We Write In Anger Because Memories Are Short And Ignorance Is Often Long
“Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker…”
Proverbs 14:31
“Open your mouth for the mute,
for the rights of all who are destitute.
Open your mouth, judge righteously,|
defend the rights of the poor and needy.”
Proverbs 31:8-9
“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due,
when it is in your power to act.
Do not say to your neighbor,
‘Go and come back, tomorrow I will give it’ –
when you have it to give.”
Proverbs 3:27-28
We write in anger.
May it please God, justified anger.
May it please God, justified anger because memories are short and ignorance - deliberate or just plain ole ignorance - is often long.
We write in anger, but we will let the man speak for himself.
On Wednesday, March 2, 2022, a toady bootlicker and member of the United States Senate from Kentucky attempted to obscure the meaning of his liege lord’s words, calling them a “mistake.”
Days earlier the then most recent former president of the United States told conservative radio hosts Buck Sexton and Clay Travis:
“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,’ Putin declares a big portion of the [sic] Ukraine – of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.’”
The following day, at his Palm Beach resort, the same former president – the once “leader of the Free World” - upped the ante:
“They say, ‘Trump said Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”
During the last weekend of February 2022, the habitually indicted former president told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference:
“Yesterday reporters asked me if I thought President Putin was smart… I said, ‘Of course, he’s smart,’ to which I was greeted with ‘Oh, that’s such a terrible thing to say.’ I like to tell them, ‘Yes, he’s smart.’”
Of course, let us not forget that this is the same former president who tweeted at 7:13 pm on December 23, 2016:
“Vladimir Putin said today about Hillary and Dems: ‘In my opinion, it is humiliating. One must be able to lose with dignity.’ So true!”
The same former president who, on July 31, 2016, as a presidential candidate, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that if he were to be elected, Vladimir Putin
“[is] not going into Ukraine. He's not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He's not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”
When the ABC commentator noted that Putin invaded Crimea on February 22-23, 2014, the candidate word-scrambled:
"OK - well, he's there in a certain way. But I'm not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you're talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he's going away. He takes Crimea."
On Friday, August 18, 2023, the thrice-married and quadropoly-indicted former president told Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow:
“Putin would have never gone into Ukraine, but that was just on my relationship with him, my personality over his. I was the apple of his eye….”
On August 14, 2023, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine noted:
26,384 civilian casualties in the country; 9,444 killed and16,940 injured.
This included 21,308 casualties (7,339 killed and 13,969 injured) in territory controlled by the Ukrainian government including casualties in Donetsk and Luhansk and other regions of the country.
5,076 casualties (2,105 killed and 2,971 injured) in territory occupied by the Russian Federation
Putin’s Kremlin is unlikely to admit to high fatality rates among its troops as a result of his “de-Nazifying” efforts – putting the Russian official number at around 6,000 by mid-August 2023.
However, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense website listed a cumulative total of the number of enemy personnel “liquidated,” alongside other combat losses at 249,110 on August 5, 2023. “Liquidated” implies killed only; “casualties” – a preferred military euphemism – groups killed and wounded. Mediazone, which partners with independent sources in Russia and Germany’s Tubingen University, put the total number of Russian deaths at nearly 50,000.
On May 1, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby – citing newly declassified information – reported the US believed Russia had suffered 100,000 casualties between December 2022 and April 2023 - amounting to 20,000 deaths and 80,000 injuries.
“It’s really stunning, these numbers,” said Kirby. “Its three times the number of killed in action that the United States faced on the Guadalcanal campaign in the Second World War.” He had previous told a New York audience that the number of Russian casualties in the first eight months of the war stood at “well over” 100,000.
At least initially, Putin attempted to justify the deaths of Russians and Ukrainians by calling his war was “de-Nazifying.” But numbers show the lie for what it is. The first Jewish communities in the Ukraine were established in the late Ninth Century by refugees fleeing persecution in Byzantium, Persia and Mesopotamia. According to the World Jewish Congress, in 2023, Ukraine is home to 45,000 Jews, making it the fourth-largest Jewish community in Europe and the 11th-largest in the world. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. This puts the lie to Putins “de-Nazifying” lie.
