Ukraina/Errusia/AEB + EB + NATO/Txina (5)

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The truth about Bucha is out there, but perhaps too inconvenient to be discovered,

in Ukraina/Errusia/AEB + EB + NATO/Txina (3)

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(https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1511750089391357957)

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(Hemen goian aipaturiko informazioa, @Twitter-ek Ritter-i bidalitakoa)

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DIANA JOHNSTONE: For Washington, War Never Ends

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DIANA JOHNSTONE: For Washington, War Never Ends

March 16, 2022

(https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/16/diana-johnstone-for-washington-war-never-ends/)

The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. It still isn’t.

It goes on and on. The “war to end war” of 1914-1918 led to the war of 1939-1945, known as World War II. And that one has never ended either, mainly because for Washington, it was the Good War, the war that made The American Century: why not the American Millenium?

The conflict in Ukraine may be the spark that sets off what we already call World War III.

(…)

The New NATO

Russia’s modernization over the past three centuries has been marked by controversy between “Westernizers” – those who see Russia’s progress in emulation of the more advanced West – and “Slavophiles,” who consider that the nation’s material backwardness is compensated by some sort of spiritual superiority, perhaps based in the simple democracy of the traditional village.

In Russia, Marxism was a Westernizing concept. But official Marxism did not erase admiration for the “capitalist” West and in particular for America. Gorbachev dreamed of “our common European home” living some sort of social democracy. In the 1990s, Russia asked only to be part of the West.

What happened next proved that the whole “communist scare” justifying the Cold War was false. A pretext. A fake designed to perpetuate military Keynesianism and America’s special war to maintain its own economic and ideological hegemony.

There was no longer any Soviet Union. There was no more Soviet communism. There was no Soviet bloc, no Warsaw Pact. NATO had no more reason to exist.

But in 1999, NATO celebrated its 50^th anniversary by bombing Yugoslavia and thereby transforming itself from a defensive to an aggressive military alliance. Yugoslavia had been non-aligned, belonging neither to NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. It threatened no other country. Without authorization from the Security Council or justification for self-defense, the NATO aggression violated international law.

At the very same time, in violation of unwritten but fervent diplomatic promises to Russian leaders, NATO welcomed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as new members. Five years later, in 2004, NATO took in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic Republics. Meanwhile, NATO members were being dragged into war in Afghanistan, the first and only “defense of a NATO member” – namely, the United States.

Understanding Putin – Or Not

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin as his successor, partly no doubt because as a former KGB officer in East Germany he had some knowledge and understanding of the West. Putin pulled Russia out of the shambles caused by Yeltsin’s acceptance of American-designed economic shock treatment.

Putin put a stop to the most egregious rip-offs, incurring the wrath of dispossessed oligarchs who used their troubles with the law to convince the West that they were victims of persecution (example: the ridiculous Magnitsky Act).

On Feb. 11, 2007, the Russian Westernizer Putin went to a center of Western power, the Munich Security Conference, and asked to be understood by the West. It is easy to understand, if one wants to. Putin challenged the “unipolar world” being imposed by the United States and emphasized Russia’s desire to “interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all.”

The reaction of the leading Western partners was indignation, rejection, and a 15-year media campaign portraying Putin as some sort of demonic creature.

Indeed, since that speech there have been no limits to Western media’s insults directed at Putin and Russia. And in this scornful treatment we see the two versions of World War II. In 2014, world leaders gathered in Normandy to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings by U.S. and British forces.

In fact, that 1944 invasion ran into difficulties, even though German forces were mainly concentrated on the Eastern front, where they were losing the war to the Red Army. Moscow launched a special operation precisely to draw German forces away from the Normandy front. Even so, Allied progress could not beat the Red Army to Berlin.

However, thanks to Hollywood, many in the West consider D-Day to be the decisive operation of World War II. To honor the event, Vladimir Putin was there and so was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Then, in the following year, world leaders were invited to a lavish victory parade held in Moscow celebrating the 70^th anniversary of the end of World War II. Leaders of the United States, Britain and Germany chose not to participate.

This was consistent with an endless series of Western gestures of disdain for Russia and its decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany (it destroyed 80 percent of the Wehrmacht.) On Sept. 19, 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on “the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe” which jointly accused the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany of unleashing World War II.

Vladimir Putin responded to this gratuitous affront in long article on “The Lessons of World War II” published in English in The National Interest on the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of the end of the war. Putin answered with a careful analysis of the causes of the war and its profound effect on the lives of the people trapped in the murderous 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including his own parents whose two-year-old son was one of the 800,000 who perished.

Clearly, Putin was deeply offended by continual Western refusal to grasp the meaning of the war in Russia. “Desecrating and insulting the memory is mean,” Putin wrote. “Meanness can be deliberate, hypocritical and pretty much intentional as in the situation when declarations commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War mention all participants in the anti-Hitler coalition except for the Soviet Union.”

And all this time, NATO continued to expand eastward, more and more openly targeting Russia in its massive war exercises on its land and sea borders.

The U.S. Seizure of Ukraine

The encirclement of Russia took a qualitative leap ahead with the 2014 seizure of Ukraine by the United States. Western media recounted this complex event as a popular uprising, but popular uprisings can be taken over by forces with their own aims, and this one was. The elected president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by violence a day after he had agreed to early elections in an accord with European leaders.

Billions¹ of U.S. dollars and murderous shootings by extreme right militants enforced a regime change openly directed by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (“F___ the EU”) producing a leadership in Kiev largely selected in Washington, and eager to join NATO.

