A s a
political psychoanalyst I find the Super-bowl halftime show the best concise
index of how psychotic American culture is becoming from year to year, and
the 2015 version signaled a complete break from reality, a nightmare of
twerking robots in a hall of mirrors, as if America had utterly surrendered
its tattered soul to some rogue motherboard pulsing deep within Dr. Evil’s
subterranean palace of sin. Hence it is the perfect analog for understanding
otherwise incomprehensible happenings such as the USA’s role in fomenting
further chaos and mayhem in Ukraine.
How
otherwise to explain things like this morning’s New York Times report that the USA
“now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered
forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be
edging toward that position….”
Earth
calling New York Times
readers: I regret to inform you that this decision was already reached a year
ago when we paid for the coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor
Yanukovych, after the poor sap decided to not sign up with EU but rather the
Russian-backed Eurasian Customs Union. Whoops! You’re so out of here, Bub, State Department
Under Secretary Victoria Nuland burbled in a clandestinely recorded phone
call to the American ambassador. Will somebody please find Yats! Yes Yats!
[UKR politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk] and plug the Bluetooth earpiece of power
into his skull!
And so
it went this past year with a cabal of the USA, the EU, and the IMF shoveling
financial support (billions!), armaments, and surely boots-on-the ground into
the Ukrainian morass. Last week, a reporter in eastern Ukraine approached a
soldier in UKR army battle garb only to be told, in pitch perfect American
English, to “get out of my face.” Say what??? The You-tube clip was seen all
over the world and to this minute no agent of the US government has been
called to account over it. Like I said, a hall of mirrors.
But
anyway, we get a little ahead of ourselves because all this really begs the
question: what business do we have in Ukraine in the first place and why
should it matter to us that they align with Russia? And more to the point:
why is it not transparently obvious that Ukraine is solidly within Russia’s
sphere of influence, and has been, really, for more than 500 years, and for
an excellent reason that has been demonstrated most recently in Napoleon’s
invasion of 1812 and then Hitler’s Operation
Barbarossa, the invasion of 1941.
In both
cases, Russia owed it survival to the vast expanse of flat geography
represented by Ukraine where “General Winter” was able to carry out his own
defensive operations of relentless howling wind, snow, sub-zero temperatures,
and frostbite that eventually vanquished the invaders. Through most of modern
times Ukraine has been under the explicit “protection” of the Russian Czars
or has been an outright province under the former USSR. Hundreds of years
before that, Kievan Rus was the center of an emerging Russian culture and
kingdom that only later picked up and moved to Moscow.
You get
the picture: Ukraine has a long association with Russia, a principal
association, not always happy, sometimes tragic, but a fact of life and
history that the US and its foolish stooges in the EU bureaucracy now wish to
challenge for absolutely no good reason. Does anybody who is not whacked out
of his/her head on crack, or focused like a laser beam on the gender schism
within the Kardashian Klan, remember when the US ever challenged the Soviets
over Ukraine? No. And for the excellent reason that we accepted the
relationship for reasons stated above. So, whose idea is it now that we
should start World War Three over this remote region where so many other
reckless adventurers came to grief? And what, by the way, do our people mean by “defensive weapons?”
Are not most modern weapons designed to work both ways? Anyway, I see the
list includes “anti-armor missiles” (i.e. tank-killers) and “drones,” the
latter presumably guided by comfortable American military gamers effortlessly
targeting pixelated “bad guys” between Slurpee gulps and taco bites, not
exactly American Sniper
style.