The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is realigning treaties because of one man’s delusional dream of controlling a mythical Russian Empire including captive, conquered states in an enormous northern hegemony to which the rest of the world must pay homage. Why are we surprised?
What is perceived clearly in Earth’s western hemisphere as a disastrous psychiatric anomaly affecting the long-time Russian President has cost the lives of almost 300,000 Russians, denying the same to as many Ukrainian families as possible.
One insane-like-a-fox leader with a cult following can come to believe, as Vladimir Putin does, in his own megalomaniacal invincibility. There are numerous historical models for this, whether any current madmen in the news has read history or not: Several Roman Caesars – Nero or Caligula - Attila the Hun. Kaiser Wilhelm, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible and of course Adolph Hitler.
Baptized in infancy as a Roman Catholic, Hitler believed during his ruthless political ascendancy to power in Germany that he was anointed by God to rule, and to eliminate all who opposed his plans for a Nordic empire. He was obsessed with fanatic belief that he was RIGHT! Absolutely – how could he possibly be wrong if destined for supreme power?
Seeing himself as a savior of the Teutonic world, Hitler destroyed as many Jewish and ethnic minority peoples as he could before his own gotterdammerung-inspired end. Good riddance.
In Putin’s case, we see a different kind of insanity: tiny, beady eyes darting here and there, crazy like a fox, eliminating as many of his enemies and former allies as possible, with a blood trail of clues that he alone wields vast secret strings of power (heh, heh! I did it!), himself alone. Using poison, plane crashes and seven-story death falls, the very openness of Putin’s murderous acts should make the world denounce and remove him from power.
But the Russians love him! They keep him there as co-conspirators in all his cruelty, while the Russian economy staggers and almost one million educated and intelligent folk have emigrated elsewhere for survival: they see where this will end.
Still Putin pants to destroy Ukraine, a nation with kinship to Russians, because its people will not submit to his deranged dominance claims. The more Ukrainians die, the more he feels vindicated in his savage war of attrition. Tiny children, cowering in the bombed out ruins of Ukrainian cities, cry helplessly and are shot in the head along with their families. There is nothing such a man will not do, to eliminate dissent.
In ancient Palestine, now modern Gaza and Israel, similar death-sweeps did and do occur, now under the awful green flag of Hamas, where a landless, radicalized people without a mega-state or its resources desperately, daily, destroy all human life which does not proclaim intifada – death to all Jews and Israelis.
Is it a wonder that children, born into this cauldron of poverty and hatred, are easily radicalized? It is easy to kill a baby or an old woman, or two, or ten thousand, if one is certain that the whole of Israel’s land is really ours – the Gazans - and we want it back.
Easy to accuse media-visible hawksters for radical war, but also convenient to decline to see that the CITIZENS of such a suffering cauldron as Gaza are doing much of the shouting: we see videos of an elderly wheelchair-bound Israeli woman hostage being pushed by Hamas terrorists to a waiting Red Cross van, amid a cacophony of jeers, curses and spitting – screamed at her from ordinary Gazans.
Other hostages lie behind her, lifeless, in ashes and dirt from Hamas “hospitality.” Like Russia and Ukraine, two warring entities share ancient kinship if not governance, with Jews, Samaritans and their descendants, the Palestinians.
Raucous Hamas terrorists torture and murder out of fear, hate, and lust for power and revenge, and will do so until revulsion against obscene death overtakes enough households and peace is possible or is destroyed in a paroxysm of bombs and rubble.
America is not aloof from these horrors, with several such wars in our own history. NO war is beautiful, and human failing on such a scale argues for a Saviour who comes without land mines, AK-47’s or uzis but brings the spirit of peace. In this lies our hope, regardless of political or religious identity. This is the season of hope, commemorating a little boy who brought it to Earth many years ago. Let us listen again for His voice and not disappoint Him.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
