Summary: <br> <a href="https://twitter.com/micaactiongroup" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Michael Doherty</a> is the PRO of the <a href="https://www.micaactiongroup.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Mica Action Group</a>.<br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> I was talking to Billy Kelleher in the last podcast about Ukraine, and the west’s reaction, and in particular the attitude of MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="http://blog.hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Michael-Doherty.png" data-wpel-link="internal"></a><br> <br> <br> <br> Naomi O’Leary started and <a href="https://twitter.com/NaomiOhReally/status/1515228143086354435" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">epic Twitter discussion</a> over Easter about the contrasting attitude of Wallace and Daly to authoritarian regimes and to the west. My attitude to this is pretty simple, it’s that two separate things can be true at the same time. It can be true that the west is responsible for gross human rights abuses, resource extraction, environmental destruction in other parts of the world, it can be possible to condemn that, while still acknowledging that there are totalitarian regimes in different parts of the world that are worthy of being condemned, and that are, in fact, much, much worse. Saying that they are worse doesn’t undermine condemnations of actions by western governments that are bad, just not on the whole as bad. And condemning the abuses by western governments doesn’t undermine criticism of authoritarian governments elsewhere.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Any attempt to calculate a hierarchy of inhumanity leads straight to nonsense.<br> <br> <br> <br> But what I’m concerned about today, and what cropped up on many of the negative replies to Naomi O’Leary’s article on Twitter was a cohort of people who seem to think that they had some special insight into Vladimir Putin’s inner thoughts, that they were in some way his councillor or therapist, that they could peer into his psyche, and know what really was going on in his poor, troubled soul.<br> <br> <br> <br> And with this special insight that they magically have, they can tell us what Ukraine could have done that would have avoided the war, or what the west could do now that would end the conflict. If only the west would dot dot dot; if only Ukraine had dot dot dot … a striking number of these comments came from Twitter accounts that had a fake, or no profile picture, no discernible name in the bio or Twitter handle, and a vast amount of Twitter activity for a very new account. These are fairly obviously coming from bot farms, located who-knows-where, and have very recently switched their obsession from sending dozens of tweets per day pushing a hard-line antivax, anti-mask positions to being instant experts on foreign policy, and the motivations of Vladimir Putin in particular.<br> <br> <br> <br> But this line also comes from what seem to be genuine accounts and genuine people. These are people who, for whatever reason, believe that however bad Putin is, the best way to prevent him from doing harm is to give him what he wants. There is a whole argument about whether that is true – are we in a Chamberlin letting Hitler dismember Czechoslovakia in a vain hope of avoiding war situation, or are we in a Cuba missile crisis situation, where statecraft can avoid a war that is possible but not certain. I’m not going to get into it here.<br> <br> <br> <br> I’m more interested in what Putin actually wants. Daly and Wallace, just days before the invasion in February said that the massive build-up of Russian troops and military hardware on the border with Ukraine was ‘<a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/russia-s-mobilisation-along-ukraine-border-is-clearly-defensive-wallace-and-daly-say-1.4786363" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">clearly defensive</a>’.
