While my novels have plenty of action scenes, I’ve never tried to compete with Hollywood’s. Forget the soundtracks, special effects, and other audiovisual aspects of Hollywood movies. I’m analyzing something both books and movies can offer—many do in fact—fast and furious action over action, over and over again. As a writer, I prefer to build tension leading to those action scenes being the climax of that tension, not the be-all and end-all of the story.

This is evident even in my sci-fi novels (Rogue Planet is a prime example), but it’s also seen a lot in my mystery and thriller novels. For example, in Intolerance (a free PDF download—see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), the tension builds ss the three cases involving Esther Brookstone evolve and culminate in action scenes.

The fundamental question is whether a reader savors more the buildup than the action scene itself. This reader does! In fact, I also prefer movies that do that too. I only saw “Fast and Furious” movies in previews, but that was enough for me to decide they weren’t for me. Likewise, I’m turned off by any book that tries to emulate an action flick.

I suppose one could argue that movies’ audiovisual media lends itself more to action, but I think that’s just a cop out. A famous director said he liked to blow up things. I prefer to know why someone wants to blow up things, and how good people can step forward and try to stop it.

For writers, this is a question of style. For readers, it’s more about a preference for complexity—real life is complex, so complexity in fiction mimics real life, a prerequisite for any good novel. It’s a question of preferring depth to shallowness.

It’s still a free country, so both sets of readers are free to follow their own preferences. I  hope I’ve made mine clear. They’re reflected in my fiction, for better or worse. I never do shallow, not even in a short story!

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Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance. Hey readers, want free novels? You have two to choose from here, #6 and #7 from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. (See the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) I’ll be publishing #8, The Klimt Connection, very soon, but maybe you have some catching up to do? Of course, the first five novels are available in ebook format wherever quality ebooks are sold, and the first three novels also have print versions. Lots of Esther’s adventures to choose from!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Have you ever read a Dean Koontz novel? He generally writes better horror stories than Stephen King, his main competitor, although he slipped a bit with his Frankenstein series. He’s like me, though, in the sense that he’s written enough books that he feels he can experiment a bit, so I’ll give hm a pass. Like King, Koontz thinks his stories are sci-fi. Who gave those guys that idea? Like King’s, Koontz’s stories are firmly entrenched in the horror/fantasy category. Even so, I’ve read more Koontz than King, because Koontz’s stories are a lot better (I even read the first Frankenstein book, which was enough to turn me off from that series).

One thing about most Koontz stories is that they often feature a dog. I get it. He loves dogs, especially golden retrievers. Including one as a character isn’t a bad idea if an author wants to appeal to dog lovers.

Animals are ubiquitous in modern literature. J. K. Rowling must like owls, for example. Every Hogwarts brat has one, and Harry Potter’s often plays an important role. Jack London probably wrote the best dog book, Call of the Wild. Then there’s Dumbo, definitely a main character if a bit freaky (maybe that is sci-fi because that elephant is a mutant). But Rudolph, who creeped into the Santa fable, didn’t make the cut for cousin Clement Clarke Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” (that might be sci-fi too, with the sled being the UFO?), and he probably was just a reindeer with a bad cold from all the frigid weather.

As much as I love animals, both tame ones and wild, they don’t often play a role in my stories. By prodding the old memory cells a bit, I remember an early short story that features a dog taken over by an ET (now that is sci-fi, and it’s found in my collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape—I can’t remember the story’s title, though). Another short story revisits a rather famous cat (it takes place around Saturn—see the blog archive “ABC Shorts”). Perhaps I should say something more about that cat so dogs don’t dominate this article?

Mr. Paws is undoubtedly my most important animal character, and The Secret Lab is my only novel to feature an animal as a main character. A. B. Carolan rewrote that novel to start his “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries” series for young adults (now four novels strong—A. B. has a cameo appearance in my novel Intolerance). In the novel, Mr. Paws lives on the ISS in the future; he’s the intelligent mutant cat who helps four tweens expose a conspiracy. It’s a good cat story, but it’s more than that.

