Terminal Lunacy
The lunacy now occurring in eastern Europe would not have happened if the US government, that purportedly represents us, and its NATO surrogate, had not broken its word with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, not to move military armaments eastward after the unification of Germany. The 14 countries that were once part of the Soviet Union eventually were provided enticements to join the alliance, so international weapons companies and several American ones gladly armed these countries to effectively corral Russian influence in its past Soviet sovereign territories.
In 1961, as part of Dwight Eisenhower's farewell presidential speech, he mentioned the "industrial-military complex". He was not permitted to include the term "congressional". For 61 years now, this trilateral power has consolidated its influence and power to fund the defense industry. Over this time period we Americans have so dearly paid the price for this complex. Of course, there's the gigantic monetary cost, but then there's the death and dismemberment of hundreds of thousands of our own young men and women and caring for their expensive unending medical treatments. The invisible cost is always borne by ordinary people. The pain and suffering from any war reverberate outward, from the devastated families who endure their incalculable loss, into the greater society. Meaning that everyone in any society loses. The millions of Koreans (Truman and Eisenhower's war), Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghanis, etc., whose lives were never lived, were victims of our western ideas of freedom and democracy. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the Ukranians now.
In 1945, Harry Truman chose the military advice to drop atom bombs on 2 Japanese cities at a time when, it had been well established that the war was winding down and such a heinous slaughter wasn't necessary. Robert J. Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during WWII that produced the bombs, visited the President in the Oval office. He pleaded with Mr. Truman not to use nukes again. After he left the Oval office, Truman turned to his staff and said, "Don't let that crybaby back in here". Just as the Germans and "Japs" medically experimented on prisoners, in a different abstract way our government used this opportunity to end WWII with a brilliant spin to save hundreds of thousands of American soldiers without an invasion of Japan, to study radiation and the effects of a nuclear explosion and to warn Russians of what could happen to them.
The Russians were overcome by the Golden Horde Mongols a long time ago and Napolean and Hitler tried again in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The Russians won WW II with the blood of their people and American firepower. They lost 20-30 million people from a population of 140 million. Imagine that if you can. Those numbers are just mind boggling. By comparison, we lost 400,000 men and women from a 1940 population of 130 million. Vermont has a population of approximately 625,000 people. That would be the near equivalent of Burlington and Colchester disappearing from the map! 20,000,000 is more than the population of NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Denver and Atlanta combined.
The point of mentioning this history is that when this particular nuclear badger is cornered, watch out! Even Henry Kissinger, a connoisseur of Realpolitik, to say the least, considered the military movements eastward the worst post-WWII decisions America has ever made. So, in light of 30 years of antagonistic encroachment, the badger has the kind of claws that only the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have experienced. That was then. Now is categorically and exponentially distinct from 1945 because the nukes have been continually upgraded for 75 years and their destructive power is way beyond that time.
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