The odd assortment of pro-Putin bedfellows grows and now features a local group dedicated to that most leftist of fixations, stopping war. Cue a million peace symbols and upturned index and middle fingers.
It turns out that peace in our time can be achieved quite easily by giving Putin what he wants and hoping like hell that he doesn’t decide later that he would like more.
This week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk climbed on to the peace train. Initial reports were sketchy.
Ukraine-Russia Peace:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2022
- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.
- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).
- Water supply to Crimea assured.
- Ukraine remains neutral.
Had the entrepreneur dialled up the Russian president for a chat?
Musk denied this but went on to offer a peace plan where the Russians would get to keep their military gains, including a few they have subsequently lost.
Craving legitimacy, Musk put his peace plan to a Twitter poll because Twitter has never got anything wrong ever.
One of the shortcomings of the peace plan loomed quickly when it transpired two of the four regions annexed by Russia a fortnight ago, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, have faced a hail of Russian missiles and Russian drone strikes.
Musk risks being seen as an appeaser. No one wants a nuclear war but only Putin has threatened it.
But we must turn to the local group who I first came across this week. Posters posted online urged people to gather on the streets and call for peace. Tune in, turn on, bring your guitar.
One of the posters reads, “March for Australian Neutrality. End the War Now. De-Escalate Nuclear StandOff.”
The fine print assures peace lovers everywhere that the march is not pro-Russian, nor pro-Ukraine. “We are calling on Australians to support a negotiated peace settlement to bring the Ukraine War to an end and avoid nuclear conflict.”
My first thought was that it smacked of the UK’s Stop the War Coalition, an anti-American leftist organisation first founded in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
In the UK, Stop the War includes the usual collective of left-wing lunatics, including its original convenor, Andrew Murray. Murray is an old commo who joined Labour to become a special adviser to Jeremy Corbyn.
Murray also created the UK’s Stalin Society, a discussion group that argued the old mass-murderer has been unfairly maligned in the history books. Presumably the chats proceed along the lines of, “He may have killed 40 million people, but his housing policies were second to none.”
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Stop the War issued a statement, “Stop the War opposes any war over Ukraine, and believes the crisis should be settled on a basis which recognises the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and addresses Russia’s security concerns.”
It was signed by political pest George Galloway and 10 Labour MPs including Corbyn, and former shadow ministers, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell.
Stop the War is something of a misnomer. Corbyn et al don’t want the war to stop. While they meekly tut-tut Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, they demand NATO stop arming the Ukrainian military.
If they had their way, war would stop only when Putin says so.
We might reasonably presume that the organisers of the March for Australian Neutrality would be cut from the same cloth, ideological bedfellows of Corbyn and his ilk.
But we’d be wrong.
Those who seek to crowd our capital cities with banner-flying anti-war protesters fighting for peace, are a tearaway group of anti-vaxxers and members of the amorphous freedom movement, including Simeon Boikov, the self-titled Aussie Cossack.
Readers might recall an article I wrote in February, entitled Putin’s Paramilitary Proxies in Australia where I detailed Boikov’s background.
In the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, Boikov vomited up the Putinist nonsense on his YouTube channel that Russia’s “special military operation” was designed to demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine. It would be over in days, Boikov suggested.
The bio, all of which featured Boikov’s own statements over time, included an account of his education in Russia.
Boikov studied at the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow when he was 18. The monastery has close ties with the KGB agency successors, the FSB and the foreign intelligence service, SVR. Boikov now leads a group known as the Aussie Cossacks. Estimates in their numbers vary, perhaps 150 or 200 ‘cossacks’ cosplay in Russian military uniforms. According to a Russian website, Boikov said of his time at the monastery, “One might say that while I was studying there I was, well, we must not say recruited, right? Basically, I fell under the influence of right-thinking pro-Russian elements. They began to fashion a pro-Russian adult from a young Australian.”
Back then Boikov threatened to sue over the article. I’m still waiting for the writ. I check the letterbox every day. Nothing.
Boikov had been quiet until recently, having spent a few months at Her Majesty’s pleasure after pleading guilty in June to breaching a suppression order. On the day of his release from prison, he attended an anti-vax rally in Martin Place, Sydney.
Boikov now fashions himself as a pacifist. Maybe his holiday at Long Bay had brought a change of heart.
Well, that seems unlikely given that a quick view of his YouTube videos features a triumphant clip of a Russian missile strike at an electricity station at Lviv in western Ukraine which Boikov spells in the Russian, Lvov.
There are reports that the missile strike and three others at power stations around Lviv caused more than 60 civilian casualties. The clip features the hashtag #JudgementDay.
One of the Melbourne promoters of the March for Australian Neutrality is freedom movement veteran Harrison McLean.
Back in November 2020, McLean through an online alias in a message group called the “Serious Anti-Zionist chat” expressed support for anti-Semitism but said his followers were “not ready for the JQ yet.”
JQ is code for “The Jewish Question.”
“We have a LOT of very NORMIE people coming in from banners and [Facebook] groups that are not ready for the JQ yet and may attack us as highly anti-Semitic and stop promoting us all together to their friends and family,” McLean posted.
McLean, too, may have changed his ways, his thoughts and beliefs.
It’s fair to say the anti-vax movement is not a one size fits all ideological group. We’re not talking about people who have an aversion to vaccines or a fear of needles but a rusted-on group of cultists that by ideological affiliation would be described as either extreme left or extreme right.
The salient point is that if people have been drawn into a belief that Covid vaccines, indeed any vaccines, are ticking genetic timebombs designed by the New World Order to bring about global genocide, it’s not too much of a stretch that they be further inculcated with the view that the world is run by cabal of Jewish bankers and that Putin is a victim of western hegemony.
The political scientists would point to the horseshoe theory of ideological affiliation, that the extremes on the left and the right are closer to each other than either one is to the middle. What has changed more recently is that those on the far right now openly espouse anti-US sentiments.
Of greater concern is that lost, delusional people are being snapped up and dragged into an extreme political movement, manipulated into a view that the West is a straw man and Putin’s might is right.
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