Ukraine's magical disappearing Nazis

Take a gander at Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral (ret’d) John Kirby, on the edge of a nervous breakdown as he discusses Russian depravity in Ukraine. Yup, the hardened military man has never before seen such heinous inhumanity. Maybe he should dust off his Abu Ghraib photo album. Kirby makes a point of dismissing the mentally unstable Putin’s claims that there are fascists in Ukraine. That’s become a standard trope throughout Western media. That’s why Globe & Mail “public editor” Sylvia Stead can dismiss Azov’s Nazi roots with the facile “we know there are no fascists in Ukraine because they elected a Jewish president.” That’s why today’s Sunday Star can bring us a 3/4 page story about the plight of the remnants of Azov trapped in Mariupol without even using the term “far right,” let alone “fascist” or “nazi.” The stench of Ukrainian fascism has been erased by an industrial-strength dose of the Washington-concocted disinfectant, “Nazi-be-gone.” But it was not always thus. Here’s a 2018 op-ed from Reuters; Ukraine's neo-Nazi problem. Note:If links not working,try Contrarian Ranter site at Substack. If google can't find it try Yahoo or Bing. Here’s a 2018 headline from The Nation; America's Collusion with Neo-Nazis. Here’s The Nation again, 2019; Neo-Nazis and the far-right are on the march in Ukraine. Here’s a 2019 photo-essay from The Guardian; Ultranationalism in Ukraine. Between 2014 and 2019, Amnesty International issued at least half a dozen reports documenting hate crimes by fascist elements in Ukraine, including attacks on ethnic minorities, LGBT groups, and political opponents. Several of those stories refer to the C14 group, which runs children’s summer camps in Ukraine. The “14” refers to the 14 words of the white supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” But now it’s 2022, and abracadabra, Nazis be gone! John Kirby can’t find any. Joe Biden can’t find any. Justin Trudeau and Ukrainian ultra-nationalist Chrystia Freeland can’t find any, and certainly no journalist working anywhere in mainstream Western media can find any. All that Nazi talk was just Russian propaganda! So let’s rustle up a few more billions in military aid for those plucky patriots of the Azov Battalion before it’s too late. They’re fighting for our shared values, after all!

Biden's Marxists take over

I saw that headline somewhere on the internet. Biden's Marxists. It must be true if you saw it on the internet.

But really? Biden's Marxists? 

Didn't they used to call Biden the senator from Mastercard? But now that he's pres of the USA, he's a Marxist? 

Colour me skeptical.

Unless credit cards are a communist plot...

Greasing the skids for war on China

The Yellow Peril demonization pogrom continues apace in Canadian national media. At the Globe and Mail it fell to Campbell Clark to carry the can today; "Canada must embrace Biden's China alliance."

There's an obvious typo in the title; it's an anti-China alliance Biden is crafting, and he's hot to trot. In fact, in his first call with Justin after the election, and apparently Campbell was on the line, Biden was "effusive about working with allies."

How effusive was he? Not effusive enough. Mr. Clark suggests we "should be pushing" Biden in the right direction lest he waver in his resolve to confront the Yellow Peril, "we" being the allies who have shivered through four years of darkness waiting for the light of freedom to shine again in Biden's City on a Hill.

Meanwhile, over at the CBC, Evan Dyer wants us to follow Australia's lead and ramp up the Yellow Peril rhetoric. Perhaps if we join Australia in pushing back against Chinese aggression it'll stiffen Biden's spine? That's a somewhat unlikely scenario. Canada and Australia together spend about 7% of what the US spends on "security" every year. Fortunately, the prospects of pipsqueak me-too nations like Canada and Australia bringing China to heel are purely imaginary.

After four years in the shadow of the Orange Ogre, The Nations of Virtue are uniting again behind the leadership of the Exceptional and Indispensable Nation, the nation with the most powerful military machine in history.

Be afraid.

