As Putin’s Russia drags the world toward the abyss of a third world war, people committed to just peace and actively engaged in activities to block powers resorting to warfare can only be discouraged.

Powerful bully states fabricate reasons why war is unavoidable and send their bombs , missiles, and bullets into building and homes, and into lives of children, adults, and elders (destroying much of the natural world as “collateral damage”).  There is a history.

The USA explodes Iraq and leads obedient “allies” to more war in Afghanistan and can’t rid itself of Guantanamo as an accusing symbol of its deadly hubris; China has done its vicious work in Tibet, carries out its policy of cultural genocide in concentration camps filled with Uyghurs, while setting the stage for an eventual invasion of Taiwan; Myanmar burns villages to force Rohingya peasants from their homes  across the border to Bangladesh; and now we have Russian invasion – again.

Michael Ignatieff helps us remember that Russian has long, historic experience in subjugating neighbouring peoples. [“History Got Us Here” article in Globe & Mail, March 5, Opinion Section pp. 1, 6-7.  See his new book:  "Finding Solace in Dark Times"]

In my personal memory, about  70 years of history confirm Russia’s unwillingness to have “free”, self-determining states on its borders. In the 1940s, Finland lost a good part of its land to Russia and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were just absorbed into the Russian hegemony as “republics” but all subject to the Soviet Communist Party, personalized by the sadist Joseph Stalin and his brutal KGB to ensure that no “alien” influences might tempt the vassal states to wander from their totalitarian hegemony.   Soviet-occupied East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent, Yugoslavia, came under Russian military and political control – the Iron Curtain, the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall – the Bear hugs eastern Europe.

Since then efforts to lift the Curtain and remove the Wall have cost rivers of human blood.  In 1956, Hungary’s bravest fought fiercely to defang the Bear's tanks; in 1968, the Czechoslovakia's “spring”  - the flowering of democratic aspirations - was assaulted and crushed; in 1981, in Warsaw Lech  Walesa’s shipyard co-workers were disarmed on Russia's orders to Polish tank crews.  NATO and democratic nations watched as tyranny triumped. 

A new possibility for more humane relations with neighbours came with Perestroika in 1989 when the Berlin Wall became chips of concrete, serving as souvenirs of totalitarianism for many-a home (including mine). The Soviet “Republics” discovered new possibilities of self-determination.  Regrettably Russia itself couldn’t achieve the transition into democracy.  Putin with his well-honed KGB skills was pressed into service.  The Kremlin with  its vast political, military, and economic opportunities became his.  Cronies and sycophants "stewarded" the wealth and Putin retained the  levers of enforcement power.

Chechnya and Georgia were the first to lose self-determination. All the other “republics” felt the pressure.   Many had a new connection to western Europe and NATO to protect their freedom.  Ukraine, still unconnected became the mania of the megalomanical quasi-Czar.  Donbas was the testing ground, and Crimea the prize in 2014. And now Ukraine is the innocent victim of criminal assault.   A morally-bankrupt effort to destroy the state and subjugate the people into “peaceful” relatives of their Russian big brothers is the vicious goal.

It reminds me of the Nazi’s wishful thinking as they invaded The Netherlands in May 1940. It took but five days then to force a capitulation of the Dutch armed forces. To avoid arrest of the Queen and government, the Royal family and most of the government cabinet fled to safety in London and some beyond to Ottawa.   The departure was initially regarded as a sign of defeat, but eventually the government-in-exile came to represent freedom and provided opportunity for Queen Wilhelmina to speak freely via Radio Oranje to the people as “Mother of the Country”,  The free monarch inspired the Resistance to take on the occupiers.

