By Jun Sheng

As the Ukraine crisis drags on, preventing a massive humanitarian crisis is a pressing task at the moment. However, the US, the root cause of all chaos and calamity, is playing “double standards” now, clamoring for “no war, more peace” on the one hand and seeking self-interests on the other. Its interference in and sanctioning of other countries will create a humanitarian crisis and impose tremendous threats to global peace and security.

The American and western politicians and media, who are eloquent preachers of high-sounding slogans such as “equality”, “democracy”, “freedom” and “human rights”, have been adeptly practicing racial discrimination and double standards during the ongoing crisis. They say that the Ukrainian refugees are more worthy of compassion than the Syrians because they are white Christians. They, when reporting armed conflicts and crisis, took skin color, race and religious belief as criteria of judgment, a fragrant violation of general “taboos”, and compared the Ukrainians with Middle Eastern and North African refugees with the underlying message that the former is superior to the latter and doesn’t deserve what they are going through. Such mind-boggling comparisons laid bare the deep-rooted sense of superiority of the US and the West in general, astonishing and disgusting the world with their racist “double standards”.

The double standards reveal how phony and arrogant the US-led West is. According to western media, America attacked Iraq without UN authorization is “liberation” rather than “invasion”, and its unilateral attack of Afghanistan is “counterterrorism” rather than “invasion”. Posing a sharp contrast to how intensely the western media is focused on the Ukraine situation, they barely mention or even notice Yemen, a country that’s also ravaged by war and a severe humanitarian crisis.

Ironically, the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine today is caused by a fuse laid exactly by the US, whose consistent suppression and containment of Russia and squeezing of its strategic space over the years by pushing for NATO’s eastward expansion in breach of commitment to Russia have eventually led to the breakout of the crisis today.

Let’s take a look back and we’d see, with no surprise, America’s long track record of creating humanitarian crises, as evidenced by its constant interferences in and military operations against other countries based on made-up excuses, in order to preserve its global hegemony.

There was a time when the US-led NATO troops, upholding the banner of “avoiding a humanitarian disaster”, bypassed the UN Security Council and bombed the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 78 days on end, killing more than 2,000 innocent civilians, injuring over 6,000, and leaving a million people homeless and over two million with nothing to live on.

There was a time when countries represented by the US and the UK invaded Iraq on a fabricated charge, killing 200,000-250,000 civilians, of which 16,000 deaths were directly caused by American troops. During the 20-year-long Afghan war launched by the US to allegedly fight al-Qaeda, more than 30,000 civilians were either killed by American troops or died because of the war they started, with another 60,000-plus injured and about 11 million becoming refugees…The list goes on. The US has been igniting war flames everywhere around the world, but has never really achieved what it set out for and always ended up fleeing in debacle and disgrace, leaving the innocent locals paying the price for its atrocities.

Despite such a shitty record rife with crimes and catastrophes, the US never for a moment stops to reflect on itself but continues to gang up with its allies to impose unilateral sanctions against other countries in glaring violation of international law, which only aggravates the humanitarian crisis it started in the first place. From imposing the embargo on Cuba to blatantly stealing Afghanistan’s national assets to suspending the payment of fees to WHO, America’s bullying actions have been strongly condemned by the international community. UN Secretary-General António Guterres criticized the US for slashing its funding to WHO or any other humanitarian organization at a bad time as the world was in the middle of fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

Injustice is doomed to destruction. We advise the US side to do some serious soul-searching, stop pouring oil on the Ukraine issue, and take concrete actions to mitigate the situation and solve the problem. Otherwise, it will only expand the scale of the humanitarian crisis and plunge the region and the world into an abyss of suffering.