So after an ugly 25-year Middle Eastern trail of blood and tears, dead or maimed bodies, massive displacement and devastation, the US government, its military, its corporate media and its predatory fellow country flunkies, drifting toward fascism as much as the US is, are defying international law, yet again, all in the name of “freedom.”
And, unfrigginbelievably getting away with it.
Once again, like with the imaginary wmds of Iraq, corporate western and even world media is all over this “story” (using the term very loosely) guaranteeing the fake legitimacy of the west’s shameless and opportunistic lies, double-standards and hypocritically reconfigured boundaries of international law.
Corporate media is busy applying the proverbial white and black hats, once again to the wrong heads. Apparently they had quite a few white ones left over from the Al-Qaeda-linked “rebels” in Syria to use now on the neo-Nazi “rebels” in the Ukraine.
There was no democratic revolution in the Ukraine. It was an illegitimate coup spearheaded by ruthless neo-Nazis setting up a fascist junta for their own empowerment as well as co-conspiring opportunistic Ukrainian oligarchs, economic cronies of the US and the EU.
Robert Parry in “Reagan-Style Hypocrisy and the Ukraine Crisis”:
Today, if you make the case that universal rules should apply to the United States, you are accused of not embracing America as an “exceptional” country. As a result, very few mainstream observers in Official Washington even blink now at the U.S. government taking contradictory positions on issues such as intervening in other countries.
Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are “justified” as are drone strikes and aerial bombardments of countries from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia to Libya. It’s also okay to threaten to bomb Syria and Iran.
Supporting the overthrow of sovereign governments is also fine – for the United States but not for anyone else. Just during the Obama administration, the U.S. government has backed coups in Honduras, Libya and now Ukraine. U.S.-endorsed secessions are okay, too, as with oil-rich South Sudan from Sudan.
Yet, when the geopolitical shoe is on the other foot – when Russia objects to the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s duly-elected President Viktor Yanukovych and, as a result, supports a secession referendum by Crimea on whether its citizens want to join the Russian Federation – Official Washington cries out in moral outrage.
Joseph Kishore in “Ukraine, the United States and international law” explains more of the realpolitik going on in the Ukraine right now:
Plans for a secession referendum in Ukraine’s Crimea region on Sunday are the focus of ramped-up attacks on Russia from the Obama administration and its European allies. Additional military forces are being shifted to the region and new threats of sanctions are being issued.
The US, Germany and Britain have denounced the referendum in the majority Russian-speaking autonomous republic as a violation of Ukraine national sovereignty and territorial integrity and a breach of international law. The US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, said Monday that the US would not recognize the “so-called referendum.” He charged that “gangs of pro-Russian thugs” were patrolling the area and there was “an active campaign to stir division in Ukraine.”
Pyatt’s comments echoed those of Obama, who has declared that any referendum would “violate the Ukrainian constitution and violate international law,” ...
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Such comments bring the level of lying and hypocrisy by the Western powers to new heights. Governments that feel in some way dependent on mobilizing a broader base of public support beyond the military-intelligence apparatus and narrow financial interests concern themselves with matters such as internal consistency and coherence. This is not the case with the supposed proponents of international law in London, Berlin and Washington.
It was Mr. Pyatt, after all, who participated late last year in the leaked phone conversation with Victoria Nuland, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, in which the two officials discussed the need to “midwife” the opposition movement in Ukraine into a new government. They agreed that the individual who has since been installed as prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, referred to as “Yats,” had the “economic experience” and “governing experience” to run the country as a stooge of the United States.
The entire regime-change operation was carried out illegally, with the US and European powers intervening in Ukraine with billions of dollars in funding for oppositional forces allied with fascist organizations such as the Svoboda party and the Right Sector. It is these rabid Ukrainian nationalists who have waged “an active campaign to stir division,” spewing anti-Jewish filth and threatening and beating up Russian-speaking Ukrainians and other minorities. In one of its first acts, the new parliament eliminated language rights for Russian speakers.
Julie Hyland in “The fascist danger in Ukraine” writes:
A politically sinister propaganda offensive is underway in the media to either deny the involvement of fascists in the US-backed coup in Ukraine or present their role as a marginal and insignificant detail.
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The reality is that, for the first time since 1945, an avowedly anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi party controls key levers of state power in a European capital, courtesy of US and European imperialism. The unelected Ukrainian government, headed by US appointee Arseniy Yatsenyuk, includes no fewer than six ministers from the fascist Svoboda party.
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Svoboda was the major political force in the Maidan protests that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. In return for providing the shock troops for the coup, it has been given control of vital ministries.