The Nazis had the vain belief that the Dutch, with their National Socialist Alliance (Nazi sympathizers of some 50,000 members), would just gradually come to amenable terms with  the new regime.  Hitler reportedly was convinced that “the Dutch had never lost their good qualities and that with a little persuasion they would soon discover that their future was in a strong Europe – his Europe.” (Henri A. van der Zee, The Hunger Winter – Occupied Holland 1944-1945. Lincoln NE, U of Nebraska Press. 1982. P.99)

Ten days after the capitulation, Hitler appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a loyal Austrian lawyer who had helped Hitler’s efforts to implement the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria to the Third Reich.  In his inaugural speech to the Dutch parliament, he “explained that the Germans had been forced to invade Holland in order to prevent it becoming an Allied base. He emphasized the communal Germanic blood that made the Dutch such good sailors and the Germans such good soldiers, and he finally assured the Dutch that Germany had not come "to enslave a nation or destroy it, nor take away its liberty.” (idem.)

Lies!   By the time liberation came to the whole nation on May 5^th, 1945, “the persuasion” had been experienced as bloody tyranny for five years.  Hundreds of thousands had been worked to death in forced labour, or killed in battle, executed in reprisal or as punishments, and Jews, gays and lesbians, Roma, and others minorities simply murdered for being who they were. The Netherlands had discovered what’s involved when a barbaric megalomaniacal dictator employs political and military forces to subjugate, plunder, and wipe out opposition.

In Ukraine we see the pattern the potential of this pattern being repeated. Putin sees Ukraine as part of the Slavic family – an unwelcome assessment in most Ukrainian households, I’m sensing.  Ukrainians do not seem inclined to include Putin in their family.  His version of “family-life” is to wield power and control as the autocrat who dictates to and controls by force Slavic peoples, as Hitler claimed for his Aryan family!

Do we again have to revert to full-scale war to stop the evil invader?   Will the multi-lateral international bodies be able to effect Russia’s disempowerment?  The General Assembly has spoken clearly in judgement.  But to whom does that give license to act? No one!?  Then the United Nations needs to rethink its operations and the place of the Security Council.   Will the International Criminal Court be able to do anything, or will that also take a decade after Putin’s reign ends?

As a Christian, I watch the aircraft bombing apartment buildings and missiles destroying village homes; I hear the naval guns blow up ships and coastal facilities; I see massively armed convoys of military might (blessedly being resisted by courageous Ukrainian warriors) trying to blast their way into the capital; I see parents weeping with their children while dads go to war and mums & kids flee w to God knows where; I hear Putin spreading lies about phantom Nazis in Kyiv and claiming to purge the capital of them – presumably also of the Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who stands as a stark contrast with moral integrity and authenticity over against the coward who separates himself by long tables from his cringing “advisors” - the epitome of a Nazi totalitarian sociopath. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the protestant German theologian who was executed by the Nazis just before the end of World War II, wrestled with the question of judging and acting to stop evil. In his “Letters and Papers from Prison” – his prison diary as letters – he can’t, understandably, reflect directly on the events of July 20, 1944 when a group of very courageous officers and civilians including Bonhoeffer conspired to place a bomb near Hitler where it exploded and – disastrously – only wounded the dictator.  But Bonhoeffer without guilt can say, in suggestive code, “…I am grateful and content with the past and the present. … above all may God lead us to Himself.” (sic)

When faced with the suffering and grief of so many innocents in Ukraine caused by the illegitimate, amoral, self-interested, psychopathic actions of a totalitarian tyrant, it may be hard not to justify conspiratorial action to end his reign of terror.  “Love your neighbour as yourself”;  "Treat others the way you want to be treated” - these text bubble up to remind us who and whose we are . But “who is my neighbour?” is the eternal question and is there a priority order? 

If I were possessed by a sociopathic killer demon and driven by amoral lust for power and greed at the cost and suffering of countless other “neighbours,” I think a faint part of me – the part of the Spirit endowing me and all humans with gifts and fruits – could, in a vulnerable moment, make me believe that  my assassination would be justified.

I also believe that the righteous Holy One would convict my assassin(s) of murder, but embrace them with tearful lamentation and steadfast faithfulness, and sentence them “to be loved by Me forever” for defending My human family and Creation.....

PEACE, SHALOM, SALAAM, MIR, VREDE, FRIEDE, PAIX, PAX – for God’s sake immersed in suffering humanity and groaning Creation.