By Zine Larbaoui
Why do we tolerate the threat of a new world war in our name? Why do we allow the lies that allow that risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter is “a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis” as if truth “never happened, even though it takes place.”
Each year, American historian William Blum publishes his “brief summary of the Archive of American foreign policy,” which shows that since 1945, the United States toppled or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, many democratically elected, that they heavily interfered in the electoral process of 30 countries, bombed civilian populations in 30 countries, used chemical and biological weapons and attempted to assassinate foreign political leaders.
In many cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, not to mention the criminal aspect, is not recognized in the West, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced means of communication and the supposedly “free press.” That the greatest number of victims of terrorism (our terror) are Muslims is simply not reported. That extreme jihadism, which led to the September 11 attacks, was nurtured and developed as a weapon of the Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is deleted information. In April 2014, the U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs noted that after the NATO campaign in 2011, “Libya has become a haven for terrorists.”
The name of “our” enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamo-fascism, but generally it is an entity independent of Western power and happens to occupy an area rich in natural resources or a strategically interesting location. The leaders of these nations are generally considered obstructive and violently eliminated, as were democratically elected leaders like Mohamed Mossadeq in Iran, Salvador Allende in Chile and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. All are subject to a smear campaign, caricature and vilification by the Western media, think Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and now Putin.
Washington’s role in the Ukraine is different in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the years of Ronald Reagan, the United States is threatening to take the world to war. With Eastern Europe and the Balkans now vanguard positions for NATO, the last frontier with Russia buffer state is ransacked and reduced into pieces. We, in the West, support neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis used to worship Hitler. Having engineered the coup against the democratically elected government of Kiev, Washington planned to seize the historic naval base of Russia and gateway to the warm seas: the Crimea and it failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done with every threat and invasion of the West for nearly a century.
Yet the strategic encirclement of NATO is accelerating, as well as attacks orchestrated by the United States against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be tricked into coming to their aid, his established prejudice role of pariah will be warranted against him for the outbreak of NATO’s war / guerrilla that will most likely spill over into Russia itself.
Instead, Putin managed to check the warmongers in seeking an agreement with Washington and the EU, removing troops from the Russian-Ukrainian border and calling on ethnic Russians in Ukraine to postpone the perceived provocative weekend referendum. These bilingual Ukrainians represent a third of the Ukrainian population and have long sought a democratic federation reflecting the ethnic diversity of the country which is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most of these people are not “separatists” or “rebels,” but citizens who want to live in peace and security in their homeland.
As in the controlled chaos of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been transformed into a CIA theme park, run by the CIA’s director John Brennan from Kiev, with CIA and FBI’s “special units” setting up a “security structure” that oversees the savage attacks on those who oppose the February coup. Watch the videos; read the eyewitness accounts of the Odessa massacre this month. Fascist thugs sent by bus burned the headquarters of trade unions, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police wait and do nothing. A doctor trying to save victims thus describes: “but I was stopped by pro-Nazi Ukrainian radicals. One of them pushed me violently, promising that soon I and other Odessa Jews would suffer the same fate … I wonder why the world is silent. ”
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are struggling for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops massed at the border, the junta’s defense minister in Kiev, a founding member of the fascist party Svoboda, said that the attacks against “insurgents” continue. In a quite Orwellian style, the West’s propaganda spun this by saying that “Moscow sought to orchestrate the conflict and provocation,” according to William Hague (UK Minister of Defense). His cynicism matches Obama’s grotesque congratulations for the junta after the coup for their “remarkable restraint” following the killings in Odessa. Illegal and dominated by fascists, the junta is described by Obama as “duly elected.” What matters is not the truth, had once wrote Henry Kissinger, “but what is perceived as truth.”
In the U.S. the controlled media minimized Odessa’s atrocities as a “tragedy”, “confusing and obscure” in which “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) attacked “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum for a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal has condemned the victims with this headline “The deadly fire was lit in Ukraine by the rebels, said the government.” Propaganda in Germany was highly reminiscent of the Cold War era with the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of an “undeclared war” by Russia. For the Germans, it is a bitter irony that Putin is the only leader who condemns the rise of fascism in Europe in the XXI century.
It has become a popular truism to say that “the world has changed” after September 11 (2001). But what has changed? According to the well known whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup occurred in Washington and a rampant militarism is now law. The Pentagon runs today’s “special operations” secret wars in 124 countries worldwide. Domestically, a drastic rise in poverty and hemorrhaging of freedom are the logical and historical corollary of a perpetual war state. Add to that the risk of nuclear war, and a burning question comes to mind: Why do we tolerate this?
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