from Strategic Culture:
The scenario is not hyperbole. Imagine a sunny beach in Florida crowded with families enjoying a holiday weekend. In a split second, mayhem and murder are unleashed as crowds flee in panic from a foreign missile exploding over the beach.
There is no doubt that the United States would go to war immediately against the perpetrator. Furious condemnations would ring out for days, weeks, and months among American politicians and their media.
But what is also obvious from this hypothetical scenario is the egregious double standard and hypocrisy of American and Western responses.
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Last weekend, Russia was celebrating its annual Day of Remembrance and Sorrow. The day honors the dead of the Great Patriotic War instigated by Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. That weekend also combines Trinity Sunday, a prominent religious holiday in the Orthodox calendar.
As Russian families were enjoying the festive weekend, the Kiev regime fired five U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles at the Crimean city of Sevastopol. It was a deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. Four missiles were shot down by Russian air defenses, but a fifth exploded over a nearby beach, where hundreds of people were enjoying sun-splashed sand and the gentle lapping of waves.
In the ensuing horror, four people including two children were killed. Over 150 were injured, dozens of them seriously, from the explosions caused by cluster bomblets released by the missile. Video footage clearly shows explosions and not merely ordnance shrapnel falling from the sky.
This was an act of state-sponsored terrorism against civilians. The United States and its NATO partners bear responsibility for the massacre. Only a week before the attack, U.S. President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders had signed off on supplying the Kiev regime with long-range (300 km) ATACMS weapons and a green light to use these missiles on Russian territory.
Arguably, too, the atrocity was an unpardonable act of war against Russia. As the foreign ministry in Moscow noted, the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine has become a direct war against Russia. The situation has entered a most dangerous moment.
The Kremlin has warned that retaliation is coming. There is no question that under international law, the Russian Federation has every right to respond to murderous aggression. It only remains to be seen what the form of retaliation will be.
It is doubtful that Russia would take revenge on innocent American civilians. The Russian leadership and its people are far too moral and strategically intelligent to countenance such barbarity.
The scenario of bombing a beach in Florida is invoked to demonstrate the heinous reality of what occurred in Crimea last weekend. And it also demonstrates the rank moral bankruptcy of American and European leaders.
Only days before the missile attack on Crimea, the American Senate introduced a bill to declare Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism”. The bill was a hysterical reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to North Korea and the signing of a mutual defense pact with Chairman Kim Jong Un.
The irony of the U.S. reaction in light of the subsequent attack on Crimea is not merely bitter. Washington is unhinged and depraved. A collection of psychopaths as are its minions in Brussels and other NATO capitals.
Following the massacre in Crimea, the Western media and NATO leaders tried to minimize the crime. The equivocations and evasions are damning. The White House and Pentagon said the decision on targets was the sole responsibility of the Ukrainian regime. A spokesman for the Kiev junta sought to justify the air strike by implying Russia was using “civilian occupiers” on a beach as human shields.
The mindset here is pure Nazi terrorism enabled by American and NATO politicians, their weapons and media propaganda. This is the same mindset and NATO enabling that terrorized the Donbass and other Russian populations after the CIA coup in Kiev in 2014. Russian civilians endured years of wanton shelling until Russia responded with the Special Military Operation in February 2022 to eradicate the fascist aggression.
Western sponsorship and practice of state terrorism have been going on for decades if not centuries. Sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly. Think of the countless Western genocides in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Why the crimes are not more well known comes down to media propaganda brainwashing.
The aggression on Crimea last weekend has reached a momentous threshold. There are numerous fatal options that Russia can take without responding to precipitate a Third World War.
Russia can step up its obliteration of the odious Kiev NeoNazi regime thereby landing NATO in the worst existential political crisis in its 75 years of ignominious existence. It can close off the Black Sea by shooting down NATO surveillance aircraft and other warplanes. Russia could supply more sophisticated weapons to other nations and groups that ramp up the security costs of the United States to unbearable levels.
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