Whitcomb: Time for Alliance of Democracies Against Autocracies; Bullets in Burrillville
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Time for Alliance of Democracies Against Autocracies; Bullets in Burrillville
“New Hampshire air curls my hair like a child’s
hand curls around a finger. “Children?” No,
we tell the realtor, but maybe a dog or two….
….Your friends in the city
say they’ll miss but don’t blame you — they
still cringe each time a plane’s overhead,
one ear cocked for the other shoe.’’
-- From “Home by Now,‘’ by Meg Kearney
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“If she fights when her clothes you are mussing,
What are clothes? ‘Much Ado About Nussing.’
If she says your behavior is heinous
Kick her right in the ‘Coriolanus.’’’
-- From “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,’’ words and music by Cole Porter (1891-1964), in the now very sexist-sounding 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate
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“Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.’’
-- Horace Walpole (1717-1797), English writer
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“The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover, it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil.”
-- Winston Churchill (1874-1965), in 1941, during Churchill’s heroic time as prime minister, when, for all his flaws, he helped save Western Civilization.
One thinks of Russian oil and gas, which fuel Putin’s murder machine.
What do you say about a dictator whose army bombards a nuclear power plant? Ask the people of Aleppo and many other places brutalized by Vladimir Putin in the past couple of decades.
First off, let’s go after false equivalence and “whataboutism”. America has done plenty of destructive and/or doomed things abroad. For example, the Bush administration’s Iraq War was a disaster and our presence in Afghanistan ended tragically. But we should remember Reagan’s line that there’s “a profound difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.’’
America went into Iraq and Afghanistan to overthrow murderous dictatorships. And we disastrously fought in South Vietnam to prevent a predictably bloody communist dictatorship from coming to power. We also, with very bad long-term effects, overthrew the democratically elected governments of Iran, in 1953, and Guatemala, in 1954, and helped oust Chile’s, in 1973. But compare that to the bloodbaths ordered by fascist and communist regimes – with tens of millions killed.
The best answer to people making, say, a U.S.-Russia false equivalence is to note that virtually all people who must, or want to, flee their countries try to flee in one direction – to the democratic West, where humane values dominate.
Ukraine is a democratic nation that identifies with the West.
One of the Orwellian aspects of Putin’s attack on Ukraine is that there be “negotiations” between the dictator’s lackeys and Ukraine. Former KGB man and long-time killer Putin (who admires Stalin) is a man of deep evil. Try negotiating with that.
Another fraud is Putin’s lie that letting Ukraine into NATO and the European Union would threaten the security of nuclear-armed Russia, with Europe’s biggest army and by far the world’s largest country by area. No, it would threaten Putin’s security by having a prosperous democratic state as an example next door.
Now watch for the despot to further menace Poland and other eastern and central European nations with the Russian border extended further into Europe by his conquest of Ukraine, citing “Russia’s’’ (i.e., Putin’s) “security concerns’’. He will try to assault and take over Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and try to terrorize other eastern European nations into becoming de-facto satellites of his mobster state.
Oh, by the way, Putin plans to invade the tiny country of Moldova soon, from which he could better threaten NATO’s southeast Europe members.
Contrary to the establishment, appeasement-driven wisdom, the world would have been safer with Ukraine in NATO and the E.U.
Meanwhile, many hope that an insurgency could drive Putin’s forces from Ukraine. But given that much of Ukraine is flat and open farmland, his planes and tanks would have a hugely lethal advantage. Arming Ukraine has been far too late, part of the West’s disastrous failure to rigorously undermine Putin until the past few weeks.
But the Ukrainians have fought gloriously with what they have.
Some people fear that we may start World War III if we get tougher. Well, nuclear war must be avoided, but the fact is that the allied tyrannies of Russia, China, Belarus, Iran and North Korea have long engaged in a kind of World War III against the democratic West and such key allies as Japan, with frequent cyberattacks, vast theft of our intellectual property, massive disinformation campaigns, exploratory forays in preparation for taking down our electric grid and murdering dissidents abroad. And it is Putin who is threatening nuclear attacks. (Would the people around him block him from launching Armageddon?)
As I and far more important people have said for years, presidents from George W. Bush through Obama, anti-NATO and anti-E.U. Trump (who has a, er, special relationship with the tyrant) and Biden -- until recently -- have been dangerously weak in the face of this world-historical sociopath (now apparently becoming a psychopath). So, of course, has been Europe.
As always with dictators, appeasement and wishful thinking by democracies just whets tyrants’ appetite for more power and treasure. And, again, Putin doesn’t care about his Russian subjects – it’s all about maximizing his and his entourage’s power and wealth. We have also been too soft with Xi Jinping’s expansionist Orwellian surveillance state.
Putin’s forces may occupy Ukraine but the West must do everything it can to damage his regime. This means many, many more weapons to the Ukrainian resisters and destroying his ability to obtain funds from abroad by selling Russian oil and gas, which is funding his killing spree.
This sadly means, in the current emergency -- perhaps for a year or two -- dramatically increasing our oil and gas production even as we rapidly expand green energy to reduce our longer-term dependence on petro/gas-funded dictators like Putin. If America can get all our major allies to join us, then the U.S. should ban all U.S. imports of Putin’s bloody oil. And we need to revive nuclear energy, including by urgently pushing research in fusion technology. Recent scientific reports make the menace of global warming scarier than ever.
It means going after the Russian oligarchs beholden to the tyrant who have stuffed money abroad and laundered it through such sleazy operations as the Trump Organization. It means much stronger efforts to counter-attack Putin’s and China’s cyberattacks on democracies and to get the truth to Putin’s cowed and propagandized Russian subjects. It means undermining the Kremlin in new, innovative, and often top-secret ways.
Hit these links about the traitor, dictator suck-up, Putin tool, thief, nonstop liar, con man, and very successful demagogue Trump’s business dealings:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helped-save-trumps-business/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-cpac-putin_n_621aa6cee4b0d1388f15d68d
Meanwhile, a formal world Alliance of Democracies – a sort of global NATO but not replacing it – ought to be created to enable members to more strongly push back against the spread of tyranny. And let’s always prioritize trade with nations that share our values and long-term economic interests and keep trading with our enemies to a minimum.
America has a powerful enlightened economic self-interest in thwarting autocratic invasions, especially of nations so close to the prosperous democracies that are our allies and trading partners in Europe. Stable democracies are much more economically dynamic and innovative than dictatorships and tend to enjoy much greater prosperity over long periods. The more territory that thugs like Putin occupy the less prosperity to share.
Taxes (even for the rich!) in America and its allies should now be raised to pay to strengthen our defenses. But do the West and its allies have staying power in all this?
The link below is a reminder of how Putin operates:
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/01/1083686606/ukraine-russia-civilian-casualties-syria
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/22/russia-ukraine-invasion-georgia-2008-south-ossetia-tskhinvali/
https://www.politico.eu/article/case-against-vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-war/
The arrest of far-right Republican and unsuccessful legislative candidate Ronald Andruchuk of (natch!) Burrillville, R.I., who had more than 200 guns and heaps of ammunition, raises a couple of issues.
First, why is it apparently so easy to create such perilously big arsenals, even considering that America is awash in guns and that the gun lobby and the GOP/QAnon have merged?
Second, it seems that gun ownership has increasingly turned into a comforting fetish for men troubled by generalized anxiety and paranoia, as well as insecurity about their masculinity. I grew up in a towns where many of us (including me) had guns, most often .22 rifles, but I never heard of the sort of huge arsenals that turn up in the news these days. A triumph of marketing by gun makers!
DMV a Sort of Delight
I hadn’t been to the newish Rhode Island Division of Motor Vehicles (aka “The Registry”) headquarters (opened in 2010) in Cranston, before. I went last Tuesday and was impressed how efficiently and attractively laid out it is, and how patient, hard-working and helpful the staff is, especially considering the very wide range of backgrounds, language skills, knowledge and emotional stability of the customers.
Still, the DMV’s Web site should be made more user-friendly.
But driving there and back is awful. Drivers are increasingly rude and inattentive these days. They speed, they don’t signal, they tailgate and, most irritating to me, they ignore signal lights when you’re trying to change lanes and instead they accelerate straight ahead. So more and more of us must roll down the window and use hand signals to get them to slow– memories of driving school!
Things will get even more exciting when the state foolishly legalizes “recreational marijuana.’’
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GoLocal recently filed under the Access to Public Records Act to try to get the billing documents for the more than a half dozen lawyers hired by the state to fight efforts by House Minority Leader Blake Filippi to force the JCLS to conduct this important legislative business in public. As the old line goes, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant’’.
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Be careful on Newport’s famous Cliff Walk. Bring ropes and crampons! The walk has a habit of collapsing. More intense and frequent storms caused by global warming may make it even more problematic.
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Glad to see that the fare-free public transit bus experiment is spreading further: All buses operated by the Merrimack Valley Regional Transit Authority will be fare-free for at least two years.
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What with Joe Biden’s low poll numbers at the time of his State of the Union speech last Tuesday, hit this link for some surprising history of presidential popularity. How soon we forget….
Protect Our Water Skiing!
New Rhode Island state rules mandate that people who want to expand or start new aquaculture farms (mostly shellfish) must identify property owners within 1,000 feet of their projects’ boundaries. The Coastal Resources Management Council will then notify those abutters about the proposal so that they have plenty of time to fight it.
Many, and in some places most, of the abutters will be wealthy out-of-state summer people who like to eat oysters, and can afford to buy lots of them, but many don’t want aquaculture near them, though it’s good for the area’s economy. They’ll get high-fee lawyers to try to block the farms.
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From the constant stories in the mass media about transgendered people you’d think that perhaps 15 percent of the population were transgendered instead of 0.6 percent, as estimated by the highly respected Williams Institute. Could the sexual-identity industry please take some downtime?
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New England hosts many small private colleges, though fewer than it did. But they have a useful role to play in meeting students’ wants and needs. To get a sense of the colleges’ future, please hit this link: