“The pretext of propagating liberty can make no difference. Every nation has a right to carve out its own happiness in its own way, and it is the height of presumption in another to attempt to fashion its political creed.”
Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, 2 May 1793
It always seems to start with the BBC. Months ago when the Ukrainian president patiently explained that his country’s economic and energy realities — which Vladimir Putin underscored — required that it stay close to Russia and not yet enter into a closer relationship with the EU, the BBC flooded Kiev with correspondents. These “independent” journalists began covering every angle of the crisis, or at least the angles that coincided with the view of pro-EU Ukrainian demonstrators and the BBC’s own, now thoroughly institutionalized, worship of the divinity known as the EU. As one rule of thumb, any non-EU government that is dealing with domestic unrest ought to immediately close all BBC facilities in its country and issue no visas for BBC correspondents who want to enter the country and “cover” — a word that always means “support” — the demonstrations. The BBC — except for five minutes at the top and bottom of the hour — has long since ceased being a news organization. It is now better seen as a “campaign group,” the name the BBC itself uses for reckless, irresponsible, and violence-and-anarchy causing international groups like Amnesty International and other components of the human-rights mafia.
With the BBC positioned and intending to make Ukrainian matters worse, the EU Commission and individual EU states began to send their senior officials to sympathize with and support the anti-government forces in Kiev, as well as to threaten, belittle, and ridicule the Ukrainian president, his government, and their decision about what was economically best for the Ukraine. The prize ass of this herd of incendiary EU officials was without question the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. On numerous visits to Kiev, Bildt openly supported the demonstrators, damned the Ukrainian president and his government, and threatened EC sanctions if the Ukrainian regime did not surrender to the rabble in the street.
Two points come immediately to mind on this issue. First, why would any Europeans in their right mind listen to anything that a senior Swedish official had to say? Sweden’s 20th century behavior speaks for itself. In two world wars it stayed neutral so that it could make enormous profits by selling nickel ore, iron ore, and other strategic minerals to Imperial Germany and Hitler’s Reich, entities which in turn used the metals to kill millions of other Europeans. This simple fact alone, one would think, should be enough to ensure no Swedish official gets a hearing anywhere in Europe, ever.
The second point is another rule of thumb. Any non-EC government that is dealing with domestic unrest ought never to issue visas for EU or U.S. diplomats to visit their protesting citizens. Such a government also should not allow resident EU and U.S. diplomats to involve themselves with the demonstrators, and should expel those who seek to do so. These EU and U.S. official visitors and resident diplomats do not intend to negotiate an even-handed end to the government-protestors confrontation. They mean to force the government to surrender, and, if that does not occur, to foment increased resistance among the demonstrators, even if such encouragement leads to violence. No matter. EU and U.S. diplomats will easily get away with recklessly stoking violence because whatever happens in Kiev’s streets will be reported by the BBC as the Ukrainian regime’s fault.
In the past two weeks, a new dimension of the West’s civil war-stimulating intervention in Ukraine has appeared in the form of those self-proclaimed if clearly addled avenging angels of freedom — Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Although late to the intervention party, Biden and Obama have made up for lost time by starting to beat the drums of economic war against Ukraine, a country that probably neither could find on a map. Obama also has threatened that the Ukrainian president would be “held responsible” by Washington for the violence in his country; this from the first U.S. president who is responsible for absolutely nothing that occurs on his watch.
If it was not clear that their words and threats are already getting Ukrainians killed, these two dilettante American diplomatists would be hilarious. Indeed, the Biden-and-Obama team could be the next Laurel and Hardy, except that neither is smart enough to make up for the other’s hopeless arrogance, historical ignorance, and naiveté. In this regard, the death-causing propensities of the Biden-Obama team in conducting U.S. foreign policy mirrors that of the other well-know team of U.S. war-causers, McCain and Graham.
As civil war inches closer in the Ukraine — with an outside chance of an European war — it is clear that its arrival will be the responsibility of the EU and the United States who, through their intervention in Ukraine in the name of democracy, have ensured many dead Ukrainians, much less democracy and a ruined economy there, and greater influence for Russia in Kiev. What Alexander Hamilton called the “height of presumption” is the standing operating procedure for U.S. and EU political leaders and diplomats, men and women who are out to teach the world’s nations how to be behave — as long as they are weak nations — and who absolutely know that no nation can solve its problems without their brilliant assistance and close instruction.
There is nothing Americans can do to stop the EU empire-builders and their BBC cheerleaders from causing war in the Ukraine, but Washington must not help them. For the sake of U.S. security, as the ever-reliable Dr. Ron Paul has said, Americans should just shut up and watch because the United States has no genuine national interest at stake in the Ukraine that would require any involvement whatsoever by our government. “That’s their [the Ukrainians’] business, and it certainly isn’t ours,” Dr. Paul said. “We’ve tried it for too long [to tell others what to do], and the American people are sick and tired of it, and we’re also out of money.”
Cogent and ardently patriotic as always, Dr. Paul is a too-long under-appreciated national treasure, except among some citizens and most U.S. military personnel, men and women who know that he would defend America but not waste their lives in unnecessary wars fought for unsavory allies. Indeed, Dr. Paul stands forthrightly in the tradition of America’s greatest citizen, whose birthday happens to be today.
Always the deadly foe of U.S. interventionism, General Washington fathered the non-interventionist path that Dr. Paul and his admirers and supporters follow. “I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation has the right to inter-meddle in the internal affairs of another …,” Washington told James Monroe, who wanted U.S. intervention to aid French revolutionaries who would cause a world war, in July 1794, “and that, if this country could, consistent with its engagements, maintain a strict neutrality and thereby preserve peace, it was bound to do so by motives of policy, interest, and every other consideration.” That is the path of sanity and security for the United States, and it mandates no U.S. involvement in the Ukraine.
Finally, a Well Done to Dr. Paul, a great American, and a Happy Birthday to General Washington, the greatest American.
