Ukraine: This Changes Everything

The story I heard, roughly speaking, was that the U.S. gave assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist leader at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, that NATO would not expand to the east, toward Russia. Then NATO proceeded to break those promises and the treaty organization brought in countries formerly within the Soviet sphere, to the point where NATO was practically right on Russia's border. Russia considers that a threat. Russia needs a "buffer zone," they said. We don't want NATO coming to our doorstep.

Okay, so I can see some validity in an argument about agreements made and broken. That argument may be true, and if so, it has some validity. At the same time, the idea that this expansion of NATO is necessarily a threat to Russia relies on the embrace of the old Cold War premise that there is some inherent military or territorial conflict going on between Russia and the West.

Allowing nations that border Russia to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not inherently a threat to Russia. NATO is a defensive alliance, saying anyone who attacks any one of us will have to deal with all of us. There is nothing in that charter that should necessarily be a threat to Russia, unless Russia has aspirations for expansion, or wants to re-establish the borders of Soviet times. The NATO treaty is not based on an aggressive stance. Being neighbors does not necessarily imply a threat.

Indeed, Russia wanted to be part of the G7, of the world community. Russia was not being attacked by these former Soviet satellite countries that freed themselves from Soviet domination. Without that underlying assumption that we are enemies at war, that argument falls apart. It was an argument worth listening to and respecting across a diplomatic table. In that context it had some legitimacy, agreements made and broken. As to whether that constituted a direct threat to Russia, I haven't seen that connection made yet. I've only seen it stated as an unquestioned premise.

It seems obvious that Putin is embracing the logic of the Cold War. He has said the fall of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." He really wants to bring the world back to that place in history. He dreams of re-establishing the Soviet Empire at its height, though under a different name. He doesn't care about communism, a workers' state or any of that. There is no ideological basis on which to unite the country, not communism, surely not democracy, only nationalism. The only thing he wants to do is re-establish is the historical Russian Empire.

And in this he will fail. The same forces that brought down the Soviet totalitarian system, notably electronic media and the information revolution, will prevent him from exercising the kind of control over information in Russia that he needs now, to keep his people from learning the truth about the war in Ukraine.

In Russia you may go to prison for 15 years for calling it a "war." But he can't exercise that kind of control outside of Russia. And he can't keep all foreign media out of Russia.

So for those who are saying the Ukraine catastrophe is the fault of the US and NATO, I could acknowledge some legitimacy to the complaint about agreements broken, but there is no way to stretch that complaint into a justification for what Russia is now doing to Ukraine. There is no way to justify it. No ivory tower theorist can now stand back and say the West is to blame for Putin's destruction of Ukraine.

You can defend some of Putin's arguments, and in many cases justifiably criticize U.S. foreign policy. But I can't see anything, can't imagine any argument that would justify this barbaric carnage launched in Ukraine by Putin.

It's not even good for Russia, or for Russia's ruling elite, or even for Putin himself. So the only explanation I can come up with is that it was a huge blunder based on Putin really believing his own BS, that Ukrainians would welcome the Russian army, support them and thank them for liberating them from Nazis. How else could he have blundered so badly?

It's that weird difference between imagination and reality. Once he crossed that line from threat to actual attack, his power in reserve began to dissipate, and the drain continues as his project continues to fail. He's painted himself into a corner. The only way he can win, to take over Ukraine and change the regime, is to destroy it. The attack was based on the misconception that the Ukrainians, or most of them would welcome the Russian takeover, or else merely cower in fear and roll over and accept domination.

Now Putin is trapped in a no-win situation, painted into a corner. At home he's trying to maintain the fiction that Russia is not attacking Ukraine, only conducting a precise surgical strike to take out an illegitimate Nazi government for the benefit of Ukrainians. That argument cannot hold up if he continues to pulverize the country. He cannot dominate the country without a scorched earth policy. And he can't do that and say he is saving the country. That can only go so far.

Putin was much stronger when he was making his arguments, but holding a posture of restraint. Now that he has unleashed his power in this way, he has weakened. He has shown his true motivations for territorial expansion as well as his weaknesses. He can no longer position himself as the moderate counterweight to the excesses of the West. He could sometimes credibly make that case in the past, when it was the U.S. that was engaging in outrageous foreign interventions. But he can't now.

