“A very thoughtful email I read this morning has led me to this statement of position.
Were I Ukrainian, I would fight in this war. Were I Russian, I would refuse.
War does force a fundamental binary choice on people. No matter how deeply we may try to understand the issues.”
I can’t imagine why such an obviously intelligent man could write something so hypothetical and bursting with implicit assumptions, about himself and the context of the war situation.
What if, for example, he was living in Donetsk, he spoke Russian, and his mom had been killed last year by an Azov battalion artillery barrage?
What if, for example, he was getting ready to ‘sign up’ and realized his future commanding officer was a NAZI and the boss of this NAZI was a USA mercenary paid by the CIA?
What if, for example, he lived in Russia and his parents had been chased out of Mariupol for speaking Russian?
What goes on in such a mind for a man with such a big following to create such a ridiculous public statement?
Am I missing something? Is it not in fact ridiculous? Am I thick concerning moral quandaries?
I can’t speak for Craig but what he seems to be saying is no matter how deeply he tries to understand he ultimately is gonna toss a coin, or carry on along the path the majority have cleared ahead, because that’s so so much easier. Twitter: like/dislike. Say the wrong thing and David Baddiel gets his pitchfork crew mobilised.
Yes/no. Tory/Labour. Soft-boiled or hard.
Essentially he’s right. Nuance is too much hard work.
Except of course where it can be used to herd people into camps. So there can be myriad genders and you’re either sympathetic to this social construct, and a good person, or you’re a transphobe antisemite Jordan Peterson A K Rowling Graham Linehan Right Wing Nazi who drinks Pepsi-Cola.
Hi folks, I got the feeling his rabid anti-Russian approach flowed from his time in Uzbekistan and from the views of his Uzbek wife Nadira. I can’t say more, it’s just a feeling.
Yes! Craig is hopelessly muddled about it. His broad naive streak manifesting again, I reckon. Also, you get a steady trickle of signals from Craig’s output that he maintains a lot of strong, cordial contacts with his former diplomatic, Foreign-and-Comm. colleagues; so presumably he’s sucking in a lot of their prejudices, and a lot of the ludicrously false information floating about in their bubble, which he believes too easily. Idiot propaganda does that to the best of us.
You always have to take anything from Craig with a bucket of salt: when he’s right, it’s mostly useful, and often impressive. When he’s wrong, it’s laughable.
And yes, E: he’s completely up the creek with his attitude to the Ukraine. He couldn’t be more wrong. It’s as if he knows nothing about what’s been happening there.
I still rate him for the times when he’s right, though; and for his essential decency and generous-hearted goodness. Just mark him down as a bright and well-informed man who nevertheless still screws up too easily because of that ingrained naivety.
Here’s another Craig Murray tweet, from yesterday. Note the framing about ‘better western diplomacy’. My understanding is that western diplomacy since the coup d’état in 2014 has been aimed at instigating and carrying out war and using Nazis and the Uke military as proxies. Maybe Putin is indeed a war criminal. But note that Murray in my opinion simply lies about the context by mis-framing ‘western diplomacy’.
I find your narrow mindset impenetrable. All these things can be true at once: 1) Better western diplomacy might have evaded war 2) Putin’s invasion is illegal and Putin is a war criminal 3) Zelensky is financially corrupt 4) Zelensky is an excellent war leader.
Craig’s off in cloud cuckoo land on this matter. He just hasn’t any notion of what the Western gic-criminals, particularly the neo-con criminally-insane loonies in Washington, have been up to, to provoke, and now to prolong, the trouble in the Ukraine. A truly astonishing, extended blind-spot. I find that he has nothing useful or even minimally-informed to say about that situation. He just doesn’t know his arse from his elbow on the matter: apparently completely uninformed. Perhaps he’s been swimming in the delusion bubble of his contacts at the Foreign-and-Comm. office.
He seems to be obsessed with declaring the wickedness of Putin in particular and Russia in general. A very strange glitch. The nazi-thug-terrorised and Western-manipulated clown elensky as a great war leader? You simply can’t be serious, Craig! You’ll be praising Bozo as churchillian next!
PS five minutes later: But then, he swallowed the scamdemic swindle hook line and sinker as well. Over-suggestible perhaps?
This is how it works, with Chomsky, Murray and other moralizing western dissidents.
First, they rarely if ever acknowledge that because they carry an imperial passport and live inside the imperial core they themselves and their families are protected from imperial assault.
Second, they criticise, posing as ‘free foating moralists’, the govts of countries resisting imperial attack.
