More than a dozen people were killed Saturday in Belgorod, where local officials described a chaotic scene.
“There are two dead children and a hit in the residential sector,” regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed Kyiv used banned cluster munitions in what the Kremlin called an “indiscriminate” strike. More than a hundred people were injured.
In a statement, the Russian military warned of “immeasurably severe” consequences. Russia, the ministry lied, targets “only military facilities and directly-related infrastructure” in Ukraine.
The strikes on Belgorod, as well as waves of drones dispatched over Russia, were presumably meant as retaliation for Friday’s prolonged aerial bombardment of cities across Ukraine. More than three-dozen people were killed in that barrage, which Volodymyr Zelensky said included “nearly every type of weapon in [Russia’s] arsenal.”
Do note: The attack on Belgorod, which Russia said was “delivered on downtown with the use of cluster munitions from Czech-made multiple rocket launchers,” would mark the single-deadliest strike on Russian soil of the war.
The Russian Foreign Ministry demanded a UN Security Council meeting, and insisted on the presence of the Czech permanent representative “to explain his country’s supplies of weapons, which are used to kill civilians.”
As usual, nobody could verify Russia’s claims (or at least not most of them), but suffice to say there was a highly unfortunate incident and faultless people appear to have died as a result.
To be sure, that’d describe every day even in a perfect, peaceful world, humans being the mortal, accident prone species that we are. But in our highly contentious, imperfect world, the frequency, scope and circumstances of lost life suggest we’re regressing — backsliding into reciprocal barbarism, and thereby squandering a century of rapid economic development and technological innovation which should’ve left us with some sort of utopia by now.
On December 28, The New York Times published an unsparingly harrowing account of — and I’m quoting the Times here — “a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality used against Israeli women during the attacks by Hamas in early October.”
If you haven’t read the linked article, it’s obligatory. Unfortunately. I say “unfortunately” because the details are ghastly. I say “obligatory” because to the extent it’s true (and I believe it probably is), it speaks to the impetus for the murderous rage on display in Gaza, where the IDF is exacting revenge by way of a mini-genocide.
The Times‘s reporting — which was based on “video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors” — by no means excuses the indiscriminate killing of more than 15,000 Gazan women and children. Just like the perpetual subjugation, impoverishment and dehumanization of a entire people by no means excuses Hamas’s day of serial murder and rape.
Similarly, the dozens of Ukrainian innocents butchered by Russia on Friday don’t justify the 14 Russian civilians apparently murdered by Ukraine on Saturday.
What all of this does underscore, though, is the notion that as a species, we’re still (all of us) running a very primitive operating system.
For all the hand-wringing over the allegedly existential threat posed by artificial intelligence, the biggest risk to our survival as a species continues to be us.
Too bad the NY Times article sits behind a paywall…
When that happens I go to the library.
We have met the enemy….
H-Man, it seems we cannot escape the biblical rule of an “eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” as the standard for resolving any dispute. I agree with you that risk appears to be hardwired into our DNA as a species.
That’s a Hebrew philosophy. Jesus would never agree.
That’s Babylonian philosophy. Hammurabi would totally agree.
One of many problems with that philosophy is greed or taking a head for an eye. In fact current Gaza genocide is a case in point of how out of balance we measure the eye for eye that is justified by the parable.
This isn’t the main topic of your article, but you reminded me of Keynes’ prediction that in perhaps 100 years (so maybe 20 from now?), humanity (or at least the “developed world”) would be in a vastly improved state of material comfort “which science and compound interest would have won us”.
Although science has brought the masses many technologies and advancements which have materially improved our lives, do you think Keynes would be shocked as to how bad the median person has it today in terms of personal finances?
Yes, that was in fact the reference. Good eye. The year would’ve actually been 2028 (or 2031). So, just four (or seven) years from now.
“Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war.” – George Santayana
Very good! Most people misattribute that to Plato. Smart readers we have here.
Connect this to the lesson in thermodynamics contained in the last Disgraceland contribution. The drift into disorder cannot be stopped, but with enough energy input one can minimize local entropy (pick up trash, maintain one’s property, volunteer….) I have no idea how to minimize it on a global scale. Maybe it can’t be done. Even saner, mythical civilizations would have trouble dealing with the chaos of entropy.
That Disgraceland post nailed it.