When Mike Johnson finally allowed a vote on military aid to Ukraine, (to universal celebration of all decent minded folks in the free world), I was tempted to, in the words of Churchill, “sleep the sleep of the saved and thankful”.  |
| Speaker Mike Johnson | |
It is of course a great relief – Ukraine isn’t down for the count yet. But how much is too little too late? Six months of wasted opportunity, lost territory, and lost lives. Adivka is lost. As we speak, the Russians are advancing on Lyptsi and Vovchansk. Who knows when the aid will actually arrive?
It would not surprise me if The Russians put up a statue of Johnson in Adivka. That he finally did the right thing after 6-months of dithering does not redeem him. He very nearly cost an entire nation its existence. Its liberation will be that much more difficult and bloody because of his Trump inspired dilly-dallying. Putin’s other puppets in Congress were clearly distraught – a delicious sight, all those tankie tears.
$60 Billion. That’s about what it will amount to. That sounds like a lot. How much is democracy worth?
Some well-meaning people have complained that $60 billion is a lot to spend on other people’s wars; that it could buy a lot of hospitals and schools at home. To such folk I would like to say that it would also buy a lot of Russian language lessons and Cyrillic signs to put up over those hospitals and schools.
That’s what I’d like to say. I’m more likely to say that it will save countless Ukrainian lives. It seriously will.
To begin with, almost none of this is in the form of cold-hard cash. Skids of dollar bills are not being sent to Kyiv to finance Zelensky’s imaginary summer home – this is a Rascist fantasy. Most of it is in the form of military hardware, already constructed and currently gathering dust. So why not send it to an embattled people who could desperately use it? Unless you want them to be slaves. . .
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Patriot Missiles
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Some of that hardware will include Patriot missile defence systems which will shoot down Russian missiles before they land on Ukrainian cities. Will anyone who’s not a Kremlin Kretin tell me this is not money well-spent? Better than letting the Patriots rot in landfill somewhere? That is what the pacifist position amounts to: withholding technology that could save lives, and letting the Russian missiles fall where they will.
Pacifists are people who refuse to prevent massacres, even when they can.
If the aid prolongs the war, it will be by allowing Ukraine to survive, which I refuse to see as a bad thing. If Russia continues to attack, then that is Russia’s crime. Russia can achieve peace any time it likes; it need only turn around and go home. It is Russian greed and Russian bloodlust and Russian delusions of grandeur that keep the killing going, not Ukrainian insistence on survival, nor its friends’ attempt to help.
Democracies either stand together, or fall one-by-one. There is enough strength in the democratic world to keep a large piece of it democratic, but no one state – no, not even that one – can do it on its own. So we are faced with a choice: a world dominated by democratic ideals (however imperfect), or dominated by strong-men like Putin, who will grab and take what they want.
Dictators are basically bullies, school-yard bullies who’ve gotten control of countries. They don’t want to make deals with you. They don’t want to reason with you. They won’t honour agreements with you. They will grab and take as much as they think they can get away with. That’s why appeasement never works. They’ll just keep taking more. So, you can either stand up to them now, or later, or not at all and find yourself with nothing.
That’s why I support the $60 billion aid package, and all other such packages from all over the civilized world. Make it $70 billion, 100, 200, whatever it takes. How much did it cost to bring Hitler down? You can be sure Putin will not be skimping on his war!
It will mean diverting more resources into manufacture of engines of death. Sorry, but sometimes that’s what survival requires. Auschwitz was not liberated by good vibes. Nicer things will be neglected so that worse things don’t appear. I don’t like it either, but it’s not like I had a say in any of it. Putin and his followers chose the way of war, and we need to respect their decision.
Fortunately for us, the Ukrainians alone are currently shouldering the burden of blood. We don’t have to disrupt our soft comfortable lives – yet. We owe it to them to render any assistance we can, whether it’s convenient or not.
Slava Ukrayini!
Слава Україні