Third, they don’t acknowledge that this criticism serves to reduce anti imperial activism inside the imperial core. Because who can organize resistance if the ‘moralizing dissidents’, who everybody respects because of their righteous resistance to imperialism, proclaim Milosovich, Hussein, Ghaddai, Assad, Putin as ‘evil dudes’! How can you organize an anti war movement when the war is directed against an ‘evil dude’???
Fourth, because they voice consistent criticisms of targeted govts which repeat the basic marketing frames of imperial planners they are tolerated and even sometimes celebrated within the imperial core. Those who DON’T do this (for example Parenti) get completely shunned by all branches of the imperial media.
Thus, these ‘morally righteous imperial core dissidents’ serve the empire, while at the same time basking in their reputations as holy dissident moralists. It is a special category of hypocrisy which I frankly find disgusting.
We all live in various zones of organized violence. Some of us are protected from attack because we live inside the imperial core. Is it our role to pretend that we are not protected? Is it our role to virtually tour the world and judge govts who resist the imperialism that we don’t have to fear ourselves?
As a contrast to Craig’s cluelessness about what’s really going on in this clash of empires, the dying and the rising, try The Duran, especially Alexander Mercouris’s solo analyses. Here’s a sample (below) of Alex Christoforou’s daily updates.
Most of what these guys produce is gleaned from comprehensive open-source trawling, though Alexander M. has some ‘interesting’ personal contacts as well. The quality of their output, though a bit patchy from some of the other contributors, is reliable. They don’t take sides, and they underline continually when they are unsure, or simply don’t know, what the truth may be. Yet still, the quality of their output is up at the top of the scale, I estimate.
Alex C. improvises his updates around a handful of subjects each time. He can wander a bit, and tends to repeat a bit too much. But the general standard of his output, like Alexander M’s, is credible and commendable. Pull yer socks up, Craig:
PS: E, your persistent critique of the ‘licensed radical dissidents’ begins to persuade me. Your point about Parenti being so hidden, despite often being more on the bullseye than the ‘licensed’ practitioners, is striking. Of all of them, I reckon Michael could win best-in-class kudos; yet who amongst the ‘radical left’ knows much of his - to my mind peerless - analyses?
I met Alex Cockburn and talked with him and mentioned somewhat innocently Parenti. Cockburn was openly hostile to Parenti. I didn’t understand why until I saw some videos/read some essays of Parenti where he convincingly mocks the Cockburn/Chomsky view of the Kennedy assassination.
Parenti was not necessarily ‘right’ but he was definitely lucid and argued convincingly for his point of view and rarely if ever repeated the propaganda frames of the USA state apparatus. He was also quite prolific and did his homework and provided his sources. Thus all in all I’d call him a real dissident. Not being a marxist I don’t agree with his basic assumptions, but I’m in awe of his work frankly. Of course I’m also in awe of Cockburn’s cutting style and Chomsky’s careful attention to the documentation.
It’s a subtle topic I think. Political writers who know their stuff are well aware that leftists who revealed/discussed Stalin’s crimes in the 30’s, when the Soviet Union was an ‘official enemy’ of the UK and USA, were attacked as traitors to the ‘cause’. Arthur Koestler, for example.
When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union does a political analyst in the USA dwell upon Stalin’s crimes? No? What would Solzhenitsyn say about that? He fought against Hitler then found himself in Stalin’s Gulag!
It seems to me though that Murray is quite false by not foregrounding the reality of USA/UK foreign policy in Ukraine. This pretense of ‘diplomacy’ is easy for us to see thru, so why not him?
And the last time I heard Chomsky on Democracy Now, which is now shite, he foregrounded his erudite analysis with ‘Of course I think Putin is the most dangerous leader since Hitler’. Well, if people agree with that how in the hell are they going to organize against an anti Putin war, in the USA or UK, who’s claim to fame is fighting Hitler!
Frankly I’m a bit sickened by Pepe Escobar’s glorification of Russian weapons killing nazis. Somehow people find it easy to chortle when the enemy soldiers are killed, though they shed a tear or two for the civilians… But they, the soldiers, are all young men, not so different from each other, guided by older men, murdering each other with incredible high tech weapons. I’m frankly horrified by all of it.
Picking up on the mention of JFK, a much better than usual Ed Curtin article at OffGuardian praised the four-part Oliver Stone documentary Destiny Betrayed.
I waited to watch all of it before venturing an opinion and will simply endorse what EC says. Particularly interesting, and new to me, was the suggestion that two other motorcades, with two other patsies, had been planned out.
