Simon Kuper Wins The Ben Hodges Award For Ukraine Fabulism
Simon Kuper
Simon Kuper. He is a “columnist” for the Financial Times. I think a more accurate title is, “fabulist.” For those whose native tongue is other than English the word, “fabulist”, is a polite synonym for LIAR. And boy did he lie in his latest column, “What If Russia Wins — A Counterfactual View of the Conflict in Ukraine.” His subtitle should have been, “A Fabricated Account of the Conflict in Ukraine.” I am not surprised that the Financial Times would embrace hysterical propaganda like this, but I did expect something classy and smart. This is crude and stupid. Just the kind of stuff that Joseph Goebbels put out for his boy, Adolf.
Here are the most bizarre straw-men from his dystopian vision of a Russian victory:
1. Russia exacts terrible victor’s justice on Ukrainians. This isn’t speculation. It’s precisely what the Russians have already done in Ukraine: mass executions, castrations, rapes, torture and abductions of children. Remember Russia’s pre-invasion lists of Ukrainian public figures to be “removed”. . . .
4. Putin’s success would encourage countries interested in invading a neighbour: China, Venezuela, Azerbaijan and, indeed, Russia. Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Every time the Russians think that they have ‘won’ in a conflict under Putin — Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014, Syria 2015 — they learn something about us . . . become overconfident in their abilities and in a few years they try bigger and bolder operations.” The likely creation of a Ukrainian army in exile running sorties from European countries would further incentivise Russian attacks on those places.
Kuper is engaged in good, old-fashioned projection. For example, Russian soldiers have not carried out “mass executions” unless your definition of mass execution is based on the Russian victories in Mariupol or Bakhmut. Ditto for castration. The video evidence of that war crime shows Ukrainian soldiers doing the dirty deed. And it is Ukraine that has earned the sordid reputation for trafficking in children to service pedophiles and harvesting organs from wounded soldiers.
Kuper’s reinvention of history may be a function of his relative youth, i.e. he’s uneducated and failed to read his history lessons. How many foreign military adventures has Kuper’s home country, the United Kingdom, carried out in the last 30 plus years? Iraq twice, Libya, the Balkans/Serbia, and Syria. Russia’s history is not littered with repeated instances of foreign conquest and colonial exploitation (and, oh yes, enslavement of local populations). That would be the United Kingdom.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
