seanessay.com “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
I wish I understood some psychology about the leaders in the two biggest countries in Europe. (For one thing, I might apply this to certain city police forces, back in the States) Like everyone else, I have been baffled, right since February 24th, as to why the governments of Germany and France are so pathetic at helping Ukraine, while smaller European countries are doing so much better. Surely, unlike the old rumours about Donald Trump, Putin doesn’t hold blackmail over the big leaders in those two countries.
I had thought, “Maybe it’s something to do with, I don’t know, being dirty capitalists?” But now I know some background—And I almost wish I didn’t know.
It’s easier to know the psychology of why the Russians, this week, at night, fired missiles to an innocent city (Zaporizhzhia) far beyond the front lines, landing far from any military or economic targets, blasting civilians into heaven or hell. A Ukrainian leader responded, “Absolute meanness. Absolute evil.” President Volodymyr Zelesnky added, “There have already been thousands of manifestations of such evil. Unfortunately, there may be thousands more.”
The psychology is explainable: The Russian forces and their Kremlin leaders are Orcs. From them no civilized, rational behaviour is possible. (Yes Virginia, there are real life Orcs)
But how to explain foot dragging by big leaders in Germany and France? This I might understand because I have had my nose rubbed into some behaviours, against EU law, that could be criminal and breathtakingly stupid.
I wish I knew the psychology of government leaders secretly helping the Russians by supplying missiles to them and not helping Ukraine. Speculation: Maybe if you do crimes then you have to justify them by being pathetic at reforming? (They say leaders of certain city police forces want to remain unreformed, giving their moral support to officers who commit crimes on the job while disparaging any honest cop who disagrees).
Forgive me, here’s a link concerning the French government sending long range missiles, and more…
I’m sorry, here’s a link about the German and French governments.
Do I have the right, with my dear readers, to throw truth in their face like a wet dishrag? When the wrongdoing was months in the past? (But police forces are now)
Maybe I could grimly say “Those who forget “psychological history” are condemned to relive it” but I know it’s hard for people to feel responsibility for a dim and unseen future. Here and now have I the right to hurt the feelings of my readers? Well, all I can do is focus on my misremembered words of a tragic Robert Ludlum character: “There is no bad truth, there is no good truth. There is only truth.” (Link to The Matlock Paper quotes)
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Sean Crawford
where a deer stands watching cars from the sidewalk
while nights are still above freezing
October
2022
Footnote: If Russian leaders in the Kremlin seem to be lesser Orcs than the Russian ground troops then that is an illusion, based on them being further from the ground, as this look at the Kremlin missile mongers shows.
Update: A German public broadcast news program shows German slowness, their self-imposed barriers to giving help and their media not showing Germans the horror. The anchor’s question to the government official, “Not enough, or too little too late?” was dodged: (link)