Live From Munich, Alaska...
while the Band Played "Deutschland Über Alles"
No matter what a 34-times convicted felon may tell you, we will not have peace in our time. For the time and place, dear readers, is not Alaska in 2025, but Munich in 1938 — or Yalta in 1945 if you like. What echoes from the horizon are not the harmonies of peace but the rhythm of the oom-pah bands heralding sour, familiar notes of pre-emptive capitulation that have never before brought peace and will not do so now.
For what peace could there ever be with a brutish murderer who demands his neighbors grovel before him, murdering and kidnapping his children when they dare resist him? What Nobel Prize could ever find its Scandinavian way to a shabby, draft-dodging, deranged Midas from Queens, whose sole interests are money and rage-tweeting inanities against actresses and entertainers from yesterday?
Long ago the Norwegians figured him out. Unlike the Republican Party, they can tell the difference between shit and shinola. Neither do they ignore Russia's routine territorial violations of their sovereign waters. The Maybelline Sniveler can play like it he’s organizing a three-ring circus at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, but no amount of preening, posturing, primping or gaslighting — not even a cavalcade of elephants deploying the National Guard to Washington — will bring peace to Ukraine. Swords are never beaten into ploughshares by means of cheap, made-for-Fox-TV stunts and distractions.
Yet there actually is a road to peace. It is the same one to Russian democracy. It’s the one that first passes through the hard, dark no-mans-land marked ‘Russia’s Total Defeat on the Battlefield’ and its acknowledgment of those international borders and sovereignties agreed to by everybody in 1991, then again in 1994. No other road to “peace” exists, no matter what anyone tells you.
Putin has long hoped for our moral exhaustion as a way of delivering a victory he cannot win on that battlefield. Now he’s found a new weapon — the simple-minded gullibility of a felonious American con man motivated by greed and alpha envy. Yet Ukraine will not surrender, any more than Britain did in 1940. “We will go on fighting,” Churchill told Parliament then, “if necessary, for years — if necessary, alone.” As President Zelenskyy once said to his tormentor: ‘you demand we choose between you and no electricity. Well, we choose no electricity. Between you and sleepless nights in bomb shelters in the Metro? We choose the bomb shelters. We do not choose you. We will never choose you.’
Neither do we. We choose freedom, not just for ourselves, but for others. A free world still exists with Ukraine its undisputed champion. Its forces fight not only for their country, for its very survival as a nation, but for us, for our American and western values. It fights for Europe. Europe gets this. Joe Biden understood it. No matter what distractions a greedy, compromised, toddler-president may throw in our way, Ukraine will continue to fight for its very existence. Because it has no other choice. Failure is not an option. Sudetenland is not an option. The restoration of the Soviet Union is not an option. The carving up of Europe is not an option.
So may Kyiv long continue to raise the blue and gold trident, with the help of Europe and Canada, fighting for us all who languish behind our new Iron Curtain, for as long as it takes. Glory to the Heroes….
Commemorating Ukrainian Independence Day, August 24, 2022.