NATO's weakest link will be the first domino to fall

It's definitely NOT coming up roses for the wily Erdogan these days.

Erdogan is being pushed into a corner by his NATO overlords. He has spent three years building up ISIS at their behest, and now that it's become more than obvious that ISIS has (supposedly) slipped its leash, he's being fingered by Biden as the shady dealer who has facilitated the rise of the Islamic State.

No wonder he's pissed!

Tonight, as the Turk army watches from across the border, NATO's Frankenstein is taking the city of Kobani in Syria, and ethnic Kurds are rioting in at least 30 major cities in Turkey.

The Erdogan regime almost collapsed not too long ago over plans to build a shopping mall.

Now it's caught between ISIS and NATO.

Realistically speaking, the Erdogan regime is a partner of both.

The Beltway nabobs are ready with an Erdogan replacement; Fethulla Gulen has been biding his time there in Pennsylvania, waiting for his turn in the spotlight.

Unfortunately for the masters of the universe, it is unlikely that their bumboy of choice could conjure up more than token support on the ground in Turkey.

Which means that going forward, Turkey is destined to become one of the ruined states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, that have been deliberately destroyed by American meddling.

This scenario isn't going anywhere good.

Pot apologizes for calling kettle "black"

I see where the dunce Joe Biden has had to do a bit of a climb-down and apologize to Turkey's wily Erdogan for having suggested that Turkey has facilitated the entry of Islamic extremists into Syria.

Biden was correct in making that accusation of course. Turkey has been complicit in flooding Syria with anti-Assad rebels from the beginning of the "Syrian Spring." What Biden failed to mention was that Turkey was doing America's bidding at the time.

Those were the hopeful days when every anti-Assad rebel was a "freedom fighter" and Assad had only a few days or weeks to go before his brutal police state crumbled and democracy bloomed forth in its stead...

Another great example of plans going off the rails...

Now of course those freedom fighters have morphed into the most evil evildoers of all time. They are running wild throughout Syria and Iraq, sporting the best and the latest of American armaments, and threatening to over-run Jordan and Lebanon in the short term, and the rest of the neighbourhood a few months later.

To which the Nations of Virtue, who created this fanatical killing machine, are responding with yet another iteration of a "coalition of the not-so-willing" who propose to eliminate this threat to American hegemony in the Middle East by carpet bombing the Middle East.

That's bound to win us lots more hearts and minds...

Usual Putin-haters have field day politicizing MH17 tragedy

The bodies of those 298 unfortunates had hardly hit the ground before Canadian PM Harper issued a statement blaming Russia. No evidence? No problem!... using 298 tragic deaths as a cudgel to bash Putin doesn't require evidence, merely an appalling level of cynical opportunism.

By Saturday the pretend "punk rocker" and professional Putin critic Masha Alekhina had an article in The Guardian likewise holding Putin to account using the same evidence Harper had, which is to say none.

And in a brazen feat of journalistic one-up-man-ship, The New Yorker was able to reveal today that no less an authority than U.S. VP Biden concluded that Putin has no soul!

In these days of hypocritical moral outrage we would do well to recall another moral outrage, the shooting down of Iran Air 655 by the US Navy in 1988.

That wasn't a mistake by ill-trained hooligan militiamen or semi-literate hastily conscripted regulars, it was a deliberate attack on a civilian airliner by the most powerful military in the world.

The U.S. VP of the time, one George Bush, remarked that he would never apologize, and no senior American politician ever has.

Putin has been downright civil and gracious in comparison.

Poroshenko dips into Nazi archives for latest anti-rebel proclamations

Petro Poroshenko is demonstrating an unexpected gift for making foolish proclamations. That pattern first revealed itself six weeks ago when the newly elected president promised that the uprising in the east would be over "in hours, not weeks or months".

That is no doubt the kind of bombastic rhetoric his American sponsors want to hear.

After the rebels who had been holed up in Sloviansk for several months withdrew towards Luhansk and Donetsk, he promised them "a nasty surprise".

