InterOuts

South African Media’s Russophobic Bias

The South African Media’s coverage during the conflict raging on the soil of Ukraine has been mostly one sided, so much so that it has now become no more than a ridiculous mouth piece tirelessly repeating the propaganda of the west. At a time that South Africa is assuming the rotating chair of the BRICS forum it is paradoxical if we can say that much that the main actors of the national press are totally sold to the lies that has lead to this conflict. That state of affairs and the failure of the authorities to mount a powerful public relation campaign to explain their position regarding the Ukrainian quagmire, explains why the South African population is largely ignorant of the realities of the European War and more importantly, are so receptive to the panoply of inaccuracies propagated by the western media.

The South African population, reminiscent of the world wide general population, is more inclined to have its attention focused on local politics and issues rather than far away conflict zones that at first view do not appear to affect them on a day to day basis. If the South African press is relatively reliable on covering national issues which can easily be fact checked by locals, it is however heavily intoxicated by western propaganda when it comes to foreign issues. This can be explained by the following reasons, lack of funds to run a proper foreign/intercontinental department (A common problem shared by Press Agencies around the world but worse in Africa), total trust in what is printed by western main stream like the American Department of Defense or the Kiev Independent, which these days is treated as a bearer of gospel truth but is in fact an obnoxious (previously US owned now Ukrainian) propaganda sheet which is not even worth the airtime spent to access it. However there are even worse reasons explaining the attitude of the Press in RSA, one is laziness to look for the truth both in the alternative and the main stream media when the truth is really out there, printed black on white and even enshrined in International Law. The last reason is straight forward, dishonesty as it is now common knowledge that writing anything that could be considered as favorable to Russia is a career killer which de-facto eliminates the chances of any hopeful to emulate Trevor Noah on a Main Stream Media platform. To dare saying that Russia maybe right on the most trivial subject does not get you invited by the cool boys for dinner but surely will get you into trouble, something that once true journalists and reporters considered part and parcel of their métier.

The general population can partly be understood when they show ignorance regarding the war in Ukraine. Between the cumulative problems associated with the rise in the cost of living, galloping inflation, wide spread load shedding, unemployment, a declining economy, unchecked immigration, and an insane criminality rate, the South African citizen has a legion of potential existential problems on its own hands to consider before even thinking about faraway Ukraine. More so if attempting to determine if the President of Ukraine presented like a hero by his western backers, is in fact nothing more than a buffoonish imitation of Winston Churchill thrown to a public craving for heroes. We say partly because contrary to the lethargic European population, the South Africans can get access to RT and Sputnik News through the internet (By setting your VPN on South Africa anyone can get access to those publications). On this subject, it is interesting to note that for weeks following the prohibition of RT and Sputnik News, the ban was effective in RSA too but it was not due to the outcry of the local press against this flagrant violation of the freedom of press by the western powers that reinstated those web publications. As a matter of a fact, except some outcries from lonely Tweets scattered here and there, this troubling matter went almost unnoticed.

The visit of Sergei Lavrov to South Africa epitomizes this pathetic and partisan position of the local press in favor of Ukraine. To illustrate our argument, we took as a show case the 24th of January edition of Business Day but to be honest, we could have taken any of the main publications in the South African MSM for more or less the same one sided position. Sadly, it has been like this during this conflict since its inception in 2014 up until the full blown war raging today. If this business oriented paper allocates a first page article signed by Sam Mkokeli, it was an exercise of pure reporting and we will come back to that shortly. To balance the coverage of the visit of Lavrov that Business Day certainly forcibly included due to the realities of the day, the financial newspaper felt an imperative to clarify its views by publishing on its 5th page, a massive Ukrainian propaganda article. This article originally carried by Reuters and written by Pawel Florkiewicz, a correspondent based in Warsaw and Kiev, one the capital of Poland, a country known to be notoriously Russophobic and incessantly trying to drag their fellow partners in NATO into a direct confrontation with the Russian forces. And Ukraine, another country which has ‘legally’ institutionalised Russophobia by promulgating racist laws against the ethnic Russian population within its borders and now engaging in a hot war against the Russian Federation. How impartial can Florkiewicz be, being fed his main information by the Kiev regime itself? The article itself can be summarized as a general plea or more of a litany to obtain western built main battle tanks to prop up yet again, the disintegrating Ukrainian land forces. Florkiewicz also spoke about supposed nuclear threats recently attributed to Vyacheslav Volodin, the Speaker of Russia’s Lower House. There is undeniably a nuclear dimension to the Ukrainian conflict and we are utterly convinced at the International Outsider that with passing of months or years after the end of hostilities, details about the matter will surface which will raise the hair of many. However like most of the western journalists, Florkiewicz twisted the words of Volodin as well much like they have constantly misreported what President Putin previously said about Russian nuclear policy. The Russians in fact have only repeated what they had said for decades concerning the reasons that would lead them to use nuclear weapons. If Vladimir Putin spoke about it, then in the first place it was to clarify that there were no changes in those policies after numerous accusations appeared in the western media that Russia may use nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. The journalist then pointed at the risks involved in shelling nuclear power plants in Ukraine (A fact that anyone with a brain cell in working order should assume is obvious.) The unscrupulous newspaperman then masterly played the words so that the readers believe that it is in fact the Russians were the ones shelling the Zaporizhzhia Power Plant as the article implied.

The Russians forces are actually occupying this nuclear facility and it surroundings, so how devious and stupid are the Russian government and high military command to shell their own technicians and troops and for what inconceivable political, tactical or strategic advantage? Which automatically leads to another embarrassing question, if the Russian are not shelling their own position as they are taken by some war dementia virus, then who is doing it? (*An article covering the nuclear aspect of the conflict is in preparation). Although this article is meant to show case how the South African Journalists view the Ukrainian War, it was important to show what kind of garbage is served to the South African public as coverage of this tragic war.

Business day was not done in its hate offensive and deployed heavy artillery in the person of Tom Eaton, a columnist at Arena Holdings (owning many main publications like The Sunday Times, Financial Times and the Herald and founded by Tokyo Sexwale). Eaton published a very wannabe Trevor Noah style of article, pushing an unpalatable humor referring to Sergei Lavrov as a grumpy vampire. According to both supporters and adversaries of Sergei Lavrov, he is among (if not) the most competent living high official diplomat today. However for Eaton writing as a geopolitical guru, what qualifies the Russian Foreign Minister is his absence of mind. Eaton just repeated by taking western propaganda points accusing the government of Lavrov of a campaign of terror. We have written extensively about the war in this region since 2014 and have even portrayed the explosive potential situation in Ukraine since 2004. We covered the events of the Orange Revolution on the infamous Maiden which was to become the focal point of a cynical 3 dimensional chess board geopolitical game lead by the United States. Thus we feel humbly qualified to ask the luminary that Tom Eaton seems to be few questions, where was his pen and his brilliant sarcasm during the massacre of Odessa where courageous Ukrainian revolutionaries armed with Molotov Cocktails (prepared by beautiful teenage Ukrainian girls) burned alive innocent people in a building in Odessa? Does Tom Eaton consider this as a high profile democratic event? (*The Odessa tragedy has been widely referred to and ample audio visual footage from both sides exists but is continuously played down by the west) Why did not Eaton raise a voice against the constant killing of Ukrainians of Russian Ethnicity during 8 years in the Donbass? To our knowledge, Mr. Eaton did not write furiously against the racists laws excluding Russian language and culture by the government of Poroshenko preceding the government of Zelenski, why not? Mr. Eaton lives in a country that recognizes eleven languages as official ones, how does he think that people speaking one of those languages will feel if suddenly such racist laws reminiscent of rotten past days, were promulgated and enforced in the Republic of south Africa? Tom Eaton not content to be a geopolitical genius could not abstain from playing the military expert by stipulating that, we quote “…as Russia struggles to sell its bloody stalemates as strategic victories”. We will not launch here in a complicated military analysis but suffice to say that Eaton should be careful of what he writes on paper, the Armed Forces of Russia have already destroyed the original Ukrainian Army which started the conflict and now the Russians are actively destroying a second hastily composed army, infused by western allied provided material. This second army has exhausted its aggressive potential in the summer offensive in the regions of Kharkov and the Zaporizhzhia where Ukraine has indeed recovered territory but not achieved any essential strategic objectives while the Russians almost completely saved their heavy material and men by retreating in good order. In other words, the Ukrainians are launching desperate and foolhardy costly optic offensives while the Russians are applying the ‘rules of warfare’ to achieve constant future victories, retreating to preserve valuable men and material assets which can be used for later defensive and offensive actions which in a nutshell is “live today to fight tomorrow”. Of course Tom Eaton ignores all these facts preferring to try to amuse people rather than enlightening them.

The columnist then launched an all out offensive on Naledi Pandor, the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa. Though admitting that Pandor’s original stance condemning the invasion of Ukraine was correct (considering Eaton’s perspective), Eaton attributed it only to a flitting liberal moment (If we correctly understood his cryptic language.)

South Africa's Ramaphosa blames NATO for Russia's war in Ukrainehttps://t.co/FrVHO8hDJg

— Garland Nixon (@GarlandNixon) January 27, 2023

What Eaton failed to understand is that Naledi’s position was a perfect exercise of diplomatic sovereignty comparable to the posture of India but instead it seems that Eaton’s suggestion is to blindly follow the dictates and suicidal position of the west whatever the cost. But he was not alone, Eaton’s article appears at the bottom of page 6 in the Opinion section, which is illustrated by an openly typical pro Ukrainian propaganda caricature depicting Sergei Lavrov posing as a cynical Manipulator, shaking the hand of Naledi Pandor who wears a tee shirt with a toll free number to Vladimir Putin while indexing the caricature with Pandora’s myth. Every single article on that page had some pro Ukrainian aligned position, the opinion article of the newspaper itself laments what it defines as the contradictory position of the South African government at the start of the hostilities in Ukraine and deplores what it calls, the ideological proximity of the South African government to Vladimir Putin’s Government without giving the least vague idea of what this ideology could be. Business Day points to the naval exercises that the South African Navy is holding jointly with the Russian Navy, which according to the newspaper is bombing civilians. Again this assertion is a gross propaganda taken out of context but for arguments sake; let’s assume that Business Day is genuinely concerned by the bombing of civilians. If so, where was this newspaper while President Poroshenko was boasting that the children of the Donbass under the bombing of his Neo Nazi battalions will hide in caves while the Ukrainian children will go to school? Where were the moralists of Business Day then? Why has this newspaper never talked about the rapes in the Donbass? Why did these new wave liberals never tell you about the racist, belligerent and Neo Nazi tendencies of the Ukrainian regime? Why is Tom Eaton silent about the Ukrainian death squads? Yet still these people want us to support Ukraine who believe in those obnoxious values. Anyone today who dares pretend that Ukraine is a democracy is insane, plainly stupid or dishonest. The main article of the opinion page signed by Richard Wainwright CEO of Investec SA is another worshipping exercise of the failing western economic model that he somehow urges South Africa to join though we at least concede that Wainwright has at least some intellectual capacity as he ends his very boring analysis by saying that he left Davos wary of the many risks besetting the world.

We said that we will return back to what should have only been an exercise of reporting by Sam Mkokeli on the front page of the financial newspaper. Mkokeli starts by comparing the determining diplomatic tour of Lavrov to a ‘charm’ offensive. Again, here we find a total non-understanding of the pivotal moment that the world has been thrown into. No! Foreign Minister Lavrov of the Russian Federation was not in South Africa on a ‘charm tour’, he was here to press among those that Russia considers as valued and critical partners, how the west has been proved cunning and untrustworthy.

More than happy for this to take place.

— catherine raats �������������������������������� (@cathyraats) January 24, 2023

Proof was provided direct from the horses’ mouths in the form of previous German Chancellor Merkel, ex French President Hollande and the ex President of Ukraine, the chocolate king Petro Poroshenko who all openly admitted that they lied to Russia, their own population and the world about the Minsk Agreement. They were only a cover up according to these ex head of states to allow the arming of Ukraine under the disguise of a peace agreement. Does the South African population understand the scope of these recent revelations? We cannot repeat sufficiently that the Minsk Agreement is part of International Law, signed and guaranteed by the countries occupying a permanent chair in the Security Council of the United Nations.

The Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, Grace Naledi Mandisa Pandor seems to have instinctively understood the quantum shift in international relations with the decline of American hegemony and a more sudden shift than expected, from an unipolar to a multipolar world. We will not insult the South African people or any of our readers from any part of the world by entering into a lengthy detailed explanation of what the revelations of Merkel, Holland and Poroshenko mean. Like the majority of the leaders in the global south, the South Africans would have grasped immediately that no one in his right mind can trust any word or signature of any European leader or diplomat, these very revelations put in peril in an existential way, the rule of International Law. This obvious conclusion seems to have unexplainably escaped people like Tom Eaton or Sam Mkokeli who subtly included that fact that pro Ukrainian activists protested against Lavrov’s visit by demonstrating with placards but less subtly, avoided to provide a picture of this so called demonstration fearing to showcase how pathetic it was.

