Two years of war in Ukraine
Today marks the 2nd "anniversary" of the Ukraine war. I did not find the strength to write anything on the 1st one, as this was such a depressing omen, signaling the impossibility of a solution anywhere soon and an immediable rottening of the wound. On the 2nd year, I would like to just equally ignore it—which is what most of us do anyway on a daily basis—and postpone the snapshot of my perception caught in the moment to the 3rd, 5th or 10th year marking the event of what appears to be the beginning of the end.
The end of what? I thought the end of the Occidental civilization, of the Roman Empire, of the European culture at first. The war in Ukraine is an attempt from the West to retain its dominion over the World by submitting the rising Russian influence. After Russia would have been China, but the pathetic attempt will break even at Russia already.
Putin said recently that they should have started earlier [1]. People always postpone. The same is true for the West. Von Neumann told them:
This was disgustingly outrageous but this was correct. After Nagasaki should have been Moscow, if it was to do what they are doing now. At all rates, they should have flooded everything to the East of Berlin up to the frontier with Russia on Christmas 1991 and crossed the border a few days after New Year's Eve. Why wait for the "enemy" to recompose itself and gather strength? In their unipolar approach of the world, why would they not strike it when it's on the floor? Where is, today, this ounce of humanity and common sense they seemed to once possess?If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o' clock, I say why not one o' clock?—von Neumann on nuking Russia
One explanation I see is that until now, the danger was not worth it: Russia would have been a fairly easy prey to feast upon, but it still had a small component of uncertainty, of surprise, this capacity of hopeless resistance that gets reinvigorated by impending doom, that would have given them a chance of survival despite all the odds, the same obstinate determination that defeated Hitler who almost starved Leningrad if not for the Russians putting a train on the icy Ladoga lake.
But now, the considerably much bigger danger appears to be worth it, given the financial chaos, the political deliquescence, the disintegration of society. It seems not only that Russia should be conquered to be spoiled—the oldest trick in the war book—but also that a huge period of complete devastation, destruction, and deaths by the hundred million is necessary to restart on a fresh basis. This approach seems to be a more modern one in warfare but with outstanding success in the wake of WWII. The war in Ukraine is needed to reset the abyssal bankruptcy and insolvency of the West. So we're going head-on towards it. The longer its preparatory stage lasts, the more devastating it will be. We are two years into it now. At this point, it's not about waiting for the Ukraine "special operation" to stop or get resolved one way or the other, but for WWIII to officially start, with the first strike from Russia on a NATO asset or, more precisely—as I am sure this sort of confrontation already takes place on Ukraine land—a strike on NATO-territory.
It seems clear that the starting point for History books will be from Russia. In the same way that Russia has been pushed or trapped into making the first "obvious" move with the territorial invasion, it will be pushed or trapped again into inaugurating the global conflict by hitting something in Poland, in Finland or a British boat somewhere. The West can, on the other hand, simply keep escalating with always more equipment, long-range, planes, marine (in Ukraine territorial waters), striking Russia from there and thus always raising the argument: this is self-defense. At some point, Russia will retaliate beyond the Ukrainian frontier, as nobody from NATO cares in the least about the amount of casualties and human losses within that perimeter. Not even European civilian populations seem to care much, but they don't even care about Gaza. So Russia could either go barbaric and nuke the place, raze a city off the map with a nuclear mushroom, or retort with conventional weapons but beyond the mousetrap they've been clasped into. No other possibility, the other impossible possibilities being that the conflicting parties get to an agreement and negotiate one way or another, but the West won't let that happen, or that Russia retreats but even if they would leave Crimea, that would not be regarded as enough compensation, so there is no way out. We are going into it until one blocks falls down and bites the dust, probably, knocking down the other one in its fall.
And with time passing, I increasingly become worried that what is at stake is not even our European identity, our culture, our civilization, but the world as humanity has known it in times immemorial. I feel that even worse than going to shit, the world is going to diarrhea, that even in the darkest months of World War two, things were not so universally collapsing. There goes vanishing into thin air what seemed to be eternal after us, like the Eiffel Tower or the countryside in UK, two things which I've learned recently are on the brink of disappearing. The tower is rusty beyond repair and the countryside is sealed off.
But this goes even worse, with also things which had already been eternal, before us. I don't even want to get started now with AI, the ultimate drop that makes the chalice of infamy spill over. But with this neuralink, augmente d reality, transhumanism... it seems it's not only the heritage of Newton, Bach and Victor Hugo that is going away. But just everything.