Background Briefing: May 30, 2022

On By gram

 

Although We Arm Police With Military Equipment, 19 Officers Stood By As 19 Kids and 2 Teachers Were Slaughtered

We begin on this Memorial Day with a member of a famous American Military family, Lucian Truscott IV, a journalist, screenwriter and author of five bestselling novels. A graduate of West Point, he has covered the wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently the publisher of the Lucian Truscott newsletter at luciantruscott.substack.com. A regular columnist for Salon, we discuss his latest article at Salon “So where were the “good guys with guns”? Standing around doing jacks**t, as usual.” Now that it has become clear that 19 heavily armed police were outside the door of the schoolroom for an hour while inside 19 children and 2 teachers were being methodically slaughtered by the shooter in Uvalde, we examine why so much military equipment is transferred to police departments whose officers dress up is full tactical military gear but when the time comes to do their duty, some would rather harass desperate parents demanding that something be done to save their children.

 

Will Democracies Remain United As Putin Intensifies His Destruction of Ukraine?

Then, as Putin intensifies his scorched-earth campaign to destroy Ukraine and enslave its people, we assess whether over the long term he will survive or whether the NATO countries and the democracies around the world will prevail and remain unified while keeping Ukraine’s military supplied with the advanced weapons they need. Joining us is Norman Naimark, a professor and the Chair in East European History at Stanford University and also Senior Fellow of the Institute of International Studies, where he has Convened the “European Forum.” He is the author of a number of books including Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Genocide: A World History and Stalin and the Fate of Europe The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty.