Savages

"The target is destroyed." Pilot of a Soviet SU-15 interceptor to his flight controller, September 1, 1983. The "target" was Korean Airlines Flight 007 with 269 people aboard. Everyone was killed in the ensuing crash.

The early indications are that a Malaysian Airlines 777 was shot down as it flew over Ukraine in an area near the Russian border. This was a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Two hundred ninety-five were aboard. According to FlightTracker it had reached FL 330 (33,000 feet) and was travelling in excess of 500 miles per hour. Amateurs didn't bring this airplane down.


Believe nothing coming out of the press, or any agency of any government (including ours) concerning this horror. The facts - an airplane crashed and nearly three hundred people spent the last moments of their lives knowing what was about to happen to them. Everything but the grim pictures of scorched earth, scattered aircraft parts and the twisted bodies of the dead is supposition. Some of it will be intentional disinformation planted to create a context for world reactions that are in someone else's interest. Whoever did this - and they alone (at this moment) know who they are - killed because the abject horror of it all would advance their cause.

Years ago, on the way to a wedding, my wife and I flew over Cuba. One would have to have been alive and aware during the early 60s to remember that lovely island as the source of a nuclear standoff. We have maintained strained relations with the Castro government over the decades. There was no way we would fly right over Cuba.

Of course we did. It is the twenty-first century. Civilized nations, even those at odds with each other, understand the benign and advantageous nature of free commerce. It is even possible to fly to Cuba, if one decides to play a fiction that "ignores" American law. We later learned (same trip) that we were free to travel to Nicaragua. Imagine that.

Civilization still grapples with the Dark Age temperaments of savages. Here, in Ukrainian skies, seems another example. We must raise our voices, our fists and maybe more, at all of them no matter what "side" they are on.

I'm in. What can I do to help?