Crimea River, Obama's Ukrainian Blunder

By Mike Whitney, CounterPunch

21 March 14

”There is no question but that Russia is confronted with an existential threat. The integration of Ukraine into the expanding anti-Moscow alliance would render Russia more vulnerable to imperialist aggression and destabilization. Future operations will unfold not only on the periphery of Russia, but within its borders. The United States and the European imperialist powers will have no difficulty finding new “human rights” causes to encourage, finance and arm.”

–”The Crisis in Ukraine”, International Committee of the Fourth International

“In the eastern part of Ukraine and Crimea in particular, we have seen the emergence of people from Kiev with a clear intention of repeating what has been happening in the Western part of Ukraine.” (Coup plotters) “want to replace regional governments.”

– Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Federation’s ambassador to the United Nations

ere’s something you won’t read in the mainstream media: Ukraine’s fake revolution is over. It ended when Russian Intelligence agents uncovered a plan by coup plotters to destabilize the Crimea using the same strategy they’d used in Kiev, that is, seizing government buildings, inciting violence, and spreading terror. The discovery, which included “hacked” e mails, shaped events on the ground. Russian troops were deployed to beef up security at the airports and government buildings making it impossible for the putsch to succeed. In other words, the Kremlin implemented its own ”preemption” scheme and it worked like a charm. The Washington-backed coup in the Crimea was foiled and order was maintained. Score one for Russia. Here’s the scoop from blogger Moon of Alabama from a post titled “The Crimean Anti-Coup Move”. Here’s an excerpt:

“On February 27 Russian forces stationed in the Crimea and supported by allegedly local paramilitary took over security at two airports and of some government buildings in Crimean cities. A Turkish flight to Simferopol airport was called back and further Turkish fights to Crimea were canceled.” (“The Crimean Anti-Coup Move” Moon of Alabama,)

So, what was Russian Intel reacting to, you ask?

Well, according to Voice of Russia, hacked emails pointed to a group of Tatar troublemakers, neo-Nazis and others who were allegedly getting assistance from Turkish Intelligence. There were also two incidents where masked men carried out paramilitary-type operations on government buildings in Simferopol in Crimea on February 27 and February 28 which suggested that something big was afoot. (Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin confirmed that the Crimean interior ministry was attacked on Saturday by armed men sent by Kiev in a statement he made before the UN Security Council.) The incidents were captured on tape and can be seen here:

Here’s an excerpt from one of the hacked emails, also from the same post, allegedly between the coup plotters in Kiev and a Tatar leader:

“Everything is going according to the plan. We are ready to proceed with the second part of the play. As agreed earlier last week, my guys together with people from the “Karpatskaya Sech” and UNA-UNSO will arrive wherever is needed and with the necessary weapons. You only need to let us know the addresses of the warehouses in Simferopol, Sevastopol, Kerch, Feodosia and Yalta, and the time of the meeting…” (The Crimean Anti-Coup Move” Moon of Alabama)

Yep, “everything is going according to plan”, all right…..Everything except for those Russian regulars that are guarding the buildings we’re supposed to blow up. Where’d they come from?

Sounds like a Monty Python skit, doesn’t it?

Of course, I have no way of verifying the information here, but it seems like a plausible scenario given what we already know about foreign involvement in these phony made-in-the-US revolutions.

Here’s more from the same post:

”According to news appearing in the French, Ukrainian and Russian press, Turkish Intelligence has a finger in the ongoing pro-EU protests in Ukraine. News stories from these three nations have claimed that the governmental intelligence organization of Turkey, the National Intelligence Organization (M?T) organized the transfer of separatist, jihadist Tatars trained in Turkey to the Ukraine. According to French news site Egalite et Réconciliation, dozens of Crimean Tatar Jihadists were extracted from Syria by the M?T and transferred to Ukraine via Turkey on an ?stanbul-Sevastopol flight of Turkish Airlines on the 22 November. According to information based on sources from the Security Service of Ukraine, (SBU), Crimean Tatars who attended the protests in Ukraine’s capital Kiev on November 21 were charged with establishing the security of the square.” (“The Crimean Anti-Coup Move” Moon of Alabama)

Nice, eh? So, Turkey’s spy agency is arming and training “jihadist Tatars” and then shipping them off to Ukraine to fight in Uncle Sam’s NWO Sweepstakes? What a tangled web we weave. But, then, just about everyone knew that the so called Ukrainian “revolution” was a big, fat fraud engineered by foreign Intel agencies, subversive NGOs and voracious globalist oligarchs. Still, it makes it a lot easier when the main players leave their fingerprints on the murder weapon so you can figure out who’s who. In this case, we know the State Department was at least tangentially involved because of Victoria Nuland’s hacked phone call. At the very least, we know that the Obama braintrust was pulling strings behind the scenes to get rid of the democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovych and replace him with a compliant US puppet. And they certainly succeeded in that regard, too. It’s the rest of the plan that went south.

