Of all the signs Jesus gave us to watch, this one, "wars and rumors of war" may be the most prominent that we see on a daily basis:
NATO countries are to all intents and purposes at war with Russia. The US knows it and Russia knows it too. Unfortunately, most of those living in NATO countries remain blissfully ignorant of this fact.
The US initiated economic sanctions against Russia, has attacked its currency and has manipulated oil prices to devastate the Russian economy. It was behind the coup in Ukraine and is now escalating tensions by placing troops in Europe and supporting a bunch of neo-fascists that it brought to power. Yet the bought and paid for corporate media in the West keeps the majority of the Western public in ignorance by depicting Russia as the aggressor.
If the current situation continues, the outcome could be a devastating nuclear conflict. Washington poured five billion dollars into Ukraine with the aim of eventually instigating a coup on Russia’s doorstep. Washington and NATO are supporting proxy forces on the ground to kill and drive out those who are demanding autonomy from the US puppet regime in Kiev. Hundreds of thousands have fled across the border into Russia.
Yet it is Washington that accuses Moscow of invading Ukraine, of having had a hand in the downing of a commercial airliner and of ‘invading’ Ukraine based on no evidence at all – trial by media courtesy of Washington’s PR machine. As a result of this Russian ‘aggression’, Washington slapped sanctions on Moscow.
The ultimate aim is to de-link Europe’s economy from Russia and weaken Russia’s energy dependent economy by denying it export markets. The ultimate aim is to also ensure Europe remains integrated with/dependent on Washington, not least via the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and in the long term via US gas and Middle East oil (sold in dollars, thereby boosting the strength of the currency upon which US global hegemony rests).
The mainstream corporate media in the West parrots the accusations against Moscow as fact, despite Washington having cooked up evidence or invented baseless pretexts. As with Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and other ‘interventions’ that have left a trail of death and devastation in their wake, the Western corporate media’s role is to act as cheerleader for official policies and US-led wars of terror.
Washington is accusing Russia of violating Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, while the US has its military, mercenary and intelligence personnel inside Ukraine. It is moreover putting troops in Poland, engaging in ‘war games’ close to Russia and has pushed through a ‘Russian anti-aggression’ act that portrays Russia as an aggressor in order to give Ukraine de facto membership of NATO and thus full military support, advice and assistance.
Washington presses ahead regardless as Russia begins to undermine dollar hegemony by trading oil and gas and goods in rubles and other currencies. And history shows that whenever a country threatens the dollar, the US does not idly stand by.
And now in Britain, the public is being subjected to the same kind of propaganda by the likes of Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond with his made-for-media sound bites about Russia being a threat to world peace:
“We are now faced with a Russian leader bent not on joining the international rules-based system which keeps the peace between nations, but on subverting it… We are in familiar territory for anyone over the age of about 50, with Russia’s aggressive behaviour a stark reminder it has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security… Russia’s aggressive behaviour a stark reminder it has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security.”
If Putin is reacting in a certain way, it is worth wondering what the US response would be if Russia had put its missiles in Canada near the US border, had destabilised Mexico and was talking of putting missiles there too. To top it off, imagine if Russia were applying sanctions on the US for all of this ‘aggression’.
What Russia is really guilty of is calling for a multi-polar world, not one dominated by the US. It’s a goal that most of humanity is guilty of. It is a world the US will not tolerate.
The media is dutifully playing its part well by keeping the public ignorant and misinformed. A public that is encouraged to regard what is happening in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Libya, etc, as a confusing, disconnected array of events in need of Western intervention based on bogus notions of ‘humanitarianism’ or a ‘war on terror’, rather than the planned machinations of empire which includes a global energy war and the associated preservation and strengthening of the petro-dollar system.
Eric Zuesse has been writing extensively on events in Ukraine for the last year. His articles have been published on various sites like Countercurrents, Global Research and RINF, but despite his attempts to get his numerous informative and well-researched pieces published in the mainstream media, he has by and large hit a brick wall (he describes this here).
As Washington continues to sound its war drums despite the second Minsk ceasefire, it’s worth asking why NATO continued to remain such a bellicose organization after the end of the Cold War, and what its objectives are if peace isn’t enough.
It so happens that the fate of the world is now being decided in Ukraine, not so much by the Ukrainians themselves as by the US, EU and Russia, whose geopolitical interests have clashed in this region. The talk about WWIII figures increasingly often in the media and conversations among the scholars and general public. Politicians try to allay their compatriots' fears, but their vociferous statements merely boost this scenario.
The Minsk 2 Agreement offers at least a slim chance of moving away from a military confrontation that would destroy a good deal of the northern hemisphere, if not indeed the entire world. Yet those who view this agreement as Putin’s triumph are not at all willing to pressure Kiev into abiding by it.
