Escalation towards major regional war and possible world war is in motion

Ignore the doom porn flooding the media

Be aware. Stay alert.

Ignore both blathering soothsayers and smirking pundits who all declare it’s illogical and impossible for such a little bitty border war to blow up across the world because they’re stupid enough to ignore the reality of our human minds

Tit for tat and tat for tit reactions in and over the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is threatening to turn a local conflict brewing with violence since late 2013 into a global conflagration. These tit for tat moves escalated today between Putin’s Russia and the Western Alliance in a rapidly developing crescendo of anger, distrust, fear, hate, ignorance, greed, and even sadness amidst conflicting interpretations of history and culture.

Remember the last four world wars: the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Great War alongside and followed by revolutions and civil wars around the globe, the Second World War, and, finally, the Cold War, a planet-wide conflict in which millions died. As one recalls these massive conflicts, keep in mind none of them began as world wars. Each one of them began as local wars that grew into regional wars. Multiple regional wars merged into a world war. Even World War II was a hodgepodge of interconnected local and regional conflicts with different timelines for each one. Each global conflict spawned a range of insurrections, revolutions, and civil wars as well.

The same will likely occur with Putin’s escalation of the Ukrainian border war into a global conflict. Only in today’s 21st Century the speed of our interwoven global communications and economies will rapidly accelerate the blossoming of such dark, bloody flowers. Cyberattacks and the reluctance to engage in massive kinetic combat may compel major enemy forces to use tactical battlefield nukes in combat. Such may quickly escalate to widespread EMP detonations and worldwide exchanges of strategic nuclear weapons between the primary adversaries.

There are significant local and regional conflicts that could easily spiral out of control and merge with others into a planet-wide war. These include the wars in and around Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, the fighting in Kashmir with India and Pakistan on nuclear hair triggers, Indo-China border conflicts, spreading violence in Venezuela and Colombia, the interrelated wars across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, and a raft of others. Two of the most serious “others” are the Chinese-Taiwan conflict and the problem with North Korea as it keeps firing rockets and missiles to provoke attention. In the midst of these conflicts we face global climate change, a still-raging COVID pandemic, political instability, and economic turbulence. What to do?

The best thing is to be prepared both psychologically and spiritually for chaos, uncertainty, and the great unknown. Get prepared physically. Much preparation would be the same as for any major natural disaster such surviving a mega-earthquake. Extra food, water, fuel, batteries, cash and coin, first aid, health and medical supplies, analog radios and other communication devices, water purification supplies, proper clothing, backpacks, footwear, shovels, and appropriate weapons. We don’t really know what a major cyberattack would actually look like or how long the consequences may last. Will neighbors and communities in nations so polarized between right and left pull together for the common good, or turn on each other in a savage settling of scores?

Western leaders are calling the dictator of Russia on his stinky shit. Putin is a former KGB agent who hijacked the Russian presidency and destroyed the nascent, messy democracy of the Russian Federation. He’s savvy as a grandmaster of global chess, as clever as a rabid fox, physically tough, and, yes, a nasty little buggering bully with a Napoleonic complex. He’s become more and more angry and more and more of a narcissistic sociopath who distorts and romanticizes history, lies to himself, is ignorant of the actual history of Kievan Rus’, Medieval Ukraine, the Mongol Empire, and the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. Putin and his henchwolves, despite all their brainy brilliance and education, stoop to gaslight the world. The wonderful Russian people are dragged behind the criminal behavior of their leadership.

Meanwhile the great leaders of the Western democracies, while finally appearing united, behave far more like Chamberlain and much less like Churchill. The hypocrisy of the West is ignored as America considers the Americas as within its sphere of influence and France considers Francophone Africa to be within the French sphere. It’s only natural for Russia and China to demand the world recognizes their own spheres of influence. The problem is if we are going to recognize every nation big and small has the right to choose its own destiny, than we must allow for every nation to do so. Yet many nations exist within the borders of other nation-states as stateless-nations, and the right of national self-determination is determined by those with the most power. At the same time we live in a time where the institutions of the nation-state are an anachronism. The right of national sovereignty is as obsolete as the Divine Right of Kings in today’s planetary world. Yet these archaic notions carry on with the inertia of freshly fired cannon balls from the 1860s. These archaic notions also drive the delusions of leaders on all sides. Their memes have turned cancerous.

