Bill Spadea Parrots Putinista Talking Points
/by Joshua Sotomayor- Einstein
Bill Spadea, photo credit: Duckduckgo.com - Putin photo credit: duckduckgo wikispooks
Bill Spadea, perennial would-be GOP kingmaker, is up to his insane ways again. The alleged grassroots GOP leader, who in a December 2020 interview advocated that “if you are voting for a Republican just because he is better than Murphy, don’t bother,” has returned this time to stump for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In an op-ed written in his trademark long winded way, Spadea buries his criticism of President Biden’s Russian failure under a mountain Pravda level propaganda that would make the Russian dictator proud.
First, Spadea engages in the logical fallacy of claiming authority by blood, in which he asserts that he is “technically a Ukrainian-American,” as if his ethnic origin impacts facts.
Like CNN’s debunked claims that the August 2020 Kenosha riots were “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”, Spadea calls Putin’s full- scale invasion of non-aggressive democratic Ukraine “far less dramatic than what is portrayed on social media.” Spadea acknowledges that something is happening but refuses to say what. In an effort to transform the destruction wrought by Putin’s invasion into unoffensive troop movements and inexplicable violence with no aggressor, Spadea states that “yes, there is violence. Yes, the Russian army is on the move.”
In his Putinist apologetics, Spadea feigns shock that the Western media he has made his career in used old photos of Ukraine’s President as well as used one clip of simulated footage in its reporting of tens of thousands of images of Putin’s invasion. To manufacture shock that Western media is bad at its job is to pretend one has been living under a rock, but Spadea’s goal is to distract from what he purposefully neglects. That while Western media is generally horrible on professional ethics, accountability, and agenda pushing, in Putin’s Russia the media is 100% state controlled propaganda.
Spadea’s moral failing isn’t that he is against US involvement in a war with a nuclear armed Putin, a rational position when dealing with an irrational totalitarian dictator armed with nukes. Spadea’s moral failing is that he has adopted the talking points of a totalitarian dictatorship. For example, Spadea states that popularly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky, a member of the tiny Ukrainian Jewish community, is “a regime leader in Kyiv who in my opinion is no better than Putin,” as well as that “Zelensky imprisons opponents and shuts down media critical of him, all making Ukraine look a lot less like a peaceful democracy.”
Even were the accusations Spadea makes true (they are not), the question remains how would that impact whether Ukraine was peaceful? It doesn’t. Has Ukraine, which in a treaty agreement gave up its massive nuclear arsenal in return for the now broken promise by Russia to respect its sovereignty, ever invaded another country? No. Demonstrating his ignorance of recent events, Spadea would have his readers believe that shutdown TV stations were not financed by oligarchs directly working on Putin’s behalf. Moreover, Spadea cannot state which political opponents are allegedly imprisoned because there are none. Equally ignorant other Putinista’s often point to the arrest of Yulia Tymoshenko, who ran for Ukrainian President in 2010, went to jail in 2011 (when Ukraine was in Putin’s sphere of influence), was released in 2014 during the Maidan Revolution (that Putin is attempting to undo), and came in 3rd in the 2019 elections that President Zelensky won. Spadea of course, doesn’t know these facts, nor does he want his audience to as he doesn’t link to any documents that show actual history but rather sites a short clip of a left wing Democrat politician making the same accusations he is parroting while also failing to provide any examples.
Spadea states that since the 2014 invasion of the Crimea, Donbass, and Luhansk “the region in dispute has been controlled by Russian separatists” when even Putin now admits he used Russian troops who merely took off their national flag patches to invade those regions. Amazingly, Spadea continues to double down on the propaganda stating that:
…at least 14,000 people have been killed as the Ukrainian government moved on the separatists.
What's even more telling is that according to local officials, the Russian government pays the salaries and provides a pension for the separatist government. And when it came time for evacuations in anticipation of war, tens of thousands of refugees in the region crossed the border into Russia, not Ukraine.
In 2019, the Russian government issued more than 800,000 passports to people living in the disputed Donbas region. Again, all signs that this area is in fact, Russian.
Spadea attempts not only to whitewash Putin’s current invasion of Ukraine but also blames Ukraine for the thousands of deaths resulting from Putin’s 2014 invasion of the Donbass, Luhansk, and Crimea regions. This immoral blame-the-victim argument is akin to Spadea getting charged with assault for defending himself from a gang attempting to break into his home. Spadea flipflops between the fiction that the ethnic Russians of these regions are merely “separatists” who were “moved on” by Ukraine (rather than truth that they were Russian troops sent by Putin) and celebrating the fact that since 2014 Putin has had total control of these regions. Spadea would have us pretend that the victims trapped in these regions by Putin have the freedom not to take Russian money, use the Russian border, or accept Russian passports when the price of resisting Putin’s totalitarian regime is jail or death. Instead, he portrays Putin as neutral to positive. Once again the facts that Spadea omits speak volumes. Specifically, he ignores that the over 8 million Russian Ukrainians overwhelming support Ukrainian independence and have not been fleeing to Russia - because they understand (unlike Spadea) a flawed democracy like Ukraine (and all democracies) is better than a totalitarian dictatorship.
The list of Spadea’s pro-Putin propaganda talking points is almost endless but the last covered in this piece is his assertion that the US “helped oust an elected government in Ukraine in 2014.” Spadea should tell this bit of insight to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who took to the streets to protest for a freedom and anti-corruption oriented government during the 2014 Maidan Revolution. If he truly has inside information that leads him to conclude that tens of millions of Ukrainians (including ethnic Russians, Jews, Tartar Muslims, and others) were mere US puppets in deciding to turn away from the sphere of influence of the absolute dictator of Russia, rather than rational actors and patriots choosing a better path for their nation, he should share with it with them.
Spadea’s desire to avoid a shooting war between the US and a nuclear armed mad man is logical. No one wants a nuclear Armageddon but attempting (though failing) to whitewash Putin’s invasion of a free and democratic Ukraine is inexcusable. Spadea should publicly apologize for advocating the talking points of an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship.
“They understand (unlike Spadea) a flawed democracy like Ukraine (and all democracies) is better than a totalitarian dictatorship”
