A Half Million Ukrainian War Casualties and 6 Million Refugees: What’s the Point?

 During the First World War, it was said that the British military maintained three sets of casualty lists. One version was kept to hoodwink the public. A second set was maintained to dupe the British War Office. And the third set was kept to deceive itself.

According to the New York Times, nearly half a million troops have been killed or wounded over the last 18 months of Ukraine's war with Russia. The Times calculates that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and another 180,000 wounded. Russian military casualties are even higher: 120,000 deaths and 180,000 injured.

Of course, these numbers are only estimates. Neither Russia nor Ukraine have revealed their casualty lists. These tallies don't include civilian casualties, which must be severe given the routine bombing of Ukrainian towns and villages by the Russians.

As the Times put it, the toll of dead and wounded is “staggering.” To put it in perspective, about 58,000 American soldiers died during the Vietnam War, a conflict that stretched over ten years. Ukraine, a country with a much smaller population, lost 70,000 soldiers in only 18 months.

Then there are the refugees. Around 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and another 5 million have been displaced but still live in Ukraine.

Most Americans feel no moral responsibility for this catastrophe, even though American weapons and money have significantly contributed to the carnage. College students, by the millions, protested the war in Vietnam, but today's young students have more refined moral sensibilities. They can be whipped into a frenzy if a conservative judge gives a speech on a college campus. They don't give a shit about the Ukrainians.

And consider this. The New York Times may have miscalculated the death toll from the Ukrainian war. Douglas Macgregor. a retired U.S. Army officer, believes 400,000 Ukrainians have been killed during the war—more than five times the number reported by the Times.

America's legacy media report that Ukraine is winning this war, but that's untrue. Ukraine will never recover Crimea or the Donbas, no matter how many Ukrainians are killed or maimed in this senseless war with Russia. And make no mistake. The Russians will find a way to make America pay for provoking this pointless conflict.

The UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident and the Boston Massacre: Universities Should Respond Quickly to Outrageous Conduct on Their Campuses

More than one million people have viewed the You Tube video showing UC Davis police officers pepper-spraying peaceful students on the UC Davis campus last November. Any eight-year old who views that video can tell you that the police used unnecessary force against university students who were peaceful protesting economic conditions as part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. 

But apparently UC Davis does not have the capacity to respond quickly and decisively when their own employees assault students in broad daylight on the University’s own campus. Almost five months after its students were attacked, the University issued a 190-page report prepared by a 13-member committee and chaired by a former California Supreme Court justice. Evidently, the committee thought the incident was too complicated to be investigated by laypeople, so it hired an outside consulting firm to find out what happened. To no one’s surprise, the report concluded that University officials made lots of mistakes.

In some ways, the UC pepper spray incident is like the Boston Massacre of 1770, in which a squad of British soldiers fired into a crowd of belligerent citizens and killed five people. Both incidents sparked a nationwide sense of outrage. But the official response to the Boston Massacre was quite different from the way UC Davis responded to the pepper spray incident.

Almost immediately after the Boston killings, all the soldiers who participated in the shootings were arrested, along with their commanding officer; and they were tried for murder. Captain Preston, the officer in command, was acquitted. The jury believed Captain Preston’s testimony that he gave his soldiers no order to fire on the crowd. In a separate trial, most of the soldiers were acquitted as well, although two were convicted of manslaughter. The soldiers were pinned into a corner by a threatening mob when they fired their guns and probably feared for their lives.

The point of my comparison is this. After the Boston Massacre, local officials responded quickly and forthrightly. British soldiers who participated in the incident were arrested and tried in a criminal court. In contrast, all UC Davis has done in response to the pepper-spray outrage is issue press releases, suspend some of the employees who were involved in the incident, and write a 190-page report.

If you disagree, look again at the You Tube video. Shouldn’t someone be punished?