Quite.
There is much criticism of US propagated in social media platforms. These, as we are coming to understand, are highly manipulated areas
using the concept of ‘free speech’ in a concerted attempt to destabilise democracy itself. This poisoning from within is a tactic used by the troll factory Internet Research Agency in Russia created by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the private military company, Wagner group.
This guided criticism, as much as we would like to believe is independent critical thought, is a dangerous misdirection. The real enemy of freedom and democracy is one (although not the only one but for the present the most urgent) who is killing people as fast and as violently as it can.
Working out who has vested interest in controlling peace is an argument for another time. When there is, hopefully, peace.
Is there some sort of lease lend deal for paying for these tanks?
So, if that’s going to happen why not have it happen now and save lives?
In the abstract, not knowing the real political and economic situation, nobody would willingly do this. But let’s make the analogy a bit more realistic.
The conflict in Northern Ireland had deteriorated into a civil war. On the UK side the violence was led by armed paramilitaries known to be fascists, and there were fears that should they win out the result would be widespread violence against catholics, possibly genocide (there were known links between the paramilitaries and holocaust-deniers).
The UK had a corrupt government, which had indeed at first tried to control the fascist paramilitaries and end the civil war - they had indeed been elected on the promise to do so - but when this failed, they reversed positions and embraced the paramilitaries, saying they were in fact now part of the British army, and lauding them as heroes.
Fearful of losing everything, the NI catholics - who had always seen themselves as Irish anyway, and had never accepted the separation of NI from Ireland, much less its incorporation into the UK - call on Ireland to help. Ireland sends in its army, and it ends with Irish reunification.
As a UK citizen, would I be happy to see the irish question resolved like this - with the loss of UK territory? Quite possibly, as in the real circumstances, it could well be better than any other alternative.
Obviously, it’s not an exact analogy - but that’s not the point. The point is that the world is complicated - especially the geo-political world - and trying to understand it through abstract black-and-white questions is not really useful. It’s no place for idealists. Generally, there are not just 2, but many sides, all trying to play the situation for their own ends, and all with their own dirty hands. And there’s history - ‘the nightmare from which we are trying to awake’, as the Irishman James Joyce said.
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Agree with you 100%.
Hoping that rather depressive view Mr Joyce was not the only way forward 
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As an aside, I remember the Japanese family incident. It was suggested that signs were erected in every language to warn of the risks!
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It was tragic and I’m sorry for that, but for goodness sakes 