Business Day is not the only newspaper of South Africa indulging in this kind of dishonest reporting and constant lying by deliberate omission, there are exceptions but they are rare. The following day on the 25 January, the feeling that probably Eaton’s heavy artillery did not prove potent enough, the financial newspaper deployed it’s HIMARS journalistic game changer system personified by Dominik Heil and Mark Peters, both men are university lecturers on strategy, Heil in the UK and Peters in RSA. Since Peters had been published in Newsweek and was a war photographer, we thought that we had better chance to be served something else than the hysterical script of Eaton. Alas, our hopes didn’t last long; the two men consider Lavrov had made his career by upsetting every sector of the international community. Again the two ‘experts’ do not say how Lavrov is upsetting everyone, we just have to take their word as experts because they say so, let’s rapidly examine the facts but first, let’s give a non-less rapid historical perspective which could enlighten the situation. Eaton, Peters and Heil like their puppet masters like to repeat that Russia acts irrationally with clear imperialistic tendencies and paints Russian diplomacy as heavy and ineffective which in fact is true but the other way around. During the period preceding the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact (An event that Eaton and consort will love as taken out of context it points to the responsibilities of Russia during World War Two), Josef Stalin who was Georgian but who paradoxically epitomizes the idea of Russian nationalism was anxious to please the sensitivities of the Germans so to ease tensions, Stalin fired his Foreign Minister Litvinenko who was a Jew but more importantly, had failed (though he tried tirelessly) to convince the western allies, Britain and France to join the USSR in a great military alliance against Nazi Germany. Stalin then called for Molotov, a more suitable candidate to his eyes, to deal with political Germany. A lot of people have an enormous amount of grievances with Josef Stalin and it will astonish many that a great lot of those live in Russia but despite all that he has been called, despot, tyrant, criminal and cunning. Stalin was far from being an idiot and was never accused of being one while his feared and hated chief of security Beria was also considered to be as an extremely competent manager and organizer. So to say that the Russians historically are not particularly known for their stupidity is factually correct even though today that is what intellectuals like Heil and Peters would like us to believe. Many South Africans like unfortunately, billions of people living under the influence of Hollywood and the soft-power of the western world, believe the United States was the key power in defeating Nazi Germany which is a gross fallacy. Without diminishing in any way the participation of the United States, any authoritative historian will tell you that it was the armed forces of the USSR who took on the full power of the German Military might and if the Red army had not hammered the Wehrmacht, reducing the latter’s capabilities to only defensive actions and if The Soviet Air force had not virtually erased the Luftwaffe of Goering from the sky, then the Combined Allied landings lead by the United States had absolutely no chance of succeeding. We will not discuss that matter with new wave imbeciles that pretend the contrary as we prefer to refer to Winston Churchill himself or William L. Shirer. The Soviet Union also literally beat the United States in the race to put a manmade object in space, as well as the first living animal and went on to put the first man and woman in space while the United States was pitifully lagging behind, incapable to explain why it’s so called traditional mighty technological advantage was constantly outclassed. Are those achievements of planetary and historical scope the work of an incompetent people or irrational nation? If Lavrov was such an incompetent, why did President Vladimir Putin keep him around? But let’s finish with the rhetoric and look into the specifics so we will neglect all the past achievements of Sergei Lavrov concentrating only on what the man did during the past year for Russia and for his direct superior, Vladimir Putin.

At the beginning of the hostilities, America started an all out diplomatic offensive to isolate the Russian Federation as well as its closest ally, Belarus. The US thought that they could get China to at least distance Beijing from Moscow if not condemn Russia outright, however Lavrov’s team made that wishful dream collapse, China did not distance itself from Russia but on the contrary, their bilateral economic, military and cultural co-operation sky rocketed. For Lavrov and his team, if keeping China aligned was an extremely notable achievement in itself, there was a tougher nut to crack and that was India. India has always maintained friendly relations with Russia (then the USSR) which considered Jawalal Nehru as a close friend and collaborator. The Indians also depend heavily on Russia for their military hardware. Furthermore, since its accession to freedom, the Indian state has been ferociously independent and considered itself non aligned. A few years ago, India seemed to shift towards an understanding with the United States, at least that was how the main pundits analyzed the past years rapprochement of the sub Indian continent with the United States. Many considered the start of the military operation by Russia in Ukraine as a key event that would mark the split between the two nuclear powers but as we know, nothing of that nature happened. On the contrary, India cemented its relations with the Russian Federation so much so that they ignored the famous price cap on Russian oil imposed by the European Union preferring to deal with the Russians, keeping to the price the two countries had previously agreed to and ignoring the dictates of the Europeans who felt the blow directly, unwilling to believe that someone would tell them no, we are not interested in the nonsense you are spouting. Without diminishing the critical work of Elvira Naibiullina and her Economic Hit Team which navigated the Russian Federation through the economic sanctions almost without a scratch, sanctions which were meant to put Russia on its knees financially, Lavrov and his team were key to keeping India on the path of a multipolar world. How could securing the nuclear and economic giant powerhouses of Asia, India and China, as partners or even allies for Russia could be interpreted as incompetence by Lavrov? It does not seem that Lavrov has in anyway upset either the Chinese or the Indians and those two countries alone account for an awful lot of the global GDP and they are both populated by an appreciable percentage of the world’s population. If Lavrov’s failure looks like that, then what will a demonstration of a diplomatic success from him appear as? And what about Turkey? Let’s remind our readers that historically Turkey has waged numerous wars against Russia and was allied to Germany during the First World conflict. Today Turkey is a key element of the NATO structure and field’s powerful land, sea and air forces and all things considered, Turkey’s armed forces are shy of the main European armies only by their not possessing nuclear weapons. This erstwhile NATO ally which in the past has waged war against another NATO member, Greece, was not so long ago engaged in an iron hand show down with Russia. As recently as the 24 of November 2015 near the Turkish Syrian border during the heat of the Syrian War, a Russian SU 24 Fighter Jet was actively engaged and shot down by the Turkish Air Force so spiraling the tensions between the two countries. Vladimir Putin found himself in an uncomfortable situation with the population at home asking for an adequate response. The government of Vladimir Putin and incontestably the team of Lavrov showed a formidable reserve which astonished diplomatic circles and demonstrated BTW, the non aggressive nature of the Russian government. Many including us among others did not understand then why Putin backed down.

If you follow the Ukrainian War carefully, you may take the bet without risking a lot of money that a few years down the line we will discover that some analysts in Langley concluded after the shooting down, that Russia will hardly react to escalation from NATO in the future. We argue that it is a fatal mistake which will translate in all its horror this year 2023 on the battlefield if NATO keep on pushing what the Russians consider as red lines. Since this is not the matter of concern here and to resume, the diplomatic stance of Russia paid and Erdogan has played a key role and has became the only viable mediator in the conflict. So successful was the Lavrov’s team that today Turkey shows growing signs of discomfort in the Atlantic Alliance and an eventual split from NATO has never been so dangerously close. President Erdogan even achieved the unthinkable, those who follow the conflict have been gob smacked the day Erdogan obtain the liberation of some members of the infamous neo-Nazi battalion Azov. If Turkey really happens to leave NATO, it will become a nightmarish military scenario and an explosive strategic position for the North Atlantic Organization. How in the name of Clausewitz can academics and university lecturers like Mr. Heil and Mr. Peters consider such formidable and almost inconceivable diplomatic achievements in less than a year as the incompetence of a man who has upset everyone?

Lavrov is a high performer and he proved it by many times in the course of the past year by engineering with his team the splitting of Saudi Arabia from the United States. The oil rich Kingdom has been a traditional ally of the United States and one of the main foundations of the Petro Dollar, the refocus of Saudi Arabia working closely with Russia and China is a tragedy of biblical consequences for the United States and a blow to its hegemony based on two main pillars, military power and the petro dollar. How can we pass over the other successes of Russian diplomacy by wrestling several African Countries from the influence of their previous colonial powers, notably France and the United Kingdom reaching the point where the majority of African Leaders boycotted the religious/political lecture that the ‘Savior of Democracy’, Zelenski himself wanted to give to them leaving a meeting attended only by four African Head of Nations. By what miracle of politico-philosophical contortions must one’s intellect be put to in order to accept that such diplomatic prowess epitomizes incompetence? You cannot but wonder what Mister Heil and Peters teach to our youth in those universities of the United Kingdom and the RSA, the mind boggles and the skin shivers. It is not astonishing that both men consider that neutrality is the most morally bankrupt option there is, we certainly admit that it is magnificently said but morally un-defendable. This logic makes sense if you strongly support NATO’s aggressive interventions as the Europeans powers (controlled by the United States) demand total allegiance because if you are not with us, you are against us. Heil and Peters do not teach us anything but argue that siding with Russia is morally abject and contrary to our democratic values from which we forcibly conclude that those who are fighting Russia are in fact bearers and guarantors of those values. South Africa and the Africans should have been clearly presented by our two academics what in detail are the idea of democracies and the values defended by Ukraine and by extension, one would understand the values of the western backers of Ukraine and those of the western propaganda mouth pieces like Business Day’s Eaton, Heil and Peters.

