š•£ Never Again… Again

What exactly was meant by "never again" all these years? Never again unless it's difficult or risky? 

We are witnessing, literally watching live, Putin commit genocide on an industrial scale in Ukraine while the most powerful military alliance in history stands aside. It's impossible not to be emotional, but let us also be rational and focus our rage on the facts. 

US/NATO/EU has already told Putin they won't touch his forces, so why should he listen? Russia is lifting target limitations and the death toll is rising every hour and lack of water and electricity is critical. No treaty forbids NATO nations from fighting to defend in Ukraine. Many say it's a choice based on the risk of Putin going nuclear. Do we really believe that arming Ukrainians is an acceptable risk of WWIII or that the citizenship of the pilot or soldier changes Putin's nuclear calculus, or for that matter NATO's? 

If NATO leaders care so much about the fine print and think Putin does too, why not ask Zelensky to issue Ukrainian passports to any volunteer to fly in combat. Sell jets to Ukraine for €1 each and paint UKR flags on them. Do you think Putin will care? Is it worth the lives lost to do nothing and stand by while the Ukrainians are slaughtered? 

World War III has already begun. Putin started it long ago and Ukraine is only the current front. He will escalate anyway, and it's even more likely if he succeeds in destroying Ukraine because the US and NATO Allies have again convinced him that they won't stop him even though they could and should. Biden and others insist NATO would retaliate should Putin attack Baltic members. Watching Ukraine, I am not sure of that at all, and Putin won't be either. If the calculation is about nuclear risk, it's no different over Estonia than Ukraine. Don't say "Putin would never", he would. 

If this sounds familiar, it's the same argument from 2014, when Putin invaded East Ukraine and annexed Crimea. It was too risky to stop him, we were told, we now know he would never stop there. Here we are, with bombs raining down on Kyiv. Risk and costs are higher now because the "reasonable" people in the West always choose lower risk today to guarantee higher risk tomorrow. Clearing the UKR skies after a warning period is risky. Letting Putin destroy Ukraine is riskier, and a human and moral disaster. 

There is no waiting this out. This isn't chess; there's no draw, no stalemate. Either Putin destroys Ukraine and eventually hits NATO with an even greater catastrophe, or Putin falls in Russia. He cannot be stopped with weakness. The corridors to get weapons, food, and medicine in and refugees out are narrowing and can be closed. Putin can bomb the trains and close the borders with NATO nations. The odds of Russian forces hitting a NATO asset are increasing, and then what? Will NATO still sit by just watching, praying and issuing toothless sanctions which won’t truly have impacts for many months and years to come? 

If your answer is no, that if a wing of an RU jet crosses Polish airspace, of course NATO will engage immediately, then we must ask why thousands of Ukrainians civilians dying first matters less than a treaty, and what that conveys to Putin. That we’re honorable… or just fools? The price of stopping a dictator always goes up. What would have been enough to stop Putin 8 years or 6 months or 2 weeks ago is not enough today, and the price will rise again tomorrow. We must Fight. We have to find a way. 

Putin vows to exterminate Ukrainians while we watch. Ukraine did nothing wrong but try to join the democratic world that is now witnessing crimes against humanity in real time. We are not unable. We appear to be unwilling. It is time to enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine now. 

So I ask again, what exactly do we mean by "never again" if we are unwilling to stand up and fight when an unprovoked dictator begins invading its neighbors the same way Hitler did at the beginning of WWII? If ever there was actually a time for America and it’s NATO Allie’s to do the right thing, this is it. So far, we are failing. 

š•£ this post is a lightly modified from the twitter thread of Gary Kasparov @Kasparov63 https://twitter.com/kasparov63/status/1499439820363468802?s=21
Location: Ukraine

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Great Orange Rorschach Blot: How Trump Became a Living Inkblot Test for a Fractured Reality

Image
The Great Orange Rorschach Blot: How Trump Became a Living Inkblot Test for a Fractured Reality By now, everyone with a pulse and an internet connection has realized that Donald J. Trump—real estate mogul, tabloid mainstay, game show carnival barker, and, oh yeah, ex-President—has become something far larger and weirder than the sum of his parts. He’s not a man; he’s a phenomenon, a gravitational anomaly in the cultural phase space, warping perception itself. Look at him, and what you see says more about you than it does about him. This is not accidental. This is not even new. It is, however, an accelerant, a quantum amplification of forces that have been bubbling beneath the surface for decades. To some, he is the prophesied savior, the Last Honest Man standing against a cabal of globalist pedophiles, a real-life John Wayne, if John Wayne were a spray-tanned New Yorker with a taste for gold plating. To others, he is the Antichrist, the beast foretold in Revelation, the final boss in A...
Read more

A Global Blackout, Then Bombs: Was the Google Outage Israel’s Secret First Strike on Iran?

Image
Detailed Timeline: Outage and Military Strike (UTC) 17:51 UTC, June 12:  The Google Cloud outage officially begins. Google first reports an "Identity and Access Management Service Issue," which cascades, affecting a vast number of global services. 18:19 UTC, June 12:  Cloudflare, a major web performance and security company, acknowledges the issue and begins its own investigation, later confirming the problem originates with its reliance on Google Cloud infrastructure. 23:30 UTC, June 12:  The initial wave of Israeli airstrikes, dubbed "Operation Rising Lion," begins.[ 1 ] The first explosions are reported in and around Tehran at approximately 3:00 AM local time (IRIST).[ 2 ][ 3 ] 23:54 UTC, June 12:  A journalist based in Tehran reports hearing strikes at 3:24 AM local time, corroborating the initial reports. 00:18 UTC, June 13:  Explosions are reported at the Natanz nuclear facility, a key target of the operation, at approximately 3:48 AM local time. 01:00 UTC...
Read more

The Map Is Not The Territory: America's Semantic Crisis

Image
In the summer of 1933, Alfred Korzybski warned us that "the map is not the territory." Today, we're drowning in maps while the territory remains largely unexplored. Americans, those peculiar primates with their capacity for time-binding and abstract symbol manipulation, have constructed elaborate semantic maps of their social reality - digital atlases of outrage that bear increasingly tenuous relationships to the flesh-and-blood humans they purport to represent. Consider the curious case of our current semantic civil war. We've developed intricate linguistic frameworks - "left," "right," "liberal," "conservative" - abstractions piled upon abstractions until we forget that these are merely maps, not the living, breathing territory of human experience. The map says your neighbor is an "enemy," while the territory shows them helping your child catch the school bus. Our digital information ecology, with its algorithmic pre...
Read more