Obama's policy confusion; Assad patriot or villain?

Farces and Fabrications

• After the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, rooting for the rebels was, for many in the West, synonymous with rooting for democracy and freedom.
•  goal was to train about 15,000 rebels in Jordan and other countries so they could return to Syria and fight. However, US defence officials admitted last month that only four or five of the recruits in the programme had actually returned to the battle.
•  “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,” said General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., at Senate hearings on his nomination to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “And if you look at their [the Russians’] behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming.”Editor's note/ I suspect that Dunford (alias DR Strangelove) is alarming!!

Was ist der Dum Doozle???

Obama is calling for Regime Change in Syria. "Assad must go !" Why? Because Obama blindly  accepts the doctrine of Victoria Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan, co founders of the Project for the New American Century, that led to the disastrous and bloody US invasions of Iraq and Libya, support for Nazis in Kiev, and with Republican support, ambitions for a bloody repeat in Syria. She is truly a viscious and evil woman.  Putin at this point has defanged Washington by militarily supporting Assad in his battle against rebel forces within Syria and joining with him in his  declared war on ISIS and Al Queda terrorists.  

To add to the confusion Washington recently initiated the bombing of the Syrian army. Take 
the time to listen to this lengthy interview of Assad with the western press before passing US Media fed judgement.

One of the toughest critics of President Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat who represents his home state of Hawaii.
Gabbard, 34, one of the youngest members of Congress, is a Hawaii Army National Guard captain with two deployments under her belt, including a year in Iraq, where she served in a field medical unit. She is vehmently opposed to removing Assad, the legitimate leader of Syria, since there is no alternative and it would be simply allying US goals with terorists. She claims that we made this mistake in Iraq and Libya and would simply be repeating it again. Gabbard is clearly a brilliant and knowelgeable woman. Listen to her comments on this news clip and draw your own conclusions. https://www.youtube.comd /watch?v=329TFfPxZBU

Tulsi Gabbard

 A bit about her background:   Elected in 2012, she is the first American Samoan^[3] and the first Hindu member of the United States Congress. In July 2004, Gabbard Tamayo asked to deploy with her Hawaii Army National Guard unit, volunteering for a 12-month tour in Iraq, where she served in a field medical unit as a specialist with a 29th Support Battalion medical company Those experiences have shaped her views on the fight against ISIS and given her credibility as a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Gabbard says she simply disagrees with elements of Obama's foreign policy.
She  is an outspoken critic of regime change in Syria and like Putin believes that for now Assad must be supported since there is no credible alternative. His removal would simply play into the hands of Al Queda and would be a repeat of the drastic mistakes made by the US in Iraq and Libya.


US policy and strategy reads like a script out of the Keystone Cops.

Keystone Cops

The confusion arises because the US isn't sure whether the Syrian President and his three hundred thousand strong army or ISIS is their prime enemy target. Putin suffers no such confusion and with Assad has joined in a strategy to militarily defeat ISIS. He is bombing the supply routes of rebel forces. This has resulted in so called moderate rebels supported by the US, in their quest to unseat Assad, being bombed by Russia. In effect a proxy war is underway between Russia and the US, with Iran and Syria supporting Russia and  the US squandering its resources and unsure of it's intentions. 500 Million dollars wasted on a US acknowledged military fiasco to train non existent moderate rebels with only 5 rather than 5,000 soldiers admitted before Congress being trained. To add to the fiasco the equipment America is financing has already fallen into the hands of Al Queda terrorists.

Fortunately Rep. Gabbard and her supporters see the issues clearly but is Congress just listening to John McCain or following the script written in the NYTimes and Fox news? And where does Obama stand? His fog index is high.

Syria and Iran strongly support Russia's military efforts while Washington vacillates and flounders with the issues.  I think that the fundamental problem in Washington is their hegomonic ambitions threatening regime change in any state that opposes their objectives. NATO is their historical battering ram against Russia and a 60 Year legacy of the Cold War still exists and of late is intensifying. Proxy wars such as we are seeing in Syria will be the wars in the future since a major war with nuclear armed nations will be unthinkable unless a suicidal Dr Strangelove shows up.

