But, in fact, as the late Sam Francis explained in various books and essays (e.g., Leviathan and Its Enemies, 2016), this Neocon vision of a new world order is nothing less than a form of managerial kleptocracy, the control by powerful elites in our (permanent) government and big corporations who talk incessantly about democracy, but in fact use that term to disguise the increasing dominance they exercise over every facet of public and private life, whether in the United States, Western Europe, or since 1991 over most of the former Eastern Bloc.

Do we need further examples of this closer to home than the recent authoritarian actions by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or the extra-constitutional actions by what is euphemistically called “the January 6 Committee” in the US Congress? Stand in the way of the Deep State administrative managers, and you get suppressed, cancelled, and arrested, and held in a Federal jail for months without bail or trial.

The present crisis in Ukraine has everything to do with the objectives and manoeuvres of this managerial kleptocracy, and its attempts to force post-Communist—increasingly anti-Marxist—Russia to accept such a template.

Recall a bit of history: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Secretary of State James Baker (representing President George H. W. Bush) solemnly agreed in principle that the old USSR would disintegrate into various new “republics,” and in return NATO would not advance beyond its current borders, that is, would not take in those former Eastern Bloc countries (e.g., Poland, Romania, Slovakia, the Baltics, etc.), an action which would be seen as directly hostile and offensive to a greatly reduced Russian Federation. Indeed, after the end of the Soviet Union, its dismemberment, and the rise of an avowedly traditionalist and pro-Christian leadership in Moscow (no less a figure than the Reverend Franklin Graham noticed this), was there any reason for NATO even to exist, as President Trump once mused…other than as a means for continued and increasing managerial control (following the Bloom paradigm)?

Professor Richard Sakwa (University of Kent, UK), in his excellent and very detailed study, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (December 2014), has termed what happened after the fall of Soviet Communism the triumph of “asymmetrism,” by which he means that instead of welcoming the new, post-Communist Russia, which had now publicly rejected and repudiated the seventy years of brutal years of Marxist domination, as an equal partner in a “Greater West,” our foreign policy and Neocon managers in Washington and Brussels demanded that Russia give up any pretence of real independence or true partnership with the West.

This process occurred in steps, each time with agreements or protocols or memoranda, which were solemnized between the parties, but then essentially undermined by the US or by our client regime in Kiev. During the Clinton administration, and continuing on until 2020, one by one the former Eastern Bloc countries were admitted as members of NATO, including the Baltic states. In effect, the promises of Baker and the elder Bush meant nothing. What then were the Russians to think?

Much is made of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of December 5, 1994. Through that protocol Russia, the US and the United Kingdom “confirmed their recognition of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine becoming parties to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and effectively abandoning their nuclear arsenals to Russia.” In return, Russia recognized the integrity and sovereignty of a neutral, non-militarized, non-hostile Ukraine. And accordingly, despite political turmoil and internal conflict within the Ukrainian state, from 1994 until the violent, American-sponsored Maidan coup d’etat revolution of February 2014 (again, recall US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland’s direct involvement), that agreement held. But with the flagrant violation of a truce between organized Kiev protesters (who had received from the US over $5 billion to foment revolution) and the popularly-elected government of Viktor Yanukovych (who was seen by the Ukraine revolutionaries as pro-Russian), and the subsequent seizure of power by US-backed Ukrainian irredentists who then proceeded to severely persecute Ukraine’s very large Russian-language and ethnic minority, the Budapest protocol was effectively abrogated (cf., Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, pp. 86-88 et seq).

It should be noted, as well, the United States never considered the Budapest Memorandum legally binding (Statement of April 12, 2013) or in the category of a concluded treaty.

Russia responded by acceding to the overwhelming vote of citizens of the Crimean peninsula, which had never been Ukrainian, only forcefully “given” to the artificial “Ukrainian Socialist Republic” in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (allegedly after a night of riotous drinking). For the Crimea includes the major Russian Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol, supposedly guaranteed by agreement to Russia, but which after the Maidan coup, the new American-sponsored regime in Kiev now threatened to take.

