The murder of at least 38 people in the city of Odessa in the midst of Kiev’s "anti-terrorist" offensive last Friday revealed the true face of the fascist regime that has seized power in Kiev – and the Western media is doing everything it can to cover up the truth.

Most "mainstream" accounts of what happened there are filled with ambiguity: it’s "not clear" who’s responsible, they say. Everybody was supposedly throwing Molotov cocktails and so who’s to say who started which conflagration? And yet the truth is getting out there. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that "police said at least 31 people were dead after pro-Kiev demonstrators hurled Molotov cocktails into a building where a pro-Russia contingent was holding out." The piece cites tweets from Howard Amos, a Guardian reporter on the scene, noting that the fire broke out on the main floor of the Trade Union building, where a pro-Kiev crowd had gathered and was storming the building – and where, as USA Today noted, "Witnesses and journalists reported that as the building burned with people inside, a crowd shouted, ‘Glory to Ukraine!” and ‘Death to enemies!’"

The USA Today headline read: "Fire Kills 31 in Odessa." But did the fire kill them – or was it the people who set the fire? And let’s go back to Howard Amos’ tweets to find out exactly who is fighting on the front lines on the pro-Kiev side: why it’s Right Sector! They’re leading the crowd, just as they did on Friday.

Right Sector is the violent neo-Nazi group that served as the Kiev coup leaders’ shock troops as they took over Ukraine’s capital city and drove Yanukovich and his supporters out. Their Fuehrer, Dymtro Yorash, is a fascist ideologue who recently announced he was moving the group’s headquarters to east Ukraine – the scene of recent fighting between pro-coup and pro-Russian factions.

By all accounts, the local police – under Kiev’s command – did nothing as the pro-Kiev crowd danced in the streets while the building burned. It took the fire department an hour to get to the scene.

Imagine if the roles had been reversed, with the pro-Russians outside the building and the pro-Kiev "activists" inside. John Kerry would be apoplectic with rage, threatening Russia with military force. Nicholas Kristof would be demanding the bombing of Moscow, and the neocons would be comparing it to China’s Tiananmen Square massacre.

Instead, what we hear from these folks is … nothing. Silence. Evasion. Ambiguity. Anything but the truth.

This is Kiev’s Waco – and a perfect analogy it is, indeed. Here we have a group of people – pro-Russian Ukrainians – who have been so demonized in the Western media that this mass murder is being framed as if the victims deserved it. They were executed by government officials in Kiev – imagine the Ukrainian version of Janet Reno – acting in concert with US officials in Washington, who no doubt gave the green light to the Ukrainian "anti-terrorist" operation in the first place. Like the Waco massacre, the Odessa mass murder was a political act designed to demonstrate the raw power of a State – and to serve as a warning to those who would defy its power.

On Twitter, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, a fervent supporter of the Kiev coup, cries crocodile tears for Odessa, averring that the perpetrators must be "brought to justice." Yet the perpetrators are the very government he and his NATO-crat friends have been telling us is the rebirth of "democracy" and "European values" in Ukraine. And, what’s more – he knows it. Meanwhile, the clueless Kiev "activists" being subsidized with American tax dollars posted to YouTube an utterly disgusting and almost unwatchable video of the incinerated bodies in Odessa under the headline: "Russian Terrorists Burnt Alive." The video was posted under an account called "EuromaidanPR." This is "public relations" in Ukraine – oh but it’s the Russians (or Russian-speaking Ukrainians, to be precise) who are the "terrorists."

As the European news media isn’t holding anything back in their reporting of the Odessa slaughter, Bildt perhaps feels obligated to address it. Our own officials are less forthcoming: the response of the US State Department is that force used in the Ukrainian "anti-terrorist" operation was "proportionate and reasonable" – even as the Odessa death toll climbs.

This is an absolute outrage. Usually Washington’s propaganda is more nuanced: even when they’re defending the most repressive regimes on earth (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bahrain, etc.) there’s an attempt to balance it out with "constructive" criticism. Not here: instead we are treated to the ridiculously obscene notion that burning down a building full of people is a "proportionate" response to a demand for … regional autonomy!