Instead, it was the government forces who got a nasty surprise when one of their convoys was hit with a rocket attack that killed dozens and injured many more. That prompted Poroshenko to proclaim that "for each death of a Ukrainian serviceman the militants will pay with ten or a hundred of their own".

If that sounds familiar, it's because that exact language was frequently employed by the Nazi's in occupied areas during the WWII.

Instead of amping up the rhetoric and pursuing a campaign of destroying the east in order to save it, Mr. Poroshenko really should give statesmanship a try. Unfortunately, whenever he seems about to make a move in that direction, he gets a call from Joe Biden reminding him who's the boss.

Have Obama and Putin cooked up a Ukraine -Venezuela quid pro quo?

After all the hyperventilating that's been going on in Big Media re: Ukraine for the past week, it was a surprise to see how little attention the matter received on the Sunday Morning propaganda shows at ABCNBCCNNFOX.

Paul Ryan's presidential aspirations are now a more pressing story than the fate of Ukraine.

But lookee here; VP Biden has uncovered human rights abuses right in his own backyard!

And not just ordinary run-of-the-mill human rights violations, but "alarming" ones. That's code speak for "we're warming up to invoke R2P."

So what's been going on behind the scenes with these multiple phone calls between the White House and the Kremlin?

I smell a quid pro quo. Vlad the Hammer gets Crimea, and the Nations of Virtue will tone down their rhetoric as long as he leaves it at that. The rest of Ukraine will be tossed to the wolves at the IMF/World Bank for an attitude adjustment.

In return, the Yanquis get a free pass to fiddle in Caracas. This is a bit of a disappointment for the American Empire crowd because they've been after both prizes since forever, but hey, half the pie is better than nothing!

Sounds like a win-win!

Justin Trudeau and the "root causes of terrorism"

Mere days after being elected leader of Canada's floundering Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau found himself in plenty of hot water with his insinuation that terrorism might be caused by something.

Trudeau was lambasted from left and right for his untoward ruminations.

Op-eds in the major dailies have ripped him for his foolishness.

Nothing, but nothing, can justify acts of terror.

We simply cannot permit anyone to excuse acts of terror.

Suggesting that there may be "something" that "causes" terror is absolutely unacceptable.

Hypothesizing a connection between cause and effect has become a forbidden trope.

Here's Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe and Mail;  "(Trudeau's) comments are maladroit and troubling..."

And at the MIT memorial today for the campus cop shot by the Boston bombers, VP Biden disavowed any hint of a "cause" for terror; the alleged perpetrators were simply "twisted, perverted, and cowardly."

Biden might be right. And this might be what twists and perverts them.

Drone strikes provoke "intense anger and growing hatred of America."

And we thought they just hated us for our freedoms...

Class warfare and the drug war

VP Biden is on a tour of Central America this week spreading the non-news that the American leadership intends to remain deaf to the chorus of voices calling for a reappraisal of the war on drugs.

It's becoming quite a chorus. Sitting and former political leaders throughout the region are uniting as never before in calling for the legalization of recreational drugs. That's not about to disuade our rich white guys in the Senate and in Congress from pursuing the path of prohibition.

Why?

Because rich white guys are never hassled about their drug use. If you're a Senator or a Congressman neither you nor the folks you socialize with are at risk for a headline-grabbing career-ending dope bust. You've got immunity.

Drug busts are for the masses. Drug laws are a tool to keep the boot of authority on the neck of the working class and the poor.

And what a great tool it is. Keeps hundreds of thousands of cops and lawyers and judges busy. Keeps for-profit jails full and their owners in dividends. Keeps the criminal cartels intact. As a high-profile threat to our "way of life" those cartels serve a useful purpose; they legitimize enormous expenditures on law enforcement.

Meanwhile, after forty years, the "war on drugs" has yet to make the slightest dent on the supply of drugs anywhere.

But our leaders are determined to stay the course.