Day 603
War at a decade's notice
"Let a European war break out—the war, perhaps, between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which so many journalists and politicians in England and Germany contemplate with criminal levity. If the combatants prove to be equally balanced, it may, after the first battles, smoulder on for thirty years. What will be the population of London, or Manchester, or Chemnitz, or Bremen, or Milan, at the end of it?1"
What will Ukraine’s population be in 2025? When I arrived in early 1991, it was 52 million. Now it’s less than 40. Maybe we’ll bottom out in the low 30s, depending on what will happen next.
Does anyone remember Day 4?
It would be bad for future peace if Team USA, Europe and Ukraine were not able to defeat Russia on their own, without the Global South or assistance from Israel, Japan, South Korea and maybe Australia.
Europe has to live with Ukraine after the war, and to cripple Ukraine now with flawed reconstruction and economic reform policy advice would be a serious mistake.
Anyone who thinks that war is in some way good for a nation should be shut up in a mental hospital.
Both Russia and Iran were hotbeds of fantaticism for years before the war, and both countries are our enemies, along with China, North Korea, Belarus, Hungary and Hamas. Serbia is not exactly our friend.
Fascistic populism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Russia. It is rampant in the Middle East, and few could argue (convincingly) that China is not behind genocide of the Uyghurs.
It should be admitted that there is trustworthy evidence that the Russians have committed worse atrocities than those which are admitted to be inevitable in war or accepted in liberal democracies as part of military usage.
Pulverizing civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine is Russia’s speciality. They creamed a residential building in Zaporizhia on Tuesday.
What Bernard really wrote about the war more than a hundred years ago.
We can’t tell the Global South to fuck off, per se, and re-writing WTO rules hasn’t helped. It might take a couple more generations to erase post-colonization hang-ups in India, Brazil and South Africa. I should probably include Indonesia and Argentina.
Oh, dear.
Apropos of Joseph’s chat.
The Great Society (Graham Wallace. 1914)
This belongs in a textbook - or as an OpEd piece in a prominent publication. It's THAT good.