There is no mystery here. The bloody chaos in Ukraine was devised not to help its people, but to weaken Russia geopolitically and topple the current leadership while mouthing noble slogans of promoting freedom, democracy and other fine Western values. So in view of those who started this mess as long as these goals are not achieved the war in Ukraine must go on even if it may escalate into an open conflict between Russia and the West. The hawks, or the War Party, do not realize that their policies contravene America’s long-term strategic interests, and are turning an important potential ally into a dangerous foe.
It did not have to be that way. After the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the Russian elite and a vast majority of the public were only too eager to join the Western world. In 1990 President George Herbert Walker Bush spoke of "a Europe whole and free" and of "the new security arch from Vancouver to Vladivostok".
According to many political observers the roots of the current crisis lie in the NATO expansion which took place after collapse of USSR. It is true that there is no signed document to confirm Bush’s promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward. However, there are lots of reliable and trustworthy witnesses who offer convincing evidence to the effect that Washington broke at least its oral pledge to Moscow.
In any case there is little doubt that it was Bill Clinton and his administration that moved sharply away from a rapprochement with Russia toward a deep divide and dangerous confrontation.
George Kennan, one of the most distinguished of American diplomats, later told the New York Times that he believed the expansion of NATO was "the beginning of a new cold war…I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.''
It may be worth recalling that in the most dangerous periods of the Cold War the risks of military confrontation were defused by the Administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan. Yet there is no sign of this kind of awareness and responsibility among the Democrats or Republicans who are all trying to outdo one another as the biggest saber-rattlers against Russia.
There are the voices of Party of Peace among Americans and Europeans but so far they are obviously overwhelmed by the Party of War. Does it mean that the Russia – West military conflict is inevitable?
However, Fox’s ‘expert’ was suggesting to kill Russian troops inside Ukraine, which wouldn’t have been quite as heartless as what the Obama-coup-regime in Ukraine is actually doing (and which Fox and all of U.S. TV ignore): slaughtering the residents in the conflict-zone. The only snafu with that idea of killing Russian troops in the conflict-zone is: they aren’t there. The few Russian soldiers that actually had been in the conflict-zone, briefly, back in August of 2014, soon left and are no longer there. On 29 January 2015, Ukraine’s top general admitted, “No Russian Troops Are Fighting Against Us,” though mercenaries and/or volunteer fighters from many countries (including from the U.S.) were fighting on both sides (America’s were mercenaries, fighting for the Ukrainian Government). So: Fox’s ‘information’ was six months out-of-date, and had been valid only seven months ago, and for less than a month even then. That’s the trash that Fox Noise puts forth, but it’s really not much worse than CNN etc. American national ‘news’ media are virtually all propaganda-media.
The Fox commentator simply cannot fathom that when the Ukrainian Government started bombing the cities and villages in the region of Ukraine that rejected the coup-government — the Donbass region — many of its men took up arms and became unwilling soldiers in order to protect their families, friends, and towns and villages, against the bombers and the other invaders. The Donbass defenders are not Russian soldiers. They’re overwhelmingly the natives there — the ones that are still alive and haven’t fled.
Such commentators as this crude and callous man at Fox have no idea, no concept, how much higher is the motivation to fight when what one is fighting against is invaders, and what one is fighting for is the land on which one has lived one’s whole life and where one’s parents spent their whole lives. Bullies don’t think about things from the victim’s standpoint. And Fox’s commentator viewed things from a bully’s perspective.
Right now, the man whom Victoria Nuland of Obama’s State Department appointed on 4 February 2014 (18 days before the coup), to lead the post-coup Ukrainian government, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is still determined to destroy Russia. But if this fact, alone, isn’t enough to get the decent nations in Europe to abandon the U.S. and even to leave both NATO and the EU and maybe to join with Russia if necessary to do so, then we are all headed for a nuclear war, because the psychopathy reigning at the very top of the U.S. Government is really extreme and has careened out of control. Never before in history has an American President installed an outright nazigovernment, anywhere.
The only thing that can even possibly restrain it now is Europe’s abandonment of it — and of the U.S. And, if that’s simply too much to ask from Europe, then there will be curtains soon for all of planet Earth, because Putin won’t be able to tolerate much longer the American Government’s surrounding Russia with its and NATO’s military bases and missiles.
Because things have gotten to such a point that either America will be stopped peacefully by its allies abandoning it, or else America will be stopped violently by Russia preemptively nuclear-attacking it, which will destroy the whole world.
The fate of the world is in the hands of America’s allies, who must quickly become former allies.
The world’s big bully on the block needs to become isolated; he needs to lose his gang. That’s what needs to happen, now.
In Gallup’s only international poll on the subject (in 2014), which surveyed 66,000 people in 65 nations, the U.S. was overwhelmingly the most frequently cited nation as being “the greatest threat to peace in the world today.” And that was before the coup, and before the ethnic cleansing, which have placed the world clearly on the path to nuclear annihilation. Russia wasn’t even among the top seven nations that were mentioned in that poll. But now the big bully on the block is going after him. Will the bully’s friends join in? Let’s hope not. Let’s hope they’ll abandon him — and quickly.
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