Should Men Be Allowed to Serve in the Military?

“Let us die like men”

It is pretty obvious that the Russian soldiers who are currently engaged in destroying Ukrainian cities — and then raping, murdering, and torturing their way around that country — are men.

And for sure it is not Ms. Putin in the Kremlin organizing these atrocities.

While the Russians are the current reigning world champions of male brutality, this disease is clearly global. Wherever you look on the planet, there appears to be a continual flow of images of armed people, often in Darth Vader outfits, assaulting defenseless, unarmed civilians — and again, almost all the people doing the assaulting are men.

It might just be a white, US-American cop shooting a black guy in the back for some issue with his car taillight….

Or it could be other guys annexing Kashmir or Crimea or Tibet….

The sight of whole apartment blocks being destroyed in Ukraine is just mind-boggling — unless, of course, you happen to be one of those unlucky ones to have been on the receiving end of similar violence from US-American bombs and missiles in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or, by courtesy of Saudi Arabia, in Yemen. In fact, the US “Is the World’s Gun Store” — as a result of which “tens of thousands of people are violently killed and injured by firearms in war zones around the world.” Or maybe you suffered the indiscriminate urban bombardments by the Russians in Chechnya or Syria….

Can you imagine? In Moscow like every other “civilized” city in the world today, people are sleeping on the streets because they have nowhere to live. At the same time, the Russian military is razing whole residential neighborhoods!

The madness is everywhere.

And what about all the street killings in the Philippines organized by Duterte…. Oh, right. Now to be replaced by Marcos 2.0. Or the horrors in Myanmar or Cambodia?

And there are some really nasty specimens letting rip in Africa too. Sudan is perhaps the continent’s poster child for a misogynistic military killing machine. Or is that the horrors in Ethiopia? The sight of state gunmen of the apartheid state of Israel attacking the mourners of a woman they probably assassinated the day before catches the zeitgeist perfectly.