Ukraine saboteurs caught in Crimea – what is Putin up to? Hitler invades Czechoslovakia – Czechs show aggression. Soviets invade Hungary – what is Hungary planning? 9/11 deaths – USA trumpets its aggression. Germany invades France – Paris pretext to issue threats. Would anyone do other than laugh at the grotesque absurdity of such historic headlines? But when it comes to Russia today such nonsense is mainstream “information” in the British, American and European press. The New Yorker featured Masha Gessen’s speculations on Vladimir Putin’s new chief of staff. Gessen wrote, “the letters of his last name (Vaino) can spell voyna, the Russian word for war. Is this the message that Putin is sending?”
It really is quite extraordinary that, however belligerent the Ukraine is – by banning communist deputies, by overturning a democratically elected Government, by banning the Russian language, by shelling civilians in East Ukraine where 9600 lives have been lost in the past two-and-a-half years, by cutting off banking and mail systems in East Ukraine and now by launching well munitioned saboteurs into the Crimea, the Western media find all these attacks as being evidence of “Russian aggression”. “MAD” used to mean “mutually assured destruction” in the nuclear-armed cold war but today it totally sums up the upside down world of Western Russophobia.
Unlike the grotesque use of the term “Islamophobia” (where it is not at all an “irrational fear” to say that thousands of deaths of “infidels” at the hands of Muslims all over the world, the ethnic cleansing of millions of Christians and the burning of churches by Islam make that fear totally rational) the irrational fear of Russia has no logical basis whatsoever – and is therefore a real “phobia”.
Russia has invaded nowhere. Russia did not take over any post Soviet European State – NATO and the EU have. Russia did not overthrow an elected Government of an independent State – NATO/EU did. Russia did not surround the USA with military bases and missile systems – but NATO/EU did that to Russia. Russia did not issue a trade embargo (an act of war) but NATO/EU did against Russia.
Russians and Russian speaking Ukrainians in the East are being bombed by Ukrainian forces and hundreds of civilians have been killed. But Putin has repeatedly said that Russians in East Ukraine should enjoy autonomy through devolution (like Scots and Welsh enjoy in the UK for instance) and it is Kiev which refuses to pass the legislation to achieve that – as was demanded by the internationally negotiated Minsk 2 agreement. Even the retrieval of the Crimea (Russian for over 220 years) is backed by an unambiguous vote of the Crimeans themselves – did Cubans get a vote on the US possession of Guantanamo Bay?
The anti Russian bigotry in the western press is clear when a Syrian or Iraqi hospital bombed mistakenly by Russia is called a war crime but when US aircraft bomb a hospital for hours it is called a mistake! When there are grave doubts about Kenyan institutional doping there is no blanket ban. When the same thing happens in Russia there is a ‘collective punishment”. When a US athlete, twice banned from athletics for doping (and has unprecedented performances in his 30s which indicate the continued effects of years of doping) is allowed to race in the 2016 Olympic Games, a Russian long jumper Darya Klishina is banned even when she had done all her training in the USA! (she was eventually allowed to compete).
MADNESS CAN LEAD TO WARS
In such an atmosphere it is no wonder that a Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell said recently that the USA should target President Assad of Syria and his allies for assassination, adding that killing Russians should be done covertly.
No wonder that NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Sir Richard Shirreff, takes his madness into the realm of pseudo fiction. He published a novel “2017. War with Russia. An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command.” In his own preface (mixing real propaganda with fictional war!) Shirreff wrote that ‘Russia is now our strategic adversary’, asserting without a shred of evidence “Putin’s self proclaimed intention in March 2014 of reuniting ethnic Russian speakers under the banner of Mother Russia”. Well Putin seems to be taking an awful long time about it – two and a half years later all he wants is a measure of devolution in Eastern Ukraine.
Why does Shirreff not declare war on Scotland, whose national socialist leader wants to expel the British nuclear submarine base on the Clyde?
Surprisingly our armed services have what our western press adolescents lack – the occasional voice of sanity. According to General Petr Pavel, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, there is no intelligence that suggests Russia is planning any broad-scale aggression whatsoever. NATO, said General Pavel, is not contemplating any further troop build-up in Eastern Europe. ”Deployment of substantial military force is not being considered. It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression, because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing.”
And among the population of western Europe there is little support for anti Russian aggression – with only 9% of Germans backing a NATO military build up on the border with Russia. This contrasted with 66% of Europeans saying Islamic State was the real threat – a threat which their “leaders” refuse to counter with their most effective potential ally – Russia!
The hysteria in the western press, among the military and the politicians is now unsurprisingly echoed in nasty anti Russian legislation of a petty nature – especially in those EU countries which were pro Nazi during the war and see Russia as the enemy who drove out their Hitlerian friends – like Croatia, the Baltic States and Ukraine! The Latvians are proposing to ban Russian names with anyone having such a name required to add an “s” (Sergey – Sergeys, Roslyn – Rouslans) to Latvianise it.
ANTI SEMITISM IS EUROPEAN NOT RUSSIAN
The dumb neocons and democons (this is a Freenations neologism – copyright!) in the USA and misguided British politicians often accuse Vladimir Putin of being a dangerous nationalist and therefore a threat to minorities. But of course it is in the former Yugoslavia that Jews, gypsies and Serbs have been targeted by those supported by NATO/EU and it is in France where tens of thousands of Jews have fled the country.
What a contrast to Putin’s Russia where the President of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder, not long ago thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for his efforts to fight anti-Semitism in Russia. Lauder noted that in 2003 synagogues in Russia were coming under attack but that now anti-Semitism was down to a “minimal level” in Russia, while in Europe it still “raises its head.”
It is Russia and its leader, whose family suffered terribly during the fight against Nazi Europe, who now hold the banner of anti racism, international peace and free trade. It is western leaders who have conjured up a western Europe largely indistinguishable from the fascist Europe of 1941 – with conditions in the Balkans and Ukraine virtually identical and the propaganda attacks, economic embargo and military build up against Russia led by mad, paranoid anti-semites (see quotes from modern European leaders in my books Fascist Europe Rising and Europe’s Full Circle) and many of the same supranational corporations seeking the same end to nation states which Hitler promised 75 years ago.
At least the British people have rebelled and have a Foreign Secretary making soothing noises about Russia. The tide may have turned.
