Dr Gabriel UguruThe word hypocrisy simply put, means, saying one thing but doing another thing. The Native Americans succinctly called it “forked tongue”. And according to a Google material, hypocrisy is caused by “an inflated sense of ego and self-righteousness, coupled with an inability to be humble,” – rings any bell?
It is good and proper to preach lofty ideals like democracy and equality of mankind, but it is another thing to demonstrably live by such ideals. Hypocrisy erodes trust, and breeds resentment, which often finds an outlet in terrorism. The current Russian-Ukrainian war is an eye opener, and has really exposed the hypocrisy of the West to all and sundry, especially to those who previously were in the dark. Any pretence by the West at high moral standards has simply evaporated. Let’s take a look at the charge sheet:
During the presidential campaign for the Whitehouse in 2020, President Biden did say that he would ostracise and make the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, a pariah for the murder of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. If you could remember, the late Mr Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered in a Saudi embassy in Turkey on 2 October 2018 on the “alleged” order of the Prince. Biden went further and promised to stop the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and end the war in Yemen, if he were elected.
Not only has Biden not made any attempt to fulfil these campaign promises, but he is currently preparing a visit to Saudi Arabia to shake hands, wine and dine with the Prince! To add to this hypocrisy, in 2021 he approved the sale of arms to both Saudi Arabia ($650 million) and the UAE ($23 billion). These two Middle Eastern nations in association with their allies, mostly Moslem countries including Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, are currently fighting the Hutu rebels in Yemen in an atrocious and long-drawn-out war that has lasted for 6 years and has claimed the lives of about a quarter of a million Yemenis with the rest subjected to subhuman living conditions, which are not helped by indiscriminate bombings by the Saudis and her allies. This is a war described by the UN as “the greatest humanitarian calamity of the 21st Century”. Yet the USA and Britain are not only continuing to sell arms to the Saudis but their technicians are on the ground in Saudi Arabia servicing and maintaining those planes used in bombing the Yemenis!
When questioned about this U-turn in Biden’s campaign promises, his press Secretary replied that Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner. In other words, so far as you are of importance to the USA, you can pretty much do what you like, including committing murder and war crimes without any fear of retribution!
Biden refused to invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to the just ended Summit of the Americas, which took place in the USA. Reason? Because the aforementioned countries are not under democratic rules, yet Biden is proposing to visit Saudi Arabia!
The US Congress has just last month approved a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine. This came after another $1.3 billion aid package approved for Ukraine in April, not counting other previous aid packages sent to Ukraine by the US since February when the war began. Now, compare these mouthwatering aid packages to Ukraine with a paltry $8.2 billion spent in humanitarian aid worldwide in 2021 by the USA!
Refugees from Ukraine are welcomed with open arms in the USA while refugees from South American countries and other countries, notably countries from Africa and the Middle East, are caged at the border!
In Britain the story is the same. In addition to millions of pounds handed over to Ukraine, the government is going to provide a further £1.3 billion. UK residents are paid £350 a month to take in Ukrainian refugees while migrants (i.e. asylum seekers and refugees) from Africa and other parts of the world are being deported to Rwanda!
Why are Ukrainian refugees getting preferential treatments over others in both the USA and UK? The answer is quite obvious: they are Europeans and as such are deemed “superior” to refugees from other parts of the world! Did I hear you shout apartheid?! What apartheid? In the West everybody is equal….. well almost, some are more equal than the others.
Russian “atrocities” are paraded on TV with cries of war crimes and war crime prosecution but the Western leaders and the press forgot that neither the USA nor Russia nor Ukraine is a member of the ICC (International Criminal Court). War crimes committed by Ukraine are not shown on TV. Are we therefore, to understand that Ukraine is a saint and is obeying all the rules of the Geneva Convention and Russia is not? Even Britain who is a member of the ICC and who is vociferous for obvious reasons in calling for the “war crimes” in Ukraine to be investigated, conveniently forgot the war crimes committed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the assassinations and overthrow of governments the West deemed to be unfriendly, which are carried out by proxies and sometimes directly by the West.
