People say ridiculous things in time of war. I have read of President Putin being accused of "Weaponising Winter". Really? War means War, and War is waged by weaponising whatever is at hand. Churchill, I believe, said something like "There is one Russian Commander that Herr Hitler has forgotten ... ... General Winter."
Do we rebuke Admiral Nimitz for "Weaponising the Pacific?".
For millennia, those waging wars have let matters rest during Winter. When Spring returns, "the time when kings go to war", then men will blow the cobwebs off their swords.
Would it really be shameful if the next few months provided an opportunity for some fixing?
Territorial boders have never been sacrosanct. The ownership of the Crimea is ... well, go and research it yoursef.
I have links by marriage with a (formerly) landed Polish family whose estates are now well behind the Russky frontier.
I believe that 'prioritising' men and women, flesh and blood, is more important than fetichising Historical Atlases.
11 comments:
Dear Father. Putin is prolly waiting for a winter freeze of the ground so his tanks can maneuver without getting bogged down.
The tragic thing is he made a settlement proposal that Empire of Lies ordered Time's man of the year to refuse.
Borders are indeed often transient, even rivers change from barriers to communication arteries. I recall a remark made by someone, about 50 years ago, from the general area now in dispute that he had lived in six different countries, but always in the same house. (Two of these "countries" were transient wartime occupations)
Of course the whole thing is bedevilled by a mystical sense of history colliding with politics "ethnicity" and "roots". Putin probably has some emotional attachment to a concept of the "Kievan Rus"
Incidentally, I was leaning over the battlements of Windsor Castle once, and noticed that the sign painters had abbreviated the directional information on the road below to point to SL'UGH.
It is hard for me to understand how Putin could have done anything other than invade Ukraine, given the ongoing mistreatment of ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian state, and its willingness to be a proxy for Western hostility toward Russia.
Zelinsky is a corrupt American puppet, who was installed to replace a validly elected (and corrupt) pro-Russian president.
The critical factor in my thinking about Ukraine always starts with a pro-Ukrainian position. The most significant fact in modern Ukrainian history is the murder of millions of Ukrainian people under the communist regime, and the systematic persecution of the Catholic Church under the Communists. This was accompanied by pro-Orthodox favoritism under Stalin, who handed over many of our church buildings to them.
However, that cannot excuse Zelinsky's outrageous persecution of the Orthodox. Nor is it a factor in the current situation.
A cold hard look at the facts demonstrates that this war is in nobody's interests (except China's) unless the humiliation of Russia, and disruption of the balance of power is your goal. Nato has already been transformed into an aggressive coalition, instead of being a defensive organization.
This war is based on the twisted worldview that Russia is always wrong, that the west is always right, that the killing of hundreds of thousands of people can be justified under the circumstances, and that we can somehow "win"
Nobody asks the obvious questions. Is Ukraine really winning? Do the Russians just "maneuver" when we claim that they "retreat" Can the U.S. and its Nato allies really afford the financial cost of this war? Can we continue to ignore Ukrainian war crimes and still hold the moral high ground (at least in perception)? Why is there no civil unrest in Crimea and the annexed provinces?
Great Britain and France beggared themselves, and in the end lost their Empires, because of the behavior that we are repeating now.
French Revanchism and British Jingoism have been replaced by American hubris, and its domination by the Military-Industrial Complex. We are traveling a well-trod road that leads, if not to perdition, then at least to humiliation.
At the back of it all is the unreasonable greed of Joseph Robinette Biden, and the refusal of the American press to tell the truth about the most corrupt presidential regime in American history.
It's sad that there are fervent Catholics reading this blog who cannot comprehend the wickedness and mendacity of Putin and his regime. The ratio of war crimes between the two protagonists is at least 95% Russian. The only deviation from the rules of armed conflict that Ukraine can be reasonably be guilty of may be some unnecessary killing of soldiers wishing to surrender, which sadly happens in all wars. The Russians have butchered and tortured countless civilians, are using rape as an element of warfare, have abducted thousands of children into Russia. Their propoganda consists of provable lies on a daily basis. They are pursuing a policy of obliterating civil communities. Finally, the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church are part of the criminal gang battening on the Russian economy and subjugated population for their own financial benefit.
As I have observed from your other commentaries, Armyarty, your analysis is sane and right on target. The personal and administrative corruption of Joseph Biden is truly chilling---and done with total shamelessness and impudence; he has no moral restraints because it is clear from his history that he has no morals. Zelensky, evidently, also has no morals but is an opportunistic buffoon for whom pimping the American public of billions of dollars that go unaccounted for is simply his pathologically conceived "right." And this tragic scenario is what we are risking possible nuclear war for! But it must be added that what really irks the debauched West today is Russia's re-discovery (flawed though it probably is) of its Christian culture. Ultimately, this is the great, unpardonable sin of Putin and his Russia (not that they are exactly saints or innocent doves). But the Satanic rage and hatred of the globalist West are now unmistakable; their motto seems to be: "go Woke or we are willing to annihilate the world." Impossible to calibrate such hubris.
