Russia is less of a threat to Irish democracy than the Irish government or the EU

Under the guise of "defending democracy" from Russia, European elites are in fact hacking away at what's left of democracy – while dragging us to the brink of nuclear holocaust

Guest post by Irish journalist Ciarán O’Regan (Substack; Twitter).

The changing of facts should lead to a changing of perspective. “Hold strong opinions”, goes an old phrase, “but hold them lightly”. And so, if becoming less wrong is something we truly value, it would seem clear that fostering open debate is favourable to encountering new arguments. Unfortunately, our devouring zeitgeist provides myriad examples of sacred cows which lie beyond rational critique: make the biologically objective claim that men are not women? “Transphobe”. Make the scientifically supported claim that climate change is real, but not the end of the world, and that drastic policy based on alarmist scaremongering will do vastly more harm than good? “Climate denier”.

This kind of impediment to open discourse is essentially the weaponisation of low-status associations in order to shut down divergence from establishment orthodoxy. One such label we have increasingly heard since February 24, 2022 is some variant of “Putin stooge”, “Putin apologist”, “Putin proxy”, or “Putin puppet”. Tim Black described the hysteric pile on against Nigel Farage due to his suggestion NATO expansion played a role in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine: a line of argumentation previously “voiced by Jack Matlock, a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union; William Perry, a former US defence secretary; and, most famously, George Kennan, former US diplomat and architect of the US strategy of containment towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War”.

It seems rather strange that, in a supposedly democratic collective West led by people seemingly intent on dragging us into nuclear war with Russia, open inquiry and heterodox thought are dismissed with binary accusations of fealty to a foreign leader by the political, academic, and journalistic establishment. The Ukraine-Russia conflict is a terrible tragedy with terrifying possibilities and we must be able to discuss it.

And as part of this discussion, we need to be able to discuss the sort of damning case laid out by Aaron Maté, an investigative journalist who hauntingly outlined What 10 Years of US Meddling in Ukraine Have Wrought. But raise questions around the 2014 Maidan coups in which a democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown with, Maté argues, massive support from the US? “Putin puppet”.

Raise questions around Ukraine’s Azov troops — described as “neo-Nazi” by Western outlets like the Guardian in 2018 and with further detail and insight by UnHerd in 2022 — who in late May 2024 were welcomed in London by Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, as “heroes”? “Putin puppet”. In his 2023 book, The Tragedy of Ukraine, Professor Nicolai Petro from the University of Rhode Island describes how, in “the 1990s, the ‘Patriots of Ukraine’ split off from its parent, the SNPU, in order to become the military wing of Svoboda, and then later, the Azov battalion”. A few pages earlier, Petro describes how the “unpalatable sounding SNPU” — Social National Party of Ukraine — was actually renamed Svoboda, but the reader may be forgiven for thinking that the ideology remained recognisably quite Nazi (which one might remember is pejorative shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers Party):

Svoboda’s political program was, in fact, an updated version of Sziborsky’s 1935 book Natiocracy, which called for “Ukrainian spiritual totalitarianism”. For Svoboda, the first task of the new Ukrainian nation must be “a radical cleansing” that ensures its spiritual-blood unity. […] All political parties, associations, and divergent ideological groups are to be banned, and full political power vested in “the Ukrainian nation”. The executive, legislative and judicial branches are to be combined in one individual — the Head of State — who will be responsible for the nation’s “blood and property”.  

Raise questions around the curious connection between Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s wild and troubled son, and the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma that apparently paid him in excess of $80,000 dollars a month to sit on their board? “Putin puppet”. Raise questions around the move in December 2015 by Joe Biden, then-vice-president, when he successfully got the Ukrainian prosecutor fired who was investigating for corruption the same firm, Burisma, that his own son worked for? “Putin puppet”.

Raise questions around the “Russia collusion” scandal — the attempt to tie Trump’s 2016 victory to Russian meddling — having turned out to be a load of manufactured nonsense? “Putin puppet”.

Raise questions around the assault on the journalistic freedom of ethnic Russians by Zelensky in February 2021, and his presidential decree toward military action against them the following month? “Putin puppet”. Colonel Jacques Baud, formerly of the UN and NATO, argues that “Zelensky’s decree” for “the reconquest of Crimea and the Donbass was the real trigger” of Russia’s Special Military Operation. “From that moment on”, writes Baud, “the Russians understood that if there was military action against them, they would have to intervene. But they also knew that the cause of the Ukrainian operation was NATO membership”, which is why, in December 2021, the Russians “were submitting proposals” to the US and NATO “to remove Ukraine’s motive for an offensive in the Donbass”.  

