It is not the job of journalists, satirical commentators and cartoonists to use their insights solely to demonise “the enemy”. It is their task – however onerous – to donate ironic examples of hypocrisy and double standards equally to both “sides”. The Ukraine crisis has highlighted a dearth of moral objectivity in the Western commentariat.
There are rare moments when the censorious pinched goblins down in the Twitter silos stick their necks out just that bit too far, and quite rightly get floored by the sucker punch.
This was one of them. It was a combo of glass chin and self-righteous liberal horseshit far too good to miss. If I find myself banned from Big T tomorrow, it will have been worth it. So far this week, the fat cheque experts have told us of war crime tribunals to come (without any discernible evidence) thousands of hit-squads out to kill Zelensky (see previous brackets) but zero coverage of St Volodomyre’s Hamas habit of putting weapon targets in kindergarten schools.
In my youth, it was often said that “the first casualty of war is Truth”. This will no longer suffice, as even in peacetime the truth is a subatomic needle somewhere in a haystack of Stately Home proportions. I suspect the only terminology that nails it in the 21st century is the observation that in peacetime there are lies, and during wars there is nothing but raw hate fantasy.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four invented the ‘Hate Rally’ totalitarian propaganda fests that are all too obviously in play today….and ironically, usually feature those same “liberal” pc stormtroopers who deplore ‘hate speech’ on the basis of it ridiculing their dissonant chimera. But when it comes to Ukraine, these zealots will hate any cardboard cut-out enemy – and want to bear the children of every flakey hero invented by the Leninist New World Order.
But here is something that will have Vladimir Putin smiling tonight. Because effectively, it is NATO fessing up to the fact that its bellicose threats are all piss and wind. Zelensky has put NATO top brass on the spot by asking for a no-fly zone over the conflict. This is the mealy-mouthed reaction he got in return:
“We are not part of this conflict, and we have a responsibility to ensure it does not escalate and spread beyond Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference. Do excuse me for a second as I call a Time-Out in order to vomit my supper into the big porcelain bathroom bowl.
This sort of comes under the heading of, “Yes, we know we wound all this nothingness up into a major crisis Zelers, but it was really all designed to distract from our neat little plan for planetary genocide. So by all means kick Vlad Rasputin in the balls, and you can rely on us to hold your coat while you do so. It’s conceivable that you might keep the Ruski Bear stuck in the mud of this conflict, and if you do then we promise to be no more than 130 kilometres right behind you. With best wishes, Jens”.
Anyway, on this damp and geopolitically uncertain Friday evening, I offer you a few cartoons that actually offer ironic truths….
I would’ve included more cartoons, but I couldn’t find any doing something beyond putting the State narrative into pictures for the hard of thinking. The majority of cartoons we see today are directly descended from those that appeared in Iszvestia under the jackboot of Joseph Stalin.
Utterly missing from this pretty accurate 1941 cartoon is the abhorrent 1939 Nazi-Sovyet pact Stalin signed with Adolf Hitler to casually divide Poland between the two of them: the ultimate admission of there being zero difference between fascism and communism.
It’s a bad show when political satire feels unable to reveal the hypocrites on both sides.
The Slog 