Why I Have Come to Prefer Putin to Our Leaders

I have never backed Russia. But I will always back sanity.

As the Ukraine War has progressed we have seen more and more emotional commitment to it within a Western World not obviously affected by it. Other conflicts have been longer lasting. Israeli-Arab conflict has been ongoing since the formation of modern Israel in 1947, insurgent conflict has been ongoing from 2002 in the Maghreb/Sahel region, Sudanese conflict and civil war has been ongoing from 2008 and it’s very arguable that civil war conditions in Myanmar have been continuous despite periods of severe military junta control from 1948 onwards.

Other conflicts are also very arguably more urgent in terms of humanitarian crisis. In Sudan, there have been more civilian casualties than in either Gaza in the Israeli-Hamas War or Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine War. Between 600,000-1.1 million people have died in the Sudanese conflict. Mass starvation and malnutrition is a far more real and urgent problem in Sudan than it is in Gaza (if such claims have any reality at all in Gaza). In Kiev and much of Ukraine, there is no Russian blockade and no immediate or even mid term threat of starvation. Perhaps there are some Sudanese warlords living in comfort, but how many of those are flying on jets back and forth to Paris on shopping expeditions, as Ukrainian leaders and their wives have done, and just how many cities in other war zones have seen a boom in the sale of luxury cars, as has occurred in Kiev?

Online, it is very possible to quickly obtain images of scenes of luxury and comfort still ongoing in Ukraine, of rich young people strutting around, partying in nightclubs, and showing off designer clothing, and to continue a theme started by our shopping trip comment, it is perhaps easier to find these for Kiev than it is for a Paris wracked by constant riots and near apocalyptic scenes of civil disturbance. One of the ironies of those elite Ukrainian shopping trips is that Paris might be more dangerous than Kiev is.

Conditions in large parts of Sudan then are considerably worse than conditions are in large parts of Ukraine. Yet the Sudanese conflict is treated with sublime indifference by the West, more as if it were occurring on another planet rather than another continent. In Africa in the recent past we saw a slaughter on imaginable scale during the Rwandan Genocide far, far greater than civilian casualties in Ukraine, and none of the combatants were nuclear armed (which should, by sane analysis, deter intervention when one combatant is so armed) . There were no calls for European or US intervention as up to 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in the span of just 100 days.

In the Congo, multiple wars have involved every neighbouring African nation again with devastating consequences for civilians and very high death tolls, and again with no calls for Western military intervention or support for one particular side. In Africa too, despite the disgusting progressive leftist contempt for the idea that white people may require protection from racism, all the conditions of genocide exist towards white farming families. Here too, even the mildest of Western intervention in the form of criticism of the South African leadership or offering asylum to South African whites, is more condemned than supported. Similar vast indifference or active progressive delight is applied to the many regions of Africa which see Islamic terrorist groups like Boko Haram slaughtering Christians and taking schoolchildren as sex slaves.

It seems that so far as any and all conflicts in Africa are concerned, a combination of post colonial guilt and awareness of geographic distance and the logistical difficulties of intervention allow the West to adopt positions of sublime indifference. I’m not saying that is necessarily wrong, but isn’t it a startling contrast to the strident pro interventionism that has seen the West interfere on a vast and unarguably disastrous scale in the Middle East and other remote regions? Iraq is as far from London or Paris as parts of Africa are, after all and compared to North Africa, considerable further away.

If the argument is that we must intervene in Ukraine because it is part of Europe, then why did we have to intervene in Iraq, outside Europe? If the argument is that Kiev is ‘only’ about 1,000 or so miles away from London and that is why our intervention is required, then clearly we have a geographic duty to determine what happens should conflict break out in Morocco, which is only separated from Spain by the very narrow waters of the Strait of Gibraltar. Indeed, we should all be intensely interested in Moroccan politics, watching closely for any disturbance just 14km away from Spain. No doubt, like me, you will have an expert grasp of Moroccan affairs, thanks to the constant media worrying about this very, very close region, a region 100 times closer to a major Western European nation than Ukraine is?

