Of all the technologies employed by Mankind today, none is more useless and obsolete than the technologies of war. War is viewed as a means of conquering territory and wresting control of that area to a new owner. But ultimately, because of the use of force rather than intellect, this technology fails when confronted by the human spirit.
This Tweet from Ukraine demonstrates this at a basic level:
A civilian woman knocked down a Russian drone from a balcony with a jar of cucumbers in Kyiv.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 5, 2022
Rusted and burned out columns of tanks and other military vehicles now litter the Ukrainian landscape and every day more messages are sent out of the failures of the invading forces. Certainly, they have made physical gains where these soldiers killed enough people and destroyed enough buildings to move forward. But once they entered the city of Mariupol for example, the subsequent resistance will be like nothing Russia ever experienced before, even in Afghanistan. Why? In the words of cowboy novelist Louis L’Amour, “There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps a-coming.“
Military technology has never understood the strength and resilience of the human spirit. Military minds try to cover for fault by the use of psychological warfare, propaganda, trickery and a host of other “tools.” In the end Russian forces may succeed in putting up few signs and flags on the rubble they create from homes and businesses, but they will never actually own them.
But so far we have only talked about the front line aspects of this war. There is also the home front. The person who decides to wage war has already lost on the home front. War is so primitive as a method of governing that the people who intentionally use it have signaled that they are frankly too stupid, too criminal or too insane to seek other solutions and remedies for whatever they think they are solving.
And such is the case with Putin. His decision to go to war in Ukraine has backfired so severely that the Russian economy has nearly collapsed in a matter of one week. Though he will dispute the numbers, thousands of Russians are protesting in the streets, heedless of the danger this places them in. Russians are trying to leave their country in droves.
Multinational corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Visa, Mastercard, Coke, Nissan and many more have ceased operations in Russia. Massive lines have formed at banks to withdraw cash and the value of the Ruble has plummeted.
This is more than a miscalculation on Putin’s part and on the part of all his enablers. It is what happens when you depend of a suite of false and faulty technologies. War, propaganda and the mindset of the pathological liar are useless against a determined people who refuse to knuckle under to being conquered.
Captured Russian soldiers are broadcasting the lies they were told by their commanders to get them moving against their fellow humans in Ukraine. They were told a variety of things like, Ukraine had been taken over by Nazis and fascists, they were just on a training exercise, anything but the truth. And therein appears the other aspect of war’s obsolescence. The fool that goes to war has to lie to his own people as well as the enemy.
People the world over are basically good. Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, British, Indian, South African, German, Japanese, on and on endlessly—good, decent humans who want to survive well and help others do the same. The big lie told by warmongers is that there are differences between these groupings of humanity or subgroups and that those are dangerous enemies and therefore have to be fought.
The only true enemy is the warmongers who insist on their obsolete technology at the expense of the many and the profit of the few.
So as Edwin Starr’s song goes, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” We’ve added Jack Black’s rousing cover below. Enjoy and let’s fire every politician the world over that deigns to use war.
