Ukraine

"Fiction usually pretends to conform to the reality:  the writer puts the conflicting wants in the ring and then describes the fight--but in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself favors win.  And we judge writers of fiction both by the skill they show in fixing the fights (in other words, in persuading us that they were not fixed) and by the kind of fighter they fix in favor of:  the good one, the tragic one, the evil one, the funny one, and so on"--The French Lieutenant's Woman

What would I do about the Ukraine war?  Personally, I'd like to subject Russia to a total economic embargo, and I'm sure many others favour this. (Before making war ourselves, we should make sure that the alternatives have been exhausted.) But don't count on it, considering that so many of the Big People would face lower profits.  

I fear that Vladimir Putin understands Western capitalism all too well.  He must have been watching 42 years ago when Moscow invaded Afghanistan and President Carter responded by stopping grain sales to Moscow. But Reagan, that wicked opportunist, opposed the embargo because it would hurt American farmers, and quickly ended it after replacing Carter. (The truth is that they weren't hurt that badly:  US grain exports actually increased that year, and decreased the following year after the trade was restored.)

It's doing nobody any favour to deny that NATO bears indirect responsibility for this mess.  It goes back three decades to when Clinton reneged on Bush Sr.'s promise and started expanding NATO eastward.  What I think Washington should have done was to encourage the former Warsaw Pact satellites to form their own defence group, then gradually increase NATO's ties to it.  Similar end, more politic means.  

But of course, once again that old mindset is prevailing: "If you aren't with us, you're with the Bad Guys!" That weaselly tyrant Keir Starmer forced a dozen Labour MPs to repudiate their signature of a Stop the War statement on the simplistic grounds that it put equal blame on NATO.  And it's "letting the side down" to point out that Washington has been enabling similar aggression in places like Yemen and the West Bank... 

We saw this after 9/11, of course. Progressives who pointed out that Washington's inept Middle East policies were a significant factor in the disaster were accused of "blaming the victim" and "rationalizing" Al-Qaeda terrorism.  Well, the American government may not have been guilty of imperialistic hegemony in the Middle East before 9/11 (or may have, for the sake of argument); but they clearly became guilty of it afterward!

I've been watching more of that realistic, exciting Sharpe series about the Peninsular War on Britbox on Sunday afternoons. (I could watch it any time of the week, of course, but I just got into the habit of watching it then.) I noticed that it was filmed in the Ukraine...

Gotta admire those Russians brave enough to speak out against Putin's war! (I recall that few Russians were pleased when Moscow invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.)