What constitutes commitment of a citizen to a nation? Let’s say this particular United States nation.
Blind or myopic or passionate loyalty? Indifference to, numbness of or a profound lack of curiosity in whatever is going on with our tax dollars in the powerful hands of our elected representatives and their networks?
There seems a naturally inclined co-dependent sensibility with said country -- a dimension of shared narcissism. Whatever ends justify the means profiteering said country achieves (no matter how unethical or illegal, though these possibilities we quickly dismiss from our minds), we presume the wins and profits will impact us (especially not true in these hard economic times but hope springs eternal) as we presume seeming losses and debits will also impact us.
What constitutes a commitment of a human being to the global human family?
I’m guessing the affiliations to country and to humanity are in conflict more than most of us are consciously aware.
I am judging that the intellectual, moral, social, economic challenges of serving humanity over country is too far outside most of our comfort zones to be seriously committed to in a sustained way.
This week I am wondering if leaders of my government helped engineer or aided and abetted murders of police AND protesters in Kiev at the end of February. If they did not, are they nevertheless now accessories to said murders after the fact?
I’m thinking yes. They probably are implicated.
Robert Parry in “The ‘We-Hate-Putin’ Group Think”:
According to an intercepted phone conversation between Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, Paet reported on a conversation that he had with a doctor in Kiev who said the sniper fire that killed protesters was the same that killed police officers. As reported by the UK Guardian, “During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.”
Paet said, “What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.
snip
However, the sniper fire has been cited by the U.S. government and major U.S. news outlets as evidence of Yanukovych’s depravity, thus justifying his violent removal from office last month when he was forced to flee for his life after neo-Nazi militias seized control of government buildings.
Yet, despite the new evidence suggesting that the coup-makers may have been responsible for instigating the violence, the mainstream U.S. press continues to revise the preferred narrative by putting white hats on the coup-makers and black hats on the Yanukovych government.
For instance, the New York Times has stopped reporting that more than a dozen police officers were among the 80 or so people killed as protests in Kiev turned violent. The typical new version in the U.S. press is simply that Yanukovych’s police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, killing 80 of them.
Mike Whitney in “Directing War Strategies from the Shadows” writes:
The Obama administration’s rationale for supporting the fascist-led coup in Ukraine collapsed on Wednesday when a “hacked” phone call between EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet revealed that the snipers who fired on protestors in Maidan Square in Kiev were not aligned with President Viktor Yanukovych, but with the protest leaders themselves. The significance of the discovery cannot be overstated since the Obama team has used the killing of protestors to justify its support for the new imposter government.
Now it appears that members of the new government may be implicated in the killing of innocent civilians. This new information could force Obama to withdraw his support for the coup plotters in Kiev, which would derail the administration’s plan to remove Russia from the Crimea and expand NATO into Ukraine.
Here’s a short recap of the details from an article in Russia Today:
“Estonian foreign ministry has confirmed the recording of his conversation with EU foreign policy chief is authentic. Urmas Paet said that snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were hired by Maidan leaders.
During the conversation, Paet stressed that “there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”….
The Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also issued a statement on its website, saying that the recording of the leaked telephone conversation between Paet and Ashton is “authentic.” (“Estonian Foreign Ministry confirms authenticity of leaked call on Kiev snipers“, Russia Today)
To its credit, the UK Guardian published an article reporting the basic facts, but there’s been no coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post or any of the major TV News networks. America’s elite media are engaged in a coordinated news blackout to keep people from seeing that the Obama administration and their EU collaborators are supporting a group of far-right extremists who were directly involved in the killing of civilians in order to topple a democratically-elected government.
As said above, the status-quo, amoral corporate media apparently won’t be bothering to deliver up these revelations or framing them in a serious way. Why interrupt the present titillating righteous and jingoistic bipartisan momentum of Putin and Russia bashing?
To me the disclosure of this crime should constitute a WAFM moment (i.e., “wait-a-f*cking-minute” moment).
Again, it turns out the ousted president of the Ukraine was not so depraved he authorized security officers to kill innocent protesters in Kiev. That crime was perpetrated by operatives of the opposition. Of the new government coalition. The proverbial false flag operation.
These revelations cry out for further exploration and justice!
But the regime change game is going now at hyper-speed, US and international government leaders (with steroidal hypocrisy) are stridently applying the protections of international and constitutional law to an undeserving and illegitimate Ukrainian coalition. There is a collective titillatingly delicious, righteous buzz going on against President Putin in the United States right now -- a national sensibility of victory from the US-involved overthrow of a pro-Russian leadership in the Ukraine and indignation at Russia's swift, reactive military movement. Why should all that hype be interrupted by reality and a basic respect for justice?
This new Ukraine government as well as the US and European nation cronies are now implicated in the assassinations of innocent protesters and police officers in Kiev.
In a sane world, the enablers of this new illegitimate regime would pull back their support and demand accountability.
In a sane world the supposed media watchdogs, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and the major tv networks would be calling out our government for supporting and aiding and abetting this coalition of mostly recycled Russian oligarchs and far-right, neo-Nazi extremists who criminally toppled a democratically elected president.
Instead? A media blackout. Or at best a minimizing "move along now, nothing to see here" cover up. Such a lack of ethical and legal accountability among the colluding, ends justify the means, US and European leaders, with their clandestine destabilizing operations that go way back, with the help of a strident, 24/7, propagandizing, amoral media.
Sociopathy reigns.
This brings to mind the media blackout when the chemical weapons, allegedly used by the Assad regime, were proven to have been used by the faux-“white-hatted rebels” in Syria. The wrongful story had been dramatically and willfully propagandized, and the corrected version quickly was “disappeared”.
I’m hoping this truth gets SOME traction.
I think it is high time we US citizens stop digging our heads into the proverbial sand to avoid facing down not all that remote evidence of criminality by our government leaders. Every time we do the blood on their hands spreads to our own.
We need a paradigm shift from the patriarchal, winner take all, competition and conquest, might makes right paradigm to one of humanism, cooperation, partnership, empathy, one citizen of this country, who just also happens to be a member of the global family, at a time.
No one should be immune from criminality. Including and especially our government leadership!!!!
[cross-posted on correntewire and open salon]