“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.” Carl Sagan
Washington poured five billion dollars into Ukraine with the aim of eventually instigating a coup on Russia’s doorstep [1]. When the former administration turned to Moscow rather than Washington and Europe for a financial package of assistance, Washington cashed in on its investment and facilitated the ousting of a democratically elected government.
To the delight of Monsanto, Chevron and others, Ukraine is now open for business and the structural plunder of its economy, which involves any IMF loans going straight into the hands of its very wealthy creditors [2,3]. It is called being ‘open for business’. It is called setting people free. It is ‘freedom and democracy’, the Wall Street version.
Washington and NATO are providing personnel, mercenary forces and advice to help the Ukraine government bomb, kill, maim and drive out those who are demanding autonomy from the US puppet regime in Kiev [4]. Washington and its proxy forces in Ukraine are ‘ethnically cleansing’ the mainly Russian speaking separatists in the east, with up to one million having fled across the border into Russia [5].
Yet it is Washington that accused Moscow of invading Ukraine, based on flimsy or no evidence at all. Washington has accused Moscow of having a hand in the downing of a commercially airliner based on no evidence at all. As a result of this invisible Russian ‘aggression’, Washington has slapped sanctions on Moscow, which are hurting Europe more they are hurting the US [6]. But that’s the point: to de-link Europe’s economy from Russia in terms of trade and energy and weaken Europe to ensure it remains dependent on Washington.
The mainstream corporate media in the West parrots the accusations against Moscow as fact, despite Washington having cooked up evidence or invented baseless pretexts. The western corporate media’s role is to cheer-lead official policies and wars.
The US has around 800 military bases in over 100 countries [7]. Russia does not.
The US has military personnel in almost 150 countries [8]. Russia does not.
US spending on its military dwarfs what the rest of the world together. It outspends China by a ratio of 6:1 [9].
Just who is the aggressor?
By the 1980s, according to former CIA ‘asset’ John Stockwell, Washington’s wars, death squads and covert operations were responsible for six million deaths in the ‘developing’ world [10]. An updated figure by writer Annie Day suggests that figure is closer to ten million [11].
Washington has moved into Eastern Europe and continues to install missile systems aimed at Russia. It has also surrounded Iraq with military bases. It is destabilising Pakistan and countries across Africa to weaken Chinese trade and investment links and influence. It intends to militarily ‘pivot’ towards Asia to encircle China and give it the type of ‘attention’ Russia is currently receiving.
William Blum has presented a long list of Washington’s crimes across the planet since 1945 in terms of its numerous bombings of countries, assassinations of elected leaders and destabilisations [12].
No other country can come close to matching in scale such aggression and criminality. Whether it is CIA-instigated coups in Latin America or aiding or carrying out the mass slaughter of civilians in Indonesia or South East Asia, under the smokescreen of exporting ‘freedom and democracy’, the US has deemed it necessary to ignore international laws and carry out atrocities to further its geo-political interests across the globe.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) is a recipe for continued barbarity [13]. It discusses taking out Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and other countries. The outcome has been chaos and slaughter for the benefit of Wall Street and the City of London. The ultimate goal is to prevent any rival emerging to challenge Washington’s global hegemony and to secure dominance over the entire planet.
Two countries present a challenge in this respect: Russia and China. Both are in the process of being dealt with. Russia is currently the top priority: it is preventing ‘progress’ in Syria, Iran and Central Asia. At this time, all paths to Moscow are through Ukraine.
A former top CIA official recently stated that if the economic sanctions do not hurt Russian oligarchs enough to make them oust Putin then a bullet to the head would do the job [14]. And that is the whole point of Washington’s game plan. To slap illegitimate sanctions on Moscow, to squeeze Russia’s rich till the pips squeak and they oust Putin and to destabilise Russia via Ukraine and install a leader who will acquiesce to the US. The US can then proceed unchallenged to loot Russia again, as it did in the nineties. But this time the plan is to balkanise Russia to ensure it remains permanently crippled.
Washington has no morality.
In a recent speech by Putin, he stated that those forces who are lining up against Russia should remember that Russia is a nuclear power [15]. Washington believes it can win a nuclear conflict with Russia. It no longer regards nuclear weapons as a last resort but part of a convention theatre of war and is willing to use them for pre-emptive strikes [16].
Washington is accusing Russia of violating Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty without a shred of credible evidence, while it sends military and intelligence assistance to Kiev and has its military, mercenary and intelligence personnel inside Ukraine.
It is putting troops in Poland and is tabling a ‘Russian anti-aggression’ act that will portray Russia as an aggressor in order to give Ukraine de facto membership of NATO and thus full military support, advice and assistance [17].
