John Pilger
@johnpilger
The Hypocrites on parade. Watch them on CNN, the BBC, read them wall-to-wall. Now imagine a strategic enclave of Britons, or French, or Germans, or Americans under violent siege - shelled and terrorised - for eight years. Would this be tolerated by the rulers of the world?
https://twitter.com/johnpilger/status/1496807122364895234John Pilger
@johnpilger
For Johnson and Biden to lecture us on the ethics of world affairs is absurd. Biden is currently stealing Afghanistan's cash reserves and condemning millions to starvation. The West could have brought peace to Ukraine, but chose not to.
https://twitter.com/johnpilger/status/1496250513641426952And:
The hypocrisy and dishonesty of U.S. policy in Ukraine
The list of governments overthrown by the U.S. is long and repetitive. For instance, the people of Chile had to "live under a government they did not choose," when the CIA enabled a military coup in 1973 that resulted in 17 years of forced disappearances, political imprisonment and torture...
"The extent of the Obama administration's meddling in Ukraine's politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post-Yanukovych government."
In Crimea, where two-thirds of the population is ethnically Russian, the Crimean parliament reacted to the U.S.-sponsored coup by voting on March 6, 2014, to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. A referendum on March 16 returned a 97% vote in favor of joining Russia. This result was not accepted by Ukraine or most other nations. But Gallup and other polls record overwhelming approval of Russian annexation by Crimeans.
In May of 2014 pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine declared the Independent People's Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are not yet recognized by Russia or any other state. This region is the birthplace of former President Yanukovych, and is primarily Russophone with a large ethnic Russian minority. It continues to be a war zone between Ukrainian government troops and separatists supported by Russia. The death toll now stands at 14,000 in what has become a trench war along a 420-km-long front line cutting through densely populated areas.
To understand the current crisis over U.S. claims about the threat of Russian troops at the Ukrainian border, we have to keep in mind the ongoing violence and instability from the Ukrainian civil war in Donbas caused by the American-sponsored overthrow of Yanukovych. Since 2014 there have been intermittent efforts to implement the provisions of the Minsk Protocol negotiated by Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), aided by France and Germany. The protocol sought to establish a new political relationship between Kyiv and the Donbas region with greater autonomy for the Donbas. So far, the political will has not been strong enough to implement these necessary changes. From the Russian point of view, the instability is desirable because it blocks NATO from incorporating Ukraine and creating a military threat on Russia's border. This stalemate is complicated by unwillingness of the U.S. and EU to recognize that Russia's annexation of Crimea is a permanent fait accompli...
Putin's demands that NATO pledge not to admit Ukraine (and Georgia) and to limit the deployment of troops and weapons to NATO's eastern flank are reasonable. He is being much more accommodating than we would be if Russia or China were doing in the Western Hemisphere what the U.S. and its allies are doing in Europe.
Biden and his foreign-policy team seem determined to revive a cold-war bipolar divide between the West and the East, with the threat of a still-expanding nuclear arsenal constraining each side. This is a wasteful and reckless vision of Europe. It forces Russia and China to forge a defensive alliance against the West instead of developing their distinctive roles in a broader multipolar world. We need instead to go back to the vision proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev of a continental community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok in which nations can live harmoniously while adopting different sociopolitical systems.https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/The-hypocrisy-and-dishones-by-Brian-Cooney-N... An excellent and important post, showing a POV other than from the triumphalism of US-led neoliberalism, determined to maintain USA global hegemony, as if the adversarial 2-party democracies are the only or even the best form of government.
Gorbachev's vision of a multi polar world living in peace with different socio-political systems is the vision of a true statesman, as opposed to the pathetic, paranoid and in the end evil "America First" Trump doctrine.