Thoughts On War

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks bland and busy on their wrists,

And hope. with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop.

                    Siegfried Sassoon                     

 

Horace overhears Doris say something to Morris. He gets the message wrong when he tells it to Boris. This could either be the beginning of a B movie or the origin of World War III. 

Leaders see with jaundiced eyes and hear with muffled ears. Call it self-interest. To retain power, they can always  rattle a saber to divert the citizenry from their real needs. Rally around the flag, boys! The enemy is at the gates. They are going to take away our Bibles, our right to be wrong or our mother tongue. It must be time to roll up our sleeves and get our guns. 

War is the abject failure of diplomacy. It took our President-General Eisenhower to warn against the military-industrial complex.The only way to win a war is to prevent it from ever happening. It is the ultimate abomination, a crime against humanity. 

Let us start with NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The name alone makes no sense. Kiev is 1,300 miles away from the north Atlantic. NATO started seventy-fours years ago with a dozen signatories; it now has thirty members, ever moving east with Finland and Sweden on the verge of inclusion.

And then there is Ukraine.

Every effort should have been made to avert the carnage. The combatants showed more muscle than brains or vision. From our perspective, the issue was sovereignty and self-determination. From their POV it was the provocation of a military alliance at their border. Two ways of seeing. Neither showed much regard for the death and destruction sure to ensue. 

I submit that both parties bear responsibility for the displacement of millions, limbs lost, rapes, torture, and a mounting death toll. High-flown rhetoric and bravado belong to B-movies. Lofty words pale compared to lives lost with dried blood and mud in the mouth of a human being.

Forgotten in the calculus is the bonanza reaped by munition-makers. How many voices are we hearing who are in the pocket of defense contractors? Loudly absent is an insistence that negotiations start at once. Great minds have developed ultimate weaponry. Now greater minds need to demand a cessation of hostilities in this unconscionable and unwinnable war.  

As constituted, the world is a fragile network. Russia is, by some measures, a failed state with a lethal arsenal. Touch this membrane at any point and the whole web trembles. Any war becomes global with famine and upheaval of energy sources a consequence.

Whether this war is a version of Hitler and Churchill or the quagmire of Afghanistan remains to be seen. Regardless of which analogy holds true it should be noted that all these conflicts are a function of the sickness staining Western Civilization, namely Nationalism. No border is worth a human life.