The cost of US military aid to Ukraine equates to a rounding error in the total US Dept of Defence budget. Many munitions are being supplied which are at the end of their 'shelf life'. They would otherwise be written off and destroyed. Separate your US internal politics position from the immoral actions of unprovoked aggression by the evil and unChristian Russian state.
'Weaponising winter' is something with a plain meaning. KGB dictator Putin's failing invaders fire missiles at electricity substations, generating stations, district heating units (found widely in eastern Europe, and a few places in the West, and is very efficient). The intent is that civilian suffering undermines the defenders. The same happened in every war Putin started as a means to demoralise and force surrender. Rape, torture and murder committed by his armed horde are of a piece with that policy, which hasn't worked. Fr Hunwicke, you should try not to be fooled by KGB propaganda as are certain marginal US faux trad influencers and outrage merchants. Ukraine banned the Communist Party while Russia is ruled by a clique of KGB siloviki oligarchs under the Tsar of siloviki, former terrorist director (Red Army Faction as a KGB officer in DDR) and moral deviant Putin. Crimea itself belongs to Ukraine and Ukrainians forces move ever closer to liberating it, having repeatedly struck barracks and bases with their own missile and drone systems plus whatever ancient stuff they get from the West. That a German woman who had an incident with a horse, ordered its conquest in the eighteenth century, and other details, doesn't change a matter of international law and fact.
How did we ever miss the important news that the nearly 100 BILLION Dollars in monetary aid allocated by the US Congress to Ukraine had an expiration date! An important detail missed by most.
Dear armyarty,
well, what else could he have done? He could have said: "Those who don't like it how things go under the rulership of their legitimate authority, are very welcome here. Coincidentally, we have a huge country to populate. Those who like to Westernize themselves are as much at liberty to do so as we are not to do so."
He did not say that.
He might have added: "Of course, if they do such things which we consider unfriendly, we are at liberty no longer to sell them any gas, or at least no longer to sell it under discount prices." He did not say that, either.
What he did say was: "We'll take that authority that you used to have and appropriate it to us by force."
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Even assuming that in the Eastern provinces there was a genuine rebellion against the Ukrainian authority (and not only covert Russian operations, something rather different), that sort of thing has traditionally been classified high-treason, and it is a state's business, not its neighbors', how it wishes to punish its traitors.
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President Zelensky did not persecute "the Orthodox"; he would have a hard time doing so given that most of Ukraine is orthodox. It may be that there was some (minor - they're still many enough) discrimination, I do not know the details, of the "Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate"; but these are not "the Orthodox". In 2018, the Church situation in Orthodox terms was settled, and an Orthodox Church of the Ukraine was formed, which has been recognized as such by the Patriarch of Constantinople. In Orthodox terms, this is the Orthodox Church; certainly if there is such a thing as "the Orthodox Church". If anyone's uncanonical here in Orthodox terms, it's those that do not join it as if all that had not happened. (Granted that may have been a majority, or big majority, of all the bishops that had before been the canonical ones, but that is immaterial.)
And despite all that, how did they who you claim were discriminated ("persecuted", you call it), how did the Ukrainian Orthodox Church formerly of the Moscow Patriarchate, react to Putin's invasion? By splitting from the Russian Orthodox too.
(Verses from a poem by Edgell Rickword)
Colonel Cold strode up the Line
(tabs of rime and spurs of ice);
stiffened all that met his glare:
horses, men and lice.
.....
Those who watched with hoary eyes
saw two figures gleaming there;
Hauptmann Kalte, Colonel Cold,
gaunt in the grey air.
Stiffly, tinkling spurs they moved,
glassy-eyed, with glinting heel
stabbing those who lingered there
torn by screaming steel.
In Ukraine, no matter how corrupt its governments have been, the Catholic Church has been free to operate. In Putin's Russia, life for Catholics carries on as if the Iron Curtain had never fallen. Is there anyone reading this blog who honestly thinks Patriarch Sviatoslav would not have gotten a bullet to the back of the head if Putin had taken Kyiv? If we care at all about the freedom of God's Church, we should not wish one of Her most persecuted members to be resubmitted to the tender mercies of the Russian state apparatus again. It doesn't matter if they are Tsars, General Secretaries or Presidents, they are all bad news for the Church.
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