Part the Second: Canadian Cynic's Post About Hunka, Poilievre, & Hypocrisy/My Comment/My Attempt to Debate with "ValJ"
So, we Canadians are all familiar (and deeply embarrassed by) the Canadian House of Commons brain-dead standing ovation for a Ukrainian 98-year old who fought the Russians as a young man. (I've got him as 18 in 1943.) 1943!!!! Why! That would be World War Two!!! Who was fighting the Russians in World War Two? If you're asking that question you're already light-years ahead of where our parliamentarians were on the day they applauded Yaroslav Huna of the Galician of the Ukrainian Waffen SS. [Jesus Christ.])
Canadian Cynic posted about how scumbag Pierre Poilievre is hypocritically making hay about Justin Trudeau's Liberals insanely stupid celebration of a former Waffen SS soldier in the House of Commons when he himself partied with the "Freedom Convoy" where a number of protesters were waving signs with swastikas on them. In my journeying around the internet I already knew one of the memes that the Convoyers and their sympathizers had for the swastikas on their signs. Then I added ... well, you all can just read it:
Convoy supporters have been saying that their swastikas were meant to describe Trudeau's pandemic policies as fascist. The new meme is that Trudeau smeared the "Truckers" as fascist and then went on to applaud an actual one.
This is interesting on so many levels. That Trudeau is being blamed for provincial policies as well as his own. That right-wingers accuse leftists of tossing the word "fascist" around so frequently that it's become meaningless. That many COVID-deniers are proven racists and fascists yet they (or their fellow COVID-deniers) refuse to own up to this. Also, that Trudeau's Liberals and everyone else who has bought into the NATO propganda bullshit continues to deny the easily proven reality that we HAVE funded, armed and trained present-day Ukrainian Banderite nazis in a cynical scheme to weaken Russia through Ukraine at a cost of almost 500,000 Ukrainian lives and tens of thousands of Russian lives in only two years of fighting.
Now, it's very important to trace the committed white supremacism of many of the leaders of the COVID-deniers. This link is from Global News but what it reports about Pat King and B. J. Dichter are easily verifiable. Also, in another post, Canadian Cynic reminds us of the Conservatives doing some extended hob-nobbing with a contemporary European far-right racist. But my main point was that if it is hideously bad and embarrassing for Canada's parliament to have applauded a nazi, isn't it much worse to be installing them in power, and giving them money, weapons and training?
But I was not expecting the following brain-dead reply from someone calling themselves "ValJ."
thwap, are you seriously trying to argue that Russia invaded Ukraine in a Machiavellian scheme to make itself weaker? Get real.
Yeah, Ukraine has a Nazi problem but so does Canada, along with our India problem, our China problem, our US problem, etc. Immigrant country attracts problems, news at 6.
ValJ
My comment said very clearly: "[W]e HAVE funded, armed and trained present-day Ukrainian Banderite nazis in a cynical scheme to weaken Russia ...". Perhaps "ValJ" read my comment too quickly. Sometimes I'm guilty of that with other people. You misread or mishear someone and thus begins a pointless argument. Still, if you're reading someone and it sounds so bizarre that you can't understand it, if you're a normal person you re-read it to make sure you got it right.
[Yes people. This is going to be one of those posts wherein I fixate upon someone being wrong on the internet. Where I vent about someone who did me wrong online as if anyone else is supposed to care. But (as I always say when I write these things), my point isn't that I think someone is a dweeb. My point is that the dweebiness under discussion is one example of a mental failure that is shared by millions and millions of people. One example of the insanity that shows the mind-destroying impact of the propaganda system. One example of how ordinary people find themselves going along with an immoral, inhuman, imperialist foreign policy with horrible consequences for millions of people. In this case the consequences of this delusion and stupidity has been the deaths of 400,000 Ukrainians, tens of thousands of Russians, worldwide human suffering caused by disruptions to food and fuel supplies, and, finally, an increased threat of civilization-destroying nuclear war. So. I hope with that having been said, you will understand that this isn't just me indulging in my narcissism and hurt feelings.]
Let's continue:
ValJ says that Canada has an "India problem" a "China problem" and a "US problem." Finishing up with "Immigrant country attracts problems, news at 6." By that, I take it ValJ means that when we take in immigrants we also bring in people who bring their disputes from the Old Country here with them. Or that having a diverse population sometimes means that conflict can arise such as when East Asian people were all being seen as Chinese by stupid people who also believe that COVID should be blamed on Chinese people. (I have no idea what our "US problem" has to do with us being a country of immigrants and I won't bother to pursue the matter.)
It is ValJ's statement that "Ukraine has a Nazi problem but so does Canada" that I wish to discuss now. ValJ seems to be saying that Ukraine's fascists are a problem for Ukraine in the same way that Canada's fascists are a problem for Canada, in that they're an unpleasant fringe group of racist shit-heads who, while occasionally violent, are too small in numbers and political-economic clout to be a significant threat to our societies.
