Periscope
Time to get the editor’s periscope up again and survey the scene. It’s not troubled waters I see all around, but stormy, tempestuous, seas. The darkest of clouds above, thunder and lightning, and the threat of a potential cataclysm.
I ask myself in what year is our magic journalistic submarine and time-machine that probes the depths and yet seeks to make sense of developments on the surface, and even in the atmosphere, semi-surfacing?
Is this Munich in 1938 when western leaders caved in to Hitler in their misguided, naive, placation of a rapacious imperialistic Nazi German tyrant? Do I see French, or is it now German leaders, attempting to convince us once again that they have secured “peace in our time” from a cynical, scheming, Hitler?
Or is it Molotov and Stalin a year later fooling themselves that they have also secured peace and security for themselves and their empire by signing a devil’s non-aggression pact with the USSR’s s equal in contempt for humanity, European civilization, and peoples under their control?
But no, fortunately! It is not the moral weaklings of the late 1930s that I observe – Chamberlain and Daladier, but today’s British prime minister Boris Johnson and French president, Emmanuel Macron. Johnson has struck a Churchillian note in telling the latter-day Hitler in the Kremlin, Vladimit Putin, to go to hell with his blackmail.
Macron evidently still thought he could produce a piece of paper from Putin securing an illusory “peace in our time.”
Today’s reaction by German Chancellor Olfa Sholtz was more encouraging, telling Putin this that he has overstepped his mark.
But Putin has disregarded all this and has in effect arbitrarily killed the so-called Minsk and Normandy “peace “ processes by having recognized this evening – Feb 21 – the Russian occupied regions of eastern Ukraine as “independent states,” read latest Russian-controlled puppet statelets akin to Abkhazia, and Transniestria.
Despite the grave, ominous, climate, I am seeing to my surprise and relief, a revitalized and reunified West saying no to the Kremlin aggressor who is seeking to restore the obsolete, unacceptable, imperialism and “might is right” notions of the past – Russia uber alles in this case, and to hell with the rest of you while I gobble up Ukraine, Belarus, and maybe others.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in his impassioned plea for Western solidarity, support and rejection of the ultimately self-defeating policy of appeasement delivered on Feb. 19, symbolically in Munch itself, reminded the free world that it cannot have it both ways – democracy, security and economic prosperity, while allowing anti-Western enemies to exploit its weaknesses, goodwill, naivety and opting for Faustian pacts with those who wish its death.
And it is time too, not only for defenders of freedom against autocracy to close ranks, tell the Kremlin that it has crossed too many red lines, and integrate Ukraine into its fold, but for domestic opponents of Ukraine’s elected leadership to put loyalty to the nation, in its moment of peril, above individual and party interests.
This also applies to Ukraine’s journalist “Rudenkos” and their like who in the name of “independent journalism,” or rather their immodest egos, undermine the standing of Ukraine’s wartime leader – President Zelensky – by mocking him internally and externally an and do a disservice to the national cause.
At a time when Ukrainians should be pulling together, and temporarily overlooking shortcomings and prejudices for the common cause, this is unacceptable and despicable, worthy only of fifth columnists
PS Olga Rudenko, ex-Kyiv Post, now heading Kyiv Independent, wrote in the New York Times today about President Zelensky: “The show must go on, of course. The crisis continues. But the president’s performance — strained, awkward, often inappropriate — is hardly helping.” Serhiy Rudenko fron Experesso TV ridiculed Zelensky on Feb. 18 ago in photos depicting him as a clown “pretending” to be a commander in chief.