“Here’s an irony of history: at the 1945 Yalta Conference (in Crimea, of all places) Russia argued that Ukraine was an independent country and worthy of its own vote at the United Nations, while the United States and Britain argued that it was a region within Russia. I guess history isn’t what it used it be.” –Matthew Stevenson, Counterpunch.org, 23 February 2022 After 40 years of allowing Russian oligarchs to hide their money and and wealth in Western banks and assets, granting them citizenship status and letting them finance political parties in the West, the EU leader Von der Leyen announced after the beginning of the Russian invasion that “ we will work to prohibit Russian oligarchs from using their financial assets on our markets.”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51