We tend to see what we expect to see in an article,

by Paul , Monday, March 31, 2014, 13:07 (3896 days ago) @ mcassill

After having read many of Peter Hammond's articles on a wide variety of subjects, it is my impression that he calls them like he sees them and does his best to address the issues fairly.

In the U.S. we have been taught to look at Russia as the source of all evil - yet our own current regime leaves much to be desired, to say the least. Why is Putin doing what Putin is doing? I believe the article addresses the motives quite well. It also shows how our own nation has stood by in the past and allowed heinous atrocities to take place with nary a murmur of dissent. This is a matter of historical record which is embarrassing to those of us who know that we as a nation know better than to act that way.

Our own national policies in the middle east have done little to help the Christian minorities there, those that have survived over nearly two thousand years only to be thrown under the bus by our blindness to their situation in that cauldron of turmoil and strife that has arisen in the wake of Islamic Jihad (something that stretches clear back to the founder of that religion and only tends to worsen over time).

Hammond is a Rhodesian who has been transplanted (by force of circumstance, circumstances that include the betrayal of his homeland by those who were supposedly their friends)to South Africa. He has a different view of the subject than those on our side of the Atlantic tend to have. Yet because he does not think like us does not mean we should write off his opinion. His statement "One would hope that those making their assessments and decisions concerning what the United States and Europe should do during this new crisis in Crimea, would consider these historic realities." has a lot of merit. In the current case, however, it does not seem like there is much hope of the leadership in the US of A actually considering the past as a key towards not repeating the same blunders and injustices that we have in the past. Rather we seem to be coming down firmly on the side of those who but await an opportunity to destroy us as well.