For over 800 years, Russia has had an image problem.  Russia has always seemed, at least to the more refined residents of western Europe, to be a land of uncivilized and primitive barbarians.  Russia constantly tries to overcome this image and present itself as a modern, civilized country, whose inhabitants are just like everyone else, but it has been a hard sell.  And now, with Putin’s rampage in Ukraine, raping and pillaging, Russia’s image has just been set back about three hundred years.  Polite people just don’t act this way in the modern era.  Not that Russia is alone with this regrettable image problem ~ there are some regions of Africa and the Middle East that appear to us, in the more civilized regions of the world, to be just as primitive and barbaric as Russia.  And there are places near Russia, like Chechnya, where gay men are rounded up and shot (so the government can claim that there are no gay people living there), that are as hard to understand as Russia itself.  

     Primitive and uncivilized regions like this are really hard for the rest of us to understand.  Putin’s invasion and war against the people of Ukraine seems totally senseless and baffling.  Sixteen hundred years ago, roving gangs of warriors used to go around raping and pillaging, like Attila the Hun, Putin’s precursor, and this was still going in the twelfth century, but there is no place for such rude behavior in modern times.  We are at a loss trying to figure out how to deal with the problem.  

     Noam Chomsky has suggested that there are only two ways this war can end.  Either Ukraine and Russia will fight doggedly on to the death, until one side or the other is obliterated (and it won’t be Russia), or there must be a negotiated settlement.  I have the greatest respect for Noam Chomsky ~ I have read many of his books, and I almost always agree with his point of view.  He cuts through the malarkey and speaks truth to power and anyone else who happens to be listening.  There are very few voices in the world up to the level of Noam Chomsky.  And yet, in the present instance, I think he has overlooked a couple of other possible endgames to this war.  

     Let us begin by looking at the two endgame scenarios mentioned by Chomsky ~ as Zelensky desperately cries out for more fire power, heavier munitions, and war planes, it seems clear that there can be no favorable end to an ever worsening quagmire of death and destruction.  Large parts of Ukraine have already been reduced to rubble; many thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, their bodies either dumped in shallow graves or perhaps burned in an effort to conceal the extent of the mayhem; untold numbers of women and children have been abducted and taken into Russia, much like the stories of Gypsies stealing children to augment their numbers, and still the war goes on, with no end in sight.  But let us take a look at the alternative ~ some sort of negotiated settlement.  The problem with attempting to work out a negotiated settlement is that Putin has already made it clear that he intends to devour the whole of southern and eastern Ukraine, perhaps using those conquests as a staging ground for further incursions into Moldova, so what sort of negotiated settlement did Chomsky have in mind?  Unfortunately, anything that Putin’s Russia might accept would look very close to appeasement ~ a very unpalatable resolution of this war.  Appeasement of the Russian Bear would be like communities allowing a monster or a dragon to devour a few children from time to time so that the rest of the community could go on living ~ not very palatable at all; no.  There may have been a time, before Putin’s invasion, where some negotiated settlement might have prevented this war in the first place, but that ship has sailed, regrettably, as an ounce of prevention could have been worth many megatons of cure (if you feel a chill, the allusion is intentional).

     But there are two other possible avenues to ending this war, which I want to suggest now.  One of them I have already mentioned before ~ regime change (vide: Restore the Tsar !, and Putin’s Folly).  That really seems to me to represent the only really hopeful ending to this horrible war.  

     But it is a fourth possible road to ending this war that I want to discuss as today’s idea.  The real root of the problem is the primitive level of consciousness prevailing in Russia.  Loading up the truck with more and more powerful munitions isn’t really going to ameliorate this problem at all.  I suggest a program aimed directly at raising consciousness in Russia.  

     I call on LSD chemists world-wide to provide at least fifty million trips worth of LSD to Russia for free or low cost distribution.  Perhaps it may be overly optimistic to expect President Joe Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act to mandate and finance the production of sufficient LSD to supply this need, but I think there are plenty of wealthy philanthropists who would gladly put up the required funds to get this project off the ground (high off the ground).  Of course it will be the young people, as always, who will lead this new psychedelic revolution in Russia.  With wave after wave of Peace and Love vibes washing over the land from one end of Russia to the other, the Russian people will rise up in short order to bring down the Putin regime and usher in a whole new and higher consciousness.  They will beat their swords into plowshares, and the Bear will lie down with the Lamb in peace and love.