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In 2010, Svoboda’s official forum posted a statement reading: “To create a truly Ukrainian Ukraine in the cities of the East and South…we will need to cancel parliamentarism, ban all political parties, nationalise the entire industry, all media, prohibit the importation of any literature to Ukraine from Russia...completely replace the leaders of the civil service, education management, military (especially in the East), physically liquidate all Russian-speaking intellectuals and all Ukrainophobes (fast, without a trial shot. Registering Ukrainophobes can be done here by any member of Svoboda), execute all members of the anti-Ukrainian political parties....”
One of the first acts of the new government was to abolish minority rights for Russian-speakers. Moves are also afoot to overturn the law that bans “excusing the crimes of fascism.”
In recent days, representatives of the Right Sector have been busy attacking Jews, Russian Orthodox Christians and legal figures. Two YouTube videos show a Right Sector leader Aleksandr Muzychko—who described his credo as fighting “communists, Jews and Russians for as long as blood flows in my veins”—physically attacking a regional prosecutor in Rovno and forcing Rovno regional parliament members to hold a session at gunpoint after he brandished a Kalashnikov, demanding, “Who wants to take away my machine-gun? Who wants to take away my gun? Who wants to take away my knives? I dare you!”
The US and European bourgeoisie, along with their media lackeys, are well aware of these facts.
In “Oligarchs to the fore once again in Ukraine”
Hyland explains that oligarchs and neo-Nazis are the big winners, the Ukrainian people themselves the big losers. She discloses that there are six key government ministries that are now run by the fascistic Svoboda Party. Also, the new administration has assigned prominent oligarchs over regional administrations. There’s also a Ukrainian-Israeli citizen among them who is used by the west to minimize the appearance of collusion with neo-Nazism
She writes:
The aim of the oligarchs, in tandem with the fascists and extreme-right paramilitaries and their Western backers, is to help the imperialist powers isolate and carve up Russia, while imposing a policy of scorched earth austerity against the Ukrainian working class.
US-appointed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is pledged to implement “very unpopular measures”, stating that he will be “the most unpopular prime minister in the history of my country.”
Paul Craig Roberts in “The Looting of Ukraine has Begun” offers some dire predictions re the welfare, or lack thereof, of average Ukrainians thanks to the illegitimate fascist junta that toppled a democratically elected though unpopular and corrupt president. The new finance ministry of Kiev has set up an “economic austerity plan” that “will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80”. According to Roberts this is so Western bankers who had lent money to the Ukraine can be repaid on the backs of Ukraine’s poor and working classes. Roberts declares, “It is Greece all over again.” Naive protesters who believed the propaganda that EU membership offered a better life are due to lose half of their pension by April declares Roberts.
But this is only the beginning he insists.
Roberts goes on to explain that the “aid” (what Western media is calling it) offered by the EU, 11 billion euros, is a loan with MANY strings attached, including accepting the austerity program of the IMF.
The austerity plan will cut social services, funds for education, layoff government workers, devalue the currency, thus raising the prices of imports which include Russian gas, thus electricity, and open Ukrainian assets to takeover by Western corporations.
Ukraine’s agriculture lands will pass into the hands of American agribusiness.
One part of the Washington-EU plan for Ukraine, or that part of Ukraine that doesn’t defect to Russia, has succeeded. What remains of the country will be thoroughly looted by the West.
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Washington, realizing that its incompetence has lost Crimea, had its Kiev stooges appoint Ukrainian oligarchs, against whom the Maiden protests were partly directed, to governing positions in eastern Ukraine cities. These oligarchs have their own private militias in addition to the police and any Ukrainian military units that are still functioning.
The leaders of the protesting Russians are being arrested and disappeared. Washington and its EU puppets, who proclaim their support for self-determination, are only for self-determination when it can be orchestrated in their favor. Therefore, Washington is busy at work suppressing self-determination in eastern Ukraine.
Obama, the "constitutional lawyer" and "community organizer", and his cabal treat both domestic and international laws, US constitution or foreign constitutions' laws like a buffet of suggestions to be carefully and only self-servingly selected from.
The next election to potentially constitutionally unseat the former pro-Russian President of the Ukraine was scheduled for 2015. There was also a system -- constitutional laws -- for a president to resign or to be legitimately impeached. This lawful route was of course ambushed by the western powers who now stridently posture as law-abiding and -respecting. Better for these predators to have a neo-Nazi-thug-driven coup. With the legitimate and constitutional route, the Ukrainian people may actually have gotten more rights and economic securities than from the Western "regime change" and IMF "austerity plan" playbooks that we Americans should all by now be so familiar with, suspicious of and willing to challenge on a mass, conscience-driven scale.
[cross-posted on open salon and correntewire]