Russian ballistics are still blasting Kyiv. They’re too high and too fast to stop with regular ground defences. People are dying. I’ve lost count how many at this point. Every day somebody somewhere dies. Another apartment burns, another playground, school, hospital, shopping centre flattened. And Donald Trump exhorts the Ukrainians not to shoot back. . .

            He’s not the only one.

            Margaret Shkimba is a long-time writer for the Hamilton Spectator, whose writings thus-far have been far too bland for me to pay much attention to. Today she grandly declared she was “not a supporter of military conflict, of armed aggression, or of war”, in case we had any notion to the contrary. She goes on to say she is “utterly disturbed” by a whole litany of world conflicts, including “the continuing devastation wrought upon Ukraine” Curiously though, she does not mention just who is wreaking devastation upon Ukraine. She earlier had no problem calling out Donald Trump and Israel for their misdeeds, but will not name, anywhere in the piece, the butchers of Ukraine.

            Odd. Such information is readily available, from a casual glance at her own newspaper. Are we to believe Ms. Shkimba is really unaware of who’s dropping the bombs? Oh goodness gracious no! By leaving out the Big-R (and the rootin’ tootin’ Pootin, also absent from her villains roll-call), she can imply via parallelism that the devastation upon Ukraine is something else we can blame on the West.

            The sentence doesn’t stop with “the continuing devastation upon Ukraine”. The full sentence reads "the continuing devastation upon Ukraine that threatens to unleash a Third World War.”  Not by Putin, of course, but by “by the robotic march to the front by those who’ve never experienced the horrors of war and who are just dying to ‘protect democracy’.” Not by Russians, who never made a pretense of protecting democracy: she clearly means westerners who do care about democracy. Notice the scare quotes around “protect democracy”. I wonder if it’s a dig against the Canadian volunteers who’ve died fighting Russia, such as the late Dante Johnson-Wells (26, fallen June 13) or Jessy Noel Bourgeois (fallen Aug. 18). I mean, they certainly experienced the horrors of war. . .

            Putin has been threatening us with World War Three ever since the war began, promising to unleash the nukes if so much as a NATO-made shoelace made it to the front line. The world has long stopped taking these threats seriously (or at least called the immediate bluff), except of course for those who wanted to placate him from the beginning. So “WWIII” has become the dog-whistle of cowards, appeasers, useful idiots and third-column russophiles.  It's taken as a given that WWIII will begin not when tyrants like Putin start wars of conquest, but when anyone stands up to them. It’s similar to the tirades against NATO expansion, which held (and hold) that Russia is entitled to dominate those countries forever and is within its rights to attack whom it pleases.

            Having identified that dog-whistle, the omission makes sense. Shkimba refuses to name Russia because deep down she doesn’t hold Russia responsible. She can just list Ukraine alongside Trump’s crimes and Israel’s crimes, and by extension the West’s crimes (all interchangeable in these circles) and imply the true responsibility lies there. Crimes are only crimes if they can be blamed on the West.

            Further in the article, Shkimba promotes an upcoming panel discussion hosted by (among others) Tamara Lorincz of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives –alternatives which, funnily enough, always coincide with Russia’s needs.  Just a few weeks ago, on September 10, Lorincz published her own article in the Spec, calling for an end to NATO exercises in the Arctic. At first, she advanced reasonable enough concerns about the environmental impact, and consultation with Inuit communities, but soon got to her real reason: Sergey Lavrov objected. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the move a “threat to Russia’s security.”

            Well of course he would! That’s what Russians always say when their plans are thwarted. It's Lavrov's job to say it. 

            Sergey Lavrov is the very poster-ogre of Russian nihilism, its chief spokesperson and talking-point parrot. His job is to say that black is white, up is down, aggressors are victims and victims are aggressors. He is the blackest of pots in a world of kettles, blithely lying through his teeth, while bemoaning most piteously his country’s entirely self-inflicted wounds. A wallowing jowly mass of dishonesty and self- pity.

            With a staggering lack of self awareness or sense of irony, he recently told the UN that the West was full of “warmongers” trying to undermine world stability through force, forgetting who it was that started the largest European land war in seventy -five years in the first place, and keep it going every single day. Yet it’s typical of his style – pining for peace while launching wars, blaming the victims and bellyaching about the cost. There’s no lie too shameless or claim too disingenuous that he won’t announce it to the world.

            Nevertheless, there are individuals and groups, such as Tamara Lorincz and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, who will take his claims at face value. Quoting him with a straight face should tell us all we need to know about their credibility.

As for the panel discussion, it’s about the plan to manufacture drones for Ukraine in Canada, and it’s called “Don’t Put a Target on Hamilton”, in case there was any doubt where they stood on that issue. Whether out of russophilia or pusillanimity I neither know nor care, but you’ll notice the implication here that they fully expect Russia to bomb Hamilton, and will hold Hamilton responsible before Russia.  

            Would we not be a legitimate target though? I mean, making stuff for Russia’s enemies during a time of war?  Well, keeping in mind that nothing’s been started yet: the plan is to make drones. The plan is not to declare war on Russia. If Russia were to bomb us, it would be the one making that declaration. It would be the one taking that step, making that decision, taking that action. Lavrov would argue we provoked it, and these folks would believe him. Folk who would never accept provocation as a defence in a murder trial or rape case will accept it wholesale when it comes to nations. Provocation, real or otherwise, lets Russia off the hook for everything, and invading countries is no worse than defending them.

            If they had been around in 1939 they would doubtless have excused the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, and opposed Canada’s entering the war against Germany. They would have opposed aid to Spanish Republicans in their fight against Franco. If they were American, they’d certainly have opposed Lend-Lease Aid to Britain, arguing it would have brought them closer to war with Germany.  

            There are no shortage of people on this side of the fence who whole heartedly buy into Lavrov’s characterization Ukrainian supporters as “war-momgers”, as if they were they ones who started it, and should just let Russia get on with it. Shkimba implies as much. 

            Here's the thing: no one in their right mind loves war. But denial won’t make it go away. Sometimes it is imposed from without. Calling it for what it is, trying to prepare for it, and survive it is no more loving it than going to chemotherapy means loving cancer.

            The Margaret Shkimbas of the world loudly think that if we would just surrender our arms, then war would magically vanish.

            If only that were true!