Just when you thought things were about as bad as they could get, along came Slovakia, to complete the circle.

While Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban have been busy offering their professed expertise to Vladimir Putin in an effort to “settle” the Ukraine problem (see yesterday’s post), Robert Fico — Prime Minister of Slovakia — has been recuperating from an attempt on his life in May, when he was shot by a 71-year-old writer and political activist who obviously cared more for his country’s future than his own.

But now Mr. Fico is back on his feet, and seemingly anxious to join in his colleagues’ drive for immortality by cozying up to Putin, verbally trashing the “liberal ideas” of the vast majority of NATO members with regard to their support of Ukraine. While not (yet) specifically offering to actively negotiate peace terms between Russia and Ukraine, he said that “meaningless” liberal ideas were “spreading like cancer,” and that there were “not enough peace talks” with Putin to end the war in Ukraine. [Aleks Phillips, BBC News, July 6, 2024.]

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Would someone please tell me what the hell is happening in these NATO member countries! Why are the people — having regained their hard-won independence just a short generation ago — now electing pro-Kremlin leaders? And especially now, when Russia’s saber-rattling is becoming more audible by the day? Have they completely forgotten the years of living under Soviet rule? The constant threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War? Or the exhilaration of that final, successful battle for freedom in the late 1980s and early ‘90s?

These three men are clearly not Groucho, Chico and Harpo — the Marx Brothers of comedy. More ominously, they bring to my mind Macbeth’s three witches. And the rumblings of discontent and anger already so prevalent throughout the world today are making it easier for the likes of Erdogan, Orban and Fico to spread Moscow’s propaganda, constantly stirring their poisonous witches’ brew toward the boiling point.

Russia, as we well know, wrote the book on propaganda; and today, with the help of the internet and social media, their reach is limitless.

The greater problem is that too many in the West are buying what they’re selling.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
7/8/24