Think what you will of Putin and his move against Ukraine, but who among us can deny, given our bitter experience, the truth of his observation on February 24 that even “US politicians, political scientists and journalists write and say that a veritable ‘empire of lies’ has been created inside the United States in recent years. It is hard to disagree with this – it is really so.”
Think what you will of Putin and his move against Ukraine, but who among us can deny, given our bitter experience, the truth of his observation on February 24 that even “US politicians, political scientists and journalists write and say that a veritable ‘empire of lies’ has been created inside the United States in recent years. It is hard to disagree with this – it is really so.” The U.S. invasion of Iraq, assisted by its United Kingdom puppet, was premised on a Big Lie about “weapons of mass destruction” that Bush and his collaborators plainly knew did not exist. The outcome of that debacle was the destruction of the Iraqi state, the death of some 500,000 civilians due to the war itself and the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, and then a bloody civil war involving Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions in which another 100,000 innocents lost their lives. Iraq today is a Shiite theocracy, closely allied to the Shiite theocracy in Iran. Since the immoral and illegal U.S. invasion, the Christian population in Iraq has fallen by over 80% —from 1.4 million, most of them Chaldean Catholics, to “less than 250,000.” No one summarized this moral travesty at the time better than the Australian journalist John Pilger:
How have we got to this point, where two western governments take us into an illegal and immoral war against a stricken nation with whom we have no quarrel and who offer us no threat: an act of aggression opposed by almost everybody and whose charade is transparent?
How can they attack, in our name, a country already crushed by more than 12 years of an embargo aimed mostly at the civilian population, of whom 42 per cent are children - a medieval siege that has taken the lives of at least half a million children and is described as genocidal by the former United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq?
Regarding Iraq, the Editor of this journal sacrificed a huge chunk of his readership in order speak the self-evident truth even the “support our troops” brigade would eventually be forced to acknowledge. And yes, we did tell you so.
Between Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,000 soldiers dead, countless more horribly maimed for life, and $8.5 trillion down the drain. For nothing. For vastly worse than nothing.
And what but a tissue of lies emanating from the Empire of Lies was U.S. “foreign policy” in Afghanistan? For more than 20 years, American blood and treasure were poured into desert sands 7,000 miles from our shores in pursuit of the fool’s errand of attempting to make Afghanistan into a replica of Delaware, as Buchanan has put it. Biden’s disastrously botched withdrawal allowed the Taliban, many of whom were formerly members of the CIA-funded Mujahedin, to take over the country as the Afghan government collapsed. The entire 20-year-long war was thus instantly rendered pointless.
Trump’s election was in large part the result of the electorate’s revulsion over the results of permanent Washington’s insane blundering about in the Middle East: between Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,000 soldiers dead, countless more horribly maimed for life, and $8.5 trillion down the drain. For nothing. For vastly worse than nothing.
Then there was the 1999 U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbian Christians which did not pause even during Holy Week. The aim there was to coerce Serbia’s acceptance of the secession of the province of Kosovo in an insurrection by ethnic Muslim Albanians whose weapons were supplied by the Clinton administration. An appeal by the Orthodox hierarchy to Clinton to stop the bombing was unheeded. After Serbia was bombed into accepting the creation of the Muslim-dominated Republic of Kosovo, “spring ethnic cleansing by Serbs was ‘replaced by the fall ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Romas, Bosniaks and other non-Albanians accompanied by the same atrocities.’”
Turning to Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen during the Obama administration—which continues to this day—it was American-made bombs away once again.
Consider also the extra-judicial killing of Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi in 2011, which included sodomization with a bayonet. As that Ghoul of Ghouls, Hillary Clinton, famously exulted over U.S. involvement in the uprising that led to al-Gadhafi’s assassination, including the bombing of Libyan targets by B-52 and B-1 bombers: “We came, we saw, he died.” The result is a humanitarian crisis that persists to this day due to the “permanent fracture of Libya as armed militant groups have tried to divide the country along political and tribal lines. Moreover, in the absence of a primary governing body, migration and human trafficking have remained problematic.” Even Libya’s post-Gadafi transitional government vowed “it will prosecute anyone found responsible for the death of Muammar Gadafy [sic] after his capture.” Hillary did not appear in the dock.
Turning to Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen during the Obama administration—which continues to this day—it was American-made bombs away once again. For example, as Rand Paul has noted: “American-built planes with American bombs were used by the Saudis to bomb a funeral procession in Yemen. Over 100 people were killed, and 500 mourners were wounded. Active-duty American pilots have been refueling the planes dropping bombs across Yemen.” The Saudis’ aim is to bomb into oblivion the Houthis who, back in 2015, overthrew the government of the Saudis’ man Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Houthis were allied with members of the Yemeni military who were loyal to Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former President who was toppled during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 and later assassinated (by Houthis!). Who financed and helped orchestrate those uprisings? The United States, of course.
The charge that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine violates sacred international “norms” holds no water. No such norms exist. For proof, look no further than the recent behavior of the United States which has routinely demonstrated a willingness to write its own norms while employing violence on a scale far exceeding anything that Russia has done or is likely to do.
By citing these examples of America’s ruinous Middle East interventions it is not my aim to provide a moral justification for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That would be the fallacy of tu quoque. But it cannot honestly be denied that Putin’s invasion is an American Rules operation: bomb, invade, destroy in order to effect the desired regime change. Bomb, invade, destroy are the rules of U.S. “foreign policy” in the Middle East. In Putin’s case, however, an American Rules war on Ukraine at least makes strategic sense as compared to the utterly senseless U.S. invasion and wholesale destruction of Iraq, which makes the invasion of Ukraine look like a minor skirmish. If that claim seems excessive, consider the assessment of the renowned historical scholar Andrew Bacevich, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University. In a piece entitled precisely “The Ukraine Invasion is nothing compared to Iraq,” Bacevich mocks the claim that Putin is violating “norms” of international law:
The frequently heard charge that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine violates ostensibly sacred international “norms” holds no water. No such norms exist — at least none that a great power will recognize as inhibiting its own freedom of action. For proof, we need look no further than the recent behavior of the United States which has routinely demonstrated a willingness to write its own norms while employing violence on a scale far exceeding anything that Russia has done or is likely to do.
Bacevich is at pains to add that “Russian actions in Ukraine deserve universal condemnation.” But then, so did U.S. actions in Iraq and Iran, the latter involving U.S. support of none other than Saddam Hussein when he was still useful to Washington: “[A]s crimes go, Putin’s aggression pales in comparison with the human toll exacted by Saddam Hussein’s US-supported war of choice against Iran. As for the calamitous results of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the impact of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine rates as trivial by comparison.” That is simply the fact of the matter.
What is happening in Ukraine, says Bacevich, is but a reflection of “geopolitical imperatives that predate the modern era. Nation-states compete against one another to advance their own interests. Pursuant to that competition, they employ various means, with suasion typically the preferred option. Given the uncertainty inherent in war, along with the likelihood of unintended consequences and higher than expected costs, violence tends to be a last resort. But last resort does not mean never. In international politics, these are the enduring facts of life.” Even Obama acknowledged the facts of life concerning Ukraine: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do…. But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”
Lunatics in the U.S. Congress and among the babbling bobbleheads of the perpetually lying media are clamoring for a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine, meaning a hot war with Russia over a nation of no strategic importance whatsoever to this country—an event that would almost certainly trigger World War III.
Yet, as I write this piece, lunatics in the U.S. Congress and among the babbling bobbleheads of the perpetually lying media are clamoring for a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine, meaning a hot war with Russia over a nation of no strategic importance whatsoever to this country—an event that would almost certainly trigger World War III. Why are these lunatics willing to risk the fate of humanity over the integrity of Ukraine’s borders? The answer, however inadvertently, was revealed by a member of Ukraine's parliament in a video Tweet that included a shot of her posing fetchingly with a rifle: “But right now it’s a critical time because we know that we not only fight for Ukraine, [but] we fight for this New World Order for the democratic countries.” By “New World Order” she probably does not mean the New World Order with its one-world government but simply universal liberal democracy in which unborn children are murdered at will by the millions and men pretending to be women are allowed by woke morons to trounce real women in athletic events. In any event, the gun-toting bottle blond has intuited that she stands for something much larger than Ukraine.
Poor Ukraine. As Lee Smith rightly observes, she is but a dispensable pawn in an American Rules game of geopolitical chess. Recall the “Russian Reset” of 2009-13 during the Obama administration. Recall the mockery to which Mitt Romney was subjected by the Democrats and the media and even most of his rival candidates when he suggested during the runup to the 2012 election that Russia was then “our No.1 geopolitical foe.” As Ann Coulter notes, the Times ran an editorial ridiculing Romney for “a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics,” while the BBC huffed that Romney’s view of Russia showed “his lack of experience in foreign policy.” Rachel Maddow—before she became the hysterical Hammer of Putin—sneered at the very idea of a “threatening Russia.” Recall, as well, the Beltway elites’ former opposition to sending lethal weapons to Ukraine back in 2015. As Coulter reminds us, in that year the Times ran an interview with Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute, who explained that “sending lethal weapons to Ukraine would make the U.S. ‘a belligerent party in a proxy war with Russia, the only country on Earth that can destroy the United States. That’s why this is a big deal.’ This was ‘the view of many experts,’ the Times added.” Also opposed to lethal weapons for Ukraine at the time were German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and Professor Graham Allison of Harvard, national defense expert.
