A few years ago, Ukrainians watched shocking news about North Korea or Iran and thought, “Well, this evil does not concern us.” All this abuse of people is somewhere far away, on the other side of Asia, and we have our own problems.
Some believed that if those nations live like this, it must be good for them. Some even condemned the United States for interfering, criticizing, and threatening military intervention in Iraq, Iran, or the DPRK. During the war in Iraq, when the press reported on a possible American military campaign against Iran, some Ukrainians, especially those who were victims of the dominance of Russian television at the time, strongly criticized Washington’s possible attempts to “interfere in the internal affairs of dictatorial regimes. Our compatriots were sincerely surprised: what do the Americans care about Iran or North Korea? But years have passed, and they have proven themselves so that Ukraine has felt it for itself.
Iranian drones flew into our cities, Belarus provided its territory and technical resources to kill Ukrainians, and indoctrinated North Korean soldiers, under the threat of concentration camps for their families, came to fight against the Ukrainian army. At the same time, North Korean civilian slaves were brought to the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol to dismantle factories destroyed by the Russians. The evil that seemed to be smoldering somewhere far away from us came to our home. If Ukrainians had known what would happen then, we would not have criticized, but would have begged the United States to strike Iran in the early 2000s. Then Iranian drones would definitely not have appeared in the Ukrainian sky in 2022. The world’s evil, which seemed so far away from us and was considered someone else’s problem, appeared on our land and became our problem.
Some Ukrainians once believed that Belarus had “order” and good roads, and even wanted to live the same way. But the nature of dictatorships is rooted in war – sooner or later, every dictator will throw his people into war. War is their trump card for maintaining power. Under the slogans of national unity in the face of enemies, one can tighten the screws until they grind, and the passive majority will consider such steps necessary. A dictatorship, if it has existed long enough, always involves war. In the case of Belarus, if not of their own free will, then under the pressure of dictatorial allies, Belarusians may soon be driven into a meat-and-potatoes war.
Before our eyes, a new “Axis of Evil” is forming on the planet, which can be called an alliance or coalition of dictatorships. Their main feature is the enslavement of their own peoples by dictatorial regimes, dumbing down the population with propaganda and using people as fodder for foreign aggression. Each country of this Axis is a “prison of nations” and each dictator oppresses even his own titular nation.
There is certainly a significant share of the blame for this on the part of the “guarantors” of the world order, who told poor countries about “homework” on democracy and the fight against corruption, bombed Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya, and traded with Russia and China, from which the seeds of the Third World War sprouted. The civilized world community “missed the boat”, failed to realize the risks and did not put the world’s villains in their place in time, and now it is burying its head in the sand, trying not to notice how it is being challenged.
Every dictatorship has a weakness – an outburst of popular discontent that can escalate into a revolution and overthrow the dictatorship. But it takes a tremendous amount of work to liberate the zombie slaves before they come to us with weapons. For example, this week, Belarusian dictator Lukashenko was outraged by attempts by Russian elites to deprive Belarus of its sovereignty and even hinted at war if this happens. But this potential within the “Axis of Dictatorships” needs to be worked with. And so far, it is not clear that the forces that talk so much about human rights have done anything tangible to liberate the more than 1.7 billion people in China, Russia, Belarus, Iran, and North Korea.
Just like Ukrainians until recently, people in Western countries do not suspect that evil that has not been destroyed and marginalized in time can come to them tomorrow.
Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk
