I have increased the pressure on Russia’s reptile Putin with 1000 Facebook “likes” for my sculpture Of course, the pressure is only about the equivalent of a hummingbird’s feather. So, I have to temper my pleasure by facing some stone cold facts.
My French penpal, who lives on Russia’s side of the Atlantic is extremely frightened by events a few nations over. She has every right to be. France has been overrun by the armies of another world power, Germany, three times since our Civil War. I shared with you the dicey story about my pal’s mother not long ago. (Here’s a related post on the Kaytn Forest) that took place in the Second World War. That was just a quarter century after my American 1st lieutenant Grandfather shed a little blood during the second of these invasions World War 1.
Now, a half a million of the Ukraine’s 45 million people have become refugees in the already refugee-soaked Europe. What concerns my friend other than Putin’s inhumanity is a nuclear war. That would be the nuclear war we thought Ronald Reagan had all but put to pasture.
Putin has a nation that is much less militarily threatening than the military the Soviet Union marshalled before the fall of the Iron Curtain. But Vladimir Putin is not Leonid Brezhnev. He wants to restore Stalin’s empire. At 65 he has had twenty years to work on it but has only been able to crush a few small uprisings in what remains of that empire. His utterly supine Congress, called the Duma, has assured Tsar Putin of another ten years of total power. But his avid elderly supporters are being replaced by westernized young people who don’t appreciate his stifling of their Democratic notions. He’s desperate to do something. Today I was directed to a fascinating story from Bloomberg about how the Ukrainians have shut off the river flowing into his prize Crimea. The person who posted it wanted to generate sympathy for Russia. My response was terse:
“That is a very interesting and insightful story. But it changes nothing. If you stole my computer but I controlled the hard drive remotely and you couldn’t use it that wouldn’t justify your staging a home invasion in MY house to make my stolen computer useful to you”.
In fact, Putin is a remarkably isolated man from all the stories. He’s paranoid about Covid, critics, and has surrounded himself from a far distance with “yes men” who no doubt rolled their eyes in private at the folly of invading the second biggest nation in Europe. But he controls the Internet and his jails keep filling up with Russians courageous enough to question him. And I wondered a few days ago, and still wonder who could relieve him of his duties today. In the Brezhnev days there was a Politburo of powerful commies. They took down Khrushchev when I was a kid. But today?
Like all megalomaniacs Hitler, Hussein, Asad and Trump Putin would rather destroy his nation than lose a war started by his Earth Shatteringly stupid decisions. I believe Fiona Hill when she says “yup”. He’ll act on his threat to start world war III.
He is using a weapon I’d not heard of before; a thermobatic bomb. He helped his ally Assad kill damn near everyone in the once beautiful city of Aleppo with it. It creates explosions like in dusty Feed mills or in Beirut’s harbor when oxygen saturated with fine particles catches fire. Here it is being used in the Ukraine:
And Putin has allies in the United States like Rupert Murdoch who makes money hands over fist by letting his Tucker Carlsons and Laura Ingrahams lie through their teeth to divide America. This is the real “empire of lies” that Putin says infects the west. The lies are all Putin’s and his cheeto-colored prick sucker Donald Trump’s. They work. Here’s one their their good-ole-boy converts cheering Putin on from the Ukraine invasion staging area.
https://twitter.com/borzou/status/1498393087952961541?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1498393087952961541%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-19578016901166578533.ampproject.net%2F2202142035002%2Fframe.html
