Geopolitics are cancerous

Western media and politicians have finally found an event significant enough to change the news cycle away from unfavorable pandemic coverage: a hypothetical third world war.

As per usual, the powers that be have taken a side that allows little room for nuance. Ukraine, a country that has been perpetually ignored for the last eight years, is the heroic underdog, and Russia, enemy number one for at least the last six years, the evil villain.

The only narrative being pushed is that Ukraine is a sovereign power whose dignity should be respected. Interestingly, this narrative requires that we, the consumers of media, ignore the western financed coup that removed their democratically elected president in 2014. We must also forget the separatist regions of the country have been in a constant state of war since 2014 — and two referendums were held in the same year that overwhelming favored separation. The Donbas war has included thousands of civilian deaths in that region, daily shelling, and blockades (the kind the media is in favor of, apparently).

Furthermore, we must ignore the fact that Ukraine’s military distinctly features neo-Nazi militias like the Azov Brigate and Right Sector, which are growing in strength by the day. The powers that be are celebrating, or at least tolerating, these groups.

Ironically, the “I support Ukraine”-types are the same people that continue to use the appearance of one Nazi flag only briefly seen at the first day of the freedom convoy protest as an instrument to call the entire movement racist. Whatever the origin of the flag at the protest in Ottawa, I do not expect a single politician that went on the record as denouncing the entire movement over that flag to say a single word about the neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine.

Even more important, though, is that the media consumers must ignore the military experts who warned for years that NATO whispering sweet nothings into the ears of Ukrainian politicians would lead to this exact scenario. Zelensky, his peers, and western politicians, like Joe Biden, have adamantly taken a hardliner stance against Russia, ignoring the country’s numerous requests for a buffer country between NATO. Zelensky went even further to suggest that he wanted to make Ukraine a nuclear power.

Yikes.

In any case, I am not trying to make a pro-Russian argument, they have their own problems which have been sufficiently caricatured in the media. I just find it interesting how the same people ignoring, and even glorifying, human rights violations in their own countries are so quick to pick a side simply because it allows them to signal their virtuosity.

Many of those picking a side are even going so far as to suggest the west take up arms to defend Ukraine. Do not expect to see these types, plane tickets in hand, on their way to Eastern Europe to fight themselves. Suddenly, in their minds, freedom has become more important than safety. The question of whose freedom and whose safety remains unimportant. We can be sure they do not mean the freedom of people in Donbas, nor the safety of Ukrainians in Kyiv.

Anything, I suppose, to keep their minds off the freedoms being trampled on in their own countries in the name of a vaccine that does not prevent or reduce transmission and, therefore, does not even increase safety.