Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: John McCain
What a person’s enemies say about them when they die can reveal much about that person.
When news came on Aug. 25 of the death of U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of McCain’s enemies, Oleg Morozov of the Foreign Affair Committee of Russia’s Federation Council, the upper house of the Kremlin’s rubberstamp parliament, spoke ill of him in a grudgingly complimentary way.
“An enemy is dead – honor his honest hostility, honest hatred and intransigence,” Morozov said, according to a report by Sputnik, a Kremlin propaganda mouthpiece that masquerades as a news outlet.
“Others act crookedly; this one said what he thought. He taught us to better understand ourselves and the United States,” Morozov went on.
Meanwhile, Russian state television news program Vesti, which broadcasts the official line of the Kremlin on the Rossiya 1 channel, told its viewers that McCain “was an implacable opponent of Russia, who supported even tougher sanctions…”
That was a lie, of course. McCain did not hate Russia: he was a good friend to many in the pro-democracy Russian opposition, including Boris Nemtsov, the critic of the Kremlin who was murdered under its blood-red walls on the night of Feb. 27, 2015. McCain even said Nemtsov was one of the greatest men he had ever known.
Rather, McCain hated the Kremlin and its sinister tyrant leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin: “(Putin’s) a thug, he’s a KGB agent and he’s a killer,” McCain told a CNN Town Hall meeting on March 1, 2017. The U.S. senator insisted that in opposing the Kremlin, he was standing up for the Russian people, and he wore the Kremlin’s sanctions against him as a badge of honor.
“I couldn’t be more proud of being sanctioned by Putin for standing up for freedom and human rights for the Russian people and against Putin’s deadly aggression in Ukraine,” McCain said in 2014. “I will never stop my efforts to support democracy, free speech, and the rule of law in Russia.”
Sadly, McCain’s efforts were ended by an aggressive brain cancer, which took his life at the age of 81, just over a year after he was diagnosed with the illness. With his death, the Kremlin lost a foe, and Ukraine lost a great friend, who had supported Ukrainians’ efforts to establish democracy in their country since the 2004 Orange Revolution, and before. For that reason he is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for a second, final time.
During Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted Kremlin-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, McCain strongly supported the aspirations of the majority of ordinary Ukrainians, who wanted to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and closer to the European Union. A military man, who was held captive by the North Vietnamese for five years after his plane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, McCain was comfortable even when visiting troops on the front lines: He spent New Year’s Eve with Ukrainian soldiers in Shyrokyne on Dec. 31, 2016, arriving not long after Ukrainian positions near the Azov Sea village had been shelled by Russian-led forces.
A Republican, McCain also had domestic, political enemies, and some of his fiercest critics were from his own party. U.S. President Donald J. Trump, nominally a Republican himself, is reported to have nixed a White House statement that was to have praised McCain. Instead, Trump tweeted a short sentence of condolences to McCain’s family, not even using up Twitter’s character limit.
What a person’s enemies say about them when they die can reveal much about that person. It can also reveal much about their enemies. It is a sad indictment of U.S. politics that some of the comments made about McCain by his compatriots in the United States were more mean-spirited than those of the Kremlin.
McCain would have shrugged them off, however.
“First I was sanctioned by Vladimir Putin, then #ISIS labeled me ‘the enemy,’ now Fidel Castro! Who’s next?!” McCain tweeted on Sept. 4, 2014, after the former Cuban leader absurdly accused him of conspiring with Israel’s Mossad security service to create the Islamic State terrorist group.
“Congrats Fidel Castro, you have revealed my true secret role in shaping world events!” McCain also tweeted.
That was a joke, of course. McCain did not shape world events in secret: He did it entirely in the open, with honesty, saying exactly what he thought, as even his Kremlin foes admit.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Roger Waters
Roger Waters plays the bass guitar very well. He also plays the acoustic guitar, and the trumpet, and he has a pleasant singing voice.
As the creative force behind the British rock band Pink Floyd from 1968 to 1985, Waters has also written some very catchy tunes.
Moreover, Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall,” largely his creations, are two of the top-selling rock albums ever released.
But he’s a rotten analyst of international affairs, and appears to have swallowed completely the Kremlin’s propaganda line on the EuroMaidan Revolution, Russia’s occupation of Crimea, and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people, among other things.
Speaking to Kremlin-controlled newspaper Izvestia in an interview published on Aug. 27, Waters also said he distrusts the UK government and security agencies’ assessment that the Kremlin carried out the poisoning by nerve agent of former spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in March.
What sources of information Waters is privy to that lead him to dispute the facts in all these cases is unknown, but he closely follows the narrative given by Russian propaganda channels such as RT and Sputnik. For instance, he parrots the nonsense conspiracy theory that Victoria Nuland, a former U.S. State Department assistant secretary, orchestrated the EuroMaidan Revolution protests that led to the overthrow of runaway former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Waters also said blaming Russia for invading and occupying Ukraine’s Crimea and starting the war in the Donbas was “ridiculous,” adding that the West was to blame for “provoking” Moscow into taking its actions.
All that would have been music to ears of the propagandists at Izvestia, of course, in harmony as it is with the tune the Kremlin has been singing about Ukraine since 2014.
As bonus material, Waters also cast doubt on the activities of the White Helmets, a Syrian civil activist group that rescues civilians from shelling attacks and air strikes launched by Assad’s forces and Russian warplanes based in Syria. He appears to have accepted the lie that the White Helmets are a “false flag” organization, setting up attacks on the civilians they actually protect.
In fact, the Kremlin and the Assad government have been attempting to demonize the White Helmets since the organization formed in 2014, accusing the group of aiding anti-Assad “terrorists.” According to independent investigative journalists, the White Helmets have been subjected to a sophisticated disinformation campaign led by the Kremlin and the Syrian authorities, aided and propagated by “alt-right” (or neo-Nazi) websites and figures.
“We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control,” run the first two lines of one of Waters’ best-known songs, the 1979 hit “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2).”
But the dangerous Kremlin propaganda that Waters is relaying, amplifying, and blaring out to his millions of fans, indicates that the star really should get an education about what is actually going in Ukraine and Syria.
Because just now it sounds as if he’s willing going along with Moscow’s thought control. That makes him Ukraine’s foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin.