Source: Daily report for February 16, 2022 by the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine as part of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

Raise questions around the massive escalation of fighting in Eastern Ukraine, seen above as reported by the OSCE for February 16, 2022, on exactly the day President Biden suggested it was Russia who were planning to escalate, but which others argue actually drove the Russian intervention eight days later on the 24? “Putin puppet”. Colonel Baud argues “Russia was only reacting” to Ukraine’s February 16 offensive, and outlines some background to Russia’s decision to intervene:

In 2008, Russia intervened in Georgia to protect the Russian minority then being bombed by its government, as confirmed by the Swiss ambassador, Heidi Tagliavini, who was responsible for investigating this event. In 2014, many voices were raised in Russia to demand intervention when the new regime in Kiev had engaged its army against the civilian population of the five autonomist oblasts (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk, and Donetsk) and applied a fierce repression. In 2022, it could be expected that the population of Russia would not understand the governments inaction, after no efforts were made from the Ukrainian and Western sides to enforce the Minsk Agreements.

Raise questions around the September 2022 Nord Stream pipeline attack and, curiously, why NATO governments and affiliates seem uninterested in genuinely determining who actually carried out the worst sabotage of infrastructure on Western European territory since the Second World War? “Putin puppet”. In a July 2024 speech that is astonishing for a host of reasons, not least of which its brute geopolitical realism and unapologetic defence of national sovereignty against the smothering force of globalist lifestyle leftism, Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, issued the following indictment on the EU’s masochistic relationship with the US:

We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged; Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property — which was obviously carried out under US direction — go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clarify it, we do not want to raise it in a legal context.

Raise questions around the claims laid out by people like Michael von der Schulenburg, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, and General Harald Kujat, formerly the highest ranking German officer at NATO, that Boris Johnson, while PM, convinced Zelenskyy to cease negotiations with Russia in 2022? (Claims more recently supported by Ian Proud, former economic councillor to the UK embassy in Moscow, and Colonel Baud). “Putin puppet”. In his meticulously footnoted and presciently subtitled 2023 book, The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat, Colonel Baud outlines this damning scandal in further detail. And due to the horrific loss of life and growing risk of omnicidal nuclear holocaust that has occurred in the time since, I will quote Colonel Baud at length in outlining these early peace efforts:

On February 25, 2022, after Ukraine had lost much of its military potential, Volodymyr Zelensky called for negotiations. He contacted Ignazio Cassis, Switzerland’s Foreign Minister, to organize mediation and a peace conference. Russia declared itself ready for talks, and a first round of talks was held in Gomel, close to the Belarussian border. But the European Union disagreed. On February 27, it arrived with a 450-million euro package to finance arms, halt the negotiation process and encourage Ukraine to fight.

In mid-March 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky, realizing that NATO was not ready to accept Ukraine into its fold and declaring that he wanted to give up his candidacy, sent his proposals for the Istanbul negotiations. The prospects for a solution between the Russians and Ukrainians looked good. The European Union immediately released 500 million euros to provide lethal and non-lethal military aid to Ukraine. For his part, Boris Johnson intervened and destroyed all negotiating efforts, as reported by Ukrainska Pravda. In fact, “BoJo” did nothing more than blackmail Ukraine during a telephone conversation and then, a week later, during his visit to Kiev, he exchanged the withdrawal of his proposal for unlimited Western support.

In mid-August 2022, during his visit to Ukraine, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan offered to arrange a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. After some hesitation, Vladimir Putin declared himself ready for a meeting, but Boris Johnson intervened — once again — and warned Ukraine against “frivolous” peace plans. The Turkish initiative was abandoned.

Thus, while the Russians see a fluid, two-way link between war and politics, the West tends to make war an end in itself. That’s why Westerners struggle to get out of conflicts, whereas Russians have provided exit routes (in February, March and August 2022). This gives the Russians a more strategic, considered and less impulsive approach to conflict than their Western counterparts.  

In reference to this final paragraph in particular, it would be remiss of me not to mention Vladimir Putin’s terms for beginning new negotiations which he issued shortly before the so-called “peace” conference in Switzerland (to which the Russians were, bizarrely, not invited). These terms are much less favourable for Ukraine than those that were on the table in 2022 since Russia are, with little doubt, succeeding at pace in their Clausewitzian objective of destroying Ukrainian military potential.

Raise questions around the seemingly unwinnable nature of this war for Ukraine since many of their fighting aged men are dead, wounded, or hiding from forced conscription, while Russia have far more men and, crucially, access to a vastly more powerful military industrial capacity for producing relevant weaponry and equipment than the entirety of NATO combined? “Putin puppet”.

Raise questions around the parallels between the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 60s beginning after the US had placed Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, and Russia’s push to ensure that an increasingly militarised, US-backed Ukraine stays out of NATO so that nuclear missiles cannot be placed close to their own soil? “Putin puppet”.

It is, of course, possible that some or all of the above is incorrect or irrelevant. If so, we should still be able to be openly discuss it in the West so as to allay concerns about the seemingly endless support for a conflict that is creating millions of refugees, worsening Europe’s economic crisis, and threatening the world with nuclear annihilation. But if the above is correct and relevant, it doesn’t become very difficult to argue that the people of Ukraine have been led off a cliff, by the US led West, into a catastrophic war in order to weaken Russia militarily and economically, and possibly even to break up the country.

This is, after all, not exactly the first time that the US-led West has ruined a country on false premises. Remember the “weapons of mass destruction” fiasco that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq? Remember the humanitarian reasons provided to justify the 2011 war against Libya that has turned the country into a failed state with open air slave markets? Such thinly-veiled Western warmongering is accompanied by cleverly weaponised language in order to propagandise the public, thereby making it harder for people to dissent. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, wrote Orwell. Professor Glenn Diesen of the University of South-Eastern Norway has usefully characterised our real-life Western Newspeak:

This is what we do, we create new wars. […] We don’t interfere with the domestic affairs of other countries, we have “democracy promotion”. We don’t invade governments, we have “humanitarian interventions”. We don’t topple governments, we support “democratic revolutions”. So this is as Orwellian as it gets. We just make up new words and fill it with ridiculous content. Then no-one can criticise it because who is against a “democratic revolution”? Who is against “humanitarianism”? It’s sloganeering”. (emphasis added)

In Europe we are not strangers to such propaganda. Interchangeable, de-nationalised elites relentlessly signal loyalty to imperial orthodoxy while berating the normie public with vague moralistic platitudes like “European values”, alongside warnings around the threats posed to our democracies by “hate speech” and “Russian disinformation”.

Bullshit. Not only has Ireland’s government been ramming through totalitarian “hate speech” laws that courageous women’s rights activist and former staff writer at The Economist, Helen Joyce, has described as “literally Orwellian”, thereby clearly demonstrating they are enemies of free speech and hence democratic accountability; they also appear to have lied to the Irish public around multiple issues relating to the recent referendum in a sinister (and arguably treasonous) attempt to alter our Constitution. This is before we even mention the brazenly totalitarian plot by the European Commission president, the Pfizergate-entangled Ursula von der Leyen, who wants to roll out a “European Democracy Shield” against online “disinformation”.

“In an almost literal Orwellian sense”, wrote Dr. Ralph Schoellhammer of Webster University in Vienna, “whenever members of the Brussels Bureaucracy or the Uniparty System speak of ‘defending democracy’ they mean the exact opposite”. And elsewhere in the speech referenced above, Orbán also alluded to the EU’s Orwellian language but in the context of Ukraine’s war, and with specific regards to his government’s recent efforts at initiating diplomacy:

Brussels is […] offended at our describing what they are doing as a pro-war policy. They say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace. Central Europeans like us are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that the state will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war. Just as we did not understand Lenin’s thesis in our university lectures on the history of the labour movement, I do not understand the Brusseleers in European Council meetings. Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that in “Newspeak” peace is war and war is peace.

Putting dystopian EU war propaganda aside, the Orwellian nonsense we are berated with around “hate speech” and “Russian disinformation”, and the subsequent need to censor the public, is the product of the censorship-industrial complex. “As we uncover all the elements of the Censorship Industrial Complex and observe its ongoing attempts to expand global censorship”, wrote Alex Gutentag for Public, “it appears increasingly likely that this Complex aims to undermine and denigrate populist actors and movements through allegations that anti-government sentiment is linked to hate, conspiracy theories, or Russia”. CIA analyst turned prescient author, Martin Gurri, penned an essay that captures The Revenge of the Normies and, in reaction, the resultant drive by panicked elites to control the flow of information:

Elites require control over the information sphere because their policy obsessions — on immigration, gender, and climate, for example — are not popular with the normies. By necessity, progressive fantasies must be imposed on our mediated reality, even as dissenting opinions are cast out into the dark. The internal combustion engine will destroy the earth; windmills will save it. Trump is a wannabe dictator; Biden, the adult in the room. Antagonists are always “far right”; there’s no such thing as “far left”. The ambition to conquer the empirical world with words approaches magical thinking.

Without being able to offer genuine dissent, the normie public cannot offer informed consent to policies or to the politicians who implement them. It is, therefore, logically consistent to argue that democratic accountability cannot exist without freedom of speech and open inquiry. Obviously. And so, should the fact that despotic regimes throughout history sought to control the flow of information, in order to prevent dissent, not incentivise Irish and EU leaders toward doing the exact opposite? If only.

To suggest that the leaders of Ireland and other EU states care about the vox populi of their nations is, by extension, to suggest that establishment elites care about the common sense populist public who, I’ve argued, have been in revolt. Orbán describes this “post-national condition” that is “convulsing democracy” in the West:

Because within societies there is growing resistance to migration, to gender, to war and to globalism. And this creates the political problem of the elite and the people — of elitism and populism. This is the defining phenomenon of Western politics today. […] But if the people and the elites cannot agree on cooperation, how can this produce representative democracy?

Embarrassingly enough, I once strongly held a cartoonishly simplistic view of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. However, the facts have changed and so has my perspective. Russia’s response to hegemonic NATO expansion and the persecution of ethnic Russians in Ukraine since the 2014 coup is, in 2024, a laughable threat to Irish democracy and normie way of life when compared to the increasingly totalitarian Multikulti-Green-Rainbow Reich being rammed down our throats by megalomaniacs in Brussels, their obedient lapdogs in Leinster House, and cheerleading apparatchiks across dangerously collaborative media, academia and NGOs. What you do with any of this information is, of course, up to you. At least while the kindly tyrants masquerading as protectors of democracy still allow you to access it, that is.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)