If Russia does decide to intervene to protect ethnic Russians, NATO/the US and Moscow could come face to face on the battlefield. The strength of Russia’s conventional forces in its own back yard would surely place NATO on the back foot. Staring defeat in the face, the US could well resort to the nuclear option.
Washington’s aggression amounts to a gamble with all our lives. There would be no winner, only nuclear Armageddon for the entire planet.
Washington is pressing ahead regardless and with a renewed sense of urgency as Russia begins to try to take the legs from under the US by trading oil and gas and goods in roubles and other currencies [18]. Once the dollar loses its value because no one needs it to buy oil anymore, the petrodollar system is dead and the US economy will tank.
Gaddafi and Saddam were taken care of partly because their plans or actions would or were serving to undermine the dollar’s status as the world reserve currency. Iran is a key target because of this too. Whenever a country threatens the dollar, the US does not idly stand by. Both China and Russia are abandoning the dollar. Washington’s sense of urgency to deal with both is palpable.
Unfortunately, most members of the western public believe the lies being fed to them by Washington. This results from the corporate media amounting to little more than an extension of Washington’s propaganda arm. The PNAC, under the pretext of a ‘war on terror’, is partly built on gullible, easily led public opinion, which is (often) fanned by the emotive outburst from politicians and the media about ‘saving’ this or that group of people from some tyrant or the simplistic good versus evil narrative about ‘terror’.
We have a Pavlov’s dog public and media, which respond on cue to the moralistic bleatings of condescending criminals that masquerade as respectable politicians and who rely on the public’s ignorance to fuel their barbarity in the name of ‘protecting civilians’ from an impending bloodbath, while going on to cause numerous bloodbaths under the lie of ‘defeating terror’ or tyranny.
Why for one moment would ordinary people believe that the Anglo-US Establishment cares about ordinary people in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria or elsewhere and go in to ‘save them’ when it clearly regards its own people with suspicion and contempt.
The post-war Keynesian consensus has been gradually dismantled, leading to the offshoring of millions of jobs and leaving millions in debt, in poverty, thrown onto the scrapheap or used as fodder to fight wars for the rich under the banner of ‘protecting freedoms’, while those very freedoms at home are stripped away by illegal mass surveillance and the curtailment of freedoms and rights.
Yet the lies persist and are too often believed.
Former US Ambassador Ukraine John Herbst has spoken about the merits of the Kiev coup and the installation of an illegitimate government in Ukraine. Earlier this year during an interview for RT, he called the removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected government as enhancing democracy [19].
Herbst displayed all of the arrogance associated with the ideology of US ‘exceptionalism’ and Washington having the right to act in any way as and when it deems fit (like instigating coups under the guise of democratic uprisings no doubt).
Like Obama, Kerry, Clinton, Nuland and others, he also displayed complete contempt for the public by spouting falsehoods and misleading claims about events taking place in Ukraine.
Herbst, Nuland and their ilk would do well to contemplate their country’s post-1945 record of war mongering and destabilisations of democratic governments, which has led to millions of deaths, its global surveillance network exposed by Edward Snowdon that illegally spies on individuals and governments alike and its ongoing plundering of resources and countries supported by militarism, ‘free trade’ or the outright manipulation of markets.
If Herbst specialises in lies and doublespeak, the same could not be said of another former ambassador. The former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has called the UK a rogue state and a danger to the world.
He recently told a meeting at St Andrews University in Scotland that the British Government is deeply immoral and doesn’t care how many people its kills abroad if it advances it aims [20 – a quick search on ‘Google News’ for this item was conspicuous by its absence among the UK media)]. Moreover, he said the UK was a state that is prepared to go to war to make a few people wealthy. He said that the actions he witnessed as a senior diplomat had changed his world view and it was now “impossible to be proud of the United Kingdom.”
He added that Libya is now a disaster and 15,000 people where killed when NATO bombed Sirte, something the BBC never told the public.
Murray told his audience what many already know or suspect but what many, many more remain ignorant of: “I’ve seen things from the inside and the UK’s foreign interventions are almost always about resources. It is every bit as corrupt as others have indicated. It is not an academic construct, the system stinks.”
Murray was a British diplomat for 20 years. But after only six months, he said that in the country where he was Ambassador, the British and the US were shipping people in order for them to be tortured and some of them were tortured to death.
As far as Iraq is concerned, Murray said that he knew for certain that key British officials were fully aware that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction. He said that invading Iraq wasn’t a mistake, it was a lie.