On July 7, Fortune.com (“The sad legacy of Russian orphans lies behind Putin’s troops kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children”) reported:
“Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian soldiers have forcibly taken an estimated 16,000 Ukrainian children to Russia. Over 300 children have since returned home, but it is not clear what happened to most of the rest.
“The mass abductions led prosecutors at the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants in March 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. Moscow counters that the children it has brought to Russia – its estimates are as many as 744,000 Ukrainian children – have been evacuated from conflict zones….”
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, nearly 5.1 million – 5,100,000 - people have been internally displaced in Ukraine as of May 2023 and 6.2 million – 6,200,000 Ukrainian refugees have been displaced around the world with 17.6 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. In February 2023, the World Food Program reported:
“…roughly one in three families in Ukraine - 11 million people - are food insecure. Nearly one-third of the population is unemployed. Many are now weathering a bitterly cold winter without power.
“Landmines and other war debris have left some farmland too dangerous to plant — a massive setback for one of the world’s biggest breadbaskets.
“The fallout of the war has been widespread and devastating - feeding a hike in global prices, deepening hunger in countries as far flung as Lebanon, Sudan and Venezuela, and pushing the most precarious, like Somalia and Yemen - grappling with conflicts of their own - one step closer to a hunger catastrophe.”
A mid-July Russian missile and drone attack on the Ukrainian port of Odesa destroyed 60,000 tons of grain – enough to feed 270,000 people for a year.
In July 2023, Russia bombed the Spaso-Preobrazhenski - Transfiguration – Orthodox Cathedral, Odesa’s largest building and a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site. It was the second time the 19th Century cathedral has been assaulted by Russia; the first time was in 1936 during the reign of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. By August 1, 2023, Russia had damaged or destroyed more than 160 Ukrainian cultural sites.
In the same bombing spree Russian forces bombed dozens of other historical buildings, including the national Archaeological Museum. “Intentional destruction of cultural sites may amount to a war crime, as acknowledged also by the UN Security Council,” a UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - statement declared.
In early August 2023, Putin’s forces bombed a Ukrainian blood bank in revenge for drone strikes on Russian warships in the Black Sea. In March 2022, Russians bombed an art school housing 400 civilians in Mariupol.
In the year-and-a-half since Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine, Pope Francis has initiated efforts – both secret and public – to negotiate an end to the war and repeatedly referred to “martyred Ukraine.”
In July, Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene proposed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. She explained:
“I filed six amendments… Amendment 103 prohibits Ukraine funding until a diplomatic solution to the war is reached. My amendment prohibits funds from being provided to Ukraine until the President certifies to Congress that a diplomatic solution has been achieved to the war. President Biden's decision to send billions' worth of weapons and aid to Ukraine has engaged the United States in a proxy war with Russia that we cannot afford and jeopardizes all peace efforts.
“Instead of funding an endless war overseas, the United States should seek a peaceful end to the conflict, which will save lives….”
In his 1770 pamphlet “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,” Irish statesman, economist and philosopher Edmund Burke observed:
“[W]hen bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Almost a century later (1867), in an inaugural address (“Concerning the Value of Culture”) at the University of St. Andrews, English philosopher, politician, economist and civil servant John Stuart Mill cautioned:
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
Thomas Aquinas, certainly one of the most important theologians of Christianity, taught:
“If anger is desire for vengeance insofar as it is really just, then anger will be good and virtuous and is called zealous anger; but if it is desire for vengeance that appears just but is not really just, then the anger is a sin”
The slo-speaking, corpulent monk known as “the Dumb Ox,” also wrote:
“He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.”
Putin’s war on Ukraine insults humanity and our Creator.
Yet, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other politicians – including a four-times indicted former president – who would deny on-going support to the people of Ukraine and the poor of the world who depend on Ukrainian grain and fertilizer supplies are Putin’s collaborators in the martyrdom of Ukraine.
Those who would challenge or deny America’s moral responsibility to continue fighting with and supporting “martyred Ukraine” insult the Creator and refuse to “defend the rights of the poor and needy.”