Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.
First comes the feeding, then comes morality. the Three Penny Opera, Berthold Brecht.
A headline in Die Zeit online German newspaper of Februarty 28 reads thus: the war in the Ukraine won’t be finished until Putin is finished.
And the double entendre of mh “finished” was as intentional as the “zum Ende” in German was.)
Why?
We see this as a violation of sovereign rights, a blow at a democracy one continent too close to Putins Prison: Russia. There is the thought that he miscalculated the will of the Ukrainians to stay free. He did. quite manifestly.
Does this look and sound like a worried man?
We know he has been planning this for years.
We know he is still KGB first, then President.
We know that we are his strawmen, his less than a russian lying cheating, ruthless exploiting capitalists who are responsible for all the woes that he the Billionaire and Mass Murderer and War Criminal and Mastermind of Crimes against Humanity shoves onto us. And it sticks because we are not holy either.
We know that he has been successful in several wars for which he paid no price at all –memories of Hitler and appeasement.
We know he has threatened the deployment of nuclear weapons if anyone interferes with his plans to take and keep the Ukraine. It is clear: his negotiating position is: give up your liberty and arms.
We wonder whether these sanctions will be enough to stop him from..; doing what?
Broken record: to kill democracy on his borders?
Please.
Look at that face again, the smirk of superiority, the look of the cat who got the mouse.
Vladimir Putin is not an idealogue. Political ideology means nothing to him. What is important to him is control so as to make himself in his own mind and in fact if at all possible larger and more powerful than anyone. He thinks that the time for the tyrant autocrat has come and the time for the dithering democrat has gone.
Nothing we have done so far has persuaded him that he is wrong because he is not at the end yet.
Does he give a tinker’s damn about the fate of the people in Ukraine? Yes: about as much as the last murdering megalomanics army, Hitlers boys, came through and devastated wantonly.. Putin is total pragmatism impregnating strategic acumen. He wants what furthers his cause.]
And once more kids in the bleachers: what does he want? Control, dominate, be larger than and eliminate the empire of lies which has made him so utterly …. rich.
Here is what he wants:
- access to the black Sea so that the US Navy is blocked there;
- tie up the US so that it cannot concentrate its forces and crush him
- grain, grain , grain. Ukraine is grain, my friend, BIG GRAIN. And if he owns that, he is Grain King on Earth, his navy is already out on the high seas diddling around in places where we are in the grain game. Because controlling the grain means owning it on the way out, protecting it on the way to our former trade partners, and sinking the few traders we will have left.
and that will keep him Grain King for ever and ever, and ever…
and that will teach China that it pays to join Vlad the Paymaster to run the global economy, sink Taiwan and go to war against a vastly weakened and impoverished USA
He can kill every living human in Ukraine and get all that while we howl about human rights and crimes against humanity and war crimes.
So is this a nutcase who cannot plan his way out of an open barn door? Hardly. We need to take him more seriously than we have any enemy of ours ever,
because there is no bone of other orientation in his calculating KGB computer-brain;
because he thinks he has a right to do whatever he wants: survival of the fittest;
because he is who Luther describes in A Mighty Fortress…
“…our ancient foe, doth seek to work us woe, His craft and power are great, and armed with cruel hate, On earth is not his equal.
Vlad the Destroyer has the jump on us. Sanctions and scoldings and withholdings and constraints will just get him to pull the trigger faster and it could be gas, chemical, viral, nucler or some historically unprecedented mixture, No weapon ever invented has remained unused. Which unused one will he use? Putting our heads in the sand about his baldfaced aggression won’t stop him. Time has come to remove the velvet gloves and hit back as hard and skilled as we can.
any change demands fully taking three steps
1 awareness of what is really happening and it is not just the subjugation of Ukraine whatever the cost to him and us;
2. acceptance: of the facts of life post Party time in the Putin Era, that in one day he transformed it to the Putin Era. All the media talk just confirms it, scolding or not: different strokes for Putin folks. We must not underestimate this enemy. We did in the 1930s and it almost cost us a world war. We must accept that this man has studies all that and made sure he does not make those mistakes. Ever. Period. We must stop thinking that somehow our degrees of moral superiority will carry the day. First they aren’t that great any more and second that is bass-ackwards thought: FIRST comes the feeding, and then comes the morality. Vlad knows that while at times we seem to get them switched in terms of action.
3, ACT–So what do we do? These ideas seem to have some potentiaol while we build back up, one more nauseating time, for war on all symmetrical and-a-symmetrical fronts:
1 Do not play to his fiddle. Take all risks to keep him reacting.
2, Masquerade and mislead. We did it to Hitler, we can do it to Vlad. Dictators do not double back and ask why did it go wrong? And they know they are never wrong. He has no rearview mirror. Make him turn around a lot and while he is turned, remove one of this tools. Silently. Keep him wondering how we did it. Frustrate him. Make hjim think taht we are more and closer than he had imagined, and shortly our masquerae will become Big Boy Warships.
3 Speak softly and carry the biggest damned stick on earth in very public display keeping it just out of his reach but well within ours.
4. Make sure we own the grain. Sink his Navy if we have to.
5. Make plans for how to handle him throwing nukes at non-Nuke Nato Allies. Keep at work on some today’s equivalent of Britains radar and air defense system in WW2 but with one difference: 0 penetration coming our way and having given him a little nuke demo, assured unilateral total destruction of anything he hides in.
6, File suit in the International Criminal Court for indictments against him and all qualified associated perpetrators, enablers supporters for at least the Crime aainst Humanity of Extermination — of Ukraine or any other ethnic group he has had harmed or have been harmed because he stayed the hand of mercy when de facto acting to keep a people from harm is the sine qua non for civilization.
As Robert Jackson said in Nürnberg, those guilty of such crimes must be puhished to the ful l extent of the law because civilization cannot withstand their repetition. It should be an easy task:
- Malice aforethought if not in evidence clearly does not need to be proven by the prosecution: it will by the ICC rules be imputed from the actions.
- And since Nürnberg in international law Crimes Against Humanity are no longer a subset of war crimes, and
- since Nürnberg Crimes Against Humnity committed in wartime state service for country no longer have that state service as a defense=: perpetrators cannot hide behind orders or their rolesl=.
- Consistent with that it is also the case that a large net can be case for such crimes because those only acting to further the malicious cause in even small ways are to be held to the same penalty standards as the big wheels.
Make sure it is all widely publicized and that he has a chance even in absentia to offer a defense: keep the moral high ground via due process.
7. watch for his errors: he is far too self satisfied and angry not to make some lollaploozers. Why:? People with his win lose power thiniing nevder ever have all the right facts about strategic impactl It is too costly to tell HRH Mr Right that he not only blew it but also did it naked. It never fails. When they think they are finally in charge and that actually the people whose families he tore apart, whose national pride he trod into the mud that once was their parks and gardens, whose freedoms her ripped from their souls so that his cronies could enrich themelves in any way they wanted, whose sons died in wars of his hate which he started and whose daughters were forced into his brothels and treated like breeding bitches, then speak loudly and use the big stick.
8 Make sure we go off into this having had an unsparing national dialogue of how we fostered him and his evil. No? — Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. To get one step ahead of him and to be open to small shifts in his currents which open big holes for us, we cannot afford our warriors — in other words nowadays all of us –to get consumed with doubt about our honesty and the morality of our causel We CANNOT AFFORD MORAL HESITATION. HE WILL SENSE IT AND USE IT,
9. Every responsible national officer read and do what Richard von Weizsäcker then President of the West German State said in his memorable courageous and very circumspect and complete speech to the Bundestag on May 8 1985, the 4th anniversary of the Allies Ww2 victor- but,not about win/lose at all. Itr was far more important a speedh than a celebration. it was a plea to the soul of the nation abouT How to reconcile guilt for having been part of the disaster of the war ajd Naziism. Copy attached for anyone to taie ad read itt.
