Is it really possible that the European public has no clue what was done to Ukraine? Are the men and women of the continent that lives in hallucination, that it is well educated and well informed, really unaware how its own governments have created and supported that ‘opposition movement’ in Kiev; a movement full of fascists and bigots?
Unfortunately, it is possible, and it is to be expected!
After working in some one hundred and fifty countries, in all the continents, I have finally come to the absolutely clear conclusion: there is no part of the world as brainwashed, so programmed, so indoctrinated, as are both Europe and North America.
There are no people so out of sync with the global reality; people so naively and willing to follow the religious doctrine of market fundamentalism and the self-righteous belief that they, and only they, are the sole guardians of democracy, freedom and virtue, on this planet.
The world is once again in flames, and both Europe and North America (let us please not pretend for one second longer, that the Empire is actually somehow divided between that bad United States and that ‘moderate’ Europe) are bulldozing, demolishing, moving out of their way everything that is still standing straight and proud; everything that is defending those who used to be defenseless, everything and everyone who is dreaming about, and actually building egalitarian and decent societies.
And the great majority of Europeans are clapping. They read their propaganda sheets and they are clapping. And they are engaged in pathetic pseudo-intellectual discussions, (while sipping, Oh! – In such a sophisticated manner, their refined wine and beer), while millions are being murdered by implementing their bigoted ‘interests’.
Entire nations are, again, bleeding, in order to make sure that millions of French or Italian farmers can drive their luxury BMW’s (oh, sorry, in Europe they are not marketed as luxury, but as ‘reliable cars’), consuming enormous subsidies, for producing and often for not producing anything at all.
The subsidies are paid with the blood of African and Asian people.
How many people in poor countries have to die, so some grandma in Germany or the Czech Republic can go to a doctor, for free, again and again, simply because she is lonely or bored staying at home?
Should there be free medical treatment for all? Yes! Yes. It should be free, and for all. But not just for Europeans, while the rest of the world has to pay the going rate!
How many countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America have to be destabilized, so that the Empire can enjoy its privileges? So that the rich there can be even more obnoxiously rich, and even the poorest citizens can afford to live way above those who belong to the middle classes in the countries that are still being plundered by the West?
***
Now, please, I am not trying to be funny and I am not trying to play with words: I am honestly wondering… I am humbly asking: “Are people in the West, particularly in Europe… are they pretending that they don’t know what is happening in Syria, Venezuela, Thailand and now, particularly, in Ukraine? Or have they simply turned into a cynical assembly of brainwashed degenerates?
Where is that fabled diversity? Where is intellectual courage?
Where are huge demonstrations shaking Paris, Rome, Berlin; demonstrations trying to bring down governments that have been destabilizing a huge European nation – Ukraine, while provoking Russia, the nation that saved the world from Nazism and later helped to liberate many African and Asian nations from the claws of colonialism?
Where are those loud voices protesting against the antagonizing Russia? Don’t Europeans know their own history? Russia is not an aggressor; it has been a victim, for at least a hundred years. Russia was attacked by Europe, again and again, and in just one century, tens of millions of Russian people were slaughtered by European fascists, imperialists and ‘democrats’.
Russia was attacked at the onset of the WWI, then again, after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, by a joint invasion of US and UK troops. Russia was also attacked by Czech legions, fighting their way to the front, against the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and getting there by circling the globe). Czech legions occupied almost the entire area surrounding the Trans-Siberian railroad, raping, looting, and murdering indiscriminately as they progressed.
Then WWII came, before which, both France and the UK sacrificed just about everything that stood in the way of the Nazis towards the Soviet Union. And yes, then the war itself took at least twenty million lives. Soviet people vanished in an enormous struggle against Nazism.
Half of my family, of my ancestors, vanished there too, during the siege of Leningrad.
The Cold War was next, and finally that most cynical and Machiavellian act by the West: dragging the USSR into Afghanistan, and destroying it, using jihadi cadres from the Middle East, from South and Southeast Asia.
Finally, the Western puppet – ‘opposition democrat’, Boris Yeltsin – an alcoholic with a clearly decomposing brain, was helped by Western powers, to grab power. And when the Parliament and the Russian people rebelled, Yeltsin sent the tanks in against both Members of Russian Parliament, and the people on the streets. The Western lackey mass media cheered: “Democracy! Victory!”
Thousands of unarmed people died. The 5th Column smashed the Soviet Union to pieces, using lies, using vicious propaganda that came from Washington, London and elsewhere.
