The real reason Putin is doing this

| 3:00 pm EST March 12, 2022
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When Vladimir Putin attacked my village with the military-grade binary nerve agent known as novichok in 2018, we were subsequently further attacked by morons. It was the ultimate instance of adding insult to injury when some fool suggested (and other fools agreed) that, since Porton Down was nearby, the novichok came not from Putin but from the British government. In other words, the implication was that Theresa May decided to murder a quasi-indigent British citizen for some obscure political gain. Despite living in the miracle age of the horseless carriage, the prime minister of the United Kingdom decided to make sure the attack happened near to where it was supposedly manufactured because she was too lazy or stupid or both to transport the stuff to, say, Manchester or Liverpool.

It didn’t matter to the contemptible cretins who spread this execrable tripe that Porton Down hasn’t engaged in biological weapons research since the 1950s. The fact that they did so some 70 years ago was all their medieval, superstitious stupidity required. In the world of the unapologetically ignorant, conspiracy theory fantasist, a small coincidence is all that is needed.

It is the stuff of magical thinking but there it is. Conspiracy theories need ignorance in the same way that terrorists need the fearful. Without superstitious ignorance people like Vladimir Putin and their propaganda machines would be laughed to scorn. But because the irredeemably stupid are willing to believe this kind of idiocy it has real power, and every time we liberals participate in it we enable and empower the lies of people like Putin and Trump. You can’t have a penchant for conspiracy theories and simultaneously hold in contempt people who think Hillary Clinton sexually exploits children in the basements of pizza parlours without exposing your own hypocrisy.

Putin’s government is now claiming that Ukraine has laboratories for the manufacture of biological weapons, and that those labs are funded by the United States. They make this claim on the “evidence” that Ukraine has established bio facilities that are used to deal with public health hazards. It’s like saying that because a hobby shop sells model rockets they are engaged in the manufacture of weapons of war, and they get away with it because there is no shortage of morons willing to connect dots that are that many light years apart.

It is clear that Putin is saying this because he wants to keep the use of biological and chemical weapons against Ukraine on the table. If he does use such terrible weapons against the Ukrainian people then every conspiracy theorist out there will be partly responsible. The fact that in today’s world fools make such claims credible on social media is why we have this problem in the first place. It’s why there are hundreds of thousands of deaths per year from Covid, because conspiracy theorists keep alive the nonsense that the vaccine is more harmful than the disease.

No one would dare to waste their time uttering such irresponsible crap if we were all trained in science-based reasoning and demanded actual evidence for such claims before we passed them on. And, in the words of the United Kingdom’s Dame Barbara Woodward to the United Nations, “There is not a shred of credible evidence that Ukraine has a biological weapons program.” Unfortunately in today’s world of memes and sound bytes and instant information, credible evidence is no longer required. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.