Most Americans wouldn’t believe these things can happen in the Land of the Free Press because it runs counter to a lifetime of received popular culture steeped in magical thinking. Wrenching free of that is psychologically painful, indeed impossible for some. Harsh realities await.
The worst problem is a phony one. That is to say, numerous parties are using the cause of prosecuting Vladimir Putin for “war crimes” as yet another excuse to avoid ending the war.
There is dominant propaganda that seems to suggest war can be conducted according to a set of acceptable, standardized, and abstract rules. It can’t.
Russia’s war in Ukraine — like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right.
The belief in the justice and glory of past wars is absolutely critical to the acceptance of current wars, such as the Ukraine war. And the gargantuan price tags of wars is highly relevant to imagining creative alternatives to escalating a war that’s placed us closer to nuclear apocalypse than ever before.
For decades, the U.S. public seemed largely indifferent to most of the horrible suffering of war. The corporate media outlets mostly avoided it, made war look like a video game, occasionally mentioned suffering U.S. troops, and rarely touched on the countless deaths of local civilians as if their killing were some sort of aberration.
Watch World BEYOND War’s David Swanson speak on ‘How to Think About Ukraine’ in an event in Washington, D.C.
In light of the recent events in Ukraine, here are important things to know and do about their current situation.
In April 1941, four years before he was to become President and eight months before the United States entered World War II, Senator Harry Truman of Missouri reacted to the news that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”