10. Do what the Brits did when it looked too too much like they were cornered and could not possibLy win: have a national day of prayer. But instruct everyone that the prayer has to be only for knowledge of Gods will and the power to carry it out. No other way will work as any other request is based ipso facto on the egos decision of what is best (for itself invariably). After all it was the ego violating Gods moral script for the world that brought about this calamity to begin with.
It is the manner of prayer best suited and clearly proven to work to show the downtrodden, confused, hopeless, desperate and broken on the shards of their own shattered pride the way to safe action again. It is the way alcoholics at the jumping off place have learned to let to and let Godl. Ask them. Their contact info is usually right at the top of the A’s in the phone book. They have been using that manner of prayerwith high rates of success ever since the early 1903s and a previous time of despair and defeat. Proof that the other way does not work: German Wehrmacht belts had a buckle on which was embeded: Gott mit Uns, God With Us. You can easily ascertain from the outcome of WW2 for Germany then how well that steel prayer worked.
Do it that recovery program way and only that simple straightforward way! Leave the big stuff. the reestablishment of morality to the guidance of God. The great German poet+statesman+novelist+top level government advisor+lawyer+international celebrity Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it this way:
I believe that we bear in ourselves a spark of that eternal light that must be gleaming in the ground of all being,
and which our weak senses can only suspect from afar. To make this spark in us into flame
and thus to make real the divine in ourselves,
is our highest duty.
This is not about religion! This is about keeping the light of that divine spark burning in Europe, now, today. We must fight, it is necessary. But Putin can do that too. Only we in this struggle can act as Goethe suggested. Is it not Putin who seeks to kill that spark of the divine: it cannot coexist with him. Do his actions even remotely suggest any concern for The Light? And is that Light not what makes civilization possible: other orientation, unconditional positive regard for the other accepting the duty to act to prevent harm? Has the darkness of a Putin ever created a democratic state and is democracy, the only political philosophy that is learned and thus adult, the only hope for us?
What about the struggling, self sacrificing Ukrainians: who cannot feel that divine spark in their courage, refusal to accept Putin’s dark future, coming from afar back to their land in mortal danger to help each other? Who cannot discern that divine spark, the part of the divine in each person of good will, glowing as they stand for what’s right?
In God we trust: it is said that accepting the duty to love and defend that is the hardest challenge anyone of us will ever face. Whatever Higher Power in which you believe, it is merely a bush league pinch hitter if he-she-they-it does not demand of us that we grow, does not challenge us.
We are being challenged right now. Will we accept that call to grow? Will we open our minds to the path that a Higher Consciousness might show us? Vlad is all ego. When has that won anything lasting for anyone? Is it not time that we began to develop a higher consciousness?
The Brits had National Prayer Days when it appeared that they were finished. You can tell by the outcome of that war against men with God With Us on their belt buckles how well that beltbuckle God worked for them.
If you rail at this, then at least let the rest of us go that way. Judge by the results. And ask yourself: have our unaided minds kept us out of Putin’s grasp?
Let go and let God. That is not religion, it is just common sense.
Believe me, I have friends who live that way and I have seen it clearly. That simple practice is the foundation of a way of life that works in all situations. I;ve watched these cherished friends deal with financial woes, homelessness, fatal diseases, involuntary uprootings, death of loved ones and they, all recovered but not cured alcoholics, managed with a grace and beauty and strength that I just do not see much elsewhere. Lets use the tools that we have: it works if you work it.
Vlad thinks the feeding is the end, that life is all about hoarding. Hitler thought it was all about some mythical notion of strength and, like vlad, the survival of the greediest. In the end, even the cynical Brecht knew it, although most certainly he saw that famous dictum as being about the Fressen. Only as part one: dann kommt die Moral. Vlad does also.
We know what to do, we have turned our armies around in impossibly short times and won before. Our penalties for Vlad’s evil are starting to show their teeth. We are at the beginning of the beginning, but we have Vlad checking behind himself now. It is our one cent’s worth: in God we trust. Live it. Peace. Paneintale
Here is the link to the complete speech by Richard von Weizsäcker,. German Federal President, May 8,1985 to the Bundestag.
Want less but still get the critical points? Here are excerpts:
Pane in the Tale 