OK, your starter for 10. What Irish newspaper this morning had an editorial containing this statement and who are they referring to?
“A party that has long equivocated over Putin’s brutal regime has felt compelled to ditch its previous positions and embrace new ones.”
Right, you can stop crowing now – of course it was The Irish Times and of course they were referring to Sinn Féin. I could ask just when and where Sinn Féin said it found Putin’s use of brute force quite attractive. But that’d be a waste of time. What we have here is The Irish Times once again taking a sledge-hammer to the SF front door, in the hope that it might help put ‘responsible’ political parties in the south a little higher up the attractiveness scale.
What the IT and a lot of other newspapers are doing is dividing the world into white hats and black hats. Putin’s hat is of deepest midnight hue, while the hats of those opposed to him are fresh-snow white. And if you say anything about Russia other than “It stinks”, you clearly are an equivocator, if not in fact a commie.
It’d be easy to list a number of facts that would challenge this binary view of the present world. For example, that Russia tried to join Nato in the early 1950s but was refused. Or how Putin, in an interview twenty-one years ago with David Frost, expressed a willingness to join Nato “if and when Russia’s views are taken into account as those of an equal partner”.
And just before you begin telling me that I’m some class of fellow-traveller, I’m not. I think human rights are abused in Russia. I think Putin is ruthless and dictatorial. And I sincerely hope against hope that the Ukrainians will find a way of having the Russian army withdraw from their country. I’ve never been in favour of a bigger, more powerful country practising aggression against a smaller neighbour. (Indeed, Virginia – if the cap fits, do don it.)
That said, the most cursory knowledge of Russian history will tell you that Nato came into being to oppose the USSR; now that the USSR has collapsed, Nato continues to oppose Russia, making overtures to the Ukraine to come join Nato and the EU. To Russia, not surprisingly, that looks like Nato and the EU trying to push right up to the borders of Russia.
So what the IT calls Sinn Féin’s equivocation is maybe more an unwillingness to see both Nato and the EU as the saviours of the world. Even their hats have mud on them, so maybe it’s time the IT stopped infantilising its readers.
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