Ecclesiastes 12:13–14, The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.] For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (ESV)

Jeremiah 14:13–14, Then I said: “Ah, Lord GOD, behold, the prophets say to them, ‘You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you assured peace in this place.’” And the LORD said to me: “The prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds. (ESV)

These two passages were in my morning bible reading. They jumped up and smacked me!

I know that sometimes I come across as a grumpy old man railing against social change. I don’t want to be that guy. So let me say again why I am a Facebook and blogging warrior speaking out against what God declares to be sin.

I do not want to see those who are not fully committed to evil die in their sins. Every human being under heaven is under obligation to know the Creator of the universe and to obey him. Whether you are family or friend or distant stranger in a foreign land, you (and I) will be called before the judgment seat of God to answer for the life you have lived.And the standard of this coming judgment are the universal laws of God revealed in his word. So, yes, I get a little stirred up when the “false prophets” (the politicians, experts, commentators, media darlings, “progressive” pastors, and others) encourage men and women to disregard the law of God and to live their lives as though God is not, and they will enter some state of eternal bliss on death.

So, yes, I am angry at the Joe Bidens and Elon Musks and Madonnas of the world who are encouraging those who think them to be reliable guides to sin without regard to the coming judgment. I believe Joe Biden is the greater sinner than the women he encourages to abort. I believe Elon Musk is the greater sinner with his multiple children with multiple women than the 16 year old young man and his 14 year old girlfriend whose passion is greater than their morals. And I believe all the entertainment types who whore on stage and in life to be greater sinners than those they encourage to copy. I would not shed a tear for them should God strike them dead and usher them into judgment today.

Anyone who tells us we can disregard the commandments of God is a false prophet and a liar whether they be a president or a bishop. I wouldn’t be so angry if I did not know that they will lead many others less evil through the gates of hell. So I rant and rail. And I hope someone listens and repents for why would you want to face the judgment without a savior?

There was a tragic racially motivated massacre Saturday (May 14) in Buffalo, New York. A young man, whether he is demon-possessed, mentally ill, or miseducated, I do not know, entered a supermarket with the intent to kill as many black people as he could. Suffice it to say that what he did represents the opinions or views of the tiniest of tiny minorities in this country who are terrified and believe race or ethnicity is the defining feature of what it is to be American. This view is no more representative of America’s European majority than Louis Farrakhan’s racist rantings are representative of America’s African minority, and we can’t let the race hustlers of any ethnicity gaslight the nation into believing America is a nation founded on notions of race. It simply isn’t true. Of all the nations on this planet, ours is the one most committed to the view that the content of the mind, the philosophical and religious underpinnings, the family and the home are what makes America and not the geographic and ethnic origins of its populace. 

Christianity, and protestant Christianity especially, is America’s foundational philosophy. We find this philosophy laid out in Ephesians chapter 2. Paul, in addressing the ethnic and cultural divisions that plagued his time and place, tells the gentiles of Ephesus that Christ had broken down the wall of separation between Jew and Gentile and made these new Christians one Church by his death on the cross. What we have little understanding of today given the weakness of our public education system is how fractious Europe was during the time of the migration of our founders to this continent. 

Just to take the British Isles as an example, the native population (not those of Asian or African ethnicity) see themselves even today as English and Welsh and Scottish and Irish and Cornish and any number of other regional ethnicities rather than just British and it was yet more true at the time of our founding. In 1700, Scotland was a separate kingdom from England, and these two peoples did not see themselves as one at all. Our founding called upon these Europeans to see themselves as One People united around the central tenets of our Christian and Western European heritage and not their places of origin, just as the Church was one new people made up of peoples from every ethnicity and language centered on Christ. 

Sometime after our great Civil War (1861-65), America slipped off its foundation. Biblical Christianity was replaced by progressivism in the mainline churches and in secular society. The 20th Century, with its wars and revolutions, saw America abandon its founding principles for a worldview that considers every thought equal and nothing eternal. We abandoned the collective quest for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, for the exaltation of the individual and individual thought and expression. While it’s easy for those who think like me to point to the rise of feminism, homosexual celebration, and abortion as markers of American collapse, it is more important to point out that it is the abandonment of the simple truth that God IS which lies at the base of our national decline. With no pesky god telling us what is Good or True or Beautiful, we have been set free to come up with our own definitions and practices, and inevitably those practices don’t work very well. 

