Kermit Heartsong - Ukraine - ZBIG's Grand Chess Board & How The West Was Checkmated

— Neil Clark, Putin Demonized for Thwarting Neocon Plan for Global Domination

The list is long for those guilty of being crowned with the various epithets above now being leveled at President Vladimir Putin. If memory serves, President Noriega of Panama was one of the first crowned with the yearly award “World Leader Channeling Hitler, who is a Thug, Mad as a Hatter, and Openly Living in Another World.” The yearly award would then pass on to a number of other heads of state from Slobodan Milosevic to the Taliban (who would collectively win the award), to Saddam Hussein, who would win the award twice, to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who would hold on to the award for several years, to Mohamar Khaddafiy to Bashar al-Assad. It is now, however, President Putin’s year to be nominated for the award.

It is curious, however, that the award has not gone to a Western leader, whose never-ending crimes would show the other awardees as trifling, shiftless impostors. And given the criteria necessary to be nominated for the award, one comes perilously close to the idea that the awards judges are showing favoritism and prejudicially overlooking a host of quite worthy Western leaders.

But let us first look at the various criteria that have been utilized to evaluate President Putin for the year’s honor, “World Leader Channeling Hitler, who is a Thug, Mad as a Hatter and Openly Living in Another World.”

President Putin’s first so-called act on the world stage, responsible for his nomination, was interfering in the geo-politics of another country, Ukraine. It is said that President Putin instigated the turmoil in these ways:

•Facilitating the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government of President Yanukovych, who was ideologically aligned to Russia’s geo-strategic concerns regarding NATO and who had just decided to forego the European Union (and ostensibly NATO) agreement and to sign with the Customs Union, Russia’s equivalent to the EU

•President Putin has further been nominated for sending snipers to the Maidan and positioning them inside buildings occupied and controlled by self-identified neo-Nazis’ from the Right Sektor and the Svoboda parties, who hate Russians and just about everyone else, who then subsequently killed innocent protestors and police (In an interesting turn of events, President Putin seems to be the only world leader who continually calls for an investigation of his own crime. Machiavellianism at its finest?).

•This act, of course, would be material in the downfall of his geo-strategic ally and soon to be Custom Unions signee and associate, President Yanukovych, via a violent coup, while initiating chaos and turmoil on Russia’s border and sending upwards of a million refugees into Russia.

•Further, President Putin, after a unanimous referendum by the citizens of Crimea, overwhelmingly ethnic Russians, who decided to opt out of Ukraine when a toxic combination of oligarchs and neo-Nazis violently took over, decided to welcome them into the Russian Federation (another Machiavellian masterstroke).

•Additionally, President Putin has serially invaded Ukrainian territory with major troop and armor movements and so stealthily, it seems, that the US State Department, the various intelligence agencies, NATO, and the White House have been forced to enlist patrons of social media in order to ascertain troop movements, Russian Special Forces penetration and missile launches.

•President Putin is also quite guilty for turning off the gas spigot to Ukraine, which has been historically late in paying its gas bill to the tune of several billion dollars, while also siphoning off (stealing and extoring) gas belonging to other Western European countries that had actually paid for it.

•And most diabolically, President Putin has been deemed responsible for the downing of Malaysian Flight MH17 and the killing of its nearly 300 passengers and crew, without the burden, it seems, of any actual forensic evidence or data, and before an investigation, though the West is currently in possession of the flight’s black box recorders, military and satellite intelligence data, and Kiev Air Traffic Control tapes, but has refused to make the information public and in several cases has gone as far as signing Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) to prevent said leak of information (on this one, Putin is brilliant!).

•And in a truly Machiavellian turn of events the Master, President Putin, has consistently called for an immediate end to the conflict in the Ukraine, has orchestrated two peace conferences (Geneva, Minsk) and has been the only state player to deliver humanitarian aid to the civilians in the affected regions.

I can see how the nomination committee may have reacted to the above, though it seems a host of more appropriate candidates for the award were closer to home than realized. Putin’s super-majority-referendum re-snatching of the historically Russian state of Crimea saw not a single shot fired or a single innocent citizen killed, or a building pockmarked by depleted uranium munitions or ballistic missiles. This seems, well, rather banal and completely lacking in imagination when compared to Western “shock and awe.”

How truly unfair that the nations responsible for Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and the deaths of literally millions of their citizens were unable to secure their bid for “World Leader Channeling Hitler, Who is Mad as a Hatter and Openly Living in Another World.” One certainly doesn’t wish to name names as that would be impolitic, pedestrian, and gouache, but maybe the nominating committee should be looking to other candidates for the coming year.

Despite his nomination, President Vladimir Putin is currently more popular in Russia (80 percent approval rating) than any Western leader in the US or Europe, where leaders are hopelessly stuck in just barely double-digit approval ratings. And the recent events have found President Putin’s popularity rising not only at home, but around the world. This, in turn, has led to more and more countries looking to drift into Russia’s increasingly “isolated” orbit (BRICS, SCO, EEC, Customs Union, etc.).

It does appear that the judges are puffing up President Putin’s actions in a bid to nominate him over more worthy nominees. Favoritism? Perhaps.

In truth, and as spoken to in Chapter 4, President Putin is the mirror opposite of what he is portrayed to be by the West. Perhaps this is the greatest case of Western psychological projection in the world today.

As Neil Clark (2014) states in his article, “Putin Demonized For Thwarting Neocon Plan For Global Domination”:

By any objective assessment, it’s the Western elites — and in particular the neocon faction within that elite — who are the biggest dangers to world peace, not Putin. Look at the havoc their policy of endless war, whether waged directly or through terrorist proxies, has caused in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

These serial warmongers are particularly angry that Russian foreign policy has thwarted their plans for “regime change” in Syria, a key strategic objective. They’re also angry that Putin clamped down on oligarchs whose role it was to help Western plutocrats get control of Russia’s natural resources.

Additionally, President Putin has rebuilt Russia, (resurrected it from the ashes of the West’s exploitation, austerity, and dismemberment), increased the standard of living of ordinary Russians, grown the Russian economy by 7 percent from 2000–2007, reached out to countries large and small for constructive engagement and returned to the practice, now long abandoned by the West, of realpolitik.

Western Propaganda and the crimea

The US and EU supported the coup d’etat in Ukraine, and reverted to outright justification of any acts by the self-proclaimed Kiev authorities that opted for suppression by force of the part of the Ukrainian people that had rejected the attempts to impose the anti-constitutional way of life to the entire country and wanted to defend its rights to the native language, culture, and history. It is precisely the aggressive assault on these rights that compelled the population of Crimea to take the destiny in its own hands and make a choice in favor of self-determination. This was an absolutely free choice no matter what was invented by those who are responsible in the first place for the internal conflict in Ukraine.