Your Eyewitness always heard that “war is hell”. He’s pretty certain this was a message heard all across the globe. When one learns about the deaths, the maiming, the bodies blown to smithereens – not to mention all those buildings razed by shells dropping from the sky – it’s easy to appreciate the metaphor. Especially when there are always fires!! But has it ever deterred those who wage war?? Not from where your Eyewitness sits!!
Why…we even had a war right here in Guyana. Reading about the “ethnic riots” of the sixties, can anyone REALLY argue that wasn’t a war? Hey…everything to scale! Did you expect millions to die here when we’ve never even hit the million mark on the population charts?? Our 60s war left us more segregated than South Africa!! Refugees? Apart from the piecemeal displacement from the villages in Demerara, there was the mass evacuation of Indian-Guyanese from Wismar – followed by the Sun Chapman explosion that took 43 African-Guyanese lives. Now, if these matters are regularly regurgitated and chewed over (disgusting?) sixty years later – think about what’s happening in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where MILLIONS died or became refugees.
And we arrive at what’s playing out in the Ukraine. Now, some may be enjoying the irony of war unfolding in Europe, that’s usually held to be too “civilised” for this sort of thing. Did you hear and see all those TV commentators exclaiming in horror at the long lines of refugees streaming out of the Ukraine: “This ain’t no country in Africa”!! That’s right folks. We in the “Third World” don’t know better, since we haven’t moved out of the jungle. What else but the “law of the jungle” should rule here??
Now, if war is hell, should we expect that there’s a devil stoking the fires? And does he do some of this stoking even before the start of the war? So, who’s the devil in this present conflagration? If we go by all the reports in OUR media, Putin has won that designation hands down – even before the war! But if you go by the press over the Russian side of the fence, you hear a different story. Biden and Blinken are the big, bad devil. And don’t forget that China, India and Pakistan – with THREE BILLION PERSONS – haven’t condemned Putin and his Ruskies invaders. In fact, your Eyewitness’s favourite test-captain-as-PM, Imran Khan, was in Moscow chumming up with Putin on the very day the Russian troops rolled into the Ukraine!!
Well, let’s see how long this’ll continue to give us in the boondocks more that “a teaching moment” about why we shouldn’t go down that (war) road again.
…and the nuclear option
If the truth be told, everyone’s scared sh*tless about the possibility that nuclear Russia and the nuclear NATO might resort to using their nuclear bombs before this war ends. Maybe like how the US ended WWII at Hiroshima? After all, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) – signed by Reagan and Soviet Gorbachev in 1987 – had been scrapped in 2019. The Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) nuclear consequence was now in play again!
But we just had a close nuclear shave even without nuclear weapons when a fire broke out in the midst of nearby shelling around the LARGEST nuclear plant in all of Europe!! These reactors have all sorts of protection and are pretty invulnerable to normal shells and bombs. But what if the power supply’s taken out?? This will trigger diesel power plants to cool down the nuclear rods. But we know what can happen to these babies after our experience at the Garden of Eden Wartsila diesel plants, don’t we?!!
Europe would’ve been Fukushimaed!!
…and appeasement
Whatever Russia’s historic ties to the Ukraine through blood, language, governance and leaders (Khrushchev and Brezhnev were Ukrainians), they can’t get even an inch of territory through this bullyism.
That would repeat Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler!!
