Is it basically one gang against another gang?
And you and me, victims and witnesses.
Speaking as a generally-stay-within-100-miles-of-my-home American citizen whose relationship to “the world” is mediated by individuals and corporations publishing their interpretations of the world onto the Internet (most often and most insidiously in the form of a capitalistically-motivated algorithm), I have to believe that the felt reality of capitalist-driven, consumer- and public-debt financed colonialism feels an awful lot like an American citizen in a security-forces uniform staring down at you from behind the barrel of a gun.
What does it feel like to be in Ukraine tonight? Fear. Anger. Rage. Pride. Intolerable grief.
Witnesses and victims.
Except they’re staring up the barrel of a Russian-financed gun, into the eyes of a Russian-financed citizen standing in a Russian-financed security-forces uniform. A rose by any other name would still smell as crony capitalist.
And for what? Money and turf; and the rare metals and gasses hidden just beneath that turf.
Say what you want about the former President (and I have), but he wasn’t always wrong. Elite citizens of the United States and their family members have interests in the land we call Ukraine. Some of them belong to Biden’s gang. Some of them belong to Putin’s gang.
None of the gang members are treasonous; nor are they patriotic. The elite citizens of the United States have long-since abandoned the ideology of nationalism, laying their heads instead on the satin-sheets of crony capitalism.
It’s not “Down with Russia” or “Let’s Go Joe or Brandon”. It’s witnesses and victims feeling powerless on the Internet while two gangs that neither of us belong to destroy yet another generation of Homo sapiens.
Thoughts and prayers.
