Ukraines Foe Of The Week: Glenn Greenwald
One would have thought, in the early weeks of 2014, that the Ukrainian people’s achievement of throwing out the corrupt, Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, would have been greeted with general acclaim from leftist politicians and journalists.
One would have been wrong though: In the days after Yanukovych abandoned office, and Ukraine, in line with its constitution, restored its government and elected an acting president, many on the left in the West started to parrot Kremlin propaganda that there had been a “fascist coup.”
One of them was Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former lawyer who has been a prominent voice in left-leaning journalism. On Dec. 31, 2014, nearly a year after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and eight months after Russia fomented war in the Donbas, Greenwald criticized fellow journalists in a tweet for “obsessing on Russia’s actions in Crimea while ignoring U.S. interference in Ukraine,” which he said was “jingoistic and deceptive.”
Given that Greenwald had already had almost a year to find out what had actually happened in Ukraine, there must be some other factor causing him to be so wrong about the country.
That factor is, of course, knee-jerk anti-Americanism. While many on the left quite rightly criticize the United States for mistakes in its foreign policy, their opposition to foreign interventions and imperialism tends to be one-sided.
Correctly seeing Russia as a foe of the West, they incorrectly ignore or, worse, justify, the graver crimes of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian, imperialistic regime.
The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend — in fact, it may well be an even worse enemy.
This has clearly not sunk in with the likes of Greenwald, as seen from a recent exchange on Twitter on U.S. plans to arm Ukraine with defensive weapons, including much-needed anti-tank missiles.
Greenwald was challenged for using the term “anti-Russian Ukrainians” in his tweet with a link to a report of Pentagon plans to arm Ukraine. When challenged about the pejorative phrase, he first said it was justified because two think tanks had used it, and then tweeted that he had “simply pointed out that US arming of Ukrainians is a policy Kremlin opposes, because it regards Ukrainians as adverse. That’s it.”
However, when asked whether he was OK with the Kremlin arming and training “rebels” inside Ukraine, Greenwald never replied.
Maybe he was bored with the exchange, but this failure to support Ukraine and recognize the truth, while apologizing for the Kremlin, fits a pattern. For that, Greenwald is Ukraine’s foe of the week and earns this week’s Order of Lenin.
https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/ukraines-friend-foe-week-5.html
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