Thread by @RyanBurtonKing

🧵
I'm told my support for Ukraine is "an abuse of the platform you have as a pastor", "Be careful when you publicly take sides", and it is claimed I "compromise your position of a pastor who leads a black majority church when you openly back their side."

Let me be clear...

I have moved in black majority circles for 2/3 of my life. I am staunchly antiracism and have been attacked for standing for racial justice and reconciliation. I empathise, show solidarity, and act. I reject attempts to redirect true narrative with bothsidesism and whataboutism.

Ukraine, like everywhere else in the world, has problems with racism. A number of factors do not help this, and as ever there are different categories from ignorance to discrimination. War, with all its panic and displacement, brings out not only the best but also the worst.

Recorded scenes at train stations, bus depots, and on the border are real, albeit ethnic Ukrainians have also reported similar, though less racially charged, treatment, and everyone regardless is facing extreme weather, overcrowded buses and trains, and dangerously long queues.

Problems like racism, prejudice, abuse of authority, corruption etc. are why the prayer guide I circulated a few weeks ago, translated from Ukrainian, and by Ukrainian pastors, begins with a prayer of repentance. Repentance of what? Sin. And specific sins have names like these.

Nonetheless a line of thought is emerging, straight out of the Russian propaganda playbook. I'm seeing attitudes of "there are racists in Ukraine so maybe Putin has a good reason/we shouldn't help Ukraine/I'm with Russia/I'm not taking sides".

"There are racists in Ukraine so I'm not taking sides" is like saying in WW2, "there are Nazis in the UK, so I'm not taking sides" or after Pearl Harbor and the USA entered the war to fight fascism in Japan and Europe, "there are racists in the USA so I'm not taking sides".

But it was still right to take sides against Nazi Germany, even as it is right to take sides against Putin's imperialising, culturally erasing invasion of an independent sovereign nation. It is missing the wood for the trees frankly to say otherwise.

"But what about" is a form of the Tu Quoque fallacy. Noting real or perceived hypocrisy, creating true or false moral equivalancies, but always failing to address the actual argument or issue at hand. Whataboutism is a form of it.

During the Cold War, when America critiqued - justifiably - horrific human rights abuses of the USSR, Soviet propaganda responded with "And you are lynching Negroes". Variations on this theme have been deployed, and so far as the propaganda is concerned, without sincere concern.

I am deeply concerned by all sin and the need for spiritual regeneration and cultural transformation in Ukraine. I am also concerned with efforts to minimise or play "what's the other side?" games with the evil Putin is wreaking both on Ukraine and his own nation.
#PrayForUkraine