It was a lie just like the ongoing demonisation of Putin and Russia is based on a series of lies. The BBC lied about Libya by not telling people the truth about NATO’s slaughter (or the real reasons Gaddafi was targeted). Furthermore, politicians, officials and the corporate media do their utmost to conceal from the public what Murray revealed: that the British Government (and US) is deeply immoral, doesn’t care how many people its kills abroad if it advances it aims and is a state that is prepared to go to war to make a few people wealthy.
Yes, prepared to sacrifice mainly working class young men’s lives to go to war for the wealthy. The working class whose jobs were sold to the lowest bidder abroad three decades back on the back of Margaret Thatcher’s treachery, again for the benefit of the wealthy.
Who in their right mind would sign up to fight for Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Monsanto, BP, Barclays and the like. Not many. However, economic conscription is always guaranteed to swell the fighting ranks. If that isn’t possible, just roll out the flag and patriotic sentiment will neatly serve to conceal the actual reality from the public.
Catastrophic events that send the world into turmoil happen on ‘just another day’. Pearl Harbour, 9/11 or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand took place while millions of ordinary folk across the world were just going about their everyday business on ‘just another day’. An Israeli missile attack on a neighbourhood in Gaza or a drone attack on unsuspecting civilians in Afghanistan: death, destruction or war comes like a bolt from the blue as people shop at the local market or take their kids to school on ‘just another day’.
It will be ‘just another day’ when the next nuclear bomb is exploded in anger, an ordinary day when people are just going about their daily business. By then it might be too late to do anything, too late to act to try to prevent a rapidly unfolding global catastrophe on a scale never before witnessed by humans.
Yet most of humanity appears too arrogant, apathetic, wrapped up in a world of gadgets, technology, shopping malls, millionaire sports players and big-time sports events to think that such a thing could be imminent?
Are they so preoccupied with the machinations of their own lives in cotton-wool cocooned societies to think that what is happening in Ukraine or Syria or Iraq is (after endless news reports) just too boring to follow or that it doesn’t really concern them or it is ‘not my problem’? Do they think they are untouchable, that only death, war and violence happens in faraway places Syria or Iran?
Could any of us even contemplate that on some not-too-distant day a series of European cities could be laid waste within a matter of minutes? Could it soon be the case that the mention of Kiev, Moscow, Brussels, St Petersburg or London conjures up similar thoughts of nuclear wasted cities as has for decades the mention of the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It isn’t worth thinking about.
But it is. That is where we could end up very shortly if Washington continues with its madness. The USSR backed down over stationing missiles in Cuba because it knew the US would not; it was on Washington’s doorstep. This time, it will be Russia which will not back down because of what is happening on its doorstep. Its very existence as a state is at stake.
However, would the US be prepared to back down? Faced with possible defeat by conventional Russian forces if the worst case scenario comes to pass, would it use the nuclear option to avoid backing down and attempt to eradicate Russia as a potential rival and risk destroying humanity in the process?
Given its track record of reckless disregard for human life across the globe since 1945, what do you think?
Mr. Colin Todhunter is one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media.
Notes
1] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37599.htm
2] http://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-the-corporate-annexation-for-cargill-chevron-monsanto-its-a-gold-mine-of-profits/5375170
3] http://rt.com/op-edge/170960-economy-imf-ukraine-oligarchs/
4] http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_03_06/US-NATO-CIA-supporting-nazis-in-Ukraine-project-2569/
5] http://news.yahoo.com/un-nearly-million-ukrainians-fled-fighting-east-174928803.html
6] http://rt.com/op-edge/sanctions-russia-west-ukraine-513/
7]http://www.alternet.org/story/141071/spending_$102_billion_a_year_on_800_worldwide_military_bases_is_bankrupting_the_country
8] http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2012/04/us/table.military.troops/
9] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/defense-spending-fact-of-the-day_n_1746685.html
10] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm
11] http://revcom.us/a/291/zero-dark-thirty-en.html
12] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/William_Blum.html
13] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm
14] http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/how_to_solve_the_putin_problem.html
15] http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/don-t-mess-with-nuclear-russia-warns-putin/article1-1258033.aspx
16] http://rt.com/op-edge/dangerous-crossroads-nuclear-war-770/
17] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-russian-aggression-prevention-act-rapa-a-direct-path-to-nuclear-war-with-russia/5397171
18] http://rt.com/business/164752-russiia-de-dollarize-yuan-china/
19] http://www.countercurrents.org/todhunter280214.htm
20] http://en.ria.ru/world/20140828/192428303/Former-British-Ambassador-to-Uzbekistan-Says-UK-Rogue-State.html