VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY

The collective west, led by the United States, declared economic war against Russia last month in response to the invasion of Ukraine, imposing perhaps the harshest sanctions against any nation in history. President Joe Biden has said the aim of this economic warfare is to turn the Russian people against its government. Sanctions against Russia’s central bank were intended to destroy the value of the ruble. One U.S. dollar was worth 85 rubles on February 24th the day of the invasion and soared to $154 on March 7th. On Friday, the currency straightened to about 101.

ROBERT BRIDGE—And while it is perfectly natural to loathe war, and to speak out against it, a little consistency would be nice. Since I’ve already explored the question of Western hypocrisy in a previous column, I’ll just touch on it here: Why have the US and its NATO allies never suffered so much as a canceled dentist visit for their illicit military adventures across the Middle East and North Africa?

GLENN GREENWALD—Prior to the U.S.’s jumping directly into this war, those questions were never meaningfully considered. Instead, the emotions deliberately stoked by the relentless media attention to the horrors of this war — horrors which, contrary to the West’s media propaganda, are common to all wars, including its own — left little to no space for public discussion of those questions. The only acceptable modes of expression in U.S. discourse were to pronounce that the Russian invasion was unjustified, and, using parlance which the 2011 version of Chris Hayes correctly dismissed as adolescent, that Putin is a “bad guy.”

ALEX RUBINSTEIN—This February, the State Department announced $350 million in additional military aid to Ukraine, bringing “the total security assistance the United States has committed to Ukraine over the past year to more than $1 billion.”

Another $200 million was sent in early March, and following Zelensky’s March 16 appeal to Congress for more weapons, Biden is reportedly set to dole out another $800 in military aid including 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 9,000 anti-tank systems, 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, 400 shotguns, 400 grenade launchers, 20 million rounds of ammunition, 100 tactical drones, 25,000 sets of body armor and 25,000 helmets. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

These figures add to the $2.5 billion in military aid the US delivered between 2014 and the summer of 2021, bringing the total to $3.8 billion.

ERIC ZUESSE—Hitler himself even commonly used the phrase “Judeo-Bolshevism” in order to suggest that the Satanic attributes he assigned to Jews extended to the Soviet Union itself. However, whereas the original (German variety of) nazism was mainly against Jews and only secondarily against Russians, the Ukrainian variety, which Obama installed, is mainly (and sometimes even exclusively) against Russians. And sometimes that hatred has been expressed by the Obama-installed regime’s hired Ukrainian thugs herding terrified peaceful pro-Russian demonstrators into a building and then burning them alive there. The U.S. press virtually ignored it, but there it is, plain as day.