Stephen Sefton *, May 9th 2014
Not even a week after the neo-nazi massacre in Odessa, on May 8th, President François Hollande placed a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Solider in Paris to commemorate victory in Europe over Nazi Germany 69 years before. May 8th will also forever mark the anniversary of the 1945 Setif massacres in Algeria when French security forces and settlers set out on a murdereous rampage killing over 40,000 Algerians.
Worth constantly remembering is the French philospher Simone Weil's comment that what shocked people in Europe about the Nazis was their use against Europeans of atrocities the Europeans routinely inflicted on their colonial victims around the world. Since 1945 and to this day, European and US governments have killed many millions of civilians in Africa and Asia with occasional excursions into Europe as well. That barbaric record is either played down or entirely written out of self-serving Western historical accounts.
Unlike Nazi and Japanese war criminals, US and European imperialist mass murderers have completely escaped prosecution. US and European supreme war crime aggressors cynically evangelize freely for Western corporate capitalism while their victims enjoy Western injustice via the International Criminal Court. For their part, modern German political leaders have always expressed emphatic rejection of Germany's Nazi past.
In 1970, then Chancellor Willy Brandt famously knelt at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial at the start of Germany's then Ostpolitik. In January 2013, Angela Merkel said her country has "an everlasting responsibility" for Nazi crimes. That was on the 70th anniversary of the Nazi government taking office in Germnany in 1933. Fast forward to President Barack Obama's appearance with Chancellor Merkel on May 2nd 2014.
According to the White House their remarks began at 12.07pm. Odessa is 7 hours ahead of Washington. So by 8.00am Washington time the Odessa Trade Union building was already on fire. Hours later, as they strolled out to speak, there can be little doubt Merkel and Obama knew much of what was happening in Ukraine at that very time. Such high powered leaders get situation reports on sensitive world events minute by minute.
By 7.00pm Odessa time, noon in Washington D.C., many survivors of the Odessa conflagration had either been arrested by the police, if they were lucky, or else attacked, beaten and killed by the US and European Union's well-organized Kiev regime neo-nazi protegés. As that was going on, US President Barack Obama said "as Ukrainian forces move to restore order in eastern Ukraine, it is obvious to the world that these Russian-backed groups are not peaceful protestors."
Around the time he spoke, US taxpayer funded Kiev coup regime supporters in Odessa were being filmed chanting, "“Let us burn those motherfuckers right in the building" as unarmed Ukrainian anti-coup regime protestors struggled in vain to escape. Obama went on, "The Ukrainian government has the right and responsibility to uphold law and order within its territory, and Russia needs to use its influence over these paramilitary groups so they disarm and stop provoking violence."
He was using the very justification he previously denied the legitimate governments of Libya and Syria governments to exonerate a regime whose supporters at that very moment were shooting at survivors of the Odessa conflagration trying to get to safety. It is no exaggeration to note that what Obama and Merkel wanted to say at that May 2nd Press Conference would have been completely undercut by any acknowledgment on their part of events in Ukraine. For public relations purposes they had to make their malevolent disingenuous, deceitful remarks before the Western newsrooms reported the events in Odessa or the release of the hostages in Slavyansk
On the alleged OSCE observers detained in Slavyansk (four German military officers, one Swede, one Pole, one Dane and one Czech), Obama said, "....it is disgraceful and it’s inexcusable. Russia needs to work to secure their immediate release." But both Obama and Merkel, certainly knew, even as they spoke, that Russia's Human Rights Commissioner Viktor Lukin had successfully negotiated the release of the European military officers concerned.
Merkel shared Obama's falsity, saying "We don't have any release of the hostages of the OSCE, among them also four German hostages. This is a very crucial step that needs to happen first. We have not yet seen any implementation of the Geneva agreement by the Russian side. The Ukrainian side has taken some steps in the right direction." Merkel and Obama piled up lie after redoubled lie, cynically issued just in time to beat the global news rooms reporting the hostages' release in Slavyansk and the massacre in Odessa.
When Merkel stressed the importance of the Kiev coup regime's calendar for elections on March 25th, President Obama still went on to describe the coup regime as a "duly elected government". At the very moment Chancellor Merkel and President Obama uttered their faithless distorted version of events, the hostages released in Slavyansk may even have been en route to Donetsk. By then, it was Friday evening in Ukraine and the Kiev coup regime's neonazi shock troops were burning, beating and strangling to death the remaining unarmed men and women anti-coup regime Ukrainian protestors.
The May 2nd press event in Washington dealt mostly with events in Ukraine but also touched on the very important proposed trade-in-your-sovereignty Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This so-called TTIP is the ugly twin of the US corporate-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, vigorously knocked back recently by Japan. Obama dwelt on the matter long enough to explain the geopolitical reason why the US and the European Union have funded the Ukraine coup regime and trained its false-flag operation snipers and its neonazi shock troops.
He said : "We discussed energy security, including the importance of Europe diversifying its energy sources. The United States has already approved licenses for natural gas exports, which will increase global supply and benefit partners like Europe. And TTIP would make it even easier to get licenses to export gas to Europe." A cynical translation might go: "We talked about freezing Gazprom out of Europe and making our high-cost fracking gas viable for shipping across the Atlantic, so Europe would depend on our expensive US gas instead of getting it cheap from Russia."
Later on Chancellor Merkel confirmed that cynical translation of Obama's remarks on the TTPI saying "Looking at our dependencies in the next 10 to 15 years on Russian gas supplies, there are six countries right now in the EU that depend 100 percent on gas supplies. We need to improve the reverse flow, as we call it. We need to improve our grade of pipelines. All of the countries need to share supplies. And those are measures that we’re currently discussing in Europe. We’re talking about short-term but also medium-term and long-term measures. And then the free trade agreement, TTIP, is also gaining more prominence in this respect."
Back in January 2013, during her remarks, Angela Merkel observed : "We must clearly say, generation after generation, and say it again: with courage, civil courage, each individual can help ensure that racism and anti-Semitism have no chance.....We're facing our history, we're not hiding anything, we're not repressing anything. We must confront this to make sure we are a good and trustworthy partner in the future, as we already are today, thankfully..."
The massacre in Odessa proves beyond any doubt that the hypocrisy and sadism of the Western oligarchic elites will never change. The lesson of Odessa, as of so many other atrocities in so many other conflicts, is that, in the West, there are no "good and trustworthy partners". The political leaders of the European Union and the United States are unlikely ever to recover the confidence of their regional counterparts Russia and China. The Odessa massacre will in future be seen as marking a decisive point, accelerating the relative decline of Western power in the world.
* This article was originally published with a byline using my then pseudonym, Toni Solo