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Would I give up a year or two of my life, or ask a young man to do so, for the cause of freedom? Right now there are nations in Europe, not all of them in NATO, that enforce a year or two of conscription, what Americans loosely call “the draft.”
I can see pledging money, what you might call “fortune,” or “my sacred honour,” or “my life.” Right now, in Ukraine, lives are being lost, bodies under rubble are turning cold. Women, children, and over a hundred good soldiers per day, after day, after day. But what civilians are talking about, over in Ukraine, is not some easier-to-visualize words but an abstraction, a word soaked in centuries of tears and blood. Freedom.
I wonder: Would I give up some dividends, lower the funds of my portfolio, suffer my nation to have a recession, in order to cause an army of evil Orcs to finally back up and get out of Ukraine? In my cozy middle age it’s so easy to send men to die, day after day, rather than face switching to a plainer diet. We had ideals when I was a youth; now my old peers can ask a young farmer to leave his crops, a worker to leave his wife and kids, but we won’t ask each other to stop sending munition money to Russia in return for their “blood oil.”
I am told the Germans won’t stop using Russian pipelines until after some thousands of lives from now, around Christmas of 2022. It would serve them right if the Russians learned of their plans and then started reducing oil shipments sooner, on Russia’s timetable, rather than later, at the German’s leisure.
Earlier still, back in 1988 when Russia was infested with communism, we in Canada kept selling wheat. Better, we thought, to support an evil land of gulags than to reduce our gross national product by a fraction of one per cent. And who can forget the Wall Street meltdown, and the resulting horror of the 2008 recession? So maybe, over here, I shouldn’t complain when in Europe, right now, blond grandchildren of Nazis would rather buy oil than suffer another 2008 to save freedom.
…
…
Sean Crawford
As old now as the fellows my father,
When he was a young volunteer,
so despised for enabling WWII,
Canada,
July,
2022
Here’s a BBC story about the current numbers of shells fired (see my previous essay) and the ongoing uncountable Donbas casualties.
