Russian ruthless slaughter of innocent Ukrainians

Editor: of the Northern Virginia Daily newspaper:

While Vladimir Putin threatens the Western world, with nuclear war, the Russian military indiscriminately slaughters the children, women and elderly of Ukraine.

Russia is guilty of  War Crimes. Full Stop!

For years, NATO and European Union leaders have administered lukewarm sanctions and slaps on the wrist in response to Putin's cyber mischief, annexations and collaborative killing. Those leaders are reacting to the current invasion with more stringent sanctions and pious condemnation. Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, has termed the murder of civilians "unacceptable." What a pathetic response!

By making yet another region of the world unlivable, Putin contributes to the overcrowding of the declining number of livable areas, eventually affecting every corner of the planet. While the extent to which sanctions deter monstrous dictators remains unclear, it is certain that harsh economic repression destroys and disrupts the lives of the most vulnerable everywhere.

If they have not already done so, America's leaders should school themselves in the lessons of 1939. They should stop taking counsel of their fears and demand that NATO create a "no-fly" zone for Russian aircraft over Ukraine. Do the right thing, now!

John Clem, Edinburg, Virginia in Shenandoah County

Russian war euphemisms

Echo opinion by columnist Leonard Pitts published in the Northern Virginia Daily newspaper:

When Russian bombs began to fall on Ukraine, Julia Tymoshenko called her aunt in Moscow.

She told her about spending a night in the basement as explosions thundered overhead. Her aunt was unimpressed. "Well, you don't know who did that," she said. "We're seeing one thing on the news, you're seeing another thing on the news."

Tymoshenko, who is 22, sent her aunt photos: the bomb shelter, the refugee train packed with fleeing people. "It's not the news for me," she told her aunt. "It's my reality, and it's what I see with my own eyes."

In response, her aunt blocked her.

That story, told last week on "CBS News Sunday Morning," suggests that, for as much as this is a war against buildings, bodies and a legitimately elected government, it is also a war against objective truth. Richard Pryor, channeling Chico Marx, once put it like this: "Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

Well, this is a war against your lying eyes.

Evidence abounds. It includes Russia's attack on TV towers in Ukraine, its crackdown on social media and other independent information sources, its detention and intimidation of journalists and its new law mandating up to a 15-year prison sentence for reporting so-called "fake news," i.e., news that contradicts the Kremlin. Some Russian TV journalists have quit rather than parrot Moscow's lies about the "special military operation" they are forbidden to call a war.

More ominously: At this writing, four reporters have been killed by Russian forces. War being as heinous as it is, it's impossible to say definitively whether journalists Brent Renaud, Pierre Zakrzewski, Oleksandra "Sasha" Kuvshynova and Yevhenii Sakun were specifically targeted. 

But Russia, being what it is, it sure seems likely the journalists were targeted. (Check the website: Committee to Protect Journalist ).

Four journalists killed covering Russia-Ukraine war
Two Ukrainian journalists missing since start of conflict

Yes, every nation at war seeks to control the flow of information, to shape the narrative to its advantage. That's why television and radio stations are prize targets for invading armies. But this feels like an Orwellian step beyond that, an extension of something with which we've become sadly familiar in this era of preposterous social-media conspiracies and multiple-choice truth. Meaning, an attempt not just to lie, but to overwrite reality.

America, unfortunately, has extensive recent experience with that.

So it's hard to watch this with any sense of detachment, to observe as though through some intervening window, as the very idea of knowable things is mauled. No, this is frightening stuff.

Julia Tymoshenko's aunt is, what you'd expect her to be, under a regime that weaponizes lies and interdicts truth. And Lord knows, truth has trouble enough even without that. "You can't handle the truth!" Jack Nicholson famously snarls in "A Few Good Men," but the thing left unsaid is that many of us don't really want it anyway -- all protests to the contrary notwithstanding -- because it challenges what they choose or need to believe.

In other words, truth is hard, but QAnon is easy. And defending truth grows harder still, not only in Ukraine, but also in Lafayette Square, where journalists were gassed, in Ferguson, where they were arrested, in Minneapolis, where police shot one in the eye. This, as some of us wait for John F. Kennedy to return from the dead and Donald Trump to be restored to the White House. All of which makes it difficult to have any sense of remove from Moscow's war on reality.

You'd like that war to be just some scary thing far away, glimpsed safely through a window. But it's actually a mirror reflection of us.

Distorted, yes. But not nearly as much as you'd like to believe.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Maine Writer post script:  I continue to be mystified about the delusional effectiveness of euphemisms: A mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
"“downsizing” as a euphemism for cuts"

1984 in 2022: In George Orwell 's novel 1984, the government 's highest class, called the Inner Party, (could be a euphemism for "Putin's Party) uses multiple tactics and pressuring mechanisms such as using slogans/propaganda, persuasive surveillance and Newspeak to maintain social control. The Inner Party uses language as means of social control by using ¨doublethink¨ which is a major way the Party controls the Outer Party and Proles. They do not question the elimination of words from the vocabulary.