Brain Dead conformity

 “People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”
― Jess C. Scott, Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody  

 “Why do you have to be the same as the others? ...Most of them are stupid.”
― Ken Follett, Winter of the World

  “The city was filled to overflowing with persons who had neither brains nor individuality, who bore no resemblance to men that live by bread, and had only their outward shape to distinguish them from sheep.”
― Lucian of Samosata

 “I don’t like the term “Average Joe.” I prefer “Dolly,” because not only is the Everyman a sheep, but he’s also a clone. They all think alike and act alike.”
― Jarod Kintz, 99 Cents For Some Nonsense


Pavlov and his experiments with dogs.
Pavlov Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was an eminent Russian physiologist and psychologist who devised the concept of the conditioned reflex. In his initial experiments, Pavlov rang a bell and then gave the dog food; after a few repetitions the dog started to salivate in response to the bell. Pavlov called the bell the conditioned stimulus because its effects depend on its association with food. 

Just like the dogs we all have Pavlovian responses to repetitive stimuli. French teenage girls are exposed repetitively to TV and film images of attractive people smoking and a very high percentage of them smoke. Russians have experienced a profound rise in their living standards under the leadership of Putin and experience a positive Pavlovian response to his name. Conversely Western media associate Putin with a rejection of our American leadership and in our media he is vilified. Just like the dog's salivating response on hearing the bell ring, many in the West have an instant negative response on hearing his name. Republicans have the same spontaneous bell ringing reaction to hearing Obama's name. 

Mindless Conformity
It logically follows that our Pavlovian responses can blindly lead us into collective herd-like and mindless conformity. A rush into a war in Iraq with flags waving. Oops!! a mistake based on lies that leaves a nation destroyed  including 5,000 American soldiers and as many as a million Iraqis dead.  Thomas Friedman, (described by Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stones as light weight but popular columnist of the NYT) was a strong advocate for this war. 
This was a repeat that followed the disaster in Vietnam that killed an estimated 3.6 million in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and 6,500 American soldiers and ended up with an ignominious American defeat.

 The Lonely Crowd - Written in 1950 by David Riesman describes three main cultural types:  tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. If we can step aside from the herd and listen to mainly inner directed personalities it can give some hope to the human race. The Internet has opened a window to these voices all of whom reject mindless conformity. Their voices are now being heard and shared by millions through the Internet. The aren't so lonely anymore. My list is long but here are a few names: Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Jon Stewart, Naomi Kline, Jesse Ventura, Michael Moore, Pepe Escobar, Elizabeth Warren, Edward Snowdon, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange (Wiki Leaks) Cenk Uygur (Young Turks), Erik Margolis, Peter Lavelle (RT).

Where does mindless conformity take us? There are many allegoric stories written about this human weakness such as

• Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' where the crew blindly follows Captain Ahab's  obsession to kill the Great White Whale. Only the first mate rejects this maniacal obsession and survives to tell the tale.
• The fable 'The Pied Piper' tells the story of children listening to the leaders flute and blindly following him to their death. Dates back to an actual event in Hamelin in 1284 where 130 children were killed.
• Examples of modern day Pied Pipers for military interventions, including the disastrous wars in Iraq and Libya, include Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Fred Barnes of Fox News, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and influential Republican right wing policy advocates such as Victoria Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan with the backing of PNAC (Project for the New American Century).  She is currently busy in Kiev with a 5 billion dollar budget to realize her hegemonic goal to replace Putin with a US handpicked leader just as they  replaced Ukraine's elected leader with Poroshenko, a US handpicked stooge. 

What can we do to prevent being swept away by mindless conformity? Unfortunately the  controlling and wealthy interests need their armies of well cared for sheep. The Koch Brothers can  be included in this select group of 20 people whose wealth is estimated to amount to a total net worth of over a half-trillion dollars. 

Their collective investments run into the many millions to finance chosen politicians, conservative think tanks and media campaigns. Koch brothers for example promote the rejection of global climate change regulations related to oil and gas production and generously finance conservative politicians who support their causes. 

The history of the Koch family makes for some very interesting reading. The pile of money Fred Koch and his family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil industry provided the foundation of wealth for Koch industries. Fred Koch (1900 - 1967) from this experience in Stalinist Russia became an ardent anti-communist and a founding member of the John Birch Society. He was convinced that the evil 'socialism' was taking over America through unions, colored people, Jews, homosexuals, the Kennedys and even Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had four sons who were all rabid conservatives; Charles and David who manage the Koch empire, and Frederick, the oldest brother a philanthropist who died in 2014 and William, the youngest brother an American businessman, sailor, and collector. William's  boat was the winner of the America's Cup in 1992.
Read about an unsavory Nazi past of Koch relatives.

Since Sheep rarely think about these issues, their complacent conformity lends a helping hand to the influence of the .00001% as they trash Obamacare and environmental protection. In my view only an economic upheaval can alter the course of this complacency.
 

I Can't Take it Anymore - Feb 2015 update

•  last week, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney sharply criticized austerity policies common to the Eurozone states, warning that the single-currency area was constrained by strangulating levels of debt that could plunge it into years of stagnation. 
•  Following Carney’s comments, UK economist and anti-austerity campaigner Michael Burke argued that debt burdens of struggling EU states such as Greece and Ireland are unsustainable, and must be largely written off if real growth is to occur in these states.

Jan 2015 update. The sweeping victory of Alexis Tsipras's left-wing Syriza party raises hope for a better life in Greece and dashes Merkel's demands for endless austerity.  Read on.

"The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945"
Dmitri  Christoulas

* * *

Our Capitalist Manifesto: Welcome to laissez-faire Global Capitalism!! Anything goes! We the bankers and international oligarchs own the system, enforce the rules, and the public must pay for it.  As personal profit is our sole motive we shelter our wealth off shore to hide it from Nation States, lend without discipline and constraints to create collapsing bubbles, day trade for speculation from tax havens sums that exceed by many times the world's daily GDP , and take ownership of the media and flood the political system with largess to ensure it does our bidding. We grab hold of an ever increasing share of the nation's wealth from a less worthy citizenry and accept that many will provide their inexpensive labour within a modern framework of serfdom.

In the US, Canada, Great Britain and the greater part of Europe the public, largely disillusioned and passive, have retreated from participation in the public debate. Demonstrations are scattered, lacking teeth and soon forgotten. France is currently an exception that raises hope for revolutionary reforms. This hope for change comes from a movement on the Far Left that has become the third force in the election battle. It is a revolutionary call for citizens to take charge to gain their rights and bring an end to laissez-faire capitalism. It's apparent that there is an awakening of a disillusioned public, many of whom in the past have retreated from voting. With more than 15% of the popular vote and not far behind the UMP(conservatives) and PS(Socialists) they have become a deciding factor in who will take power in France. It is also a cry that is reaching the public in Greece, Spain and other countries now facing years of brutal restraints to pay off the bankers who are largely responsible for creating the financial mess they are in.

This movement is being led by a fiery orator,  Jean-Luc Melanchon who is attracting audiences of  70, 000 or more wherever he speaks filling public squares and surrounding streets.  Here is a video of his oration in Toulouse. You don't have be bilingual to gain an impression of his passionate delivery and the audience's enthusiastic response. 

His critics, of which he has many, say that his programs for radical reforms are unaffordable, in conflict with France's trading partners and excessively idealistic. Clearly his is critics are right if France decided to go it alone, but I think Melanchon  is reaching out for an international audience to bring about unbearable pressures on laissez-faire capitalism and those fighting to maintain the status quo. 

The months ahead will determine whether this movement burns out from exhaustion or this is the beginning of a constructive and hopefully non-violent revolutionary movement that will spread.

Feb 2015 update.

Alexis Tsipras

Feb 2015 Update!! On Jan 25th the Greeks finally gave voice to "I can't take it anymore" and elected the left-wing party SYRIZA led by Alexis Tsipras winning a legislative election for the first time ever, securing 149 out of the 300 seats, 2 seats short of an absolute majority. On the other hand, conservative and then-ruling New Democracy lost 53 seats and obtained its worst result ever in terms of seats won.

 The above was written in 2012. With the election of Alexis Tsipras, Merkel's demands for endless austerity is being challenged and with it the overpriced Euro. In the months ahead we predict that southern European countries including France will rally around Greece's issues . Like Roosevelt before them, they realize  that austerity is the problem and not the solution.

Thomas Friedman,"Imperial Messenger''

The armchair warriors of Official Washington are eager for a new war, this time with Russia over Ukraine, and they are operating from the same sort of mindless “group think” and hostility to dissent that proved so disastrous in Iraq, 

How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust

Exclusive: Pundit Thomas Friedman says the new Ukraine regime “shares our values” but – as much of the world marked the 70th anniversary of the Nazi Holocaust finally being ended by Russian and U.S. armies – politicians in Kiev were busy honoring Ukraine’s Nazi collaborator so what does he believe? 

Robert Parry.

The Nitwits are in charge
Exclusive: Pundit Thomas Friedman laments that the new Cold War isn’t funny enough for him, but there really isn’t anything funny about the U.S. plunging into an unnecessary nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine while Friedman and his fellow VIPs misreport what’s happening, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Sometimes I wonder if today’s crop of U.S. pundits and pols could ever rise to meet some truly urgent need of the American people, let alone the interests of the world. Everything, it seems, is done with a snigger and an attitude – even as we stumble into a wholly unnecessary confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia over which batch of thieves and oligarchs gets to run Ukraine.

Friedman's position as one the world’s leading pundits is “testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media”, and right to characterize him as a “mouthpiece for empire and capital” and “resident apologist for US military excess and punishing economic policies”.

 Belén Fernández, Verso

 “The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been--but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.”

Matt Taibbi's  comments about  Friedman's prose:

“How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened? Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?”

 

Though Thomas Friedman, a leading New York Times Columnist is clearly a shill and has been wrong again and again such as promoting the stampede into Iraq, He is still regarded as perhaps the preeminent foreign policy pundit in the U.S. media.  I find  him horribly glib and superficial. He is a booster of globalization and with it the spreading of the good will and intentions of US foreign policies and initiatives. He even sees the wars in Iraq, Aghanistan and other foreign interventions as beneficial, spreading American know how, and enlightenment to backward nations. The violence and killings are merely an inconvenient but  necessary shaking up of backward people. 

Here are a few a few of his observations and beliefs.

•  “to be a French educated Arab intellectual is the worst combination possible for understanding globalization. It is like being twice handicapped” 
• “the education of Hezbollah….the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians – the families and employers of militants – to restrain Hezbollah in the future”
• Friedman announces in 2003 that the reason for the invasion of Iraq was the need to burst a “terrorism bubble” that had emerged in “that part of the world”:
•  His complaint that American occupying forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war” is a direct echo of Barack Obama’s promise during the 2007 presidential election campaign that “we're not going to babysit a civil war”, as though the bloodbath engulfing the country was attributable to the infantilism of its people and not to the effects of it being violently invaded by a foreign power. Elsewhere, Friedman’s likening of the US occupation of Afghanistan to the adoption of a “special needs baby” 

In the Ukraine Friedman states as fact that 9,000 Rusian troops are in Ukraine. As usual Friedman throws around accusations without adequate evidence. The Guardian provides a much more balanced perspective while aware of thae dated photos and uncertainty of much of the evidence.

Which brings us to the issue of his views about Ukraine and Russia. As the United States rushes into a new Cold War with Russia, we are seeing the makings of a new McCarthyism, challenging the patriotism of anyone who doesn’t get into line. Friedman and Hilary likening Putin with Hitler is a pathetic cheap shot unworthy of a leader. It might be more rational to associate the very active Nazi's movement in Kiev with Poroshenko and his aid and support from the US's notorious Victoria Nuland, the famous 'regime change advocate' who when working for Dick Cheney promoted the disasters in Iraq and Libya and  hand picked the leadership in Kiev. Seems this would be worth Friedman's comments.

Poroshenko, a Disaster for Ukraine ?

 

 

Thirteen years after the end of the Soviet Union, the American press establishment seemed eager to turn Ukraine's protested presidential election on November 21 into a new cold war with Russia. Stephen Cohen                     Is Porosheko still working for his former masters in Washington, DC? Two diplomatic messages from the WikiLeaks Public Library on U.S. Diplomacy indicate that newly elected President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko was an agent for United States State Department.   The West created [Ukrainian] President [Petro] Poroshenko, but he is in many respects the tail that wags the dog, they cannot always rein him in. He is the rogue player, he is the joker in this hand,”  Martin Sieff  April 4th 2016 Update:https://www.rt.com/op-edge/338675-ukraines-petro-poroshenko-biggest-loser/ Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko: The biggest loser from the Panama Papers?  The outcome of the elections was known in advance - Poroshenko was declared the winner of the race. The results will further split the country. many regions refuse to recognize as President this cocolate king who is notorious for pocketing government money. Poroshenko has no chance to stop the bloody conflict even scrupulously carrying out all the orders given by Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt. Besidess,the mission of putting an end to the bloodshed has never been set by his US bosses... Gregory Kolyada

Democracy, which Kiev so much adores and venerates together with the “civilized countries”, as President Poroshenko puts it, is about learning to live with differences, by respecting and accommodating it. I do not see any sign of if coming from Kiev. What Ukraine really needs is a President and a government that listens to all Ukrainians and respects their right to be different. Yes, the majority of Ukrainians want to be part of Europe. But there is also the other Ukraine that wants to keep close ties with Russia. Any political project of state-building in Ukraine will succeed only if this other Ukraine is heard and accommodated.

Halyna Mokrushyna

It has become evident that Washington is using Ukraine as a battle ground to achieve their hegemonic goals against Russia. While Merkel and Hollande are attempting to negotiate a peace accord by meeting with Putin and Poroshenko, Kerry is deliberately undermining this attempt by independently asking Congress for funds to strengthen Kievs military capacity. Washington is not interested in peace because it doesn't fit with their battle to bankrupt Russia and unseat Putin. Porkyshenko is their loyal soldier in this battle and willing to sacrifice Ukranian lives. He sits in the command post in Kiev with his American allies, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt.

Don Currie

A reenactment of 'Dr Strangelove' Starring Poroshenko

'Billionaire Poroshenko started his business by laundering the money of 'Soviet times’ administrators. He has never been an entrepreneur to start a business of his own. The story is invented. He made a head start thanks to the criminal connections of his father sentenced for large-scale theft in 1986. Having served the sentence, Poroshenko Sr. launched his own business and involved his son in the activities. Poroshenko Sr was rewarded for his merits in 2009 the Hero of Ukraine decoration bought for him by his son. The business was dirty, it all started with plundering state property. The Poroshenko family had plans to expand the activities beyond Ukraine.  Poroshenko is well known for misappropriating budget funds. He has the reputation of someone who knows how to make money out of thin air. Many times he has been accused of being involved in large scale corruption schemes, open lobbying, embezzlement of budget allocations, tax evasion, illegal operations to acquire shares, and physically threatening political opponents and competitors. '

Forbes lists Petro Poroshenko as the 130th wealthiest person in the world with 1.6 billion dollars. 

open lobbying
Poroshenko has received a hero’s welcome in the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and the media, as well including their counterparts in Canada. In fact, Poroshenko has recently addressed a joint session of Congress, an honor bestowed only on America’s closest allies, especially Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who has spoken twice to joint sessions. Netanyahu typically comes to Washington when he expects to return to Jerusalem with financial guarantees, military aid packages, and other largesse courtesy of the American taxpayers. Poroshenko and other leaders know this and try to emulate the influence of the Israel Lobby that ensures huge assistance packages for their client.

Corruption is a major problem for Ukraine. It has become a simple, effective and sometimes the only way to do things in a lot of cases: getting a medical certificate, the permit for construction or a job, entering a university. In most cases one has to grease the hand. Even to bury someone one must pay a bribe for a place at a cemetery.
 

Graft has become the main source of income for many public sector employees. This has largely eliminated the stimulus for the government and society to reform. Corruption has become the norm for governmental relations 

Depending on the region the bribe for avoiding being sent to war fluctuated from 500 euros to 2000 euros. Special pay is envisaged for a chance to choose the military service and the place of deployment. The failure to tackle the rampant and deep-seated corruption plaguing the Ukrainian people could quickly squash any optimism that the revolution and the recently signed EU Association Agreement herald a better future.

The speech to the joint session of Congress will place Poroshenko on the same level as other present and past U.S. allies. However, Poroshenko’s speech will be forgotten as soon at it is given. Today, few, if any, older members of Congress would recall similar addresses by NATO allies such as Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Dutch Queen Beatrix, or Canadian Governor General Vincent Massey. All those speeches became, as will Poroshenko’s, insignificant footnotes of history.

Pavel Gubarev a leader of the Donetsk Republic (who was wounded and  hospitalized in an assassination attempt in October 2014) says: "We want to create a fundamentally new state based on social justice  and equality of people. We now have a chance, an opportunity to reboot . When people understand that the new state will protect their rights and interests, they will be happy and will support us. We wanted the new government to ensure the rights of the Russian-speaking population and to consider an autonomous status for the Donbas area. However, we never saw any desire of the Ukrainian authorities in Kiev to find a compromise. How will I explain to the families who have lost loved ones in the fighting what they died for if we negotiate with Kiev? For the return of the oligarchs?"

The yes vote in the self-rule referendum in the Donbas was born as much from a sense of difference between eastern and western Ukraine as from deep disillusionment about the extent to which the Ukrainian state symbolized the kind of social justice to which Gubarev aspires.

 Soviet-style egalitarianism mixed with cultural mythology,geography and the historical precedent of Donbas may not only appeal to those who supported the the referendum but is also an attractive geopolitical concept from Moscow’s perspective.

