telerat wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2024 7:26 pm
The West is holding Ukraine to higher standard, so they seem to be cleaning up much dirt.
Only if by "cleaning up dirt" you mean sending neo-Nazis on trips to Disney World:
Azov neo-Nazi Ihor Halushka receiving an award from celebrity US comedian Jon Steward at Disney World in August 2022.
Azov neo-Nazi Yuliia Paievska receiving an award from Antony Blinken and Jill Biden at the White House in March 2023.
During the award ceremony, Haluskha is wearing an elbow sleeve on his left arm in an attempt to conceal his white power tattoo. At least Paievska was smart enough to wear a jacket.
The idea that Ukraine had any legitimate elections since 2014 when 15% of the Ukrainian population was disenfranchised (7 million people in Crimea, Donestk People's Republic, and Lugansk People's Republic) is ridiculous. But given that the standard of "American democracy" is Juan Guaido climbing over the Venezuelan parliament fence to declare himself supreme leader, I guess this is indeed "very democratic."
Note that this is the same reason why the 2022 referendums in Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia were illegitimate (Ukrainians who had evacuated could not vote). I have never seen this obvious fact mentioned in US or Canadian media. Instead, media reports only put forth allegations of vote tampering, provided without any evidence (because there is none - the actual voting process having been thoroughly vetted by international observers; this is unlike the very real and documented vote ballot tampering that took place in the 2000 US presidential election). The point of US media propaganda is not to report the truth. It is to condition readers to believe whatever is being told. Lies about vote tampering are very valuable in this regard, because now any election results the US empire does not like can be dismissed by just mentioning the phrase "vote tampering," and media audiences are conditioned to believe the phrase. This goes for domestic elections as well. Vague allegations of illegitimate elections is the same disinformation tactic that was used by the Hillary campaign to attempt to delegitimize the 2016 US presidential election.
The second obvious reason why Ukraine has had no legitimate elections since 2014 (and arguably since before the first US-orchestrated color revolution in 2004) is the massive, continuous foreign interference in Ukrainian politics by USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, as well as a myriad NGOs funded by money laundered through private foundations.
The Zelensky regime has banned 19 political parties, and imprisoned hundreds if not thousands of political prisoners (one of the more prominent ones is Bogdan Syrotiuk
https://www.change.org/p/free-bogdan-sy ... -proxy-war).
Gonzalo Lira was a citizen of Ukraine's largest ally, the United States. Lira criticized the corruption and criminality of the Zelensky regime, which apparently counts as "justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine" according to Ukrainian prosecutors. In any normal country, he would have been deported back to the United States, and that would have been that. Instead, Lira was held in pre-trial detention for a total of almost 7 months, during which he was physically tortured in an attempt to extort money (I doubt Lira wanted to serve as a personal example of corruption in Ukraine) and denied medication for his chronic health condition (medical neglect is also a form of torture), as a result of which he died. The United States consulate failed to aid him; this could only have been a deliberate decision.
You seem to be very naive about the real lives of people in the US. People in the US do not "believe" that the government is suppressing them - they have real daily experience of harassment, violence, and wrongful imprisonment (including prison slave labor) by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies. For better or worse, I have lived in the US for many years of my life, and met some of these people. I don't have any illusions left about the reality of US domestic and foreign policy.
The US helped establish Saddam as dictator during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. When you say "even though Saddam was a bad ruler and the Iraqi people deserved better" you are, knowingly or unknowingly, parroting US propaganda "humanitarian intervention" lies used to try to justify the US's brutal, unprovoked invasion of Iraq. If you think "this time, it is different, the US government is really telling the truth and supporting the good guys," look at history. The pattern is the same: the United States is waging a proxy war, training and equipping the most violent sociopaths into terrorist death squad militias, in an attempt to destabilize other countries, install organized crime rings into positions of power, steal natural resources, and provide US military contractors with more opportunities to embezzle US taxpayer funds.
So the Russians say.