And then the West stood suddenly unopposed. It appeared that there was nothing blocking its way, towards absolute control of the world, anymore.
Colonialist nightmares from the past returned. The world became mono-polar. With only one dogma, one ideology, and only one Empire.
And in just a few years after the Soviet Union ‘collapsed’, it became total… Total shit!
***
Is Europe so indoctrinated, is it propagandized to the point that it is really not actually able to recognize, anymore, what their regime has been doing, all over the world?
For years, the West in general, and the European Union in particular, have been destabilizing Ukraine, paying for its ‘opposition’… Wait; damn… what are we talking about? Everybody knows it, right? No? Really? Not everyone?
It is not about ‘proof’ or ‘the avalanche of information’. For years, for decades I have been amassing proof and arguments about the horrendous and unthinkable crimes that the West had been committing on all the continents of the world. I have been painstakingly researching what was going on, sometimes risking my life or ruining my health, sometimes doing it without being supported by anything or anyone… actually, that was the scenario, most of the time.
I was doing it because I believed; I believed like an idiot, I believed day and night, that my findings would shock the world, particularly the West… That it will shame the European and North American dictators… That what I show will enrage the public… That the horrors that I had witnessed all over the world, will finally end… you know: That bloody idiotic fairytale world of mine: “People will see the truth and force the monsters who are ruling them, to stop killing human beings everywhere on this beautiful planet.”
Today, I have to declare, publicly: I was a fool!
I failed to move people, of course! I tried. I even dropped the journalistic style in my writing, and I began writing as a poet, as the novelist that I am.
I did it because I realized that nobody cares only about facts! There are facts everywhere. Everything is documented. Coups all over the world, financed and planned by the US – it is all available, easily accessible. Yet nobody bothers to read about it!
I tried other tactics – novels, films, journalism mixed with poetry. Nothing! Nothing pushed Westerners to the barricades.
Yes, people like me, we are failing to move, to touch, those who are committing crimes against humanity… and also those who are benefiting from enormous global plunder.
Those, mostly well-fed masses, don’t give a shit: in Europe, or in the United States. Their governments and companies rule the world, and at least most of the citizens of those countries – Those that get some crumbs. Their level of understanding, their political awareness is way below those in Africa, Latin America and Asia, those very people who are being constantly robbed and sacrificed.
To know and to understand… that would make many Europeans and North Americans uncomfortable… That would mean having to take responsibility; to be co-responsible for the crimes committed by Western governments and multi-nationals. It would mean, god forbid, to take action.
***
In one recent Reuters article, an author argued that China is watching what Russia is doing. Of course, from the tone of the article, right from the beginning, it was clear that, that what Russia, China, Iran and other countries that disagree with ‘Western-style democracy and capitalism’ are thinking and doing is absolutely wrong.
Without inviting Russian, Chinese or Venezuelan polemicists, the author selected the ‘grievances’ of the world, saying that the West should face criticism, by some, for Kosovo and maybe for Libya… Although such criticism would be wrong…
Such a degree of self-discipline and propaganda would be fitting for German newspapers in the 1930’s and 40’s. And it is becoming the norm in both Europe and North America, as well as in many countries in the ‘developing world’, where information is fully controlled by Western funding, training programs and other means of arm twisting.
The propaganda coming out of Europe is so mighty, so potent, that it has blurred the eyes of even those that live in the former colonies of the West, including China, India and Indonesia.
It is not about Kosovo and it is not only about Libya, damn it!
In Yugoslavia, which I covered intensively from all sides, the West destroyed an entire country, a great country, one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (Indonesia had already paid the price in 1965, with between one and three million people brutally slaughtered, in an US-orchestrated coup performed by the military and religious cadres).
In Africa, an entire continent screams in pain. Pretty close to ten million people, have been slaughtered in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone since 1995, by Uganda, and Rwanda, on behalf of Western geopolitical interests. DRC has uranium, Coltan, and diamonds… Its people do not matter. The Belgian King Leopold II succeeded in killing ten million people there one hundred years ago, by chopping off their hands and burning people alive in huts.
France is involved in all of its former colonies. It is once again as sickeningly brutal as it was in the past.
Mali, the Central African Republic, and almost all the countries in the area are destabilized and close to total ruin.
