Skip to main content

Blood on our hands

By


To be honest, I don't know quite what to think of this, but I'm sure the images will be picked up quickly by the international news services.  A number of young men and women stripped down and waded into the red-dyed pond in front of the Russian Embassy in protest of the latest atrocities coming out of Ukraine.  The blood-soaked pond was the idea of Berta Tilmantaitė, Neringa Rekašiutė, Rūta Meilutytė and Aurelija Urbonavičiutė.  Rūta's solo swim yesterday was enough in my opinion, but others wanted to take advantage of the situation this morning to display their indignation in front of Russian diplomats.  Unfortunately, it just comes across as some strange baptism.  

I worry that there will be a lot of virtue signaling in the weeks ahead.  It is a cause that has captured the imagination of the world.  Everyone wants to voice his or her frustration and anger, turning such moments into viral memes and videos that serve mostly to draw attention to individual protests.  Meanwhile, the war lingers on with no end in sight.

The harrowing images coming out of Bucha and other Kyiv oblast towns is enough to give even the most hardened soul pause.  It serves to remind us just how brutal this regime is in Moscow.  This massacre give you a better idea just how vicious Putin's army was in Aleppo and Grozny.  He is a man who seems to have no limitations in his relentless and unredeemable quest for power.  The only question is how do we stop him?

We are finally seeing some contrition from EU leaders who appeased the Kremlin all these years, despite the many warnings from Eastern Europeans.  The belief was that Putin could be reasoned with, but the latest atrocities dispel any such notion.  Once again, the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge its war crimes.  Sergei Lavrov and others claim the images were staged to make the Russian army look bad and deflect attention away from the "peace talks" going on in Turkey.   

Russians are having a hard time coming to terms with these disturbing images, as they have long regarded Ukrainians as their brothers and sisters.  They refuse to believe their army could have done this to people, so the propaganda coming out of the Kremlin is working for the time being.  However, at some point they will have to come to terms with the mounting atrocities throughout Ukraine - an estimated 4500 registered war crimes to date.

Hard to say whether this will finally be the tipping point in this war.  The West announced more sanctions but NATO has yet to consider military intervention.  More weapons will be sent, but there isn't much Ukraine can do except hold its ground.  There is no way to mount an offensive to reclaim lost ground with the types of weapons it has.  They need fighter jets and longer range missiles to push Russian forces out of Mariupol and back to the other side of the Azov Sea.  So far, NATO countries have refused to give Ukraine such offensive weapons.

There is the belief this war can be contained, but to what end?  The devastation is already beyond the pale.  How much more before the blood is on our hands as well?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more