Stumbling Into Armageddon

CALIFORNIA

Biden sharply warns about “Armageddon” in connection with Putin’s threats

I’ve been reading Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 about the coming of the First World War and the resulting catastrophe for Russia – defeat, disorder, revolution, dictatorship, tyranny, immiseration. His picture is instructive: a feckless Tsar Nicholas II, unable to control events and unable to control his own need to avoid humiliation; the Russian generals promoted to leadership through connections and careerist machinations, unable to lead their men in actual combat and unconcerned with their troops’ suffering; a vast coterie of self-styled “intellectuals” with no discernible practical skills prosletyzing for harder and harder left-wing revolutions. 

It reminds me, sadly, of our own country today, with an impaired President, an ineffectual military saturated with careerist desk jockeys, and a chattering class that constantly challenges each other to contests to see who can epater le bourgeoisie more outrageously. 

How do you find yourself in a nuclear war over a peninsula called Crimea in the Black Sea that most Americans couldn’t point to on a map? You stumble, you bumble… then you rumble.