War is terrible, especially in modern time when Christian standards that used to regulate its conduct are no longer observed. When it threatens it is desirable to ask: Cui bono? Who benefits? When the Prime Minister of Israel addressed the U.S. Congress on March 3 it was obvious, but what about Ukraine?
As these lines were written in real time reports were beginning to circulate that there are now Islamic State fighters in Ukraine on the side of the government installed by last year’s U.S.-backed revolution, but these reports will here be ignored because, at the moment, they are murky.
Except for a couple of blips of a few years, Ukraine for centuries has been part of various empires but most importantly those of imperial Russia and then of the Soviet Union during Russia’s seventy-year Communist nightmare. Stalin purposely starved to death millions, but even then the country continued as it had before and would after: as the “breadbasket,” as it was called, of empire, both the tsarist one and the Soviet one. Now, after a couple of decades of independence and due to mismanagement and the outright thievery of too many of its leaders, the country can barely feed its population, much less pay to modernize its military.
Why bring up the military? Bear in mind that the inclusion intended by the U.S. and EU of Ukraine within the orbit of today’s Western liberal democracies will entail membership in NATO as it has with other former Warsaw Pact countries despite the assurances given to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 that if he agreed to German reunification the alliance would not advance closer to Russia’s borders. The point here is that for a country to join NATO its military must meet certain standards of readiness and Ukraine’s armed forces currently are equipped with little except obsolete Soviet-era weaponry.
Where would nearly-bankrupt Ukraine get the money to update its armed forces? Why, from U.S. military assistance, which is to say from U.S. taxpayers. This on the condition that the money will be spent on purchases from U.S. arms manufacturers. Our politicians will quickly point out that means jobs for U.S. workers, expecting those workers and all other Americans to forget or ignore that the money came from them in the first place, as well as that the manufacturers are a major source of contributions to the campaign coffers of political candidates and potential future clients when the politicians leave office and set themselves up as consultants. (When it comes time to vote on appropriations bills members of Congress will not forget, if they want the money to keep coming in and contacts not to dry up.)
This would be something for Americans to think about if they could look up from their smartphones long enough to notice what goes on in the real world.
If they did they might also see that even as Vladimir Putin prevented the war that almost was in Syria in 2013, he has made, and is making, strenuous efforts to curb the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Of course their electronic screens tell Americans the exact opposite. They proclaim that Putin wants to take over eastern Ukraine. Why? One reason, it is said, is simply that he is evil – another Hitler, as Hillary Clinton has told us. Another is supposed to be that the region is the industrialized part of Ukraine. It is where most of the country’s factories are located. The trouble here is that the factories are like Ukraine’s armed forces: a whole lot of ramshackle plants left over from the Soviet era. Why would Putin want them? He is currently having difficulty enough with his own economy that it would be crazy for him to take on the modernization of Ukraine’s obsolete and unproductive factories.
Sure, Putin wants to protect the people of eastern Ukraine who identify with their Russian past and would even like their region to be part of Russia again if the government in Kiev would let it go peacefully. Some would say he is morally obliged to do so, and to assist those fighting to return or for a land of their own that would be allied to Russia. But it is preposterous to believe he would try to crush Ukrainian independence by military force the way Abraham Lincoln crushed Confederate independence. That would require all-out war in 2015 as it did in 1861 but with the danger now of some deranged nationalist reaching for a nuclear-tipped missile. The U.S. would recognize this and end its own involvement in Ukraine except that despite defeat in its last three wars it remains committed to a messianic liberalism determined to spread everywhere the joys of progress, freedom, democracy and secularism (translated as abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, same-sex “marriage,” and open borders). There are also those juicy defense contracts to consider.
Here is another question: Why is Putin having economic trouble? Everybody knows it is because of 1) economic sanctions imposed against Russia by the U.S. and EU; and 2) the current low price of oil, of which Russia is a major producer. But why is the price of oil currently so low?
We have all heard various explanations. One theory is that the low pricing has been engineered by the Saudis and other oil-producing U.S. “allies” in the Persian Gulf as pay-back for Putin’s preventing the war in Syria and the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad, a government that has always protected the persons and property of Syria’s Christian minority.
Whether or not the theory eventually proves correct, causing economic trouble for Putin, as do the U.S. and EU sanctions, fits the obvious overall goal of America’s neo-cons and their overseas bedfellows: regime change in Moscow. The neo-cons pretend that Putin would be followed by a great flowering of freedom and democracy in Russia, but they know that isn’t true. It is far more likely that there would be either a reversion to the chaos that prevailed in the early 90s before he took hold, or he would be replaced by outright fascists with no interest in upholding the Christian standards Putin defends – standards that once upon a time were also those of the West.
That reminds us: American electronic screens did not show it, but the same week it was publicly announced that Pope Francis will speak to the U.S. Congress in September, providing Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi with another occasion to pretend they are Catholic, Patriarch Kiril, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, addressed the State Duma in Moscow – Russia’s parliament. It was the first time in history that a patriarch had addressed the body. He called on members to enact legislation that would lead eventually to a total ban on all abortions and would begin by removing abortion from the list of medical procedures the government pays for under the country’s national health-care plan (another holdover from Soviet days). He also asked for a law against surrogacy.
Given the political reality of Russia today – call it “directed democracy” or whatever you want – Kiril would not have been standing at that rostrum issuing such a call if President Putin did not want it.
Who or what would benefit from regime change in Russia? Let’s not speak of individuals or groups who could profit from instability the way the oligarchs did in the early 90s before Putin sent them packing. A clear winner would be the liberalism born of the Enlightenment, that erupted politically and began to unfold with the French Revolution and emergence on the world scene of the U.S. as a liberal republic instead of a Christian one, whose development in America accelerated after 1865, and to which it is intolerable that there is still a government anywhere, let alone in a major nation, whose actions are guided to any degree by Christian standards.
