BSNEWS

In denying the Russian Federation the courtesy of allowing it to have a coherent alternative view, the US is attempting to claw back the illusion of its unquestioned supremacy, its absolute hegemony, its role as chief moralizer and arbiter of what counts as normal and abnormal in thought and behavior. Because either the world must have gone mad, or Putin must have.

Obama attempted to launch two wars (Syria and Ukraine). He – lucky for him – lost both even at the “attempt” stage. Assorted neo-cons and the whole exceptionalist brigade are predictably livid. Expect the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to go ballistic. And expect US ambassador to the UN Samantha “R2P” Power to wish she were Sinead O’Connor singing Nothing Compares to You.

What Washington has made completely obvious is that “self-determination” is a weapon used by Washington in behalf of its agenda. If self-determination advances Washington’s agenda, Washington is for it. If self-determination does not advance Washington’s agenda, Washington is against it.

Despite all the lofty standards of law and rights articulated by Western states, what we are witnessing with regard to the Ukraine and Crimea are the real Western “standards” in practice – of hypocrisy and resort to violence when it suits their aims.

Angela Merkel is half-right. The “law of the jungle” is being practiced. It’s standard Western practice all down through history and presently over Ukraine.

While economic sanctions have become a favorite punitive tool of US foreign policy against Third World countries to make them financially and politically beholden to US interests, sanctions on Russia is a another matter entirely. Unlike their US counterparts, Putin and his erudite Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov know how the game is played, as a bevy of US corporations doing business in Russia (ie Pepsi, Coca Cola, McDonalds, IBM, GM etc.) can expect to have their assets frozen.

Imagine a National Security Council controlled by people whom (it now appears) hired snipers to fire on the Maidan crowd, with the intention of blaming this on Yanukovich’s security forces.) This is not business as usual. This is a leap into darkness.

As if the EU had any feasible Plan B to escape its dependency on Russian gas (not to mention eschew the very profitable financial game played between key European capitals and Moscow). What are they do, import gas on Qatar Airways flights? Buy LNG from the US – something that will not be feasible in years to come? The fact is the minute a gas war is on, if it ever comes down to it, the EU will be under immense pressure by a host of member-nations to keep (and even extend) its Russian gas fix – with or without “our (neo-nazi) bastards” in power in Kiev. Brussels knows it. And most of all, Vlad the Hammer knows it.

“It appears that the US State Dept. gave $5 billion to Ukrainian neo-Nazis who used some of the money to hire mass murderers who massacred protesters, policemen and bystanders in order to provide a rationale for overthrowing the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installing an anti-Russian puppet government.”