Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” includes the eternally famous lines: “What is in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

I have a fantasy about International Politics in which every ‘know-it-all’ EXPERT and AUTHORITY has a permanent thought reversal problem and it goes like this:

Every time they try to think and speak about Ethnic Ukrainians in Ukraine, they say ISRAELIS – and every time they try to think and speak about Ethnic Russians (whose families have now lived in Ukraine for generations) in what is universally claimed to be 100% Ukrainian national territory for all eternity, they say PALESTINIAN ARABS.

I do not believe any of these ‘know-it-all’ credentialed educated EXPERTS and AUTHORITIES are intellectually or morally capable of getting the IRONY.

Furthermore, for one and a half years, a never-ending procession of these Careerist Lecturing Experts and Authorities almost always speak as if the Communist Soviet Union and the Post-Communist Russian Republic and Federation are even more politically inseparable than the Fourth French Republic and today’s Fifth French Republic (which appears ready to save France once more by becoming a Sixth French Republic).