Why don’t animals appear more in my stories? You might already know. Animals are more interesting when they almost appear human! (Walt Disney made a fortune making that happen.) My Mr. Paws beats Koontz’s dogs and Rowling’s owls, precisely because he’s more like a human! In other words, humans are more interesting than animals to write about. And there are many humans that I don’t like who can be model villains, while there are few animals that I don’t like. You must have both the bad and the good in your fiction. Take that, Ms. Rowling and Mr. Koontz!

By the way, for those of you who miss having an animal in my stories, you might like that cat Boris in The Klimt Connection (coming soon!) where there’s both a cat and dog. They don’t have very important roles, though, although the dog’s presence is symbolic. (The cat’s more there to annoy an MI5 agent detested by Esther Brookstone!)

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The Secret Lab. A. B. Carolan’s rewrite of this sci-fi mystery improved this novel about a mutant cat and his four human pals on the International Space Station far in the future. The four tweens want to discover Mr. Paws’ origins, but they end up uncovering an old conspiracy. This novel for young adults and adults who are young at heart (especially cat lovers!) is available wherever quality books are sold in both ebook and print.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

…because it’s the day that everyone becomes Irish! Whether Erin is in your blood or not, that island with a history that includes Viking invasions, monks who saved classic literature, and more recent oppression from the English (not just from the Crown but from the likes of megalomaniac Cromwell), shares its celebration of their patron saint around the world, although that old boy might have frowned on the excesses many indulge in during their celebrations.

Not to detract from St. Paddy’s accomplishment of bringing Christianity to pagan Celtic tribes and the remaining Viking invaders who mixed pagan gods and rituals with those approved by ancient Rome, we need to remember that the saint wasn’t even Irish. He was a Briton, kidnapped from ancient England as a wee lad and then escaping to go home to become a priest. When he returned to Eire, he didn’t drive out the snakes—the Oireachtas’s politicians can be as hissing and biting as those in any other western democracies.

Faeries, leprechauns, and other legendary creatures add to the mystery surrounding Eire and their patron saint. Modern fans of the Irish Republic like me can enjoy it all while imbibing Irish ale or whiskey at our favorite local Irish pubs.

Slainte!

While there’s a litigation trial in my upcoming novel The Klimt Connection, Vladimir Putin can’t sue me in any court of the free world. First, he’s a monster who’s been ostracized by more than 140 nations—only a handful of Russian puppet countries voted against the resolution in  the UN’s General Assembly. Second, no country would let the man headed to the Hague for war crimes besmirch their courtrooms. And third, I write nothing about the megalomaniac that’s false and not readily available to the general public. at least outside Russia’s oppressive censorship.

I will focus on the third point. (This article is about writing, after all.) Generally speaking, good authors still collect background material that will infuse their fiction with realism. Even writers if cozy mysteries and romance novels do that, (Fantasy writers might be an exception, but even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and his wizarding friends are often among the Muggles at times.) To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the best fiction has to seem possible and real. The process of collecting this background material is often incorrectly called “research,” but today it’s more just trawling the waters of the internet, although I will often use real physical reference works from my bookshelf.

In particular, I’ve been collecting background material on Vladimir Putin for years, and I can categorically state that all facts in The Klimt Connection, beyond the ubiquitous vitriolic adjectives uttered by my characters, are absolutely true. No UK barrister or US lawyer would ever represent Putin if he decided to sue me for libel or slander.

The general advice writers read all the time is that one can use real persons as characters if what is said about them, real facts or otherwise, is complimentary. I followed that advice in my novel Aristocrats and Assassins (where Esther Brookstone’s current husband, Bastiann van Coevorden had a cameo appearance, by the way). But I have nothing complimentary to say about Putin, so I stick to the facts. Just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday used to say. (Guys will probably enjoy the novel too, of course.)

Putin isn’t even a major character in the novel, though; he’s such a worthless piece of human garbage, he doesn’t even deserve to be a secondary one. And the major theme of the novel only involves him in his role of bad actor trying to destabilize western democracies. (It’s interesting that the invasion of Ukraine has served to unify the world against him.) No, the major theme of the novel can be summarized in this Thomas Paine quote: “Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight against, are within ”

As I explain in the end notes of the novel (I’ve always included them, by the way, and I hope people read them), I wrote much of The Klimt Connection as the ex-KGB madman from St. Petersburg waged war on Ukraine, but I’ve often gone after Vladimir Putin before. Even my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin hates that other Vladimir and probably celebrates the Ukrainian Zelenskyy’s ability to motivate his countrymen to fight the real Russian monster.

