World War III
When I travel outside the United States, I find myself watching a lot of CNN International. This isn’t necessarily an intentional increased globalization of my perspective, but rather a function of what hotel cable news tends to be available. At home my go-to provider has, as I’m sure most of my readers have guessed, become MSNBC. With the loss over the past year of Brian Williams, that controversial but very tongue-in-cheek anchor of the 11th Hour show that was a great way to end the news day, and the scale-back by Rachel Maddow of her prime time TRMS, I have weathered the storm and settled in on Chris Hayes, Ari Melber, Ali Velshi, Nichole Wallace, Joy Reid, Stephanie Ruhle and Alex Wagner (in the old prime time Rachel spot most nights). Let’s not forget good old Lawrence O’Donnell even though I get pretty tired of his all-too-serious attempts at humor. They feel like family to Kim and me now since they are all on throughout the day along with their other up-an-coming colleagues. I am OK with a hotel not carrying MSNBC so long as they do not carry Fox News either. In fact, I would give up MSNBC permanently if I thought it would help get rid of Fox News and its related anti-humanistic rhetoric altogether. But CNN International is a real staple of the international hotel community, best epitomized by Hosni Mubarak’s famous comment that he got his Israeli invasion news on “the CNN”.
Back in 1989 (wow, that’s now 33 years ago), I went to dinner in Edinburgh, Scotland (technically at Greywalls Hotel at Muirfield outside of Edinburgh) with my old buddy John, who is Scottish and from Edinburgh, with two lovely women from London. One was someone Kim and I call “Bad Kim” because I ended up going out with her for a turbulent two years and creating an entire chapter of my life around the concept of the trial-by-fire of repeated acceptance and rejection over an extended period of time. The choice I avoided was the other woman, a redhead with a forgettable name who made a career out of going around the world selling hotels on adding CNN International to their cable TV menu. While CNN was started by Ted Turner in 1980 as a 24X7 news channel in the U.S., the International service was launched in 1985, so it was still pretty young when this redhead was running around signing up global hotels to the service. I have no idea what ever became of that woman (Bad Kim might know, but that is not a source available or desirable to me), but she sure did a good job of penetrating the market. Back in those days, I imagine the majority of business travelers staying in hotels around the world were Americans. That is much less the case today, but CNN is much less American even though it has been joined in its mission by the likes of BBC, Sky News, Euro News and Al Jezeera. Those are all credible news sources, but habit still favors CNN for me.
Christiane Amanpour, the CNN prime anchorperson is reason alone to stick with CNN. She is a British-Iranian journalist who, at age 64, is easily the most recognizable television personality on global cable news. She has always sounded very credible and informed. I once sat next to her husband James Rubin on a flight into Kuwait. They were not yet married, but far enough along in their relationship that I got a few insights about what the lady was like offscreen (which was very serious, indeed).
So, it did not surprise me when I got here into our hotel room in Barcelona and I switched on the big flat screen TV that lives in every hotel room these days, and found myself opting for CNN International as my go-to channel. One of the things I like about watching CNN International when I’m overseas is that they interview a broader array of people for their news content than I am used to seeing on MSNBC (and, I am certain, compared to Fox News). Yesterday I saw an interview with a Russian historian who only spoke Russian but was being translated into English for the rest of us. The occasion for the interview was the Putin announcement of the massive scale-up of Russian conscription to signal the intentions to overwhelm Ukraine with soldiers. That seems like a foolish bluff by Putin, one which was immediately met by a sharp escalation in online flight ticket prices reflective of one-way travel purchases to get the hell out of the country before they get strapped to a T-14 Russian Armata tank. The scenes being shown all over the news of the traffic jams as cars tried desperately to flee the country across the southern and western borders into whatever country would take Russians without an advance visa, were a pretty loud tell about how the general Russian population felt about the war efforts being promoted by Vlad the Destroyer.
This Russian historian, whose name I don’t recall, said something that is still ringing in my ears. We have all used the terminology World War III many times over the years to denote some altercation that was likely to get out of control. It is mostly said in jest since we have all recognized for some time that the world is far too smart to go into another massive world war again. That is just like the thinking that the atrocities of racism and totalitarian autocracy are simply inconsistent with evolved human values at this stage of global development. In other words, history yet again seems doomed to repeat itself and we, as a species, seem more rather than less likely to fall back into the error of our ways and become a self-defeating species that needs to bite at its own appendages rather than do the hard work of trying to get along with one another. Damn that sucks, and, as a thought, has been lurking in the background of my consciousness for several years. But now we have the Ukraine conflict.
The historian’s view from the Russian history perspective is that there have been only three times when Russia has mobilized nationally and visibly over its history (perhaps he meant modern history or that defensive maneuvers taken alone did not count, like when Napoleon tried to invade Russia). There was 1914 when Tsar Nicholas II declared a mobilization against the mounting forces of aggression he perceived as coming their way from the Kaiser. The second time was in 1941 when Stalin declared that Russia needed to enter “The Great Patriotic War” to defeat the very real aggressions of the Nazis at their doorstep of Poland and elsewhere. Of course, both times, Russia had the important benefit of the power of Western Europe excluding Germany (and Italy…and perhaps a bit of Spain… in WWII) and eventually the United States. All that allied power overcame the inherent weaknesses of the somewhat wobbly industrial complex of Russia, which was stronger during the time of Stalin than the time of the Tsar, but still tentative.
The argument put forth historically is that this recent mobilization by Putin is a declaration of WWIII. Boom! That woke me up and it sort of makes sense. We never seem to realize we are in a world war until we are well into it. It doesn’t help that modern warfare seems much more focused on technological elements and cyber attacks rather than soldiers and bullets. We can’t see this stuff or feel it unless it directly falls on us. But then again, we are feeling it as it kicks us in the supply chain and in the inflationary pants. Given that Putin is doing what all autocrats are driven by survival instinct to do, doubling down, I think it might be fair to agree with this historian that this announced mobilization is nothing short of a declaration of World War III. God save us all.