As the United States imposes sanctions on Russia and moves to do likewise to Venezuela, it’s essential to keep in mind which country it is that’s the most destructive and dangerous in the world today. When such questions have been posed in international polls in recent decades, the answer overwhelmingly is the United States. Not Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia or any of the many other nations the ruling class and corporate media here regularly demonize, but the United States.
Obama and the lawyers who drafted his executive order did not notice that the way the order is drafted it applies to Obama, to the unelected coup government in Kiev, and to the Washington and EU regimes. The order says that any person “responsible for or complicit in, or to have engaged in, directly or indirectly . . . actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in Ukraine” is subject to having his assets frozen.
Washington and the EU are the only two governments whose personnel have undermined democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine by overthrowing the elected government and imposing an unelected one.
This report/analysis in Le Monde Diplomatique (also attached below) provides a background on the rise of far right — some would say neo-fascist — politics in Ukraine. I have reformatted and highlighted it to emphasize points that struck me as important. If you find my markup distracting, the preceding link will take you to the original version. In either case, I urge you to read it carefully.
Bear in mind, the Le Monde report was written before the stunning conversation between EU foreign policy chief Lady Catherine Ashton and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet was leaked to youtube. Paet told Ashton that there was evidence that the snipers in Kyiv (aka Kiev) were firing on “people from both sides” and that there were suspicions that someone from the “new coalition” might have been behind the shootings. The links to youtube recording of this conversation can be found on Russia TV (RT) here and the complete conversation here.
According to this report in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Estonia’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the authenticity of the youtube recoding.
The information in the Le Monde analysis helps us to understand questions of why and how some Ukrainian factions might benefit from indiscriminate killing that ratchets up general hysteria, creating particularly a parallel incitement of hysteria in the foreign media. Such uniformed hysteria in the mainstream media is by no means a new phenomena when it comes to Ukraine; over 10 years ago, John Laughland penned this analysis of Ukraine’s 2004 election. His is a description that, with a few changes, would apply today. Of course, none of this denies the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin benefits from and may in fact be the ultimate source of the hacking operation that culminated in the youtube leak — but that does not obviate the fact of the conversation itself.
I want to stress — the forces driving the evolving situation in Ukraine and the Crimea (and Russia’s role in the crisis) remain very murky. The American National Endowment for Democracy, a front for the CIA and an engine for US meddling in other peoples affairs, is clearly stoking the fires of the regime changing revolt in Ukraine, although the extent of NED’s involvement is not clear and there is nothing (yet) to link the operations of the NED to the shootings.
Nevertheless, one thing is clear: the dominant black and white narrative fueling the near-hysteria in the mainstream media in the U.S. and among the U.S. political class is more reflective of our fractious domestic politics, where our political protagonists are engaged in a foodfight that both misrepresents and vastly oversimplifies a dangerous evolving situation — a situation that, conveniently, is taking place in a distant country with a complex history about which the vast majority of Americans know almost nothing.
There is an elegant symmetry to the political hysteria, however. The timing for foreign policy crisis with respect to Russia and Ukraine is coincidentally covenient, coming as it does with the Pentagon's release of its greedy sequester-dodging Pentagon budget plan (see page 3), coupled with the growing awareness that the only way to feed the voracious appetite of the Miitary – Industrial – Congressional Complex will be to declare war on social programs like Medicare and Social Security — see The Biggest Threat to the Pentagon’s Budget Is Entitlement Spending. This war on social programs has been in the works for a long time , for reasons I explained in this 5 September 2000 op-ed.
The overthrow of the government of Ukraine was an armed coup d’état ordered, planned, organized, funded, carried out and executed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Pentagon, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and their surrogates in the European Union (EU) using every instrument at their disposal including the National Security Agency (NSA) and all of their amassed media resources. It was carried out with the knowledge and approval of US President Barack Hussein Obama if not at his directive.
The actions of the US in organizing the armed overthrow and installation of an illegitimate puppet government in Kiev was and continues to be illegal and revelations that continue to be exposed, including the latest regarding the hiring of snipers to kill demonstrators and police, are an outrage and a crime against all humanity that must not be allowed to stand.
