On 3/6/22 13:54, Leroy wrote:
> 
> When this all started a few weeks ago. When The US said we know what your doing
> pretending that your protecting Russian people that are trapped in a hostel
> country.  I thought they agree on something!?
>  When Russia went ahead and attacked, My first thought was 'does the west have
> the will to stand against this?' Well Do WE?

When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the USA declared victory over communism
and celebrated the end of the Cold War.  My thought--and I seemed to be
alone in this--was, wait a minute, not so fast!

The dissolution of the USSR, along with the fall of most other communist
governments around the same time, showed one thing: that the Leninist
model of socialist governance is unsustainable.  What it did *not* do was:
  - Eliminate nuclear weapons.  This was foremost on my mind.  They were
    now less likely to be used, but as long as they remained, I could
    not agree that the Cold War was truly over.
  - Insure that Leninist governments would be replaced by democratic
    governments.
Since then we have seen, in Russia and around the world, including the
USA, that the presence of a democratic government today is no guarantee
that said government will be democratic tomorrow.  While I did not
foresee Russia's backslide into dictatorship, I did see that we should
not have dropped our guard.

During the MAD of the Cold War, the USSR pledged no first use of nuclear
weapons, a pledge that the USA never made.  Now, with Putin, we cannot
be sure.

I haven't seen world solidarity on this level since 9/11.  But President
Biden and the rest of the world are in a tight spot: how do we contain
Russia without starting World War III?  This is why, as dire as the
pleas are from Ukraine, NATO will not establish a no-fly zone.  It is
plain to see that this war is bad for Russia.  But Putin is a madman and
a kleptocrat who doesn't care for Russian lives, let alone Ukrainian,
Syrian, or American lives, and we cannot appeal to his rationality or
sense of decency.

Another bind is our dependence on fossil fuels.  If we shut down
Russia's pipelines, our fuel prices go up.  Even progressives are in a
bind on this one, as this would hurt the poor the hardest.

But why are we still dependent on fossil fuels, even after decades of
warnings about climate change?  This speaks to Bald Eagle's point.
Though his terse wording sounds like a conspiracy theory, the fact is
that if American politicians cross American oligarchs (yes, let's start
calling them that), they will lose their campaign funding--and quite
often, media access, because the major media in the USA are owned by
oligarchs--not to mention, that they milk the revenues from campaign
ads.  Pay attention to how much the mainstream media focus on
candidates' fund raising, and how little they pay attention to issues
that affect ordinary Americans.

Remember this the next time you see some TV ad from an oil company
talking about energy independence.  Oil pumped in the USA goes straight
to the international market.  They say the Keystone XL pipeline would
help American energy independence.  But follow the oil: drilled in
Canada, piped through the USA (with a temporary stop in Oklahoma), and
offloaded onto tankers in Texas.  When a bill was introduced into
Congress to keep that oil in the USA, it was voted down--by Republicans.
 Remember, when an oil company says "energy independence," they are lying.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I remember Europe got super nervous
about the prospect of German reunification.  But Germany has done an
exemplary job of facing its horrid past, certainly better than the USA,
which cannot face its own present, let alone its past.  It was not
Germany we had to worry about; it was post-communist Russia.

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