When Russia and other countries “commit” war crimes, the Western media will make a great noise about it, but when the West and their allies commit war crimes, they are called regrettable collateral damage. The constant mendacity we are being forced to swallow is: the West are the good guys and others the bad guys. But does the rhetoric match the optics? Well, I leave you to draw your conclusions.
British mercenaries captured in Ukraine are being portrayed by Western media as aid workers! Imagine such a stupendous assaults on our collective intelligence! NATO who have openly been economically fighting Russia, are also fighting a proxy war by sending military aid to Ukraine. Imagine if Russia had sent military aids to Afghanistan or Iraq during the wars, and those weapons were used to kill Westerners, what would have happened? NATO have even upped the ante by massing more than 40,000 troops on Europe’s bother with Russia.
Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and others are demonised and their economies crippled by sanctions simply because they failed to toe the line of US foreign policy. Nobody shines any light on how many millions have died of poverty and curable diseases in those countries as a result of US-led sanctions. All we are being spoon-fed daily by the Western media is how terrible and dangerous to our safety those nations are.
When the USA and her allies invaded Iraq without any provocation, nobody said anything. But when NATO provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, there was and still is uproar everywhere. The West are arguing that Ukraine has every right to determine her foreign policies. But they conveniently forgot that Cuba also has the right to pursue her foreign policies. Cuba for years has been economically crippled for daring to have a different system of government from the USA; even at one time, an unsuccessful invasion of the country was attempted by the USA via her proxy.
There have been many wars in Africa, and nobody cared. Currently there is a civil war between Ethiopia and the breakaway region of Tigray to the effect that Tigray had been blockaded by Ethiopia for more than a year and half, and as a result there are hunger and starvation and lack of medical care in Tigray. But nobody cared. There are civil wars going on in Libya, Yemen, Myanmar and Syria; but nobody cared. The moment war occurred in Europe, suddenly, there is bedlam everywhere and our ears are being spliced open by Western media. The USA have been going round bribing and pressuring countries to condemn and cut ties with Russia. India alone is being considered by the USA for an offer of as much as $500 million in military aid to reduce her dependence on Russian arms, and to also cut ties with Russia. But nobody is talking about these other wars going on before the European one. Compare the level of response by the West to the plight of civilians caught up in all these forgotten wars with the Western response to the plight of Ukrainians, and then draw the necessary conclusions.
To give you an example of Western hypocrisy, a picture of an 11-year old Palestinian girl in 2012 confronting an Israeli soldier during a protest against the confiscation of Palestinian land by Israel in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh drew little or no attention as at then. But when the same picture was doctored and shared online under the false claim that she is a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier, the girl was hailed a hero with the image receiving more than 12 million views! As observed by one Twitter user, “I guess Palestinian kids are only heroic when mistaken as Europeans?”
As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian assets in the West were seized. There were sanctions and boycotts galore of anything Russian. Even FIFA, IOC (The International Olympic Committee) and the academic world, which should be above politics, shamefully joined in the frenzy of sanctions and boycotts. But when Iraq was unlawfully invaded by the USA and her allies, no such sanctions and boycotts took place, and nobody seized any assets of the USA and her allies. It was business as usual. Why? Was Iraq not a country populated by people just as Ukraine? Or was the invasion not unlawful? I leave you to answer the “why”.
Times were after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent breakup of the former Soviet Union, when Russia was praised and hugged by the West while her wealth was systematically stollen and dumped in Western economies. Now, Russia is a pariah. Not because she invaded Ukraine, far be it, Ukraine is not remotely of any strategic importance to either USA or Britain.
The invasion is a heaven sent opportunity to settle old scores: Hilary Clinton lost in the presidential election to Trump in 2016 and Russia was blamed for the loss. In Britain, a Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, was poisoned with plutonium in 2006, and in March 2018, another former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, were poisoned with the nerve agent, novichok, in Salisbury, UK; Russia was accused of both poisonings, and relations since then soured between the two countries.
The above, in addition to Russia daring to have the effrontery to masquerade as a rival super power to the US, brought out the latent hatred of Russia by the USA and Britain, hence the bellicosity by the two countries in trying to humiliate and cripple Russia by sending arms and intelligence to Ukraine! As far as the West are concerned, Ukrainians can die in their millions or the country cease to exist just so far as Russia is humiliated.
