There is a simple truth in sociology. In the absence of clear direction, a society will not know how to behave. Absent clear norms, its fabric will tear; without leadership—absent the “social good” will be. The role of societal leadership therefore falls to government.

While each society goes to defining its model of government, each model goes to ensuring that its society holds together under stress. The corollary goes that when a government stops mandating behaviours when faced with societal threat, governing stops too.

History is framed with challenges and responses in this regard: Magna Carta, Reformation, Communism, Fascism, 1950s Civil Rights, 1960s Apartheid, 1970s Feminism, 1980s Gay Rights. And since 2019, the Free World’s response to Covid-19—where individuals rather than governments have defined freedom as the selfish right to live without social responsibility.

It is likely more correct to say, that faced with the scientific reality of the world’s first pandemic in 100 years, governments have uniquely not defended their societies from media manipulation—social and corporate. Nor have they desired to. In fact, when it comes to the concept of government of the people, by the people, for the people in this era of social media we are left asking who “the people” are, and whether they are human at all?

Since 2019 then the governments of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Nordics (pretty much thereby NATO itself) and Australia have proven weak defining their social responses to Covid-19.

Quite correctly, one might ask if these governments have been unable to unite their societies in the simple protection of wearing masks against a killer airborne pathogen for the social good—that these societies have even been manipulated to violently and psychotically demonstrate against them—how can they ever be expected to have them don a helmet and pick up a rifle against a killer international foe?

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin asked just that and declared “military operations” in Ukraine perceiving the answer.

There is a simple law in war. If your enemy is strong, evade. If your enemy is weak, attack.

Russia has attacked—and not in the backwaters of the Caucasus or with the deniability of “separatists” along the Russian border, but into Western Europe.

He attacked because the West has never been societally weaker: European Covid laissez-faire, US congressional sedition, the burning of Australia’s old parliament, the First World rise of conspiracy over reason.

As I write, NATO and Australia can see Russian vehicular columns in the open, clogging the roads to Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol.

Yet, rather than hitting them with Hellfires, Tomahawks and GBUs—they are imposing sanctions. It is just that this is not Kuwait 1990 with a 10:1 fallback in military odds for a desert storm should diplomacy fail. When superpowers go head-to-head there is only the unknown. Which is why to date, they haven’t.

© 2022 Adam Parker.