Current Events

Ukraine’s Viking Revival

by

When I wrote “The Ukraine Crisis — Some Background and Thoughts” back in February 28, 2014. I expected the Russian – Ukraine War in the Donbass to be headline news in the American media. It turned out…not so much. The NFL Patriot’s deflated footballs and bad mega-blizzard forecasts for the North East United States, among other headlines, seem far more important to the America’s media mandarin’s quest for advertising dollars.
.
Part of this lack of coverage is laziness. American broadcast networks and cable news services just don’t cover foreign news much, as it is a lot of work for low ratings. And when it comes to things that reflect poorly on Pres. Obama, other than Fox News, they are all “UK Guardian reporting on the Labour Party” regards Obama Administration foreign policy failures. Which the war in the Ukraine definitely is. Meanwhile the Russophile “fanbois” are spam-commenting on the Mil-blogs and military-themed forums I follow to the point they are useless. I had given up hope of finding anything useful on the fighting there.
.
Then I ran into the following video from a defense industry guy who is tracking the Donbass fighting…and then I snorted up my coffee…_Violently_.
.
This Ukrainian propaganda video showed not only the fighting, but Ukraine’s Viking Revival spawned by the fighting in the Donbass.
.

“100 BIYTSIV.” (100 Warriors) – New Ukrainian Propaganda Clip
(Lyrics Nehrebetskiy, Score Telezin, sung by Donchenko)
.
This is a classic piece of war music in many ways reminiscent of WW2, and the video clip is designed to produce that martial effect. It is being propagated by the Right Sector militia via their Youtube portal. The video is a huge viral phenomena in Ukrainian social media, reflected by the fact that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense placed it on their Facebook page despite very poor relations with the Right Sector.
.
This emerging Ukrainian nationalist cultural revival has huge tactical, operational, and strategic military, plus grand strategic political, implications for the 21st Century. Implications I intend to explore in posts here on Chicago Boyz.
.
If the song sounds familiar when you play the video — it’s why I breathed coffee — it should be. The tune of this song is based on SSgt Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” —
.

.
See for background on Sadler:
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Sadler
.
Too Sadler’s Green Berets tune, Nehrebetskiy placed the following lyrics for Ukraine’s Right Sector Militia media team:

Read more

The Way of the Warrior

by

So, the wailing, the sobbing, the gnashing of teeth from the so-called intellectual and cultural elite over the runaway box-office success of American Sniper is pure music to my ears … all the more so since I started calling for this kind of movie to be made … oh, in the early days of the Daily Brief, back when it was still called Sgt. Stryker. It didn’t take the WWII-era studios to get cracking and crank out all kinds of inspirational military flicks within a year of Pearl Harbor, the disaster in the Philippines and the fall of Wake Island. Of course, those were full-service movie studios, accustomed to cranking out movie-theater fodder on an assembly-line basis. There was, IIRC one attempted TV series, set in an Army unit in Iraq, which was basically recycled Vietnam War-era military memes, and died after a couple of episodes, drowned in a sea of derision from more recent veterans, especially after an episode which featured an enlisted soldier smoking dope. On deployment. In a combat zone. The producers of the show had obviously never heard of Operation Golden Flow. Or maybe they had, and assumed it was something porn-ish.

Read more

A Random Upper-Middle-Class White Guy Writes About MLK

by

So, OK, my employer made me burn off some vacation days before the end of the fiscal year, in the form of a cap on the number of PTO hours that can be carried over from FY14 into FY15, which boundary has shifted by 3 months due to our recent change of ownership. Much lower down, my management intimated that due to certain software-release and testing milestone dates, no significant block of time off in February or March would be approved. But thanks to an unrelated M&A a few years back (a spectacularly problematic one, destined to be a business-school case study for decades to come), we now get the MLK holiday off. I decided to take the whole week and head southwest in search of sunlight. After a swing through New Mexico, I am spending a few days at Crow’s Nest, a 10-minute hike from the 6+ acres I own near Bloys Camp. It’s my first visit in four years.

Mitre Peak (1887m/6190’) as seen from my lot
Mitre Peak (1887m/6190’) as seen from my lot

This is what I would write if somebody made me enter one of those hoary MLK essay contests that middle- or high-school students get sucked into. The entries that I’ve read over the years have seemed pretty unimaginative, but it’s hardly realistic to expect much historical perspective from a teenager. The tone I’m aiming for here is, of course, originality combined with some mildly discomfiting assertions, while avoiding stereotypical politics. The structure is a simple three-parter: past, present, and (near) future.

Read more

A Few Cautious Predictions About Our “Crisis Era”

by

The world weighs on my shoulders, but what am I to do?
You sometimes drive me crazy, but I worry about you
I know it makes no difference to what you’re going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg, and I worry about you …

– Neil Peart, Distant Early Warning

 

But wouldn’t it be luxury to fight in a war some time where, when you were surrounded, you could surrender?

– Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

 

Reading through background material on the UN’s recent request for $16.4 billion in humanitarian aid in 2015, I find that the number of displaced people was already at its highest since World War II at the end of 2013, and has risen by several million since then. Nearly all are somewhere inside or on the perimeter of the Muslim world, with Ukraine the only sizeable exception. My sense, in which I am hardly alone, is that we are reliving the mid-1930s, with aggression unchecked and chaos unmitigated by morally exhausted Western institutions. That “low dishonest decade” ended in global war with a per capita death toll around 1 in 40. A proportional event a few years from now would kill 200 million people.

Read more