Putin has been declaring in one form or another since at least 2007 to anyone who would listen he seeks the restoration of the Russian Empire. He feels the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire to be the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century – not Hitler and the Nazis, not Stalin and the Soviets, not Mao and his Communists, not any of the world wars and genocides and atomic bombings and horrors of the 20th Century but the collapse of the USSR. Putin doesn’t seek to restore Soviet Communism, however, for he is more of a corrupt despot, a racist, a Fascist-hating ultranationalist protofascist, a sexist misogynist, a cynical religionist, and a homophobe. Similar tho not as verbose as Hitler’s Mein Kampf, however, Putin has laid out his plans and intentions in a series of papers and speeches. Likewise Xi Jinping, the tyrant of Red China, has long sought to lead China back to it’s mythologically “rightful place” as the Middle Kingdom, the empire upon which the rest of the world revolves around in obeisance. It’s almost as if these two old bloodthirsty bureaucrats are unintentionally recreating the Mongol Empire. Xi and Putin, however, are no Genghis or Kublai Khans.

Never mind the Republic of China government on Taiwan has existed since 1912, long before the Han Chinese Communists conquered Mainland China, Manchuria, Tibet, and the Uighur Turks. China claims Taiwan as part of its own neo-imperial dominion as well as claims the East and South China Seas. China is as antagonistic towards Japan, with which it hasn’t signed a peace treaty from the Second World War yet, as it is towards Australia. China supports despots in places as far apart as Myanmar and Nicaragua. North Korea, despite being hollowed out by the pandemic and resulting famine, is leaping ahead with developing nuclear bombs and long-range missiles. One can see the real possibility of China attacking Taiwan as Russia invades Ukraine and North Korea launching missiles at Guam and Japan while Iran and Venezuela stir up trouble in their respective neighborhoods. The problem for them, however, is COVID-19 has hollowed out their economies and disrupted their societies. China isn’t truly ready to invade Taiwan just yet as China isn’t quite prepared to take on the full might of the USA and its allies. Meanwhile devilishly tricky Vladimir Putin is making sure things are going sideways for the West as he sustains his military noose around Ukraine. He’s a master of suddenly moving one step forward then three steps sideways.

So far Putin has amassed an estimated 150,000 to 190,000 troops around the borders of Ukraine. These include Ukrainian rebels in the Donbas but not Belorussian forces. It’s unclear if naval figures are included in those numbers. Apparently, however, it’s nearly two-thirds of the Russian Army. By comparison, the Napoleonic Grande Armée numbered some 570,000 to 680,000 troops from across the Empire when it invaded Russia in 1812. Some estimates go as high as 800,000 as Napoleon pulled together soldiers from all over his European empire. Combined Axis forces under the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in the Summer of 1941 numbered 3.8 million troops. North Korea invaded South Korea and almost pushed the Americans into the sea with nearly 75,000 troops in 1950. Putin, however, sneakily stole Crimea from Ukraine by infiltrating it with small numbers of so-called “little green men.”

Our responses, however, are not up to Putin, Zelensky, Xi, Biden, Macron, Johnson, or anyone else. Our responses to this crisis is up to you, to me, to us. And may this crisis be resolved without any further violence. I dread this border war will quickly escalate into a regional conflict and then a world war. So get ready. Be ready.

If Putin’s War escalates into the worst case scenario of a nuclear exchange, keep in mind while still unlikely as few people actually want such a horror, we humans are prone to error, accidents, and miscalculation in the emotions of the moment with minds lost in rationality amidst the chaos and fog of war. There are those who explain how to prepare for and survive nuclear attacks if one is outside the primary blast zones. Here’s one highly recommended resource: https://defconwarningsystem.com/2021/02/22/you-can-survive-nuclear-war/. Be ready already. Don’t be an ostrich with its head buried so deep in the sand it gets its ass blown off by some scared, mean bully.

William Dudley Bass
Monday 21 February 2022 
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

Copyright © 2022 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.