Ukraine: A Modest Proposal

I was recently reading a writer who both advocated for deeper commitment to Ukraine and for the classical liberal goal of avoiding suffering as the highest moral position. Given that the writer had some understanding and wasn't a buffoon, it seemed strange, but we get that these days.

People advocate for transgender surgery, no bail, medical assisted suicide, and decriminalization of drugs among other things justify these things, in part, by using the idea of avoiding suffering. Yet struggle and suffering are part of life and avoiding it is a tremendous error. I will write something later on the immorality of basing a moral system on “avoiding suffering”, but not today.

However, in an effort to aid those who are like that writer, I have decided to write A Modest Proposal in homage to Jonathan Swift.

{On a side note, life has been crazy recently, so I apologize for not writing more.}

The people of Ukraine have fought hard to avoid conquest by Russia. It is now winter, and Russia has knocked out a large portion of Ukraine’s power grid and much of Ukraine is without heat or light and Ukraine will struggle to relocate troops and resupply the front lines. It is likely that thousands if not tens of thousands of civilians will die from the cold this winter.

Even more refugees will be fleeing Ukraine and the EU already is struggling with the refugees they already have, as well as the self-inflicted damage from the sanctions on Russia and the NATO bombing of the NordStream pipelines.

Ukrainian troops and NATO troops pretending to be mercenaries are dying at huge rates. The equipment rushed to Ukraine is sold off or destroyed almost instantly. The money given either gets spent on villas and Paris shopping trips or hidden in foreign bank accounts. Ukraine has been sent back to pre-modern times and we may see civilian death similar in numbers to Holodomor.

Russia seems unwilling to stop. Putin will not give in and even if Russia removed Putin the likely successor would be even more aggressive and less restrained. And the US is willing to help Ukraine to the last Ukrainian.

This suffering must end. Ukrainians must be free from this suffering. Europe must be free from this conflict. And thus, we arrive at my Modest Proposal. It is nothing so crude as Jonathan Swift’s proposal that the poor just sell their children for rich people to eat. Cannibalism is far too extreme for our modern era. We should abhor the idea that the Ukrainians might turn to cannibalism to fight starvation this winter.

Here is my modest proposal: NATO should nuke non-occupied Ukraine to glass. Kill the country once and for all, leave it a giant dead zone that will prevent further Russian aggression and end all suffering in Ukraine once and for all.

It will provide a huge buffer zone between Russia and NATO for the next thousand years. Chernobyl already contaminated a huge section of Ukraine, so this would only be taking it the next level.

No more Ukrainians would need starve or freeze or bleed out from Russian bombardment. No more NATO troops would need to pretend to be Ukrainians or mercenaries. We could even warn the Ukrainians so that they have a chance to flee and avoid death.

And Western defense contractors would lose out on this looting opportunity, but still get to rearm NATO countries after they sent off all their supplies to fight Russia this year.

Additionally, since Ukraine is saying it will need $600 billion to rebuild after the war, NATO countries will save on this expenditure, as only walls around Ukraine will be needed to keep everyone from going in. The monetary cost of glassing Ukraine will be lower long term than fighting the war and rebuilding the country. It will provide regional peace.

With no ability to go home, the Ukrainian people can be integrated into Europe as workers, not refugees. There will be less concern about depopulation of Western Europe with the sudden influx of even more Ukrainians.

{This is not intended to be taken seriously by anyone, any more than Jonathan Swift wanted poor people to sell off their children to be eaten by rich people. However, the utter absurdity of maintaining the current Ukraine policy and its huge costs on all the NATO countries, as well as Ukraine itself, must be addressed.}