But if the crimes accused Russia of by USA and Britain were true, had not the two countries been committing the same crimes for over a hundred years in many countries around the world? Or is it a case of what is good for the goose is not good for the gander? Who incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs with a total casualties of 199,000? Who deliberately targeted civilians in Dresden and Hamburg, respectively, and incinerated more than a combined total of 62,000 of them with phosphorus bombs and other incendiaries? Who invaded Vietnam, Iraq, Grenada, Somalia, Syria and Libya? Who sponsored coups in Latin America and Africa? Who is currently waging economic wars and destabilising other countries because they refuse to obey the dictates of the West? Who started colonisation and exploitation of other countries? Who started Slave Trade? Who started apartheid and benefited from it? Questions, questions, questions.
The West do not really have a leg to stand on when it comes to the issue of morality, ethics, and decency of purpose. In fact no country in the world does. All are solely driven without exemptions by self interest, an intrinsic human frailty.
Mauritius was in 1965 forced to hand over the sovereignty over Chagos Islands to Britain in exchange for independence in 1968. Between 1968 and 1973, the UK at the instigation of the USA carried out a forced deportation of all the inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago and renamed the islands the British Indian Ocean Territory. Britain leased one of the islands, Diego Garcia, to the United States Navy. In fact, the Island played a critical role during the Afghan War when US planes flew missions from Diego Garcia into Afghanistan.
But the United Nations’ highest court in The Hague ruled in 2019 that continued British occupation of the remote Indian Ocean archipelago is illegal, and directed that the Chagos Islands be handed back to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible”. Britain has failed to comply with this ruling, yet she is calling for the ICC to investigate Russian “war crimes” in Ukraine! By Britain failing to recognise the ruling of the UN’s highest court, she has lost the moral high ground to now ask the ICC to investigate war crimes in Ukraine. Or are we to take it that we should obey court rulings only when they favour us?
Some of these so-called war crimes are even dodgy. Take for instance a particular film clip, which showed pictures of murdered men strewn along the road as the Russians withdrew. TV crews and other journalists were invited by the Ukrainians four days after the Russians had left the area! Anybody with a bit of grey matter upstairs would immediate know that something did not add up. For instance, why would the Russians not murder all these people all the while they occupied the area and bury the bodies but had to wait until they were leaving before murdering them and strewing their bodies along the road for the world to see? And why did it take the Ukrainians four whole days to invite the press?
Nobody asked all these questions because it made for a good stick with which to hit Russia by shouting war crimes! If the incidence is probed objectively and truthfully, one wouldn’t be surprised to learn that those poor fellows were Ukrainian collaborators executed by Ukrainian partisans for collaborating with the Russians, and their bodies planted to discredit Russia.
Yes, the dead and the living must receive justice, but such justice must be universally applied. If truly the ICC is going to investigate war crimes in Ukraine, then war crimes committed in all the other wars ranging from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Myanmar, etc., must be investigated by an independent committee with members drawn from non-aligned nations, and any evidence submitted by interested parties in the war, especially from NATO members, should be viewed as compromised and discounted.
For the issue of war crimes to be taken seriously, if Putin is a war criminal for initiating a war of aggression against Ukraine as Western leaders and the press are trumpeting, then the British Tony Blair and the American George W Bush are also war criminals for waging a war of aggression against Iraq. The aforementioned three men should be tried as war criminals. Until then, calling only Putin a war criminal and wasting energy and resources gathering evidence in Ukraine is an exercise in futility.
Russia is being derided by the West for their inability to inflict a decisive blow on Ukraine. This by any proper reasoning shows that Russia is very restraint and not all out to conquer Ukraine. Compare the USA-led unprovoked invasion of Iraq with her “shock and awe” strategy in which in about 42 days, more than a hundred thousand bomb sorties were flown by the USA and her allies in Iraq, and Russia in Ukraine who in the same period had flown 8000 bomb sorties. The size of Iraq is approximately 438,317 km² with a population of 25.6 million as at 2003 and Ukraine is 603,548 km² with a population of 43.2 million as at 2022! So, who is or rather was more responsible and humane than the other in prosecuting an unjust war?
