If you think that the fate of the Ukrainian resistance won’t much matter either way to those of us who are privileged to live in the world’s liberal democracies, your ideas are perfectly in tune with the fashionable cynicism of the times. No offence, but you’re also deluded and dangerously wrong.
In this special weekend edition of The Real Story, I’m going to show you why. You might want to put your feet up.
The global police-state bloc has been on the rise for 16 years now. The world’s democratic space is shrinking. Only about a fifth of the world’s people still live in fully free countries. Immediately before Russian tanks crossed the border into Ukraine on February 24, the venerable Freedom House organization released its annual report: “The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”
Now that Vladimir Putin is waging a bloody war of conquest in Ukraine after obtaining all those “no limits” assurances from Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping during their Winter Olympics get-together, we’ve reached that tipping point. But there are powerful cultural and political forces at work within the NATO countries that are determined to lead you to believe otherwise, and to do Putin’s propaganda work for him. Pulling the Kremlin’s RT propaganda platform off the air won’t change that.[…]
Corbynism is the English iteration of the same bizarre compendium of leftish affectations that prevailed in Canada during the height of protests against Canada’s military engagement in Afghanistan. Corbyn has lately returned to his old habits in alliance with the weird American outfit Code Pink, staging rallies to loudly ask, what about Iraq? And to blame NATO for Ukraine’s agony, on account of so rudely upsetting President Putin that the poor man had no choice but to invade Ukraine.
The Syrian activist Leila Al Shami has helpfully described the politics at work here as “the anti-imperialism of fools.” Now that this anti-imperialism that gives Putin a pass is up and running again, the popular progressive columnist George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian this past Wednesday, settled on describing the thing as “a kind of leftwing QAnon.” This was a reference to the rightist American conspiracy theorists whose ideas really are so outlandish it’s difficult to describe them succinctly. Something about pedophile rings and secret extractions of baby genes during Covid-19 vaccinations.
The leftish version of QAnon that Monbiot writes about is a bit like Scientology, too, except perhaps with a cast of higher-profile celebrities: the journalists Seymour Hersh, John Pilger and Robert Fisk, along with Pink Floyd’s undead Roger Waters and Hollywood documentary fabulist Oliver Stone, people like that. Just one conspiracy theory among this crowd – an outright lie, really – is that the heroic Syrian first-responder organization known as the White Helmets is an auxiliary of Al Qaida that has murdered people in gas chambers to pin chemical-weapons charges on Bashar Assad.
In the horrible autumn months of 2014, the great Syrian revolutionary democrat Yassin Al Haj Saleh described the same bad smell that’s now wafting in from the edges of high-society “discourse” around Ukraine. What Saleh noticed was that that the parochial pseudo-leftism that prevails in the cultural elites of the NATO countries is “better suited for the right and the ultra-right fascists.” […]
Imagine if Vladimir Putin wins in Ukraine the way he and Assad and Hezbollah won in Syria. “Imagine a boot,” a certain English writer warned us in a certain book published the year NATO was established, “stamping on a human face, forever.” If that’s too rich for you, here’s Canada’s less scary deputy premier Chrystia Freeland: “There are moments in history when the great struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to one fight in one place which is waged for all of humanity. In 1863 that place was Gettysburg. In 1940 it was the skies above Britain. Today in 2022 it is Kyiv.”
It matters very much what those of us who live in the NATO countries think, and what we say out loud, because our democratically-elected governments have to deal with it. They’re accountable to us. If you want to know why our elected leaders appear to have suddenly grown some backbone in the matter of Vladimir Putin’s barbarism, it’s because they’ve seen and heard the righteous anger of their voters, the hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets of the NATO capitals demanding their governments take on an urgent, unflinching militancy on Ukraine’s behalf.
We can’t allow apologetics and whataboutery and the boring habits of unpacking and problematization to dampen the fire under the backsides of Justin Trudeau and Britain’s Boris Johnson and Germany’s Olaf Scholz and U.S president Joe Biden. It’s a fair guess that if they had their way they’d just as soon let Putin get away with his war crimes in Ukraine the way they’ve allowed Putin and Assad to get away with destroying Syria.
So no, this isn’t just about Ukraine. This is about all of us. After 16 long years of democracy’s retreat and the rise of the gargoyles, we’ve coming to the tipping point. There’s the endless possibilities of one future course, and the certain future of the other. The one with the boot.
I'm no fan of George Monbiot, but you have to admire his integrity in calling out those "anti-imperialist" leftists – many of whom he admits are his friends – who've been parroting Putin propaganda. Here's that Guardian article.
I've missed out much of Glavin's article: it's worth reading in full, though he is writing from a Canadian perspective.
Mick Hartley 
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