A Shocking Act: Ryanair Flight #4978

So said the US government in regard to the RyanAir flight diverted by Belarus to Minsk. Ostensibly threatened by a bomb, all admit the move was made by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko in order to seize an opposition journalist with Western ties.

The world is outraged over this act of air piracy, this hijacking and kidnapping. Some reports even made sure to mention that Lukashenko wouldn't have dared to do it were it not for the cover and support provided by Vladimir Putin who is to Western media a veritable incarnation of the Devil. It would seem that every dark deed in the world finds it genesis in the mind and plots of Putin.

It was a shocking and indefensible act. Who can deny it? And yet there are some nations that have no moral standing in this regard.

A shocking act the American government proclaimed. Rather it's a shocking case of the Orwellian Memory Hole being employed.

For years (and still as far as we know) the US kidnapped people off international streets and whisked them away by plane to be tortured at Black Sites in other countries. Not a few of these people were completely unconnected to any of the accusations made by the US – people in the wrong place at the wrong time as they say.

And then there's the July 2013 incident in which the plane carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales was effectively forced to land in Vienna at which time it was (by some reports) forcibly searched. The United States government believed that Edward Snowden might be on board.

Aside from humiliating Morales, a head of state marked by the United States for removal, it was an aggressive and outrageous act – but one that Western governments and the media helped to cover up. It's one thing to divert a plane to arrest an activist journalist. It's something else to force down the plane of a head of state.

And so while the West may in fact be outraged by Lukashenko's actions, morally speaking they have nothing to say. He has behaved no differently than they do – deplorable as that may be.

Or are they especially outraged as the activist-journalist in question, one Roman Protasevich was one of their assets, formerly working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) an organisation with historic ties to the CIA. With someone like Protasevich the line between agent/asset and journalist gets rather blurry. That doesn't excuse Lukashenko tampering with civilian aviation but even a brief look into the context and a little reflection on events over the past two decades exposes the Western coverage as more than a little slanted.