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Kerry’s Hyper-Hypocrisy Hits Escape Velocity
TND Guest Contributor: Finian Cunningham | 
How does US Secretary of State John Kerry do it? Just when you think his hypocrisy and ability for doublethink have reached the outer limits, the American top diplomat finds another quantum leap to flabbergast the listener. Indeed, he may have already reached «escape velocity» in his irrational thinking, making him irretrievably lost to the orbit of normal intelligent dialogue.
The latest blast from Kerry is his terse dismissal of planned referenda in theeastern regions of Ukraine this weekend. The polls have been organized by the people of Donetz, Lugansk and Slavyansk, among other places, to determine a new constitutional political arrangement for citizens living in the regions. The vote may call for a federalized Ukraine in which regions like the eastern cities of Kharkov and Donetz assume autonomy from the central capital, Kiev. Or, they may vote to secede altogether as the people of Crimea have already done.
A reasonable observer might see the call for elections as admirable local democracy in action, whereby people self-determine their system of political governance and associated economic and social policies. Surely, a diplomat from America, which apparently never stops proclaiming the virtues of democracy, would welcome such a popular exercise of freedom?
Not John Kerry, nor the entire US government. Kerry was livid in his denunciation this week of the planned referenda to be held across Ukraine. Speaking with the European Union’s foreign policy unelected bureaucrat, Lady Catherine Ashton, in tow, Kerry said: «We flatly reject this illegal attempt to split up Ukraine… This is the Crimea playbook all over again».
The latter pejorative mention of Crimea was a cheap shot at the referendum held in the southern peninsula on March 16, in which the vast majority of citizens there voted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin their historic motherland of Russia. The Americans can’t seem to cope with that legal and democratic reality and have thus resorted to smear tactics, alleging that the «Crimea playbook» is a pernicious Russian plot to «land grab» Ukrainian territories. As in one-to-one debate, if you can’t win with reason and fact, then resort to ad hominem attack.
Kerry described the democratic exercise of self-determination in Ukraine’s east and south as «bogus» and he threatened that if the referenda go ahead then Washington would punish Russia with stiffer economic sanctions. Note the false premise promulgated as fact: Russia is to blame for how people of Ukraine are exercising their universal right to self-determination.
In a mental summersault, Washington’s foreign minister nonetheless insists that the presidential elections convened on May 25 by the Western-backed fascist junta in Kiev are legitimate and inviolable. The Kiev junta, headed up by self-proclaimed prime minister and Washington acolyte, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, came to power on February 22 after it violently and illegally seized the office of elected President Viktor Yanukovych. That is fact Mr Kerry, not subjective opinion, by the way.
So, in Kerry’s mind, the presidential election is valid, even though it has been invoked by a cabal of very dubious authority. But the referenda called by the people in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, with arguably much greater inherent democratic authority, is invalid. What kind of irrational contradiction is that? The only rationale employed here by the Americans seems to be: «Because we say so, and that’s the end of the argument».
Kerry is threatening that if Moscow does not support the holding of the Kiev-designated presidential elections later this month, then that will also be a red line for imposing further economic sanctions on Russia.
For his part, the Russian Foreign Sergei Lavrov has said that the holding of a presidential election in the midst of widespread turmoil and violence across Ukraine is «absurd». Many would agree with the evident objective reasoning here.
In the past week alone, some 90 people have been killed in gun battles between pro-Kiev armed forces and brigades of people’s self-defense militia that have sprung up in more than a dozen eastern cities and towns. These militia reflect the opposition of their local communities against the Western-backed regime in Kiev. The worse violence was in the southern Black Sea port city of Odessa last Friday, where more than 40 anti-Kiev regime protesters were killed after a building they were sheltering was set ablaze by the junta’s neo-Nazi supporters. Tragically, the victims were earlier holding a peaceful demonstration calling for a referendum on federalization, as in the eastern regions.
Up to half – perhaps much more – of the Ukrainian total population of 45 million view the Kiev junta as imposters with no democratic mandate. The Kiev regime may have its supporters in Maidan Square and in the western part of the country around cities like Lviv. But that in no way confers a legal mandate to rule over the country. In the eyes of many Ukrainians, especially ethnic Russians of the east and south, the only mandate the Kiev junta possesses is that which has been imposed from outside by Washington, Berlin and other European allies.
To the anti-Kiev protesters, federalists or pro-Russians, what has happened in their country is Western-backed regime change that has ushered in a neo-Nazi regime – a regime that adulates the collaboration of former Ukrainian fascists with the mass extermination of millions of fellow Slavic Ukrainians during the Second World War.
This Western fomented and facilitated regime change was the culmination of three months of provable CIA-backed violent street disturbances and occupation of public buildings. The massacre of up to 100 protesters and police officers on February 20 by covert snipers working for the coup plotters was the final tipping point that forced the incumbent president from office and ushered in the Western-backed junta. The junta comprises members of the fascist Fatherland Party and the neo-Nazi Svoboda, whose paramilitary cohorts in the Right Sector now make up the National Guard and «special police forces» sent out to crush dissenting populations.
It’s a sign of the disturbing lawlessness that the West has engendered in Ukraine when the Kiev junta is now issuing cash bounties for police and informers to round up political opponents. Western regime change is evidently not about instilling democracy or EU association; it is all about a bigger geopolitical project of aggression towards Russia.
Kerry’s hyper-hypocrisy and doublethink exemplifies the wider geopolitical problem of why the US is escalating conflict with Russia. Washington cannot abide objectives rules of international law or even simple dialogue because it is behaving so lawlessly and recklessly. The Americans see themselves above the law and normal boundaries that all other nations are obliged to respect.
This is what Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against in his New York Times opinion column at the end of last year when he referred to the «danger of American exceptionalism». The ineluctable endpoint of that mentality is «we are the master race».
Is it any wonder, therefore, that Washington is today collaborating with neo-Nazis in Kiev? American government working with totalitarian fascists is not a contradiction. It is a natural progression…
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Reprinted with permission. Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal: www.strategic-culture.org.
Source: http://thenewsdoctors.com/kerrys-hyper-hypocrisy-hits-escape-velocity/
