UKRAINE: ARE YOU ALLOWED A VOICE?
Is the West at war with Russia? In wartime internal dissent is clamped down on, but there has been no official announcement that we are now at war with Russia. So, are we free to speak out... or not?
Neither the USA nor the EU nor the UK have announced that they are at war with Russia over the issue of the conflict in Ukraine. Yet there appears to be a growing conviction among the leaders of the West that the normal rules regarding freedom of speech must be suspended, or at least strictly bounded by restrictions.
The recent sanctioning of Colonel Jacques Baud by the European Commission for voicing his expert opinions on matters related to the conflict in Ukraine should concern us all. After all Ukraine is not in the EU and the EU is not officially at war with Russia. So what justification could there be for the EU to punish Jacques Baud for exercising his UN-supported enshrined right to speak freely on whatever subject he chooses?
During World War Two there were strict rules that western states expected to be obeyed concerning speech. Slogans such as ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, ‘Walls Have Ears’ and ‘Loose Lips Lose Ships’ were generated to send a message to the public at large to mind what they said. But we are not at war, are we? Not officially, no. But we certainly are in what I will refer to as war mode. In war mode, if you can possibly achieve it you allow nothing bad to be said about your side, including concerning your allies, and nothing good about ‘the enemy’.
The western powers are certainly in war mode. This includes the USA though its president is engaged in a pretense of being a neutral moderator while his military is actively involved in targeting Russian positions, planning Ukrainian tactics and supplying the Kiev regime with weapons via NATO.
We have seen the arrival in the West in recent years of ‘Cancel Culture’. If you speak out of line on certain issues others’ can deem it justifiable to seek to ruin you for it, to destroy your livelihood and make you a kind of exile within your own community, society and country.
The event that first heralded the arrival of cancel culture was 9/11. 9/11 was a wholly unjustifiable act, one that ended the lives of almost 3,000 innocent civilians. There are no possible words that could ever justify such an atrocity. This terrorist act was to have an effect even more long-lasting than the horror, anger, hatred and regime change wars it engendered. It is an effect that continues to inform western societies today, one that acts to severely limit criticsm of western foreign policy.
The foreign policy of the West before 9/11 had many severe and high profile critics. The Guardian newspaper in the UK was one of the most constant and forceful of these. Post 9/11 its content flipped almost 180 degrees to support it. The BBC, along with ITV and Channe4, also of the UK, previous to 9/11 featured various series where criticism of U.S. and UK foreign policy could be found. After 9/11 this programing was noticeable by its absence. It had become very bad form to mention U.S. foreign policy in anything approaching a bad light. Despite the many fabrications and lies used to instigate the western regime change wars that followed 9/11, criticism was relatively limited, no one was found particularly guilty and soon all was forgotten, replaced by new expectations that the western public at large would once again believe state and media pronouncements regarding the West’s future enemy, Vladimir Putin and Russia.
The problem western leaders and their compliant mainstream media have is that there remained a significant number of critics that had not forgotten the lies used to manufacture consent for their wars of choice. They did not feel inclined to fall into line behind the next call for war, announced or otherwise, against yet another demonized figure and his nation.
The foreign policy critics therefore remained skeptical regarding the vast flow of political statements, magazine articles, films and books which began targeting Vladimir Putin. These came in a seemingly unstoppable flow, continuing to this day after Putin spoke up and asserted that Russia would not necessarily bow to western requests on all issues.
Prior to his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 Putin had been wined and dined by world leaders including George W. Bush, had visited with Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace along with his then wife and was treated as a man the West could ‘do business with’. But only as a vassal, as a weak, submissive underling... not as the leader of a world power with its own sphere of influence. After Munich Putin became described as an outright demon, a dictator, a murderer, a thief, as some kind of insane megalomaniac seeking to expand his empire and recreate the Soviet Union. He became persona non grata and was savaged by all and sundry across every possible western source of influence to force him to repent, fall in line and crawl to the West asking for forgiveness, accepting that Russia would henceforth do whatever the West wished.
Those who were immune to the forceful demand of western states that they join the hate-fest against Putin were naturally inclined to criticize the injustice and hypocrisy they perceived in their states’ going after Putin. They had heard Putin’s Munich speech and found nothing bad in it. After all, hadn’t Putin stated that Russia would align with the western powers on eliminating international terrorism, on ensuring there would be no proliferation of nuclear weapons and indeed on ALL issues where the interests of Russia and the others aligned?
What was there to criticize in this?
All the great and good of the West who sat and listened however, seem to have heard only one thing from Putin; Russia will not slavishly follow western diktat but will consider what is in her best interests and then, informed by this, follow her OWN path.
This is all to say that critics of western foreign policy who are westerners themselves have their reasons for not going along in silence when their political leaders admonish them to hate, demonize and support yet another war in which, as a matter of course, in war mode, they will skew the facts, invent fabricated events and never admit a single wrong done by themselves.
And in what manner do we now see these western politicians now reacting to this honestly and openly stated resistance to their latest regime change war? Predictably, now that the war they thought they would so easily win is going horribly wrong for them, they wish to shoot the messengers saying so.
Jacques Baud is the first.
Who knows who will be next?
Professor John J. Mearsheimer? Professor Jeffrey Sachs? Professor Glenn Diesen? Professor Richard Sakwa? Professor Richard Wolff? Professor Dejan Šoškić?Associate Professor Pascal Lottaz? Ambassador Chas Freeman? Colonel Douglas Macgregor? Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson? Lt. Col. Daniel Davis? Dr.Warwick Powell? Scott Ritter? Max Blumenthal? Arron Maté? Ben Norton? Alastair Crooke? Larry Johnson? Ray McGovern? Tucker Carlson? Judge Andrew Napolitano? Alexander Mercouris? Alex Christoforou? Patrick Henningsen? Alex Krainer? Kim Iversen? Michel Hudson? Mark Sleboda? Pepe Escobar? Mario Nawfal? Jackson Hinkle? Rachel Blevins? George Galloway? Matthew Hoh? Phil Giraldi? Liu Sivaya? Patrick Lancaster? Danny Haiphong? David Pyne? Tuomas Malinen? Michael J. Carley? Elizabeth Lane?
UKRAINE: ARE YOU ALLOWED A VOICE?
