad?
Well, there’s a limited amount of time allowed to us mortals. We gotta pick a side. I can’t stay mad at me.
Sometimes the Muslim Brotherhood imperial theocracy driving Muslim birthrates in Yugoslavia on one end and Nationalist-Socialist (nazi?) like Milosević both need to be shunned.
Reminds me of John’s comment to me when the current Russia-Ukraine conflict started: “Can’t they both lose?” Both corrupt. On reflection, I still tend to agree, but find myself coming closer to Russia, with Ukraine being a pawn.
The losses are most obvious in the case of the Ukraine, which has lost very large numbers of soldiers, has lost an order of magnitude more citizens voting with their feet, and has even lost its vaunted “democracy” with the Zelensky regime’s cancellation of elections.
But Russia has also lost – substantial numbers of dead soldiers, along with the economic impacts from the loss of gas sales to Europe and some disruption from sanctions in addition to the theft/freezing of its assets in Europe and USA.
Unfortunately, needless to say, we citizens of US and European nations have also lost – $billions wasted on paying Ukrainian bureaucrats’ salaries and on giving away expensive military equipment. Our economic losses are mere collateral damage in the eyes of our rulers. War – What is it Good For?