White (or Black) Supremacy is one of those beliefs that don’t work well. It is a belief built on a vapor. The color of the skin says nothing about the condition of the heart and mind, but the idea of ethnic superiority is as old as humanity itself. The natural default position is us against them. Are you with me or are you against me? That is The Question. The Christian concept of the creation of a new humanity that spans all tribal and ethnic identities unites us on universal principles. Once honest Christianity is abandoned, we revert quite naturally to our old tribalism. 

Consequent to America’s rejection of unity on a common identity, it has embraced a concept of pluralism in which every philosophical/religious/ethnic identity is encouraged in the name of diversity. The problem is that diversity doesn’t work. For a nation to remain one, it must have a common identity. Multiple identities, like multiple personality disorder, is an illness not an advantage. A hyphenated America is a disordered America. This is not to say that every immigrant must surrender his prior identity, but he must embrace the founding principles of the republic and see himself as fully American with no loyalties to any other governmental or social principles. Enrich the existing culture while embracing the founding principle of “out of many one” – the principle of Ephesians 2. 

So to answer the question that heads this epistle, the answer is, No. Ethnic supremacy, be it white, or black, or Chinese, or Japanese, or whatever is a denial of our founding and the instrument of national suicide. The walls of separation must be torn down from both sides, from the majority and from the minorities and our oneness celebrated. 

John 8:7 – “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” (ESV)

To quote Richard Nixon, “Let me be perfectly clear!” I believe Russia is wrong in its invasion of Ukraine. They were wrong – very wrong. Having said that, when it comes to national sentiment and reportage by the media, it all depends on whose ox is being gored.

What do I mean by that? Somewhere around 1 million Iraqis and Afghans have died due to America’s war making there in the past 30 years. That’s a whole lot of dead men, women, and children, and not counting the widows, orphans, and little boys and girls sold into sexual slavery because of the deep poverty into which they were thrust.

But here’s the thing: I cheered when American forces destroyed hundreds of Iraqi tanks and other combat vehicles on the Highway of Death in the 1st gulf war – along with the thousands of Iraqi conscripts who perished in their vehicles. And I cheered just as loudly when the air campaign began during the 2nd and we leveled sections of Baghdad. and when we leveled Mosul in order to save it later on in the war.

In Afghanistan we overthrew the legitimate government of the nation and installed a puppet regime more to our liking and less to the liking of the Afghan people – and over the years killed over 200,000 Afghans in the process.

All this to say I’m more than just a little uneasy watching this current war play out on our screens. It’s not that I want the Russians to succeed – I don’t. I want them to return to their borders and cease this wanton destruction of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, and the senseless devastation of the civilian populace. (And I don’t like seeing soldiers die either!) No, it’s that war is a horror. It’s never clean. Killing is never surgical. Cities are chokepoints and you destroy them and everyone in them. And our hands are not clean and we shouldn’t pretend that they are.

Putin’s “reason” for this war is almost the same as ours in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Vietnam too for that matter, but most of you are too young to remember that one.) – the “enemy” was threatening our national interests and intervention was necessary to prevent further damage.

War should always be the option of last resort. It is not always an atrocity, but it is always a horror. Looking at our history over the past 150 years, there are only 2 wars that stand out as necessary from our perspective: World War 2 and Korea. The others, from the Spanish-American to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we got into either through hubris or political expediency – or just bumbled into them. And wars, even those waged from the purest of motives leave death and destruction in their wake requiring a generation or more to recover. America has a generation of soldiers who will carry the physical and mental wounds of war to their graves – and this is not counting the millions in those nations in which we warred who will do the same.

So, Mr. Putin – stop! Withdraw and pay Ukraine for the death and destruction you have caused. And America and her allies – stop pretending your hands are clean and your motives pure; they are not.

Reflections on the Ukrainian War 

I may be a little cynical, but the longer this war in Ukraine is reported upon, the more curious I become on why it is being reported as it is. Those of us of a certain age grew up watching World War 2 play out on our television screens. We watched the replays of the various news outlets and the propaganda films of the War and Navy Departments, and I find myself marveling at the contrast between then and now. 

World War 2 was covered as a clash of armies and of battles on the seas and in the air. December 7th, the American entry into the war, wasn’t reported as an attack on Honolulu or even on Oahu. We saw the Japanese attack on the naval anchorage in Pearl Harbor, the air bases at Hickam and Wheeler, and Army installations at Schofield Barracks and Fort Shafter. There were civilian casualties, but they were collateral damage to the Japanese attack. 

