Ukraine

Oh the humanity:

Per the Royals, Harry saw "the red mist" when William shoved him onto the doggie bowl;

Per the Ukraine: "You are a 22-year-old Ukrainian who has just been handed a Kalashnikov, four magazines of thirty rounds, and body armor. Last week you were studying architecture at Kyiv University. Now an officer puts a hand on your shoulder and says: 'You’re a fire team leader. That's your team'. There are three people behind you. You’ve never seen them before. They await your command." Ukrainian's Paramilitaries.

So who's more alive? The answer might begin with a moving letter written by a young Russian refugee from Severodonetsk, a city in the Donbas region in the northeast part of the Ukraine -- or, maybe in Russia, depending on the day. The stream-of-consciousness account of this extraordinary girl named Ruslana -- having studied Ulysses, age fifteen! -- reflects a kind of "Joyce field" connection that bespeaks this entire besieged population "My Ithaca Burned Down, Too".

There's nothing like an up-close-and-personal existential threat to focus the mind, to give one meaning, and to achieve a hyper-alive awakening. Zelenski's pre-Christmas speech before Congress captured that certain essence with a vivid reckoning there on the front lines of Bakhmut, not too far from Ruslana' previous home (Zelensky Speech).

Postpone, for the moment, framing the war in terms of the Russian narrative as voiced by Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev, "The events in Ukraine aren't a clash between Moscow and Kiev. It's a military confrontation of NATO, first of all the US and Britain, with Russia. Fearing a direct engagement, NATO instructors push Ukrainian men to certain death." We might separately discuss the alarming implications of this perspective were Russia to ultimately recharacterize the engagement from one of war by proxy to a direct superpower confrontation.

For our discussion purposes, rather, we will regard this war through the lens of Western media i.e. as one of an unprovoked incursion into an independent country, defended by freedom fighters versus an army, while massive, is dumb as a fist. Zelensky in his Congressional address invoked the tyrannical equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge. Our discussion will stipulate this view to be our working hypothesis.

As such, the matter might be seen as simply a one-time engagement in which the size of the dog in the fight is measured against the size of the fight in the dog. No one knows how this Russian adventure will play out but history points out, once again, the role of an entrenched hubris i.e. a supposed two-day romp has now morphed into a one-year slog. One detects the faint echoes of our own Vietnam experience or the way those neocon wet dreams played out in the Middle East. Lessons unlearned.

We are thus invited to see Russia’s Ukraine incursion as one more way-station in the flow of history, a dynamic we explored six years ago in MM 12/4/17 The Fate Of Empires (centered around Sir John Glubb’s remarkable 1976 essay, again here The Fate of Empires and Search For Survival. (Empires, you see, have been characterized by their rise, collapse, and reform in predictable phases -- breakout; absorption; affluence; and disintegration -- i.e. ten generations of twenty-five years each, aggregating to a typical empirical life cycle of two hundred and fifty years.)

So many empires, so many similarities. We might discuss the manner in which the West, particularly, suffers from the late-stage curse of answered prayers marked by frivolity, celebrity, and an entitlement mentality. The author of the referenced article "notes the accounts of tenth-century Baghdad and feels he's reading a then-current edition of The Times”(p.15).

Speaking of the British press, the Royal family, and symptoms of late-stage empires, we circle back to "the red mist" indignancies. Oh the humanity.