God damn Putin's Russia. And God damn Vladimir Putin, Alexandr Dugin, and the whole apparatus of which they are part. God damn the Russian leadership's division of the world into zones of conquest arrogantly and presumptuously crisscrossed by Russian "red lines."
There is one silver lining in this present cloud - namely, that it has become blindingly obvious what sort of nation Russia has become and what sort of leadership it now has. The advantage of stealth possessed by wolves successfully camouflaged in sheep's clothing disappears once the sheep costumes have been abandoned. But there is also a danger - namely the danger that the depredation of the wolf will both continue and expand by means of a lack of moral courage of the sheep, particularly of the bellwethers, the rams of the flock. This is what almost happened in the late 1930's when Adolf Hitler chose to play a game remarkably similar to the game now being played by Vladimir Putin. In this re-run of that earlier game, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson's voice becomes merely a more rabid repeat of the sympathies expressed by Charles Lindbergh toward the Nazi party. And as for the bellwethers - will the hard necessity of resistance be obfuscated by them as it was by Neville Chamberlain? That is, will the West lull itself back to sleep with half-measures rather than facing the hard necessities - both moral and intellectual - of successful resistance, of successful defense of a separate identity that one can call one's own, of successful removal of a tyrannical threat? In the days to come, it won't be good enough merely to say, "I tried."
A further note: many, many ordinary rank-and-file Russians have now begun to make their voices heard by standing against Putin and his narcissistic little war. They themselves have stated boldly that they want to craft a separate identity of decency and morality for themselves. They are rejecting the identity of "Putin's Russia." Pray for them - many of them are now being arrested by Putin's apparatus of goons. Speaking as I have of wolves in an earlier paragraph, I say now that Putin is expertly acting the part of a son of a dog.
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