On the death of a good man

I live in a college town, so most of my friends are among the Good People who take their beliefs from the editorial pages of the New York Times. Still, I was surprised at the reaction when I lamented the death of Charlie Kirk. Fascist, catch! was scratched on one of the cartridges the killer left behind; and Bella Ciao on another, referencing a ballad sung by Italian partisans fighting the Mussolini government and their German occupiers in the Second World War.

But Charlie Kirk wasn't a fascist! Rather, he impressed me as a young Socrates, a decent conservative traveling to American colleges to engage students in friendly and respectful debate. This is a sin against the zeitgeist, apparently. He was therefore murdered by an unhinged young man with a Mauser 98, a military rifle adapted for hunting with a telescopic sight and .30-caliber bullets.

Greece got rid of its troublesome citizens by condemning them to drink poison hemlock, as Socrates was required to do in 399 BC. In 21st century America, we have the sewers of the internet, where our mentally unbalanced citizens discover that murder is an okay solution to their unhappiness. Thus a United Healthcare executive was shot in the back last December by a young man who objected to his medical insurance and - in an eerie forecast of Charlie Kirk's shooting - explained himself by scratching delay, deny, and depose on his cartridges.

Socrates might not have voted for the current occupants of the White House, but neither would he have murdered one of their supporters.

130,150 Russians killed in Ukraine

These are the men Putin has sent to die in Ukraine: 36,568 volunteers, 18,261 recruited prisoners, 14,797 conscripts, and 2,777 mercenaries. Their names were compiled by Mediazona and the BBC from published obituaries, social media posts by relatives, and other firsthand sources. Among the known dead are 5,567 officers. The figures are for the period from February 24, 2022, to September 11 this year, so they don't include the "frozen war" from 2014 to 2022. I assume they also don't include several thousand North Korean soldiers killed in Kursk province last year, nor does Mediazona track deaths among soldiers recruited or conscripted from the Russian-occupied provinces of Ukraine.

By comparison, American losses totaled 58,220 died in our Vietnam misadventure, and 33,686 in the Korean War.

Ukraine keeps its own count of Russians casualties, which now comes to 1,093,730 killed, wounded, captured, or deserted. Of the last three categories, some or many have probably since returned to active duty.

Ukrainian losses are also substantial -- about 100,000 soldiers killed, by Western estimates, along with a civilian death toll that seems to average about five every day, for a total of 6,485 over the 1,297 days since Russia launched an all-out invasion that everyone expected would be over in a week or ten days.

Bella Ciao

The lad who murdered Charlie Kirk left some empty shells and unfired bullets behind him, scratched with his musings on the atrocity he was planning. One read Fascist, catch!, which is pretty clear. Another is apt to bewilder an American audience: Bella ciao, which means Goodbye beautiful. It's the title and refrain of a partisan song still sung in Italy on the anniversary of the 1943-45 rising against Mussolini and the German occupation. One verse translates like this:

And if I die a partisan / Oh goodbye beautiful, goodbye beautiful, goodbye beautiful bye-bye / And if I die a partisan / Then you must bury me.

Tyler Robinson may get his wish for death, since Utah does have capital punishment. In the spirit of Charlie Kirk, though, instead of hoping for lethal injection, we'd do better to support Mr Kirk's charity, Turning Point USA. He believed in honest and open debate and was practicing it when the "assassin's veto" silenced him forever.

NATO steps up

The more we learn about Russia's swarm of drones over Poland on Wednesday, the more I admire Europe's response. The drones were shot down by two Dutch F-35s and two Polish F-16s. German Patriot missiles were put on alert but not fired. And the whole operation was overseen by two AWACs command aircraft, a jet from Italy and a prop plane belonging to Poland. Impressive!

NATO's weakest links now seem to be those cheapsakes in Spain and that loudmouth in the United States. I should note, however, that almost all the equipment used in downing the drones was American-built. The exception was the Polish AWACs, a Saab 340 built in Sweden, famously neutral throughout the 20th century but now a full-fledged member of NATO.

Drones over Poland

Wake up, Donald Trump! Your buddy in the Kremlin sent 19 drones over Poland, a NATO ally with 10,000 American troops stationed on its soil. Poland and other NATO countries had to deploy anti-aircraft missiles and jet fighters to knock them down. All this in the course of another massive attack on Ukraine that killed 29 people and wounded 34.

The Polish incursion wasn't an accident, though Putin of course will claim it was. None, apparently, carried explosives. Unarmed decoy drones are a regular part of Russia's bombardment of Ukrainian cities, but it defies logic to think that in this case all the drones just happened to be decoys.

What comes next, drones over Finland? Drones over the White House? We have a treaty obligation to Poland, not to mention a moral obligation to Ukraine. Get off your ass, Mr President! You're dealing with the Adolf Hitler of the 21st century. Even Neville Chamberlain, scorned as the appeaser who let Hitler swallow Czchoslovakia in 1938, did finally go to war and bring Churchill into his cabinet, though Winston (how conveniently we edit our memories!) didn't become prime minister until well into 1940.

And even Joe Biden sent military aid to Ukraine, though never enough, and always too slowly.

What's in a name?

Mr Trump keeps muttering about changing the name of our Defense Department back to what it was from 1789 to 1947, the honest and robust Department of War. Well, why not? The US never lost a war before 1947, while it more recently seems that we just can't win one. There are footnotes, of course: the War of 1812 was a bit iffy; the Korean War was more of a draw than a loss; and, okay, the old War Department didn't include the US Navy. But what the heck: a name change can't hurt, as long as the new Secretary of War doesn't include Al Jazeera in his classified chats.

China rewrites the Second World War

Stalin was annoyed that Germany surrendered to the Western Allies on May 8, 1945, so he dragged the ad hoc German government to Moscow the following day so they could surrender all over again. Ever since, Moscow has celebrated "V-E Day" on May 9. Now Xi Jingping is at it, proclaiming that Japan surrendered on September 3 thanks to Russia's help. (The Japanese emperor surrendered in his first-ever broadcast to the people on August 15, which has ever since been regarded as "V-J Day," though it wasn't until September 2 that the document was signed aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo harbor.)

The South China News, which like every newspaper in the People's Republic is a mouthpiece for the Communist Party and its chairman-for-life Xi Jinping, announced the Wednesday celebration under the headline: Why some Chinese academics say it’s time to rethink WWII history – starting with 1939. Which is reasonable enough, I suppose. Indeed, "some academics" argue that the two world wars were a single conflict with a bit of a cease fire from 1917 to 1939.

As the newspaper story expands, it broadens to a rather comical complaint about a "Western-centric" conspiracy to downplay China's role in defeating the Japanese, a role that mostly involved the Kuomindong (Nationalist) forces under General Chiang Kai-shek. The Red Army under Mao Zedong seldom met the Japanese army in combat, and Japan's final surrender came on September 15, 1945, when it signed over the island of Taiwan to Generalissim Chiang himself. That's a factoid that won't be much mentioned at Mr Xi's grand military parade on Wednesday.

Putin brags about his American escort

Among Putin's souvenirs from Akaska the other day was a video of super-stealthy American jet fighters safeguarding him as he returned to his homeland. (This image was clipped from the Kremlin's propaganda channel on Telegraph.) The Anchorage meeting was, altogether, a triumph for the Russian dictator, who could have been arrested for war crimes if he stopped in another country en route to his meeting with Trump.

And what did we get in return? Timothy Snyder of Yale, who knows more about Ukraine than anyone in Washington, says it best: "Trump has made extraordinary concessions to Russia in exchange for nothing at all."