From the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 to the surrender of Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri in September 1945, this war was reported as the march of armies and great battles fought from the Russian steppes to the African deserts, battles between great fleets from Midway to the Coral Sea, and air raids over embattled Europe. Seldom were civilians mentioned other that as collateral damage as an incident of the war. 

Seldom, that is, unless those were good guy civilians. The Battle of Britian was shown from the perspective of both the great heroism by the outmanned and out-gunned Royal Air Force, and as the remarkable endurance of the British people as they bore down and endured during the destruction of their cities and homes by the German bombers. The newsreels highlighted the suffering of “our” people in the war even as the destruction of Italian and German and Japanese cities were celebrated. 

Now don’t get me wrong. Just as you can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs, you can’t fight a war without killing civilians along with those in uniform. My sympathies lie with the attacked not the attackers. (Unless, of course, those attackers are “my” attackers. Then the sympathies can get a little confused.) 

All this to bring us to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how it is being reported. Ukraine has 200,000 active-duty soldiers and another 600,000 or so reservists and veterans of previous conflicts with the Russians. The Russians have been gnawing away at Ukraine since at least 2014 and the Ukrainian military is well-versed in Russian military tactics and how to counter them. Ukraine is not a helpless child whimpering in the corner. These are tough people used to tough times and they have a long memory of Stalin’s starving to death of some 2 million of them during the 1930s (a fact the New York Times denied at the time and has not corrected since) to bring those Ukrainian peasants into submission to his socialist ideals. But this is not how this war is being reported. Correct me if I’m not seeing everything, but I’ve not seen one Ukrainian general or colonel speaking to their victories in the reports by the major media outlets. I’ve not seen a single graphic showing how the Ukrainian army is deploying to counter the Russians nor how the use of American and European weaponry is being used by them to great result. 

Now we know the Ukrainians are enjoying success on the battlefield. Russian units are being decimated. But if we only knew what the media is showing us, these successes are by Molotov cocktail-throwing grandmothers defending their homes and shops, and not by well-armed and well-trained professional soldiers defending their homeland. This war is being reported as a war on civilians resisted by civilians, and the question is, “Why?” 

Fleeing women and crying children make good video. It is easy enough to pluck the heartstrings by showing a bloodied woman clutching her wounded child, or to show them in refugee encampments in Poland and elsewhere standing in soup lines and weeping over not knowing what tomorrow will hold. It makes good video, but poor understanding about how the war is being waged from the Ukrainian side. Watching 30 minutes of reporting by PBS or CBS or NBC (Russell Holt is on the ground in Poland with Mr. Biden and I cannot understand why he is the only person in the shot wearing a mask – but that’s a rant for another day!) or the BBC or DW or any of the other “news” organizations will give us tears but no understanding. How is the war progressing from an operational or strategic perspective? We have no way of knowing from their reporting. We know some Ukrainian cities are being reduced to rubble, but no one is pointing out that can be a really bad idea from the attackers’ perspective. Rubble makes great defensive positions. 

So we have a fairly good picture of the civilian dislocation caused by the Russian invasion but no picture at all of how Ukrainian defenses are holding. And this, now I get to my point, is the strategy behind the reporting/propaganda effort. We hate Russia. We’ve hated Russia since the 1918 Communist Revolution. We even hated them when they were our allies during WW2 – that alliance was a marriage of convenience not of shared values. We hated them during the communist uprising in Greece, the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War (Russian pilots were flying missions for the Norks), the Vietnam War, and the entire Cold War. And our ancestors hated Russia long before our hating began. Russia has been a contender for European dominance since at least Peter the Great (in other words, since before the United States were even a twinkle in the eye of our founders’ fathers) and our European ancestors weren’t about to surrender their grip on power. So, we hated Russia yesterday; we hate Russia today; and we’ll hate Russia tomorrow. And by “we” I mean those who hold the reins of power and influence. 

Wars take time and consume resources that might be better used in other endeavors. And people, especially the American people who are entertaining themselves to death with Tik-Tok videos, have a very short attention span. (Most will find this essay too long to hold their attention.) How do you get them to stay engaged – to stay engaged and be willing to lower their standard of living to pursue the war? By highlighting helpless women and children. I’ve railed against our feminized culture and political landscape elsewhere and I need not pursue it further other than to say that the way to keep American women focused on what you want them to see, is to show them how a terrible man (Vladimir Putin) is making women and children suffer. (He probably tortures cats too!) 

