Darren Grimes: Do you think it’s time for a focus on freedom and liberty, not whackery and wokery?

Darren Grimes: Do you think it’s time for a focus on freedom and liberty, not whackery and wokery?
Darren Grimes

By Darren Grimes


Published: 27/02/2022

- 14:24

Updated: 14/02/2023

- 11:47

My favourite football moment of the weekend came when Manchester City and Everton were warming up at Goodison Park.

My club Newcastle United won yet another match yesterday, meaning we've had quite the winning streak so far this year, not something you can usually say as a fan of Newcastle United.

But folks, this wasn't my favourite football moment of the weekend.


My favourite came when Manchester City and Everton were warming up at Goodison Park.

The Ukrainian internationals Vitaliy Mykolenko and Oleksandr Zinchenko met at the halfway line to hug and console each other in support of their homeland.

The pictures and videos shared across social media of players and fans coming together to show their support for Ukraine in the face of invasion and bloody war by Russia's psychotic, murderous, former KGB leader has touched so many of us.

The West is united in its view that if we do not act now, Putin won't stop once he's installed some pro-Russian puppet as leader of Ukraine, mimicking what we see in Belarus. He will want to carve up as much territory he can to leave a lasting legacy for this supreme ageing narcissist.

And speaking of leadership, Putin has underestimated the bravery and fortitude of the Ukrainian President. It's arguably easy to have done so.

Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in 2019 as a comedian without political experience and starred in the political satire drama Servant of the People. His character became President of Ukraine by accident.

All of this would perhaps leave Putin and the rest of us of the view that Zelensky was destined to be a joke. Not so, folks, not so.

On Friday night, to directly challenge Russian media assertions that the President had fled Kyiv, he recorded a video from a smartphone of him on the street in the capital, surrounded by advisers and his Prime Minister.

"We are protecting our independence, our state. And it will continue to be this way."

How many of us can seriously say we'd display such bravery as the comedian turned statesman.

The bravery of war correspondents and social media users mean this war cannot be conducted in secret.

Even in Russia itself there have been almost 2,000 arrests for protests against the war.

To protest in a country like Russia you need a spine of steel.

It's the first war I and so many of us have followed via social media.

It's the first war many of us have had live updates of, watching the drama unfold in our own continent with the kind of shock and awe we've become used to seeing on Netflix, not from Europe.

The small children cradled by their mothers, kissing and hugging their fathers goodbye as they're dropped at the border, clutching the suitcases we're used to seeing used for short-haul flights, not for starting a new life as refugee.

It has hit all of us so hard because there is absolutely nothing to say it couldn't happen here.

We have had the most brutal wake up call, placing into perspective the culture wars, propagated by left-wing activists.

How decadent and comfortable we have become to focus on such pathetic battles.

In a country not very far away, we've seen how quickly the luxury of being decadent and comfortable can dissipate.

How quickly the flame of freedom can be, not extinguished, but diminished.

We're starting to see the seeds of a West getting its act together.

We've all come together to cut Russian banks off from the main international payment system, Swift.

We're starting to hear of the need to find alternative energy sources to Russian oil and gas.

All Nato members smelling the coffee on spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence, only a third actually do so.

Germany, most radically, is setting up a special fund to rebuild its army.

€100 euro investment. Raising defence spending permanently above 2 per cent of GDP permanently.

Say what you want about President Trump folks, but his warning on NATO not meeting its commitments was the right one to make.

Putin has shaken Germany out of the delusions of the Merkel years, in which it was thought Nordstream 2, a pipeline of Russian gas to Germany, was a good idea.

Putin's invasion has exposed Europe's decaying defences, now folks, right now, is the time to act before we are the people of Ukraine, who only last week would've been sat drinking coffees with their mates, only to find themselves being hurtled toward the border of a foreign country or into war to face an armed-to-the-teeth enemy.

We need to remember why our values are worth fighting for, revitalise them and commit to defending them.

Do you think it’s time for a focus on freedom and liberty, not whackery and wokery?

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