The USA invaded Iraq in 2003 with Britain, Poland and Australia. This was after crippling Iraq with sanctions for years, including imposing a no-flight zone. Iraq had no help or weapons supplies from any other country. The people and army were disorganised rabbles divided along religious lines with each sect not willing to fight the invaders except to murder and sell each other to the West. Whereas Russia is invading an united Ukraine with only one allied country, Belarus (formerly Belorussia), and even at then her economy has been crippled by the West while mercenaries encouraged by the West, and intelligence and weapons provided by NATO, are all pouring into Ukraine. So, there is no basis for comparison of the two unjust wars. And those still gloating over Russia’s difficulty in mastering Ukraine conveniently forgot that a ragtag Taliban army just last year sent the almighty USA army and her allies packing in Afghanistan.
Since late February when the Russian-Ukrainian war started, all mainstream materials about Russia and any other material with a hint of favouritism towards the Russian position have been cleaned on the web. The web is awash with only one-sided debate and Western narratives. Any dissenting voices or sources are quashed. It is only of recent that a trickle of mainstream materials about Russia, which sometimes escaped the censorship of the West are beginning to be intermittently seen. Yet we are being told we live in a democracy with freedom of speech and association! Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf (or the big bad wolf)?
The tragedy of the West is that they have a massive credibility issue. The public are being fed only one-sided narratives and are being brainwashed into believing that other nonWesterners pose existential threats and as such should be treated as enemies. This behaviour suggests that the Western ruling establishments and media, do not trust their public to be matured and intelligent enough to know the truth, therefore, the truth needs to be sugarcoated and repackaged in lies and propaganda for them.
Instead of finding a diplomatic solution to the Russian-Ukrainian war, the USA with her faithful Western allies are arming Ukraine and urging them to fight on, not for the benefit of Ukraine but for the prestige, military and economic advantages of the USA and her allies.
Several agreeable peace deals have been drawn between Russia and Ukraine, but the USA and UK are digging their heels. They wanted to humiliate Russia and see a regime change, until then they are continuing to send arms to Ukraine and urging them to fight on until the last Ukrainian! Which country is being destroyed? Ukraine. Who are the people fighting and dying? Ukrainians!
Remember that it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Hungary that sparked the first World War, while the genocides of the Igbos, Armenia, Native Americans, and others did not even merit a footnote in world history! Why? Because they were not strategically important to the West. But when the current Russian-Ukrainian war degenerates into a world war, the West will come down to Africa, Latin America and Asia to recruit you to fight for them. And soon after the war is over, they will sling you out on your ears and slam the door on your face – the British Windrush Generation and the Afghans will bear witness to this.
The naive question people often ask is, “Why can’t the West and East get along?” And the obvious answer is, because there is huge profit in death, destruction and human misery. If peace existed in the world today, all the security agencies would be out of jobs and the armament industry would collapse. We wouldn’t want that, would we?
What a screwed up world we live in!
Lesson: the West are not saints and do not for one moment think that they like you! You are as interesting to them as you are worth. In other words, you are tolerated in as much as you are of use to them! Quarrelling and shouting about who will make a great leader in the USA or Britain during their elections, are useless efforts. All governments ultimately are the same, whether it is the Clinton government, Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden, they are all, rose by any other name! So, stop pinning your hopes on the West, rather concentrate your efforts into managing and making your country better! Nobody has your interest at heart than you. And surely, you should not take sides or concern yourself about European wars, for they certainly do not give tuppence for your wars unless the wars impinge on their strategic interests!
Credibility is a cherished asset, but sadly, it is currently in short supply in the West, and we are back to the hysterics and lies, which preceded the Iraqi War in 2003.
P/S: The aim of this article is not to condemn the West and praise Russia. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is categorically condemned, but so also was the invasion of Iraq by the USA and her allies in 2003. The purpose for writing this article is to fill the void in the one-sided narrative of the Russian-Ukrainian war, and in the process demonstrate the fact that nobody involved in the politics of the unfortunate current conflict is a saint – both the West and East are all guilty of the same offence and are each a mirror image of the other.
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