I’m tired . . . major rant coming

With the invasion of Ukraine by the despotic Putin after what is chillingly akin to appeasement (especially by that IPOC POTUS45, who WAS ELECTED BY the USA) and an extreme and persistent workload in my day job (we’ve nearly double our workforce, but still need more people - at least I’ll get help next month), both on top of three years of family medical issues, I’m tired - physically exhausted, emotionally wrung out, mentally overdone, and utterly, utterly tired of “pussy footing around”.

So I’m going to let rip - but I’m not going to start with Ukraine. No, let’s start with Yemen.

Yemen - a nation which at times has seen 13 million of its more or less 20 million people needing food aid to survive. Yemen, where the violently misogynistic and Taliban-like Houthi have been running a rebellion - started, in part, by their response to a flawed government, but continued and conducted by their hate . . . and opposed by misogynistic Saudi Arabia and the human rights abusing (including outside its borders) UAE  (with the aid, I understand, of a former Australian soldier . . .  and munitions from the UK and USA). Saudi Arabia - the nation that refused to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because they wanted to keep murdering apostates, the nation where women are living under near mediaeval conditions, a nation kept afloat and untouched because of its oil reserves.

Is the war being conducted by Saudi Arabia and the UAE doing long term harm (all wars do short term harm - asking about that is moronic)? 

Yes.

Would doing nothing do greater harm?

Yes.

As US President John F Kennedy said:

“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

Of course, action doesn't always require violence - as an example, Germany is now acting firmly and decisively against the gas pipe from oil-rich Russia.

It’s at times like this that I regret diplomats and national leaders not having enough brains and ethical backbone to do things like switch their nations to renewables (including electric vehicles and geostabilisation of accommodation temperatures) decades ago, as we wouldn’t be in this mess now - or, at least, not in as much of a mess.

Anyone who wants to argue that such would have harmed Russians should look at what they’re been living with under Putin (including a declining economy). 

ALL diplomats and national foreign affairs ministers should start putting human rights front and centre - after all, it is in nation’s highest interest to NOT be at war, and letting despots get away with “a little” human rights abusing (which it is not to the victims, of course) in the interests of money is just setting us all up for fuck ups like what is now happening in Ukraine.

Continuing with that theme of violence, Russia has been sending sadistic and/or psychopathic mercenaries to quite a few places (the most recent notoriety is in the CAR), and the only nation that has done anything to stop a vacuum on this issue is France - anti-religious, surprisingly racist, still colonialist (New Caledonia and through imposition of its currency in agreements in Africa) France, land of Bastille Day on the 14^th July, the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” partly written by Thomas Jefferson (a slave-owning “Founding Father” of the USA who also co-authored that nation’s Declaration of Independence), and the short-lived, flawed, and violently suppressed “Paris Commune”.

There are shades of grey in all of this, but one area there needs to be fewer shades of grey is diplomacy, where diplomats have to, as I’ve already written, start realising that they can’t put human rights to the side or on the backburner - that’s how despots like hitler, Amin, Mugabe, the Khmer Rouge, Hussein, the Shah of Iran and his successor both, and many others including Putin can get set up in the first place.(If you don't know who those people are, do an internet search.)

So, noting that there are lots of other "Yemens", let’s now go to Ukraine, where the long foretold invasion is underway. Ukraine, where brave people are fiercely defending against overwhelming force - a discrepancy most apparent in Russia’s nuclear weapons, which Ukraine gave up (for a treaty where both the West and Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and to defend Ukraine’s borders) to someone who could actually use them.

And that is the biggest problem here: it’s not just Ukraine against Russia, it is the entire world against Putin’s (many Russians object to all this, so by no means is it “Russia’s”) potential use of nuclear weapons. 

Nuclear weapons . . . the use of which is banned by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons negotiated by ICAN, to which neither Russia nor the USA (nor France or other nuclear weapons holding nations - nor even nations without weapons, such as my Australia) have signed up to . . .