Tuesday, March 1, 2022

History will remember the double-standard not the war’s outcome

Wars come and go. Some are remembered because of the “who” that participated in them, and some are remembered because of the “why” someone participated in them.

 

Those who participate in a war do not always engage in the “kinetic” part of the exercise. Instead, their engagement can range from the moral support for one combatant or the other, to the training and arming of their soldiers.

 

History records everything that’s known about a war, from the “Who” to the “Why” to the other “Ws” associated with it. But as time passes, people tend to retain only the things that impressed them the most when they studied, lived through or read about the war.

 

This is what will happen with the war that’s ongoing at this time; the one they call Ukraine War. There are many things to remember about this war, but with the passage of time, what will be retained the most, is the double-standard that has fueled its conduct, and exposed the bankruptcy of Western morality.

 

The fact that this war took place at a time when the one on Palestine is ongoing without any attempt to restrain it, has exposed Western morality to be a bagful of such toxic hypocrisy, it would kill all lifeforms if dumped in the vastest of oceans. It is that aid and comfort is given to the Ukrainian underdog that’s battling the Russian giant, at the same time that aid and comfort is given to the Israeli giant that’s crushing the Palestinian underdog and robbing him of his meager possessions.

 

Whereas respect for human rights is the criterion by which the West claims to judge the governments that do not adhere to the so-called democratic system of governance, that same West has not formulated a system by which to gauge how well governments that claim to adhere to democracy, respect the human rights of their own citizens, and those it may have under its control, such as the situation in occupied Palestine.

 

For this reason, we can only rely on the anecdotal evidence which has it that people in the so-called democracies have a greater chance at being cancelled and seeing their lives ruined if they deliberately or by accident violate the amorphous rules of political correctness. Which explains why it is that new commers to the democracies find that the life they left behind in the so-called autocracy, was more liberating than the one they met in the co-called democracy, not knowing what they were getting into when they decided to migrate from East to West.

 

This is the landscape that makes up the background against which unfolds the double-pronged drama of giving more help to those who may or may not need it, while inflicting more punishment on the innocent who already suffer enormously. And these are the realities that will go down in history to reflect the true nature of the times in which we live.

 

A small fraction of what the West is doing to help the people of Ukraine fight against and survive the invading Russian army, is described in an article that came under the title: “US and allies attack ‘fortress Russia’ with major economic offensive,” written by Joel Gehrke and Misty Severti, and published on February 26, 2022 in The Washington Examiner.

 

A condensed version of that article reads as follows:

 

“President Biden is targeting Russia’s central bank with restrictions that will leave Moscow defenseless against sanctions while officials expel Russian banks from the global financial system in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine. An official told reporters: ‘What we're doing here is disarm the Central Bank.’ The new restrictions will prevent Russian officials from exchanging their US and Canadian dollars, as well as their euros for Russian currency held overseas. This will undercut the value of the ruble. The Central Bank restrictions accompanied an announcement that the EU has agreed to cripple Putin’s ability to finance his war machine by expelling a certain number of Russian banks from SWIFT. ‘We’ll continue imposing costs on Russia,’ Western leaders said. ‘We stand with the Ukrainian people … We are prepared to take further measures to hold Russia to account … We must spare no effort to make the invasion of Ukraine costly for Putin, Russian elites, and the Russian economy.’”

 

When you see how easy it is for the Western leaders to come together and tighten the noose on someone, thus force them to change behavior, you understand that the West always had the means to prevent the Jews from turning the occupation of Palestine into the genocidal situation that it is today.

 

Worse, not only did the West fail to tighten the noose on Israel, it showered the Jews with money and the most hellish of weapons while at the same time tightening the noose on the unarmed Palestinians for exercising their right to fight off the genocidal occupation of their people and their country with stones, weather balloons and kites.

 

History will not be kind to the practitioners of the double-standard that have it in their power to do for Palestine a fraction of a fraction what they are doing for Ukraine, which will be enough to end the occupation that has been ongoing for 55 years.

 

The Western powers are seizing the opportunity of standing with Ukraine to show how virtuous they are. This may be the immediate effect, but that’s not how history will look at this episode. Unless the West does the same for Palestine, the virtue that the West is seeing in itself will be the evil of hypocrisy that history will see in them.