Of course, there’s also an art theme in the novel. After all, Esther Brookstone is the “art detective”! Please look for this novel that will be available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reputable retailers (that excludes Amazon). You will enjoy Esther’s new adventures…and the Putin bashing. And there’s an easy way to catch up on some of her previous adventures you might have missed: Download Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance. They’re free. (See the list of available free PDFs on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for these and other free fiction.)

There’s a long tradition of fiction writers battling autocracy. From the seminal (and alarmingly prescient!) 1984 and Animal Farm of George Orwell (still obviously current, considering the despotic Pig Putin’s invasion of Ukraine!) and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to C. M. Kornbluth’s Not This August (his famous novella “The Marching Morons” does a good job of describing Trump’s followers or anti-vaxxers—those two groups overlap, of course), authors have been outspoken about the dangers of autocracy. Although my skills aren’t anywhere near the caliber of these literary giants, I’m doing my part.

While many of my novels have an anti-autocracy theme and are therefore “evergreen” books (novels as current as the day I finished their manuscripts), let me focus on a few recent ones. Three books from the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Death on the Danube, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, and Leonardo and the Quantum Code, focused on Putin and his psychotic dream of recreating the Soviet Union. Yes, autocracy vs. democracy is only one theme here, but it’s an important one, and the autocrats are shown to be thugs who are willing to kill innocent people.

My holiday gift to readers this last year was Defanging the Red Dragon, #6 in that series, and it went after Xi’s China. The Chinese and Russian governments try to censor such tales because they speak truth to autocratic power, so I couldn’t let Xi’s China escape my literary wrath. I had to go after them as well. Their attacks on democracy are more clever than crazy Putin and friends’. For example, the financial success of a Hollywood movie all too often now requires success in China, and this leads weak Hollywood moguls to dilute freedom of speech and expression, a core democratic value, and thus aid and abet Xi’s censors. As one pundit put it on CNN a while ago, “You can’t kill a Chinese spy anymore!” In the recent James Bond movie, for example, they edited out an entire scene where that occurred. That didn’t stop me from writing one in Defanging. Xi can go to hell!

So can Putin! I took a vacation from bashing autocracy in Intolerance, an important theme if only because autocrats know how to encourage that as a way of turning citizens in democratic societies against each other. But in The Klimt Connection, I’m back to blasting autocracy in general, and Putin in particular, spurred on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What makes fiction such a useful tool in battling autocracy, whether it takes the form of a sci-fi, mystery or thriller novel? The answer is simple: It’s a clear case of the good guys waging war against the bad. Autocracy has been much more prevalent in world history, so the good guys always have uphill battles. That makes for a good story, albeit sometimes depressing, a meaningful one that can hopefully spur readers on to join the battle.

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Coming this spring! I hope you weren’t spoiled by the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, that you can download for free (see the list of free fiction on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). I was thinking about ending the series, you see, but I’ve changed my mind. Esther and Bastiann conspired with my muses (really banshees with Tasers!) to “encourage” me to write novel #8, The Klimt Connection. Despite the title (Gustav Klimt was an Austrian artist), the novel is another warning about how we can never let our guard down in the eternal war of democracy vs. autocracy (Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine is a recent example of the dangers). This novel will be published in ebook format by Draft2Digital. Look for it then, wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I reacted badly to an article in the February 21st NY Times, “Writers Wonder Whether People Want to Curl Up with a Covid Novel.” The reason? The Times wants to label any novel dealing with a pandemic in this manner, which is completely moronic, of course.

Is Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain a Covid novel? What about my own More than Human: The Mensa Contagion and “The Last Humans” series? We can’t ask Michael his opinion, but I can tell you mine: I’ll verbally blast anyone who says my books are Covid novels (as I’m doing now to the editors of the Times!).

Many stories have been written with a pandemic theme. Strain and More than Human are both about ET viruses, but mine turn out to be a lot more benign than Michael’s. In “The Last Humans” series, I consider the plausible scenario where an enemy uses a bioengineered virus as a WMD. Clancy also did that in one of his novels—I can’t remember which one—but his hero stopped that attack whereas mine has the more difficult job of coping with the post-apocalyptic aftermath. (Of course, in the real world, we might want to blame Xi’s China of doing that with Covid…or maybe Trump?)

The WMD scenario is actually more plausible than the ET scenario, but both are examples where bioengineered viruses can lead to drastic upheavals and die-offs. It would be another case of tech coming back to might the foolish humans who create it, perhaps well-meaning but not too bright as they ignore their unintended consequences.

I prefer the benign consequences of More than Human to Strain‘s. And I don’t know why I continue to promote “The Last Humans” series. The traditional publisher of the first book in the series (Black Opal Books) really disappointed me, and then the Amazon bots confused both books. The series seems to be doomed whether the Times might call it a Covid book or not.

Right now, I suppose that most readers aren’t in the mood for any fiction involving pandemics. I can understand that. But readers’ complaints about vaccine and masking mandates enacted to protect us against Covid fall on my deaf ears when I think that people would have had ample warning about pandemics if they had only read more pre-pandemic literature.

Sci-fi, mystery, and thriller novels often provide useful warnings about threats humans could face. When we ignore them, there can be real and deadly consequences!

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Coming this spring! I hope you weren’t spoiled by the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, that you can download for free (see the list of free fiction on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). I was thinking about ending the series, you see, but I’ve changed my mind. Esther and Bastiann conspired with my muses (really banshees with Tasers!) to “encourage” me to write novel #8, The Klimt Connection. Despite the title (Gustav Klimt was an Austrian artist), the novel is another warning about how we can never let our guard down in the eternal war of democracy vs. autocracy (Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine is a recent example of the dangers). This novel will be published in ebook format by Draft2Digital. Look for it then, wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Around the World in 80 Days. (PBS Masterpiece Theater) Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a movie review. I haven’t been to a movie theater for two years. Covid put a hiatus in this traditionalist’s view of date-night being a good movie and dinner out. I’m still cautious and wear a mask (too many idiots out and about!). And most fare on TV and from Hollywood is drivel, so PBS comes to the rescue at times, as in this case.

The movie came in several weekly chapters like a good book, not nearly as long as the Jules Verne original, of course, but longer than the usual Hollywood two-hour schlock if put end to end. It was well done and entertaining. Creating a magnificent audiovisual experience out of Vernes’s marvelous story can’t be easy, but the production has moved any previous attempts to the dark recesses of my old memory cells. The principal actors, the English actor David Tennant as Phineas Fogg, the French actor Ibrahim Koma as Passepartout, and the German actress Leonie Benesch as Abigail Fortescue, were simply marvelous. For the racists out there (I don’t expect many racists read this blog), get your bigotry and hatred sensors turned on: Abigail and Passepartout have many romantic moments. Passepartout often saves the day too, so take that! (You’ll find bios of the cast at the PBS website. I enjoyed reading that Ms. Benesch had trouble keeping up with a running Tennant at times. Poor Fogg took a beating when he couldn’t run fast enough, though.)

By Jove, well done, I dare say! Although it differs from the novel (what movie doesn’t these days?), it’s a better story because it comes from one. This is a great adventure story without much sci-fi. (I suppose some would say it’s more fantasy than sci-fi too.) Jules Verne is often called the progenitor of all modern sci-fi, but that’s more true of Voyage to the Moon and his prescient 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (the Nautilus’s strange mode of locomotion was most certainly a nuclear reactor, don’t you know?) 80 Days is more like those other swashbuckling adventures I used to read as a kid;  novels by H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs are a few more examples.

You must really see this movie, either in streaming video or reruns. And I hope you won’t miss the nuanced next-to-last scene where reference is made to another Jules Verne classic.

