Warfare #3: Social Roulette
This week I write to the brave people of Ukraine who are now in their second month of resisting Putin’s violent aggression, while the world remains on the precipice of nuclear retaliation.
A letter to all you courageous Ukrainians
Families terrorised with missiles raining in
On our television screens
You’re being blown to smithereens
Our hearts go out from all us Australians
To all you brave patriots staying behind
To defend your homeland, prepped and primed
Away from loved ones you’re torn
Your lost heroes we mourn
Your young children traumatized out of their mind
Your cities are being pummeled from the ground and air
You defend them with fervor, rage and despair
They’re bombing your homes
And your golden domes
Indiscriminate annihilation everywhere
Your citadels and towers once high and soaring
Busting streets and apartments multi-story
Now blasted and blackened
Your cities are flattened
Let’s hope they’ll be returned to their former glory
We see your city of Mariupol desolated
Your hospitals and theatres detonated
We see pregnant women
In blood-soaked linen
Residents buried, starving and decimated
With a visceral hate for these brutal invaders
You’ve united to repel these Russian raiders
They’re tightening the noose
With no sign of a truce
How will they ever again be trusted neighbours?
But it’s more than a matter of protecting your border
You’re fighting to maintain international world order
An unprecedented war
For the global rule of law
Against the tyranny of despotic disorder
You will defend your country all the way to Odesa
You will fight for freedom from the brutal aggressor
Putin’s cynical stampede
Just must not succeed
Thank you for confronting this violent oppressor
We totally depend on your determined defiance
All our bets are on you, with absolute reliance
The whole world’s under threat
From this Russian roulette
Yet just timid assistance from the NATO alliance
We tune into the news each day with trepidation
So grateful for your resistance and retaliation
While he’s murdering civilians
And displacing millions
There’s an unthinkable risk of global escalation
Europe is on a knife-edge, anxious and afraid
What other country will Putin next invade
Or that all of a sudden
He’ll push the red button
And crazily launch a nuclear grenade
If Putin is thwarted by your resilient obstruction
He may next unleash a nuclear eruption
Please Almighty God
Take out this demagogue
Before we all blindly descend into mutual destruction
You will bravely fight until the Black Sea turns red
But this war has a nuclear gun to our head
Time to revisit the argument
For nuclear disarmament
Such apocalyptic consequences …. all humanity must dread!
Kevin Holmes • 29th March 2022
