Putin–lover Scott Lively went recycling for his Feb. 19 WorldNetDaily column:
As we approach the second anniversary of the NATO-provoked Russian military invasion of Ukraine, and the world is finally getting to hear Russia’s side of the story thanks to the courageous journalist Tucker Carlson, I would like to republish my article of March 23, 2022, that might have saved us all from two years of war propaganda and social manipulation had it gotten that kind of exposure and had conservatives adopted its quintessentially American talking points.
Why? First, because it summarizes the history and reasoning of our own Monroe Doctrine as the most logical basis for comparing Russia’s demands, and second, because it links to Vladimir Putin’s “Empire of Lies” speech on the night of the invasion – explaining in his own words why Russia had no choice but to take military action in Ukraine, citing specific, systematic and factually verifiable U.S. and NATO provocations.
Lively gets a key fact wrong — NATO is a defensive alliance, thus it cannot really provoke anyone, let alone provoke a war. He also ignored the fact that Putin’s speech has been fact-checked and found to be filled with falsehoods and misrepresentations — you know, the kind of thing an authoritarian leader would do to justify a deliberate war of aggression.
Lively’s original column was also published at WND, and it’s filled with the Putin propaganda we’ve come to expect from him. For instance:
It has recently become fairly common knowledge that in 2014, the Barack Obama regime, assisted by George Soros, staged a coup in Ukraine to remove the democratically elected pro-Russian president and replace him with a “puppet monarch” who would further the NATO long-game to fully encircle Russia with nukes. Under our own Monroe Doctrine, that was an act of war justifying military action. But instead of taking on the U.S. directly, Russia (Roosevelt and Reagan-like) merely annexed Crimea to retain possession of its most important naval base, and gave support to the successionist goals of ethnic Russians in Crimea and two breakaway states on the Russian border.
In fact, there was no coup; the “pro-Russian” president Viktor Yanukovych (in reality, little more than a Putin puppet) was unanimously removed by the Ukrainian parliament after being accused of human rights violations and dereliction of duty, and there’s little evidence that the “Barack Obama regime” did anything to encourage it, let alone that right-wing bogeyman Soros was involved. Lively followed up with more propaganda:
Then, the Russians found the U.S. bio labs that none of us regular Americans knew or suspected had been in Ukraine for many years. Unlike the U.S. in Iraq, the Russians actually found makings for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which, under our own well-worn excuse for foreign military intervention seems a pretty darn strong legal defense.
In fact, the biolabs story was long been exposed as the Russian propaganda it is. Lively then engaged in a little projection:
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the great Soros-funded “Hero of Democracy,” Volodymyr Zelensky, has suspended all rival political parties and nationalized the media instead of just surrendering to spare his people further suffering. Like all leftist ideologues, Zelensky’s reality is “the narrative,” and his mission is selling it to people of the world. Yes, he has won that propaganda war, especially in America (to our great shame). But in the real world he lost the real war on Day 1 – and could have avoided every civilian casualty from that point forward by simply agreeing to Russia’s reasonable demands – an offer that has been on the table with little change ever since.
Lively did not explain what Putin’s demands are or why they are supposedly so “reasonable.” Of course, Putin is guilty of everything and much more than what Lively has accused Zelensky of doing.
Speaking of which, this recycled column appeared a few days after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny — whom Putin had imprisoned on trumped-up charges and under harsh conditions — died in prison. Lively had nothing to say about that, let alone what his interpretation of the Monroe doctrine might apply in killing off a political rival.