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We All Really Are Ukraine
“Are you ready to close the U.N.?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the Security Council during an address at the world body on April 5, 2022. “Do you think that the time of international law is gone? If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately.”
The unpredictable nature of war predictably rolls over itself. War says fuck you, fuck your plans, fuck your dreams, you’re in my way. Zelensky is absolutely right. Otherwise, why even have a United Nations?
In his 1963 song “Masters of War,” as US foreign policy was on an ominous trajectory in its commitment to South Vietnam, Bob Dylan wasn’t calling out soldiers and generals. He called out them that “fasten the triggers for the others to fire.” It was a novel approach in American folk music to call out them that inject the profit motive into too much public policy, both foreign and domestic. Health care, for example. Congress budgets three quarters of a trillion taxpayer dollars to the Pentagon every year. The three largest US federal agencies in terms of both budgets and human resources are the Pentagon, Veterans Administration and Homeland Security, even while taxpayers volunteer to hustle spare change in front of grocery stores like Salvation Army Santas for wounded warriors.
As of this writing, meanwhile, Zelensky and Ukraine have put up nothing short of a generationally heroic…