How Much War Does Washington Want?

I doubt that the Ukraine crisis precipitated by Washington’s overthrow of the democratic government is over.  Washington has won the propaganda war everywhere outside of Russia and Ukraine itself. Within Ukraine people are aware that the coup has made them worse off.  The Crimea has already separated from the US puppet government in Kiev and rejoined Russia. Other parts of Russian Ukraine could follow.

In Kiev itself where the unelected, imposed-by-Washington dictatorial government resides, extreme right-wing Ukrainian nationalists, whose roots go back to fighting for National Socialist Germany, are at work intimidating public prosecutors, media editors, and the US imposed “government” itself.  There is an abundance of videos available on the Internet, some made by the extreme nationalists themselves, that clearly reveal the intimidation of the imposed and unelected government installed by Washington.

In Kiev US bribes contend with naked neo-nazi force. Which will prevail?

The murder of ultra-nationalist Right Sector militant leader Myzychko by police of the acting Interior Minister of the American stooge government in Ukraine on March 25 has resulted in another Right Sector leader, Dmitry Yarosh, demanding the resignation of Arsen Avakov, the acting Interior Minister and the arrest of the police who killed Muzychko. Yarosh declared: “We cannot watch silently as the Interior Ministry works to undermine the revolution.” Right Sector organizer Roman Koval in Rovno, Ukraine, warned: “We will take revenge on Avakov for the death of our brother.”

How this will play out is uncertain at this time. The violence provided by the Right Sector and other ultra-nationalist groups was essential to the success of the Washington-backed coup in overthrowing the elected democratic government. But the Right Sector has emerged as both an embarrassment and a threat to the unelected coup government and to its Washington sponsors who are selling the Washington-installed puppet government as a progressive exercise in democracy. This sell is difficult when ultra-nationalist thugs are beating up the imposed government.

Could civil war break out in Kiev between the Right Sector and the government installed by Washington?  We know that the Right Sector was sufficiently organized and disciplined to take over the protests.  We don’t know how well organized is the Washington puppet government or what force this group has at its disposal. We don’t know whether Washington has provided mercenaries to protect the government Washington has installed. It is not clear at this time where the power balance lies between the Right Sector and the US stooge government.

The American, UK, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, EU propaganda machine has blamed Putin for all the trouble.  But so far the Russian government has not had to do anything except comply with the self-determination of the people in the Russian areas of Ukraine.  Much of Ukraine, as it exists or existed today, consists of Russian territories added to Ukraine by Soviet rulers.

When Ukraine became independent with Russia’s agreement when the Soviet Union collapsed, had the Russian territories first been put back into Russia from whence they came, Washington’s coup would not have resulted in the same level of crisis.

Instead, under Washington’s pressure, the Russian territory was retained by Ukraine, and in compensation Russia was given a 50-year lease on Sevastopol, Russia’s Black Sea naval base.

The purpose of the Washington financed and orchestrated coup in Kiev was to put Ukraine, with its artificial boundaries, into the EU and NATO and to evict Russia from its warm water port and ring Russia with US missile bases.  Washington and its European puppets described this as “bringing democracy to Ukraine.”

Ukraine already had democracy, a young one trying to put down roots, and Washington destroyed it.  As Russian President Putin observed, overthrowing a brand new democracy destroys democracy. Washington’s coup established for Ukraine the precedent  that force and propaganda rule, not democracy.

But Washington cares not for democracy, only for its agenda.  And Russia, China, and Iran are in the way.

The neoconservatives, who have controlled US foreign policy since the Clinton regime,  concluded that the Soviet collapse meant that History has chosen America as the socio-economic system for the world. They declared the US to be “exceptional” and “indispensable” and above international law.  Washington had a free pass to invade, murder, destroy, and dominate.  The neoconservative claims of “American exceptionalism” sound like Hitler’s claims for the German nation. When the White House sock puppet expressed in a speech the claim of American exceptionalism, Putin replied: “God made us all equal.”

Washington’s opinion is that the exceptional and indispensable nation–the US–is above not only all other nations but also above law. What Washington does is legal.  What anyone else does in opposition is illegal.

Washington’s intervention in Ukraine has unleashed dark forces. Yulia Tymoshenko, the criminal Ukrainian oligarch, who braids her hair or hair piece  over her head like a crown, was released from prison by Washington’s stooges and has not stopped putting her foot, or both feet, in her mouth.  Her latest in her intercepted and leaked telephone conversation is her declaration that “it’s about time we grab our guns and go kill those damn Russians together with their leader.” She declared that not even scorched earth should be left where Russia stands. 

Tymoshenko was sentenced to prison by Ukrainians, not by Russians. Contrast her extreme language and Russophobia with the calm measured tones of Putin, who reaffirms Russia’s interest to continue good relations with Ukraine.