Clearly whether we intervene or do not, whether we care or not, is not determined by geographic distance alone. If it were the 1,325 miles from Kiev to London, or the 4,881 miles from Washington to Kiev, would render the fate of Ukraine as meaningless to us, much more meaningless to us, than the politics of Morocco. Is there then some magical duty of care which arises from an alleged pan-European unity? Are conflicts in Europe innately more important than conflicts in Africa or Asia? That may possibly be true, but it’s an odd position to be advocated by those who are also wracked with post-colonial guilt and confused critical race theory notions of the innately evil and guilty nature of European history.

Our leaders simultaneously seem to be telling us that everything we have inherited that distinguished us as Europeans or of European descent, is worthless and wicked and not the true measure of our identity, AND that there is some innate European specialness that binds us all together and means that we must leap to protect any European nation when it is invaded. So what is the special link we allegedly share with Ukraine that we should care about it and it’s people?

When European nations considered themselves superior to non European nations and the agents of a modernity, technology, social structure, Christian faith and manner of trade and business that was of clear benefit to humanity as a whole, when we genuinely did consider ourselves the height of civilisation and other places to be improved by our example and influence, then there is an argument inherent in that attitude towards expansion and intervention everywhere. But that was the argument of colonialism, wasn’t it?

Our leaders are ashamed of that, aren’t they? Our museums and historic sites now berate us with claims of past alleged evils. Every glory we achieved is trashed and condemned. People who say ‘Make America Great Again’ are racists and ignorant yahoos, aren’t they, at least according to our media and large sections of the political establishment in both America and Europe? People who say they are proud of The British Empire aren’t given book contracts to explain that pride, are they, whereas people who cite the Empire as a racist and vile white supremacist nightmare are, and sometimes to the extent that finding a ‘history’ book that isn’t focused on how evil our ancestors were becomes a near impossible task.

Even earlier than colonialism, we had an inherent pan European identity as Christendom. There was a certain moral and cultural sense, in the context of defending and advancing Christendom because we are firmly devoted Christians, to missionary efforts to change religion and culture elsewhere and to military interventions in support of Christians in places far removed from our own homes. But clearly we don’t function by either the logic of the Crusades or the logic of the Battle of Lepanto either. We don’t teach our children to take pan European pride in the Christian Reconquista of Spain, in the successful defences of any Siege of Vienna against Ottoman hordes, or in Charles Martel’s halt of the Islamic advance at the Battle of Tours.

So what is the cultural binding link that makes the US care about Europe and the defence of Ukraine, or that makes the UK have something essential in common with Ukraine, that we value highly enough to militarily defend? What is the religious imperative that makes the defence of Kiev sacred to us, the way the defence of Vienna or the recovery of Jerusalem once was? It’s clearly not shared Christianity, otherwise the leaders who care about Ukraine would care about Christians being massacred in Nigeria or, more directly, about the Kiev regimes assaults on Orthodox Christian churches and their denial of religious equality and freedom to ethnic Russians within Ukraine.

How is it possible for our leaders to invoke the sacred name of Europe as the reason for us to care about Ukraine, the reason for the urgency of their attention on Ukraine, when our shared European identity consists of…..what exactly?

These leaders have total contempt for European history and culture. Our entire political class does. The entire ideology the West itself now functions by is one focused on denying the history, meaning, ethnicities, historic culture and religious identity of Europe. These leaders teach our children to hate their European ancestors, and do so even more urgently if they are the children of a European history of exploration and nation building in places like America, Canada and Australia. They themselves and all our entertainment, news and politics is about denying any REAL links between parts of Europe that might invoke in us a reason to care about the fate of Ukraine.

