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April 20th, 2014 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda A house divided cannot stand. So it says in three New Testament gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Abraham Lincoln echoed this idea in a famous speech in 1858.
The situation in the US – and the West generally – is reminiscent of a dark period in American history following the victory of Mao Zedong’s ragtag Communist guerrillas over Chiang Kai-shek’s far better armed, clothed, and fed Nationalist forces in 1949. The “loss” of China was a prelude to McCarthyism and an crusading anti-communist witch hunt that lasted from 1950 until 1956.
The Republicans in Congress blamed the Democrats, President Truman, and specially the State Department. The charge was baseless, but not surprising. The USSR had colonized Eastern Europe, the Korean War was on, and Truman had narrowly defeated Republican Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election (recall the famous photo of a beaming Truman holding up the Chicago Tribune with the erroneous headline, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN”). Truman’s coattails had also helped the Democrats recapture the Senate in 1948 – it was an especially bitter pill for Senator Robert (“Mr. Republican”) Taft to swallow.
In his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, wrote:
…Senator [Robert] Taft, had been widely quoted charging in the Senate that the State Department had “been guided by a left-wing group who obviously have wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose.”Senator [Arthur] Vandenberg had rebuked him for saying this. At the time, Mao Tse-tung was in Moscow negotiating with Stalin what proved to be the Sino-Soviet Treaty of February 14, 1950.
For Acheson, “It was a supercharged moment.”
Obviously, Ukraine is not China Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, and “godless Communism” is no longer a credible cause for alarm. But the partisanship in Washington is as bad now as is was then; to make matters worse, 2014 is an election year and the neo- conservative wing of the Republican party is hoping to capture control of the Senate. The Far Right is casting about for a big issue to replace “Obamacare,” which has lost much of its luster as a device for discrediting the White House and the Democrats.
This concatenation of circumstances gives rise to a dangerous strategic asymmetry because it’s only happening on one side – ours. Since Russia’s takeover of Crimea last month, pundits here have been jousting over who has failed what, when, and how.
The asymmetry is striking. Vladimir Putin controls Russia’s mass media. Most Russians strongly support Putin’s defiant attitude toward the West. In the West, the press and electronic news media often challenge and debunk the official version of reality. Lilia Shevtsova, a policy analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, calls the Kremlin line “all lies”:
“The Russia leadership doesn’t care about how it’s being perceived in the outside world…where information can be confirmed and checked…
We can’t trust anything. Even with the Soviet propaganda, when they were talking with the Soviet people, there were some rules. Now, there are no rules at all. You can invent anything.”
The contrast between the solidarity Putin’s Russia presents and the weak image the Obama White House and a irresolute Europe project is starkly apparent, as is the peril it poses to the postwar world order.
In Europe, the United States is widely viewed as a bitterly divided country with a dysfunctional government. As war clouds gathered on Ukraine’s eastern front, America looked to the world like a bad re-make of an old sci-fi film – the incredible, shrinking superpower. Meanwhile, The Economist calls the Ukraine “The Disappearing Country“.
By moving to incorporate the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO when the Soviet Union self-destructed, the US violated a tacit understanding between the two countries to respect each other’s sphere of influence. How would Washington react, they ask, if Moscow forged a military alliance in the Western Hemisphere and admitted Cuba and Mexico, among other Central and Latin American states?
To listen to right-wing Russophobes, the fault lies entirely with Putin and the his former KGB cabal in the Kremlin. FOX News on any given day provides a full roster of Red-baiters and reactionaries. Google Senator Ted Cruz, Senator John McCain, or conservative pundit Cal Thomas, who paints a shocking picture of Putin and the Russians:
“Recently, Russian news anchor Dmitry Kiselyov took to the Rossiya 1 news channel to declare that Russia is the only country capable of turning the United States into ‘radioactive ashes.’ A picture of a mushroom cloud was projected on the screen behind him. Iran might see this bragging by Russia as a challenge to its own nuclear ambitions.”
On the other side of this debate are shrill critics who embrace the Russian version of event, asserting that neoconservative hawks in the United States conspired with extreme rightwing nationalists in Ukraine (including neo-Nazi elements) to overthrow an elected president – Viktor Yanukovich.
The outlines of the argument can be easily traced. By moving to incorporate the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO when the Soviet Union self-destructed, it goes, the US violated a tacit understanding between the two countries to respect each other’s sphere of influence. How would Washington react, they ask, if Moscow forged a military alliance in the Western Hemisphere and admitted Cuba and Mexico, among other Central and Latin American states? The West provided financial and political aid to anti-Russian groups in Ukraine.
It’s all the fault of the White House, George Soros, and the notorious “neocons”. Not a few commentators agree with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s assertion that, “It’s not Russia that is destabilizing the Ukraine.” In a Democracy Now! interview with Amy Goodman, for example,Russia scholar Stephen Cohen was unequivocal in putting the blame for escalating the crisis on the West.
Google just about anything Paul Craig Roberts has written on the subject lately. Here, for example, is Roberts, a former Reagan-era Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in a recent Truth.com interview:
“There’s no evidence that the American people support Washington’s meddling in Ukraine. And they should get out and protest it, because it could mean a major war and even the use of nuclear weapons. The US government has violated every norm of international law and almost the entirety of American law. It is tyranny.”
Unfortunately, this type of McCarthy-esque hyperbole is becoming the norm in American politics and now infects the political commentariate, as well.
Moscow’s takeover of Crimea following the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was the beginning of the end of Ukraine as a fully sovereign state. It also put paid to the dream of Ukraine as a member of NATO and the EU. It’s clear now that whatever the future holds for Ukraine, joining the West is not an option.
The Ukraine crisis is a serious matter that calls for sane, sober public dialogue and sound judgment on the part of policy makers. There’s no question that Putin has the advantage in this confrontation, but the West is at grave risk of making his effort to redraw the map of Central and Eastern Europe way too easy.
Source Article from http://www.nationofchange.org/free-world-s-losing-streak-1398000535
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