Reading Revelation On The Eve Of Apocalypse, Two.

If any man have an ear, let him hear.

He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.

And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. ~Revelation 13:9-14

I saw this earlier today.
The Russians are making lists of high profile elites, political opponents, and whatever else to capture or kill if (when) they invade Ukraine.

This is basic Communist bullshit right here, literally the same exact shit they did all throughout the Baltic States, Eastern Europe and the Soviet sector in Germany...and they had done the same in Mongolia a generation before and would do in Cuba a bit over a decade later.

They would sweep in and kill or round up academics, elites, politicians, religious leaders, trade unionists and ultimately, even the first bloom of local Communist leaders...in short, anybody who knew anything and who might challenge their power.

My childhood and younger years as a conservative...not to mention my Christian life...were full of stories of people who fought against this, Dissidents who protested and spoke out, pastors who preached sermons against Communism, people who refused to follow immoral or unlawful orders or even took up arms...some of these stories were written by those that survived and got away but more often they were tales told by others of the ones that didn't.

And today "Conservatives" like Tucker Carlson are lionizing that kind of bullshit and saying that the same damn country that did it before...under a different flag but not different in all that many other ways now...is the greatest country in the world and should do such things again.

Assuming the same likely applies with Gulags in the Soviet Union itself, and the postwar looting and mass rape, summary executions, and torture in the East Bloc, on such a scale that even the Soviet government in the end could only guess at how many people it had murdered.

Because, at the end of the day, the cruelty is the damn point.

And people wonder why, in Ukraine, even the very old are preparing to fight?

I would, wouldn't you? 

Granted I already know how to use a rifle pretty well, but I'd be taking whatever training they'd give me on top of what I already have because fuck that shit....and because certainly, much of what I do know is probably pretty outdated.

I had just turned 18 when the Soviet Union fell.

If I had been born in a country like Ukraine, I would have been adjusting to this strange new thing called freedom as an adult, having had all of three months of being a free person.

And "Conservatives" want nothing more than to give up that freedom...but only after they've thrown entire other nations under the bus first?

Fuck them and the horse they rode in on. 

Have these people no concept of right from wrong??

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13:15-18

And again, I'm warning you that it will only get worse from here on out.

Some people want that type of shit here, Gulags and purges and totalitarianism...but in the end, it's actually worse from my perspective as a former conservative.

We have people, actual American turncoats or those who aspire to be such, that want that shit here. They want NATO and America to lose the wars. They long to be...indeed imagine themselves being...the hard-eyed men with AK-47's knocking down doors and dragging away or shooting all the gay people, liberals, non-Christians, Christians they don't agree with, and ultimately even their own right-wing fellow-travelers that they deem to be insufficiently fascist.

As I've been saying for nearly seven years, Republicans are basically Communists now, just without anything that helps the average person.

And when Republicans succeed in dividing America, they will bring that shit to the parts of it that they control.

Unless we stop them from doing that.

Got it?

The Canadians and the Ukrainians, the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, even the Polish for all of their hard-right turn in recent years, they remember.

Our grandfathers fought against this type of shit, be it Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, Nazism...and later on during the Cold War, Soviet Communism itself.

Why don't we?

One

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan