Let There Be Peace On Earth, But Don’t Let It Begin With Me
Letting Vladimir Putin be shoved to the front of the responsibility line is admitting George W. Bush and Tony Blair will never be held to account for what they did to Iraq, that President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Nikolas Sarkozy were able to destroy the most prosperous nation in all of Africa and get away with it.
Just admit it: You don’t have the courage to hold your own government responsible. You only have the courage to get behind the people and institutions responsible for unspeakable crimes and suffering in condemning Putin. Which is to say you have no courage at all, because you are merely taking the easiest route, merely doing what power wants you to do. Vladimir Putin and Russia have NO power over you, have NO leverage. You will pay NO cost for doing what your government wants you to do in hating Russia and Putin and whoever the hell else your government and media tells you to hate.
Imagine. Imagine if you had had the courage to oppose the Iraq War. That you had upped your game enough to encourage others to threaten the system enough to make the warmongers back down. Or imagine if, after no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found, we had held our leaders to account, demanded they pay the price we now ask Putin to pay. That we had drawn the logical conclusion that we could no longer trust our politicians, our intelligence agencies, or our media. That we decided The United States was a danger to peace and should be broken down into smaller countries that would no longer have the power to destroy foreign countries. Such thoughts are entirely unimaginable to us, and yet they are entirely intellectually and morally consistent with the predominant attitude now preached against Russia.
If we had done this, if we had prevented our warmongers from destroying countries and overthrowing governments on multiple continents, the world would not be in the state it is in today. Had Russian leadership not witnessed what was done with impunity to Iraq, to Libya, to Syria, to Afghanistan. Had those who were entrusted with the welfare of the Russian people not clearly seen that the U.S. was incapable of telling the truth and utterly uninterested in being a responsible member of the global community. That U.S. involvement in Ukraine bore all the hallmarks of those travesties that had gone before.
I understand the fear to oppose those who actually have power over us. I myself feel the fear of speaking up. But it doesn’t take the courage of a Rachel Corrie. I am no hero for saying what you will never hear said in the establishment media. It is the minimal courage of an honest human being. That such statements of the obvious are not heard in the establishment media tells you all you need to know about those who are permitted to speak in establishment media. Those with courage, honesty and conviction have long ago been purged from corporate news organizations.
To blame Russia exclusively for behaving as the U.S. has done repeatedly, to not consider that Russia’s actions were precipitated by and in reaction to a superpower gone rogue, is not an act of bravery but of abject submission to the power that is most able to threaten you personally. It is to insist not that we be the change we wish to see in the world but that Russia be the change. It is an abdication of personal responsibility.
Let me end these musings with a slight reworking of lyrics from a song that has come to be known as a Christmas carol but is equally fitting for the Easter Season:
Let there be peace on Earth
And let it begin with Russia
*Image is of the nations involved in the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011. Those nations in blue bear a rather striking similarity to a certain military alliance that has been worrying Russia for a while now.