Yet Putin's Russia is the only country that has invaded and annexed the sovereign territory of another country in recent memory...
By this definition, history is full of "Hitlers" (many of whom we regard as honorable and admirable men). Many of us have come to understand, however, that "a Hitler" in common parlance is someone against whom the neocons and their fellow-travellers want us to go to war.
Let's not forget that we've done more than our share of the invading part in recent memory -- sundering Kosovo from the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia and turning it over to narcotics-trafficking jihadists; effecting regime change in the sovereign nations of Iraq and Libya and handing the peoples of both over to the rapacity of barbarians; bombing the sovereign nation of Syria in support of jihadists who would ravage minority religious communities (including the Christians) should they ever come to power.
The warmongers ask us to believe simultaneously that, on the one hand, our recent (and disasterous) invasions of sovereign nations were just, and, on the other, that the Russian annexation of the Crimea is the work of a modern-day Hitler whose rapacity knows no limit. Yet, the Crimea was part of Russia until Krushchev transferred it in 1954 to the Ukraine (a constituent republic of the Soviet Union) in a symbolic act. It was part of the Soviet Union (with both Russia and Ukraine) until twenty-three years before its reannexation. It is majority ethnic-Russian. Its annexation (executed in response to the junta in the Ukraine) caused six deaths (three military and three civilian). The citizens of the Ukraine made no effort to defend it-- over 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers and officers and over 7,000 civilian bureaucrats defected to the Russians (fellow-citizenship with whom every Ukrainian over the age of 23 had once enjoyed). This, we are told, is the great crime of the century (a million dead Iraqis and the shattered ancient Church of Mesopotamia might disagree).
Was Russia's annexation of the Crimea just? I don't know that it was, but the case is far from black and white (however much the warmongers would have us believe otherwise), nor does it portend further such annexations without limit. Until vital American interests are threatened, we should let the Russians and Ukrainians sort things out themselves (offering up our prayers that they and the other peoples of the world may live together in peace).
Our forefathers fought for America and for American interests. They did not go out in search of monsters to slay. It's time that we return to their wise and just example.
