As the joke goes, Vladimir Putin single-handedly cured Covid. After all, from dominating media coverage almost exclusively for nearly three years, Covid suddenly all but vanished from the headlines. Instead, suddenly, it’s wall-to-wall wailing and gnashing of teeth over Ukraine.
Let’s not be mistaken: war is awful. As my father-in-law, who lived through one of the most intense bombardments of the Second World War said, “I don’t want any of you to see a war in your lives.” But, let’s be honest, war in the boonies of Europe is hardly anything new. When Kamala Harris babbled about the first European war since the Second World War, she clearly forgot about the Baltic conflict, the Greek Civil War, the Hungarian Revolution, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Balkans war, the Georgian Civil War and the Chechen conflict, not to mention the long-running sort-of wars in Ireland and Basque Spain.
Yet, another squabble in a former Soviet province is suddenly looming as the biggest threat to European peace since Gavrilo Princep said, “I’ll have that Franz Ferdinand bastard!” If the Ukraine war doesn’t break out into a wider conflict, it won’t be for lack of hysterical propaganda from the Western media-political-industrial complex.
We all know the narrative by now: plucky little Ukraine is fighting for the future of freedom and democracy, Putin is the New Hitler and Vlodymyr Zelensky is the New Churchill.
It’s all bullshit.
Ukrainians are fighting for their nation, not for universal freedoms. Fragmenting Western societies seem to have forgotten patriotic determination to defend one’s country as a universal civic virtue. The same fierce resistance to invaders was demonstrated in Vietnam and Afghanistan, highlighting both the power of the weak when fighting for the homeland and the fragility of the strong when engaged in imperialism.
Just because ‘patriotism’ has become a sneer for Western elites, doesn’t mean that it isn’t very real for a great many people. Love of one’s country, as opposed to the reflexive disdain of the left-elite, remains a powerful motivator, no matter who happens to be governing it at any given time. Russians in the 1940s had no great love for their communist bosses, Stalin especially – but that didn’t stop them fighting and dying by the tens of millions to stop the Nazi invaders.
And Ukraine, no matter what the Masters of War in the West want you to believe, is no bastion of liberal democracy.
The 2014 Maidan Revolution was a de facto coup to oust the democratically elected pro-Russian president with ‘a deep degree of US involvement’ (Washington Post) in Ukraine’s internal affairs. In the annual report from Freedom House, Ukraine’s score of 61/100 put it in the same ‘partly free’ category as Colombia, Serbia, Liberia, El Salvador and the Philippines. After the 2014 coup, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion – that’s a Daily Beast label from 2019 – was incorporated into President Petro Poroshenko’s military and security apparatus and has remained there. Zelensky has seized the opportunity of the war to ‘suspend’ 11 opposition parties, including the biggest with 44 MPs in the 450-seat parliament, and nationalise several media outlets to implement a ‘unified information policy’. In Transparency International’s 2021 corruption index published in January, Ukraine’s score was 32/100, making it Europe’s most corrupt country (cue Hunter Biden’s laptop). Russia is even worse. So pardon me for not joining in the rapturous standing ovations to Zelensky that has become part of the ritualised theatre of his Zoom addresses to Western parliaments.
The narrative of Russian violation of sovereignty and alleged war crimes might be true enough (although much is being obscured by the fog of wartime propaganda), but that doesn’t mean that the West aren’t towering hypocrites when they hyperventilate at Big, Bad Vlad. If Putin is a war criminal, then so are many recent and current Westen leaders.
The lopsided General Assembly vote, followed by this month’s suspension of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, shows that most countries do care about core global norms and share in the repugnance at atrocities against civilians. Unfortunately, every charge levelled against Russia applies also to the US. It’s used force overseas more often than any other country since 1945 […] The downing of a Malaysian Airline flight over Ukraine in 2014 is comparable to the downing of an Iran Air flight by a US warship in 1988.
It must also not be forgotten that, while Putin ultimately bears the responsibility of pulling the war trigger, those clutching their pearls at that awful man have done everything in their power to see that he did so.
Last month, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said: ‘The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region’.
Spectator Australia
From Gorbachev to Yeltsin, successive post-Soviet leaders were reassured that there would no NATO eastward expansion. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Russian history over the past 500 years – a history of repeated invasions of Russia by other powers, often those who had professed to be Russia’s friends and allies – should have under no illusion as to how Russia would react.
Remember, too: US President Kennedy was prepared to risk nuclear war to stop a hostile power camping on America’s doorstep (an encampment he had himself provoked). He is feted as an American hero. Now, try looking at Putin through Russian eyes.
That might not make the war right or good, but it might be enough to mute the incessant beating of the war drum by Western media and politicians.