Russian Invasion of Ukraine

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 Het-field wrote:

Ended up watching a Late Late Show interview from 2005/2006 with George Galloway. He has little difficulty handling Eamonn Delaney in debate over Iraq, but its the comments he makes in the interview that are interesting. He vehemently criticises invasion of other countries, and decrying Irish people who would cheerlead invasion, and compared the West in Iraq to previous invaders. He asked the rhetorical question, 'why do you concentrate on the small tyrant, rather than the big tyrant?'
To me, this just hammers home the mental gymnastics necessary to conclude that America is the big tyrant here, when the invaded nobody. The big tyrant in this situation is Russia. But that doesn't suit their world view, so they need to rope in NATO (and then the USA) to avoid making the uncomfortable conclusion (in their eyes), that the counterweight they prefer (in a relative sense), is the big tyrant. And funny enough, many of the usual suspect have little difficulty criticising Zelensky, corruption in Ukraine etc. So they also focus on the 'small tyrant (as they see it)'. Last year some of these people would give mealy mouthed condemnations of Putin, many of them won't even do that anymore.

A small demonstration took place under the Spire in Dublin a few weeks ago. The criticisms were of NATO, Zelensky, America, Ireland, and Britain, with cheap applause available for anybody who bellowed 'Free Assange'. But noticeable, was the virtual absence of criticism of Russia, Russian Imperialism, Putin, Lavrov, or any of the fellow travellers. By shifting the goalposts sufficiently, they create a war between the USA and Russia, which doest exist. And of course, they just default to the old trope 'America is bad.' Its their warped moral justification for Russian invasion of a sovereign state. Its a comfortable refuge for the ideologue and the simpleton.

With hindsight, do you think that the reports of Ukraines victories over Russia were overplayed so that it would help Bidens mid term elections thereby justifying American military aid?