Was antiglobalism about sacrificing a free nation on the altar of dictator Vladimir Putin?

I confess that I am reaching a point in my life where I am becoming more than fed up with certain deceptive discourses.

Ben Shapiro's speech criticizing Tucker Carlson as 'an opponent of conservatism'
Antiglobalism, a way to distort conservative discourse to the Kremlin's liking

One of these is the one that invokes so-called "antiglobalism" against supposed supranational elites who are allegedly dismantling national sovereignty, elites whom a segment of the right now identifies with "the rich," in a populist drift whose messages are increasingly difficult to distinguish from those of the far left. One of the points of agreement between these two extremes is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which many antiglobalists often refer to as a "war," avoiding the word "invasion" at all times.

The trick is easy to understand: if their audience doesn't perceive that as an invasion, it's easier to forget that there is an invader and that this war didn't start because evil globalist elites wanted to send young Europeans to die as part of a conspiracy to replace them with non-European immigrants, but because an anti-Western dictator, Vladimir Putin, invoked classic nationalism to justify his intention to seize another country.

How can something like this fit into the simple antiglobalist framework? By distorting it to make it seem like something else. From the antiglobalist right, some voices try to convince us that if there is a war in Ukraine, it is not the fault of Russia or Putin, the invading country and the dictator who gave the order for Russian troops to invade another country, but rather the fault of the Western governments that had the decency to support the invaded. This position is commendable and was not exclusive to any particular ideology. In fact, among the governments that have sent the most aid to Ukraine are the Polish and Czech conservatives. Because fortunately, not all of the right wing suffers from this distorted view of the invasion.

Obviously, that crude manipulation to make us forget that Ukraine is suffering an invasion has a clear purpose: to try to stop the flow of military aid to Ukraine and leave the invaded without weapons to confront the invader. In the end, behind all this rhetoric about defending national sovereignty, what lay was a discourse that aims to force an independent nation to surrender to a criminal regime, simply because that regime has a nationalist discourse and has supporters among that antiglobalist right wing, which one day boasts of being patriotic and the next day trips up true patriots like the defenders of Ukraine.

In this eagerness to distort the facts to replace them with a ludicrous ideological discourse, the latest is to reinterpret the World War I in an antiglobalist key, linking it to Ukraine and blaming "global governance," ignoring the fact that the United Nations has been completely ineffective in the face of this invasion, among other things because Russia, the invading nation, has veto power in its Security Council. It is worth remembering that the World War I was the result of a clash between nationalisms, that is, the fruit of the same ideology that some propose to solve all our problems, an ideology that has nothing to do with true patriotism, as Pope Saint John Paul II rightly reminded us.

This revision of history isn't limited to the First World War. Even from that antiglobalist right, charlatans like Tucker Carlson blame Churchill for the World War II, simply because he chose to resist the most criminal representative of nationalism in the 20th century: Nazism. In the end, as has happened so many times before, some rewrite history to fit their infamous present-day positions. Putin's useful idiots need to change history to make Russian aggression against Ukraine seem less bad, and they know it's impossible to forget that 86 years ago a world war began not because of Churchill or the United Kingdom, but because of a nationalist regime that wanted to seize half of Europe.

In the end, one has to ask: Was antiglobalism about sacrificing a free nation on the altar of dictator Vladimir Putin? Was all that rhetoric against elites and the wealthy, always focused on those who govern democratic countries (politicians who undoubtedly deserve much criticism), meant to make a criminal like Putin seem less evil? Doesn't the defense of national sovereignty include Ukraine, or perhaps other independent countries that were once under Moscow's boot? Will Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and perhaps even Poland be the next to be betrayed, for the greater glory of Russian imperialism?

Don't try to convince me that this is a conservative or patriotic speech. It's something else entirely. Fortunately, some are beginning to understand this and speak out about it, as we saw here yesterday.

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Photo: TASS.