Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

Published: 1 March 2022 ~ Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends is a Good Thing

Now, you may think that the reason I haven’t posted anything in the past few days is because as events have unfolded in Ukraine I have been hiding behind my settee. But nothing could be further from the truth. Until recently, that spot was reserved for one person and one person only, Justiceless Justin Trudeau. However, having clubbed, gassed, rubber-bulleted and horse-trampled his native citizens into undemocratic pulp using armed and armour-plated riot squads, he now emerges in his new role as the West’s Democracy Ambassador, slamming (I believe that’s the popular western media word for it) the military operation in Ukraine as an attack on freedom and democracy. Something mind, which western leaders and their collusive corporate media conveniently forgot to accuse him of.

Following President Putin’s announcement that he was recognising the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) as independent, I asked my Russian friends during a social evening what they thought about this development. After two attempts to solicit their thoughts on the subject, I was politely reminded of the social, cultural, historic and spiritual ties between Russia and Ukraine. Someone referred to the plight of Russians living in the stricken regions, but my friends were too diplomatic to allude to western interference and how it was fanning the flames.

When the news broke, 24 February 2022, that Russia had launched a military operation, I stayed schtum. After all, I didn’t want to become the Kaliningrad version of John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty. So, I did what everyone else was doing in Russia and around the world, I took to corporate, and corporate social, media.

It was touching, at first, to receive messages via my wife’s Facebook account from UK friends asking if we were alright. Silly question: being alright is never something that I have been accused of, but then, when I borrowed my wife’s Facebook account and voiced my opinions, opinions which did not strictly coalesce with the western narrative, I was subject to howls of outrage and the usual Aresebook abuse.

“I might have mentioned Woke. But I think I got away with it!”

Not that I was surprised by this reaction, because, quite frankly, many people in the UK seem to have lost the fundamental ability to think for themselves, if, indeed, they ever possessed it. It was not that I was being radical, at least not anymore ‘radical’ than people judge me to be, I was merely expressing my usual antipathy towards the unilateral viewpoint of the world as packaged by western media and, in answer to the Russophobic slurs doing the rounds on Facebook, drawing my fellow Brits’ attention to the glaring socio-political flaws of living one’s life in Britland, a subject which, quite evidently, they did not want reminding of, such was their joy to escape the plandemic and immerse themselves in a new hysteria.

As for Ukraine, I am more than sure that until this week hardly any Brits had heard of it, let alone know where it is, and those that do know would not have the slightest notion of its history, either ancient or modern. They would certainly possess no knowledge of the symbiotic relationship between Ukraine and Russia, of the intertwined history of both cultures and know even less about what has been happening in Ukraine over the last eight years, although, with respect to the latter, this is an ignorance they cannot be blamed for as the neoliberal corporate media has been rather more than sparing when it comes to telling the truth.

LINKS:

Prof: Russian Spec Op to De-Militarise & De-Nazify Ukraine Fully Justified Under International Law
German MP Says NATO Responsible For Ukraine Crisis, Should Have Guaranteed Neutral Status

Nevertheless and suddenly, every Brit under the sun (and there’s not much of that in Britland, either actual or metaphorical) is an expert on Ukraine, at least everyone on Facebook.

I often wonder on those few times that I visit Arsebook whether anybody on there knows anything more than nothing. The site is littered with all sorts of bizarre claims and even more bizarre counter-claims, and it seems that everyone, almost without exception, is snapping at the others’ heels like little yappy dogs.

Facebook is full of know-it-alls who quite obviously don’t know the difference between knowing it all and bugger all, but what they don’t know they are more than willing to share with you. On the bitchometer scale, Facebook is beneath Twitter, just. But I cannot help thinking that Mark Shutulbugger, whatever his name is, could have chosen a more apt name for his argumentative, politically censored and deplatforming media site. Arsebook fits the bill, but Megaphone would have been better or failing that what about Bitch-Brag?

It’s a funny thing, but when I read reports and articles from media sources from around the world, I never go to those sources with prejudice aforethought, hoping to read something that will bolster my opinions or prejudices. I read and then after I have finished reading, I think about what I have read, and then to what extent I agree with it or, conversely, to what extent I bring it into question. I think it is called critical judgement: The ability to be able to read or discuss something, analyse it, extrapolate from it, digest it and then, if possible, reach a conclusion. It might not be the right conclusion, if ever there was or is such a thing, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I arrived there of my own volition, after considering different points of view, rather than jumped onto the bandwagon and allowed my mind to be hijacked as an echo chamber for the corporate media.