Putin crossed a line, a point of no return, when he decided to express his grievances with a military attack on Ukraine. That changes everything. There's no going back for anyone. Let's just hope for as prompt and peaceful an outcome as possible.

May 20, 2020

A New Journal of the Plague Year

It all came upon us with such a rush, like an invisible tidal wave, that it was hard to get one's bearings or to even keep track of events. Now that the changes seem to have slowed down a bit, I've decided to keep a journal of life during the time of the Coronavirus to mark the changes from here on out.

The speed of the advance in March was breathtaking as the numbers screeched up from zero to thousands and thousands in only a couple of weeks. The whole world was shell shocked to suddenly be forced to recognize the factual existence of this terrifying science fiction threat to humanity. It threatened to decimate our economic system, and maybe even our social cohesion. The way the numbers were skyrocketing in exponential progressions, it seemed as if it might even be the end of humanity.

Our mighty species, dominated by the great economic powers of the world was forced, for once, to bow to nature. To admit that we were overpowered and had to beat a retreat. We had to hole up in our homes until the scourge had passed.

Who could say how bad it could get once the chain reaction of exponential growth was underway? Would our social order collapse into some kind of savage tribal warfare from the pressure put on individuals of a collapsing world order? Was this the lead-up to the social collapse that was the backstory of The Hunger Games? Who could have known then where things were headed? And still now, in late May, who knows where this is headed?

But now after two months of it, to have had New York, which became the tragic global epicenter of the disease, finally prevail over the disaster, the shock is wearing off. The reflex to quickly jump right back to where we were, to pick up exactly where we left off, is strong. It's a natural reaction whenever one is hit with a shock, to scramble recover one's bearings as fast as possible and to return to the previous state with minimal disruption. But that reflexive impulse is bound to bump up against some of the same natural barriers that caused the lockdowns to be a necessary survival measure in the first place.

As much as we may wish to return to where we left off, the world is now different, irrevocably so. We want to recover as much of the best of those times as we can, but some aspects need not be dragged into the future.

It is a new world, there is no doubt about it. There is nothing anyone can do about that. The change is already manifest. There is no turning back the clock of history. The prerogative we do have is that it is now up to us to make the new world that we now inhabit as good as we can. We are building this new world now through our actions.

Nature Tames Humanity

Soon after observing the awesome power of nature seize the fate of humankind through the the Coronavirus I came involuntarily to a view of it that many may find offensive, but nonetheless I couldn't shake it from my head.

If you look at all this from the standpoint of the many animals we humans have driven or are driving close to extinction, all the habitats we are destroying, the way we are ravaging the earth and even disrupting the natural cycles of climate, then it is easy to see us, the human species, as the antigen, and the Coronavirus as the antibody.

From the standpoint of the natural system, human beings had become like a cancer. We were overpopulating, draining our environment of resources, turning beautiful places into garbage dumps. We were making the earth an inhospitable environment for human habitation. And yet we could not stop. We were locked into cycles that fed the big machine. Our legal system, our institutions, our economic system forced us to stay locked into that wild cycle even as we could see that our way of life was leading to an unsurvivable future.

We could see it, but we couldn't act on our knowledge. The machine had too much momentum. Everything had to keep going to keep everything else going. Even as wildfires ravaged California and Australia, the savage destruction of the Amazon increased in momentum. We were like a species gone mad, ravaging the earth.

Then suddenly nature produced an antidote to that kind of behavior. The virus showed us that if we couldn't stop ourselves, we could still be stopped. And we were. We will surely pick up again and try to get roughly back to the civilization we left behind. But it will be different. It has to be. And that can be something good.

When Charles Koch, the surviving Koch Brother and shadowy puppet master of the Republican Party, started putting out the word through his Heritage Foundation and his networks of control that the economy had better get churning again, Trump and the Republicans quickly dropped into lockstep to obey his order. When Koch threatens to turn off the money faucet, Republicans get into motion. When he threatened to turn it off if he didn't get the major tax cut he wanted before the 2018 election, McConnell's do-nothing Senate and Paul Ryan's similarly unambitious House of Representatives, suddenly managed to produce some legislation to give the Kochs and the other oligarchs another large chunk of the public's funds.

