Happy days are here again…
It is good to be back home in Brussels, and the popular song Happy Days from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pitching optimism to a depressive populace in the 1930s runs on a circular tape through my mind.
However, it seems less good when I switch on the television and watch the BBC news or browse Le Soir and other local mainstream media to complement the Financial Times and New York Times which come to my inbox wherever I am. The barrage of propaganda coming from Zelensky’s narcotics-distorted face on my screen brings to mind very unkind thoughts about what his tragic final scene should be in the ‘nearest future,’ as the Russians say..
Today’s dose of venom from the Ukrainian president, presented as God’s honest truth by the editorial team at Euronews, concerns the latest attacks on the Zaporozhie nuclear power station, which, of course, he lays at the door of the Kremlin, notwithstanding the nonsensical nature of such allegations given that the Russians would be interested in the uninterrupted supply of electricity to the territories they now occupy whereas the Ukrainian command would be interested in its disruption or even in some leakage of radiation that would threaten the nearby population that is now once and forever outside their control.
All of these Ukrainian allegations following one or another atrocity that they themselves have committed with an eye to false flag propaganda become very tiresome. I think of the atrocities in Bucha, in which the victims were one and all persons suspected by pro-Urkainian neighbors of having collaborated with the Russian occupation forces. I think of last week’s shouting by Kiev that the missile attack on a POW camp which killed and wounded large numbers of Azovstal defenders in captivity was done by the Russians. This impudent, bare-faced lie which does not stand up to any test of logic, sailed past the editorial teams of our major electronic and print media.
However, there are some signs that enough is enough. Yesterday the FT carried an article about what they call the war weariness of the European public, which, they say, endangers further economic and military aid to Kiev. The public, they say, has stopped being interested in news dispatches from the front. The numbers of published articles on the Ukraine war seem to be down 80% from where they were in March. Is it that the European public is unable to concentrate on any one issue for long, as the FT would have us believe, or is it that the farcical accounts of what is going on in Ukraine have brought about sullen rejection from the broad majority of readers who just turn the page to get to sports news?
The only bright spot on the news front is the release last week by Amnesty International of its report on the Ukrainian army’s systematically putting civilians at risk by intermingling its weapons and men in residential blocks, hospitals and schools, all in violation of international law. The word “war crimes” has now been used in conjunction with the Zelensky regimes. Some media in the United States are now challenging Zelensky’s credentials as a democrat and champion of human rights.
And yet, it is clear that whatever European leaders know or do not know about Zelensky and the murderous gang presently holding the Ukrainian nation captive, they are not about to reverse course and say ‘sorry’ to Russia. Only a clean sweep of Europe’s “leaders” and their replacement by new persons who may or may not be smarter but who will have no reason to double down on dead wrong policies out of empty vanity can bring some reason and common sense back to European politics. Johnson is gone. Draghi is gone. Time for Scholz, Macron and a host of other buffoons wearing presidential hats to leave the scene.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022