On March 23 Tymoshenko was interviewed by the German newspaper, Bild, a mouthpiece for Washington. The crazed Tymoshenko declared that Putin was even more dangerous than Hitler.

This year 2014 is the 100th anniversary of World War 1. As my Oxford professor, Michael Polanyi, said, this was the war that destroyed Europe.  He meant culturally and morally as well as physically.  As John Maynard Keynes made clear in his prediction, the propagandistic way in which World War 1 was blamed on Germany and the “peace” that was imposed on Germany set up World War 2.

We are witnesses today to the same kind of propagandistic lies with regard to Russia that caused World War 1. In The Genesis Of The World War, Harry Elmer Barnes quotes the French chief editor of a French account of the organization of propaganda in France during World War 1. The French built a massive building called La Maison de la Presse. In this building images of people were created with hands cut off, tongues torn out, eyes gouged out, and skulls crushed with brains laid bare. These images were then photographed and “sent as unassailable evidence of German atrocities to all parts of the globe, where they did not fail to produce the desired effect.”  Also provided were “fictitious photographs of bombarded French and Belgian churches, violated graves and monuments and scenes of ruins and desolation. The staging and painting of these scenes were done by the best scene-painters of the Paris Grand Opera.”

This vicious propaganda against Germany meant that Germany could be blamed for the war and that all of President Woodrow Wilson’s guarantees to Germany of no reparations and no territorial loss if Germany agreed to an armistice could be violated.

The propaganda success guaranteed that the peace settlement would be so one-sided as to set up the Second World War.

Russia has observed Washington’s strategic moves against Russian national interests and Russian sovereignty for two decades.  What does Putin think when he hears the vicious anti-Russian propaganda based 100% in lies?

This is what Putin thinks:  The Americans promised Gorbachev that they would not take NATO into Eastern Europe, but the Americans did. The Americans withdrew from the ABM Treaty, which prohibited escalating the arms race with anti-ballistic missile systems.  The Americans arranged with Poland to deploy anti-ballistic missile bases on Poland’s border with Russia.  The Americans tell us the fantastic lie that the purpose of American missile bases in Poland is to protect Europe from non-existent Iranian ICBMs.  The Americans change their war doctrine to elevate nuclear weapons from a retaliatory deterrent to a pre-emptive first strike force.  The Americans pretend that this change in war doctrine is directed at terrorists, but we know it is directed at Russia. The Americans have financed “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine and hope to do so in the Russian Federation itself. The Americans support the terrorists in Chechnya. The Americans trained and equipped the Georgian military and gave it the green light to attack our peacekeepers in South Ossetia. The Americans have financed the overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine and blame me for the anxiety this caused among Crimeans who on their own volition fled Ukraine and returned to Russia from whence they came.  Even Gorbachev said that Khrushchev should never have put Crimea into Ukraine. Solzhenitsyn said that Lenin should not have put Russian provinces into eastern and southern Ukraine.  Now I have these Russian provinces agitating to return to Russia, and the Americans are blaming me for the consequences of their own reckless and irresponsible actions.

The Americans say I want to rebuild the Soviet Empire. Yet, the Americans witnessed me depart from Georgia when I had this former Russian province in my hands, thanks to the short-lived war instigated by the Americans.

There is no end to the American lies.  I have done everything possible to respond to provocations in a low-key reasonable manner, offering to work things out diplomatically, as has my Foreign Minister Lavrov. But the Americans continue to provoke and to hide their provocations behind lies.  The Americans brazenly bring to me a strategic threat in Ukraine. They intend to put Ukraine in NATO, the purpose of which expired with the Soviet collapse. They intend to put more missile bases on Russia’s borders, and they intended to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, its warm water port.

Americans have no intention of working anything out. They intend to subjugate Russia. Washington wants Russia powerless, surrounded with ABM bases that degrade our strategic deterrent to uselessness.  These Americans will not work with me.  They will not listen to me or to Russia’s Foreign Minister.  They only hear their own call for American hegemony over the world.  My only alternative is to prepare for war.

The government of China, having read Washington’s war plans for war against China and being fully away of Washington’s “pivot to Asia,” in which the “indispensable nation” announced its “safe-guarding of peace” by surrounding China with naval and air bases, understands that it has the same Washington enemy as does Russia.

What the entire world faces, every country, every individual regardless of their political orientation, is a Washington-engineered confrontation with Russia and China. This confrontation is enabled by Washington’s bought-and-paid-for European and UK puppet states. Without the cover provided by Europe, Washington’s acts of aggression would result in war crimes charges against the government in Washington.  The world would not be able to enforce these charges without war, but Washington would be isolated.

The European, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and UK governments have betrayed  not only their own peoples but also the peoples of the entire world by lending the support of Western Civilization to Washington’s lawlessness.

The propaganda that the West represents the hope of the world is a great lie.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is How America Was Lost.

 

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.