So now the marching orders are to open the economy, and since American Way of Life doesn't allow government assistance to citizens such as European countries are providing, Americans are desperate to get back to work.

And there's an election coming up. Eric Trump went on Fox News a day or so ago and said the pandemic was nothing more than a hoax to try to unseat Trump and that it will disappear after the election. It's being used to stop him from doing rallies, Eric said. So now we may see lots of Trump rallies get going again, and they may well spread the virus widely. So we shall see how that develops.

Though the changes may have slowed down for the moment, there is little doubt that we have many wild and turbulent events to look forward to in the coming months. So now I am beginning my Journal of the Year of COVID to mark the events and comment on them. Perhaps some others will follow these markings.

A Rebellion Against Health Practices

Those first few days in March when COVID-19 burst upon us, it came on so fast and hard that it was disorienting. It was like suddenly being thrust into a sci fi movie. Things were happening that were too monumentally horrifying to accept as reality.

The rapid speed with which it spread around the world, the number of people infected, the spiraling numbers of deaths, the ghastly reports of kind of death it was, the way the disease suddenly mushroomed so that a person could go from mild symptoms to death within a day, it was all just too much to assimilate. I felt like I was in a daze, never really comprehending the full magnitude of what I was hearing, of what other people were going through. I don't even know how many weeks went by in that state of maximum emergency.

I guess many people didn't ever assimilate it and now want to forget or not believe it ever happened. Maybe none of us have fully grasped it. How can you make sense of "100,000 deaths" in something like two months? How can one human being fully understand the reality of that? If it didn't affect you personally, I guess you could be convinced that it was all a big hoax.

Now the emergency has let up a little. New York is no longer a battlefield with bodies piling up in trucks, quiet nights pierced only with the sounds of sirens, people dying because there aren't enough respirators and other hospital facilities to provide for what they needed to survive. Now even though the virus is still spreading rapidly throughout most of the country, people are understandably tired of being pent up, and worse, that their incomes have vanished. Of course everyone wants to see businesses get going again so they can survive.

In some European countries they have taken a different approach. They are having the government compensate people for staying home and participating in the national effort of stopping the spread. That way people don't have to risk their lives in order to restart their income.

That idea doesn't fit the dominant American political philosophy, so it's not happening here. Unfortunately, opening too soon will probably extend the health crisis, so we'll be in it longer. Even though it will allow many businesses to get going again, if the pandemic gets too far out of control it may hurt them later.

But America is the laboratory of Social Darwinism and laissez faire capitalism, and although our death rate for COVID-19 is far higher than any other country by any measure, ideology trumps all. If you want government "small enough to drown in the bathtub," which was the conservative motto coined by Grover Norquist and embraced by virtually all the big Republicans since Reagan, then you can't expect much better when a crisis hits. You asked for no government and you got it, right when it would hurt the most.

New York is over the hump now, still suffering from the disease but not in a full-blown crisis any more. Much of the country is still in the early phase of their own episodes of it.

The COVID Revolution:

How BLM Seized the Initiative and Forced the Final Reckoning of White Supremacy

The White Supremacists, Nazis and Confederates will not get the race war they have envisioned at least as far back as 1969 when Charles Manson tried to make the Tate and La Bianca murders appear as if they had been committed by Black militants in hopes it would set off a black-white race war.

In the limited binary consciousness of the white supremacist they were unable to imagine that their vision of a white-versus-black race war would never fly, because once their violent racism came out into the full view of America and the world, most would find it repugnant and would reject it with disgust.

So their black-white race war transmuted into a battle between the racists and everyone else. The white supremacists can only be white, or at least look white enough, but they are by definition limited. The anti-racist side includes everyone else of all colors including most whites, who are not racists, though many of them, like me, may be realizing now that they have always been naïve about racism and never realized how bad it really was.