We will summarize the matter as we have countless times through these very same pages and across social media the complexity of the Ukrainian situation and the dubious values this nation defends. First of all how does the government of Zelenski come to be? All the governments of Ukraine having existed since 2014 originate from the violent events where elements of the Ukrainian population deposed an elected president. The questions we would like the Gurus of Business Day to answer is, are they supportive of removing elected governments in that fashion? Some will argue that numerous governments have come into existence from popular revolutions and we will concede that at least to them, although it is more than questionable if the so called revolution of 2014 was a popular one but even if it was, what do our academics say to the right of the Donbass people to say “ Look we got that, we understand that you people in Kiev are unhappy, we too from the Donbass are pretty unhappy but we would prefer the elected government to be reinstated so that elections can be organized”. Was that so unreasonable? The Crimean situation was fundamentally different as the peninsula had an autonomous status with its own Parliament as well as a Constitution which guaranteed the majority dominated Russian population of Crimea the right to declare themselves independent (A Right guaranteed by the Ukrainian constitution BTW) which they swiftly did in the face of the violent transition in Kiev. Will Mister Peters tell us as a University lecturer and a war photographer if Crimea was legally entitled to do so at this point in time? If the answer is no, then how do Peters and Heil explain that for the same exact reason NATO forces waged the first war on European soil since World War 2 to enforce the secession and independence of Kosovo from Serbia? An independence still not recognized by few members of the Atlantic Alliance. Why does that apply to Kosovo which at the time of it secession did not even have a constitution comparable to Crimea and this is categorically refused to the Crimean’s? How do they factor that fact in the great game of equality of populations? Later on in our story, the Donbass proceeded with an autonomy referendum which the new Kiev Government met with full military force. What followed for 8 long years was where the extremists of the Azov Battalion conducted an atrocious campaign of real terror in the Donbass with its panoply of rapes, murder and death squads whose graphic evidence needs the expertise and opinion of a war photographer. Has Mister Peters written articles admonishing the Ukrainian brutality? Maybe it was of course only Russian propaganda? We will concede (albeit not willingly and strictly for the sake of argument) to our experts of Business Day, a newspaper informing South Africans since the 1980’s that the whole Donbass story of Evil Neo- Nazi battalions as well as the rape, murders and death squads were at best, just the figments of the imagination of Vladimir Putin and the population of the Donbas. Even so, apparently, both men failed to see at this time the explosive potential of the Donbass and that it would lead to the worst land warfare Europe has known since the Nazi Hordes engulfed the old continent. Why have Mr. Heil and Peters kept remaining silent on the subject while this forgotten martyr region of the world was pounded by the artillery of Ukraine which is said to be now defending democracy? At the International Outsider with our very humble means, we were informing everyone around us about this totally ignored conflict and many times sent our opinion to the ‘Letter to the Editor’ section of the Voice of Russia which was later to become Sputnik News Though we are not associated to these publications in anyway, thankfully the newspaper published our modest contribution to the revulsion that we shared with few about the untold massacre which was unfolding. Our point is if we were able to see what was coming, how then does Business Day in accordance with Western Media keep silence like an accomplice on the plight of the Donbass but even more importantly, why experts such as Mr. Heil and Peters did not warn us of danger to come, the same two who now predict a disastrous outcome for South Africa if she clings to Russia? What part of our values defended by Ukraine today explain our morbid blindness in front of their crimes of yesterday? What is the position of our experts on the respect shown for International Law by the signatory parties? Are our values upheld when International Law is spoiled, ignored, twisted and played with in order to gain time to arm an ally? How do they explain the attitude of Poroshenko, Merkel and Hollande towards the Minsk agreements? Is bluntly lying in international agreements part of the values defended by Ukraine on the battlefield to this day? Does the whole Ukrainian fan club which Business Day seems to have become want us to embrace hooligan values that upheld the imperatives in the blowing up of a strategic asset of a close ally only to ensure the docility of the said ally even though this act of state terrorism could bring turmoil and struggle to the allied population? But let’s not beat around the bush, in other words who according to Mister Heil blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, for him who lives in the country of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, can he eliminate all those who could not have done the crime to know inevitably who has done it? Is it also part of our values to lie and use military allies like vassals and not valued partners?

So many questions that we know the geopolitical team of Business Day is absolutely incapable to answer honestly even if they would attempt to try. We are too small and insignificant to deserve any kind of response but if there was one, it would not be a comprehensive demolishment of our arguments but more along the lines, Kremlin paid trolls, Putin Useful Idiots, Muscovites, Commies, Kremlin propagandists and a flurry of more exotic denominations which leads us to our next and last set of our neophyte questions to the experts. Does the fact that one find itself in war with another country justify the cancellation of the culture, scientific and artistic achievements of this nation throughout all historical time? If the geniuses Heil, Eaton and Peters find it abject to ban Russian ballet, prohibit Russian theater and if they judge it moronic to cancel the periodic table, if they agree that temporally moving the flight of Yuri Gagarin to allow Alan Sheppard or John Glenn to be the first man in space is quite moronic; then if by any means the Strategic ‘experts’ think that all this woke cancel culture is another form of discrimination or racism, if this attitude revolts them, then why in the name of the all mighty we beseech on our knees, why then did they ask us to support politicians in the west with primal animalistic behaviors. Does not following and supporting a racist make me some sort of racist too? If I cannot read Tolstoy while I can easily read the “Hammer of the witches” or Mein Kampf without being a heretic, if I must in a spasmodic Pavlovian reflex get rid of Anna Karenina( after of course re-baptizing the reflex), can I then throw them on a bonfire? Can Mister Eaton explain to us what burning of books makes me part of? But maybe for Business Day columnists, Russophobia is not racism.

