Sorry for the following somewhat pessimistic essay. Advice: Force a smile on your face before you read :)
The numbers, if correct, are staggering. Young Russians and Ukrainians of all ages have died in the thousands because Putin decided to invade Ukraine. And back home in Russia, the population, if one can judge by interviews of people in the street, has little choice but to accept the government’s word—as promulgated by the Press—that Ukraine posed a threat to Russia because of Nazis. I might have missed something, but I don’t remember Ukrainian war games or military buildups along the Russian border though I do remember the Russian takeover of Crimea and the on-and-off skirmishes in the region that have occurred over the past eight years. And I certainly remember enough geography to note that eastern Ukraine has valuable mineral resources.
So, people are dying because…That’s just it. What’s the “because”; what’s the cause?
Does Putin covet those resources once controlled by the Soviet Union that now lie in the hands of allegedly corrupt companies like Burisma and allegedly corrupt prosecutors accused of shielding them? Are those Russian soldiers’ lives spent to “reclaim” a territory that has ties to Russia but that has been “independent” since the fall of the Soviet Union? Have the people of independent Ukraine, not Soviet Ukraine and not the Russian enclave in the Crimea, shown any overt desire to rejoin a newly reconstituted Soviet Union? Makes one think that Ukrainians weren’t having fun behind the now torn Iron Curtain. Makes one think that whatever the level of corruption displayed by recent Ukrainian administrations, that Ukrainians as a whole were relatively happy calling themselves “Ukrainians,” and not happy to be called “Russians.”
Our species’ history is peppered with mad men and bad men who have caused not just a death, but many deaths, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and in the instances of the two world wars, millions of deaths. And for what? Where are those mad-bad men both ancient and modern? Dead of course. And the world in general did not mourn their passing, as it will probably not mourn Putin’s passing.
In the meanwhile, all those Russian families who lost loved ones in an unnecessary conflict will mourn the losses they have personally suffered while their docile and unaware fellow citizens with no apparent skin in the game will continue to parrot the words of TV anchors and pundits and continue to hate the “enemies of the state,” including not only the Ukrainians, but also the NATO countries supplying Ukraine with weapons for their defense.
Are the Ukrainians without blemish? I don’t know. Like those Russian civilians, I have been fed some propaganda, I’m sure, but I have attempted to ferret out some truth by visiting different newspapers and websites for related stories. If the Ukrainians do bear some blame—for example, for including the Crimea as part of their independent nation—do they deserve the wholesale destruction, the rapes, tortures, and deaths imposed by Russian soldiers? Do those tales of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers that are demonstrable through bound and executed civilians lying in the street and through intercepted telephone calls between Russian soldiers and their wives, parents, and grandparents make the Russians different from the savage Nazis they claim to detest enough to risk limb and life?
And in the West, are we free from mad-bad men? Particularly in the United States, where we see children killing other children, attacks on police, threats against political opponents, and drug cartels pushing fentanyl that seems to have killed more than 100,000 Americans, have we, like the Germans of the 1930s, allowed indifference to reign unless we are personally affected? Do we see but care little about today’s vitriolic adults that foreshadow the next generation’s Caligula, Timur, Hitler, or Putin?
The reality of our times is no different from the reality of all those other times when angry and hateful men sent many to their deaths. We might wish it were not so, but every generation’s mad-bad men repeat the evil. Somewhere today, tomorrow’s evil is festering. The percentage of people who exemplify mad-bad men might not differ now from that same proportion in the past, but the absolute numbers tell a different tale. Today’s 7.8 billion people far outnumber the populations of one- or two-millennia ago.
If you look at estimates for world population over the past two millennia, you will see a rise in numbers except for the two centuries between 1200 and 1400. What could have caused a decline in humans? Was it the Black Death of the 1340s exacerbated by Timur’s cruel devastation in the region east of modern Ukraine that included the Crimea? Here’s what J. J. Saunders writes about Tamerlane:
“Timur’s kingdom vanished with his life, and his imperialism was imbued with no purpose other than the agglomeration of sheer power built on the corpses of millions. Till the advent of Hitler, Timur stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism” (174). *
Is Putin Timur reborn? Whatever its truth, the running estimate of Timur’s conquests is 17 million dead. They died in a region that includes modern Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, southern Russia (the Crimea), Syria, and India. Seventeen million people made up at that time about 5% of world population. So, how can I compare Timur and Putin whose recent invasion appears to have cost lives numbering only in the tens of thousands?
Remember the threats Putin made at the outset of the invasion? You know, the nuclear threats repeated by his minions in the media who called for the destruction of eastern United States and all of Great Britain? Five percent of the world population would pale by comparison in a nuclear exchange. And that exchange would, to the surprise of those Russian pundits, include Russians under the policy of mutually assured destruction. The soulless call for the nuking of the West by mindless media types indicates that mad-bad men still exist—and they will continue to exist.
If you listened and smiled as I advised at the outset, you probably find yourself frowning now. I apologize for that. The foregoing makes a lengthy restatement of succinct advice written by A. E. Housman in “Terence This Is Stupid Stuff”:
Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good. **
With this generation’s and next generation’s mad-bad men always a threat, it might be wise to remember Housman’s lines and my own advice: What you anticipate is rarely a problem. Had NATO and other Ukraine-friendly countries anticipated the actual invasion of February, 2022, their preparations might have saved thousands of lives—both Russian and Ukrainian. Had the Ukrainians not returned the Soviet nukes to the Russians after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the threat of their use might have warded off the invasion and Russian threats to use nuclear weapons.
Train for ill and not for good because the ill, if it has not already surfaced, will surface. You do, in fact have skin in the game because it is literally your skin that’s threatened by soulless men seeking power.
