by Alan Bickley

I noticed last week in those newspapers that I look at but never buy claims that the Russians had murdered three hundred civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev. My first and continuing response was scepticism. The Russians are not famed for their gentleness in war, and their conquest of the Ukraine appears to be taking longer than they expected. On the other hand, these were reports carried in a mass media that has, in the past generation, given up the right to be believed without strong external corroboration.

I remember the claims, made in 1990, of the Kuwaiti babies pulled out of their incubators and dashed to the floor by the bestial Iraqi invaders. Some years after the bodies from the resulting war had finished rotting in the desert, I learned that the whole story had been fabricated by a public relations firm in London, and that the girl who had spoken so piteously about the poor little babies was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, and she had been in Washington at the time of the invasion. Add to this the lies about Serbian atrocities in the Balkans, those weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq, plus the library of warmongering falsehood since then, and I repeat that anything of the same kind published in any of the British or American mass-media comes with the rebuttable presumption that it is a lie.

If the Russians might have gone about shooting civilians, I see no credible reason why they should have. Shooting three hundred people requires a degree of organisation that suggests at least the consent of commanding officers. No one in the Russian command has any reasonable interest in leaving three hundred bodies on display to be photographed and used as propaganda by a Ukrainian Government desperate to bring in outside help. Looking beyond the front pages of the usual unbought newspapers, I then learned that the Russians had demanded a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the alleged massacre, and that the demand was vetoed by the British Government. This is something, by the way, only reported in The Morning Star. I have no doubt much was made of that veto on Russia Today – only Russia Today has been taken off-air in Britain and Europe. It was taken off-air to the public jubilation of the British Government and almost certainly at its private behest.

I will not say with full conviction that the Bucha Massacre is yet more atrocity propaganda to set beside the raped Belgian nuns in 1914 and the Kuwaiti incubator babies of 1990. I will not say so because I see no point in investigating the alleged facts deeper than I have, and perhaps because a positive denial will soon attract police attention. Even so, until I am shown convincing evidence to the contrary, I shall be inclined to think it is.

Though it shames the Russian and Ukrainian states that Europeans are once more killing Europeans, this is a war procured by the American and perhaps the British Governments. The Ukrainians were promised membership of NATO and the European Union. They took the bait. The Russians saw this as an invasion of what they had for centuries regarded as their own sphere of influence, and an attack on their own territorial security. When the Russians complained and threatened, the Ukrainians were showered with semi-promises of military support. The war began. The Western response was a set of premeditated outrages against freedom of speech and property rights, plus a flood of weapons into the Ukraine that are plainly intended not to drive the Russians out, but to trap them there. The object is to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, then to lean on the Chinese.

The final purpose appears to be one world order, and one ruling class, and one money – somewhere from which there is no geographical escape. Call it one big Oceania. To get there, the West has, at least since 1990, been made a parody of free market liberal democracy. We, the peoples of the West, are treated as so many conquered populations – mostly disarmed, universally lied to and spied on and robbed, and probably marked out for culling along with all the rest. As for the rest, you can, since 1990, fill swimming pools of blood from their murdered bodies.

I do not want a world dominated by Russia, or by China. Nor though do I want continued domination by what now passes for the West. I have tried to avoid reading too much news about this dreadful war – a wise choice, I suggest, when almost everything reported in the permitted media comes with a smell of untruth. But there do seem to be some hopeful possibilities. One is that the outright theft of public and private property from the Russians, and the weaponising of the whole financial infrastructure of the West, is destroying trust in New York and London as safe places to do business and to store wealth. The result will be the emergence of new banking systems outside the inspection and control of Western governments, and much less reliance on the Dollar as a universal currency. The sanctions appear to be hurting us more than the Russians. The great clamour raised in the West against Russia seems to have no echo outside the West. However this war ends, it will probably not be followed by the one world order for which it was started. It may instead bring on the end of Western hegemony and the re-emergence of the diversity that existed before about 1800. There is an advantage in real diversity. There is an advantage in the collapse of our financial police state. There is an advantage in borders beyond which our humanitarian bombing raids are not allowed.

Let these things come about, and we may eventually learn who shot those people in Bucha.