Let us allow ourselves a cheap comparison. The Republic of South Africa and its population take very seriously being accused of being racist. If the South Africans put their reaction to be called by the ‘R’ word into a Russian context, it would equate for someone insulting a Russian policeman by calling him a fascist and this is common reaction by the majority of the Russian people. If ever you are foolhardy enough to call people a fascist on the streets of Moscow, then you may find yourself rapidly able to judge if the Russian health care system is up to scratch or not. For very good reasons, the South African judicial system has a vast internationally recognized expertise in matter of racism and it would be interesting as a compelling intellectual exercise to ask a true expert what is his take on the relation between Russophobia and racism. But we will not wait for the answer of that expert; instead we will rather graphically illustrate our point. Tomorrow perhaps(God forbid) the Zulu people enter into hot conflict with the Xhosa people (We chose for our example two ethnic groups of South Africa but could have chosen any ethnicity in the pool of the human population). In this hypothetical conflict between the Xhosa and the Zulu, let’s assume that our sympathy and support goes to the Zulu nation. If during the heat of the military action between the enemy armies, the Zulu political leader comes forth and announces that he intends to ban the Xhosa language as an official one, that his intention is to rename all the Xhosa streets, interdict Xhosa books, dance and culture and he will encourage all his supporters to tie any suspected pro Xhosa supporters to street poles. Would Mr. Heil, Eaton and Peters agree that the Xhosaphobia proposed in our hypothetical situation should evoke a slight suspicion of racism? This depiction may seem extreme but it is rigorously and textually what is happening now in Ukraine and it is those moronic policies that Heil, Peters and Eaton consider as depicting our values. Most probably Eaton and his intellectual companions agree with the wise words of Joseph Borrell that’ Europe is a garden and the rest of the world a jungle’. Why does Eaton teach us that neutrality is amoral as a notion and that we should abandon it to follow such a moronic person as Borrell!? What Borrell means is that the Strategic expert Heil, living in Britain lives in a paradisiacal garden but Peters, Eaton and their South African audience lives in a jungle, not even a Savannah or a Bush but a Jungle. Heil to Borrell applauded the aptly named Dominik Heil. The 75 five years old Caucasian white man has spoken, indeed what a man to follow! Thus are stated the values of the civilized man in his European garden speaking to the primitives in the other parts of the world. Does Eaton really understand when he asks African readers to adhere to the values espoused by people like Borrell, Macron or Van der Leyen that they are asking you to idolize state kleptocracy? Today, non elected European officials sitting in the European parliament (which is not really one) are changing laws to allow them to grab Russian investments worth billions of Euros to inject more money in the giant money laundering machine that Ukraine had become under the fallacious pretext to rebuild the country. Congratulations, you have just been invited by Business Day to join theft to your values. It may appear to the reader that we are indulging in a complicated exercise of trollism but all that has been written are well established facts. We cannot resist asking to the geopolitical experts of Business Day if Ukraine has a Nazi problem or again, have those who have come to believe the story accomplices or victims of the Russian Propaganda machine? For us the answer is invariably yes, not only Ukraine has a Nazi problem but those extremist elements hold key sectors of the political and military structures of this country.

But it is unconceivable to think that the team at Business Day will agree with our assertions, they are too supportive and keen to sell the second grade comedian Zelenski as a hero rather than admitting that the whole of the Ukrainian government is nothing less than a bunch of violent thugs. Here again at the Outsider, we will be magnanimous, we will concede for the endless sake of argument that we will forget the death squads, we will ignore traumatised children hiding in cellars terrified by the artillery barrage of the smiling clown Zelenski and his predecessor, the chocolate king Poroshenko. We will wipe out the rapes, the killings and the death squads not to hurt the sensibilities of our Strategic and Geopolitical ‘experts’ because for the people that control the narrative that sublets like Business Day will then redistribute among their local population, the neo Nazis infecting the Ukrainian military and political life are at worst, naughty boys. They try to sell us the white wash and rebrand the Nazi elements not by effectively uprooting this rotten philosophy but by telling you that Ukraine has solved this problem. As we said, we will go along with them on that because you cannot trap and uncover professional, unscrupulous and slimy journalists that way. What you have to do is to point out to them something that Ukraine worships officially and this something has to be shameful and obnoxious. Fortunately for us in the obnoxious arena, the panel of choices showing the rotten nature of the buffoonish Ukrainian regime is astronomically large and it takes huge amount of efforts from the MSM to effectively cover up the morbid nature of the Ukrainian government but so much evidence filters through that it is becoming extremely difficult with passing of days except for die hard Pro Ukrainian individuals like Eaton, Heil and Peters.