You may have noticed that the above post mentions a third group along with the Tatar jihadis and the Nazis. They also mention the UNA-UNSO. So who the heck are these guys anyway?

As it turns out, political analyst, F. William Engdahl has done a bit of research on the group and gives a rundown in a recent article titled “The Rape of Ukraine; Phase Two Begins”. Here’s what he says:

“The question unanswered until now is who deployed the snipers? (who shot into the crowd in Maidan Square) According to veteran US intelligence sources, the snipers came from an ultra-right-wing military organization known as Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).

…

Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the crack-para-military UNA-UNSO members have been behind every revolt against Russian influence. The one connecting thread in their violent campaigns is always anti-Russia. The organization, according to veteran US intelligence sources, is part of a secret NATO “GLADIO” organization, and not a Ukraine nationalist group as portrayed in western media….

“These people are the dangerous mercenaries used all over the world to fight NATO’s dirty war, and to frame Russia because this group pretends to be Russian special forces…..

If true that UNA-UNSO is not “Ukrainian” opposition, but rather a highly secret NATO force using Ukraine as base, it would suggest that the EU peace compromise with the moderates was likely sabotaged by the one major player excluded from the Kiev 21 February diplomatic talks—Victoria Nuland’s State Department.” (F. William Engdahl, “The Rape of Ukraine; Phase Two Begins”, Information Clearinghouse)

So, were there NATO-backed paramilitaries on the ground stirring up trouble prior to the coup? Did they instigate the coup by firing into the crowd on Maidan Square, killing innocent people and creating the panic that forced Yanukovych to flee the country? Did they execute this plan to avoid new elections which were agreed upon by the opposing parties? Did they execute the plan to take advantage of the fact that Putin was still bogged down at the Olympic games and unable to give the crisis his undivided attention?

These are just some of the questions that remain unanswered, but even without all the details, there’s certainly enough to suggest that agents of foreign governments played a critical role in toppling Ukraine’s president.

At present, the situation in the Crimea appears to be relatively calm due to stepped up security. The Russian military has secured the main government buildings, airports, military bases and harbors. Working people are still able to carry out their daily activities much as they had before the government was toppled. Putin has done what he had to do to defend Russian security and protect Russian-speaking people in the Crimea. Obama would have done the same thing had he been in a similar situation.

Naturally, the Obama team is hopping mad. Their plan failed, they have egg on their face, and they want revenge. That’s why they dispatched the dreary John Kerry to make the rounds on the Sunday talk shows, so he could wave his finger threateningly at Putin while boring people to death with his monotone bloviating. The whole Obama team is having a giant hissyfit because they rolled the dice and came up snakeyes. That’s unfortunate, but what do they plan to do about it; that’s the question? After all, holding your breath and stomping your feet may be personally gratifying, but it doesn’t translate into effective foreign policy. That takes insight, vision and a solid grasp of the facts, all of which are sadly lacking among the dismal members of the present administration. The problem is, there are no good options. Aside from launching a full-blown ground war, which nobody wants, Obama is just going to have to suck it up and move on, because, at the end of the day, Moscow’s still going to control the Crimea and Obama and his EU collaborators are still going to be stuck with a broken, underwater province run by technocrats, kleptocrats, and neo-Nazi, clownshoes politicos. So, deal with it.

Here’s how the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, summed it up in an interview on CNN earlier in the week. He said, “This is not Syria, where the United States did have real options, and the president chose not to implement them. Here we really don’t have very good options to introduce.”

Indeed. There are “no good options” which is why we think that Moscow will shrug off the mudslinging and the saber rattling and go about its business much like before. In the words of an old Russian proverb, “Dogs bark, but the caravan passes on.”

How the GOP Became the White Supremacy Party and Got Away With It

By Chauncey DeVega, AlterNet

21 March 14

The question is not 'Is Ryan a racist?' but 'What type of racist is he?'

aul Ryan has attempted to clarify his racist argument [3] that “inner city” black people are lazy and do not want to work. He issued a statement that:

After reading the transcript of yesterday morning’s interview, it is clear that I was inarticulate about the point I was trying to make. I was not implicating the culture of one community—but of society as a whole.

This is a false and disingenuous pseudo apology. Paul Ryan is the leader of a political party that is the country’s premier white identity organization. The Republican Party has also merged conservatism and racism in such a way that appeals to white racial resentment are its Lingua Franca and a taken for granted way of thinking about political and social reality.

Paul Ryan traffics in racism [4] because the Republican Party is a racist organization. The calculus is not complicated.

There has been some smart writing [5] about Paul Ryan’s use of coded racial appeals [6]. However, the majority of the news media is asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to figure out “if” Paul Ryan is a racist, the more revealing question is “what type of racist is he?”

There are three basic ways to understand Paul Ryan’s racism, both as part of a pattern of behavior by Republicans, and as an example of (symbolic) white racism in the post civil rights era.

The Southern Strategy.

Paul Ryan’s claim that black people have “bad culture”, may be genetically defective, and do not have “normal” “middle class” values about the merits of “hard work”, is a simple channeling of legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s tactics for mobilizing white voters by leveraging their hostility to black Americans.