The US-UK-Israeli coalition is undermining Somalia, using Ethiopian, Ugandan, Kenyan and Burundian forces. South Sudan, an artificially created entity, with oil but no ability to govern itself independently, is now on the verge of famine and civil war. And it is at the total mercy of the West.
Zimbabwe and South Africa are standing tall against Western imperialism, but in both places, the West directly finances the ‘opposition’, and propaganda viciously smears both nations.
Eritrea is facing a direct embargo. For being what is called – The African Cuba (of course nobody knows anything about Eritrea in Europe, except for some educated Italians).
Even the tiny and prosperous Seychelles, known for royal weddings and honeymoons, is facing an ‘opposition’ groomed from abroad (particularly from the UK), mainly for its free, excellent medical care, and its Cuban-influenced education system.
In both Uganda and Rwanda, brutal and insane fascist regimes are clinging to power, coached openly by people like Tony Blair (advisor to President Kagame).
The Arab Spring has been fully derailed, and in Egypt, a country with powerful labor movements, that have been openly murdered. In the process, thousands of people have died, as pro-Western military and elites have overthrown a democratically elected moderate Muslim government.
The most horrendous religious regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar, are being pampered and defended by both North America and Europe.
In Latin America, the governments of Honduras and Paraguay have been overthrown; Venezuela has had to face coup attempts and its own brutal ‘opposition’, fully and openly financed by the West. Cuba has survived countless terrorist attacks from the North, and the ‘opposition’ there is also directly financed and supported from abroad.
Bolivia and even Brazil were targeted by the malicious attempts to destroy their left-leaning governments, as is the case with Bolivia, even the geographical integrity of the country has been threatened.
In Asia, things go from bad to worse. Both China and North Korea are being literally provoked, often militarily, from US air force bases located in Okinawa and elsewhere. Countries like the Philippines are being openly pitched against China (PRC) by the US, while Vietnam is also being ‘encouraged’ to antagonize its enormous neighbor.
It goes without saying that the Chinese ‘opposition’ has been financed mainly from abroad, for decades. On the contrary, in pro-Western brutal regimes like Indonesia, the Philippines but also Thailand, the West is paying and helping the military and elites to actually control and if necessary, destroy the genuine opposition.
The ‘opposition’ has been clearly employed to ruin Syria (the West created refugee camps in Turkey and elsewhere, to train and arm the so called ‘opposition’ there), Venezuela, Ukraine and even Thailand. It has also caused some great damage to Russia and China, as well as countless Latin American and Caribbean countries.
The West is directly attacking foreign countries, by arming and indoctrinating thousands of people who are then paid to overthrow governments and political systems.
Not only is it illegal – it actually amounts to an act of war… undeclared, and covert, but war.
Do the citizens of Europe and North America ignorant of the fact that their governments and companies are fighting undeclared wars and committing acts of terrorism all over the world?
And it has been done for decades, with total impunity, it is perfectly well documented and it takes tremendous discipline to overlook it!
I have worked in almost all those places, making films, writing books and reports. I am intimately familiar with what the West has been doing in Venezuela, Syria, Turkey, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Congo, Rwanda, the Philippines…
I have proof. But have you noticed that proof is, these days, worth nothing? You can come with the most powerful, most damning and shocking proof, but it will move nobody, propel nobody to action… In the West, I mean. In that ‘democratic’ and ‘free’ West!
You can proof that 10 million people were slaughtered, and you will be told: “Thank you… Wonderful! Another cup of coffee?”
***
And even this incomplete but powerful list of horrors that the West is administering all over the world, is not something that could be defined as new.
It is simply a continuation of colonial culture, of plunders and of mass exterminations, of genocides and holocausts, those that have been taking place for many centuries.
Look at the map of the world at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and everything will be clear. The West was basically occupying almost the entire planet.
It was plundering thoroughly all that it controlled. It destroyed cultures, raped women, robbed all that it could get its hands on.
Ever wondered from where all that wealth that allowed Europe to build lavish palaces, theatres, museums, public buildings came from?
Of course it came, and is still coming, from the blood of oppressed people, from their hard labor for a pittance, from their sweat, from their humiliation.
And now, people from India, China, Indonesia, Peru, Nigeria, Senegal – they come to Europe and they sigh in front of those tremendous facades of enormous buildings, in the middle of well-manicured parks, on board fast moving trains.
And some say: “What a civilization! What a wonderful part of the world! Here they respect other human beings. Here they are kind to others.”
