Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Washington continues to drive Europe toward one or the other of the two most likely outcomes of the orchestrated conflict with Russia. Either Europe or some European Union member government will break from Washington over the issue of Russian sanctions, thereby forcing the EU off of the path of conflict with Russia, or Europe will be pushed into military conflict with Russia.
In June the Russian sanctions expire unless each member government of the EU votes to continue the sanctions. Several governments have spoken against a continuation. For example, the governments of the Czech Republic and Greece have expressed dissatisfaction with the sanctions.
US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged growing opposition to the sanctions among some European governments. Employing the three tools of US foreign policy–threats, bribery, and coercion–he warned Europe to renew the sanctions or there would be retribution. We will see in June if Washington’s threat has quelled the rebellion.
Europe has to consider the strength of Washington’s threat of retribution against the cost of a continuing and worsening conflict with Russia. This conflict is not in Europe’s economic or political interest, and the conflict has the risk of breaking out into war that would destroy Europe.
Since the end of World War II Europeans have been accustomed to following Washington’s lead. For awhile France went her own way, and there were some political parties in Germany and Italy that considered Washington to be as much of a threat to European independence as the Soviet Union. Over time, using money and false flag operations, such as Operation Gladio, Washington marginalized politicians and political parties that did not follow Washington’s lead.
The specter of a military conflict with Russia that Washington is creating could erode Washington’s hold over Europe. By hyping a “Russian threat,” Washington is hoping to keep Europe under Washington’s protective wing. However, the “threat” is being over-hyped to the point that some Europeans have understood that Europe is being driven down a path toward war.
Belligerent talk from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from John McCain, from the neoconservatives, and from NATO commander Philip Breedlove is unnerving Europeans. In a recent love-fest between Breedlove and the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by John McCain, Breedlove supported arming the Ukrainian military, the backbone of which appears to be the Nazi militias, with heavy US weapons in order to change “the decision calculus on the ground” and bring an end to the break-away republics that oppose Washington’s puppet government in Kiev.
Breedlove told the Senate committee that his forces were insufficient to withstand Russian aggression and that he needed more forces on Russia’s borders in order to “reassure allies.”
Europeans have to decide whether the threat is Russia or Washington. The European press, which Udo Ulfkotte reports in his book, Bought Journalists, consists of CIA assets, has been working hard to convince Europeans that there is a “revanchist Russia” on the prowl that seeks to recover the Soviet Empire. Washington’s coup in Ukraine has disappeared. In its place Washington has substituted a “Russian invasion,” hyped as Putin’s first step in restoring the Soviet empire.
Just as there is no evidence of the Russian military in Ukraine, there is no evidence of Russian forces threatening Europe or any discussion or advocacy of restoring the Soviet empire among Russian political and military leaders.
In contrast Washington has the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which is explicitly directed at Russia, and now the Council on Foreign Relations has added China as a target of the Wolfowitz doctrine. http://carnegieendowment.org/files/Tellis_Blackwill.pdf
The CFR report says that China is a rising power and thereby a threat to US world hegemony. China’s rise must be contained so that Washington can remain the boss in the Asian Pacific. What it comes down to is this: China is a threat because China will not prevent its own rise. This makes China a threat to “the International Order.” “The International Order,” of course, is the order determined by Washington. In other words, just as there must be no Russian sphere of influence, there must be no Chinese sphere of influence. The CFR report calls this keeping the world “free of hegemonic control” except by the US.
Just as General Breedlove demands more military spending in order to counter “the Russian threat,” the CFR wants more military spending in order to counter “the Chinese threat.” The report concludes: “Congress should remove sequestration caps and substantially increase the U.S. defense budget.”
Clearly, Washington has no intention of moderating its position as the sole imperial power. In defense of this power, Washington will take the world to nuclear war. Europe can prevent this war by asserting its independence and departing the empire.
An excellent piece. I’m surprised there are no comments.
Europe is proof that for every action, there is an equal opposite reaction.
So, you have the USA!USA!USA … all full of spit and vinegar, loaded to the hilt with brass balls, bombing the fuck outta everyone we don’t like (as long as they can’t fight back), ….. SWAGGER, BABY!!
Then you have the Europeans ….. spineless fucking cowards with no balls whatsoever, so they lick Uncle Sammy’s balls … day and night, night and day … and they’re happy because Sammy promised not to cum on their faces …. but, as far as turning their own cities into rubble, again? Oops, so solly. Don’t worry. We got an other Marshall Plan for you!!
Thank you, Jeebus, for taking my fat ass outta shithole Europe!
Another fine piece from The Saker
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Russia and Ukraine – a Study in Hatred and Love
The Saker (written for Russia Insider)
I am sitting in front of my computer watching the movie “The Burn,” by Arkadii Mamontov, about the May 2nd Odessa massacre. The movie is very well made and I hope that somebody will subtitle it in English. It shows a lot of video footage of various events, which all took place last year. Scenes include the intercepted telephone calls of local extremist leaders, the smiling faces of the young Ukrainian girls preparing Molotov cocktails, the applause from the crowd, with the Ukronazi lynch mob approaching the square where the anti-Maidan demonstrators had their tents. Two things in particular amaze me: the absolute burning hatred of the Ukronazis for the “separy” or “colorady” (the anti-Maidan Ukrainians) and the fact they are all speaking in Russian! Not a single word is uttered by these Russia-haters, in their beloved Ukrainian language.
And I ask myself – are these Russians or not?
I suppose that it depends on your definition of Russians. For me, a Russian is any person who loves, and cares for Russia. It is not an ethnicity or a language, but a “civilizational realm”, just like there are Indian or Chinese civilizational realms. By those criterions, these Ukronazis are not Russians.
In that logic, history is literally irrelevant.
Let’s imagine an imaginary people who lived for 5000 years on an island with no contact with the outside world. And yet, one day, some of them, for whatever reason, decide to declare that they are a totally different nation, with nothing in common with the rest of the islanders. They invent themselves a language, a history and some ersatz of a culture. It is all utter nonsense, of course, and any historical investigation will reveal this fraud. But even if all their founding myths completely contradict the historical record, even if their language is completely artificial and invented, and even if their entire claim to a separate identity is based on nothing, nothing at all, there is one thing which cannot be impugned, one thing which is undeniably real: their seething hatred for their own people, culture and history. That hatred by itself does not need to be based on anything, it can appear ex nihilo and no amount of logical demonstrations will weaken it.
Superficially, one could look at the footage of the Odessa massacre and say that these were Russians killing Russians. But this is a deeply misguided view. Because of “russian-ness” or “being Russian” is something which originates in the soul and identity of a person, then you cannot be Russian and hate Russia. Even if you come from 100 generations of “pure” Russians (whatever that means), you cease to be ‘Russian’ the moment you start hating Russia. You become a Russian-speaking Ukronazi.
There is also another crucial difference between Russians and Ukronazis. You can watch any Russian TV show, read any article, and watch thousands of hours of footage made in the streets of Novorussia or Russia proper and you will see the same thing over and over again: people moved by love. Love of their country, love of their people, love of a socially just, social order, love of the memory and examples of those who gave their lives in defense of freedom.
Che Guevara once wrote: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality. This is perhaps one of the great dramas of a leader; he must combine an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decision without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealise their love for the people, for the most hallowed causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the terrain where ordinary men put their love into practice. ” The Che wrote this about Cuba, but it very much applies to Novorussia today: the Novorussian revolution (that is what it is, of course, a revolution) is moved by love.
Compare that with the Nazi-occupied Ukraine I call “Banderastan”:
How do you burn cops who are ordered to stand down and not fight back?
How do you gouge out the eyes of an already wounded cop?
How do you shoot your own demonstrators?
How do you betray every pledge you make?
How do you rejoice at the sight of people burned alive?
How do you take pride in shelling your own people, all civilians?
How do you voluntarily accept to be a foreigner’s puppet?
How do you massacre hundreds of foreigners, who just happen to fly across your airspace?
How do you deprive your own people from basic necessities to fight an unwinnable war?
How do you spend all your time, day in and day out, lying, lying, lying and then lying some more?
How do you so sell – literally – your own country, people and culture to foreign vultures?
You do that when you are moved by a burning, raging, seething hatred.
But where does this hate come from? Centuries of oppression and vicious ‘russification’? Hardly, one cannot oppress for “centuries” something which was only born 100 years ago. The famous “Holodomor”?! Nope. Every single nation of the Soviet Union did suffer terribly under the Soviet rule, not just the Ukrainians. I would add that the historical record shows that the Ukrainians were over-represented in the Soviet political system and that they had it better, not worse, than the rest of the Soviet people. So what is the cause of such hatred?
Could it be that deep inside themselves they know that they are a fraud? That their national identity has no positive expression? That Ukrainian identity is nothing more than ‘russophobia’? Can you imagine how humiliating it must be for them to only score “victories” against unarmed civilians? Or how it feels when your national Parliament declares that Russia is an “aggressor state” and Russia simply ignores this? Or how these nationalists feel when they look at the “score board” of the Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917) was a total disaster, as were the equally short-lived Hetmanate and Directorate. Then, after the usual Polish meddling, the “independent Ukraine” was finished. It took the “independent Ukraine” only 5 years to end in total chaos by 1922. It reemerged in 1991 as the richest ex-Soviet Republic. This time it took the Ukrainians over 20 years to completely destroy all the immense human and material capital the Soviet Union had built: first came the “glorious” independence, followed by a no less “glorious” Orange Revolution and it all climaxed in an even more “glorious” Euro-Maidan. Now the country is ruined, broken up into at least 5 regions (Crimea – gone, Donbass – gone, and South, Central and West regions) ruled by local feudal lords. Russia, in the meanwhile, has achieved an economic miracle and is probably in the process of achieving a second one, all this, while staring down the entire Western Empire. Yeah, if I was an Ukronazi, I would probably also hate Russia.
