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In September, former president Bill Clinton said Russia did not go into Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion. “The former president said the U.S. and NATO never meant to threaten Russia and that the nations of Eastern Europe had a right to live in security after decades of being dominated by Russia,” Politico reported at the time.

No mention of Clinton’s betrayal of Russia. Or that of George H.W. Bush, James Baker, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. All had promised NATO would not push its troops up against Russia’s border, an obvious national security threat for Russia. It does not have similar troops and war materiel lined up against the borders of Canada and Mexico.

In a speech delivered in 2007, well before the current crisis, Vladimir Putin “reserved his bitterest complaints… for the US drive to expand Nato into former Soviet eastern Europe and for the plans to deploy parts of the missile shield in central Europe. ‘Why do you need to move your military infrastructure to our borders?’” he asked.

I’m not sure why Putin posed this as a question. It’s obvious, even here in the Land of Psychopathic Lies, that the USG and its NATO attack dog have long hungered to destroy Russia and turn it into another Libya in the bloody wake of Obama and NATO’s vicious attack and assassination of the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadaffi.

There is but one reason for this: the elimination of any competitor to the neoliberal order. Clinton, a skilled pathological liar and model psychopath, set the stage for what we are now witnessing.

“Americans generally have no idea what life was like for Russians during the 1990s. They naively assume that because Russia swiftly adopted capitalism, the result was great economic prosperity. The reality was quite different,” writes Caleb Maupin.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin took office and dramatically re-organized Russia’s economy on free market [neoliberal] lines. When Bill Clinton was elected as President of the United States, it was widely understood that Yeltsin was “Clinton’s man.” According to the US Bureau of Public Affairs, Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton were very close. The official US government website states: “Clinton was strongly inclined not only to like Yeltsin but also to support his policies, in particular, his commitment to Russian democracy.” US President Bill Clinton met with Boris Yeltsin 18 times while he was in office.

I doubt Clinton was “close” to Yeltsin. Psychopaths are unable to form “close” relationships. Yeltsin, a notorious drunk and buffoon, was manipulated by Clinton, and the Russian people paid for his befuddled compliance.

Maupin notes that a mere 6% of Russians approved of Yeltsin’s USG-contrived economic “reforms.” According to the US Bureau of Public Affairs, “at the time, and periodically throughout his term in office, Yeltsin faced growing opposition at home to his efforts to liberalize the economy and enact democratic reforms in Russia.”

And rightly so. The USG, World Bank, and IMF imposed “reforms” resulted in

not the establishment of a free market paradise, but rather a huge catastrophe. US Senator Bill Bradley explained it this way: “30% unemployment, rampant inflation, pensions gone, savings gone, 30 or 40 years… it’s all gone. No jobs. A few people doing very well, who bought all assets from the state, but the average person, no.”

In “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein writes how between 1991 and 1998 “more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed creating an epidemic of unemployment.” This resulted in 74 million Russians living below the poverty level. Klein adds “25 percent of Russians—almost 37 million people—lived in poverty described as ‘desperate.’”

During the 1990s, when Yeltsin was dramatically changing the country under the direction of the Clinton administration, the rate of drug addiction in Russia increased by 900 percent. The suicide rate almost doubled. HIV, which had previously only infected no more than fifty thousand Russians, became a nationwide epidemic with millions contracting AIDs.

Bradley described the neoliberal mindset in crude, albeit accurate, terms.

An entire population of people who had lived with guaranteed employment, guaranteed healthcare, old age pensions, and a planned economy saw the social safety net swept from underneath them, as widely unpopular policies, backed by Washington, were imposed on the country. US Senator Bill Bradley describes the tone of US diplomats in their interactions with Russia, saying Clinton administration officials spoke of “stuffing shit down Boris throat,” gleefully taking pleasure in ordering him to wreck his country’s economy.

This wrecking ball approach to taking out a possible future competitor resulted in the premature death of millions. Russian academic Vladimir Gusev, according to Klein, said “The years of criminal capitalism have killed off 10 percent of our population.”

Russia’s population decreased by 6.6 million between 1992 and 2006. Klein quotes US Economist Andre Gunder Frank calling what took place in Russia as “economic genocide.” Russian Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi used the same words as the policies were beginning in 1992, saying it would have catastrophic results for children and the elderly.

Clinton was selected to be president precisely because he is a high-level psychopath able to usher in neoliberal policies that result in immense suffering and death. Like all psychopaths, he does not experience remorse, conscience, guilt, or anxiety. It does not bother him (or his equally psychopathic wife) that old people and children starved to death while oligarchs made fortunes off their misery.

Putin and the Russian people are attempting to avoid a repeat of this criminal experience of the 1990s. Millions remember the privation and widespread suffering as the USG forced “shit down Boris’ throat” and the country slipped into third-world status, perilous close to becoming a failed state.

Of course, thanks to the lying and duplicitous corporate war propaganda media, the majority of Americans are completely ignorant of this previous attempt to take out Russia. Instead, remaining ignorant in the face of a possible life-terminating thermonuclear war, they are fed a toxic amalgam of lies and fabrication that distort reality like a funhouse mirror.

Millions believe Russia is the new Nazi Germany, and Putin is the New Hitler, determined to regain and expand Russia’s lost Soviet empire and wantonly commit genocide in the process.

The idiocy of this transparent narrative and its acceptance by a large number of Americans demonstrates how easy it is for the ruling elite to gain consensus for mass murder and war crimes.

False and deceptive narratives paved the way for demonizing and destroying a raft of countries, notably Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and other nations reluctant to force millions into misery and privation at the behest of an inhumane neoliberal order willing to steal, starve, and murder in its unquenchable thirst for control and power.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author