Ukraine and the collapse of Western values
November 4, 2022
Peace, democracy, human rights, environmental protection: in the fight against Russia, we sacrifice everything that does our honor
by Guy Mettan, freelance journalist*
“Russia, this aging tyranny, seeks to destroy the impertinent Ukrainian democracy. A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of free government, integration into Europe and the ability of people of good will to face global challenges. A victory for Russia, by contrast, would increase the genocidal policy in Ukraine, enslave Europeans, make it impossible to fight climate threats, strengthen fascists, tyrants and nihilists who see politics as a spectacle intended to entertain people. of the destruction of the world. This war determines the principles that will prevail in the 21st century , policies of mass massacres or policies defending human dignity. It is the future of democracy that is at stake.”
This is essentially how
Timothy Snyder, one of the most prominent academic representatives of the Western establishment, describes the stakes of the war in Ukraine in the September issue of the American journal
Foreign Affairs . Defense of "European values" against barbarism, democracy against dictatorship, heroic virtues against war crimes, this is the discourse that Western leaders and media have been giving us day after day since 24 February in a tone and with unanimity which suffers no reply.
Wars contrary to international law
Are we quite sure that this vision corresponds to reality and that this war corresponds to a fight of the good guys against the bad guys? And what are these famous values that we hear about but that we are careful not to define and, above all, to put to the test of our own behavior? For what is the value of a "value" rendered unusable because adulterated or which would have been devalued by attitudes even more criminal than those for which the adversary is accused? These questions are not insignificant because, seen from the rest of the world, Europe is showing that it has failed to share its internal model – cooperation between member nations on an equal and mutually respectful basis – with others. nations of the world and that she is losing her honor and her credit with them.
An inventory is required.
First problematic observation, the founding value of Europe since 1945, the one we brandished for seven decades to justify the creation and success of the European Union, peace between nations, has completely disappeared from official and media discourse since last April.
Admittedly, peace had already experienced a serious hitch during the 1990s, during the war in Yugoslavia, when the premature recognition of the independence of Slovenia and Croatia by Germany had set fire to the powder and that in 1999 , the German and NATO staffs had concocted the false Horseshoe plan and staged the Racak massacre allegedly hatched by the Serbs to liquidate the Kosovars and thus justify the bombardment of a European state for 78 days at the expense of dozens deaths and billions of damage. This ideal of peace had also been undermined by the gradual transformation of NATO into an increasingly aggressive alliance after the demise of the Soviet Union, as witnessed by the attacks on Serbia, already mentioned, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan,
Despite these sprains, peace, officially at least, remained a basis for action and a claimed “value” of Europe and the West.
It is also in the name of peace that Europe, led by France and Germany, again negotiated and guaranteed the Minsk Accords which followed the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and the uprising of the eastern provinces of Ukraine after the riots of February 2014 and the annexation of Crimea to Russia. We had even hoped that a peace would be possible between Ukraine and Russia at the end of last March, until the media coverage of Boutcha and the visit of
Boris Johnson , at the beginning of April, put an end to any hint of negotiations of the western side.
Since then, peace has disappeared from the European horizon. Moreover, ministers and the media, headed by the President of the European Commission, constantly call for more war, more arms deliveries, more sanctions, more financial support, more energy austerity, stigmatizing the few voices that dare to call for de-escalation and diplomacy like traitors. This gaping gap between proclaimed values and actual behavior undermines the entire Western discourse on values.
Along the same lines, how to interpret the discourse of European leaders and the media, who do not have words harsh enough to castigate the nationalism of Serbia, Russia, Hungary, Turkey and who have all possible consideration for the secession of Kosovo, the independence of Taiwan, the occupation of the Golan and the colonization of the West Bank, yet not recognized by international law?
Politicians disregard the popular will
Second value defended by the West, democracy. As for peace, we want to applaud. But on closer inspection there are doubts. How can we justify unconditional support for a country, Ukraine, under the pretext of democracy, when this same country banned all opposition parties (last March), closed all non-governmental news channels (in 2021 and 2022), banned minority languages (and even majority languages since Russian is spoken by two-thirds of the population), had its security services assassinate dozens of journalists, political opponents and even negotiators, allowed rampant corruption to develop ( 122nd position in the ranking of world corruption, not far from hated Russia), sold off 17 million hectares of good agricultural land to three American multinationals despite popular opposition, forcibly conscripted the male population into its army, executed prisoners of war, used its own civilian population as a human shield (see the
Amnesty report), stuffed its army and its administration with notorious neo-Nazi sympathizers, to name but a few notable facts that have been acknowledged and paid lip service to by the mainstream media? Is this really the model of democracy that we want to defend?
And what about our own appetite for democracy when we rush to Baku to cajole Dynast Aliyev who keeps attacking Armenia, to Saudi Arabia to appease Prince
Mohammed bin Salman who had journalist
Kashoggi cut to pieces , in Qatar to laugh at the Emir or in Cameroon to make friends with President
Biya in power for 40 years, for the sole purpose of fetching a little gas or oil? All this to boycott
Vladimir Putin ?