Banderastan today, is a spiritual, intellectual and moral cesspool, filled with hatred, ignorance and envy. Paradoxically, it is this dark and nasty nature, which makes it so un-Russian, so truly alien to Russia and to the Russian people. In a sad and tragic way, the Ukronazis have achieved their dream – they have created an anti-Russia, a polar opposite of the Russian civilizational realm.
What we are seeing today in the Donbass, is similar to what happens when you mix matter and anti-matter, it is a clash of Russia with anti-Russia, and it results in a volatile rupture, an implosion which has already claimed many lives and which will claim many more, before it is finally over.
It gives me no joy, no Schadenfreude, to see how ugly, nasty, vicious and depraved this rump-Ukraine has become. When I think of Kiev, the “mother of all Russian cities,” as it has been known since antiquity, occupied by Nazi freaks, I think of the words of the Scripture about the “abomination of desolation standing in the holy place” and I only feel an immense sadness.
I hope and pray that there will be enough love in Russia to overcome this hatred and that one day the Ukraine will recover her past identity and glory. Yes, for the time being, Darkness has really completely engulfed this land, but as long as the Donbass remains unconquered, there is still hope. As long as there is love and truth anywhere in the ex-Ukraine, the Nazis have not won. I take immense solace in the fact that after over a year of hateful anti-Russian propaganda and after an endless series of ugly provocations, there *still* is no anti-Ukrainian hatred in Russia. This fact, somehow unnoticed by most, is almost miraculous by itself. The junta in Kiev has literally done everything conceivable to enrage Russia, and yet there are no anti-Ukrainian feelings in Russia at all.
It will take a lot of love and compassion from the Russian people to rescue whatever will be left of the Ukraine, by the time the Nazis are fully defeated. Nobody else will do it, least of all the EU or US, if only because they themselves suffer a sharp deficit of love or compassion.
Until that day comes, Russia will have to protect her people from the hateful maniacs which have taken over the Ukraine and her soul, from the contagion of hatred. I believe that she can do it.
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/us-and-them-study-hatred-and-love/ri6484
Stuckey you hit the nail on the head. The USA and Europe are bullies who are really good at picking fights with 3rd world countries that can’t fight back. USA no balls Europe NO BALLS. this all adds up to nowar with the Russians .
Measuring the Unseen, Calculating the Unknown
“On the 28th of October 1940 Greece was given a deadline of three hours to decide on war or peace. But even if a three day or three week or three year deadline was given, the response would have been the same.
The Greeks have taught dignity throughout the centuries. When the entire world had lost all hope, the Greek people dared to question the invincibility of the Germans, raising against it the proud spirit of freedom.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“If the Russian people managed to halt and reverse the German torrent at the doors of Moscow, they owe it to the Greek people, who delayed the German divisions long enough so that they could not bring us down to our knees.”
General Georgy Constantinovich Zhoukov
“Until now we used to say that the Greeks fight like heroes. Now we shall say, that heroes fight like Greeks.”
Winston Churchill
When the great Persian King demanded the surrender of the weapons from the Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae, King Leonidas I of Sparta responded drily, molṑn labé (μολὼν λαβέ), meaning, having come, take them.
And although most have forgotten, when the whole world was falling into despair, the Greek people dared to defy the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht, and raised the hopes of all nations who yearned to remain free. Greece in the Second World War.
This incalculable principle of the resilience of the human spirit may find some application in any number of situations we see today in our modern world, as it has done so frequently in the past.
The Greeks may stand, and bravely fall again, and the cynics may say, ‘see we were right after all. We told you so. It is foolish to resist.’ Or it may be some other people, at some other place. But it will happen.
And at least they will have lived, and stood free, and upheld their legacy for a time when they could raise a hand. And this is something those groveling at the feet of power, making snide remarks, quietly and unheard to themselves, hoping that they will be left for last, may never be able to say.
And this is what frightens the petty despot and the tyrant, and makes a chill run through their heart. They never know when the people will finally have the will to stand and say, ‘enough.’
And so, in retrospect, no matter how powerful, they always seem to finally go too far, into some needless excess of power, some abuse of propriety, some excessive assertion of vain invincibility, and set into motion their own terrible decline and downfall. Think of it.
JESSE
Imagine a day when the neo-con war criminals have been indicted, tried, found guilty, and are serving their sentences. I need not name them, you know who they are. And in the process of all this occurring, we’ve learned the truth about 9/11, along with a host of other false flags (need I name them?). We’ve even learned much of what the “breakaway civilization” http://www.afterdisclosure.com/2011/04/breakaway.html (BTW I know this guy, he’s a solid historian) has been keeping a secret since at least the 40’s.
I can imagine this and more, and I think it’s time we started doing that instead of constantly regurgitating what’s fucked up and shit. Let’s fix it.