A Cruel and Suicidal Decision--A Humanitarian Disaster

 

I am reading a book written decades ago which expresses how I feel this morning about Putin's catastrophically wrong and cruel decision to invade Ukraine--a decision which is already costing an untold loss of life and which I believe  history will record as totally against the interests of  the nations  and people of Ukraine, Russia and the entire world. Never in the last seventy years has the action of one man and his administration created such a humanitarian disaster.

 

The book:  The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn.  

Gellhorn was a fearless war correspondent who covered wars from the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America in the mid-80s.  She was a leading journalistic voice of her generation.  Her candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people no matter their political ideology and the openness and vulnerability of her conscience. 

 

In the Introduction to her book written in 1986, she writes:

 

“Only governments prepare, declare and prosecute wars.  There is no record of hordes of citizens on their own mobbing the seat of government to clamor for war.  They must be infected with hate and fear before they catch war fever.  They have to be taught that they are endangered by an enemy, and that the vital interests of their state are threatened.  The vital interests of the state, which are always about power, have nothing to do with the vital interests of the citizens, which are private and simple and are always about a better life for themselves and their children.  You do not (or I would say should not) kill for such interests, you work for them.”

 “An aggressor government sells its people a project of war as a defensive measure:  they are being threatened, encircled, pushed around; enemies are poised to attack them.  It is sadly easy to make people believe any lies; people are pitifully gullible, subject to instant flag-waving and misguided patriotism.  And once a war is started, the government is in total control:  the people must obey the orders of their government even if their early induced enthusiasm has waned.  They also see that however needlessly the war started, it would be better not to lose it.”

 

This explains the pursuit of the Vietnam War, well past the point where President Johnson and most of the leaders in the government felt it could be won.  Tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed on the altar of not losing, which, of course, in the end it was.

It also describes the horrible human tragedy happening in Ukraine before our eyes as I write this.  

Never would I have believed we would again see the kind of horror we did 30 years ago in the bombing of Sarajevo and almost 80 years in the Nazi's obliteration of Poland.