THERE aren't that many brave voices in the West fighting for justice for all. Of the few profiles in courage, Irish member of parliament Richard Boyd Barrett is one.
He, like the Irish government, rightly condemns Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But he doesn't just stop there, like the Irish government and the rest of the West do. To him, it is a case of remarkable double standards to just condemn the invasion of Ukraine and the war crimes there but not the invasions elsewhere.
We can't agree more. Ireland's alignment with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), he says, is a big mistake. As we speak, he writes in thejournal.ie, an Irish news portal, Nato members, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, are conducting a war in Yemen that has claimed the lives of 377,000 people and brought 14 million people to the brink of famine.
What's more, these very same Nato nations, trenchantly oppose calls for sanctions to be imposed on these regimes for their crimes.
Barrett is right. What the West should be doing is to condemn all wars, occupation, empire and the global arms trade.
Sadly, this isn't going to happen. After all, Nato is all about war, occupation and empire building. Take US President Joe Biden's comment on March 28, the infamous Putin is a "butcher" and "cannot remain in power". However much Biden and his allies tried to backtrack, to Putin it is one reason for the invasion.
His case for preemptive strike is not all nonsense. As Jonathan Cook points out in his op-ed in The Middle East Eye, Putin has only to look to recent examples of Washington meddling around the globe — from Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to Syria, Iran and Venezuela — to see that regime change has regularly been front and centre of its playbook. "Based on that record, why would Putin imagine his own government would fare better," Cook rightly asks.
In fact, one could argue persuasively, he writes, that it was just such policies that unleashed the chain of events that culminated in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Western media is equally guilty. It rarely speaks truth to power. And as we can see, this has brought grave consequences to the world. It didn't speak truth to power when the US and its allies (Ukraine provided the third largest force) invaded Iraq.
It didn't speak truth to power when the US and its allies again invaded Afghanistan. Today, even big names in the business like The Economist and the Financial Times in the UK and The New York Times andThe Washington Post in the US are racing with each other to be the star of mendacity, to borrow a phrase from former British diplomat Sir Tony Brenton.
We join him in asking as he did in The Guardian what happened to the West's claim that its system is superior because of its free press? It is arguable that a truly free Western press would never have allowed their governments to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.
Or having allowed the invasions to happen, would at the very least, have called for the trial of war criminals like former British prime minister Tony Blair and former US president George W. Bush.
Perhaps it would have even called for the investigation of Biden and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice for their role in the invasion of Iraq.
Instead, they walk free calling others butchers.