THE FOG OF HYPOCRISY

    As news outlets like FOX and CNN trot out their armchair generals like that old duffer Barry McCaffrey, bemoaning Russia's tactical restraint with statements like "This isn't exactly shock and awe..." and almost every pundit explains his or her lack of hard information on the "fog of war" I'd like to give this so-called "Russian invasion of Europe" a little wider lens of historical perspective. We have to go back a bit farther than 2014.

1609-1622- After years of land expropriation and systematic attempts at extermination of Native tribes, the Powhatan people attacked the English settler colony at Jamestown, Virginia on March 22, 1622, killing 347 white settlers. So began the American Indian Wars that never really ended.   

    In the ensuing centuries the Dutch and English armies and corporate entities like Hudson Bay Company and Dutch (East and West) Indies invaded North America and the African continent. The Slave Triangle between Africa, the Caribbean and North America was established and thrived. As time went on revolutions in North America, France and Russia redrew the geopolitical map. Slavery continued unchallenged until Civil War "officially" ended the practice in the U.S., replacing it with "rule of law" racism that continues to the present day. Steam and fossil fuel industrialization of farm and manufacture equipment and the invention of the revolver revolutionized agriculture and birthed mechanized warfare spawning global warming and climate change, setting the stage for two world wars with more efficient ways of conducting battlefronts and genocide. The invention of the second chance occurred simultaneous to the second shot. World War I introduced the machine gun, poison gas and death from the air. Welcome to the Twentieth Century. 

    This brings us to Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, the beginning of the Holocaust, an ideological second front of World War II, not unlike the attempted extermination of Native North American nation states that had begun in 1609 on the Virginia Company's plantation at Jamestown. Any of the many documentaries and historical treatises on the Holocaust like Shoah spread the guilt for the genocide of the Jewish people quite evenly not only on Germany, but throughout Eastern and Western Europe, as well as Russia and the Soviet Union. When Putin talks of the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine he is not pulling this out of thin air. When Germany invaded Eastern Europe on its way to Moscow with its Einsatzgruppen death squads, specifically tasked with killing "bolsheviks" (Jews), the rightwing, nationalist Ukrainians, Poles, Latvians, Romanians, etc. were more than willing to join in the ethnic cleansing and ensuing genocide on the side of Germany. Ukrainian collaborators - riflemen and concentration camp guards - actively participated in the annihilation of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Nobody argues that fact. 

   To deny that right wing "Nazi" elements exist in Ukraine today and point to President Zelensky as being Jewish as proof of its innocence is a little like denying the existence of racism in the U.S. just because Obama was once President. This is in no way a justification of Putin's hegemonic, belligerent lunacy in invading Ukraine, nor to label Zelensky's government "Nazi." There is no proof of that. It just gives context to Putin's propaganda. Europe and Russia (and the U.S.) have to face their separate histories of horror with clear eyes. One would do well to read all the laughably codified "treaties" the Euro-Americans signed with First Nations as we stole the North American continent. Almost every one started with a short, poetic, introductory statement by the Indigenous orators: "Open your eyes, clear throats, remove stones from ears and clear the path from briars...." Only then will history's crimes be revealed and the fog of hypocrisy maybe lift.