No Time

We have to end this war—this war is killing Ukrainians and this war is bleeding humanity out.

“In the very likely event that the GOP takes power, through deceit and criminality, we’ll probably be doomed, because of climate denialism alone, not to speak of their craven subservience to private power.”

“So, those are the games we’re playing with the lives of Ukrainians, Asians, and Africans, the future of civilization, in order to weaken Russia, to make sure that they suffer enough.”

“Forget the Global South. If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they’d think we were all totally insane. And they’d be right.”

“So it’s not just that this is moral imbecility and it’s not just that this is theft—this is also suicidal and crazy and insane when it comes to Ukrainian interests.”

The war in Ukraine threatens to kill us all—it’s imperative that we stop blocking diplomacy and it’s imperative that we start doing our very best to end the war as soon as humanly possible.

I just want to use this piece to look at (1) the horrors of the war, (2) the moral imbecility of prolonging the war, (3) the theft that the war represents, and (4) the suicidality of hardliners who want to prolong the war.

The Horrors

This war is destroying Ukraine’s economy and Ukraine’s infrastructure and Ukraine’s environment. But the worst horror is the harrowing loss of Ukrainian life—I took these notes on an 18 June 2022 NYT piece:

• “A little boy blown up by a mine at the beach. A young mother shot in the forehead. A retired teacher killed in her home. Soldiers killing and dying every day by the hundreds. Older people and young people and everyone in between.”

• “A war can be measured by many metrics. Territory won or lost. Geopolitical influence increased or diminished. Treasure acquired or resources depleted.”

• “But for the people suffering under the shelling, who hear the whistling of incoming missiles, the crack of gunfire on the streets and the wails of loss out of shattered windows, the death toll is the most telling account of a war.”

• “For many Ukrainians facing Russia’s invasion, there is hope that the daily battles can be won: A soldier may beat back his enemies. A rescuer might miraculously pull a survivor from rubble. A doctor could save a life.”

• “But in one line of work, also deeply affected by this war, grief seems like the only sure end: the handling of the dead.”

• “From gravediggers to embalmers, funeral directors to coroners, these workers carry deep psychic wounds of war—and have few others who can relate to them.”

• “‘Nowadays, I feel numb,’ said Antoniy, a morgue worker in Lviv, Ukraine. ‘Even when someone is telling me a joke that I know is funny, I can’t laugh. My emotions are too numbed.’”

• “So many people have been killed in the past 115 days—and so many bodies buried in mass graves by Russian forces—that international organizations the West has relied on for an impartial accounting acknowledge that their tallies fall woefully short.”

• “The overwhelming majority of the dead were civilians, shot in their cars as they tried to escape, in their homes and gardens as they dared to venture outside, usually just to fetch bread or water. Scores were executed in yards and on the street, or in cellars where they had been detained.”

• “This was Bucha. A pretty northern suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, with weekend cottages and new apartment complexes set among fir-tree forests, it emerged as a haunting ground zero of Russian atrocities.”

• “To be from Mariupol these days is to be consumed with death. More than a month after Russian forces took full control of the Ukrainian city, the dead are still being buried.”

• “‘In our city, there are a lot of mass graves, a lot of spontaneous graves, and some bodies are still in the street,’ the city’s mayor, Vadym Boichenko, said this past week at a briefing in Kyiv.”

• “They are being taken to morgues, landfills and mass graves, in an ‘endless caravan of death,’ according to Mr. Boichenko’s adviser, Petro Andryushchenko.”

• “Mr. Andryushchenko said that officials were finding 50 to 100 bodies beneath every collapsed building.”

• “Among the many innocent victims of the nearly four-month-old war, perhaps the most innocent are the children.”

• “On average, nearly three children have been killed in Ukraine every day since the war began. The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office reported on Friday that some 322 children had died during the war.”

• “They include a 6-year old Ukrainian boy who was sitting on a swing on a playground in Lysychansk on Monday afternoon when shrapnel tore through his body.”

• “Through tears, a neighbor in that eastern town described to local news outlets how he had run to the child after hearing an explosion. When he arrived, he realized that it was too late to save the boy’s life. He made a cross, and the child was buried that day.”

• “They died as thousands of others have died in Ukraine, from the spray of metallic shards that burst from an artillery shell. When it hit, Tetiana Perebyinis, 43, and her two children, Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9, along with a church volunteer who had been helping the family flee from fighting, were only a dozen or so yards away. They didn’t stand a chance.”

• “All four slumped to the pavement, dead or unconscious and dying. The family dog, also hit and wounded, yelped in terror. Blood splattered on the face of the church volunteer, Anatoly Berezhnyi, 26. But the scene of the bodies, lying motionless by a bridge they had crossed seeking safety, was eerily calm.”

We have to end this horrifying war as soon as we possibly can—we have to stop blocking diplomacy and start facilitating diplomacy.

Moral Imbecility

US democracy might very well collapse. And this war is driving food prices and oil prices in a way that might give the GOP power in the elections ahead—my friend wrote this to me about what giving the GOP power would mean for the world:

In the very likely event that the GOP takes power, through deceit and criminality, we’ll probably be doomed, because of climate denialism alone, not to speak of their craven subservience to private power.

Those who say you are being hysterical are not a new phenomenon. I’m old enough to remember the frightening spectacle of Hitler worshippers. Much the same with Trump worshippers, though Trump worshippers are psychologically more interesting. Hitler was not just an empty-headed goon with one idea in his mind: Me. And he actually did things for the German people, not just screw them (apart from the very privileged).

And Chomsky has an excellent new interview:

• “Chomsky: US Is Playing With the Future of Civilization in Order to Weaken Russia” (16 June 2022)

I took these notes on the 16 June 2022 interview:

• “In 1997, Clinton invited the so-called Visegrad countries—Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania—to join NATO.”

• “The Russians didn’t like it but didn’t make much of a fuss.”

• “Then the Baltic nations joined, again the same thing.”

• “In 2008, the second Bush, who was quite different from the first, invited Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.”

• “Every U.S. diplomat understood very well that Georgia and Ukraine were red lines for Russia. They’ll tolerate the expansion elsewhere, but these are in their geostrategic heartland and they’re not going to tolerate expansion there.”

• “the Maidan uprising took place in 2014, expelling the pro-Russian president and Ukraine moved toward the West”

• “From 2014, the U.S. and NATO began to pour arms into Ukraine—advanced weapons, military training, joint military exercises, moves to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command.”

• “There’s no secret about this.”

• “It was quite open.”

• “Recently, the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, bragged about it.”

• “He said: This is what we were doing since 2014.”

• “Well, of course, this is very consciously, highly provocative.”

• “They knew that they were encroaching on what every Russian leader regarded as an intolerable move.”

• “France and Germany vetoed it in 2008, but under U.S. pressure, it was kept on the agenda.”

• “And NATO, meaning the United States, moved to accelerate the de facto integration of Ukraine into the NATO military command.”

• “In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected with an overwhelming majority—I think about 70% of the vote—on a peace platform, a plan to implement peace with Eastern Ukraine and Russia, to settle the problem.”

• “He began to move forward on it and, in fact, tried to go to the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what’s called the Minsk II agreement.”

• “It would have meant a kind of federalization of Ukraine with a degree of autonomy for the Donbas, which is what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium.”

• “He was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort.”

• “Well, he’s a courageous man. He could have gone forward if he had had any backing from the United States.”

• “The U.S. refused. No backing, nothing, which meant he was left to hang out to dry and had to back off.”

• “The U.S. was intent on this policy of integrating Ukraine step by step into the NATO military command.”

• “That accelerated further when President Biden was elected.”

• “In September 2021, you could read it on the White House website. It wasn’t reported but, of course, the Russians knew it. Biden announced a program, a joint statement to accelerate the process of military training, military exercises, more weapons as part of what his administration called an ‘enhanced program’ of preparation for NATO membership.”

• “It accelerated further in November. This was all before the invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed what was called a charter, which essentially formalized and extended this arrangement.”

• “A spokesman for the State Department conceded that before the invasion, the U.S. refused to discuss any Russian security concerns.”

• “All of this is part of the background.”

• “On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion.”

• “These serious provocations provide no justification for it.”

• “If Putin had been a statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with Europe, to take steps toward a European common home.”

• “The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. This goes way back in Cold War history to French President De Gaulle’s initiatives to establish an independent Europe.”

• “had there been any statesmen within Putin’s narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron’s initiatives and experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe and avert the crisis”

• “Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from the Russian point of view, was total imbecility.”

• “Apart from the criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep into the pocket of the United States.”

• “In fact, it is even inducing Sweden and Finland to join NATO—the worst possible outcome from the Russian point of view, quite apart from the criminality of the invasion, and the very serious losses that Russia is suffering because of that.”

• “So, criminality and stupidity on the Kremlin side, severe provocation on the U.S. side. That’s the background that has led to this.”

• “Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.”

• “There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy.”

• “Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility.”

• “The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence.”

• “Those are the options.”

• “Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It’s explicit. We have to keep going to hurt Russia.”

• “You can read columns in the New York Times, the London Financial Times, all over Europe. A common refrain is: we’ve got to make sure that Russia suffers. It doesn’t matter what happens to Ukraine or anyone else.”

• “Of course, this gamble assumes that if Putin is pushed to the limit, with no escape, forced to admit defeat, he’ll accept that and not use the weapons he has to devastate Ukraine.”

• “There are a lot of things that Russia hasn’t done. Western analysts are rather surprised by it. Namely, they’ve not attacked the supply lines from Poland that are pouring weapons into Ukraine.”

• “They certainly could do it. That would very soon bring them into direct confrontation with NATO, meaning the U.S.”

• “Where it goes from there, you can guess. Anyone who’s ever looked at war games knows where it’ll go—up the escalatory ladder toward terminal nuclear war.”

• “So, those are the games we’re playing with the lives of Ukrainians, Asians, and Africans, the future of civilization, in order to weaken Russia, to make sure that they suffer enough.”

• “Well, if you want to play that game, be honest about it. There’s no moral basis for it.”

• “In fact, it’s morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on a high horse about how we’re upholding principle are moral imbeciles when you think about what’s involved.”

So the stakes couldn’t be higher—this senseless and insane and horrifying war might bring us all down.

Theft

I took these notes on Chomsky’s comments—in the 16 June 2022 interview—about a remarkable 16 April 1953 speech that President Eisenhower gave:

• “You should read it and you’ll see why it’s interesting. It’s the best speech he ever made.”

• “This was 1953 when he was just taking office.”

• “Basically, what he pointed out was that militarization was a tremendous attack on our own society. He—or whoever wrote the speech—put it pretty eloquently.”

• “One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals.”

• “Every time we’re building up our military budget, we’re attacking ourselves.”

• “He spelled it out in some detail, calling for a decline in the military budget.”

• “He had a pretty awful record himself, but in this respect he was right on target.”

• “And those words should be emblazoned in everyone’s memory.”

• “Recently, in fact, Biden proposed a huge military budget.”

• “Congress expanded it even beyond his wishes, which represents a major attack on our society, exactly as Eisenhower explained so many years ago.”

• “The excuse: the claim that we have to defend ourselves from this paper tiger, so militarily incompetent it can’t move a couple of miles beyond its border without collapse.”

• “So, with a monstrous military budget, we have to severely harm ourselves and endanger the world, wasting enormous resources that will be necessary if we’re going to deal with the severe existential crises we face.”

• “Meanwhile, we pour taxpayer funds into the pockets of the fossil-fuel producers so that they can continue to destroy the world as quickly as possible.”

• “That’s what we’re witnessing with the vast expansion of both fossil-fuel production and military expenditures.”

• “There are people who are happy about this. Go to the executive offices of Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, they’re ecstatic. It’s a bonanza for them.”

• “They’re even being given credit for it. Now, they’re being lauded for saving civilization by destroying the possibility for life on Earth.”

• “Forget the Global South. If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they’d think we were all totally insane. And they’d be right.”

Everyone should read the full text of the remarkable 1953 speech—here’s an excerpt:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Humanity is indeed “hanging from a cross of iron”. There’s not much time to act because we can’t afford—in 2022 in the era of potentially terminal ecological collapse—to waste precious and urgently needed and desperately needed resources on senseless destruction.

Suicidal Hardliners

There are people who think that dragging this war out will somehow serve Ukrainian interests—I think that that’s insane because the more Russia sinks its hooks into Ukrainian territory the harder it’ll be to remove those Russian hooks.

I asked my friend about these hardliners who apparently think that dragging out the war—with all of the death and destruction that that entails—will somehow result in a good outcome for Ukraine. My friend responded as follows and I added a hyperlink to their response:

They won’t be the first hardliners to destroy their own country, which seems to be what is happening. They’re being encouraged by hardliners here, like the Atlantic Council and lots of posturers, many on the left.

It’s important to recognize just how well Russia is doing in this war—here’s an excerpt from an 8 June 2022 NYT piece:

The nature of the fight has changed for the Ukrainians from up-close urban fighting and hit-and-run attacks on Russian armored columns around Kyiv, at which they excelled, to long-distance artillery battles and airstrikes on the eastern front, where Russia’s superior firepower gives it the upper hand.

So it’s not just that this is moral imbecility and it’s not just that this is theft—this is also suicidal and crazy and insane when it comes to Ukrainian interests.