Now that this movement of white supremacists has been brought out into everyone's view, people can see them as what they are, a freakish subculture. As they have become more visible and open in their racism and murderousness, most people are repelled and disgusted.

Some, unfortunately, are attracted to white supremacy, but most don't see their behavior as something to aspire to. Their days are numbered.

Tipping Point
Against the backdrop of Trump's public courting of the white supremacists, when the mass consciousness that had been drawn together by the COVID catastrophe shifted its focus to the murder of George Floyd, most people recoiled at the ugly world that was uncovered under the rock Trump pushed away revealing the racist elements still festering under the surface of American life.

With Trump as president, the white supremacists were having a heyday. They thought their time had come. They had a president that would stand with them and David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. It was their time to come out in the open, rise up and start pushing black and brown people out of the country, or into increasingly subjugated positions.

The private prison corporations were growing their profits handsomely along with a network of business interests that still profit from slave labor 150 years after slavery was outlawed.

It had become possible to march in the street with Nazi swastika flags and not even earn the rebuke of the President of the United States. How far we had come!

But just as they were experiencing what felt like their great triumph, their movement went a little too far and passed the tipping point.

Revolution
All of this activity took place in the environment created by COVID-19. The Coronavirus changed the world in fundamental ways we are still trying to come to terms with. It created the fertile ground on which the George Floyd protests would burst into flame and grow almost instantly into a formidable international movement.

COVID focused the entire world on a single point, the ravages of COVID-19 as it tore through the world. And when the George Floyd atrocity caused the world to shift its focus, it brought a more potent energy to the issue than ever before. It exploded, broke through a threshold, and went into runaway, just as the virus did.

Once the ghastly torture and murder of George Floyd was made vivid to the world, the vast majority of Americans united in their abhorrence of everything about white supremacy. When the whole country became focused on that issue and on the white supremacists themselves, it became clear how out of step they are with the rest of American life. They appeared as a cranky minority of bizarre characters whose behavior was repellent to most Americans of all varieties.

The majority of people who embrace diversity includes people of all colors, ethnicities, religions and national origins, and they are united in the beliefs underlying the formation of this country: freedom, justice, equality before the law.

People have come to America for centuries from all over the world because of the principles articulated in America's founding documents. And once here, Americans of all origins have joined in the struggle to make this country live up to the ideals in those documents.

Inherent in those principles is tolerance. There is absolutely no place for racism in the vision of American democracy that inspired the world in 1789.

Jefferson understood that contradiction even though he and others of the original framers were slaveholders themselves. That's what prompted him to write, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever."

But the barbaric institution, begun in 1619 was already deeply lodged into the institutions of America by the time the republic was formed. Slavery pre-dated the formation of the republic by more than a century. It was grandfathered in by precedent.

But slavery and the American democratic republic were mutually exclusive. There was no way they could coexist. Slavery was an obscene contradiction of the doctrine of The Rights of Man.

There lay the unresolvable conflict at the heart of the nascent American republic, and there it sat and festered until it finally exploded into the American Civil War in 1861.

Barbarism in America
The practice of slavery in America was so shockingly barbaric that when reports of it reached Europe through a report from America to the British Anti Slavery Society, it outraged Europeans.

It prompted Arthur Schopenhauer in Germany in 1851 to write that "This book, consisting of dry but authentic and documented reports, arouses one's human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade to subjugate and punish the slave-owning states of North America. They are a blot on mankind."

It did eventually come to something like that, though it was the South that instigated the war that eventually led to the abolishment of slavery.

But although Lincoln proclaimed the end and later Congress outlawed slavery, the Civil War did not succeed in blotting out the white supremacist culture that underlay slavery.

The process of reforming the slave states and routing out the slaveholder culture was cut short by the assassination of Lincoln. And that contradiction at the heart of the American democratic experiment has continued to fester ever since.

The murder of Lincoln by a gang of confederates short-circuited the process. Only Lincoln had the moral authority, the strength, the perfect combination of "velvet and steel," as Carl Sandburg put it, to oversee the transition out of the slavery culture that festered within the American republic like a cancer and prevented the country from realizing the vision staked out by the founders.

