By Scott Taylor
With the war in Ukraine still raging it has been amazing to watch the success of the West’s propaganda machine.
Even though Canada is not directly involved in this conflict the term used to describe Ukraine is ‘ally’.
As such, the Liberal government can take full credit for contributing lethal military aid to Ukraine, and Canadian civilians are told they can legally volunteer to fight in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion.
More importantly, the Ukrainian side can simply do no wrong in the eyes of western media. When the Ukrainian defence force has posted videos of Russian prisoners of war, they have violated the Geneva Convention which prohibits the using of prisoners for propaganda purposes.
In further circulating the videos, the collective attitude of western media outlets has been that of ‘who cares?’
As for the Russians, they can do absolutely nothing positive. Across North America, Russian vodka has been pulled from the shelves of liquor stores and night clubs.
Late night TV hosts ridicule Russians as being simpletons who have only potatoes, turnips and borscht in their diet.
Lost in this dumbed down racist stereotyping is the fact that roughly 30 per cent of the brave Ukrainians citizens resisting Putin’s invasion are ethnic Russians.
Also openly mocked is the fact that Putin has ordered his state-controlled media to refrain from using the word ‘war’ – the invasion is instead to be deemed a ‘special military operation’ – and it is now illegal to spread negative disinformation about the conflict in Ukraine.
Yet despite this media blackout, ordinary Russian citizens have taken to the streets in the tens of thousands to protest Putin’s illegal aggression. At time of writing, some 14,000 Russians had been arrested and jailed for publicly opposing this war.
This should be comforting to know that this many Russians still have access to the truth and are willing to sacrifice their own personal liberties to challenge Putin’s regime.
What is troubling is the fact that when U.S. President George W. Bush illegally invaded Iraq in 2003 there was no such violent public backlash in the U.S.A. We find it gobsmacking that Putin would claim he is taking military action in Ukraine in order to protect Russia. However, when Bush claimed he was invading Iraq to protect America from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction the vast majority of the U.S. population cheered him on.
In those heady days leading up to Bush’s illegal and unwarranted invasion if Iraq, the sentiment across the U.S. was that America was being abandoned by its allies at a time of peril. When France refused to join in the war effort, they were pilloried as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’ French wine and cheese imports were boycotted and accusing fingers were also pointed at Canada for opting out of the invasion.
When Iraq was occupied and Saddam deposed without the discovery of any weapons of mass destruction, the world should have sanctioned the U.S. and Bush should have been tried for war crimes.
In addition to the self defence justification in the days leading up to the invasion, the U.S. leadership had portrayed Saddam as a hated dictator and they predicted the U.S. soldiers would be greeted as ‘liberators.’ If that sounds familiar it is because that is what Putin told the Russian soldiers they could expect in Ukraine. When the Ukraine invasion bogged down against heavy resistance Putin ordered a media blackout.
In Iraq, when the insurgency began in earnest, the Pentagon tried to prevent the media from publishing photos of the flag draped coffins of fallen soldiers being repatriated to U.S. soil.
On the subject of lionizing the Ukrainian resistance, Canadians, myself included, are saluting their bravery in combating the would-be Russian occupiers. Untrained civilians are using Molotov cocktails and improvised explosive devices to engage and kill the foreign soldiers trying to control their country. Many Hollywood aficionados have likened these brave Ukrainians to the mythical Wolverine U.S. resistance fighters in the Red Dawn movie series.
Employing that same yardstick, the Taliban and Afghan insurgents were the ‘wolverine’ freedom fighters in the war in Afghanistan.
Canadian soldiers, as part of the U.S. led occupation force were the hated foreigners trying to remake Afghan society in the western mold.
But we did not hail the Afghan mujahedeen as freedom fighting liberators when they chased the last of the American occupiers from their soil last summer. However we did salute the exact same Afghan Muslim extremists when they resisted the Soviet Union’s attempted and failed occupation in the 1980’s.
For the record, during Canada’s decade long combat contribution to the occupation of Afghanistan, the successive governments of the day tried to stifle any public debate by declaring that to question the war was to question the Canadian Armed Forces.
That argument is absurd, but it kept most critics silent.
