This week’s Independent News & Media/Mediahuis Irish weekly newspapers’ column.
Michael Commane
A wise man once quipped:‘If you see the other fella’s point of view you are finished.’
It presupposes you have a position on something and should you listen to other people’s views you might change your thinking.
On May 12 Paul Johnston, the British ambassador to Ireland was interviewed on RTE 1’s Prime Time. He was talking about his government’s views on the Northern Ireland Protocol. He was supporting the decisions of prime minister Boris Johnson.
Listening to him set me thinking about the job of an ambassador. With no disrespect to any ambassador, but aren’t they simply the mouthpieces of their governments.
Yuri Filatov, the ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ireland, assured us up until February 24 there would be no invasion of Ukraine.
When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Putin explained that Russia was obliged to de-nazify Ukraine and the country had to protect its borders from the advance of Nato. Subsequently Filatov gave us the Putin line. Is that what diplomat do? Do ambassadors have minds of their own?
It is said that the majority of the Russian people support Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. If you or I were Russians living in Samara or Novosibirsk would we be supporting Putin? Most likely we would. In World War II the majority of Germans supported Hitler. That’s why I’m always nervous when people talk about ‘Nazi Germany’.
When one uses that term one can easily think it was a small group of Germans who were mad and bad enough to support Hitler. Just as Hitler had the German people behind him, no doubt Putin too has the majority of the Russia people supporting him.
We say they have been brainwashed. Are we brainwashed?
Do any of us think for ourselves? How influenced are we by our surroundings, by what we read and see?
Are we all marionettes submerged in the prevailing environment, controlled by the powerful?
How do we ever know what is true and honest?
I read an article in the May issue of the free-sheet ‘Alive'. It was attacking the veracity of ‘The New York Times’. It is true that the newspaper’s Berlin correspondent in the 1930s was a Nazi supporter but that does not mean that one can rubbish the history of the newspaper because of one instance of bad judgement.
The ‘Alive’ author based his argument attacking the newspaper on the works of Mark Crispin Miller. I googled Miller to discover that he is an anti-vaxxer, says the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax. And he also claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 United States presidential election.
How can we discover what is true?
Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds is a waste of a life. Our lives make sense when we spend our time and energy seeking out truth and goodness. It’s a life-long journey.
2 comments:
An interesting podcast worth to listen:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/jacques-baud/id1449753062?i=1000560946382
A note on Jacques Baud, who features in the podcast referred to in Andis’ comment.
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and started a bloody war. Jacques Baud’s rhetoric completely repeats the political rationale for the war from Vladimir Putin. He justifies the Russian President’s actions in the same way as he did during the war in Syria.
He denies Russian military killings of civilians in Bucha. Also, in his opinion, it is necessary to fight against Nazism in Ukraine. A month after the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, terrible facts about war crimes by the Russian military began to be revealed. In this regard, the statements of Jacques Baud look very surprising.
There is an assumption, expressed by some people on the Internet, that he was recruited by the Russian intelligence agency during his work in Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service (linked to the countries of the former socialist camp).
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