The slave culture was so deeply entrenched in American life it looked as if perhaps it could never be removed. The rise of Trump, as a backlash to the presidency of Obama, proved how strong the white supremacist beliefs still are in America.

In the era of COVID, the issue has burst forth in a way never seen before; with such strength and potency that it becomes realistic to consider the possibility that maybe that long-delayed reckoning will actually take place and America will finally get the "new birth of freedom" that Lincoln spoke of in his Gettysburg Address.

Excising a Tumor
It turns out the old jokes of "The South will rise again" were based on some reality. The slavery culture of the south, of the confederacy, with its barbaric, feudal philosophy of white subjugation of blacks, was kept alive by the KKK and the white racist elements of southern society.

But now all this poison has come to the surface, gushing from the pores of the America body politic. And the body is rejecting it. It's like an exorcism.

And this time the anti-racism movement seems to have gained too much momentum to be pushed back into suppression. There is a real possibility that the majority of Americans, who actually do believe in the ideals of the founders, will join together and force change, a true confrontation with the devils of racism and a final reckoning with white supremacy.

There is just no place for racism within the vision of America as a free society. They just cannot coexist.

What we have to finally come to is a complete denunciation of the white supremacist culture, America's version of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation. We have to dig down to the roots, like a rotten tooth, and pull the ugly, disgusting monstrosity out of American life.

No one can effectively outlaw racist feelings someone may harbor inside. But racist behavior cannot be tolerated.

That is how we can go forth from this moment of reckoning. And that may be in the end the greatest benefit that the COVID crisis has brought us.

Out, damned spot!
You dignify white supremacy by calling it an ideology. In the global cybernetically connected world of the 21st Century, it's a sickness. A mental disorder.

There is no civilized way to deal with racism in a modern, multi-racial society that aspires to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, except to outlaw it. Flat out. No racism.

You can harbor hatreds in your own heart if you insist, but racist behavior will not be allowed. Zero tolerance. That's the way we find a path forward from the present complex of crises.

On the Streets Where You Live

It looks as if the evil specter of slavery that has been haunting this country for 400 years is demanding a reckoning. It's not just a natural disaster hitting us this time, but a confrontation with our own history, our still-unresolved issues of race that have their root in that horrible, barbaric institution, which flourished in this country for a longer time than it has been outlawed.

COVID still is a natural disaster of unprecedented dimensions, a crisis still in progress, and now we are hit by another crisis of great magnitude, and now the two crises are interacting with each other in ways no one can predict.

This crisis is a natural disaster of human nature. We sometimes look at nature as if we aren't part of it, but COVID has been a cosmic crack of the whip to disabuse us of that naïve notion.

Now the brutal murder of George Floyd by a gang of police officers has become the catalyst to ignite a nuclear chain reaction of events that is fueled by the energy of all the millions of similarly heartless and savage murders that have taken place over decades and centuries without justice. Even now in 2020, police can murder human beings with no consequences.

We are seeing now a resurfacing of issues that have burned hot underground for America's entire history, first as a colony and later as a nation.

The initial reckoning took place in the American Civil War, with more than 600,000 Americans dead, but was left uncompleted because the leader who had the moral authority and the temperament to administer the transition to a post-slavery world "with malice toward none" was cut down.

We would have been a much better country today if Lincoln had not been murdered. Slavery, the curse of America, has still not been eradicated. The essence of slavery, the culture of slavery still has a strong presence in American life.

It seems the time for reckoning with that lingering infection cannot be put off forever. Eventually the "terrible swift sword" must come.

Slavery started in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. It was outlawed in 1865, 246 years later. It's been outlawed for 155 years.

I guess it should be no surprise then that the attitudes that underlay slavery have not been fully routed out of this country. And that is the underlying conflict that we are seeing explode during the last several days. Unresolved issues from the time of Lincoln. He was killed before he could administer the actual abolition of slavery. With his moral authority he could have done a much better job of managing the transition than his successor, the southerner Andrew Johnson did.

The military occupation of the south was curtailed by President Johnson before the reform had time to set in. With the withdrawal of the Union armies, the former slaveholders and racists were able to re-establish their society, with its cornerstone belief in subjugation of the Africans. Though the outward form of slavery was abolished, what followed it continued much of what had gone before.

After the change to a post-slavery society didn't take place during the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War, things settled back to a modified version of the former status quo. With the best opportunity for reform missed, it never really did happen. The spirit of white supremacy continued to thrive and wield a lot of power in the South. And just as in the time of the Civil War, white supremacy was not confined to the South. That culture had its adherents across America. And it still does.

Trump was able to capitalize on the underlying racism of the country, to signal to the white rage that went along with so many people having their lives ruined by the Crash of 2008. Trump channeled that rage, which was already misguided by Tea Party propaganda, and used it to gain power. A big part of his power is that bloc of white supremacists, so he is constantly signaling to them, arousing them, inciting them.

Now the pandemic and the economic catastrophe it has brought on have brought many of these seething issues underlying American life to a head.

Now while the pandemic is still raging, we are plunged into a new crisis that is deeper, and could cause a great deal more trouble. And this crisis is on top of the pandemic. The danger of people gathering in large groups spreading the lethal Coronavirus will no doubt be greatly worsened by all the demonstrations and civil unrest.

So we are back to where we were in March in the sense that we barely know from moment to moment what calamity is going to take place.

These are highly challenging times. Everyone's adaptability is being tested.

May 25, 2020

COVID Made Us Kinder

The last two weeks of March were when COVID devoured the nation. It totally consumed the consciousness of practically everything. It was exhausting, a full-time job just to keep up with it and watch it develop via the news. The country was overwhelmed by an invisible tidal wave that brought disease and death.

It completely overwhelmed the healthcare systems of New York. We had heard of what had happened in Italy, the sudden wave of mass death. It sounded like a science fiction horror story. It was hard to believe it really happened. And then COVID unleashed its fury on New York. It was stunning and disorienting. It felt as if the world changed at that moment.

Days stretched out till they felt like weeks. So much was packed into each day that it felt like an extended period. But underneath the horror, in spite of it and even because of it in a way, we also saw something else happen. People evolved. As concentrated as the time was, as heavily weighted with events as each day was, events also exerted influence on people. We were experiencing something new, something with a greater magnitude than we had ever imagined. And it couldn't help but cause changes in people.

Fortunately for the most part the changes I saw in people's attitudes and behaviors were positive. The great thing about disasters is that people help each other. In the middle of all the horrors, it's the natural inclination of human beings to help each other. That's how we've been such a successful species, in spite of our flaws that sometimes seem self-destructive enough to cancel out all we've accomplished. Human beings are among the most social animals. Our greatest accomplishments were possible only through a high degree of cooperation. In this case, when COVID burst onto the scene, I saw an elevated level of compassion and caring in people in general.

People started adopting the safety precautions, social distancing. Masks started to appear. When people kept their distance from you in a grocery store or on the street it was a gesture of respect and care. Even while driving in my car on the highway I sensed a new level of awareness and courtesy among drivers. They seemed to be social distancing even in their cars on the highway.

Everything changed almost instantly. Social distancing recommendations evolved into shelter-in-place orders. Nearly everyone was staying home most of the time. Suddenly Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah were doing their night-time comedy shows from their homes. Stores were closed, except for those offering basic necessities. Everything changed practically overnight.

But while all these frightening, deadly things were playing out, the basic change in people seemed to be toward more care and concern for each other. Social media evolved to a whole new level of importance. An elderly lady I was in communication with said the "the miracle of social media" made it possible for her to stay in close touch with remote family members in spite of the pandemic.

Since the initial reaction, which was a wave of compassion and concern of people for their fellow humans there has been a counter-reaction, a politically driven reaction against any change, people asserting that it violates their rights to have to wear a mask when going into a store. But these are politically driven and funded by those who most want to go back to the previous normal that fit their needs so perfectly.

We don't know how much the next normal will resemble the previous normal. But this has been too powerful a disruption to pass unnoticed and leave the world exactly as it was before the pandemic. We're starting to move back toward a more normal level of activity. But I believe people have changed. We'll see how much the change is sustained. I think people are kinder and more compassionate, both to each other and to the rest of nature.