My favorite movie is “The Hunt for Red October.” Each time it’s on TV as a re-run, I am enchanted, not by the Russian Admiral’s (Sean Connery’s) rugged good looks nor by the young CIA defense analyst’s (Alec Baldwin’s) fine acting. It is the plot which engages…….twist and turns and astute lucky guesses. It rings true…..the Russians are mortal – like us – and the powers that be in the Pentagon are not above unorthodox solutions to a thorny international situation, never mind the extreme risk involved. Somebody has to do it; most of us never know.
As in the movie, it is long understood that every serious defense force on earth has a cadre of “expendables,” though the euphemism is obscene when applied to human beings. At 1945’s D Day, none of the commanders, Eisenhower least of all, regarded American soldiers as such. Every life was valuable; the invasion was necessary. The soldiers themselves knew, in order to retake France and defeat Nazi Germany, that someone – many someones – would die, probably heroically, and be memorialized 80 years later as was recently done through the airlift of several 100-year old surviving vets to Normandy to be thanked by the French, yet again, for saving their country.
Fair enough: France helped us in a crucial phase of our Revolutionary War, and we did, actually, rescue France and Europe from a hideous future in which everyone not blonde and blue eyed would also have been expendable…….as is any Russian army front-line warrior today who becomes too badly wounded to fight. Rather than evacuate them or risk medics in the field, non-commissioned officers are instructed to shoot and kill them, not in mercy but in ruthless convenience. Other armies in history have done the same, presuming an endless supply of replacement bodies, unwilling draftees or drugged fanatics, stepping up to take the fallen ones’ places.
War is horror. Russia, which has lost untold thousands of soldiers trying to capture Ukraine, is now running short of prison draftees, often paying urban “volunteers” large sums to sign up. Over 1,000,000 left the country from the outset, instead. Cultures which view the individual person as only having value in service to the state are likely to employ such practices. Democracies foster the belief that the state serves the people, rather than otherwise. The views are diametrically oppositional, and there is the root between the West-East conflict. Belief systems, once entrenched or accepted by a people willing to surrender liberty in exchange for being “taken care of” and relieved of responsibility for their own welfare, tend to persevere in some form.
Ancient Romans, after a centuries-long attempt at self-governance through an increasingly weak and corrupt senate, gave up to invasion in the face of raw military aggression, though not without protracted negotiations, resistance and heroism by some citizens and legionnaires. Their concept of freedom was limited, however – Patricians held the upper hand, and slaves were unenfranchised non-persons. Social forms and ideas without conviction and practice in government become hollow. Real freedom only for the privileged few, economically or otherwise, is a recipe for disaster or for French King Louis XIV’s cynically predicted “le deluge.” It could have been stopped.
The gallant Ukrainians are now penetrating deep into Russian airspace and territory, using American F-16’s and highly efficient battle drones. They have sunk the “Rostov-on-Don,” a mega-nuclear sub based off Crimea, a tremendous achievement against an aggressor they never provoked, except to disagree with being conquered by a post-Communist dictatorship from a little KGB-holdover gnome hiding in the Kremlin. Slava Ukraine!
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