What’s wrong with these people? Is it stupidity – or something a bit more calculated?

The first phase of the US-bought-and-paid-for regime change in Ukraine involved the exercise of "soft power" – the mobilization of compliant local "activists" who would take the pro-EU anti-Russian cause to the streets. Millions were pumped into the Ukrainian opposition under the guise of "democracy promotion" – and when enough people were out in the streets the next phase, the militarization of the campaign, began.

That’s when Right Sector jumped into the fray, leading the charge against government buildings and breaking the truce mediated by the European Union that would’ve kept the elected government in power in return for reining in presidential authority. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland wasn’t cursing out the Europeans for no good reason: they were getting in the way of Uncle Sam’s plans, which had yet to fully unfold.

First, "democracy promotion," then – terror.

The burning of the Trade Union building in Odessa was meant to send the east Ukrainians – and, standing behind them, the Russians – a message: we mean business. And it isn’t only the authorities in Kiev issuing this warning. Because standing behind them is the United States of America: there’s a reason why CIA chief John Brennan allowed himself to be located in Kiev just prior to the Odessa massacre.

No matter what contortions the Western media engages in to spin Odessa as a morally ambiguous "tragedy," the facts are coming out and they point to one inescapable conclusion: this was mass murder for which the Kiev coup leaders and their American puppet-masters are directly responsible. In short, this is a war crime.

And I would argue it is a new type of war crime, which, on one level, the perpetrators deny, and yet on another level they proudly proclaim their guilt to the skies. Why else is "EuromaidenPR" posting gruesome videos of charred bodies on YouTube? Why is the US State Department declaring the bloody Ukrainian "anti-terrorist" operation is "proportionate"?

In the beginning, I thought this whole Ukrainian regime change effort was just sheer stupidity on the part our clueless leaders in Washington, who had no idea what they were getting into or what dark forces they were unleashing. Over time, however, as the crisis escalated, and we actually had the State Department defending Svoboda – a major factor in the "interim" government – against fully justified charges that it is fascist, I began to wonder. Why would the US government act as a lawyer for a party that traces its ideological lineage back to Stepan Bandera, the WWII Nazi collaborator whose "insurgent army" slaughtered 6,000 Jews in Lvov? Why would they go out of their way to characterize the party as having "moderated" its views?

It’s always a mistake to underestimate Washington’s capacity for evil. In retrospect, it’s clear they always knew what and who they were unleashing. It’s not ignorance of the historically specific and – to most Americans – unimaginably virulent hatred given free rein by our machinations in Ukraine. Washington knows perfectly well what they’re doing – and they’re doing it anyway.

One final point: I’ve noted before that the Russian "invasion" of Crimea was bloodless: no casualties, no deaths, no significant damage to property. If this was an "invasion," then we’re looking at a new kind of "warfare" entirely. Now look at Kiev’s invasion of east Ukraine, which they are calling an "anti-terrorist" campaign: I don’t think anyone has totaled the casualty count quite yet, but surely it is in the hundreds by now.

And the perpetrators of the violence are mostly supporters of the Kiev coup. Of the actual military personnel sent into restive regions, a good half have gone over to the other side or otherwise dropped out of the fight. The real fighters on behalf of the regime are mobs organized by Right Sector, which has in fact become a semiofficial arm of the Ukrainian "self-defense" forces, kind of like our National Guard. The Rada – the Ukrainian parliament – ratified Right Sector fuehrer Yorash as the deputy chief of the National Security Council by majority vote, but he was vetoed by the executive branch. It wouldn’t have looked good. Yet anyone who doubts Yorash got the job anyway, at least unofficially, has only to look at videos of the confrontations in east Ukraine, and read the reportage coming out of there.

Phase three of Kiev’s terror campaign: attacks by Right Sector in Russia itself. Yes, and you can tell them you read it here first …

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.