Hypocrisy on Sanctions and Protests

Sanctions are an act of war, a way to besiege a population to starve it into submission. This was acknowledged as recently as last November by Sec. of State Pompeo, who said, referring to new US sanctions on Iran - “ the leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat.”

But this very same Pompeo got up in front of the UNSC last Saturday and told the world that a baby who starved to death in Venezuela was the fault of President Maduro. It takes a lot of nerve for a person trying to starve people in multiple countries around the world to hold up one of his successes as the fault of someone else!
In Pompeo's world, apparently there is such a thing as Schrödinger's Sanctions, in which they can starve and not starve, depending on Pompeo's spin.

In the 90s, as the US tried to starve the Iraqis into submission, a news anchor, Lesley Stahl, asked the Sec. of State of Clinton, Madeline Albright - "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright didn't deny that sanctions caused children to starve. She replied - " I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it."



But, of course, people who have screamed about election interference for two years, who turn around and openly back a coup of an elected government in another country, clearly have no concept of logic or morality, and cannot be shamed into not lying.

Representatives of a government which has millions of people living on the streets should not be able to stand at the UNSC, (during a cold snap in which their citizens are freezing to death), and brazenly pronounce that another government should be overthrown because it is not "meeting the needs of its people".


Representatives of a government which uses tear gas, rubber bullets and water hoses in their country to shut down protests should not announce that protests in a foreign country should be followed immediately resignation of the government. (This goes double for France, which, not to be outdone in sheer mind-blowing brazenness, echoed their US bosses in condemning the refusal of Maduro to step down, and called for "negotiations" to take place. France, of course, has had ongoing Yellow Vest protests for 3 months now, and has met them with violent crackdowns, including the deaths of at least 8 people. These protests go unreported in the worldwide imperial media.)

The "Resistance" of the Democrats to Trump has temporarily stopped, as Democrats join with their war-mongering Republican brethren to praise the overthrow of yet another sovereign country. (In the last 20 years, the Dems and Reps, tag-teaming, have overthrown the governments of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Sudan, Honduras, Libya and Ukraine, and made the good old college try to overthrow the last secular government in the Middle East, Syria. I might have missed a couple.)


But of course the Democrats are familiar with the effect of sanctions. They shut down the government for a month (except for the regime change parts, of course) and refused to vote for a bill which would have paid government workers while the government was shut down. As a Democrat explained, if workers were paid (and not suffering), there wouldn't be any leverage for the Democrats to oppose Trump's wall. Of course, it was striking airport workers who put a stop to the posturing and the shutdown. Oh, wait, not the posturing. Nancy Pelosi strutted around claiming that she personally had caused Trump to back down. In any case, sanctions were applied to 800,000 American workers, so that the millionaires in Washington, DC could make their soundbite appearances on the TV "news".