By the end of the year, the government of “democratic Ukraine” was largely in the hands of U.S.-approved foreigners. The new minister of finance was a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, Natalia Jaresko, who had worked for the State Department before going into private business. The minister of economy was a Lithuanian, Aïvaras Arbomavitchous, a former basketball champion. The ministry of health was taken by a former Georgian minister of health and labor, Sandro Kvitachvili.

Later, disgraced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was called in to take charge of the troubled port of Odessa. And Vice President Joe Biden was directly involved in reshuffling the Kiev cabinet as his son, Hunter Biden, was granted a profitable position with the Ukrainian gas company Barisma.

The vehemently anti-Russian thrust of this regime change aroused resistance in the southeastern parts of the country, largely inhabited by ethnic Russians. Eight days after more than 40 protesters were burned alive in Odessa, the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk moved to secede in resistance to the coup. 

And a referendum then returned Crimea to Russia. The peaceful return of Crimea was obviously vital to preserve Russia’s main naval base at Sebastopol from threatened NATO takeover. And since the population of Crimea had never approved the peninsula’s transfer to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, the return was accomplished by a democratic vote, without bloodshed. This was in stark contrast to the detachment of the province of Kosovo from Serbia, accomplished in 1999 by weeks of NATO bombing.

But to the United States and most of the West, what was a humanitarian action in Kosovo was an unforgivable aggression in Crimea.

The Oval Office Back Door to NATO

Russia kept warning that NATO enlargement must not encompass Ukraine. Western leaders vacillated between asserting Ukraine’s “right” to join whatever alliance it chose and saying it would not happen right away. It was always possible that Ukraine’s membership would be vetoed by a NATO member, perhaps France or even Germany.

But meanwhile, on Sept. 1, 2021, Ukraine was adopted by the White House as Washington’s special geo-strategic pet. NATO membership was reduced to a belated formality. A Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership issued by the White House announced that “Ukraine’s success is central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy” – Washington’s current self-justifying ideological dualism, replacing the Free World versus Communism.

It went on to spell out a permanent casus belli against Russia:

“In the 21^st century, nations cannot be allowed to redraw borders by force. Russia violated this ground rule in Ukraine. Sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. The United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to work to hold Russia accountable for its aggression. America’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering.”

The Statement also clearly described Kiev’s war against Donbass as a “Russian aggression.” And it made this uncompromising assertion: “The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea…” (my emphasis). This is followed by promises to strengthen Ukraine’s military capacities, clearly in view of recovery of Donbass and Crimea.

Since 2014, the United States and Britain have surreptitiously transformed Ukraine into a NATO auxiliary, psychologically and militarily turned against Russia. However this looks to us, to Russian leaders this looked increasingly like nothing other than a buildup for an all-out military assault on Russia, Operation Barbarossa all over again. Many of us who tried to “understand Putin” failed to foresee the Russian invasion for the simple reason that we did not believe it to be in the Russian interest. We still don’t. But they saw the conflict as inevitable and chose the moment.

Ambiguous Echoes

Putin justified Russia’s February 2022 “operation” in Ukraine as necessary to stop genocide in Lugansk and Donetsk. This echoed the U.S.-promoted R2P, Responsibility to Protect doctrine, notably the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, allegedly to prevent “genocide” in Kosovo. In reality, the situation, both legal and especially human, is vastly more dire in Donbass than it ever was in Kosovo. However, in the West, any attempt at comparison of Donbass with Kosovo is denounced as “false equivalence” or what-about-ism.

But the Kosovo war is much more than an analogy with the Russian invasion of Donbass: it is a cause.

Above all, the Kosovo war made it clear that NATO was no longer a defensive alliance. Rather it had become an offensive force, under U.S. command, that could authorize itself to bomb, invade or destroy any country it chose. The pretext could always be invented: a danger of genocide, a violation of human rights, a leader threatening to “kill his own people”. Any dramatic lie would do. With NATO spreading its tentacles, nobody was safe. Libya provided a second example.

Putin’s announced goal of “denazification” also might have been expected to ring a bell in the West. But if anything, it illustrates the fact that “Nazi” does not mean quite the same thing in East and West. In Western countries, Germany or the United States, “Nazi” has come to mean primarily anti-Semitic. Nazi racism applies to Jews, to Roma, perhaps to homosexuals.

But for the Ukrainian Nazis, racism applies to Russians. The racism of the Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into Ukrainian security forces, armed and trained by the Americans and the British, echoes that of the Nazis: the Russians are a mixed race, partly “Asiatic” due to the Medieval Mongol conquest, whereas the Ukrainians are pure white Europeans.

Some of these fanatics proclaim that their mission is to destroy Russia. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States supported Islamic fanatics, in Kosovo they supported gangsters. Who cares what they think if they fight on our side against the Slavs?

Conflicting War Aims

For Russian leaders, their military “operation” is intended to prevent the Western invasion they fear. They still want to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality. For the Americans, whose strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of having lured the Russians into the Afghanistan trap (giving them “their Vietnam”), this is a psychological victory in their endless war. The Western world is united as never before in hating Putin. Propaganda and censorship surpass even World War levels. The Russians surely want this “operation” to end soon, as it is costly to them in many ways. The Americans rejected any effort to prevent it, did everything to provoke it, and will extract whatever advantages they can from its continuation.

Today Volodymyr Zelensky implored the U.S. Congress to give Ukraine more military aid. The aid will keep the war going. Anthony Blinken told NPR that the United States is responding by “denying Russia the technology it needs to modernize its country, to modernize key industries: defense and aerospace, its high-tech sector, energy exploration.”

The American war aim is not to spare Ukraine, but to ruin Russia. That takes time.

The danger is that the Russians won’t be able to end this war, and the Americans will do all they can to keep it going.

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

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