Opinion: Russia’s ‘War Without End’

The older you get, the more you come to understand that almost everything depends on your point of view. But even when you reach that realization, viewing or understanding things from certain other points of view is impossible. For example, I grew up in New York City among many survivors of the WWII concentration camps. I will never be able to understand anything from the Nazi perspective.

Years later, when I was in my late teens, the United States started sending advisors into Vietnam. By the time that I was teaching college, we had fighting troops there. Hippies had come up with the question, “What if you gave a war and nobody showed up?” The query was answered by shouts of “Hell, no. We won’t go.” Although I was never a hippie, I still don’t understand why we were involved in that war.

So, it was no surprise to me when I read a story in Business Insider that raised the question, “What if you gave a war that could never end?” And the story was printed in that particular magazine because the war is now a business imperative for Russia. In other words, Russia’s economy is so invested in war that it must keep on fighting, neither winning nor losing the war.