And finally what to think of our own democratic functioning when we support a war without having consulted the citizens, when we scuttle neutrality without debate, as is the case in Switzerland, when we make a warmongering assault against the opinion of the people ? Let us recall in this regard the survey carried out in Germany and published on August 30 by the magazine
Sternin the absolute indifference of the Western media because it is annoying for the dominant doxa: 77% of Germans are in favor of peace negotiations in Ukraine (against 17% who believe that nothing should be done), 87% believe that talk to Putin (against 11%), 62% that heavy weapons should not be delivered to Ukraine (against 32%). Another gave roughly the same results in Austria. These are popular opinions that we will be careful not to listen to.
Crackdown on freedom of expression
Third category of values that we are supposed to defend in Ukraine, human rights. Western ideologues claim that Russia has committed a crime of aggression, the worst of all crimes according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, by launching its "special operation" against Ukraine. It's possible. But the Russians, in the same fashion as Western accusations about the Uighurs in China, respond that they have only responded to the crime of "genocide" perpetrated by Ukrainian forces since 2014 in Donbass, at the cost of 14 000 deaths attested by the UN… Ditto for violations of humanitarian law, the taking of civilians hostage, the execution of prisoners. According to August estimates, the UN put civilian casualties at some 5,587 dead and 7,890 injured since February.
Similarly, the West, and Europe in particular, likes to pose as a model of freedom of expression, compared to a Russia that would flout them shamelessly. But how to explain then that our sycophant media trample all the criteria of objective information by unanimously taking the side of Ukraine without listening to the other party?
Audiatur and altera pars however say the manuals of journalism. Why were the Russian media
RT and
Sputnik simply banned from the EU? Isn't this a gross attack on freedom of expression? Since when is censorship democratic and representative of freedom of expression? And how to justify the despicable treatment inflicted on
Julian Assange, Edward Snowden or
Chelsea Manning, because they denounced the turpitudes of the NSA, the American crimes in Iraq or the compromises of
Hillary Clinton and the Biden son ?
Last point, for a list that could be extended, the flagrant violation of the right to private property with the confiscation of the assets of the Russian Central Bank, the private property of the oligarchs, and even the pure and simple theft of the seven billion assets of the Afghan National Bank after the departure of American troops.
Coal power plants against Putin
Fourth and last category of values betrayed by Western practices, ecology and the fight against climate change. Since the Rio Summit of 1992, the West has posed, not without difficulty and with strong internal debates, as champion of the fight for the "preservation of the planet" and the development of green technologies, in particular by declaring war on CO 2 emissions. Three years and six months of war in Ukraine later, what happened? In the name of the fight for Ukraine and the "bringing to its knees of the Russian economy", Europe has begun to import at great expense and with great reinforcements tankers and bulk carriers polluting gas and oil of schist scorned once. We are reopening coal-fired power stations in Germany and Poland with the blessing of environmental ministers who would have cried foul twelve months ago. And soon it will be the turn of nuclear power plants.
Europe convinces itself that it still embodies a moral ideal and that it can content itself with declaiming the moral clichés of the Cold War – without having to apply them to itself. Whatever the adventures and the outcome of this conflict, it is to be feared that it only deceives itself and that this war, waged in the name of morality by Ukrainian intermediaries, is only the mask of a desire for universal predation and global hegemony that is never satisfied and that no longer abuses – or amuses – the six billion other inhabitants of the planet. •
References
Survey: “Mehrheit will Verhandlungen über Kriegsende”,
Stern, August 30, 2022.
John Pilger, Silencing the Lambs – How Propaganda Works,
Consortium News, September 8, 2022.
Joe Lo, African leaders blast European no-shows at climate adaptation summit,
ClimateHomeNews , September 6, 2022. Laurence Caramel, Africans castigate the absence of rich countries at the Rotterdam summit on adaptation to climate change,
Le Monde, September 5, 2022.
George Kennan, America and the Russian Future,
Foreign Affairs, April 1951 (
Guy Mettan
's article appeared in first publication in the columns of the Swiss weekly “Die Weltwoche”, in its edition of October 1 , 2022, reproduction with the kind permission of the author and the publishing house.)
* Guy Mettan is a journalist and deputy to the Grand Council of the canton of Geneva, which he chaired in 2010. He began his career as a journalist while studying political science; he then worked for the “Journal de Geneve”, Le Temps Stratégique, Bilan, the Nouvau Quotidien and then as director and editor-in-chief of the “Tribune de Geneve”.
Since 2005, he has chaired the Union of Swiss-Russian & CIS Chambers of Commerce. From 2006 to 2014, he was president of the Geneva Red Cross and member of the Council of the Swiss Red Cross until 2019. In 1996, he founded the Swiss Press Club, of which he was president and then director from 1998 to 2019.
He is the author of several books, including “Russie-Occident. A Thousand Year War,” which was published in seven countries, including China and the United States. The title in English is called: “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria”.
www.rt.com
