Will O'Connell

I am incandescent with rage right now. I feel sick to the stomach. A US Vice President stood today on the soil of where so many Americans gave their lives to defeat fascism in Europe. He delivered a disgraceful speech that spat on their graves. Not that we should expect any different, given his boss skipped visiting the graves of fallen Americans in Europe for fear of getting his hair wet. The same man who called the same fallen heroes suckers and losers. As a Brit that loves America and the American people, I am deeply disturbed at the insults delivered by a man who once described Donald Trump as an “idiot" and said he was "reprehensible." Privately, comparing him to Adolf Hitler. How times have changed. Vance is now part of the most authoritarian administration in American history. An administration actively seeking to deny bodily autonomy to women. An administration pursuing the same mass deportation of immigrants that Europe witnessed in 1930s Germany. Vance is a man that his own president doesn’t even see as his successor. He came to Europe to vomit his Christo-fascist bile on leaders from the UK and across Europe, in what appears to be a retribution tour designed to assert American power. The U.S. are to my knowledge the only NATO country to have invoked Article 5 of the NATO charter after 9/11. We, his European allies, met that call with no questions asked. We sent thousands of soldiers to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to fight a war on the false premise of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknowns’. We did this despite millions of our own citizens protesting in the streets of our cities. Our military stood shoulder to shoulder with his military and we, like many Americans, stood to salute our fallen young men and women returning home day after day. I have tears in my eyes as I write this, thinking of them and their loved ones. Our brave men and women willingly gave their all and far too many made the ultimate sacrifice in support of an American led war. For the record, 6000 Ukrainian solders server alongside American soldiers in Iraq. This, despite Ukraine not being a member of NATO. In 1994 upon signing the Budapest Memorandum they gave up their nuclear weapons in return for security assurances from the US and the UK. These were then reneged upon in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea. They were told ‘An assurance is not a guarantee’. Now, despite their friendship and their brave sacrifice on the battlefields of Ukraine, the President of the United States has decided to abandon them and hand a victory to an indicted war criminal, who illegally invaded the sovereign territory of a US ally. An ally who’s soldiers had previously lost their lives supporting America in its war on terror. SHAME ON HIM. Shame on the man who dodged the draft and never served a day in defense of his nation. He is a coward and I would gladly call him that to his face. To all those Americans on social media currently posting vile insults to those who have always been there for America, I say, democracy is bigger than you, as you sit anonymously behind your phones posting poison. America might have the most powerful army on the planet, but remember, that same army fled from Saigon after being handed their ass by a bunch of peasant rice farmers, armed with grenades made from discarded US coke cans. Ukraine have been to the Russian army what the Vietnamese were to you and we salute them. You might want to throw Ukraine under the bus while stealing there mineral deposits, BUT EUROPE WILL NOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN. I know for sure that the UK will not abandon the Ukrainian people. Our aid to GDP contribution already exceeds that of the US as does Poland, Germany Finland and others. The U.S. is no longer a reliable ally and if need be, we will stand with Ukraine without America. As for your pathetic tariffs, do your worst. You will soon have no friends but thugs and autocrats, so I’m sure Wun Dum Fuc will be right at home.