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Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Who gets the new code for quantum computers based on ideas in a recently discovered Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook? Surprise, surprise! Autocrats are up to their dirty tricks here—and maybe even the US?—and they send spies and assassins to steal the technology. One of Esther’s brilliant old friends from her Oxford days has created the code. In the background, another bad player, who’s always interested in new technology, lurks as well. Can Esther and Bastiann protect her old friend? Find out here. This novel is available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reliable ebook dealers (that excludes Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump. G. B. Trudeau, author (Universal Uclick). Relatives and friends know that I’m an avid reader and that my reading tastes range far and wide. This little gem was a recent gift. Like Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington, my review of this book is appropriate for both my writer’s blog and my political blog. So here goes!

Mr. Schiff’s book probed more serious matters (emphasis on Trump’s first impeachment) associated with the psychotic sociopath’ (a spot-on diagnosis from twenty+ mental health professionals, including his niece) and wannabe dictator and admirer of Vladimir Putin, Donald J. Trump, aka “The Donald,” Il Duce, and “f&%$ing moron.” The last quote is from ex-SecState Tillerson and provides a nice segue to Trudeau’s lampooning of the idiot who tortured sane people in the US and around the world for four years as POTUS until Mr. Biden pommeled him in the 2020 election. (Yes, it was a pommeling!)

One can learn a lot from reading (or should—Trump never does; he didn’t even read his national security briefings). And Trudeau’s cartoons are often such bold and profound lessons that many right-wing leaning newspapers place them on the editorial page, if they publish them at all. The cartoons speak truth to power and the Goebbels-like schlock the Good Ole Piranhas bombard us with almost every day.

I’ve always been fond of cartoons and comics. I learned to read and write somewhere around three-years-old by trying to design my own comic books. I needed to know what to put in those balloons! (Instead, I go after Trump, Putin, Xi, and all their ilk in words.) I never learned to draw very well—my father was the artist—but I’ve always admired those who can do everything, both draw the characters and fill in the balloons! Garry Trudeau is a genius for doing just that.

In this cartoon collection covering thirty years of the narcissistic conman’s life, I learned that I’d missed some great political satire during my sojourn in Colombia. I could argue that reading Gabo in Spanish might be more edifying—his composite of several Latin American dictators in Autumn of the Patriarch (Otoño del Patriarca) nicely covers Trump and his ilk as well, except that Trump didn’t invade a country like Putin and hasn’t poached an enemy’s head and served it to guests like Gabo’s composite dictator…yet. (He has threatened to walk down NYC’s Fifth Avenue, though, and shoot someone.)

I learned that Trump has been a butthead for a long time, mostly exploiting workers and evicting renters in the tristate area (for his followers, the “marching morons,” as described by C. M. Kornbluth in his famous sci-f novella, the tristate area is Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, those awful “blue states” he and you hate so much). In the process, he blew through $30 million his psycho daddy gave him, had several bankruptcies, and wrote the Art of the Deal (or his ghostwriter did?), as if those obvious failures qualified him as a business genius. (At least Putin, whom Trump greatly admires, earned his money the old-fashioned, autocratic way—by putting in the work to steal a country.)

As a historical document, Trudeau’s collection belongs in every serious university’s political science and business departments’ reference list. My only critique? Garry should branch out and cover Kim, Putin, and Xi. After all, Trump wants to be like them, a president-for-life so he can suppress and oppress all opposition to him and make Trudeau disappear. Let’s not give Il Duce that chance in 2024. (I wonder if Trump is such a moron—or is it just approaching senility?—that he confuses Garry with Justin. No matter. He hates them both.)

Even though we often laugh at the chaos of American democracy (that’s healthier than crying), it’s worth saving it from the destruction that Trump and his cronies want to happen as their march toward fascism continues on.

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Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Who gets the new code for quantum computers based on ideas in a recently discovered Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook? Surprise, surprise! Autocrats are up to their dirty tricks here—and maybe even the US?—and they send spies and assassins to steal the technology. One of Esther’s brilliant old friends from her Oxford days has created the code. In the background, another bad player, who’s always interested in new technology, lurks as well. Can Esther and Bastiann protect her old friend? Find out here. This novel is available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reliable ebook dealers (that excludes Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

While the Biden administration is worried about the traditional publishing behemoth Penguin Random House swallowing up Simon and Schuster in yet another monopolistic merger, questions about mergers might be occurring to self-published aka indie authors regarding the merger of Draft2Digital (D2D) and Smashwords (SW) ebook publishers. The first has a lot of hidden, sneakiness about it; the second is more open and is a non-cash merger, a joining of forces to promote self- and small press published authors and their books who use their aggregating features.

