MICHAEL BASSETT: DUPLICITY IN THE MODERN WORLD

We have entered a new world where few things are on the level. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Dictatorland. Vladimir Putin’s forces brazenly invaded Ukraine in 2022, breaking a vital stipulation in the United Nations Charter to which Russia signed up at the end of World War Two. It specifies that no sovereign state shall invade another. In 2022 Putin knew that Russia’s veto at the UN would prevent any united action against Russia so long as his delegates weren’t temporarily absent from the Security Council, as they had been in 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea, thus triggering the Korean War. Having invaded a neighbour, Putin has moved Russia on to a war footing. All Russians, including those in the Far East have been informed that their country is at war, and they must watch out for “terrorists from the west” who are “threatening Russia’s security”. How about that? First you break international law by invading a neighbour, and then you warn your people to beware of any fightback, and label those engaged in it as “terrorists”.

Russia is gradually becoming a basket case. Many thousands of its best and brightest fled the country when the invasion of Ukraine began. Russia has lost at least 100,000 people in the fight against Ukraine. Its economy has subsided to the 11th largest in the world, about on a par with Italy’s. It would collapse without its copious oil exports. Putin has an arrest warrant out against him from the international criminal court. But with the backing of the Russian Orthodox Church he has embarked on a crusade to restore his country’s boundaries to those that existed when the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991. Many countries have expressed their disapproval, but are doing little to stop Russia’s aggression that daily becomes more of a threat to Europe.

But Putin’s not alone in the world of threats and lies. Donald Trump, his great fan, is an eager disciple. Having twice sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, to defend free speech, and to rule for ALL Americans, Trump has quite brazenly announced that he’ll use the National Guard and the wider armed forces against his political opponents. Selectively, he is picking out Democrat-run states and cities to invade with trumped up stories about sudden outbreaks of crime. Mind you, crime in the US is omnipresent because of too many guns and drugs. But it isn’t confined to Democrat-run states and cities. Trump remains enraged because he was badly beaten in 2020 by a Democrat and twice impeached for his misdemeanours. No matter what the Constitution might say, he sees his second term as payback time. Trump hopes, indeed expects, that he’ll be saved from any consequences by his appointees to the Supreme Court. Yes, a federal judge in Oregon found that the President’s reasons for federalising the National Guard in Portland, Oregon, were “untethered to the facts”. But the White House probably believes a Supreme Court with a majority of judges appointed by Republican presidents (three by Trump himself) will always support a Republican POTUS on appeal. Or will it? Are those judges just as careless of the Constitution as their President? Are they, too, untethered to reality? Having sworn themselves to do one thing, will they do another?

New Zealand, too, has its share of duplicity. Take the Green Party which officially is concerned with New Zealand’s future, preserving forests and wetlands, and trades on that inspirational name “Green”. In reality its MPs preach class warfare using language that Lenin’s Bolsheviks would have been proud of more than a century ago. Even its leader, Chloe Swarbrick, gives a Lenin salute. These days, the so-called Greens are obsessed not with oceans and threatened species, but with the fate of Hamas-led Palestinians. So much so that they shout and roar as though one small expression of opinion from our Minister of Foreign Affairs could solve all Gaza’s problems. The Greens’ conduct eggs on the madder end of town which breaks windows in Chloe’s own constituency. Amazing behaviour from people who have convinced themselves they deserve to hold office after the next election.

We live in a world where little seems straight forward any more. International agreements and security guarantees like those given to Ukraine in the 1990s that were constitutional safeguards carefully devised to protect individual freedoms, all seem insubstantial in our rapidly changing world. We are tugged this way and that by social media, Trump’s Truth Social, and our own irresponsible Main Stream Media. We need to focus more on the longer-term consequences of speech and actions, not the impulses of the moment. Above all, we need to start thinking about the likely repercussions if we simply ignore constant duplicity.