no question

It doesn't matter. It's just me, and it doesn't matter in the least, except to me alone. Nevertheless though. 

This is a maybe, because I'm not sure I wrote it, and I'm not going to bother looking it up now; but earlier - - it would have been last week as the War started, and I may have taken it down because it exposed my eccentricities more publicly than I'm comfortable with - - in a blogpost, I went on about honor and that in my family growing up, I was taught that nothing is more important in life than honor, than one's own personal honor, and honoring one's Word; and that the cost was beside the point. And I applied that to our obligation to Ukraine.

Time and events are moving rapidly these days and hours as we watch the forty-mile long column of Russian armor move into Kyiv, and I must correct what I said, I was wrong: one's own honor is more important than life itself; but innocent lives are worth more than one's honor, or one's notion of protecting one's honor at any cost. 

A couple of instances come to mind. One is the "family honor" outrages in which a family murders one of their own family members for having gone against the family's notion of their honor by disobeying the patriarch or marrying someone the family didn't approve. Those notions of honor are damnable.

But my main thought this morning is my notion that, regardless of cost, our national honor compels us to take up militarily with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people to whom US, UK, and Russia gave assurances when the Soviet Union evaporated and Ukraine voluntarily became comparatively defenseless in the world field of battle.

But we are dealing with a madman. And, more morally determinative, we are looking at innocents, millions of innocent people. 

What notion of honor would be worth so enraging a madman as to proceed into the apocalyptic nuclear exchange that would destroy civilization. There is Just War, and militarily taking the side of a bullied friendly nation would be it. But there is a moral point at which one cannot counter evil with greater evil, with consummate evil that destroys not only the enemy, but all the enemy's innocents, who, as I look safely out my window this morning, are protesting in droves and being arrested and carted away by the thousands. And our own innocents. Nothing, no concept of Just War, can justify the immolation of innocents.

The proposition of the Cold War, for any who don't remember or weren't there with us, was nuclear deterrence so nerve-wrackingly shaky and yet so absolute, the idea of mutually assured destruction, aptly called MAD, that if they attacked and destroyed us first, our responsive second strike capability would destroy them; and vice versa. Deterrence, knowing that neither side would survive, that if one attacked, the other would respond in full kind and both would cease to exist. As well, the fallout that civilization itself would be destroyed. 

Many dystopian novels appeared, many of which I have read, and the 1987 television miniseries "The Day After", depicting the launching of nuclear war and its result, its gut-wrenching aftermath. Perhaps the miniseries should quickly be revived and shown again so we can remind ourselves what total nuclear war would leave. 

Where's the moral line. At this point, it is irrelevant to suggest that nuclear weapons should never have been developed, and having been developed anyway should never have been used, and having once been used anyway with horrific results, should have been universally destroyed; but it is profoundly relevant, even obligatory, to project ourselves into a future in which all future humans, all the unborn forever, have forever been permanently denied existence. Including all my generations forever and all your generations forever; as totally and completely denied existence and life as the unborn future generations of thousands upon thousands of Jewish corpses found piled in concentration camps in 1945 were deprived of life: how might history judge not only the perpetrating initiators, but perhaps even more, those who exacted final and total vengeance, posthumously, by the second strike. 

At the My Lai massacre, photographed and documented for history and incontestable, an American military group, in the words of the American officers who ordered it and carried it out, "destroyed a village in order to save it", gobbledygook nonsense as meaningless as it was unspeakably evil. We may not ever launch a nuclear first strike; but might we launch a retaliatory second strike that destroys not only the enemy but all the innocents on the other side, and that possibly sets humankind back to emerge mutant from radioactive rubble and puzzled from remote jungles.

How highly do we value ourselves and our notion of honor. How worthy are we to take humankind down to destruction having destroyed everything behind us and leaving in our wake nothing for a future. Who would defend our sense of honor to whomever or whatever creatures unearthed bits of our civilization in some future age.

Is there a line in the sand.

Shall we watch and tolerate atrocities.

Lesser evil, or shame.

Mutants, ants, rats, and roaches.

What if the madman strikes first.

My questions don't have question marks, because they are beyond rational and conscionable contemplation.

But then, we are a week beyond the Age of Reason. 

++++++++++++++++