President Barack Obama during a meeting at the White House praised Petroshenko for signing the recent “Association Agreement” with the European Union and encouraging the military exercises being conducted in Ukraine by Ukrainian and NATO forces (also the Sea Breeze naval exercises recently completed with the US Navy in the Black Sea).

Canada Defense Minister Valery Heletey recently announced that NATO countries are delivering weapons to Ukraine for use against the Russian speaking population of eastern Ukraine. There are no guarantees that NATO weapons will not end up in the hands of ultra-rightwing Ukrainian militias from Kiev sporting Nazi helmets. These same miltias have entered eastern Ukraine with genocide in their foremost thoughts.

Putin has recommended forming a federal system of government in Ukraine that would give a freedom of expression between the different languages, and aspirations of the people in Kiev and those in the Eastern cities of Donestk and Luhansk.  Ukraine could successfully use this rational approach by following Canada's federal system that recognizes the distinct cultural and language differences of  it's French and English speaking  citizens.  Quebec where most of it's French speaking citizens live maintains strong cultural and commercial ties with France. 

The Kiev government is dysfunctional and bankrupt and is deploying Western taxpayer money to wage a vicious war on several million Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbas (Donestk and Luhansk region).This area is the traditional center of greater Russia’s coal, steel and industrial infrastructure. Donbas and Russia have been Siamese twins economically and politically for centuries. Under Poroshenko Kiev carries on with a senseless and murderous shelling and  bombing of these cities on it's eastern border with Russia. 

NATO is itching on the sidelines to enter the fray using the return of  Crimea to Russia as it's justification. The fact that Crimeans in an open vote overwhelmingly elected to leave Ukraine is of course viewed by Poroshenko as illegal even though there is precedence for such a vote in Kosovo's choice to declare independence from Serbia and Canada's referendum in 1995 on Quebec's choice whether to remain in Canada or become an independent state. 

Update Feb 24th 2015: Excerpts from Robert Parry's observations in Consortiumnews.com.

There is a madness to the Kiev regime that the West doesn’t want to recognize because to do so would upend the dominant narrative of “our” good guys vs. Russia’s bad guys. If we begin to notice that the right-wing regime in Kiev is crazy and brutal, we might also start questioning the “Russian aggression” mantra.The deputy foreign minister announced that Kiev is preparing for “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia.The deputy foreign minister, Prystaiko, announced that Kiev is preparing for “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia.Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable about Prystaiko’s “Dr. Strangelove” moment is that it produced almost no reaction in the West. You have a senior Ukrainian official saying that the world should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to maintain its historic relationship with Russia.

 No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet, across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality, even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established.

 Ask yourself why our mainstream media is hiding the truth from the American Public

 The New York Times and the Washington Post have spearheaded this journalistic malfeasance by putting on blinders so as not to see Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, such as when describing the key role played by the Azov battalion in the war against ethnic Russians in the east.

The Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.

The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article from Mariupol on Feb. 11, depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. he Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.

The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article from Mariupol on Feb. 11,2015 depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. The Times left out the salient and well-known fact that the Azov battalion is composed of neo-Nazis.

Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.
Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, “is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,” according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”


An Orwellian World
In a “normal world,” U.S. and European journalists would explain to their readers how insane all this is; how a dispute over the pace for implementing a European association agreement while also maintaining some economic ties with Russia could have been worked out within the Ukrainian political system, that it was not grounds for a U.S.-backed “regime change” last February, let alone a civil war, and surely not nuclear war.

 In our land of the free, there is no “official narrative” and the U.S. government would never stoop to propaganda. Everyone just happily marches in lockstep behind the conventional wisdom of a faultless Kiev regime that “shares our values” and can do no wrong — while ignoring the brutality and madness of coup leaders who deploy Nazis and invite a nuclear holocaust for the world.

 


Assistant Secretary of State for European/Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland of "fuck Europe" fame is  the wife of arch-neocon policy wonk Robert Kagan. While knowing full well Poroshenko's corrupt past she can be sure to line up Congress and the media to hype Porky as the “Saviour of Ukraine” while, at the same time heaping scorn on Russia. This is the same couple who advocated the disastrous wars in Iraq and Libya in the name of 'regime change' that destroyed those nations, leaving millions dead and clearly contributing to the birth of ISIS. They were only prevented from doing the same in Syria by Putin although they keep trying . Here she is handing out cookies in Ukraine.