Eric Zuesse

In a remarkable disjunction between voters and their elected (supposed) representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, the members of the House voted on December 4th, by  411 “Yea” to 10 “Nay,” to donate U.S. weapons to the bankrupt Ukrainian Government, which is engaged in trying to eliminate the civilian population of the portion of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the former Ukrainian President whom the U.S. Government (CIA, State Department, USAID, etc.) had overthrown in a violent coup in February of this year. (Click onto that link for full documentation.)

This 411 to 10 vote margin is 98%, and it contrasts starkly against the 62% of Americans who, in the most recent poll, opposed sending U.S. arms to the Ukrainian Government; 30% favored sending those weapons. (8% had no opinion.) (The above link includes also that poll-result.) So, 67% of those who had an opinion (62% divided by 92% is 67%) shared the view of the 10 members (2%) of the U.S. House who voted against this measure. Only 33% of the surveyed Americans who had an opinion on it shared the view of the 411 House members (98%) who voted in favor of this measure.

This is a war-and-peace issue, so the U.S. Constitution assigns it to the Congress; the President is assigned the executive function of carrying out the will of Congress, as the Commander-in-Chief and U.S. Chief Executive Officer.

However, the situation here is actually even a bit more extreme than that, because the way that the Pew poll of the U.S. public was phrased, it had the U.S. “sending arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government,” and not “donating arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government.” The Ukrainian Government cannot possibly actually pay back all of the financial obligations that it already has, much less pay those plus interest, and buy more weapons. As was documented in the first of the links within the linked report above, “The only reason that things haven’t totally imploded [for the Ukrainian Government] is because of the $18 billion package of assistance from the IMF and the $9 billion in additional assistance pledged by the United States and the European Union.” All of the weapons that the U.S. will be technically ‘selling’ to Ukraine will now go to the back of the line of creditors for Ukrainian debt — never be paid. U.S. arms-makers will receive payment for those arms from U.S. taxpayers (the sale won’t be merely technical for them, nor for the lobbyists they pay), it won’t be paid actually by the Ukrainian Government. Consequently, the U.S. taxpayer is totally funding Ukraine’s bombing campaign going forward, to eliminate the residents in the area which overwhelmingly supported the previous Ukrainian President.

In fact, on September 18th, when the U.S.-installed new Ukrainian President was greeted with standing ovations by a special Joint Session of the U.S. Congress, he addressed them and the weapons-lobbyists to cheers as if he were a hero; he said that this was “the forefront of the global fight for democracy,” and said “I urge America to help us, I urge America to lead the way." He was doing a sell-job for them and their financial backers. Of course, those financial backers also fund the sale of these politicians to the public.

His use of the term “democracy” there was interesting. A secretly recorded phone conversation on 25 February 2014, right after the coup, was subsequently uploaded to the Internet, and the discussants were Catherine Ashton, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister, and her appointed investigator into how Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych came to be ousted on February 22nd, Urmas Paet. In it, was revealed that the snipers who precipitated the coup had been hired by “somebody from the new coalition” (perhaps the U.S. CIA) that replaced Yanukovych, and that, “it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, … they don’t want to investigate [since they were its beneficiaries].” Paet told Ashton that, “what was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Poroshenko -- and so when he became ‘democratically elected’ as President of all of Ukraine on May 25th, he already knew this] told [Paet] that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who had just said that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.” So, Poroshenko himself knows that his regime is based on a false-flag (meaning set up so as to falsely blame the other side) U.S.-controlled coup d’etat against his predecessor. So, there can be no reasonable doubt that, despite his rhetoric when speaking before the Special Joint Session of the U.S. Congress on September 18th, Poroshenko actually knew, by no later than February 25th, that the regime that replaced Yanukovych was being appointed by the United States Government, hardly a ‘democratic Maidan’ event (though it is sold as if it were).

Specifically, the new regime had been selected on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the coup, in yet another secretly recorded phone conversation, this one between the U.S. State Department official who is responsible for Europe, Victoria Nuland, and the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, in which she instructed Pyatt to place “Yats,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk in charge of Ukraine until a new Ukrainian President, acceptable to Washington, would be installed in such a way that it would seem more democratic than merely a coup-regime.

The Maidan demonstrations that were used as a cover for the U.S. operation were actually not for democracy, since Viktor Yanukovych had been as democratically elected as any previous Ukrainian President, but it was instead a movement against Ukraine’s endemic corruption, which was embodied in Yanukovych and every other Ukrainian President. It was not a democracy movement. There is no democratic tradition in Ukraine; it doesn’t exist there. What exists there instead, and has always existed there, is a population who are constantly fooled and exploited by an elite, an aristocracy, which Ukrainians call “oligarchs.” Basically, in the new Ukrainian regime, America’s aristocracy are in control of Ukraine’s aristocracy who are in control of the Ukrainian public. Under Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s aristocracy were in control of Ukraine’s aristocracy who were in control of the Ukrainian public.

This contrasts with Poroshenko’s address to the U.S. Congress, which presents himself as being the leader of a new democracy. It’s not new, and it’s not a democracy; but only the personnel, and the foreigners who are in ultimate control, have changed. But, of course, any member of the U.S. Congress who even cared about the matter, already knew that; and, presumably, the 421 House members who voted on the bill about donating weapons to Ukraine, knew about it, too. They are insiders; the public are outsiders. Insiders exist in order to exploit outsiders. Outsiders exist in order to be exploited by insiders. That’s the system.

