Consider this: you open your front door one morning and to your dismay, you see the large man from three doors up engaged in a ferocious fist-fight with the smallish man five doors down. There is blood, there are cries of pain, there is ripped clothing. How do you respond?
Would you pass a cudgel or a knife to the small guy? Would you urge your neighbours to do the same? Or would your instinctive reaction be to first stop the two men fighting, and from there try to settle the bloodthirsty differences between the two men in a peaceful way?
In today’s Irish Times, Kathy Sheridan takes a different line. Anyone calling for a ceasefire are misguided. Any call for an end to hostilities in Ukraine, she argues, “feeds Putin’s hopes and motivates him to keep fighting…The louder the chorus [for a ceasefire], the great Putin’s hope that a squabbling, hopeless west will abandon Ukraine.”
In the Letters section of today’s Irish Times the leader of the Irish Labour party, Ivana Bacik, expresses the belief of her party that “it is misguided for anyone on the left in Ireland to call for a ceasefire”.
In contrast with this, on Friday last former Irish ambassador to Russia James Sharkey wrote a piece for The Irish Examiner titled ‘All avenues for a peaceful end to war in Ukraine must be explored.’
I’d suggest that James Sharkey knows more about both Ukraine and Russia than either Kathy Sheridan or Ivana Bacik. I’d also suggest he’s more keenly aware that with every day, hundreds or even thousands of young Ukrainians and young Russians are being killed. These are not numbers; they are young human beings who were alive yesterday and today are dead.
Give peace a chance.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41078642.html
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2023/03/01/lefts-response-to-russias-war-on-ukraine
Very good Jude
Blessed are the peacemakers. That sentiment is as true today as two thousand years ago. Putin is undoubtedly the culprit but pouring petrol on the flames is never a good thing. The sooner we get peace the better.
When Russia finally realised the Minsk agreement had been a ploy to buy time for Ukraine to re-arm and prepare for a US/NATO/EU/UK proxy war against Russia – which Angela Merkel has admitted – this was an existential threat which it had to confront militarily and, furthermore, declare Russia would use everything it had to remove the threat. All other considerations about the legality of the SMO etc., and its international consequences for Russia had to be of much lesser importance. The fact many countries accepted Russia’s actions as necessary, is proof they knew Russia had no other option, no doubt aided by the fact many of them had been victims – or are potential victims – of the same adversaries
The main reason for the highly dangerous, scary world we have now, is the fact the corporate-controlled U.S. will never willingly accept a multi-polar world. Driven by insatiable greed, empires never settle for anything less than total ownership and control of the world’s natural, human and financial resources. This makes the US the main instigator of wars and terrorism worldwide. Humanity urgently needs real democracy in the corporate-controlled U.S., fraudulently disguised as ‘democracy’. The 20 year-long Princeton University research in 2014 revealed/confirmed the US is not a democracy or a republic, it’s a corporate-controlled oligarchy which serves the corporations not the people. The US still illegally controls 80% of Syria’s oil fields.