New in PJ Media:
Have you noticed that the people who are speaking most strongly about defending freedom in Ukraine are not exactly defenders of freedom in their own countries?
One aspect of the Trump-Zelenskyy imbroglio that few have remarked upon is the fact that the allegedly stalwart freedom fighters who have lined up with the supposedly Churchillian Ukrainian president don’t exactly have sterling records of protecting freedom at home. Is this just a coincidence? Or is there something else at play here?
Take, for example, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has led the way with his bold pledge to supply “boots on the ground and planes in the air” to keep the dastardly Putin at bay in Ukraine. In less than a year as prime minister, Starmer has earned the nickname “Two-Tier Kier” by aggressively prosecuting native Britons who are opposed to mass migration into the country, sometimes for nothing more than a rude remark, while letting those guilty of violent crimes against people who transgress against woke sensibilities walk free.
When Starmer visited the Oval Office last week, Vice President Vance upbraided him for his encroachments upon the freedom of speech in his once-great nation: “To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.”
And yet here is Keir Starmer posing as a champion of freedom, not for Britain, but for Ukraine.
Then there’s Canada’s vapid Justin Trudeau. Back in Feb. 2022, Trudeau invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act to crush the Freedom Convoy, a peaceful protest of truckers against the COVID mandates and restrictions that were destroying their ability to make a living. Trudeau’s government froze the protestors’ bank accounts and took other authoritarian measures, earning a rebuke even from that staunch freedom fighter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wrote: “The Violent crackdown on #FreedomConvoy2022 has nothing to do with freedom of speech and human rights. How coercion could be related to liberty & freedom of choice? #TruckersForFreedom.”
But Justin Trudeau, the destroyer of freedom in Canada, is going to save it in Ukraine.
Joining Starmer and Trudeau in this alleged coalition for freedom is France’s President Emmanuel Macron, whose government is busy with efforts to get his principal opponent imprisoned and barred from seeking political office. Yes, that sounds as if Macron has taken a page or two from Old Joe Biden’s playbook, and of course if Old Joe were still pretending to be president, he would be standing with Starmer, Trudeau and Macron both in cracking down on our freedoms and in forking over more of our money to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
There is more. Read the rest here.
Billy says
These virtue-signaling, totalitarian Leftists are against their citizens and against freedoms while partnering with totalitarians like Islam and its Muslims.
Rarely says
Hmmm. Macron, Starmen and Trudeau are communists according to your headline. They should be grateful to Vance for explaining to them how they should lead their countries. Not. There is no hypocrisy in their support of the Ukraine. It would help to understand and accept that the Republican party’s concept of Freedom of Speech is not the gold standard for the rest of the World. The US’s lack of support for the Ukraine is much more surprising and uncharacteristic of the country that claims to be the champion of democracy.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Somehow, you claim that the Republican definition is not the Gold Standard, but the rest of the world, such as Russia, has to accept EU definitions on what constitutes “freedom”. Hypocrite much?
What Trudeau did to the truckers 3 years ago was exactly what someone like Leonid Brezhnev would have done. What Starmer is doing now to people who post things online that he doesn’t like is exactly what Erich Honecker would have done. Similarly for Macron’s crackdown on Yellow Vests, which is like what Wojciech Jaruzelsky did in Poland in the 1980s
Somehow, Russia is supposed to be condemned for not allowing serious political challenges to Putin every time there is an election, but Ukraine is supposed to get a pass for just cancelling the whole thing altogether? And before you protest that it’s during a war, it’s worth noting that during WWII, Churchill created a national unity government and then went to war, and in fact, resigned weeks after the death of Hitler, when Labour ministers refused to continue. Similarly, Prime Minister Netanyahu formed a national unity government immediately after October 7th, 2023, even if the opposition has largely left that government some months ago
Zelansky has done none of this. But he did ban all opposition parties, and independent media stations. Russia still has a bunch of political parties besides Putin’s own United Russia. It has a total of 7 major recognized political parties spanning Left (CPRF) to Right (Civic Platform). Somehow, Russian elections are regarded as undemocratic, while Ukraine’s – and now Rumania’s – cancellation of elections is considered democratic
That’s exactly how it was during the Cold War on the Left. If you saw the term “Democratic” or “People’s” in a country’s name, you knew right away that it was a communist dictatorship. That is how it looks now: countries like Ukraine and Romania which cancel elections are considered democracies, and countries like Russia where one person gets 90% of the vote is considered a one-party state. That is why Robert described all these Western European leaders as commies
Rarely says
If I called you a “table” it wouldn’t make you a “table”.
These countries are what they are but communist isn’t it.
To the American far right everyone who isn’t in lock step with them is a communist.
Once again: The Republican party’s definition of “Freedom of Speech” is not the gold standard for freedom of speech elsewhere in the World.
The trucker’s civil disorder against the COVID vaccine in Canada crossed the line separating legal protest and civil disobedience and broke the law — maybe not US law but Canadian law. After all, the “protest” was in Canada. US laws don’t apply.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Then why complain about Russia? Everything that has happened there may not be in line w/ Canadian or EU laws, but it’s certainly consistent w/ Russian laws. So if the trucker protest was illegal under Canadian law, why ding Russia for what happened to Navalny?
When these countries can toss people in jail for wrongthink, it’s immaterial whether their economic systems fit a Marxist-Leninist model. They have more in common w/ the Soviet Union or the German Democrat Republic than the current people running things from the Kremlin
Keys says
They (the likes of Starmer, Trudeau, Matcron, American Democrat party leadership, …) seem to be a new type of communist; a NWO agenda type.
“Workers of the world unite” is secondary to “Elite masters of the world unite”, because only we know best what is the enlightened way for humanity to survive; and only we can ensure the survival of our species, the good of the planet, allocation of resources, and world-wide peace under our control.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
It’s interesting that the Left, which historically gave Soviet megalomaniac dictators like Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev a pass on how the Soviet regimes treated ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, et al, today has a bigger issue w/ Vladimir Putin. Back during WWII, FDR was willing to ally w/ Stalin, who was a far greater monster than anything Vladimir Putin has been accused of. And in the 70s, President Nixon was willing to get into bed w/ Chairman Mao in order to break the Moscow-Beijing axis – something inconceivable to our Democrats of today
Honestly, I think that today, Russians are better off than hapless citizens of the EU. Okay, they’re not allowed to criticize Putin, and on the other side of the erstwhile Iron curtain, European citizens aren’t allowed to criticize the unrestricted migration of muslims into their countries. If you had to pick b/w one of these, which would it be? Yeah, there are muslims in Russia – both citizens like Tatars, Bashkirs, Dagestanis, and yeah, Chechens (which is a unique case in Russia), as well as muslims from other ex-Soviet republics like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and so on. Those muslims have lived through 70 years of communism and then 30 years of Atheistic rule, and are largely MINOs (except again, in Chechnya). They don’t go about raping Russians b’cos the latter are infidels, b’cos they know it wouldn’t be tolerated in the name of freedom of religion
Compare that to Europe. They don’t have their homegrown muslims like the Russians do (yeah, there may be exceptions like Lipka Tatars in Lithuania and Poland, as well as Bosnia and Albania). But they’ve thrown open their borders to all sorts of people, and have cracked down on their own people who dare protest about it. Russia, otoh, is a lot more sensitive to the demands of its citizens. Some years ago, when a Chinese entrepreneur tried to build a pipeline from Lake Baikal to China and local Russians around that lake protested, the Russian government cancelled that project. I see no evidence that governments in Germany, Britain or France would have done the same
No, I agree w/ VP Vance. In fact, I’d go a step further and say that much of Western Europe is a lot less freer than the Russian Federation