The war in Ukraine has shown us many things – apart from the ongoing cruelty of madmen.
It has shown Western complacency, it has shown us
that other evil men will take advantage of the world’s inability to focus on more
than one big story at a time – as Saudi Arabia ramped up the state slaughter machine
with 81 executions in a single day last week, including for the crime of holding ‘deviant’ views.
Sadly it has shown us (again) that we are more
easily shocked by white suffering than brown.
Fortunately, it has also shown us that international
co-operation is still possible; sanctions are the right thing to do and they
will work and may discourage similar acts of war in the near future. Though sanctions
will do nothing to halt the horrific, immediate death toll and suffering in
Ukraine.
But now that the UK Conservative party is fully
exposed as a Russian-money whore, it seems the full glare of
international shame is burning hard on Britain and we are uncovered in the new,
much depleted position we hold in in the world.
While thanks have been forwarded for munitions in
Ukraine – we also provide abundant weapons to murderous Middle Eastern regimes
and can claim credit for some of the armaments used against civilians in Yemen,
so, it’s maybe not something we should shout about.
Following an unprecedented period of callous austerity in the UK, which has meted out a long slow punishment beating on the poorest in Britain, plus the cutting of foreign aid during covid, the ruling party is laid bare as Oligarch oglers and toadies. We even learnt that Boris Johnson was warned that one of his money buddies was a national security risk but ignored that Intel to give Lebedev a peerage after generous donations to Tory coffers.
The juxtaposition of brutalising the lives of Britain’s most
vulnerable and abandoning the world’s needy while bathing in the ill-gotten
gains of obscenely wealthy Russians, could not be more morally revolting.
Add that to the catastrophe which is Brexit and the
cruelly slow, incompetent response to Ukrainian war refugees plus the
dreadfully bad response to covid (for a country with developed health
infrastructure) and the corruption and pandemic-profiteering of Tory cronies; wash it all down with a Prime Minister regarded internationally as a dishonest
clown and Britain’s global credibility is shredded.
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