Volodymyr Zelenskyy
BY DAVE GUTKNECHT
Memory of even recent history is being lost. To review early warnings: Thirty years ago, Boris Yeltsin argued vehemently against expanding NATO to include Ukraine, and George Kennan, our foremost diplomat, said that NATO expansion was a “fatal error.” U.S. scholars Stephen Cohen and John Mearsheimer strongly warned against it.
But empire strategist Brzezinski, in The Grand Chessboard (1997), identified Ukraine as the ultimate prize in a strategy of weakening Russia and achieving regime change there. With Ukraine, he argued, Russia was powerful, but without Ukraine Russia was vulnerable. In 2008, William Burns, ambassador to Russia and now CIA director, clearly warned in a famous (leaked) email that bringing Ukraine into NATO would lead to civil war and violate Russia’s red-line security concerns.
These warnings were ignored. Provoking Russian intervention and war was the intent, not peace. No peer military power would be allowed. Under Plan A, Russia would be drained and weakened by a long war and extreme economic sanctions. But that strategy has failed badly. The U.S. is floundering, with no Plan B except to keep pouring weapons and hundreds of billions of dollars into a failing campaign. Russia is advancing, another U.S. defeat looms—and Trump doesn’t want to be a loser.
I’ve written a half-dozen columns detailing how Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine was planned and provoked by the West. The Russian invasion was with a military force intended not for conquest but to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table—which it did, resulting in the Istanbul negotiated agreements. Istanbul 2022 would have kept Ukraine intact and avoided well over a million subsequent Ukrainian deaths. But the U.S. and Britain directed Ukraine to instead wage war, and conditions now are much worse. Endlessly repeated mantras of “unprovoked” aggression and “full-scale invasion” can readily be proven false—but propagada does not operate by rational argument.
The framework of U.S. domination vs. Russian national security interests explains this thirty-year war. Disguised as democracy vs. autocracy, it is more accurately described as a global empire proclaiming its universalism versus other nations that endorse a multi-polar global vision.
Vladimir Putin
Unfortunately, the U.S. and its imperial parent Britain do not respect others’ national sovereignty, unless forced to do so. Examples: Did U.S. rulers learn anything from Vietnam—a twenty-year atrocity following the Tonkin Gulf false flag event to justify war? In Afghanistan, another twenty-year catastrophe, where we sponsored the Islamic jihadists: Did the U.S. learn anything? Destroying Iraq, after the U.S. lied about weapons of mass destruction: Did we learn anything? Destroying the most prosperous country in Africa, Libya, based on lies about Ghaddafi and lies to the U.N.? Helping to destroy Syria because of its links to Iran, the latter another target? Sixty years of cruel sanctions against Cuba: Why? And now, U.S. arms and funding make possible Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine. Yet we are told that the U.S. is a force for the rule of law!
Russia-gate was another elaborate fraud, concocted to distract from a bad candidate and a bad political campaign and especially to distract from the threat of rapprochement with Russia. I wish I had challenged earlier this propaganda campaign that helped prepare us for war with Russia.
Now, our rulers threaten war on China. False assumptions of U.S. superiority persist.
Propaganda: when everyone thinks the same, no one is thinking. When did you last read or hear in mainstream media a discussion of the security concerns of a U.S. adversary? There is no such discussion, because the conflict is framed as one of good versus evil—an appeal to emotions, not rational argument. But when our side does this, it is not propaganda but public relations.
Aristotle argued that democracy leads to tyranny. Look at our deep class division! This oligarchic process is advanced by propaganda. As Malcolm X told his audience: “You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been tricked. You’ve been bamboozled.”
I’ll end with recommending online sources outside the mainstream:
• Locally, Vets for Peace and WAMM newsletters
• “Neutrality Studies” interviews by Pascal Lottaz
• Interviews on “Judging Freedom” by Andrew Napolitano
• Interviews and discussion of propaganda by Glenn Diesen
• Jeffrey Sachs on numerous platforms
• Nima Alkorshid interviews at “Dialogue Works”
• Max Blumenthal at “The Grayzone”
• Peter Korotaev at “Events in Ukraine”
These are brilliant critical voices amidst a flood of war propaganda.
So long as the U.S. pretends it can finance its global empire, there will not be peace. My hopes for reversal are on a U.S. financial crisis and contraction—forcing retreat and reconstruction.
Southside Pride Note: We support an immediate ceasefire and a plebiscite to allow the people of affected provinces to decide if they want to be part of Ukraine or Russia.