When Poroshenko delivers speeches to Ukrainians, they’re very different. He tells his audiences there that the Ukrainian Army will destroy the residents in the Donbass or rebelling southeastern region, and that those people are “subhumans,” and not merely “terrorists.” “Subhumans” (in addition to “terrorists”) is a commonly used term for them also among the U.S.-imposed regime’s other leaders. (Of course, Germany’s Nazi Party likewise used the term -- “Untermenschen” -- often.) The regime’s Army (and its mercenaries who are paid per piece for the corpses they produce and dispose of) treat them as being that (as you’ll see in that video).

This vote in the U.S. House follows less than two weeks after the November 21st U.S. vote at the U.N. in which the U.S. was one of only 3 countries, out of the 173 countries, which three voted against a resolution condemning nazism or racist fascism. The Ukrainian Government voted against it because their ethnic-cleansing operation in the heavily pro-Yanukovych area is clearly nazi, though the proposed resolution doesn’t even so much as mention Ukraine, which is the only nation in the world that is run by nazis and which was installed by nazis. The representative of Canada’s far-right Premier Stephen Harper also voted against it. This was the first occasion in U.S. history in which the U.S. Government was clearly pro-nazi. The verbiage of Obama’s U.N. Representative explaining the vote denied that the U.S. Government is at all pro-nazi. Lying is now routine at the top levels, just as it was for Germany’s Nazis.

In any case, the condition of U.S. ‘democracy’ itself comes into question when 98% of the U.S. House of Representatives vote to donate U.S.-made weapons to the world’s only nazi regime — one right on the border of Russia, moreover — and when 67% of the American public (including the vast majority of the American public who don’t even know that the Ukrainian Government is nazi) oppose not only the donating of these weapons, but even any sort of transmittal or “sending” of them, including selling of them, to that Government.

So, the U.S. House vote about this on December 4th was a reflection of today’s U.S. ‘democracy,’ whatever that is. It displays a pervasive and profound alienation between the U.S. Government and the U.S. people, and this is something that’s impossible in a democracy. It cannot happen in a democracy; it disproves a ‘democracy’; but it’s the case in the United States.

This House vote is one crucial step along the path toward a nuclear war with Russia. (To call it a renewed “cold war,” as some writers do, is dangerously understating and misrepresenting the actual threat. This is not “MAD.” It’s the opposite of that. This is already part of a “hot war,” that could easily get out of control.) Many more steps are yet to go, but now the direction is clear and incontrovertible, and we are already on it.

How can the Russian Government stand by and merely watch while Russia’s supporters right next door to them in Ukraine are being exterminated? However, now clearly, the U.S. Government seems to be overwhelmingly committed to exterminating them. There are even cluster-bombs, and white phosphorous, and also more-advanced forms of incendiary munitions, that are being used to get rid of the residents there. But mostly, it’s just the routine type of military mass-murder. (Those are the ‘terrorists’ that Ukraine and its sponsors are constantly referring to including in their standard phrase for the extermination-campaign: “Anti-Terrorist Operation,” or ATO for short. That’s the sales-phrase by which they market it to suckers everywhere. And these are the ‘terrorists.’)

The U.S. is laying down the gauntlet to Russia. Perhaps the idea is that if Russia sends in their army and publicly commits to the defense of these people, the U.S. aristocracy and the ones who are in its pay will proclaim this to be a cause by ‘the West’ to attack Russia for its ‘aggression.’ Things might already be out of control.

On the positive side, member-nations of NATO could quit the alliance, which would considerably reduce the U.S. threat. NATO was supposed to have been set up in order to defend against communism. However, now that communism is all but dead, yet NATO has expanded and especially surrounds Russia, NATO is more clearly shown as being instead the international marketing-organization for U.S.-made weapons. It’s not only for invading Syria, etc., but especially for weakening and isolating Russia and all of its allies. Even a third world war could be highly profitable to their financial backers. And perhaps those financial backers have more clout in the U.S. Government now than the American people do. However, if that’s the case, then arms-makers wouldn’t be the only industry — there’s also banking, oil, corporate agriculture, and others, who would also be at the feast — and perhaps Ukraine isn’t more corrupt than the United States after all.

Perhaps Ukraine is America’s future, unless America’s future is World War III. The odd thing is that this time we would be leading the fascist nations, instead of leading their enemies. It could be called “Hitler’s revenge.” In case it seems not possible, consider America’s vote for nazism at the U.N., and the House’s vote for war against Russia. Hitler’s revenge is a possibility. It is not an impossibility. However, this time, the first target is Russia, not Jews. But the conflagration could be world-wide, and far worse than last time.

The December 4th House vote to finance the “ATO”; and the November 21st U.N. vote for nazism; are just two steps along the path toward that conflagration, but they are both steps that are of historical magnitude in that they indicate not just that America’s aristocracy are determined to do everything to destroy Russia, but that they don’t care what the American people think or feel about that, and they have the overwhelming support of the U.S. Government in doing it.

So, the alienation between the rulers and the ruled in the United States is bound to intensify even beyond its current 98%-versus-33% support-level, and its 2%-versus-67% opposition-level. But is that not extreme enough already? How much more would it need to be in order to consider the United States to be a dictatorship?

-###-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .