Category: Military

Avoiding Putin’s Trap

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President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to stop the Russian war on Ukraine. While he possesses a strong personality, Trump’s personality alone is not likely to stop the T-80s from rolling into Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. Stopping the war is a worthy goal, but Trump and his team need to ensure that they do not lose the peace. The following article illuminates how to get a fair deal.

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

Background

Ukraine is renowned for its fertile, black soil, and Ukrainian agriculture ranks among the most productive in the world. Fifty-five percent of Ukraine’s land is arable, mostly in the western and central regions, and 14% of Ukrainians work in agriculture.[1] Equally important, Ukraine has historically had several excellent ports on the Black Sea to safely and cheaply get its crops to market. These ports include Odessa, Chernomorsk, Yuzhny, Berdyansk, Mariupol, and Sevastopol.

Situated to the north and east, Russia lacks Ukraine’s vast swathes of rich farmland. For centuries, Russians moving to Ukraine to find a better life had few opportunities to settle in the western and central regions since native Ukrainians were there. The Donetsk and Luhansk regions along the Dnieper River in the east lacked such productive soil but, as the Industrial Revolution began in the 19th century, these regions had something even more valuable. Eastern Ukraine is flush with coal and iron and has a major river to move the coal and iron to market. In the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, Russian settlers flocked to these regions, together known as the Donbas. Nationwide, Ukrainians account for 77.8% of the people in the Ukraine and Russians account for 17.3%, but the Russian population percentage is much higher in the Donbas and in the Crimean Peninsula.[2]

Prelude to War

Putin had what he considered to be good reasons to attack Ukraine. He argued that the West had invaded Russia six times in the past two centuries, while Russia had not initiated hostilities against the West.[3] He cited NATO encroachment as a threat to Russia. Putin styled himself as a modern Russian savior along the lines of Peter the Great.

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Whitewashing History

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Nations, like peoples, make mistakes. The people who supported Hitler are dead, but many nations, organizations, and people groups that supported the Nazis in World War II are not. What about other evil-doers in history? How do these nations portray their involvement with villains? Many ignore it, hoping that people who know will forget or die and people that do not know will never learn. Others such as Germany persevere over it, endlessly apologizing and integrating permanent shame into their national psyche. A few admit their guilt, memorialize it in museums and textbooks to warn future generations, and balance sharing the good with the bad in their national or organizational life.

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

My family and I visited our family in Prague in the Czech Republic earlier this month. Along with family time, we caught some sites, of which many, due to our nerdy nature, were museums and battle sites. As a soldier and military historian, many military museums showed up on our list. White Mountain, the site of a seminal battle between Protestants and Catholics (1620), was little more than a cairn on a small rise in the ground. Vitkov Hill which marked a major Hussite victory over a Papist army, was a sizeable hill with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a towering statue of Jan Zizka, the victorious Hussite commander on his mount. The ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern history in the National Museum was spot on. The problem began with the 20th century.

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Arab-Israeli Conflict

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On 7 October 2023, the Palestinian Arab terror group Hamas suddenly attacked Israel, killing over 1400. In the succeeding two months, more than 10,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed. This article, part of a lecture series called the Bible and the News, answers the questions: What is the situation? How did we get here? What does the Bible say? What do we do about it?

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

What is the situation?

Jews and Palestinian Arabs claim the same land as their homeland, the area known as Palestine. 25 April 2023 was the 75th anniversary of the founding of Israel. 7 Oct 2023 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab states’ most successful war against Israel.

The Israeli claim to the land. God gave Abraham and his descendants the Promised Land. The granted land includes Canaan, part of Transjordan and much of modern Syria. The promise is far larger than modern Israel.

  • Bible testimony
    • Genesis 12:1-3, 7 – God promises to make Abram into a great nation.
    • Genesis 15:18-21 – God promises give Abram a son, make him a great people, and give him the land of Canaan.
    • Genesis 26:3 – God repeats His promises to Isaac, Abraham’s son.
    • Genesis 28:13-15 – God repeats His promises to Jacob, Abraham’s grandson.
    • Exodus 23:30-33 – God repeats His promises to the Hebrew nation.
    • Numbers 34:1-12 – God promises specific areas in Canaan to the twelve Hebrew tribes who came out of Egypt.
  • Historically, the Hebrews only comprised a majority in Canaan from roughly 1400 BC to 586 BC, 800 years. Jews did not live in the land in large numbers from AD 135 to about 1940, over 1800 years.
  • The Hebrew Temple Mount and much of Hebrew religious history is in Palestine.

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Paul, Leadership Under Fire

Leadership under fire in Corinth
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The Apostle Paul faced a tough task in writing to the wayward Corinthian church, bringing them back to the Lord while they assailed him. In a time when leadership is under fire across the globe, Paul can shed some light.

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

Corinth was a hotbed of scum and villainy in the first century Roman Empire. Located on a narrow strip of land between the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, Corinth grew rich and fat on the wares of merchantmen passing between the east and west of the Empire. In the AD 40s, God used Paul and his companions to plant a church in Corinth (Acts 18). Though it grew, the church stumbled from sin to sin and heresy to heresy. Writing from Ephesus in about AD 55, Paul confronted his wayward church in 1 Corinthians. The list of sins was long:

  1. The Corinthians abandoned Christian unity and were riven with internal strife (Acts 1).
  2. They were competing for status among themselves (Acts 1).
  3. They were abandoning godly wisdom in favor of worldly wisdom (Acts 1).
  4. They were denying the work of the Spirit (Acts 2).
  5. They were boasting in men (Acts 3)
  6. They were judging each other harshly at times and weakly at other times (Acts 4)
  7. They were tolerating blatant sexual sin (Acts 5).
  8. They were suing each other in secular courts (Acts 6).
  9. They were denying intimacy to their spouses, divorcing, committing adultery, and simultaneously emphasizing marriage over mission (Acts 7).
  10. They were using their Christian freedom without care for how their conduct harmed others (Acts 8).

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The Battle of Civitate

Battle of Civitate
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One of the most important and yet unheralded battles in world history, Civitate (1053) pitted Normans against Lombards, Swabians, Byzantines, and a host of others in Southern Italy. The Great Schism (1054), the Battle of Manzikert (1070), and the First Crusade (1096) came as a result.

By Stephen Harris, Historian

Background

Many people know about the Norman Conquest of England. The Battle of Hastings is one of the most famous events in medieval history and possibly even world history. It transformed England, and by transforming England, changed the world. However, many do not know that during the Middle Ages, the Normans conquered other areas of Europe as well. First, they were given the region now known as Normandy by the king of France to keep them loyal to the crown. Later, they took Southern Italy.  Their control over Southern Italy was not brief either, as the Normans ruled Sicily for centuries. Norman control over what became the Kingdom of Sicily took decades, but the battle that enabled Norman control over Southern Italy was the Battle of Civitate, on June 18th, 1053.

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Rejection of Authority in the Human Heart

authority in the human heart
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Why don’t we have good leaders? Why don’t we have a moral society? Why do the good, the true, and the beautiful seem so scarce in our society? Why do we have so few good men and women? Why do we see a rejection of authority in the human heart? What can we do about it?

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

The conscience that God has placed in the heart of each man, and the Law that He has revealed to His people, tell us how He commands us to live. We don’t like it, preferring to go our own way. As a result, we often despise anyone who keeps God’s commands. We pretend that universal moral standards do not exist. We scream and cry that no one can make us do what we don’t want to do. We resent and tear down those sent to help us. Finally, in our rejection of godly authority, and often any authority, we destroy ourselves, and cause terrible suffering to others.

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