First, let me remind readers what D2D and SW are not: They’re not Amazon! That’s a very important detail. Amazon is just another possible retailer for D2D and SW. (I say that for SW only because, with the merger, they will use them that way, even though up until now they just sell .mobi formatted ebooks that are not available on Amazon…without DRM! I hate DRM, by the way. It’s Bezos channeling Jobs by trying to make their products incompatible with everyone else’s.) Moreover, Amazon does not distribute ebooks to anyone! (They only pretend to be traditional publishers using subsidiaries like Thomas Mercer Amazon is just a huge retailer, a shoddy Walmart on steroids, and only one of many retailers that sells books.)

What D2D and SW both do is distribute to other retailers. They provide self-published authors as well as small publishers an easy path to “go wide,” i.e., follow that tried-and-true retail advice that the more retail outlets a product appears in, the more sales that product will have! Both D2D and SW distribute to affiliated retailers (like B&N, Kobo, and so forth) as well as many well-known library and lending services. They are “aggregators” in the sense that they collect proceeds from the sales at these affiliates and send them to the book’s authors or publishers. Yes, they take their cut, but authors and small publishers would go nuts trying to do all that aggregation. (Their affiliates take a cut too, but nothing like Amazon does!)

There’s bound to be some growing pains with the D2D and SW merger, though. For example, will this affect D2D’s promised rollout of print book production? (It’s currently in beta-testing mode, but it’s been that way for far too long!) Will they offer some help to authors and small publishers with PR and marketing? (No publisher does much of that now.) Editing services? Book cover design?

Let’s wait and see how it all shakes out!

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on my “Join the Conversation” web page.)

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” This series is seven novels strong now, and I’m working on the eighth novel, The Klimt Connection. (A short preview is found in book seven.) Novels in the series have different publishing histories. The first two, Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder, were published by Penmore Press. Book three, Death on the Danube, was released by Carrick Publishing. (These first three novels have ebook and print versions.) Novels four and five, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats and Leonardo and the Quantum Code, were released by Draft2Digital. Novels six and seven, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, are free PDF downloads found on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page, and book eight, The Klimt Connection, will probably be with Draft2Digital/Smashwords! Except for the free PDFs and book eight, you can find all these novels at all reliable online booksellers (that excludes Amazon in many cases). This series is perfect for binge-reading. Please don’t neglect Esther Brookstone, a 21^st century agile and less doddering incarnation of Christie’s Miss Marple. Her obsessions to right wrongs and look out for innocent victims will provide you with many reading adventures.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Let’s support the Ukrainian freedom fighters!

There’s a real possibility that Putin’s stormtroopers will overrun Ukraine. Whether that occurs or not, all people of good faith, especially Americans who pretend to be for freedom, despite Trump and his minions’ efforts, to be defenders of the free world, should make a solemn vow to support Ukraine’s freedom fighters. We know Ukrainians can fight. They ousted a Putin puppet, and they’re better prepared now than when Putin took Crimea.

Yes, Ukraine isn’t a NATO country yet, but so what? We must support the battle against Russia. If it comes to supporting resistance against Russian occupiers, though, that should still occur! We can turn Ukraine into another Chechnya for the Russians, only this time making Ukraine Putin’s Afghanistan.

If we don’t stop Putin now, he will move on to realize his dream of reconstituting the Soviet Union. The way Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland rejected the Soviet hegemony in the nineties still eats at Putin. He’s out for revenge, that’s clear, and he’s willing to ruin Mother Russia to get it. Let’s make sure he pays that price.

Sure, worldwide sanctions against Putin and his oligarchs and their finances are good—I proposed that to @POTUS and @SecretaryBlinken in a tweet—but they’re probably not enough. Putin laughs at them, although his inner circle might not. We must also stand up to all attacks on democratic countries and freedom everywhere they occur.

Let’s all take a solemn oath to do just that! We’re at a tipping point in world history not seen since the second world war, where we can either be smart and halt the march of fascism in the world, or we can surrender to it.