Atwater famously advised Republicans to:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

The Southern Strategy has been the cornerstone of Republican politics for at least five decades. While former Republican National Committee chairmen Ken Mehlman and Michael Steele admitted (and apologized) that Republicans use racist appeals to motivate white voters, the Southern Strategy remains central to their party’s electoral logic and approach. Paul Ryan’s racism and embrace of the Southern Strategy is the Republican Party’s conventional wisdom in practice.

Colorblind racism and White Victimology.

Paul Ryan’s use of “dog whistles” and coded racial appeals to disparage and slur African-Americans exist within a social context where overt racism is a violation of public speech norms and values.

Following the triumphs of the civil rights movement, colorblind white racism has largely replaced “old fashioned” racism.

While whites still use very explicit and racist speech in the “backstage”, private spaces, or online, America’s embrace of multiculturalism and pluralism have deemed such acts anathema to “decent” people. This is especially true for a nationally known politician like Paul Ryan.

Colorblind racism inverts reality and distorts the facts. It involves denying that racism still exists as a serious social problem; black and brown people are limited in their life chances not because of institutional discrimination but because of their “bad culture” or “laziness”; white supremacy and systems of white racial advantage are dismissed as either exaggerated or non-existent; racism is reduced to mean words by white people, as opposed to systematic institutional discrimination against people of color.

The most perverse result of colorblind racism is that many white people now believe that they are “victims” of "racism", and that “anti-white racism” is a larger problem in the United States than is discrimination against black and brown Americans. Mountains of research and empirical data detail how Americans society is oriented around maintaining white privilege and white material advantages over people of color.

Colorblind racism overrides those facts by distorting white people’s (and some others’) ability to process and understand reality.

Paul Ryan’s “inner city” comment is a quintessential example of colorblind racism. He cannot plainly state that lazy black people are genetically predisposed to idleness, crime, violence, and sexual promiscuity. However, Ryan can suggest that the supposed failures of black people are really their own fault, and that all they need to do is “work hard” and have “good culture” to get ahead in America like "normal" (read: white) people.

Paul Ryan’s defenders are enabling colorblind racism by trafficking in its other distortion of reality: white victimology. Paul Ryan is portrayed as a victim of political correctness. Black conservatives such as Ron Christie [7] claim that Ryan is a “truth-teller”. Ryan will tell interviewers that he is just misunderstood and is being unfairly criticized.

Once more, colorblind racism protects white people from the consequences of their racist behavior by transforming them into “victims”.

White privilege and white racial innocence.

Paul Ryan’s faux apology emphasized his intent, and how he was “inarticulate” in his claim that black people are lazy and have bad genes.

Paul Ryan meant what he said and said what he meant. White privilege is more than the unearned advantages that come with being identified as “white” in American society and elsewhere. White privilege is an assumption that whiteness, and white people, are benign. White privilege is also an assumption of preeminent good intent and innocence.

The historical record suggests otherwise: whiteness was born of violence towards people of color. Whiteness works and is made real through many lies both small and large.

Paul Ryan, like other racists, will deploy the common phrase “I didn’t mean it that way” or “that was not my intention”.

By contrast, the twin facts of white privilege and white racism are not dependent on intent.

The racist cannot tell the victim of the former’s racism how and if they should be offended.

Moreover, Paul Ryan’s claim to have made a mistake will be granted because he is white and male. The errors of prominent (as well as rank and file) African-Americans for example, are never excused away or viewed as aberrations or outliers. No. When black folks are “inarticulate” or “misspeak” the white racial frame deems such moments as indications of incompetence, or proof that people of color are somehow “not qualified” or as “intelligent” as white people.

The white gaze does not view black Americans as individuals. When a black person makes a mistake it becomes the focus of a “national conversation” about the black community, one in which “black leaders” are forced to publicly explain and condemn the actions of other black people. There is not an equivalent ritual for white people. White conservatives and the white community will not be forced to condemn Paul Ryan. Nor will white people be held publicly accountable for Paul Ryan’s and the Republican Party’s racism.

Whiteness deems that Paul Ryan is a “racial innocent”, an “individual”, and that he should be treated as such.

Paul Ryan and other movement conservatives are racial political arsonists. Ryan’s racist claims about lazy black people with bad genes are a function of a willful political strategy and determined worldview. They are not exceptions, outliers, or bizarre happenings.

Paul Ryan and other conservatives can claim that they are innocent of their racist political arson. But, they are repeatedly caught, hiding behind the dumpster, or in the bushes, as the building burns. The hand is concealing a lighter. The police approach, shake their heads, and say “you again!”

Paul Ryan and his fellow racial political arsonists in the Republican Party apologize, flummoxed, and indignant with the police that “you have the wrong guy!”

The police will just slap his wrist and say “don’t do it again”. Why? Because Paul Ryan and other racial political arsonists in the Republican Party are really decent people who are just misunderstood.