For days wrestling with how to do a post such as this without pretension -- with this being the best in that direction Crabgrass will offer while Ukraine/Russia is happening - in Europe.
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Strib - opinion - By Ahmed Tharwat: War is hell — when white people are dying -- It's not happening in some "poor, remote country," someone said. It's happening to "civilized people," said another. February 28, 2022.
In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published "The End of History and the Last Man." He argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall had brought the end of ideological conflict and the beginning of a post-political era.
Fukuyama declared that the West had won. Western-style liberal democracy would be the final stage of humanity's social development.
The book was criticized, especially by Samuel Huntington in his 1993 book "The Clash of Civilizations." Unlike Fukuyama, Huntington argued that there are no universal values, and the world is divided into distinctive cultures and civilizations.
"The Islamic civilization," Huntington wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world "do not share the general suppositions of the Western world."
America and the West have taken Huntington's words to heart in the last three decades, especially after the 9/11 tragedy, and declared war on terrorism and Islam. America and its allies invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and destroyed Libya and Syria.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed things. Putin didn't read either Huntington's or Fukuyama's books. His war in Ukraine is neither a clash of civilizations nor of ideologies; it is based on Putin's old-fashioned Russian nationalism and pride.
Russia has been run by oligarchs tolerated by the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin wasn't anti-West, as David Hearst explained in the Middle East Eye, an online news outlet, he repeatedly tried to engage the West and was repeatedly rebuffed.
"America — and it alone — defined democratic behavior and issued waivers to pro-Western autocrats to ignore it," Hearst writes. "Thus human rights or a values-based foreign policy became highly selective — to be used against Venezuela but not Saudi Arabia or Egypt."
America has been deciding, uncontested, what countries to invade or regimes to change. Ukraine, which sent troops to help the "coalition of the willing" that invaded Iraq, now is fighting alone, only getting encouraging words from the coalition of the unwilling.
[...] Western media has portrayed the invasion as an attack on Europe's civilized countries, and Putin as the new Hitler. Conservatives are impressed by Putin's chauvinistic aggressive persona.
Sounding like Muhammad Ali when he refused to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, Fox News star Tucker Carlson asked: "Why should I hate Putin? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?"
Bloody images are coming out of Ukraine, where the victims look like European whites. Nothing moves liberals like white suffering. Flustered CBS foreign correspondent Charlie D'Agata reported live: "But this isn't a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades ... . You know, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European [country]." He was choosing his words carefully, he added.
One wonders what words he didn't choose.
Similar racist media reporting and internet postings are coming from Europe.
"It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed," Ukraine's former deputy chief prosecutor David Sakvarelidze sobbed on the BBC.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are welcome in Europe, where they have been turning away refugees from Africa and the Middle East.
This was on BFM TV (France): "We are in the 21st century, we are in a European city and we have cruise missile fire as though we were in Iraq or Afghanistan. Can you imagine!?"
From the Daily Telegraph: "This time, war is wrong because the people look like us and have Instagram and Netflix accounts. It's not in a poor, remote country anymore.
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Marley - lyrics No commentary, lyrics Ted Nugent will never match, and musically more creative - So, do watch the YouTube item.
The context of another European war rests upon a history reaching far back beyond the immense and frightening two Twentieth Century wars - to touch indirectly the basis of the Constitutional decision to have no established religion in the U.S. of A.
Despite those among us now who'd have it differently, religion and culture are vastly apart, despite Huntington's fuzzing things, with minimal overlap and culture the larger of the two, by far. We are a nation predicated upon a tolerant culture. In theory. Founded by slave owners. Buffalo hunters.
We don't need no more trouble. Need for a New World Order has to focus upon Marley's view and message, not the oligarchic top-down improperly-regulated worldwide neofeudalism of George "Willie Horton" Bush, compare two Tom Waits items, same album, here vs here. Who are we?