Is Vladimir Putin Beating the Drums of War?

“If you have a pistol hanging on the wall in the first act, it should be fired in the second.” — Anton Chekov

Photo by Radik Sitdikov on Unsplash.

All around the world, the same song has been playing since the dawn of human civilization. Since humankind abandoned the tree tops to wander upright, then abandoned foraging for farms, then farms for towns and towns for cities, the same song has set the tune and history has danced.

We want to live together, obviously. The faster, free exchange of ideas from larger and larger groups of humans living in close proximity is a driver of modern technology and all life as we know it. We keep concentrating ourselves into larger and larger numbers, living all boxed-in apartment complexes, office buildings, and modular houses.

Once in a while, we collectively experience something so unpleasant or dangerous, it reminds us why this isn’t always a good idea.

Diseases and viruses spread more easily in a large, heavily-concentrated population. People sometimes concentrate so closely together as to cause injury and death.

And then there is the real mortal enemy of humans and it isn’t viruses or microbes but our own fatal flaw. It is a generational disease so deeply woven into the fabric of human society, it might even be imprinted on our DNA. We have been beset by permutations, variants and strains of it as long as humans have been keeping records, and long before that judging by archeological evidence of 60,000 year-old human skulls bearing the unmistakable signs of blunt force trauma

War.

Violence is endemic to human societies and civilization. It is as ubiquitous as the housefly, as old as the hand axe, as prevalent as taxes.

Human beings have been engaged in an arms race since long before the inventors of the chariot wiped the battlefield with their opponents.

In spite of the fact that we live in the Information Age- and there is no shortage of information about war, the wars which have been fought, why they were fought and how, including pictures, war persists into the modern age.

Today, there are perhaps as many wars and rumors of wars as ever.