Pershing said Infantry wins battles, but logistics wins wars. Wars are fought on three levels: the tactical, the operational, and the strategic. The tactical is led by captains and non-commissioned officers. The operational is led by commanders of battalions, brigades, and divisions. The strategic (from the American military perspective) is led by the highest ranks of the flag officers and their civilian overseers at the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the White House. Captains fight skirmishes: colonels fight battles; generals fight campaigns; politicians fight wars. And the news front is part of the war effort. 

The newsreels of WW2 were propaganda videos. They presented the war effort in a way to keep the populace motivated to continue the war in the face of shortages by showing them great campaign victories and highlighting the evil intent of the enemy (which wasn’t hard given the evil that had seized Germany with the rise of the National Socialists). Much of the rationing that was imposed on the populace and the rubber and metal collection campaigns were designed to let the people feel they were participating in the war effort even when little of it was needed in much the same way as the government’s Covid restrictions were designed to control the people and not the virus (which is far more difficult if not impossible to control). 

So, today’s video from the front is not intended to inform, but to control and motivate. I’m not saying that it is out of evil intent by government and media, but it is manipulation not information, and Caveat Emptor.  

I will not lie; my sympathies lie with the Ukrainian people. Russia does have some legitimate complaints about how the United States and its European client states through NATO have encroached into what Russia considered its area of interest after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that in no wise justifies the Russian assault on the Ukrainian people. However, the American/European response lies open to question as well. Here are a few observations from an old man. 

1. Ukraine, as a nation, has only existed for 40 years while Ukrainians, as a people, have been one of the many tribes/ethnicities that make up Europe for at least 1000 years and probably much longer. Europe is a mishmash of tribes and languages not unlike the rest of the world even though it pretends to be above such things. Well, Ukrainians are one of those tribes even though they have been included within other nations and empires since the collapse of the Kievan Russ a thousand years ago. Nation status and ethnic identity are two different things, and a little observation of human history tells us that identity is stronger than statehood. So, although Mr. Putin wants to absorb the Ukrainian people into the Russian people, as long as Ukrainians identify themselves as a distinct people, that will be a failed enterprise regardless Russia’s military success. 

2. We all love “David and Goliath” stories regardless the fact that the first one was not a recitation of the little guy defeating the big guy but rather the continuing story of God’s care for his elect. History tells us that the big guy almost always wins and that the more resistance the little guy puts up, the greater his injury in his defeat. Given that, the US/European encouragement for the Ukrainians to put up a good fight against the Russians before they go down in defeat will only cause greater death, injury, and destruction for the Ukrainians. Yes, they may bloody the Russians, but unless we are seriously overestimating Russian military capabilities, the Russians will win in the end. That is, they’ll win unless they lose the will to fight to the end as did the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan (two other ill-conceived invasions of sovereign states). 

3. So, is the West acting in the interests of the Ukrainian people when they send arms and ammunition to the Ukrainian government that they might continue their resistance to the invasion? Who benefits from the US paying Poland to send Ukraine MiG fighters? It will prolong the fight, no doubt. But is a prolonged fight in the interest of the Ukrainian people? You know my answer: the Ukrainian people are best served by their government coming to an agreement with the Russian government and restoring the peace. Yes, the Ukrainian government may need to retreat from their push to join the European Union and the NATO military alliance in this generation. Yes, they may need to keep themselves within the Russian sphere of influence. But spheres of influence and military alliances aren’t forever, and what’s a generation or two in the history of a people whose story spans millennia? 

4. Who then is benefiting from the US and her client states encouraging the Ukrainian government in its resistance? As I watch the price of gasoline and diesel soaring at the pump here, my first candidates are the major oil-producing nations and regions: The United States (#1), the Persian Gulf states (#3), and Russia (#2). Yes, Russia. Their oil isn’t going to magically disappear if it is not pumped to Germany and the other EU countries tomorrow. The US may embargo Russian oil, but that embargo won’t last long, and Russia will soon be able to pump away and at a much higher price. So, the #1 beneficiary of this conflict are the oil producing states and their energy corporations. Next are the weapons manufacturing countries and industries, and again the United States takes the lead with our client states and Russia again following in our train. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and many other smaller corporations will be making bank off this conflict for decades to come. Those Polish MiGs must be replaced, and they will be replaced with more expensive, more technologically advanced aircraft from the United States. And less I forget, Ukraine is a large market for Western products and a major producer of foodstuffs. The only people I don’t see benefiting from this conflict are the Ukrainians themselves. They are the ones who will pay and continue to pay for generations to come. 

So, pray for peace in Ukraine. Pray intelligently. And be just a little cynical about the purity of national interests on every side.