How can saying ‘Ukraine is part of Europe, we must intervene!’ be a real argument, when it is distant enough that Russian rule there would not make the slightest difference to any of us and when the only links that make ‘Europeanness’ in any sense real are things the same war hungry forces invoking that ‘shared identity’ undermine constantly and determinedly in everything else they think and do?

If Russia was a Muslim nation, and Ukraine was a bravely resisting Christian one, there would be a meaningful cultural and religious reason to care about which triumphed. But when we compare these nations, both are officially Christian. And when we compare the leaders of these nations, we get a contrast that doesn’t favour either the Ukrainian cause or the Globalist Western backers of that cause.

Set aside for a moment the purely emotive argument that Putin is a bad man, a dictator, an evil person. These moral arguments focused on the nature of your enemy can make sense in certain circumstances. But let us for the moment exchange that reasoning for looking at declared identity instead. After all, our current ‘values’ tell us that declared identity matters more than old moral judgements, doesn’t it? The European leaders who hate Putin believe in declared identity trumping even such things as biological reality. So if the argument that we must defend Ukraine is one based on shared identity, what is Putin’s European identity, and what is Zelenskky’s European identity? Both are Europeans. But what kind of Europeans?

Zelenskky was a stand up comic and TV entertainer. He seems to have a very modern European identity. He is Jewish, but not in the least bit religiously Jewish or seemingly concerned with that cultural and ethnic heritage. He did not in any way ever stand for or represent traditional European or Christian or Judeo-Christian values. As a comic his material and thinking was very much in the progressive leftist mode. He mocked traditional European values. He celebrated hyper-modern European ‘values’. He played the piano with his penis. He dressed in sado-masochistic bondage gear and performed semi naked dance routines that seemed like gay fetish twink and sub erotica. He ‘deconstructed’ masculinity, before he was built up as an absurd Poundshop Churchill and took to wearing paramilitary fatigues.

In Britain there used to be a late night TV showed called Eurotrash. It was fronted by flamboyantly metrosexual types such as a gay fashion designer. And it essentially reported on deviant sexual kinks and odd and bizarre celebrity and ‘news’ items with a kink or fetish twist. Its tone was finely balanced between a knowing, wink wink mockery of these things and an open, celebratory endorsement of them. It included jokes and reports on adults who dressed in nappies or puppy dog bondage masks. Like the yearly feast of terrible music and bizarre costumery that is the Eurovision Song Contest, and like the most extreme manifestations of Pride festivals, it treated even quite obviously degenerate and harmful sex fetishes as amusing and joyful examples of the freedom of people in the western world to be who they want to be and behave as they wish to behave.

Much of this stuff of course is not about homosexuality, but about more extreme, dangerous, far more disgusting and anti-social sexual identities and tastes that have parasitically attached themselves to an older advocacy of the idea that gays should not be bullied and persecuted simply for being gay. Conservative gays can be as disturbed and indeed revolted by some of this as any heterosexual critic of these ‘lifestyle choices’ is, with the added uncomfortable awareness that their sexuality is being tarred by association and their liberty suborned to the defence of degeneracy and fetish.

But this is the kind of European Zelenskky was and the kind of ‘values’ he represented. The Penis Piano Premier is a Eurotrash figure, and the kind of freedom and value system he represented was the kind once viewed with giggling shock even by the avant-garde. It seems extremely likely that rumours of a coke addiction are accurate, to add to the fetish performance past.

When people say we have shared values with Ukraine or with Zelenskyy, is this what they mean and what they think is worth risking a nuclear war or a major war with Russia on behalf of? Are we intended to be fighting for the right of Ukrainians to be led by a cocaine addicted entertainer who plays the piano with his penis? I’m not sure thar these are values I actually share, or that this is what many of us consider the kind of culture we identify with.

