COLUMNIST

Brave little soldier

By Marc Munroe Dion

If there's one thing Vladimir Putin's mob has in common with the warriors of the American white nationalist movement, it's that both groups like killing civilians, and neither group does well against soldiers.

"We'll take Kyiv in six weeks!" the manifesto of war declares.

They do not. They start killing old ladies and 11-year-old girls because the soldiers on the other side are too tough to kill.

Same for our own right-wing "soldiers" who melt like snow when the cops show up but are "combat-ready" when it comes to killing old ladies in the grocery store.

You know why the American right hates rioters loosely tied to Black Lives Matter? Because the rioters stood and fought. The white right doesn't.

Both the Russian army and the American right are very fond of the big guns. The Russian army doesn't have the guts to take a city, so they rely on missiles and artillery, things that can be fired from far away, where it's safe.

Likewise the gunned-up American right, as ripe a pack of physical cowards as ever, surrender meekly to the cops. They favor the AR-15, which fires many bullets quickly and lets you shoot an old lady in the grocery store without getting close enough for her to clock you with a can of green beans.

A lot of writers are still moaning and weeping about the "insurrection" at our nation's capitol.

Yeah, I didn't like it either, and I think everyone involved should be forced to spend the rest of their lives on a desert island guarded by heavily armed drag queens and being forced to work in a factory that produces Barack Obama bobbleheads and textbooks used to teach critical race theory to preteens.

But to me, the central fact of the cartoonish "insurrection" was that it failed. It flopped. It fizzled. It laid there like a lox. The brave would-be revolutionaries couldn't do it; they couldn't stop the process. Even with a president behind them, they couldn't overthrow the government.

As they slunk away; they muttered that they'd be back with their "long guns."

They didn't come back. They knew who'd be waiting next time they came to call. They have no stomach for facing real soldiers.

In a way (a dark way), it's funny.

America has a long, painful, glorious history of fighting for freedom. Our own freedom. Other people's freedom. When Hitler enslaved France, it wasn't long before a tired soldier from Oklahoma showed up with a Camel cigarette hanging from his lips, drawling, "Which way is Berlin, ma'am?"

The Soviets enslave half of Europe, and the Americans dig in for freedom, fighting everywhere, financing other nation's fights, slogging forward painfully. Radio Free Europe! The Berlin Airlift! The Cuban Missile Crisis!

And now, the American weapons and the American food go to Ukraine, where the people fighting for freedom don't mean the freedom not to wear a COVID mask, where the leader doesn't tell you to march and then Trumps out on the fighting.

You want to see a fight for freedom? Don't look at the grocery store shooter giving himself up to the cops. Don't look at the revolutionaries who failed.

Look at the Ukrainian soldier. Don't look at the live Ukrainian soldier. Look at the dead one. Look at the headless one lying in the dirt outside some wheat village.

He didn't give. He didn't run. He didn't shoot up a grocery store, didn't kill an old woman from a safe distance. He was a little light on slogans, and now he's dead as hell.

Marc Munroe Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

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