Some of us Unpatriotic Putin Apologists have been found committing treasonous thought crimes and have been publicly condemned. (Well … you know, by a handful of avid commenters.) Never mind the notion of measured and reasonable discourse, or that wholly antiquated innocent-until-proven-guilty thing. Wherever the great finger of the 95% media is pointed, shame and cancellation must follow. Name-calling is so much more fun than critical thought.
All right, so we might be whining a tad, but let’s get serious. Some of us, in trying to come to a balanced conclusion, try to see ourselves, as though wearing the shoes of the Other. This was once known as part of the process of “understanding.” In the case of the Ukrainian “Special Military Operation,” otherwise known as the brutal Russian invasion of its faultless neighbor, we might even be inclined toward some small measure of sympathy for Putin’s predicament. There it is. The confession. How right and righteous the finger pointers are proven to be!
But whether Ukraine has been warring against its own enclaves of Russians, since the U.S made them part of the Obama-planned and supported Orange Revolutions, in 2014, or whether the areas Putin wants to annex are overwhelmingly populated by Russian-speaking people, or whether the Ukraine’s military point-of-the-spear is actually a cadre of rabid Hitlerian Nazis, waving swastikas and proudly wearing SS insignia, or whether agreement with Putin’s position would have averted, and could now immediately end, this atrocious war, rather simply and painlessly, is truly not the real concern of those opposing this war. We, who are apparently post-Soviet Russian assets, prove to be pretty fickle when it comes time to hug the Russian Bear. We love you, Comrade Vlad, sort of, kind of, once in a while, but, whatever sympathies we may be accused of harboring, the terminus of these “affections” is finalized in this: We don’t care what’s happening over there! We care about what’s happening right here in the USA.
Like the authors of our Constitution, we would rather avoid “foreign entanglements,” as a matter of principle and wisdom. We have already, long since, engaged in endless, costly and useless foreign wars. Like Trump, we want to make America great again. We want to put America first in forming our policies. We see this war as one Trump would almost certainly have avoided or, at least, brought to a quickly negotiated cease-fire and settlement. Which he could, and would, tomorrow, if Biden’s invisible directorate were less invested in the continuation of the slaughter of both Russians and Ukrainians, the draining of our treasure and the depletion of our assets for self-defense.
You, who are participants in the government-mandated boosterism of a war that drains us to the point of real and deadly vulnerability (as such Democrat-initiated involvements have in the past) may want to reconsider exactly who the useful idiots really are.
This is how you are being used:
Who are they? Blessed if any of us knows! But if we listen to what the overt, self-avowed globalists are saying and wishing, and carefully compare that to what the present “leaders” are doing and saying ,we get a pretty good idea of what they are.
The current administration is so obviously destructive as to require the use of squirrels, to distract an awakening public. As in the good old, “Look, there goes a squirrel!” Never mind that the wages of this particular squirrel are an extreme expansion of Eastern European cemeteries. Never mind that we’re killing our own nation in the process! Look at these killer Russians we keep screaming about (while the Ukes are just trying to put flowers in the barrels of their guns), and get with the program. Or we might have a nuclear war … any day now!
What good patriot could fail to go along with that!
So! Shut up, shut up, shut up! We’re back in the Business of War. It must be right to pay them to fight. And we must exile you from the public square of discourse. What else but a profound righteousness could have brought us around, we who once shouted, “Free Speech” and “Give Peace a Chance!”