Perhaps people will say that this is unfair, because we aren’t just supporting Zelenskky, we are supporting shared European values and innocent Ukrainians threatened by Russian invasion and conquest. But if that is the case, why the level of symbolic focus on Zelenskky, why the turning of this man into a supposed heroic figure that we are supposed to admire and worship and see as a new Churchill? When it suits them, the advocates of supporting Ukraine are very willing to reduce the whole thing to a matter of a few personalities. We should fight for Ukraine because Putin is bad or because Zelenskky is good.

Therefore by their own logic if I, by contrast, consider Zelenskky representative of many of the worst individual traits, doesn’t that have validity in deciding whether I think we should risk wider conflict in order to keep him in power? Doesn’t it matter that the conflict could possibly be ended by a different Ukrainian leader? Doesn’t it impinge on the trustworthiness of the declarations and promises of a foreign leader we are asked to support, if we know him to be a trivial, talentless, vulgar deviant, drug addict and degenerate?

And if this is a conflict required by shared values, isn’t it valid to ask what values that leader actually possesses and manifests? If Putin’s character flaws and traits are a valid enough basis on which to go to war with Russia, why aren’t Zelenskky’s character traits and flaws a valid enough basis on which to refuse such a war?

Or what if there are things about Putin that are much more appealing to us than a sort of Eurotrash vacuity? Putin, by contrast with our leaders and with Zelenskky, has notably and repeatedly defended traditional western values. Many people, particularly on the Right, refuse to take this point seriously. Putin gives speeches about western decadence and we say that all dictatorial enemies of the West have done so, that Hitler did so or that Islamic jihadis do so. But it seems to me that Putin doesn’t just talk about what is wrong with the West. He also talks about what was traditional and right about the West. He has strongly advocated Christianity. This isn’t just rhetoric. The Russian Orthodox Church and faith has been restored in Russia since the Soviet system fell. An ex KGB officer has actually adopted, in power, a Tsarist attitude to Orthodox Christianity. He has strongly supported the Church in practical as well as verbal ways.It is not just talk. Funding and freedom has been offered, and Russian faith has resurged. The Soviet persecution could not kill it, but the mere end of persecution could not have fully restored it.

Only real support could have seen it come back the way it has, a solace and a guide to the Russian people, and Putin supplied that.

Rightists of the mainstream and establishment persuasion in the West tell me that Putin is no Christian and no real defender of Western history and culture. These are simply dishonest words from a personally evil dictator, designed to fool the ‘alt Right’ or the ‘woke Right’ into backing an enemy of the West. But a man can be politically brutal and still sincere in his faith. He can be authoritarian and autocratic in the manner of his rule, and a firm and real believer in Christianity and in European traditional values. Indeed, this was the case with the majority of Russian Tsars and with nearly all European monarchs until very modern times.

Why should we assume that Putin talks about European history, Russian history, Ukrainian history, and traditional values, without being sincere?

As far as I can see the only culture Zelenskky represents is that shallow, narrow, hyper modern one that rejects the entire past and substitutes self gratification, knowing and nihilistic relativism, and sexual fetish masquerading as freedom. He represents Eurotrash modernity. And as far as I can see Putin, whether or not he’s a ‘nice man’, actually does know and care about his nation, its history, a set of values that are older and deeper than the right to do drugs, dress in bondage wear and have a thousand genders. Putin references old and real things. He seems a traditional Russian nationalist and Orthodox Russian Christian. There’s no evidence to supply that shows his advocacy of these things or older European culture to be dishonest or merely manipulative.

Now for any real western conservative, for anyone sickened by much of modernity, we are in the contrast of Putin and Zelenskky offered a contrast between old values and new ones. We are told we should regard Russian nationalism as inexplicable and evil, and the desire to join the EU or NATO (two postwar modern institutions young enough to have no sanctity of tradition and old enough to have succumbed to the perversion of mission and values which is the fate of every older bureaucracy) is sacred and worthy of war. We are told we should take the defence of degenerate European culture, this shallow mess of self indulgence and historical ignorance, as a thing worth fighting and dying for, while equally considering the restoration of the traditional sphere of influence of a major European power with an old and storied history, as a thing we cannot understand or endorse.

Now tell me, if you really are rightwing, does that make sense?

Does it especially make any sense to support Ukraine on moral personality grounds, because Putin is ruthless enough to rule autocratically and invade another nation, when the people saying this makes him and his nation vile beyond belief…..do the same things, with less of a genuine historic grounding for doing so?

When Putin says that Ukraine was historically part of Russia, that it’s got a longer history as a part of Russia than Texas has as a part of the USA or that the USA has as an independent nation which isn’t part of The British Empire, he’s telling the truth. You can believe that historic connections don’t matter, but it’s hard to believe that as a patriot, a conservative, or someone informed on history.

It’s telling that Putin referenced long history when justifying the invasion of Ukraine, and equally telling that everyone in the West dismissed that as meaningless. People, even on the Right, laughed at Putin trying to explain Ukraine by reference to the origins of Rus or to princes who have been dead for hundreds of years or even a thousand years and more. But this is not reflective of Russia’s justifications for involvement in Ukraine being false ones or absurd ones. It’s reflective of Russians being serious people who know their own nation and value its history, and of Western Europeans being unserious people who know and value hardly anything older than World War Two.

Even those who claim to be ‘the Right’, especially the most respectable of those people who are part of the Establishment, don’t value their nations and their history at all. They don’t know it, in most cases. They have culturally abandoned it, in most cases. They actively betray it. The Official Right fetishise and worship the Postwar settlement of the international rules based order, the UN, and NATO. All of these are modern creations, not ‘the West’. Yet Establishment Conservatives, just like internationalist and globalist leftists, worship these things far more than their own national interest, their own long national histories prior to World War Two, and their own people.

What that laughing contempt for Putin’s history lessons tells me is that even many rightists in the West have no accurate conception of history, or knowledge or respect for how it shapes modern conflict. Modern understanding even among so called conservatives is incredibly shallow and ignorant in the West. It isn’t in Russia, that part of the West that straddles much of the geographic East.

Russians are prepared to fight for deep, old and real things. Western Europeans can suddenly and immediately worship Ukraine, a foreign nation of recent creation whose whole old history is tied to Russia, and are so ignorant and so lacking in seriousness that they can’t even comprehend what Russia is fighting for. Konstantin Kisin alone of western commentators has shown understanding of Russian history and its psychological effects on a nation that has been invaded multiple times and only ever had any kind of success and stability under the most autocratic of rulers. But Kisin first describes Russian psychology and then ignores it in strongly supporting western interventionism in Ukraine.

Anyone with even a basic familiarity with Russian history would not enact stupidities like comparing Putin to Hitler or like thinking a desire for a sphere of interest is the same as a desire for world conquest. Anyone who is a nationalist should be able to understand that telling Russians they have no rights or interests in Ukraine is like telling the US, should California or Texas secede, they have no claim on California or Texas. The connection is far longer, and it’s real history. And the Russian desire for buffer zones, for friendly neighbouring nations and for no NATO military alliance on their border, is also based on perfectly understandable history. Russians remember Napoleon and 1812. They remember the West invading in support of White Russian forces in the early 20th century. And they particularly remember losing 20 million people in World War Two and Ukrainian separatists at that time being allies of Nazism.

Because Western Europe has rejected and ignored and mocked its own history, they expect Putin and Russia to show the same contempt for their historic connections and rights….and they do not.

None of this says that invading Ukraine was moral or good. But it was certainly understandable and possibly justifiable. Especially since the modern very anti Russian turn of Ukraine was indeed facilitated, aided and secretly and conspiratorially supported by the neocons of the West. Those same people helped a coup in 2014, without which Zelenskky and his Ukrainian oligarch backers would not be in charge and the Russian invasion would not have occurred. Again, pro Ukraine fanatics tell us all of this doesn’t matter.

OF COURSE it matters. Russia’s history explains its tendency for autocracy and the limits on what Putin is allowed to concede. A successful Russian leader is expected to preserve a Russian sphere and Russia as a major power that has to be taken seriously. Russians fear another 20 million deaths if this isn’t the case.

Equally the immoral interference and reckless tinkering stupidity of the West, together with the shallow historical ignorance and pathetic and sordid values of our leaders and all their corrupt connections in Ukraine, matters too.

Just as we are told that Zelenskky’s degeneracy and corruption should not matter to us, we are told that Putin’s autocracy should. But what are our own leaders if not also autocrats now? All of the Western leaders and parties that condemn Russia for invasion and consider this the easy and simple basis on which to judge accurately….and all of the western leaders and parties that condemn Russia as an initiator of war and an aggressor….now possess a history of military interventionism that has more dead bodies to its name than Russia has created in the last 20 years.

This is not relativism. Establishment conservatives say that people like me are doing what the Left has done for a long time-supporting an enemy using moral relativism to do so. But I don’t love Russia more than Britain. I don’t hate my own nation, I do not want Russia to rule Britain. Old leftists wanted the Soviets to win against US, not just against some nation we were supporting against them. And when we fought the Cold War, I strongly agreed with that. Communism is internationalist and all Communists want a version of world conquest, just as all Islam does. Communism is also inherently opposed to our nations and our national interest. And people from Churchill to Thatcher who opposed the Soviet Union were right that the West was better than the Soviet Union.

Is Keir Starmer a better man than Putin? Is Globalism less dangerous than Russian nationalism? I’d argue no on both points.

Russian nationalism is not inherently opposed to my interests the way Communism was. It can be a competitor without being an enemy. Most claims of Russian malevolence are cheap fantasies, like the Russia Collusion hoax. Russia is only belligerent because we won’t admit it as a great power to be respected and because western Globalists and neocons have been working towards its destruction ever since Putin blocked the mass theft of Russian resources they wanted and had anticipated when they imagined seizing everything in the post Soviet collapse. An estimated 75 trillion dollars worth of Russian natural resources were supposed to be divvied up by our corporations and nations as the reward for beating the Soviet Union. The pathetic Yeltsin period and the results of late Soviet incompetence had western Globalists drooling over the anticipated returns from gobbling up the old nationalised industries and all the yet unexpired riches under Russian soil. But just like he dealt with Russian oligarchs who only wanted to siphon off that wealth and then take it abroad, Putin blocked western seizure of Russia’s assets. These were supposed to be handed over in the same way Ukrainian leaders did deals to hand much of Ukraine to western ‘investors’.

The western Globalist fixation on Russia and determination to create a West v Russia war is based on three things:

1. The ideological contrast and that culture difference Putin accurately cites between Russia as Christian, nationalist and traditional and the West as post-Christian, anti Christian, internationalist and degenerate.

2. The financial and corrupt lure of Russia as a resource rich land where Western corporate exploitation was thwarted.

3. The western economic and social mismanagement that makes war necessary as an economic driver and means of keeping a banking and financial system going when it’s on the point of total collapse without some massive readjustment, the kind of readjustment that’s easiest to enact in the circumstances of war.

These are the real causes for Russophobia and for the propaganda driven hysterical support of Ukraine, into which is dragged a whole host of absurd comparisons and vast claims (Putin is Hitler, it’s 1939 again, peace is appeasement, Ukraine is an ally, Ukraine is a bastion of Democracy, our war mongers are fighting for Democracy, we have shared values with Ukraine, Putin wants world conquest etc etc). None of that stuff is real.

The one thing a Kissinger style realpolitik got right (as opposed to the things it got wrong as a sort of precursor of neocon interventionism) was that nobody in power is making their judgements morally, and that moral judgement of a leader is also less important than national interest. The idea that Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron or Ursula von der Leyen or any other Globalist has a moral dedication to defending ‘Europe’, to seeing borders as sacred, and to demanding moral behaviour from national leaders, let alone some kind of holy righteous mission in defending Ukraine, is laughable.