A fortnight ago a colleague published a vitriolic critic of a debate which appeared on YouTube where she explains what are the people’s expectations regarding what should be discussed in a debate between opposing parties in the Ukrainian War. She went on to introduce to our readers a website called Myrotvorets, which is a golden occasion to show to our readers what kind of principles the country some South African news papers would like you to embrace are in reality. We will not go into a long diatribe about Myrotvorets but few words that define the core ideas that it conveys. Myrotvorets keeps a list of the enemies of Ukraine; this hit list contains figures of the opposition in Ukraine and also of course a full load of Russian politicians or simple civilians who irritate them. The list also contains foreign journalists as well as a little girl of 13 yrs old speaking about her experience of the war. The website calls for the murder of the people listed and will mark of an X when these people are executed, you cannot invent it, and it is gross, cruel and barbaric. We are the first to say that you cannot judge a nation by the actions of a handful of fanatics and incedently, we cannot say that Mister Heil, Eaton and Peters sympathise or agree with it, maybe they do, we do not know and we wish to believe they don’t because the story does not stop here. Our colleague wrote about Myrotvorets, we quote “A fact that is not widely known is that the UN and some European countries have demanded the closure of the site but that demand was refused by the Ukrainian parliament” end quotation. So here are the facts, the United Nations and few European nations still having microscopic traces of a backbone demanded the closure of the website but the Ukrainian Parliament, not Zelenski, not his party but the Ukrainian Parliament itself refused to close the site. The conclusion is terribly straight forward, maybe Eaton and consort do not agree with Myrotvorets but Ukraine officially does. The ‘values’ defended by Myrotvorets are so profoundly representative of the core of Ukrainian thinking and values that its Parliament went head to head against the UN and its own financial backers and refused to prohibit the barbaric site.

The following questions are simple since Business Day and the Authors propose we support Ukraine. What can justify the murder of a 13 year old child and in what sense is that a value that I should share? Why is Heil telling me to support people that call for murder of journalists and 13 year old little girls? We did not uncover any writings, articles, or social media posts of Eaton, Heil or Peter’s denunciating the barbarism of Myrotvorets. Was it by ignorance? Or by omission? Or could it be that it is one of those things that these people suggest us to support in silence because you know in some conditions like arming the Ukrainians that are defending our ‘values’, murdering little girls is acceptable.

To close this section on Nazism in Ukraine, we often wonder what on earth are the common points and values that tie a man of the Bantu people standing proud in the heart of Africa to a pathetic Slavian thinking he is an Aryan and dying like a rat for the wrong hateful and racist reasons under the steel of a Soviet factory with the name of Bandera on his lips? (Bandera was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, a criminal that the Ukrainians consider as the father of their independence). And to finally conclude with the ‘experts’ in Strategy, the pair wrote ….” To be fair, BRICS is probably the club that is most likely to stop Russia going nuclear in Ukraine” Really? Contrary to NATO, the BRICS is not a military alliance and not one of the countries of the BRICS are jeopardizing or have lost an ounce of the sovereignty, contrary to the NATO club where any country voicing the slightest voice of opposition is bullied to swiftly rejoin the ranks. Under no circumstances would Russia allow its policy regarding the use of nuclear weapons to be tied in any way to the BRICS and if ever the Russians find themselves compelled to use atomic strength, it is highly doubtful that any of the Russian BRICS partners could have any kind of influence on them if that decision was in the making. We will not advise a nephew or son of yours to book the Strategic lectures of Mister Heil or Peters as we would not trust these people to teach Golf management course and design (A serious matter in South Africa as if you do not know your stuff, you could find yourself in the stomach of a crocodile or surprised by a baboon sitting in your Golf car drinking your cold drink and it goes without saying that in both cases the situation is life threatening).

In its campaign against Russia, Business Day was unable to resist calling the soul of Nelson Mandela for help when in their own opinion article of the 24 of January where they refer to Mandela’s outburst at Saro-Wiwa’s execution like a commitment to human rights values and justice and we cannot but agree. However, we cannot pretend at our level to know what Mandela would have done and said about the Ukrainian war if he was alive today. Would he have supported his historical allies and friends from Russia or joined the Americans who once plotted against him? For us, the answer seems evident but consider this. Mandela considered Colonel Khadafy as a valued friend and once famously invited anyone who had a problem with his friendship to jump into a pool. Biden the man responsible of the degradation in Ukraine by leading a catastrophic policy of confrontation with the Russian Federation was the Vice President of Barrack Obama while Hillary Clinton, part of the government assisted with hysterical joy barely restraining her morbid enjoyment when she watched live while Khadafy was being butchered and sodomized with a knife. We have some compelling doubts about Mandela supporting Biden and Ukraine, should Mister Peters who has interviewed the great man tell us his educated opinion on the subject?

S.Martin

This article was originally thought to be signed by the team as it conveys the indignation of all of us but due to its content, we did not want to be accused of hiding behind vagueness and the author of these lines would like to thank Anton V.K Komarov for the military and historical insights, Julia Brooks Bean for the research and AI Astroverbot Julia, for tracking the past works of the people we quoted, Our Editor Sandra whose support has always been unconditional and determining and who recently suffered a close personal loss and to whom we present our sincerest condolences, was integral to the completion of this article.