BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a story titled 'WORLD: 'Heartbreaking decisions' had to be made in Canada's response to Ukraine: Trudeau,' published March 17.
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I hope that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his NATO allies are aware that the blood of Ukrainian people will stain our hands for a thousand generations to come and that these 'heartbreaking decisions' will haunt us forever.
Where I come from, you never turn your back on a brother or sister who is begging you to help them. Jesus Christ teaches these same lessons when he asks us "To do unto others as you would them have do unto you."
But I'm more afraid of his dire condemnation in Matthew 25, when wicked souls are condemned because they never fed the impoverished person, welcomed the stranger as a gesture of hospitality, or sheltered the one who needed shelter. Christ tells these selfish souls, 'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'
Vladimir Putin and his Russian military are intending to commit genocide and erase the Ukrainian people from the Earth. It is evil and selfish of western powers to simply tell Mr. Volodymr Zelenskyy to 'buck up' and 'fight hard' when we had the power to prevent this atrocity with a no-fly zone or military support.
Maybe evil will keep returning. But allowing the innocent to be killed by a wicked man becomes an act of moral cowardice that proves Mr. Zelenskyy's conclusion: that the 'never again' maxim the west used after Hitler's defeat is merely empty words.
It is an obscenity that the west refuses a no-fly zone to give Ukraine the fighting chance it needs to survive its deadly entanglement with its Russian oppressors. It is beyond disgraceful that we watch a proud, courageous man beg our nations for help that goes beyond money and weapons. It is shameful beyond words that we hear him call our leaders and their nations his 'dear friends' when we know very well none of them will come to Ukraine's aid.
The abandonment of Ukraine is a moral cowardice that proves the west, including Canada, only intervene when it suits them.
America invaded Iraq and butchered innocent civilians over the pretense it contained weapons of mass destruction only to find it did not. But perhaps our sympathies do not extend to people of a different colour than our own. It's what makes the denial of entry to Ukraine in the EU and NATO so ironic.
But Western European nations always held some hatred for the Slavic peoples that rose to brutal prominence under the Nazis. Perhaps the reluctance of the Western European nations to accept Ukraine has more to do with an unconscious prejudice, as virtually every Eastern European nation heartily endorsed their admission.
By failing to protect Ukraine, our brother nation, we bring on ourselves the blood of the slain. We knew Putin was evil, that his regime became a danger to the world, but we did nothing. That so many of our neighbours in Canada are from Ukraine constitutes a betrayal to fellow Canadians.
But to see Volodymr Zelenskyy have to entreat our help and use slideshows to attempt to move us from empathy to action is a repulsive thing. It proves human beings are the selfish, wicked little things we see depicted in Bible stories.
Because if I were Mr. Zelenskyy, I would never again place my trust in the west. If his country survives... if his people return home... I hope they rise from this war a new power in Eastern Europe and the world. And I hope they have a healthy skepticism toward the western countries who denied them acceptance into those soulless agencies.
Christopher Mansour
Barrie
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