How can anyone take such claims, which are the ONLY arguments given for supporting Ukraine, seriously?

Is the Britain I live in now democratic? Of course it isn’t. Is the EU? No. Is Western Europe? No. Is Ukraine? No. Do the nations and leaders attacking Putin as a dictator hold free and fair elections still, unaffected by fraud? No. Are there things they won’t do and rights they won’t take away? Hardly, given COVID measures. Are the values they really care about ones an ordinary patriot or conservative can share? Of course not. Do they represent my best national interests? No-they have supplies nothing but decline and betrayal for pretty much the entire period since 1945. Do they really think borders are worth fighting and dying for? Well, Ukrsine’s are, but ours aren’t. Is Putin or Russia the most urgent threat (sans Western Globalist provocation of them) to my security, life, liberty and values? Hardly. It’s not Putin who rules me unjustly and can imprison me arbitrarily.

Are there more urgent threats, more meaningful loyalties, I should care about before Ukraine? Of course. And who is threatening the things I love most immediately, and who is destroying my nation and my liberty and endangering my children? It’s not Putin.

Putin does not seem good to me. His interests aren’t identical with mine or those of my nation. But his interest and Russian interest is understandable to me. He values a few things that I value too. His loyalties are to something real. He’s not superficial, stupid, or insane. His reasons for invading Ukraine are comprehensible ones based on Russian security and national interest. There is far more substance to them than there was to claims of weapons of mass destruction existing in Iraq.

And nobody has been able to persuade me that I should wish my nation to fight a war against a nation that need not be an enemy, on behalf of a nation thar has never been an ally, in support of a dictator who is a degenerate, because his enemy is a dictator who isn’t a degenerate, and on the instruction of people who behave like dictators towards me. The moral reality of our leaders renders any moral argument from them redundant. The tyranny of our leaders renders any other tyranny less urgent, because it is our leaders who apply tyranny to us. I see no reason to save another man’s house when mine is on fire. I see no reason to fight those who the man strangling me tells me to fight. I don’t take instructions in good and evil from degenerate psychopaths who sympathise with Hamas and invite Al Qaeda trained terrorists to State banquets. People who have killed hundreds of thousands in unnecessary wars aren’t the people to tell me that someone else is an invading maniac with no concern for civilians. People who have lied to me for years don’t get to tell me I’m falling for Russian propaganda. People who won’t defend my borders can’t tell me to defend someone else’s. People who despise the history and culture I care about are not the people I listen to on which history and culture matters.

In all this I think my national leaders have lied in every reason they have given for me to care about Ukraine. I don’t think Putin has lied about any of his reasons for invading Ukraine. They may or may not justify the invasion, but he’s not lying about why he did it. The idea that it is 1939 again is an obvious fantasy based on only knowing a tiny bit of history. The idea that Russia and Ukraine have been linked for centuries is an obvious truth verified by any knowledge of history.

I don’t deny that thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians have died because Putin invaded. I do deny the idea that it’s a morally simple matter because of that. And I especially deny that I should risk everything I love so that people I hate can interfere in a war I don’t actually care about at all, any more than they care about what is happening in Sudan. I’m actually vastly indifferent to whether Russia or Ukraine wins. A Russian victory brings absolutely zero additional threat to me. A Ukrainian victory with British help probably brings much more risk for me and mine then a Russian win does. But in terms of loving and caring about either….these are not my people.

My people are being raped and murdered at home. My people are being denied free speech at home. My people are being subjected to the slow genocide of total demographic and cultural and religious and ethnic replacement. Islam threatens my culture, at home. My leaders threaten me with prison for political protest or for saying things that are true.

Even the very few things I have in common with Putin, are vast points of accord when compared to all the things I don’t share with my own leaders. Even though Putin is a ruthless autocrat, he is an explicable and sane autocrat.

This alone makes him better than our lot.