OK. One last vent and I'm off.
It's clear now that all this thing is going nowhere. Russia is quickly and secretly pulling out of Ukraine, Putin already admitted that the Donetsk and Lugansk regions are Ukrainian territory, in a few days the dust will settle and everything will sort of return to more or less as it used to be. The world will likely slip into a Cold War v.2.0 but that doesn't seem to be such a serious threat as compared to nuclear warfare. Everyone can cool off and relax, sort of.
But there's something that's going to be missing from the picture.
300 people, who had nothing whatever to do with the conflict.
They died.
(Just like the infamous Kursk submarine, which 'sunk').
300 beautiful people. Students, scientists, just families. A grangpa with three grandkids. Look into their faces.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/18/malaysia-airlines-victims-photos_n_5600372.html Read into their lives.
http://time.com/3012667/mh17-victims/ They are treated as expendable pawns by the 'global powers' now, but they were people. They lived. Now they are dead.
It could have been someone you love. It could have been you. It could have been me. As a matter of fact, it
really could have been me and my family. The news of the crash came right as we were about to board a Rome-Moscow flight which normally flies over Ukraine. Of course, days before the incident the Russian air authorities closed Ukrainian air space for Russian flights (what a coincidence!), but we didn't know about that just then. Besides, things look differently from a board of a plane which is about to fly in the neighbourhood of someone who's shooting down civilian airplanes with long-range rockets.
I believe (that's the right word, 'believe', as, like one journalist aptly noted, there's no information about it, only propaganda, so nobody can 'know' anything) that the plane was shot down by mistake. Some proverbial monkey-with-a-hand-grenade was trying to hit an army plane but missed. But it doesn't really matter now. All military conflict involves deaths of innocent people. A war is a mess full of people who survive by shooting quickly and shooting to kill. It's a chaos full of accidents waiting to happent and no amount of good intentions will prevent it.
It doesn't matter much now what was the monkey's nationality, whether it was Ukrainian or Russian, volunteer, professional military or mercenary. The monkey was there because there was a war going on. And whatever your take on the conflict, there's one indisputable fact - without Russian support, there wouldn't be any 'self-proclaimed states'. There wouldn't be any war in the region.
The war happened because of a nation's and a leader's imperial revanchist ambitions, and now they're going to get away with it. And they'll start again somewhere else. If they don't, someone else will. We can all remember how it was during the Cold War. The third world was full of petty tyrants who came to power by asking for money from the USSR to have a 'socialist revolution', then they were overthrown by other ambitious bastards who got money from the US to 'restore lawful democratic regime', and over and over again. Now we're slipping into another Cold War. That means more 'minor conflicts', more monkeys with hand grenades.
You never know where and when the next monkey's hand grenade will go off. It can be a nut case deciding the only way to stop bloodshed is blowing him- or herself up in a crowd. It can be a refugee from a war zone, desperate for money, breaking into a house and confronting the homeowner. It can be that a doctor who could've cured you dying in a crash. Everytime you say 'oh, come on, it's just some far-away monkeys, let them kill each other', you're inviting something like that to happen to you. Yes, you.
In today's intertangled world, there's no such thing as 'someone else's war'
There. I'm feeling better now. Thanks for reading. No reply necessary.
