Hypocrisy in politics is as common as coke. If you drink gallons and gallons of it, the gut swells with laws and legislation written to deceive and infatuate. If you snort pounds and pounds of it through contaminated straws, the nose becomes toxic with foreign policies and diplomatic strategies far beyond the regions of truth.
For example, one can’t help but wonder whether President Barack Obama Administration’s reaction to the conflict in the Ukraine is deliberate or unavoidable – whether it results from ignorance or stupidity.
All of the major players in Obama’s Administration – Secretary of State John Kerry, White House security advisor Susan Rice and Obama himself – accuse Russia of violating Ukrainian territorial rights by annexing Crimea into Russia, even though 97 percent of Crimeans voted in a referendum for the territory to be returned to Russia.
But what gives the United States, and some of its allies, the right to criticize Russia for violating the territorial rights of the Ukraine? On what moral ground does Obama stand that urges him to slap sanctions on the Russians? And shouldn’t only “he who is not guilty cast the first stone”?
The United States has a long, fist-pounding history of stealing other nations’ land.
What better example to prove this point than the natives who inhabited the Americas hundreds of years before the Europeans arrived. Almost immediately upon landing at Plymouth Rock, Jamestown and other places, the white colonists began a 350-year terror campaign of treachery, lying, rape, torture, murder, massacre and other tear-gushing crimes that almost wiped out the natives.
In its quest to annihilate the natives, the U.S. government even established treaties with those unfortunate ones, promising to respect their territorial rights. But what was the real purpose behind the treaties? To buy time, so that the Sioux, Iroquois, Comanche, Hopi, Cherokee, Choctaw and other native tribes could dwindle away like skim milk poured down a sewage drain.
As a result, the native population in the United States declined from millions before 1700 to about 250,000 by 1890. And they died not only unnaturally from war and famine, but also naturally from the measles, cholera, malaria, chicken pox and other diseases the whites brought with them from Europe. Truly, this was genocide mingled with the sickle and hammer of land theft.
And who can forget the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada under the pretense of restoring constitutional democracy? Or the invasion of Panama in 1989 to capture Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and install a new American-friendly regime? Or the continued imperialist occupation of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in an era when colonialism is a shoddy mixture of greed and insincerity?
Moreover, the United States not only steals other nations’ land, but also supports the stealing of other nations’ land by its allies.
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, during a press conference in Paris, France, on March 19, 2014, accused Obama of applying a double standard in the Ukraine. While the United States accepted the vote of mostly Britains on the Islas Malvinas, also known as the Falkland Islands, to remain a British colony, the Argentines have maintained territorial claim to the islands ever since they lost a war with England over the islands in 1833.
The United States consistently gives implicit approval of Israel’s stealing of Palestinian land. Statements by U.S. government representatives over the past decades have said the United States opposes the Israeli land grab. But the United States does not impose sanctions on the thefts, which puffs Israel’s jaws with more and more daring burglaries of Palestinian land.
And when the United States and its allies in the United Nations took control of the Province of Kosovo from Serbia and recognized it as a separate country in 2008 over the objections of Serbia, Russia and other nations, whose territorial rights were sustained? Certainly not Serbia’s.
So if the United States, Great Britain, France and their allies violated Serbia’s territorial rights despite Russian objections, why should Russia care what they think about its annexation of Crimea from the Ukraine?
And if the United States and its allies have a sustained history of stealing and supporting the stealing of other nations’ land, why should they criticize Russia for aiding Russians who fear persecution in the Ukraine?
Hypocrisy is the handkerchief power offers to justice. And as hypocrites are untrustworthy in all that they do, so Obama’s response to Russia’s actions in Crimea and the Ukraine doesn’t suggest one scent of justification.
Send your comments to strongpoints123@gmail.com.
