Putin: hoisted on his own petard
I think the international community should unite to fight such inhuman phenomena as terror attacks and the murder of totally innocent people. (Vladimir Putin)
“All the attempts to appease the Nazis between 1934
and 1939 through various agreements and pacts were morally unacceptable and politically
senseless, harmful and dangerous.” ….
And another of your pithy epithets:
“It is wrong to make anyone into an enemy; it is wrong
to scare the people of one’s own country with that enemy and try to rally some
allies on that basis”…
And then there is this:
“Russia is a part of European culture. Therefore, it
is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.”
And how could you possibly ever have uttered these
words?
“There are both things in international law: the principle
of territorial integrity and right to self-determination.”
And for the rest of the world to attempt to reconcile
these words (your words), we need your exegesis:
“History proves that all dictatorships, all
authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are
not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything
superior.”
Inevitably, on the media in the west, the Russian
dictator is and will continue to be denounced as a liar, and not to be trusted,
especially in the middle of a bloody massacre
of Ukrainians and their towns and cities. And, to be sure, none of us is totally
free of hypocrisy. We are all bearers of, sustainers of and even generators of complexities,
absurdities and incongruities.
However, what cannot be described as mere absurdities,
or incongruities, are the bodies lying in the streets in Mariupol, riddled with
Russian bullets. Nor can we dismiss or ignore the burned-out shells of apartment
buildings across Ukraine, deliberately, wantonly and coldly transformed into
their own architectural ghosts.
The fire and the smoke
belching from their broken windows, framed in black carbon soot, is a monument
to your unyielding and over-weening lust for power and the listless, and
betrayed acts of Russian fighters compelled to follow your commands. “A special
military operation” is one of the most cowardly euphemisms ever designed and
imposed on a war, by an ultimately provable desperately weak tyrant. Ironically,
your naivety in either believing that your people would fall for your
chicanery, or that the world and the Ukrainians themselves, (admittedly your brothers
and sisters) would fail to see the depth of your venom exposes your Achilles
Heel: a blind arrogance and isolation that separates you not only from the people
of Russia, and from the very military that serves you, but also from the rest
of the world community.
Your Ambassador to the United Nations, too, is so
utterly compromised in having to deliver on the world stage, such monumental “Alice
in Wonderland” concepts as “neo-Nazis controlling the Ukrainian government”.
Also in your demands for peace talks to include a “denazification” program in Ukraine,
following the silencing of your bombs and missiles you beg the question of
which country, Russia or Ukraine is behaving in an identical manner to that of
the Third Reich. If, like Alice herself, you find death lurking underneath all
of the puzzles and riddles that escape resolution in your life, as they did in
her’s, and long ago have lost any last vestige of innocence, as your chosen
archetype of world leader, and thereby consider it a requirement of your legacy
to rid the world of all ‘hope and innocence’, you are not only engaged in a
campaign to kill women and children, but also to eradicate the concept of innocence
and awe from the landscape. The president of Estonia, appearing on State of the
Union, with Jake Tapper, articulated an insight that exposed an even more
insidious motive and tactic that is being reported and analysed in the North
American media: that as a deliberate strategy, having decried the flow of
refugees into Europe over the last twenty years, emboldening the far right in several
European countries, you have now generated a massive refugee migration single-handedly,
thereby again underscoring the arguments of the far right in those same European
countries against an open-door receptivity to desperate, war-fleeing innocents.
How insidious, and how contemptible.
Such antithetical, underworld motives and methods echo
other literary figures like Hades, god of the Underworld, and Lucifer from
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
In a CBC piece, on March 13, 2020, entitled, “Sympathy
for the devil: Milton’s Satan as political rebel,” we read: ‘Charismatic and sympathetic.
Milton’s Satan leads a rebellion against God and rails against what he
perceives as the tyranny of heaven—little wonder, then, that he has often been
interpreted as a revolutionary figure’….
You, Sir, are railing against what you perceive is the
tyranny of neo-Nazis, in Kyiv, a supreme and utterly ‘trashable’ lie known to
you and the whole world. Attempting, as you seem to be convinced you are doing
in these mass killings of innocent civilians, to ‘rescue’ the people of Ukraine
by murdering them is one of the most corrupt and contemptible wars in the history
of Europe.
Ukrainian president Zelensky declares that your
military’s inhumane blockade and slaughter and starvation scorched earth actions
in Mariupol among to acts of terror, war crimes and will be remembered by
history for a very long time. Undoubtedly, you consider his words hollow and
meaningless war rhetoric. It is the shadow of your frozen heart and mind that
casts a death knell over the cities and towns of Ukraine and effectively over
the future of western Europe, if not the ‘free world’.
You are now the terrorist you once decried. You are now
frightening your people with the hollow enemy of the Ukrainian people having
been rendered into that role by your propaganda alone. You are violating the
principles of international law, territorial integrity and the right to self-determination
you once proclaimed to support. You now not only imagine NATO as a real and
pressing enemy; you have emboldened and awakened the alliance to the very sense
of alert you previously would never have considered imaginable. Indeed, it is
now significant that President Zelensky again today on CNN’s Global Public Square,
articulated a highly convincing argument that NATO make a decision, either to
open the alliance’s door to Ukraine, or to formally close that door, rather
than leave Ukraine in limbo, as he put it.
By you own words, you indicate that it was “morally
unacceptable and politically senseless, harmful and dangerous” for the allies
in the Second World War to participate in pacts and to appease the Third Reich,
signalling, presumably without contention from you now, that for NATO to continue
to appease the Russian tyrant by similar pacts, negotiations and appeasements is
and will be “morally unacceptable, politically senseless, harmful and dangerous.’
You know all too well, that to appease tyrants and dictators is an act of
foolishness. So, we can hardly expect and anticipate that you would be
surprised if NATO, through Ukraine, actually took off the gloves, in whatever
manner it deemed appropriate and necessary. Nor would you and your forces, considerably
depleted and demoralized as they appear to be, be ready, willing and able to
address such a shift in policy and practice.
In the CBC piece quoted above, we also read these
words from Gabby Samra, one of the contributors to the piece: Milton’s Satan is
a very human vision of what evil is. Satan is this really charismatic, transfixing
image of evil that differentiates from the previous medieval depictions of the
devil as this slavering, demonic monster. She said the Miltonic devil figure is
defined by cunning, eloquence and the ability to manipulate others into bringing
about their own ruin.
You Sir, are cunning, too cunning for your own good,
somewhat eloquent so long as you are the only microphone permitted on the podium
as you were before the fawning thousand in the soccer stadium at your recent
rally. And as for your capacity, unimpeded, unchallenged, and free of all
impunity, to manipulate others into bringing about their own ruin, your own
officers demonstrate the fullness of this manipulation better than any of us
could script. Those officers who have walked away from Ukrainian grandmothers
confronting them on their illegitimate and unwarranted invasion, with sunflower
seeds, so that flowers will grow on their grave, after they die in this battle,
and then watched as those men did indeed just walk away, demonstrate how
poignant has been their manipulation, their seduction that they were merely
going on a special military operation, and not a full-scale war.
Your manipulation of the people in Moscow and in St.
Petersburg, and in the hundreds of towns and cities dotting your vast land, also
knows no limit: 15 years in prison for uttering or endorsing the “fake news”
which literally is defined as using words like war, invasion, and killing.
Protesters in the street, by your other manipulated men in uniform, are carted
off in vans to prison, or for interrogation, and punishment. The cell phones of
your people are being scrubbed of any evidence of expressions of protest against
this war, for fear that those devices, too, will be and are instruments in your
scorched earth campaign of ‘tyrannizing the truth of your actions, and your
motives.
Your most noxious chicanery, of course, is that you
appear to be telling the world “your demands” as if you are totally transparent
in your earnest efforts to seek a peaceful negotiated settlement of this conflict.
However, you more than anyone on the planet, know, both in your heart and in
your mind, that the people of Ukraine are unalterably opposed to those demands,
as would any self-respecting people be. And, as for self-respecting people, the
Ukrainians have demonstrated such a degree and level of self-respect that the
world everywhere has learned the full meaning of that concept from their
inescapable mountain of evidence, hour-by-hour and day-by-day, and
week-by-week, for the last month.
You, Sir, are engaged in, indeed giving birth to, the
most calamitous conflict in world history since 1945. Your place in history has
been secured in blood. And your fellow countrymen and women will need decades,
if not centuries, to remove the stain on both their consciences and on their
archives. You are the Alpha and the Omega
of this blood-bath, and while you have no justification to any kind of
deification, your legacy will be covered in shame, in layers of spider-like
webs of neglect and forgetfulness, for the next hundred years, regardless of
the initial outcome of this conflict.
Is it not long past time for you to come to your
senses, as we say in the west; to abandon your fealty to your puppet trump, and
your sycophancy to Xi Jinping, and your adulation of your own hollow and virulent
ego? Russia will not erect a monument to your travesty in Ukraine. And your manipulation
of the world’s fossil-fuel dependency is not only unsustainable from an
environmental protection perspective. It is also unambiguously manipulative of
those you consider needing your largesse, another piece of evidence of the
brittleness of your regime: dominating on the one hand and hollow at the same
time.
You, Sir, are far more to be pitied that scorned. And that,
Sir, is the epitaph you warrant on an unmarked grave in an anonymous cemetery outside Leningrad.
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