I’ve been having some discourse with another Medium contributor who believes that Ukraine should compromise for peace. His position is that if the USA and other western nations just stopped supplying the Ukrainian government with financial aid and the Ukrainian military with modern armaments, the Ukrainian government would be forced to negotiate with Russia for a peaceful resolution to this conflict. There is some merit to this argument; this conflict is likely to go another year. More unnecessary deaths. More mental illness. More infrastructure destroyed.
Somehow, a little anecdote from my younger life came into this discussion. After I wrote up this anecdote as my response, I thought it was deserving of a bigger audience.
I’m going back to my time in Czechoslovakia shortly after communism fell. There was a big highway interchange on the south side of Brno, Moravia. Near one of the interchange’s off-ramps was a skinny angular tower with stairs climbing to a high platform about 20 meters above the roads. The platform, with sides about a meter high, looked over that interchange. It also had a small roof for sun and rain protection.
I asked my Czech girlfriend about that tower. She said that during communist times, a Russian soldier or two would occupy that high platform most of the day, watching traffic. The Russians were gone, so the tower was no longer occupied. Empty, it still looked ominous.
I could see the main purpose of that tower was to remind the Czech citizens that the Russians were not that far away. All the vehicle drivers could see the young Russian soldiers with their rifles. Several thousand vehicles a day!
Later I moved to Trnava, a Slovak city of about 80,000 people. I noticed an inner-city complex that was undergoing serious renovations. I asked my friend about this building. He said it used to belong to the Catholic Church which used it for schools and hospitals since industrial times. The Russians confiscated the building after the Prague Spring and used it as a barracks for 50 or so Russian soldiers. These young men just wandered around Trnava with their uniforms and rifles.
Many cities in eastern Europe had these Russian garrisons.
Ukrainians do not want Russian occupation. They are willing to go through a lot of turmoil not to have this arrangement again. We should acknowledge their experience of many decades of Russian rule.
We should acknowledge that the Russian culture has a sense of entitlement to rule over other people.
Occupiers in the USA
There is an American analogy that is shaping up similar to the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia. I and a few other Medium writers are seeing the possibility of the Republican Party eventually taking total political control of the USA. Here is my recent article on this matter.
If this takeover happens, there will likely be thugs in your streets with uniforms with rifles. How would you like that?
If you agree that peace is more important than civil unrest to challenge this rule, then the sacrifice is high-ranking Republicans making arbitrary laws in their favor. How would you like that?
Our modern western society is really not that far away from a similar outcome that this Medium contributor wants for Ukraine.
There are good reasons for encouraging Ukraine to end this war. Losing Crimea and the eastern province might allow Ukraine to rebuild in a western way sooner than later.
There are also good reasons to support Ukraine to drive the Russians out. If Russia gets to keep these provinces, it might be plotting for a total takeover later.
There is no easy answer.
While I am in favor of Ukrainians pushing for their independence from Russia, I admit that I don’t have the full picture from my side of the computer monitor. And the dynamics of this situation can change quickly: the new Patriot missiles could put an end to the war — or could make things worse.
While some pundits like to blame the war on NATO expansion into former Warsaw countries, we need to remember that all these countries asked for that NATO protection and jumped through some high hurdles to get it. Whatever faults the West may have, these people prefer NATO protection to Russian occupation.
And we should acknowledge the faults of the West. A few of us can see that western democracy seems to be reaching its limits as to how it can hold society together. And there was too much IMF funding (and attached strings) for both Russia and Ukraine that dislocated too many citizens economically so much that they really didn’t believe they were in a democracy. This attitude left the door open for a kleptocracy. We, in the West, have our own sins that contributed to the war in Ukraine.
Tiered Democratic Governance
My solution would be that we should have the better people in charge of these kinds of big decisions. And they should not be encumbered with partisan or ideological thinking. They should be motivated by service to humanity, not their self interests. I believe my alternative democracy is the solution.
In the absence of no other solutions, should we not investigate this idea?
Published in Medium 2022
Democracy Coming to a Ukrainian Theatre Near You
