Why should Americans care about the war in Ukraine? Part I of II
How the money the USA is spending will get us a high return on the “investment” in this war.
Photo by Stijn Swinnen on Unsplash
by framersqool:
Clayton Craddock sent a message which threw down an intellectual gauntlet on me, of staggering proportions, when he asked, 'tell me Ron... why we should care about the war?' Here is one part of a response:
Now you've exposed my own permanent conundrum about this war:
On the one hand, I simply find it rude and un-neighborly behavior for one country to invade another. This is little different from how I regarded the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Or if I'm being honest, the Black Hills, the Cherokee Nation, or the Republic of Mexico. I don't apparently have the big-picture skills to rationalize what was done to homes and families and folkways in any of those instances by adding up enhanced revenues of some form alongside them. There is a part of me that is at heart as much a pacifist as an anarchist, so sue me. The one exception to either being that when one's home is invaded, one must fight back, and that for as useless as governments tend to be in peacetime they are a tad better at organizing a war than angry mobs and citizen committees tend to be.
On the other hand, and you aren't the first to pose the question, what indeed does the American citizenry receive by way of return on these massive investments in arms sent to Ukraine? If I were to try and uphold the Official Version, how if Russia isn't stopped in Ukraine, [name a country] will certainly be next, this would come out sounding like some kind of warMed-over Domino Theory, the type of extrapolative opportunistic prophesying that was used to invade Vietnam.
In other words, I cannot answer your question.
I don't want to see Ukraine over-run by a mafia state, which is precisely what Russia is, and I cringe at any development in world affairs that encourages this 'leader of the free world' bullshit I have opposed for decades about my own country. I hate it that Joe Biden gets to get away with being pedestalized as a gun-runner, when that same lowlife motherfucker is who took my children away. I am shaken by the crimes and horrors against innocent people revealed each time a Ukrainian city or town is taken back from Russian forces, and I am just as appalled to realize daily that Americans still capitulate to having their incomes plundered and show no signs of bringing an end to this piracy.
So if you want me to pitch an arms bonanza lining the pockets of the US military-industrial complex, I'm not the right one for that job.
But if you were to ask me to ignore what is happening to Ukraine and Ukrainians because it doesn't fit my political daydreams or worldview, I would have to refuse. I pay attention because it is happening, because it is the history of my lifetime, and because no, I don't want Putin or the Russian state, or any goddamn government, to get away with it. If I were younger and could deal with passports and customs and all that crap without anxiety attacks, I might have been in a trench in Bakhmut by now.
You may notice I'm not exactly in any position to have my own opinions made policy anyway.
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
The comments on the twatter thing personify the essentially moot nature of the Our Tax Dollars thing. The tone generally taken is so typically 21C: that each one of us is somehow personally responsible for determining the outcomes in all historic events that breach our attention spans, however briefly, and that during that time we must each post comments on social media outlets indicating that we 'support' one faction's solution du jour or the other's, or else we must be duly blamed and wallow in guilt for being personally culpable for whatever it is the other faction wants its sycophants on social media outlets to disapprove of on their behalf.
Remember folks, this is the Century of Stupid. Actual (alleged0 adults cannot, apparently, withstand ever being more than three feet away from a thousand-dollar handheld supercomputer which is designed to make them instantly and permanently addicted to being told by it what they must think from one silly fashion trend to the next. Actual (alleged) adults agree to being in debt up to their eyeballs for life to possess homes and appliances and automobiles that are smarter than they are and continually transmit data about their everyday lives to tech companies using AI and 'machine learning' to carry on the lucrative business of informing them what it is they think, according to their appliances.
And as if this isn't a stupid enough way to live, while these digital junkies are straining their lives away trying to keep up with all that debt required to be told how to live by machines, another set of machines calling itself 'government' is stealing a share of that income right of their pockets in order to make interest payments to international creditors who are smarter than governments ever have been, and who realize that keeping governments in permanent debt is the most effective means of keeping everyone permanently in debt. To them.
And people stupid enough to fall for this kind of debt-enslaved life and call it 'freedom' because they get to choose where to take their vacations, somehow believe that making comments in a virtual environment where actual (alleged) adults routinely refer to linguistic expression by the verb 'to tweet' is going to magically alter the course of events in their (preferred faction's) favor?
My only solution to all this utter insanity is to choose a life requiring as little money, debt, amenities and involvement with anything resembling government as I can manage, a quest I have pursued (with mixed results) since a very young age when I began to realize just how stupidly all this is set up.
Sadly, my own approach has not caught on widely. Apparently there is something more emotionally gratifying in a life of sustained debt and continual surveillance by a plundering regime, than in one where we choose to love thy neighbor as thyself and help each other get things done together.
Government is a symptom, of a disease of mass delusion: that we require being told how to live by blundering, plundering organized-crime fronts wrapped in flags. Until a cure is found for that disease, what one government does to another is not any responsibility of mine to answer for.
What is happening to innocent people in Ukraine does hurt my soul, and I do want it to stop.
So what? War is just one form of the disease of governments and their very existence, and I personally have not found a way to stop that. I finally recognized that doing this is not my personal responsibility, nor is any other episode in world affairs.
But I choose to stay as informed as I can manage about this war, for my own reasons.
The scariest thing of all is recognizing every day in how many of its historic ways and means the Russian empire is identical to the American one, and how little historic knowledge Americans bother to have about how their own country came into existence, and has expanded its powers ever since over conquered and colonized peoples.
And yes, 'conundrum' is the word for it.
Unlike those who call speech 'tweeting', I make no claim to having any solution to any of it.
But simply ignoring it on grounds of implanted factional pseudo-principles does not seem to be a very viable option either: my country has stumbled into a circumstance where its most regime-expansionist factions in its politics have now decided that the USA being a gun-running superpower is back in vogue again.
That alone means something, and whatever that is might come to be pointed at me.
In a society where already almost everyone tolerates having their livelihoods monitored and plundered by a regime bureaucracy for life, the questions of what else that regime might come to point at me, and how little I can expect anyone else to stand up to it besides 'tweeting' about it, do matter to me.