Tomás Ó Flatharta

Joan McKiernan, who has been a socialist activist in both the United States and Ireland, reports. Joan also writes for Against the Current https://againstthecurrent.org/joan-mckiernan/

When I was teaching college sociology, I used to do a session on the bizarre things that Americans believe or don’t believe. Like, only 60% of Americans believe in evolution. 10% believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, to mention a few notable examples. Long ago, Mark Twain remarked, “It is easier to trick the average person, than it is to convince them that they have been tricked.”  

I should not have been surprised then during the Trump era and the pandemic, we saw so many Americans accepting untruths, refusing masks and vaccines, refusing to believe that Covid was real, even as they went to their deaths. And during these years after Trump’s defeat, so many still refuse to accept facts, electoral counts, data. We are told there are alternative versions of facts! 

So now we have the same lack of truth applied to support for Ukrainians resistance against the Russian invasion and destruction of their country. Recently, this was seen in this article, The Con Artists Who Blame Ukraine Aid for America’s Social Problems, in which independent presidential candidate and anti-vaxxer, RFK Jr., Green Party candidate Cornel West, Glenn Greenwald, and other Putin apologists are making disingenuous, pseudo-populist arguments against U.S. support for Ukraine. Rather than looking at capitalist exploitation, the Trump tax cuts, unemployment and low wages for the majority, they are blaming the Ukrainian support for all of the US social problems.  
https://newrepublic.com/article/173902/ukraine-war-cost-russian-propaganda-rfk-jr-greenwald  

The Con Artists Who Blame Ukraine Aid for America’s Social Problems

The reliance on untruths, twisted thinking and re-writing of history is no longer just an American characteristic. This week Irish member of the European Parliament, Clare Daly, came out with her own bizarre explanation of how to deal with the Ukraine war. She says, “The US sat down with the Taliban.” praised the role of United States in the Irish Good Friday Peace Agreement and said the international community should try and do something similar in Ukraine.  She accuses the West of giving arms in order to keep the war in Ukraine going! 

Link : https://www.newstalk.com/news/west-arming-ukraine-to-keep-the-war-going-clare-daly-1481421#Echobox=1687898013-1

Clare Daly’s confusion is not confined to Ireland and Ukraine – Rwanda is one of her targets : “The people in Rwanda sat down; there were different sides, there was cannibalism orchestrated [and] mass rapes” – this shows she has lost the plot completely. By different sides she means that there was a genocide, with perpetrators and victims. They did not in fact sit down : a rebel army overthrew the genocidal régime. And where does her cannibalism story come in? What cannibalism? She has her African myths all mixed up.

She is making the US out to be saints, peacemakers…. What about Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, numerous forays into the Caribbean and Central America? It is so bad that despite the fact that Haiti needs international assistance so desperately now, the US is afraid to go there because of its own history. Now, all the destruction by the US is overlooked because they stepped in at the last minute to make a ‘contribution’ to the Irish peace process. That is overlooking the truth, something that is so easily done these days by people like Clare Daly. Actually, Gerry Adams and the IRA made decisions early on in the 1980s that led to the peace process. Charlie Haughey, Tony Blair and other notables did play a part, but the Americans, no, not till the last minute, after all the important decisions had been made. .  

Ms. Daly is also overlooking all the imperialist oppression that is being carried on these days, supported in large part by American weaponry and dollars – Israel and the Palestinians, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. And most relevantly, the imperialist exploitation carried out in Africa by the Russian Federation with its foot soldiers, the Wagner Group, as was exposed during the coup attempt this weekend. The Russian state and Wagner are promoting brutal modern-day colonialism as they steal the wealth of African nations for the benefit of the Kremlin oligarchs.  

Clare Daly and her ilk should be supporting the people who are fighting this brutal regime, that is the Ukrainians, and supporting the Russian people who oppose the war and their allies throughout the world.  

Time to Leave the Shadows: #NoToWar Statement On the Prigozhin Coup – Lefteast

…… And here is a real anti- war statement from Russian people calling for organization from below to stop the war, bring troops home, dismantle the militaristic regime and its oligarchic base. That’s a movement worth supporting. 

Time to Leave the Shadows: #NoToWar Statement On the Prigozhin Coup

Joan McKiernan June 29 2023