Peter presents an old joke in this post. It's funny, but you have to go there to read it.
Following the joke, he has a very pertinent observation:
...the western provinces of Ukraine used to be the eastern provinces of Poland until the Soviet Union allied with Hitler to dismember that country in 1939/1940. Ethnic Poles were "cleansed" back into Poland, and Ukrainian and Russian newcomers were settled on the land that had once been theirs. After the carnage of World War II finally died down, there weren't many on either side who could rebuild what had been there before, because all sides had genocided the heck out of each other as a matter of policy.
I saw the same thing in Africa on numerous occasions. I'm sure many of you recall the Rwanda genocide of 1994, or the many conflicts making up the Congolese civil war over the past half-century or so. Most recently, Nigeria saw ethnic and religious conflict flare up over the Christmas period. The root causes and ethnic hatreds on display there mirror and echo those in eastern Europe, and are every bit as bloody....
He didn't mention this because he didn't have to: the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is exactly the same; for that matter, the Persian/Israeli and Arab/Israeli conflicts are the same.
Grim is resigned to pulling back and simply watching all of it. He's not wrong. Adding dead American troops to the war casualty total is not going to change a damn thing except that American troops died, too.
Get that old Coke commercial out of your heads. Now.
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