Ukraine comes full circle. In six months, a troubled but intact nation is now pulled to pieces. Vasyl Krutov, the general in charge of what the provisional government in Kiev insists on calling its “anti-terror” military campaign in the east and south, acknowledged over the weekend that the country is “essentially at war.”
Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, had to go in February because of the violence that had erupted in Independence Square, scene of demonstrations since the previous November. We still do not know who was responsible for the shootings used to justify the Yankuovych coup, but we know this: The provos who took his place are now doing the shooting — killing their countrymen, reclassified as terrorists, by the score.
Samantha Power, the most tendentious hypocrite in the Obama administration (and the competition is keen), defends these murderers thusly: “Their response is reasonable, it is proportional, and frankly it is what any one of our countries would have done in the face of this threat,” Power said in the Security Council at the weekend.
Does this remind you of anything? It should. Is this not a replay of the Egyptian catastrophe? An elected leader trying to hold a nation together on its own terms is deposed, what follows is magnitudes worse than anything the deposed leader ever dreamed of, and the army is turned loose on those it is supposed to defend. The Americans, having backed the putschists from the shadows, tell you, “No, that was not a putsch you just watched. It only looked like one. The elected guy was replaced violently by the unelected in the service of a democratic restoration. And there will be another election, under the auspices of the unelected, to confirm all this as best.”
For its speed and sheer wastage, Ukraine’s arriving fate is astonishing. It is a spectacle.
And this is the one good thing about the Ukraine calamity: The anatomy of it is all there, spectacularly. I cannot recall a moment so revelatory. Very little is hidden, even as much was meant to be. Precisely the effort to hide things is in plain sight. Pay attention and there are some things to learn, primarily about ourselves.
I am encouraged in this connection. So far as I can make out, a quite considerable proportion of the paying-attention public now adopts a posture of resistance in the face of official narratives. It suggests an important passage in the late-afternoon hours of America in its (long) phase of imperial pretension.
