The modus operandi of the West’s “elites” is that it’s not the truth that matters but successfully managing the hypocrisy so that it doesn’t appear too painfully obvious.
Soon after Nancy Pelosi’s recent descent on Taiwan, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called out Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, for “keeping an embarrassed silence” regarding Madame Speaker’s “brash and insolent stunt.” Burns’ silence was quite a change from a mere month back at the World Peace Forum in Beijing, where he “demanded that China stop supporting the war in Ukraine or relaying ‘Russian propaganda’.” Even more brazenly, Burns used that opportunity to flatly accuse the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson of “telling lies about American bioweapons labs, which do not exist in Ukraine.”
But that was then and this is now in the West’s “rules-based order,” where each occasion requires a new set of rules. Thus, it goes without saying that, for the time being, Burns is also keeping an “embarrassed silence” about another potentially tectonic event – the latest, even more damning evidence of the work of U.S.-run biolabs in Ukraine offered by the Russian Defense Ministry on August 4, including involvement in the Covid-19 pandemic, highly suspicious U.S.-funded research of the monkeypox, West Nile fever and African swine fever pathogens, and even U.S. involvement in the death of ex-Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
The reason for Burns’ silence is not difficult to discern: since the “free” Western mass media have massively ignored the latest proof that Victoria Nuland’s March reluctant admission that the U.S. was indeed running “biological research facilities” in Ukraine was just the tip of the iceberg, neither Burns nor any other U.S. official are going to do anything to force their “free” /media to even broach the subject. And now that Twitter has suspended the Russian Foreign Ministry account for daring to quote key parts of the Russian defense ministry’s sensational presentation, Burns and company don’t have to say anything at all. If it’s memory-holed by the “free” social media, then it must not exist. At least until such time that it can be properly “genetically engineered” and made “safe” for consumption.
That’s the modus operandi of the West’s holier-than-thou liberal “elites” – it’s not the truth that matters but successfully managing the hypocrisy so that it doesn’t appear too painfully obvious even to minds numbed by the sheer inanity of Western mainstream narratives. Or to paraphrase former Clinton advisor James Carville’s snowclone about the economy – it’s the West, stupid. They think they can do whatever they want.
Perhaps we should remind ourselves of the post-Cold War Western formula announced during the heady days of the early 2000s, an era marked by another famous American political quote, Carl Rove’s “we’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.” As Tony Blair’s policy adviser Robert Cooper nonchalantly put it on the pages of the London Guardian in April 2002: “The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.”
Two decades later, despite the rise of both China and Russia and the world’s inexorable evolution to multipolarity, imperial habits die hard – usually until they hit a wall of reality, as is currently happening in Ukraine and is bound to happen in Taiwan. Although, firmly caught in its Thucydides Trap, West still simply can’t help itself, as the EU’s foreign-policy chief Josep Borrel was recently forced to admit (“international politics is to a large degree about applying double standards”) while bumbling to explain the difference between the EU’s approach to Ukraine and Palestine.
But back to Burns for a moment. He’s far from new in being a poker-faced double-standards enforcer. Before his present work on poking the Dragon regarding Taiwan and the Bear regarding just about everything, he distinguished himself as a partisan and apologist of NATO’s illegal aggression against Serbia and the resulting unilateral secession of its Kosovo province nine years later. Back in 2009, when he was the U.S. Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Burns explained to the media that the recognition of the independence of Serbia’s spiritual and historical cradle was in fact an expression of the U.S.’s “interest in good relations with Serbia.” It’s a safe bet that he’d be perfectly happy to express himself similarly vis-à-vis China and Taiwan should the U.S. drop all pretense and openly recognize Taipei’s secessionism. For, outside the West, it’s all still a “jungle” to Burns and his ilk, and the “natives” are to be dealt with accordingly. Thus, in Burnstalk, Pelosi’s Taiwan sojourn and pledge of continuing U.S. support for the island is actually a sign of the U.S.’s interest in good relations with China. Got it?
Another of the usual Anglo-American suspects scavenging the fertile Kosovo-China-Ukraine crisis landscape is the rather ironically surnamed Englishman Geoffrey Nice, who gained international notoriety as a prosecutor of the kangaroo court officially known as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), whose sole purpose was to shift the blame for the Western-inspired bloody breakup of that multinational country onto the Serbs, whose sin of being independent-minded and friendly towards Russia is irredeemable in the eyes of the (geo)political West. In addition to his unsuccessful prosecution of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Nice’s ICTY legacy also includes being accused of having destroyed evidence related to human organ trafficking in Kosovo.
Nice subsequently offered his legal services to former “Kosovo” president and KLA terrorist Hashim Thaci, one of the main suspects in not just the trafficking but the “forcible extraction” of human organs of still-living, mostly Serb prisoners, as outlined in the stunning Council of Europe 2011 report, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo.” Nice’s subsequent attempt to discredit the report was, however, brilliantly dissected and exposed by American journalist Diana Johnstone as just another attempt by a representative of “self-righteous Western democracies” to reserve the privileges of a “culture of impunity” exclusively for themselves and their clients.
Of course, the clients from the “jungle” still have to pay for the imperial “double standards” umbrella, so in the end Nice publicly accused Thaci of owing him “almost a half a million euros” for his work for the “Kosovo” government,. This included “help” with Thaci’s biography, which could presumably use some whitewashing from the serious charges contained in the COE report, which, along with the extraction of living human organs, also included “violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics.”
Maria Zakharova just recently more fully described the house of horrors over which Thaci presided and whose cause Nice has taken up over the years: “Kosovo is the territory of ‘black’ transplantation. People were dissected alive, taking out internal organs for sale to those people in the West… In the West they stood in line for organ transplant operations. And they began to receive these organs when Kosovo turned into a terrible black hole in which people disappeared, who were not just killed, but killed to sell their internal organs.”
In today’s postmodern, post-historical and, indeed, increasingly post-human West, active support for such unadulterated evil served as a natural recommendation and platform for Nice’s subsequent forays into both the Ukrainian conflict and China’s internal affairs. During 2020, Nice chaired something called the Uyghur Tribunal, which the BBC referred to as “independent” with a straight face. However, for those familiar with Nice’s ICTY work, it was a foregone conclusion that the entire purpose of setting up this latest in the line of Western pseudo-judicial international bodies – in the “neutral” setting of London, to boot – was to produce a pre-ordained verdict that could then be uncritically hung around China’s neck by the appropriate mass-media narrative masters. Thus, the “Tribunal” proclaimed China as “guilty” of “genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang,” using “birth control and sterilisation measures” to bring about “long-term reduction of Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations.”
Naturally, the “verdict” was reached on the basis of hearsay evidence” and, in Nice’s own words, the Tribunal itself operated with “no rules of procedure,” and on the basis of “free evaluation of evidence, unrestricted by technical rules on admissibility.” In other words, it operated according to the rules of the jungle. Naturally, China rejected the “pseudo tribunal’s” conclusions, calling it a “political tool used by a few anti-China elements to deceive and mislead the public,” which was in fact putting it mildly. Now, however, as the Taiwan-related crisis develops, it’s even more obvious that the true purpose of such a “tribunal” was certainly not justice, but part of a well-organized effort to maximally discredit China as a prelude to the current escalation. And, as expected, Nicholas Burns has readily taken up the baton from Nice, recently expressing his “profound concerns” about China’s human rights record in Xinjiang. It’s a tried-and-true recipe, straight from the Nazi kitchen of repeating lies a thousand times until they are accepted as “truth” and dehumanizing the future enemy in order to better justify pre-planned aggression.
Needless to say, Mr. Nice has managed to throw in his two cents’ worth regarding Ukraine as well, opining in April that Russians “could be tried for war crimes over their actions in Ukraine.” Admittedly, it might prove a bit more difficult to arrest and bring in Vladimir Putin to face Mr. Nice’s idea of “justice,” but even the most unrealistic hopes of dreamed-of regime change in Moscow, like decadent empires, also die hard. The important thing to observe is that, in Nice’s eyes, with all its biolabs, use of human guinea pigs neo-Nazi paramilitaries and use of civilians and residential areas as shields – Ukraine nevertheless “holds the moral high ground.”
To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt’s immortal words justifying U.S. support for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, they may be sons of bitches, but they’re the West’s sons of bitches. Nicholas Burns and Geoffrey Nice are but two case studies of the type of shady figures representing the West in the current Western-induced Kosovo-Ukraine-Taiwan crisis-triangle, not only cheerleading the empire’s “SOBs” but projecting the empire’s aggressive motives onto its present and future targets. They have perfected FDR’s pragmatic approach into a dark art. One that is currently shaking the world to its foundations.