*The History of the Mongol Conquests. 1971. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
**1896
The numbers, if correct, are staggering. Young Russians and Ukrainians of all ages have died in the thousands because Putin decided to invade Ukraine. And back home in Russia, the population, if one can judge by interviews of people in the street, has little choice but to accept the government’s word—as promulgated by the Press—that Ukraine posed a threat to Russia because of Nazis. I might have missed something, but I don’t remember Ukrainian war games or military buildups along the Russian border though I do remember the Russian takeover of Crimea and the on-and-off skirmishes in the region that have occurred over the past eight years. And I certainly remember enough geography to note that eastern Ukraine has valuable mineral resources.
So, people are dying because…That’s just it. What’s the “because”; what’s the cause?
Does Putin covet those resources once controlled by the Soviet Union that now lie in the hands of allegedly corrupt companies like Burisma and allegedly corrupt prosecutors accused of shielding them? Are those Russian soldiers’ lives spent to “reclaim” a territory that has ties to Russia but that has been “independent” since the fall of the Soviet Union? Have the people of independent Ukraine, not Soviet Ukraine and not the Russian enclave in the Crimea, shown any overt desire to rejoin a newly reconstituted Soviet Union? Makes one think that Ukrainians weren’t having fun behind the now torn Iron Curtain. Makes one think that whatever the level of corruption displayed by recent Ukrainian administrations, that Ukrainians as a whole were relatively happy calling themselves “Ukrainians,” and not happy to be called “Russians.”
Our species’ history is peppered with mad men and bad men who have caused not just a death, but many deaths, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and in the instances of the two world wars, millions of deaths. And for what? Where are those mad-bad men both ancient and modern? Dead of course. And the world in general did not mourn their passing, as it will probably not mourn Putin’s passing.
In the meanwhile, all those Russian families who lost loved ones in an unnecessary conflict will mourn the losses they have personally suffered while their docile and unaware fellow citizens with no apparent skin in the game will continue to parrot the words of TV anchors and pundits and continue to hate the “enemies of the state,” including not only the Ukrainians, but also the NATO countries supplying Ukraine with weapons for their defense.
Are the Ukrainians without blemish? I don’t know. Like those Russian civilians, I have been fed some propaganda, I’m sure, but I have attempted to ferret out some truth by visiting different newspapers and websites for related stories. If the Ukrainians do bear some blame—for example, for including the Crimea as part of their independent nation—do they deserve the wholesale destruction, the rapes, tortures, and deaths imposed by Russian soldiers? Do those tales of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers that are demonstrable through bound and executed civilians lying in the street and through intercepted telephone calls between Russian soldiers and their wives, parents, and grandparents make the Russians different from the savage Nazis they claim to detest enough to risk limb and life?
And in the West, are we free from mad-bad men? Particularly in the United States, where we see children killing other children, attacks on police, threats against political opponents, and drug cartels pushing fentanyl that seems to have killed more than 100,000 Americans, have we, like the Germans of the 1930s, allowed indifference to reign unless we are personally affected? Do we see but care little about today’s vitriolic adults that foreshadow the next generation’s Caligula, Timur, Hitler, or Putin?
The reality of our times is no different from the reality of all those other times when angry and hateful men sent many to their deaths. We might wish it were not so, but every generation’s mad-bad men repeat the evil. Somewhere today, tomorrow’s evil is festering. The percentage of people who exemplify mad-bad men might not differ now from that same proportion in the past, but the absolute numbers tell a different tale. Today’s 7.8 billion people far outnumber the populations of one- or two-millennia ago.
If you look at estimates for world population over the past two millennia, you will see a rise in numbers except for the two centuries between 1200 and 1400. What could have caused a decline in humans? Was it the Black Death of the 1340s exacerbated by Timur’s cruel devastation in the region east of modern Ukraine that included the Crimea? Here’s what J. J. Saunders writes about Tamerlane:
“Timur’s kingdom vanished with his life, and his imperialism was imbued with no purpose other than the agglomeration of sheer power built on the corpses of millions. Till the advent of Hitler, Timur stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism” (174). *
Is Putin Timur reborn? Whatever its truth, the running estimate of Timur’s conquests is 17 million dead. They died in a region that includes modern Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, southern Russia (the Crimea), Syria, and India. Seventeen million people made up at that time about 5% of world population. So, how can I compare Timur and Putin whose recent invasion appears to have cost lives numbering only in the tens of thousands?
Remember the threats Putin made at the outset of the invasion? You know, the nuclear threats repeated by his minions in the media who called for the destruction of eastern United States and all of Great Britain? Five percent of the world population would pale by comparison in a nuclear exchange. And that exchange would, to the surprise of those Russian pundits, include Russians under the policy of mutually assured destruction. The soulless call for the nuking of the West by mindless media types indicates that mad-bad men still exist—and they will continue to exist.
If you listened and smiled as I advised at the outset, you probably find yourself frowning now. I apologize for that. The foregoing makes a lengthy restatement of succinct advice written by A. E. Housman in “Terence This Is Stupid Stuff”:
Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good. **
With this generation’s and next generation’s mad-bad men always a threat, it might be wise to remember Housman’s lines and my own advice: What you anticipate is rarely a problem. Had NATO and other Ukraine-friendly countries anticipated the actual invasion of February, 2022, their preparations might have saved thousands of lives—both Russian and Ukrainian. Had the Ukrainians not returned the Soviet nukes to the Russians after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the threat of their use might have warded off the invasion and Russian threats to use nuclear weapons.
Train for ill and not for good because the ill, if it has not already surfaced, will surface. You do, in fact have skin in the game because it is literally your skin that’s threatened by soulless men seeking power.
*The History of the Mongol Conquests. 1971. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
**1896
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