Most Facebookers, however, seem either to go off half-cock, so to speak, make it up as they go along or present evidence to support their prejudices with flagrant disregard for the maxim that ‘There’s always two sides to every story [at least]’. The remaining Arsebookers are just insulting ~ to everyone else and their own intelligence, that is presuming they have some hidden away somewhere.

Sanctioned by Facebook Bullies — **The Facebook Bully, showing how it’s done in a real free-speech democracy!**

When people say ‘utter bollocks’ on Facebook (Oooh, and they do, don’t they!) and shout the odd word or two that they have picked out of the Daily Mail or Guardian or from sitting in front of the goggle box, it generally makes me laugh.

I know I should have more sense than to reply to the numpty heads, but who can resist a little bit of fun. When someone on Facebook assumes that they are asserting the unassailable truth (and Facebook has many of them) and is able to do it in three words or less from something they read or heard yesterday, ie “It’s all propaganda!”, I cannot help but admire the obvious confidence they have in themselves and in their incisive powers of ratiocination.

By stark contrast, it took me about 30 years to realise that the political system in the UK is rigged and that the Establishment is rotten to the core. Like Neil Oliver, historian and author, I, too, had been brought up to believe that we, the Brits, the West, were the ‘good guys’. It was only after working on a number of political publications that it slowly began to dawn on me that I, and my generation, had been played, that our neoliberal masters had sleep-walked us into a completely different and, from their point of view, completely indifferent era.

I began to question the lifelong orthodoxy that we were in fact the ‘good guys’ but could not easily make the transition from this long held and internalised view to something that I would rather not admit, not even to myself, namely that the West had gone bandito. But sadly, events in recent years have proven that this is the case.

Whilst our neoliberal lords and masters run around the world causing untold havoc in the self-appointed role as crusading missionaries, bringing ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ to countries that don’t want it ~ at least not the woke kind that we are peddling ~ and branding it nicely for public consumption (it says ‘intervention and regime change’ on the tin), on the home front they are insidiously busy, eroding and destroying everything that we hold dear, our history, our sovereignty, the security of our ancestral home, our heritage and all that they would have us believe the West has always stood for, such as personal freedom, freedom of speech, decency and humanity. And you’ve got to hand it to them, they are doing a very good job.

Meanwhile, the UK’s armchair political pundits and Facebook’s keyboard warriors, those who know everything in the two seconds that it takes to see it on the telly or read it in The Daily Neoliberal, are child prodigies in reverse.

As such, being unfriended by them is a breath of fresh air. Where friendship is concerned, real friendship, not the kind that comes with a screen-tick or a silly little ‘like’, the collateral damage from airing your opinion on social media and then being ‘slammed’ (there’s that word again!) by your ‘friends’ before they ceremoniously unfriend you, is nothing to be ashamed of; on the contrary it is without doubt a most excellent way of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends is a Good Thing

One fellow-me-lad (It or Other) on Facebook, accused me of being ‘brainwashed’? Who was he confusing me with, if not a high percentage of the UK population? I replied:

“Hello Chris, Not brainwashed. I was fortunate to go to school at a time before the UK education system became the liberal-left academy of Woke, so I am still capable of independent thought. Another point in my favour is that I threw the TV (that’s television, by the way, not transvestite) out 25 years ago. After all, as I could never bring myself to pay the TV license to sponsor the BBC’s liberal-left bias I thought it only fair. Furthermore, having worked in the media for years, I have a healthy disrespect for everything I read in the media, no matter where it comes from. And everyone who knows me knows that I would never wind anyone up … All the best.”

A good many Arsebook commenters are what I would call ‘last worders’. They are not interested in the slightest of soliciting a meaningful response. Their remarks are typically childish, clearly intended to provoke and insult rather than engage and the last word is truly paramount.

As I reach the end of this post, I am almost inclined to let my brother have the last word. He has always had a way with words, as you can see from his email yesterday.

“I just have to say I’m sick of hearing these c! *! s on UK TV slagging off Mr Putin.”

My brother should think himself lucky that he does not do social media, although I have a feeling that if he did, he would really do quite well.

Whoops, sorry, must dash, there go those sanction sirens!