by Andrew Korybko

Germany and Poland’s rejection of visa issuance for the Night Wolves patriotic bikers is politically motivated and speaks loudly about the West’s double standards towards NGOs. The group wanted to partake in a commemorative pilgrimage across Eastern Europe en route to Berlin in order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Victory Day, and they were entirely transparent about their routes and itinerary. In the context of the New Cold War, it was obvious that if they would have been granted access to the EU, they’d have been watched over like a hawk and had every one of their moves monitored, thus ensuring that none of the ‘provocations’ that the Western mainstream media scared their citizens about would have had any chance of coming to pass even if the bikers wanted them to (which they didn’t).

So what in effect happened was that the EU fear mongered about and banned non-political private citizens who were planning to pay homage to the tens of millions of Europeans that perished in World War II. The Night Wolves are essentially a Russian NGO, in that they’re literally a non-governmental organization, meaning that the EU banned a foreign NGO at the last minute after embarrassingly exposing its members to hours-long interrogations and searches. The EU was so against the Russian NGO that they wouldn’t even allow them across the border under the Orwellian observation that they obviously would have been exposed to during their entire trip. Let that sink in for a moment, and then imagine if the shoe was on the other foot.

Russia has never treated a foreign NGO in this manner, not even those which are politically oriented and clearly engaged in regime change destabilizations. Rather, Moscow simply stipulates that NGOs receiving financing from abroad need to register as foreign agents in order to legally conduct their affairs in the country. It doesn’t force their members to undergo humiliating searches and interrogations at border crossings, and the harassment techniques practiced by the EU against the Night Wolves are noticeably absent in the case of their Polish counterparts’ yearly commemorative visit to Smolensk and Katyn. Russia doesn’t treat any foreign political, social, or historical NGO members in the same hostile manner as the EU treats Russians, nor does Moscow ban private individuals like the EU has de-facto done against the bikers. Despite this, Russia is constantly smeared in the Western press as being ‘authoritarian’, ‘xenophobic’, and ‘nationalistic’, but the irony is that these labels actually describe the West itself, as is clearly evidenced from their treatment of the Night Wolves.

In fact, the EU epitomizes all the socio-political negativities that it accuses Russia of, and actually behaves worse than it ever accused Moscow of acting when it comes to the Brussels’ own practice in this regard. It’s not the pot calling the kettle black, but more like a burned-out kettle having the audacity to level that label against a stainless steel pot. Such a comparison is delusion and devoid of reality, but the EU’s hypocritical criticism of Moscow’s NGO treatment testifies to the ideological rigor in which politics is practiced in the EU. The only reason that such a narrative is even espoused and surprisingly believed by many in Europe is because of the heavy information war that Brussels is waging against its own citizens.

People living in the EU are brought up in the belief of their own civilizational exceptionalism, not unlike the American indoctrination that has been ongoing for decades already (the proxy learns from its master, evidently). From the cradle to the grave, they’re led to believe that Europe is the proselytizing ‘force of good’ in the world, and that its people have an obligation to ‘civilize’ their Russian and Arab neighbors, including through the use of EuroMaidan and “Arab Spring” Color Revolutions. Solely through the narrow dialectic belief that one’s ideas represent the only ‘true good’ in the world can the hypocrisy of the EU’s treatment of Russian NGOs and private citizens (to say nothing of Syrians) appear ‘acceptable’ to the European populace, while the comparative lack of harassment by Russian and Syrian authorities can be used to fuel a ‘human rights’ crusade against those two countries that continues to this day.