There is no other nation in Europe so maligned and demonised as Belarus. Ever since former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice branded the democratically elected president of the country as “Europe’s last dictator” in 2008, the image and reputation of this noble country has been callously tarnished.
Belarus is deeply familiar with the notion of dictatorship. More than any other country it suffered the worst of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War.
The former Belorussia has always been a multicultural place, with Jews, Christians and Muslims living side by side for centuries. This deep tolerance for cultural and religious differences is still celebrated in Belarus today.
Yet the European Union, Israel and the United States never cease from spreading atrocious lies and disinformation concerning the country. This is because Belarus is a social democracy that refuses to take orders from the IMF, the World Bank and their geopolitical manifestations.
Unlike the crony regimes in Ireland, Romania, Poland and other European states, you will not find complicity in crimes against humanity in Belarus. There are no CIA stopovers like Shannon, no CIA-run prisons where innocent people are incarcerated without trial or due process and tortured. You will not find Belarusian shock troops in Iraq. They will pay for their oil and energy, unlike the US and Nato who seem to want to control all of Central Asia for its resources under the pretext of ‘security’.
President Alexander Lukas-henko – whose salary amounts to a modest €17,000 per year – has no connections to multinational corporations, unlike the crooks in the US and the EU who accuse him of human rights violations, corruption and electoral fraud. Under Lukashenko, Belarus has enjoyed some of the highest living standards in the former Soviet Union, with little over one per cent unemployment.
But isn’t Lukashenko the man who praised Hitler in an interview with the German paper Handelsblatt in 1995? Isn’t that the anti-Semitic guy who called a Jewish town a ‘pigsty’. That’s a no on both counts. The interview with Dr Martin Zeiner was cleverly mistranslated by a Russian TV network to include references to Hitler. This was confirmed by the interviewer himself! In reality, Lukashenko is a die-hard communist who has spoken out against fascism on numerous public occasions.
As for anti-Semitism and the ‘pigsty’ comment, Lukashenko was trying to explain that the town in question, which once had a thriving Jewish community, has become a pigsty since they left for Israel. Yet in spite of the fact that the chief Rabbi of Belarus has praised the president for his kindness to the Jewish community, the EU and the US are seemingly adamant that Lukashenko is anti-Semitic.
In 2000, President Clinton appointed Michael G Kozak as US Ambassador to Belarus. Kozak is a great champion of human rights – he oversaw the ‘humanitarian’ massacres of the US-trained Contra rebels in Nicaragua under the Reagan regime, who slaughtered entire villages, killing over 30,000 innocent men, women and children. Kozak later told the Times that the US ‘democracy’ mission in Belarus would be similar to that in Nicaragua. Perish the thought!
The EU is firmly behind the US mission, threatening sanctions and spreading lies about repression, electoral fraud and oppression of ‘free media’. But as we in Ireland know too well, the EU has a problem with any election results it doesn’t like.
The problem with Belarus is that it just doesn’t understand what we Europeans mean by liberty, democracy and ‘European values’. But don’t worry, we’ll teach them!
