Born yesterday

When I was a child and tried to get away with things by dissembling or  being economical with the truth my dear old Mother used to tell me that she wasn’t born yesterday and could see through what I was trying to do. It’s very easy to spot when a kid is trying to move your attention away from what they have done. Most adults tried to do this themselves when they were kids so it’s not difficult to work out what questions to ask.

It made me think about the narrative that’s being sold to us about Ukraine. You hear the argument that the Ukrainians want to be part of NATO and the EU, and so on ad nauseam but is that true? The US state department (supervised by then VP Biden, no less) spent a small fortune, claiming five billion dollars, overthrowing the elected government of the sovereign nation of the Ukraine in 2014, after spending a smaller amount on a colour revolution a few years earlier.

This fact is fundamental to any discussion about what Ukrainians and their government might want or not want. It certainly makes any claims about what the people there want very dubious. If the government that is saying it wants these things was itself bought by people that want it to say them it’s hardly reasonable to give its wants any credibility. NATO itself isn’t a club anyone can join, a prerequisite of membership is that the country joining is one that the other members are willing to defend it - this manifestly isn’t happening, is it? So joining NATO was never on the cards, it was meant to provoke and it did. Now the people are paying the price. The US government is fine with that, like it always is. The imperial core are not the friends of people like us, never have been and never will be.

If you listen to most commentators the obviousness of a bought government staying bought and doing what it is told is never mentioned. Steps that might be taken to get the views of the actual people living there without millions of dollars being poured in to try and get the result that suits the imperial core have never been taken. As I said in the Kidnapping the Maiden article a few days ago the arguments that forget this history are dubious at best. The constant interference and extreme violence against opposing voices paid for by this money means the supporting assumptions for the whole EU and NATO love-in are not credible. The fact that the country was already violently split along ethnic lines means the question is very far from settled.

This is typical of the absence of long-term memory you find in the imperial centre’s apologists. Whatever nonsense story needs to be created to go with the current short term wants of our owners will be pushed. Anything that doesn’t support the bloody handed continuation of the imaginary status quo won’t be talked about. Often, things are just made up, or presented in a way that only tells half of the story.

Small L liberals do this all the time - they conveniently forget that things that undermine their arguments, and when reminded of history or broader contexts they claim you are indulging in whataboutism. Pointing out hypocrisy, and that people are paid-for bad actors whose views may well be dubious isn’t whataboutism, but they can’t acknowledge that.

The status quo is the one that allows the eco disaster to unfold, keeps people down and ignorant, and acts like everything only happened yesterday with a context that keeps us “free” and our attention away from the real things we need to deal with. The freedom to starve if we don’t do what we’re told. The freedom to starve even if we do, because the price of everything has shot up.

There is a song entitled A new day yesterday. It has the refrain:

It was a new day yesterday
It’s an old day now

We need to be more like my mother - the imperial story tellers don’t want us to see through their nonsense. It’s not just Ukraine, it’s claiming inflation is our fault, it’s Brexit, it’s why power bills are going through the roof, it’s why life expectancy is falling, it’s why we’ve seen the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since records began. Look at Johnson’s ridiculous comparison of Brexit with the Ukrainian crisis. We weren’t born yesterday, and we should treat people who expect us to act as if we were with contempt and ridicule.

It’s an old day now.

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