A PARCEL of paradoxes is always evident when the west takes umbrage at someone else’s imperialist adventures. Four days into Russia’s clumsy attempt at invading Ukraine several incongruities have already become apparent in the populist British response.

These are rooted more in a desire to showcase empathy than to seek a long-term solution in the volatile Russia/Ukraine border. As social media expresses outrage at the actions of Vladimir Putin there has been silence about the genocide that’s been visited on the population of Yemen, mainly by the west’s most important ally in the Middle East: the pirate kingdom operated by Saudi Arabia’s brutal royal family.

A NATO coalition has formed that includes all the UK parties once considered left of centre. They have all become the willing glove-puppets of a Conservative Party whose ideology has been formed by centuries of imperialist expansion. The UK Tories currently reside in the grip of hard-right ultras who were swept to power on a sewer of racism and British exceptionalism during Brexit. There is now no left in British politics, only "leftism", the favoured aspersion cast at those who oppose NATO and its aggressive expansionism.

They all proclaim the virtues of peace and mutual cooperation and express fury at President Putin’s violent incursions into Ukraine. Yet, far less indignation has ever been expressed about Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinian people. There’s little said about how the rich west maintains an economic stranglehold on Africa by refusing to forgive old debts, despite having looted the continent of its natural resources over centuries.

The civilised west has failed to share Covid vaccines with the world’s poorest communities and the UK Government routinely supplies arms to regimes in the knowledge that they’ll be used as instruments of oppression against poor people. But this stuff happens in less eye-catching lands which don’t possess a large and charismatic social media footprint. And they’re at the wrong end of the racial conflict scale where white Caucasian casualties are considered a hundred-fold more newsworthy than other ethnicities.

The BBC has become an uncontested platform for a host of dreadful, six-fingered Tory banjo-players seeking the enlargement of NATO as the only known antidote to Putin’s megalomania. Yet, after the fall of Soviet communism in 1989 which removed the last of the three pillars on which NATO was built it has more than doubled in size and become a conduit for America’s global messiah complex. Its new gathered territories have taken the world’s most powerful military alliance right up to the front door of Russia despite US promises back then that NATO would cease any further expansion. But, of course we must accept that NATO had absolutely nothing to do with the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

The west is now seeking to punish the Russian oligarchs in the manner of drug barons who claim they thought their couriers were involved merely in the importation of cuddly toys. Following the collapse of the old Soviet Union these kleptocrats were treated like princes by the US and Britain who handed them all-inclusive, no-questions-asked access to our banking system and viewed them as a gateway to the riches of Europe’s largest country. The civilised west points to the relative poverty of Russians under the Putin regime but have nonetheless been eager to offer safe havens for those who robbed these people of their natural resources.

In the UK right now a Ukraine empathy-fest is underway. Let’s re-name our streets after Ukrainian towns; let’s all paint our social media profiles in blue and yellow. Why should it end there? Let’s have a weekly clap for Ukraine and have Chicken Kiev Saturdays. When Celtic and Rangers next meet, let Celtic play in blue and Rangers play in yellow. For world peace, you understand.

It’s just that, according to the World Population Review, 21 countries are at war – including civil conflicts – right now. They are all about power, influence and money. And the west, either directly (such as Yemen) or indirectly (by supplying arms) have their fingerprints all over many of them. As with Ukraine and Russia it’s poor and working-class people who suffer the greatest number of casualties in these conflicts. Our outrage is measured by how many clicks we can accumulate on Twitter by being tearful about them.

Sometimes, in our haste to exhibit sanctimony about our pet conflicts we can overlook some inconvenient facts. This was part of Amnesty’s appraisal of Ukraine prior to Covid in 2020. “Allegations of torture and other ill-treatment, particularly in police custody, continued. Security service officials responsible for secret detention and torture in eastern Ukraine from 2014 to 2016 continued to enjoy complete impunity. Attacks by groups advocating discrimination against activists and marginalized minorities continued, often with total impunity. Intimidation and violence against journalists were regularly reported.”

Much of this is perpetrated by far-right groups against the minority Roma population; LGBT activists; feminists and Jews. There has been a civil war raging in the pro-Russian Donbass region for eight years with human rights abuses perpetrated by both sides. It’s what we’re fond of calling a ‘powder-keg’ situation, yet for the entirety of that time the West’s response has been to encourage the Ukrainian government to join an anti-Russian military confederacy. Did no one in Washington, London, Berlin or Brussels ever wonder how this might end? Surely they wouldn’t be using Ukraine as a geo-political patsy to lure Putin into an action that will destabilise him in the long-term and have him replaced by a more west-facing actor?

In Scotland, fuelled by the pathetic narcissism of the SNP’s NATO fanboys, the Ukrainian crisis has led to some predictable concerns about independence. This is no time to be thinking such things, they say. There is a paradox here too. Those who are falling over themselves to salute the sovereignty of Ukraine and the nationalistic pride of its people routinely disparage Scottish nationalism as ugly and divisive when it’s nothing of the sort.

Yet, there’s another view. That by having a keenly-contested independence referendum fought peacefully and reaching the highest standards of civic engagement (as the first one was) would be a fine example to the rest of the world. In Kiev they might even name one of their boulevards Sauchiehall Street in tribute.

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