Christian Democrats in the United States

Friday, July 3, 2009 7:11 PM

Russian supply route a Bad Idea

Russian Warmth once meant the indiscriminate fire of attack helicopters and tanks rendered amoral by the state's assumption of intellectual authority, and rendered palatable to the learned Russian's conscience by the anesthetizing warmth of vodka and acquiescence to fear of the state. The CCCP/USSR meted out merciless punishment upon whole villages. Americans have the power if not always the will to change their government and control their military. The all-volunteer force echoes the spirit in which Americans engage our government, by and large, egregious caricatured thugs of pop entertainment aside. It's all to easy to be lulled into the complacency of war, that the next death, of opponent or ally, is unavoidable. After being suppressed, and after oppressing, cultural norms re-orient around the spinning wheel of fortune which unavoidably seems to have this vicious outcome, and then "statistics" make it an abstract, distant thought, to encourage the mind to accept that violence is necessary and that violence will always go wrong, without judging. Once that thought becomes accepted, it is easier for a state to direct an enraged mob instinct against opposing forces, whether political or military.

Thus in the occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's by Russian troops, the CCCP/USSR took the usual path of thought, the accepted doctrine of military might, not really much different than the 19th century imperialist European traditions against whom communism arose. Through propaganda the Russians turned racial, religious and geographic differences into "reasons" people should live or die, extending presupposed crimes against the state by allegiance to the families and children, to the entire bloodlines of the accused. This is a feudal strategy that worked tactically well for Rome, among other empires of antiquity, and was brought to a horrific plateau by Stalin.

That kind of association is not good for P.R., so to speak. Russia is a nation changed so very much for the better, in the long run, by the freedom they had the courage to express bringing down the Soviet state. Yet Russia still has some big problems with presupposing the need for centralized authority in order to be personally powerful and prosperous. Someday I hope to see some of the Russian Orthodox churches. These orders understand the world is not ours to dictate, that powerful unseen forces act out an unknown drama in our lives, in our dreams and beneath our being. Those memories run deep, and forgiving the Russians cannot be easy for any Afghan who recalls living in that kind of terror.

America at home perceives our effort as its duty to help Afghan people live free from the constant threat of violence for what they choose to believe and express, be that from oppressive states like the Soviet empire, or from spiritually regressive terrorists perverting the beauty of scripture and the creator.

Can you see how many Afghans seeing military supplies come in from Russia might think they are the ones threatened with violence now, for no good reason? Without matching action in the field, our belief is just propaganda, a mass delusion of American people enforced by the state and by manipulating the human tendency to conform. It's a nice idea, it sounds nice, but it cannot be true, if Americans acquiesce to the perceived necessity of continuing to kill innocent people in pursuit of terrorists by dropping bombs in populated areas.

As long as Americans stay the course of traditional military thinking, the Afghan perception of innocent casualties will always be that of a foreign state oppressing ethnic, religious or economic classes as a whole. Communist propaganda was a penultimate hypocrisy, claiming to equalize the status of all people, blatantly oppressing some ethnic, religious and economic classes more than others, and oppressing everyone in the path of the vampyric and intellectually inbreeding communitarian councils. As long as Americans continue a strategy of no-holds-barred violence in their warranted pursuit of lawless murderers and the forces of "organized anarchy," we will continue to step down the path laid down for us by national competitors far more powerful than a handful of terrorist brigands.

We will step straight onto the land mine, and the Russians will claim the Afghans buried it there.

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