Russian president Vladimir Putin responded via a press conference on March 4, 2014, to a question about Russia’s supposed violation (in Crimea) of the Budapest Memorandum, describing the current Ukrainian situation as a revolution:  “a new state arises, but with this state and in respect to this state, we have not signed any obligatory documents.” The Ukrainian state as envisaged by the Budapest Memorandum had, effectively, ceased to exist, and in its place an American-CIA-US State Department-created state had been forcibly implanted.

Further, Russia declared that it had never been under obligation to “force any part of Ukraine’s civilian population to stay in Ukraine against its will,” including the two newly-independent heavily-Russophone states of Donetsk and Lugansk in what was eastern Ukraine (those provinces, like Crimea, had never been a part of any independent Ukrainian nation, but were forcibly given to the artificial Soviet republic by Vladimir Lenin in 1922).

Once again, whether through the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia, or the American debacle in the Balkans, which only succeeded in creating an Islamist republic—Kosovo—in the heart of Europe, the “Orange Revolution” in Kiev must be seen in context as part and parcel of the overall Neocon and globalist effort to advance their internationalist aims. And those goals, let it be said, have nothing to do with traditional Western and Christian beliefs and values. Rather, they were and are a manifestation of what globalist Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, defined as “the Great Reset,” the “window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”

In fact, the Russian incursion into Ukraine comes as a direct and cumulative result of actions which our State Department and intelligence community, with its minions in Western Europe, have engineered for thirty years: to, as it were, “put Russia in its place—at the back of the bus.”

President Zelensky of Ukraine, most recently implied that Ukraine might well go back and reconsider its decision to de-nuclearize. This, then, along with the violent persecution of the huge Russophone minority within Ukrainian borders, precipitated Putin’s decision to take action. After decades of broken promises, broken treaties, and violated protocols, whether at Budapest or the Minsk Agreements (which could have settled the issues equitably), which Ukraine, encouraged by our globalists, never implemented, the Russian bear had its back against the wall: either stand up to those who would subjugate you, or fight back.

Recall again the words of that great anti-Communist novelist, anti-totalitarian and fervent Christian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Moscow News, interview with W. T. Trietiakov published 28 April/4May 2006):

“Events in Ukraine, ever since the time of the referendum in 1991, with its poorly formulated options, have been a constant source of pain and anger to me. I have written and spoken about this often. The fanatic oppression and suppression of the Russian language there (a language which polls show is consistently the preferred language of 60% of the people there) is a beastly methodology aimed primarily against the cultural prospects of Ukraine itself. The vast territories which were never part of historic Ukraine, such as Crimea, Novorosiya and the entire southeast were forcibly and arbitrarily consumed into the territory of modern Ukraine and made hostage to Ukraine’s desires to join NATO…. It is all a simple minded, indeed simpleton and cruel joke perpetuated against the entire history of XIX and XX century Russia. Given these circumstances, Russia will never, in any way, betray the many millions of Russian speaking peoples in Ukraine. Russia will never abandon the ideal of unity with them.”

No one—no one—wants war, with the resultant terrible destruction, loss of life, and mayhem it inevitably brings. But as I have written in previous essays, if you search for the profound cause for what has happened, it is not the invading Russians, it is not really the regime in Kiev, but rather it is the sponsoring apparatchiks in Foggy Bottom along the Potomac, in Brussels, and in the houses of Congress (the Lindsey Grahams and Roger Wickers who actually urge our potential use of nuclear weapons against Russia), and what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts calls the “presstitutes” in American media, from Fox News to MSNBC (which now are like an indistinguishable, foaming-at-the-mouth phalanx in their defence of the aggressive managerial world revolution).

The blood spilt will be on our hands, that is, on the hands of our elites. As cartoonist Walt Kelly once put it: “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

Reprinted with the author’s permission.