NATO considering deployment of up to 300,000 troops on border with Russia

[The Magistrate]

59. So What?

Seriously, Sir, so what?

Russia has been invaded. Russia has invaded quite as frequently. Germany has been invaded, France has, and Italy, and any other European state has been. So who cares? I've been struck a few times in my life, so I have license to punch the next guy I look at funny?

None of this makes the Russian campaign of genocide in Ukraine any less a vast crime. And make no mistake, the Kremlin's declared intent of erasing Ukraine as a political, social, and cultural entity, can be found almost word for word in the legal definition of the crime of genocide, and that crime is being pressed with wholesale atrocity.

Whether you realize it or not, you are quoting the Athenian emissary to Melos: The strong do as they please, and the weak suffer what they must. I doubt many here would apply the same principle in the same way should, for instance, the United States invade Venezuela to overthrow Maduro tomorrow. Though traditionally the place has been part of our sphere of influence for a couple of centuries, at least by our traditions, anyway.

It is possible Putin has come to realize portions of NATO cannot be peeled off. The idea that all Europe would have the grit to go to war over some small, far away place has a long pedigree among aggressive dictators who fancy themselves the hardest man in any room. It has worked before, and it was not, until recently, wild to speculate the little Baltic states might be again absorbed, by a calculated campaign of subversion pitched to the idea ethnic Russians are sorely persecuted in Estonia, or Latvia, for starters.

And of course, if one is to cite past harms as cause for current events, it ought to be taken into account that Russia has already, not quite a century ago, murdered by starvation millions of Ukrainians. You cannot possibly imagine this gives no steel to Ukraine's national resistance to Russian invasion, and so know the soldiers of Ukraine do not fight as proxies for leading parties engaged in conflict over their heads. They fight for the survival of their land. Why should they not be given assistance? Why should they be consigned to defeat by a genocidal power seeking to reconstitute its lost empire?