UKRAINE SHORT COMMENTARY: COMPARING WAR CRIMES EAST AND WEST

What comparisons can we make between the Russian operation in Ukraine and the series of operations the western powers led by the USA conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya?

I think you will agree that there was an almost complete absence of any outcry from western populations regarding any of the western targets for regime change and certainly nothing of the scale we see now in relation to Russia’s in Ukraine. Why is this?

You will no doubt have your own answer to that question. I find it interesting to compare the virtual silence of the population of the West on those consecutive attacks and invasions by the West and the absolute furore of weeping, wailing and instigation of every possible attack on Russia branding the nation and its president with the most egregious of epithets. Where was all this rage when the West began its assaults on the nations of the Middle East or for its intervention in Yugoslavia for that matter?

For my own part I see the striking dumb of most of the western world regarding the attacks and invasions of their own nations as a phenomenon based in a conditioned reflex. It is almost as if western populations simply cannot visualise their own leaders doing anything untoward, let alone anything downright wrong. It is as if only foreigners can be suspect, never our own. This degree of conditioning doesn’t arise overnight. It can only be developed through mythologies, belief systems and familiarity with what appears to be normality within one’s own political elites. These are populations who have become totally used to their systems, cultures, mythologies and social norms being the “right” ones.

Russians and no doubt just about every other national populace feel the same. We all grow up believing what is around us and feeling an interior assurance being ‘well adjusted’ to our society and its norms. We can’t be in revolution against those who run our societies constantly, can we?

Yet, the western world has advanced this self-awarded normality to greater levels than anywhere else. To levels that incorporate being superior and exceptional. The western powers have put themselves on a global pedestal as ultimate arbiters of right and wrong and who by some unknown decree have the “right” to judge all others and punish them if need be. In a process known as unconscious conditioning these beliefs, taken to the level of almost inalienable and god-given attributes, have filtered down to permeate the consciousness of most westerners in a subtle manner quite beyond their conscious, everyday awareness.

This I believe is why when western leaders do heinous things such as fabricating “justifications” for wars to proceed and by their feelings of infallibility repeat the process over and over again even with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives the effect on their populations is minimal, almost completely absent. Yet, when a foreign power does something lesser in scale but similar in terms of an attack on another nation all hell is let less. The similarity to racism is not a shallow one. Westerners see themselves as ‘different’ and ‘superior’  even when the activities of their elites time after time show them otherwise and not in any subtle way but in obvious, mindbogglingly obvious ways of mass slaughter, devastation, torture… all underpinned by lies exposed soon after.

Yet Russia is the reviled villain across all western populations and must be punished as Nazi Germany was punished for having a president the mirror-image of Hitler… though his “crimes” are clearly not one hundred thousandth of those their own elites have committed in recent times.