Obama and Putin, July 7, 2009, during the “Russian Reset”
(before Russia became the most evil nation on earth)
Nor can we forget that Joe Biden was Vice President when Putin annexed Crimea in response to the U.S.-orchestrated overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 (about which more below). As Buchanan explains: “Rather than lose Sevastopol, Russia’s historic naval base in Crimea, Putin seized the peninsula and declared it Russian territory.” The Obama-Biden administration’s response to that invasion of Ukraine was, as even the neo-con Brookings Institute admits, “weak and underwhelming”—i.e., ineffectual sanctions. Further, says Brookings, although “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the final nail in the coffin of the Reset, President Obama remained reluctant to view Moscow as anything more than a local spoiler, and thought the whole mess was best handled by Europeans.” Which happens to be exactly the truth.
As we can see, in the chess game the U.S. is playing with its Ukrainian pawn, American foreign policy on Russia flips back and forth with the politics of the moment.
But with the election of Donald Trump, Russia was instantly transmogrified, as Coulter writes, “into the most evil country on earth” and Putin into the arch-nemesis of the U.S. with whom Trump had treasonously “colluded” in some vague manner to “steal” the 2016 election. And so, to prove that he was no puppet of Putin as the fantasy claimed, Trump did precisely what his opponents had rejected during the Obama years: shipping lethal weapons to Ukraine. But that did not prevent his impeachment for allegedly holding up the shipment until he received information on Hunter Biden’s corrupt Ukrainian dealings—information he and the American people had a right to receive, and Trump had a duty to obtain. But the supposed quid pro quo with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—which he himself flatly and repeatedly denied—never existed. Like Trump’s nebulous “collusion” with Russia, it was pure fantasy.
As we can see, in the chess game the U.S. is playing with its Ukrainian pawn, American foreign policy on Russia (to quote Coulter again) “flips back and forth with the politics of the moment.” But overall, Putin views Ukraine as a grave threat because, “for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin.” Consider, first of all, how Zelenskyy came to power following the aforementioned overthrow of President Yanukovych (once the Russian Reset had outlived its usefulness). Due to the “Orange Revolution” of 2004-2005—one of a string of U.S.-orchestrated “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics—Yanukovych’s election in 2005 was annulled and he lost the new election ordered by the Supreme Court of Ukraine. But in 2010 the pro-Russian Yanukovych had the temerity to be elected again, this time in an election even Wikipedia admits “was judged free and fair by international observers.” The globalist establishment, led by permanent Washington, would have none of that. So, with dreary predictability, Yanukovych was overthrown during the U.S.-backed “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014.
Two months after Yanukovych’s flight from the country, then Vice President Biden visited Ukraine “as the public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” Days later, Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, and millions of dollars began flowing into the Biden family’s collective pocket. There has never been a more blatant conflict of interest in the history of American foreign relations. Except perhaps the Biden family’s corrupt dealings with China, including off-the-books meetings between Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden and Chinese Communist officials in the White House, after which came the Chinese business deals that reaped some $31 million for the Bidens. (This would explain why Biden had nothing to say during his bumbling State of the Union address about China’s support of Putin’s invasion, including China’s assistance in working around the U.S.- and EU-imposed financial sanctions.)
Zelenskyy is just another U.S.-sponsored autocrat. In May of 2021 he had his most prominent political opponent, the pro-Russian head of the Opposition for Life party, Viktor Medvedchuk, placed under house arrest on charges of “treason,” where he remains to this day.
Following the one-year term of Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov in 2014 and the five-year term of Petro Poroshenko—during which Vice President Biden extorted the firing of the state prosecutor investigating his son’s (and thus his own) corrupt dealings with Burisma—Zelenskyy was elected as the sixth President of Ukraine. A former TV comedian and actor, the first Jewish president of the country was known for performing diabolically obscene “comedy” skits of such unspeakable depravity I cannot even describe them, much less link to them. This sicko is now being hailed as a latter-day Churchill (a vastly more impressive sicko) and the heroic defender of democracy for the Ukrainian people. But Zelenskyy is just another U.S.-sponsored autocrat. In May of 2021 he had his most prominent political opponent, the pro-Russian head of the Opposition for Life party, Viktor Medvedchuk, placed under house arrest on charges of “treason,” where he remains to this day. For good measure, Zelenskyy issued a decree shutting down three pro-Russian TV channels for at least five years and sanctioning eight media and TV companies “in order to protect national security.” The head of the Ukrainian Union of Journalists protested that “The deprivation of access to Ukrainian media for an audience of millions without a court [proceeding] ... is an attack on freedom of expression.” Those millions include the population of eastern Ukraine, which is essentially Russian. Indeed, Ukraine as a whole has historically been part of Russia during the Empire and the Soviet Union. Today, the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk formally consider themselves part of Russia once again.
Also quite useful to Western elites is Zelensky’s wife Olena, who dutifully “initiated Ukraine’s accession to the G7 international initiative on gender equality, the Biarritz Partnership,” which Ukraine joined in September of 2020—one of only six countries outside the G7 to do so. Among other depraved Western desiderata, the advisory committee of the Biarritz Partnership calls for rigorous enforcement of school girls’ “sexual and reproductive rights.” The terminally amoral Western democracies could not ask for more obedient Ukrainian stooges than Ukraine’s first couple, the beneficiaries of a U.S.-backed coup. That is why, beyond the obvious military threat of Ukraine as a potentially nuclear-armed NATO member abutting Russia, Putin at least professes to fear the cultural and social consequences of the eastward expansion of Western powers to Russia’s very borders. As he said in a speech and colloquy with an international gathering of journalists, intellectuals and politicians last October:
Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union….
Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mile- posts on the path towards social renewal….
Honesty also requires the recognition that this war is none of our business, and that the Western elites and their media mouthpieces are encouraging the Ukrainian people to fight and die in a conflict they cannot win.
Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times.
Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists – is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.
Honesty compels one to admit that if Putin’s name were not attached to these “anti-American” and “anti-democratic” remarks, they would receive a standing ovation from any audience composed of this journal’s readers.
Honesty also requires the recognition that this war is none of our business, as even Obama rightly suggested, and that the Western elites and their media mouthpieces are encouraging the Ukrainian people to fight and die in a conflict they cannot win, as the brilliant Col. Doug McGregor patiently explained to a clueless Trey Gowdy, leaving him speechless. Putin’s goal, says McGregor, is to reach a negotiated neutral status for eastern Ukraine—which, again, is essentially Russian—in order to create a buffer against NATO, perhaps including outright annexation, while leaving western Ukraine alone as he lacks the military means to capture and hold it. McGregor noted that Biden has indicated to Putin that this would be an acceptable resolution of the conflict. Said McGregor:
We are imputing to him [Putin] things that he does not want to do, in our usual effort to demonize him and his country. We need to remember that Ukraine is fourth from the bottom of countries in the world as corrupt. Russia is perhaps three or four places above them. This is not the liberal democracy, the shining example, that everyone says it is. Far from it. Mr. Zelenskyy has jailed journalists and his political opposition. I think we need to stay out of it. The American people think we should stay out of it. The Europeans think we should stay of out it. And we should stop shipping weapons and encouraging Ukrainians to die in what is a hopeless endeavor.
It’s all a game by the powers that be, with small and dispensable nations being the pieces on their globalist chessboard.
The U.S. and the Europeans will indeed “stay out of it,” adding fuel to the fire from afar. Meanwhile, the U.S. will continue to import Russian oil, thereby indirectly financing Russia’s war machine, as well as oil from Iran. And the Biden administration will do absolutely nothing about China’s role in support of Putin’s invasion, which not only China, but India, Pakistan and 32 other nations have declined to condemn by abstaining from a vote on the U.N.’s condemnatory resolution.
It’s all a game by the powers that be, with small and dispensable nations being the pieces on their globalist chessboard. To quote Lee Smith: “By tying itself to an American administration that had shown itself to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support.”
In the game of chess, one must be prepared to sacrifice a pawn or two in the effort to kill the King. If the effort fails, the pawns are gone, and the king—in this case, Putin—survives. So, it seems, will it be with the people of Ukraine. May God help them. And may Our Lady of Fatima intervene to prevent the world war the godless, reckless fools who rule a dying West are determined to provoke.
More on the Ukraine situation — THE ERRORS of GLOBALISM: Russia, Ukraine, and the Suicide of the West
