US, NATO powder keg in Europe
One hundred years ago today, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo was the fatal spark that ignited a geopolitical powder keg in Europe.
Within a month, all the major powers of Europe would be embroiled in the First World War, which also dragged in Russia and the US. The war would last for nearly five years and resulted in at least 20 million deaths.
That catastrophe has perplexing resonances with today. A single incident set off a conflagration back then because it came amid simmering rivalries among imperial powers. Another resonance is how historians recount that in the run-up to the First World War few believed that a war in “modern, civilized” Europe was likely because of the belief that diplomacy would prevail.
Today, we see similar reckless goading by imperial powers across Europe. The US and its European NATO allies have embarked on a 25-year expansion towards Russia’s heartland. The dynamic of encroachment has only sped up, not lessened. This expansion is provocative, aggressive and duplicitous because it not only presents a military threat to Russia it also flies in the face of past commitments by the US-led NATO alliance not to do so, such as in the 1997 Founding Act, signed with Moscow.
Russia has every right to feel threatened by ever-encroaching ballistic missile systems on its borders that could be used in a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the US and its allies. That concern is heightened ever since Washington invoked a “first strike doctrine” under President George W Bush, which Obama still retains.
Yet, provocatively, Washington dismisses Russian President Vladimir Putin’s concerns about NATO expansion as if they the deliriums of a Soviet revanchist.
The complacency of the present time towards the dangers of war has disturbing echoes of the past – on the eve of World War I. A major factor in the present complacency is that the Western mainstream media are failing, woefully, to properly report on the gravity of the situation in Ukraine, and just how provocative that parlous situation is to Russia’s vital interests.
This week saw the signing of a trade pact between the European Union and Petro Poroshenko, the declared president of Ukraine. The Western media have hailed it in glowing terms as “a landmark event” and a positive outcome of democracy in the former Soviet Republic. That blithe assessment invites dangerous ignorance and complacency.
The truth is that the signing of the EU trade pact is the outcome of an illegal regime-change operation in Ukraine fomented by Washington and its NATO allies. That regime change involved CIA-backed mass murder of civilians (the February 20 sniper shootings in Kyiv’s Maidan Square) and the overthrow of an elected government.
Since the illegal coup against President Viktor Yanukovych, the Western-backed Kyiv regime has been waging war on the ethnic Russian populations in the east and south of the country, who refuse to recognize the regime as legitimate. Poroshenko, the billionaire oligarch who is now signing over sovereign affairs of Ukraine to the
US, NATO and the EU, was elected as president in a farce vote last month, where only 45 percent of the electorate turned out and large sections of the east and south did not even cast a ballot amid a murderous “anti-terror” crackdown by Kyiv troops and paramilitaries.
The campaign of terror by the Kyiv forces against pro-Russian civilians was launched at the end of April, days after CIA chief John Brennan made a secret visit to the Kyiv regime. Brennan briefed the Kyiv leadership, including the so-called Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who only last week used Nazi language to vow that his military forces would “cleanse sub-humans” from the country – referring to the ethnic Russian populations and the self-defence
militias they have set up in the Donetz and Lugansk regions.
The impostor-President Poroshenko may have declared a ceasefire over the past week, but the hostilities against civilian centres continue unabated. Crimes against humanity include the bombing of homes, churches, schools and hospitals, the use of White Phosphorus incendiary bombs and exploding bullets, as well as shelling of electricity and water supplies.
Western media have largely ignored these violations by the “new democratic Ukrainian government”, or at best have reported them as “unverified” or merely as “breaches of the ceasefire by both sides”. Western governments and media have gone into denial mode, refusing to acknowledge what even the United Nations this week confirmed as a massive displacement of over 150,000 people from eastern Ukraine. Why are such numbers fleeing if the violence is not also massive?
Another example of the Western cover-up over state terrorism in Ukraine is the recent killing of three journalists. Earlier this month, Russian journalist Igor Kornelyuk and his colleague Anton Voloshin were killed near Lugansk when they were hit with a mortar shell. Survivors of the attack said it was deliberate targeting by Kyiv troops. Previously, Italian journalist Andrea Rochelli was slain near Slavyansk in another incident that bore the hallmarks of
shoot-to-kill.
In the past week, by contrast, there was an outpouring of condemnation from Washington and other Western governments, as well as widespread media coverage, of the jailing of three Al Jazeera journalists in Egypt. Those sentences were no doubt a gross miscarriage of justice. But what about the taking of journalists’ lives in Ukraine? Where is the Western condemnations and media coverage?
Western-backed regime change and genocidal repression in Ukraine is a collision course of extreme provocation towards Russia and its vital interests. Yet it is presented to the Western public as if it is a “good news” story about democratic European enlargement, which, perversely, is being spoiled by Russian “interference”.
This is a powder-keg situation in Europe, led to by the US geopolitics and its European henchmen, and which is wrapped up in an explosive shell of ignorance by lying Western media.
The repetition of history is not inevitable. But the chances are increased when people are kept in the dark about the underlying causes of war and conflict.
FC/HMV