What Nightmares May Come...

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom Of Fear.

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In Varietate Concordia (United In Diversity) ~Motto Of The European Union.

Today, Russia was expelled "With immediate effect" from the Council Of Europe, after having been suspended since 2014.

I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and seeing ordinary Germans take sledgehammers to that symbol of oppression a lot more than I remember stuff about the gradual formation of the Council Of Europe or the European Union by diplomats and heads of state. But I know these things were in the same vein. I remember the final fall of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994 far more clearly than I recall the signing of the Maastricht treaty two years before that. I can't help but feel that the hope for a more peaceful world that all these things represent, which characterized my younger years, is slipping away. 

I know that, whatever dreams may come, it will be too late for thousands of Ukrainians who died in this war, including hundreds today in a theater in Mariupol that was being used as an emergency shelter.

But the Ukrainians are still hanging on, even more military aid is piling up including S-300 SAM systems from Slovakia, and I think that Ukraine will not just survive, but the day will come when that country will be a part of the EU and NATO, in the end, a contributor to global peace, multilateralism and the kind of transnational unity that Putin is trying to stamp out.

And I know that over 200,000 people have fled Russia in recent days to places like Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey.

In a rambling speech today, Putin called for a "Natural and necessary self-purification" of Russian society. Listen, folks, it's not hard to see how that's going to turn out, and I wrote about exactly this concern yesterday. 

What nightmares may come for the Russian people?

Putin idolizes Stalin, and I'm starting to wonder how many of his own people will end up exiled, killed, or shipped off to Siberia where a future Russian State or perhaps the United Nations will only be able to guess at whatever dark fates they met in his modern version of the Stalinist terror.

I said awhile ago that Putin was trying to re-Sovietize Russia and bring back the old Soviet Union. Actually, I've been saying this for a good couple years now.

There's just one problem with that.

Today, Putin basically said he wants to go full Russian Ethno-Nationalist version of North Korea on everybody's ass.

And the whole idea of Putin Juche seems kind of scary. Like Trumpism, but much worse. So of course "Conservatives" will love it.

And there's still Republicans who will defend Vladimir Putin, and vote against aid to Ukraine. Hell, today Marjorie Taylor Greene said Ukraine has "No chance of winning" when, honestly, it looks like they're doing exactly that. I just don't get it, unless the Cruelty Is The Point and this really is the Future Conservatives Want.

A future best represented by the Hammer And Sickle, which should be a horrible symbol of humanity's past that has a modern place only in a museum.

But again, there's at least some Republicans out there who would be perfectly fine with having the Order Of The Red Banner pinned on their uniform blouse, and I could absolutely see somebody like MTG or Tucker Carlson demanding that "Hero Of Socialist Labor" be used as their title when their name is announced or appears on a screen. Or that the Republican Party in whatever part of America these fools try and make a Soviet Satellite banana republic out of be known as the "Order Of The Red Banner Republican Party."

These fucking people want the blood spilled in our past to be our present and our future, too.

War, ethnic cleansing and genocide...and whatever other horrors come of this...is exactly what the fuck these "Conservatives" want. They're forgetting that Russian ethno-nationalism is unlikely to consider them "White" enough. 

It's not just ethno-nationalism either. Commies like Putin love a good purge of anybody who might stand up to them.

Current Republicans are also not thinking about what the Communists did to the existing governments and to their own collaborators in Eastern Europe after World War II Or to their own initial allies in places like Afghanistan or Mongolia later. 

I mean, shit, Mongolia's first two Communist leaders, Damdin Sukhbaatar and Khorloogiin Choibalsan both died under suspicious circumstances. In 1979 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan one of the first things they did was sent KGB Border Guards assault battalions to assault Tajbeg Palace and assassinate Hafizullah Amin, Afghanistan's communist ruler, which they did after a fierce battle. 

The Putin Caucus of the Republican Party is not thinking this through, are they?

I'm not surprised, just disgusted.

And whatever happens, it'll always be too late for around a thousand innocent people in Mariupol, and for whoever Putin kills in his own country.

It's really just that simple. 

We've done plenty to help the Ukrainians, but we need to start doing more.

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? ~Revelation 6:9-10

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