Outside of small left sources and scattered independent journalists, the propaganda blitz continues over the events in Ukraine, with absolutely no context or historical background.
President Barack Obama, the first African-American to reach the presidency, is the nominal leader of the U.S. NAT0 bloc, leading the campaign against “Russia.” His administration has denounced the atrocity in Nigeria (the kidnapping of hundreds of girls by rightwing religious fanatics) and offered aid, But his administration, along with its allies, are silent concerning the atrocities committed by the “midget Hitlers” of Ukraine, the storm troopers of the Neo Nazi groups which are both part of the new government and advancing their terroristic activities through the country.
One cannot expect President Obama to denounce the expulsion of Communists from the Ukrainian legislature, even though that violates elemental definitions of political democracy and is reminiscent of the Hitler government’s refusal to seat elected Communist deputies to the Reichstag after the Reichstag fire, deputies who would of course have voted against the martial law decree that became the “constitutional basis” of the fascist dictatorship and needed a two thirds majority to pass. If this were a real multi-party democracy, that might however be a reasonable expectation.
But the use, as Robert Parry , the best independent journalist coveringthese events, has reported, of these neo Nazi thugs to burn building and incinerate political enemies, is certainly something that the President of the U.S. should be called upon to condemn.
Also, while some may see this as unfair to Obama, the forces that he and the “free world” aka U.S. NAT0 bloc are supporting here are the equivalent of a Southern white supremacy government declaring its “independence” from all U.S. civil rights laws and containing leaders of the Klu Klux Klan who were openly celebrating the history of lynch law and terrorizing anti-racists.
It is said, and I think rightly so, that the great majority of Ukrainians do not support these fascist groups, although the groups and parties whom they do support seem willing to aid and abet them, and use them, the way conservative political groups in Italy and Germany and their friends in Britain and the use fascists and Nazis.
For those who minimize these groups, I give this piece of advice that the conservative albeit non Nazi postwar Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer gave to U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower about Senator Joseph McCarthy after Eisenhower became president. “Once you create individuals like this it is hard to get rid of them.” Adenauer knew well how his fellow conservatives helped to nurture the Nazis in the 1920s, hoping to use them only to be used by them.
What would be a reasonable solution to the question of Ukraine?
First, the removal of NAT0 from all of Eastern Europe. NAT0 was established for one reason only—to “contain/encircle the Soviet Union, which after WWII was not only the leading socialist nation on earth but the major supporter of socialism in the world and an ally of Communist parties throughout the world, particularly then powerful Communist parties in France and Italy, the Communist Party of China which was on the brink of leading the Chinese people to victory in the Chinese Civil War, the Communist led Viet Minh fighting a war of national liberation against French colonialism in Vietnam, and other revolutionary movements through the world.
That the power of the Soviet Union over these parties and movements was vastly exaggerated, and the contention that the Soviets were puppeteers behind all of them an absurd cold war “big lie,” is less important today than the fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the Warsaw Treaty Organization no longer exists, so why should the NAT0 bloc to exist, not to mention its expansion to include former Warsaw Treaty states and its involvement in events that had nothing to do with its founding(from the intervention in the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s to the Afghanistan War).
Just as Czarist Russia was called in the mid 19th century the “gendarme of Europe” (policeman of Europe) NAT0 has in the 23 years since the destruction of the Soviet Union developed into the policeman, or to use an American term, the “beat cop” of the world.
All this can do and mean is to incite conflicts with what I call “crony capitalist” Russia, China,(as far away from the USSR as Ronald Reagan was from Franklin Roosevelt in terms of what they represented) perhaps in the future India, even Japan. Non NAT0 nations whose may find themselves at odds with the U.S. NAT0 bloc on various questions.
Of course, the former Soviet leaders who participated in the dismemberment of the Soviet Union did so with assurances that the NAT0 alliance would not be expanded so as to threaten then even more than NAT0 threatened the Soviet Union. Those “assurances” turned out to be as real as Gorbachev’s policies of Perstroika and Glasnost.
Second, one should demand the outlawing of all Neo Nazi groups and the criminalizing of open racist incitements against Russians, Poles, people of the Jewish religion, which have become part of the Ukrainian political landscape. That kind of action may not sit well with many Americans, such legislation, it terms of Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial, racist incitements, have long been part of European law, given the mass murder that these policies were associated with during WWII.
Instead of threatening sanctions against Russia in Crimea, it would make much more sense to use international sanctions seriously against governments, especially in the former Soviet Republics, former Yugoslavia, and other nations which clearly violate international human rights standards while being members of NAT0 the European Union, the IMF, the UN, and other global economic, political and military organizations.
As for Crimea, once you partition a country as the Soviet Union was, as Yugoslavia was, as India was with the end of British colonialism, as first Ottoman and then British colonial Palestine were(the former including the British created kingdom of Jordan) then everything is really up for grabs and the only rational policy is to support the fairest autonomy possible without violating minority rights(which is easy to say but very hard to do)
These are rational proposals but it is very doubtful that the mass media, which is recycling old anti-Soviet cold war stereotypes and applying them to a government which represents the class and social forces that betrayed and liquidated the Soviet Union from within, will entertain any of them. So , in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, I have a “modest proposal” for all the assorted couch potatoes of the right and the center standing with the “freedom fighters” in Ukraine.
How about taking a lesson from the left of the 1930s, which organized the International Brigades to fight Spanish fascism when the non fascist capitalist states did far less to thwart Hitler and Mussolini than anyone today is doing against Putin’s Russia? In the U.S organize a “Ronald Reagan brigade” of stock brokers, young Republicans, “neo conservative” pundits, to fight to “liberate Ukraine.” Give everyone who joins the brigade amnesty from prosecution for insider trading, banking fraud, real estate swindles, etc
Release Bernard Madoff from prison and declare him chief financial officer of the Ronald Reagan brigade. Have Rush Limbaugh broadcast daily from the front to rally the home front, even if the broadcasts will be in Miami Have Condoleezza Rice stand as the “La Passionaria” of the Ronald Reagan brigade, shouting “Listen Russians, we will bury you in a grave of MacDonald’s Freedom Fries.” Let the U.S. propose a global ban on Borscht in all NAT0 bloc countries.
If that sounds pretty far out to you, it makes as much sense as the present mass media and establishment politicians comments on the events in Ukraine, the former Soviet Ukraine, in Russian Crimea, in the region. Of course, other NAT0 bloc nations can join in. Poland might send the Joseph Pilsudski brigade, seeking to re-establish the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom which was broken up in the 17th century. Turkey might send an Ottoman Brigade in the hope that somehow the Ottoman armies, which centuries ago were in that vicinity, might make a comeback. Angela Merkel of Germany might call for a Kaiser Wilhelm II brigade, since that would be more politically correct, as our conservatives like to say than the brigade named for last German invader of Ukraine, whose political heirs are engaging in terrorist acts there today
The English might organize a Tony Blair brigade, since Blair showed in the Iraq War that he was capable of supporting anything.
I hope no one misunderstands the second part of this essay. Satire, while it is often seen as a weapon of the powerless, can serve as a bridge to understanding, when the conventional wisdoms are so removed from reality that it is difficult to address them seriously for too long
Let me suggest finally that readers google Robert Parry on the Internet to read his fine independent journalism on the ongoing events in the Ukraine, accounts that continue to be largely invisible in U.S. establishment media