Losses of Russian army soldiers and officers in the Ukraine will make Putin weaker

The Guardian reports: The intelligence arm of the Ukrainian defense ministry said Maj Gen Vitaly Gerasimov, chief of staff of the 41st Army, had been killed outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, along with other senior officers.  The ministry also broadcast what it claimed was a conversation between two Russian FSB (intelligence) officers discussing the death and complaining that their secure communications were no longer functioning inside Ukraine. Gerasimov is the second Russian general from the 41st Army to die within a week in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. At the beginning of March, its deputy commander, Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky, was confirmed by Russian media to have been killed. 

Accepting the cost of punishing Russia
An echo opinion editorial published in the Northern Virginia Daily newspaper, by Merino de Medici.

Thankfully, a majority of right thinking Americans has answered the appeal by President Biden, to support the embargo on energy imports from Russia, mostly oil, by accepting the inevitable consequence of an increase of the cost of gas at the pump.

The question that cynical observers are asking is: how long will they accept it? This question begets another: how long will the war in Ukraine last? And the answer is: a long time. The present fighting that pits a powerful Russian war machine against a small Ukrainian defense force cannot last forever. But a different fight will ensue when the Ukrainian resistance emerges to inflict heavy losses on the Russians replicating the situation in Afghanistan where the Russian occupiers were forced to abandon a costly adventure.

History makes clear that an invading force needs a huge fighting presence to control the territory, maintaining highly mobile and efficient forces, with unchallenged control of the skies and communications. In Afghanistan, the local mujaheddin resistance did the job by making good use of the American-provided ground to air Stingers. Such weaponry represents a very small part of the arsenal that the Ukrainian fighters will receive and deploy in what promises to be a widespread guerrilla-type national campaign against the Russian occupiers. 

No one can foresee if the present fighting in Ukraine will evolve through escalation, which is obviously the strategy of President Putin in doubling down and reducing the capital Kyiv to rubble toward imposing an iron fist on a defeated Ukraine. 

Ukrainian peace dove

Having invested huge resources in his vendetta on Ukraine and the concomitant project of reviving czarist Russia, Vladimir Putin will impose the subjugation of the government in Kyiv and the detachment of Ukraine from the Western sphere of influence.

At this point, the Western countries will have to choose: either swallow the bitter pill of the loss of Ukraine or decide to fight on by allying themselves more openly with the Ukrainian insurgency.

Much will depend on the will to fight of the Ukrainians and the resolve of the United States and NATO countries with the risk of escalation all the way to a clash between NATO and Russia.

In fact, there are several scenarios at play, the major one connected with the capacity of the Ukrainian insurgent force to cause heavy losses for Russian forces, weakening the position of President Putin and exposing him to regime change. This vision of escalation achieving regime change in Russia is a daring one for the simple reason that the Western leadership, President Biden included, wants to avoid a fatal confrontation with Russia. But there is one more massive reason why the West will tread carefully: Putin does not make empty threats and in desperation he could cross the nuclear threshold by using a tactical nuclear weapon, thus avoiding a full nuclear exchange.

At this point, the world would face an existential danger that no diplomatic effort could effectively neutralize.

As stated in the premise, the length and intensity of the fighting in Ukraine will dictate the tempo of the escalation. 

Moreover, the other factor is the spreading of devastation that the Russian forces will rain down on Ukraine recreating the brutal model of Grozny in Chechnya. The only real hope for a negotiated settlement is that the losses of the Russian army in Ukraine will make Putin weaker, albeit not enough for a regime change, while a makeshift escalation may allow a few mitigating steps on the ground. As for the U.S. posture, it will clearly rest upon the leadership of President Biden and his skill in balancing restraint and the same time supporting the future of the Ukrainian nation.

Marino de Medici is a columnist who resides in Winchester, a community located in Northern Virginia.

Hospital vaccine mandate is ethical and preventive health care

Valley Health: Virginia, West Virginia & Maryland

Echo opinion To The Editor

Published in the Northern Virginia Daily newspaper:

Although disagreement persists over the long-term threat that the COVID-19 vaccines may pose to humans, we might yet agree that, as Valley Health clearly embraces the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, the organization is quite right to mandate vaccination of its employees.

No one should expect Valley Health, whose obvious mission is promoting public health and wellness, to employ individuals who refuse a procedure that the organization deems vital to fulfilling that mission. No one should expect Valley Health to employ those who, in its view, might undermine the well-being and productivity of staff and patients. No responsible business of any kind employs people it considers liabilities.

With regard to any violation by Valley Health of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics (mentioned in a commentary that appeared in the Aug. 5 edition of the Northern Virginia Daily), the code was written in 1947, subsequent to World War II, in response to the monstrous, forced experimentation performed by Nazi “doctors” on concentration camp prisoners. In fact, the Nuremberg Code addresses the treatment of human subjects in medical experiments and says nothing about the use of approved vaccines tested on people who agreed to be immunized and is authorized to give to patients.

Parallels to the systemic sadism of the Nazis simply cannot be found in the American medical profession.  The code of medical ethics created in response to Nazi experiments during the Holocaust has been misrepresented by those pushing an anti-vaccine message during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

To falsely insinuate that such parallels exist represents an attempt to enflame rather than to enlighten.  #VaccinesSaveLives

John Clem, Edinburg, Virginia