Well, it is built from your wealth that evaporated, from the terrible labor of your grandparents, from the rape of your female ancestors, from the cracking of whips on the naked backs of your male ancestors…. It is built on the ruins of your culture, of your civilization. It is all built, because you were left with nearly nothing, and for decades and centuries forced to live in shit…
The majority of people of what is now Latin America vanished! Their religions were destroyed and so were their languages. The Inca people had to obliterate their temples, and from those stones, enormous Christian cathedrals were erected. And they were decorated with gold and silver, dug by once free but now enslaved Incas. In Cusco and Potosi, Quito and Cuenca, everywhere.
Slaves poured out from Africa to Latin America and to North America, as well as to the Caribbean! Entire states in Africa, entire families were ruined, destroyed, uprooted. Human beings were treated like animals, while literary salons in London and Paris were enjoying refined music and perfumes.
Countries like Germany and Belgium performed clear genocides – The Belgians in Congo, Germans in what is now Namibia.
There was no mercy then, as there is no mercy now.
The Christian religion, that outrageous machinery of terror has been part of this for centuries, walking hand in hand with the Conquistadors and Crusaders. Periodically it took the lead in the massacres. The Church had been greedier than monarchies, and it was power hungry, oppressive and brutal.
Christianity, that symbol of Western civilization, brought torture and slavery; it blessed the men and the deeds that murdered millions.
So far, there has been no attempt to declare Christianity illegal because of the genocides it performed, strictly based on crimes against humanity.
***
And this culture is now scalding Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran – this culture that has murdered billions. And nobody is laughing. No one is rolling on the floor, dying from amusement.
In the Middle East, the Brits bombed and gassed ‘those niggers’ (both Lloyd George and Winston Churchill saw ‘lesser races’ as something worth exterminating, if ‘necessary’), divided nations, manipulated and enslaved them.
‘Divide and rule’ led to horrific consequences later, like the ‘Partition’ of India and Pakistan, or genocide in what is now Bangladesh.
In Asia, just about everything was occupied, plundered and raped, including such enormous areas as the sub-Continent, or China and the archipelago that is now known as Indonesia.
All was neatly divided. French Indochina, British India, and Dutch Indonesia.
Western Empires fought over vast foreign lands and no Europeans protested (as they are not protesting now, against neo-colonialism) against the genocides that were committed by their rulers. Some countries like France ‘successfully’ exterminated a hundred percent of the people on some islands in the Caribbean, and came very close to exterminating the entire population of Rapa Nui in Polynesia.
Rape, looting, murder, have been all over the world. The West still feels that it has the full right to determine who lives and who dies, and who should live which way.
The great Swiss psychoanalyst Gustav Jung described European and Western culture as a ‘pathology’, as an illness. To him, as a doctor, Europe was a patient, a seriously ill one, in constant need to terrorize others, to control, to steal, and to murder.
And Jung was not the only one. J. P. Sartre’s writing on colonialism is as damning and also much more detailed.
But now, after decades of huge propaganda injections, everything is ‘forgotten and forgiven’. But is it? Europeans ‘do not know’ what horrors they have been spreading all over the globe. Westerners in general do not know. They are conditioned not to know. They have eliminated almost all ‘comparative thinking’ in their own continent, and simultaneously in their colonies.
People do not know how to compare, anymore. The media and scholars are discouraged from comparing crimes and brutality. It is obvious why. No continent, no culture, committed such monstrous crimes, performed such horrible and unforgiveable deeds, as Western ‘cultures’ and ‘civilizations’. They committed them and they are still busy committing them. Until this very moment!
***
This essay is just a brief reminder of ‘who is speaking’! Who is pointing fingers at Russia right now, and who is demonizing China, and calling true Latin American democracies – ‘dictatorships’.
One feels like paraphrasing an old Communist slogan, and shouting:
“People of the world who still have some brain left – wake up and unite!”
It is clear that the West is on an offensive: it tries to annihilate all dissent that has grown since the destruction of the old multi-polar world.
But a new, perhaps better, multi-polar world has emerged.
Some parts of it are much more informed and educated about the horrific terror that comes with allowing the West to rule over this world, unopposed.
It is not Russia that is ‘on the wrong side of the history’, as Obama recently declared.
It is the West, clearly and patently. And just to say; that it is not good enough… Not good enough, anymore!
Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His discussion with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism is now going to print. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. He has just completed the feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/07/the-indoctrinated-west/