by Grouse Beater
Reading newspapers on the Ukranian war becomes a painful business. Listening to weak-minded politicians proclaiming from a comfortable television studio that the war must continue until Russia is wiped out is nauseating. Hypocrisy is everywhere. I have lost count of the number of countries invaded or devasted by the US since 1945, and that does not include their 19th century appropriation of Mexican territory, or dropping not one but two atomic bombs on Japan. Few point this contradiction out to the US.
It is almost impossible to find untainted news of the fighting, and yet the majority of countries in the West know this is a proxy war, South American countries especially, none supporting the US. The war is an extention of US policy to remove Russia off the world’s map (seen only as Moscow and St Petersburg) grab its wealth, (they tried in the Eightes) and then move onto China, visits to Taiwan nothing less than planned intimidation to annoy the Chinese government.
You won’t hear an English speaking politician announce he or his sons are picking up a rifle and telling Zelensky they can count on them on the front line. Boris Johnson isn’t out there helping Zelensky plan attacks, or even hand out soup to the hungry troops, but our generals are there with SAS advising how best to kill Russians. Our taxes are being used to serve Ukranian inability to demand a peaceful solution – no NATO in Ukraine the basis of any settlement. This has been Russia’s request since Gorbachev’s time as president, and each Russian president since, ignored by the West, a flagrant breach of promises made by their US counterparts starting with Clinton.
Back home we are cancelling anything creative with an ‘insky’ at the end of its name that isn’t Ukrainian. Yesterday, on the radio, I listened to a heavily loaded report by a BBC correspondent discussing the Russian Economic Summit. It was so blatantly weighed to Russia as the evil empire it sounded like a junk cartoon, the bubble narrative from a war comic. He denigrated Putin’s claim that there are neo-Nazi units flourishing in Ukraine, a known fact for decades, plenty of photographic evidence and first-hand accounts on record. And he made light of millions of our taxes sent there not reaching the poor, the homeless, and the war disabled but instead ending up in the hands of the corrupt. This is BBC propaganda bullcrap.
President Putin referenced the presence of such units within the Ukrainian military as one of the reasons for launching his “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine”. It might seem a contrived excuse but not if you are a Russian or a Ukranian living in the Donbas region. When added to NATO, moving in on Russian borders with all that that implies, it is an unacceptable development to a strategic country, as Cuba was to the US.
When the special military operation began, Ukraine’s national guard tweeted a video showing Azov Nazi fighters coating their bullets in pig fat used allegedly against Muslim Chechens – allies of Russia – deployed in their country. Who funds Azov? One source sending early funding and assistance came from oligarch Serhiy Taruta, the billionaire governor of Donetsk region.