Putin: standing for national sovereignty
At the peak of the Syrian crisis in 2013, Russian president Vladimir Putin stood his ground and got NATO to back off from attacking Bashar al-Assad. Many awful things have been said about the former KGB Colonel, but nobody can claim that he is not the man at the helm of Russia. One might like it or not, but Putin is clearly in charge of his country, which, if nothing else, at least gives people a sense of clarity. Unlike the so-called "leader of the free world," there are no puppet masters behind Putin. Fidel Castro was the same, although he ruled a smaller island state. Putin also understood, that in order to maintain Russia's national sovereignty against the United States and the European Union, he had to forge strategic and economic alliances, especially with China; BRICS was created in this context and for this reason.
But the BRICS nations and Putin must remain ever vigilant. The engineering of a failed state in the Ukraine cannot be allowed to happen. Likewise, BRICS' member Brazil must also closely monitor the situation in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro is less charismatic than his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, and what global corporate imperialism abhor the most is "resource nationalism," i.e. the nationalization of prime resources such as oil by sovereign states, as is currently the case in Venezuela. National sovereignty is not about nationalism; it is instead an expression of different cultural identities. National and cultural specificity are getting in the way of the end game of corporate imperialism. We must, as diverse people, unite and fight to stop this abomination. The United Nations is a failed institution at best, but it could be worse if it should ever become the United Corporations.
For more details on this analysis, please listen to Gilbert Mercier's radio interview on the Kathleen Wells Show. Photographs one, three, five, seven and eight by Russ Allison Loar. Photographs two and six by Snapsi and photographs four and nine by Mark Rain.
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