This is certainly wrong in the case of Ukraine and it is becoming increasingly possible that it is quite wrong in the case of Canada as well. In the first place, fascism in Ukraine had a much bigger impact than openly fascist movements have had in Canada. (We didn't even have anything at the level of the UK's Oswal Mosley.) And the Ukrainian fascists under Stepan Bandera weren't just motivated by hatred of Stalinism and the desire for Ukrainian independence. They were murderous racists who went on to kill thousands of Jews, Poles, Romani and other peoples.
Now, one thing we all have to be cognizant of is that (to the extent that any Ukrainians revere the memory of dead nazis) this sort of behaviour isn't particular to Ukrainians. There are still Russians who revere Joseph Stalin. (Who was a Georgian, but whatever.) There are Germans who revere Hitler. Us Anglo-Americans think of Winston Churchill as a hero even though (among other things) it's highly likely that he (taking the advice of John Maynard Keynes) deliberately caused the Bengal Famine. The USA's Harry Truman consciously slaughtered tens of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, NOT to save one-million US-American lives, but to get a totally "unconditional" surrender from the Japanese and to intimidate the Soviets. And, of course, some Japanese still revere their hideously racist and murderous militarism. Every society pukes up monsters and afterwards has idiots who worship at the shrines of these monsters.
Anyway, ValJ's big failure is the total misinterpretation of my assertion that the USA provoked Russia into a war with Ukraine in an effort to weaken Russia. Instead, ValJ claimed that I said that Russia tried to weaken itself. I can only put this down to one of two things: 1) ValJ is a complete and total shithead, or 2) ValJ (while still being something of a shithead) was trying to say any kind of stupid thing in order to deflect from the main point and thereby avoid talking about NATO support for nazis. I don't know which is worse, being a hopeless moron or a snivelling coward.
Attempting to stay on topic I replied thusly:
ValJ,
????
No. I'm saying that the USA and its NATO allies funded, armed and trained Ukrainian nazis, provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, because they [the USA & NATO] hoped to weaken Russia.
To deny this, you would have to insist on so many stupid things that I can't be bothered to list them all. The simple fact that we're giving weapons to Ukrainian nazis is all you need to know to tell you who the baddies are in this story.
To which ValJ responded with some desperate flailing:
Thwap - that's a lot like a rapist's defense. "Your honour, it's her fault, she provoked me into it."
At the end of the day, Putin invaded a sovereign state and is waging war to occupy and, ultimately, assimilate their territory.
The childishness of it all!! The complete and total denial of history! The shittiness of the analogy! Just how is it I'm saying that Ukraine being provocatively dressed and thereby enticing Putin to invade her? Like this?
How does pointing out the FACTS of the USA using bonafide NAZIS to attack ethnic Russians in Ukraine, while flooding the country with weapons and threatening to have it join an anti-Russian alliance, and saying that these acts constitute a deliberate provocation of Russia, somehow equate to justifying a war of imperialist expansion? To believe that ValJ has to make the following three errors:
- To ignore the several warnings given by Putin (as well as by foreign policy experts like George Kennan and John Mearsheimer) that NATO's threatening eastward expansion was not welcomed by Russia and that including Ukraine in NATO was a glowing red-line that they should not cross. Relatedly, one has to pretend that Putin made three attempts to diffuse the crisis and maintain the integrity of Ukraine's 2014 borders (Minsk I & II and this December 2021 security architecture proposals) which were either deliberately undermined by the other side or arrogantly dismissed. I would remind ValJ and anyone who agrees with ValJ to remember that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has killed around 450,000 Ukrainians. If NATO had ANYTHING to do with the failures of diplomacy that led to that it should be AT LEAST cause for introspection.
- ValJ also has to pretend to believe that the USA would tolerate what it expected Russia to tolerate. The Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnic Russian. They wanted to separate from Ukraine back in 1991. Their separation from in 2014 is widely regarded as representative of the population's desires. But even if were not, expecting Russia to merely fondly wave farewell to its Crimean naval base as it was taken over by its enemies was unrealistic to say the least. The USA would never tolerate Hawaiian nationalists taking over Pearl Harbor with Russian or Chinese assistance and then allowing Russia or China to use it. The USA would never tolerate Canada or Mexico joining an anti-USA military alliance with Russia or China. At this moment the Americans are getting into a lather over a possible Chinese airstrip in Cuba. They're even having conniptions about China signing a security treaty with the Solomon Islands!
- ValJ's third error is to pretend that the world that (supposedly) exists inside their head is of greater significance to the real world. I'll let Caitlin Johnstone speak for me and get out of this numbered list.
Here she is:
The reason foreign policy realists like John Mearsheimer were able to correctly predict years in advance that the west’s aggressions toward Russia meant that “Ukraine is going to get wrecked” was because they were just looking objectively at the raw data of what the west was doing and what Russia’s national security positions were. They weren’t fixating on ideological shoulds and shouldn’ts or babbling about what would be the just and moral position for Russia to have in some alternate hypothetical universe, they were focused on what was happening and what would happen. And a lot of death and destruction would have been avoided if they’d been listened to.
...
That’s the main tool in the empire apologist’s toolbox these days: arguing with reality. If you point out the reality of where people are at in Moscow and Beijing with regard to western provocations on their nations’ borders, their only answer is to say “Yeah well that’s not how things should be so we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing.”
It’s like being warned that you’ll get punched if you keep yelling ethnic slurs in public but doing it anyway because you believe people should respect free speech, and then melodramatically clutching your broken nose and yelling that what happened should not have happened. Reality doesn’t care about your ideological shoulds and shouldn’ts; as far as reality is concerned, there’s just what happens and what does not happen. If you actually want to avoid certain outcomes, you can’t just heap a bunch of conceptual shoulds and shouldn’t on concrete circumstances — you’ve got to actually conduct yourself in a way that steers clear of those outcomes.
If we want to at least TRY to work with ValJ's stupid analogy of Ukraine being Putin's rape victim it would have to go something like this: The USA thought Putin was an out-of-control sexual predator. The USA dressed up Ukraine in a mini-skirt and a push-bra, fishnet stockings and "fuck-me" high-heels. Putin told the USA "Don't dress her that way! It's driving me out of my fucking mind!!!" The USA said: "Ukraine can dress anyway she wants to!" The USA gave Ukraine a knife to defend herself with and said "If that's not enough, just call. I've got your back." ... But I can't continue with this stupidity because it ignores the fact that ValJ is trying to conflate having Ukrainian nazis attacking and killing ethnic Russians in Ukraine and seeking to join NATO which will then fill Ukraine with offensive missile systems to destroy Russia and kill Russians (the same way the USA gradually surrounded and weakened weaker countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Afghanistan) as innocent and harmless actions, akin to a woman dressing to look sexy.
Again, it's possible that ValJ really is this stupid. But I rather think ValJ is more of a partisan hack and an intellectual coward who will block any facts that challenge their delusions and shamelessly say anything, no matter how idiotic, to divert and deflect arguments that they can't respond to.
Regardless, I dealt with their imbecilic analogy and attempted to stay on the topic of NATO empowering and arming nazis:
Anonymous,
Thank you for the lesson in morality. Now explain Biden's and NATO's support for Ukrainian nazis.
Alas, ValJ responded with yet more calculated dishonesty:
thwap, you think all the Ukrainians are Nazis? That seems highly unlikely as they tend not to vote for the far right.
Are Biden and NATO supporting only Ukrainian nazis or the whole country which has been invaded for no good reason? I mean, I highly doubt that NATO provoked Putin into anything, he's just a murderous asshole who wants to assimilate Ukraine.
Then there are all the fascists and neo-Nazis Putin has supported in Russia and elsewhere.
https://theconversation.com/putins-fascists-the-russian-states-long-history-of-cultivating-homegrown-neo-nazis-178535ValJ
There was so much bullshit in ValJ's reply that I could only deal with their downplaying the extent of the nazi influence on the Ukraine's military and ValJ's desperate resort to the illusory truth effect:
ValJ,
When did I ever say that ALL Ukrainians are nazis? I'll answer for you: I NEVER said that.
I'm going to engage with you here because you are expressing the same childish, deluded brainwashed propaganda lie that has led to Ukraine suffering 10X the deaths that so traumatized the USA's society in the decade of their Vietnam War. As well, your smug delusion is shared by so many others in North America who are cheering on a project that could conceivably result in a nuclear war between Russia and NATO.
In your reply you said this: "Are Biden and NATO supporting only Ukrainian nazis or the whole country which has been invaded for no good reason?"
So, there you admit that Biden and NATO have supported nazis. But you try to portray this as the inadvertent result of a desperate attempt to assist the entire Ukraine from Putin's "unprovoked" [the term repeatedly used by Washington propagandists] invasion. (Similar to your "invaded for no good reason.")
But your claim is false. The USA's support for Ukrainian nazis was direct and crucial for the coup that overthrew the Yanukovych government.
"However, occasionally, the inconvenient truth has slipped through. For instance, shortly after the February coup, the BBC described how the neo-Nazis spearheaded the violent seizure of government buildings to drive Yanukovych from power and were then rewarded with four ministries in the regime that was cobbled together in the coup’s aftermath."
I'll leave it there for this comment. Sometimes there are limits on how much you can type in a blogger comment window.
I didn't bother to read the link about Putin's support for the far-right in Russia and elsewhere because I'm already aware of that. I keep writing that I don't like Putin because it's true. He's a corrupt, far-right, reactionary. But the point isn't whether Putin is a nice man or a bad man. Truth be told, the US-American foreign-policy elites support "death squads" in Latin America, jihadist-fundamentalist nutbars in the Islamic and/or Arab world, and (as is the topic here) NAZIS in Ukraine. And they invade countries and destroy them. Are Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya better off now that the USA toppled their previous governments? No. They're FAR WORSE. For fuck's sake! The governments the USA and NATO propped-up in Afghanistan were so bad that the people sided with the Taliban against them! The US oligarchic elite are AT LEAST just as bad as Putin is.
Grasping at straws, the stupid ValJ pointed to the link to Consortium News and how it questioned whether Putin's reinforcements of his military in majority-Russian Crimea in 2014 was an "invasion" as somehow discounting the possibility of the Russian invasion eight years later:
Thwap, you linked a rabble rousing article from Dec 2021 that says:
"And now there’s the curious case of Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine, another alarmist claim trumpeted by the Kiev regime and echoed by NATO hardliners and the MSM."
You know there was a real invasion a few months later which is still going on. Tanks, bombs and all that. Civilians getting killed.
Your source doesn't appear all that credible.
The link is a 2021 re-posting of a 2014 article by award-winning journalist Robert Parry (who died in 2018). But even if it was from 2021, as I point out in my reply, Volodymyr Zelensky also discounted the possibility of an invasion until almost the last minute. (I'm pretty sure that ValJ is the sort of stupid liberal who still cites sources like the New York Times, or CNN as respectable sources even after decades of brazen lies and propaganda.)
ValJ,
Sigh. The issue that I originally brought up was NATO's present-day support of Ukrainian nazis. To whit; If it was a mistake to applaud a guy who fought for the nazis in WW2, why is it okay to support nazis in the 2020's?
As for your latest attempt to change the subject: You say my source isn't credible because they thought the imminent invasion claims were alarmist. Besides the fact that it references the BBC and the New York Times to back-up its case for the nazi presence in the Maidan coup (which is the subject at hand here), I'll tell you another source that discounted a Russian invasion: Volodymyr Zelensky!
"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday he believes 'there will be no war' with Russia, but cautioned that Ukraine will be prepared should Russian military aggression against his country escalate further." ... Feb. 22nd, 2022.
Will you finally, at long last, cease and desist in your stupidity and look at this issue without your insufferable, delusional sense of moral superiority???
Thwap, I think you'd be more at home on the platform once known as Twitter.
I didn't respond because at the time I was finished with the pointless argument with the dishonest hack in another blog's comment section. [As you can obviously tell, I had a change of heart.] But ValJ followed that with a link from the BBC (an impeccable source for reliable information) which I'm going to read for the first time.
"Prof Marples said that while far-right extremism still exists in Ukraine, it is much smaller than what Russian propaganda tries to make people believe.
"And Ukrainian elected officials are not tied to any far-right group in the country."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66914756
ValJ
So, what to say? What is the extent of Professor David Marple's argument about the negligible influence in Ukraine? From the BBC link there is nothing but Marple's claim. That's it. So, we're to forget about Zelensky praising Azov Battalian founder Andriy Biletsky. Here's a link to BBC's Channel 4 (taken from "Moon of Alabama"):
The man facing down Putin’s aggression as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy. He oversees national security for the nation having previously served as security commandant during the anti-government protests in Kiev.
Parubiy was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians.
The Social National Party would go on to become Svoboda, the far-right nationalist party whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok was one of the three most high profile leaders of the Euromaidan protests – negotiating directly with the Yanukovych regime.
...
Inside Right Sector was an alliance of hardline nationalist groups including Patriot of Ukraine and the paramilitary group UNA-UNSO, who have fought against Russian troops in Chechnya and Moldova. Their members paraded in balaclavas and wore uniforms bearing far-right insignia, including the wolfsangel.
In 1989 he joined the moderate nationalist group People’s Movement of Ukraine but from there went on to join the right wing Trizub organisation in 1994 and has been its leader since 2005, preaching and preparing for a Ukrainian “national revolution”.
...
The new Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych is a member of the far-right Svoboda party, which the World Jewish Congress called on the EU to consider banning last year along with Greece’s Golden Dawn.
The party, which has long called for a “national revolution” in Ukraine, has endured a long march from relative obscurity in the early 90s. Their declaration that Ukraine is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” has raised fears for the safety of the country’s Jewish population.
Svoboda now controls the ecology and agricultural ministry with Andriy Mokhnyk, the deputy head of Svoboda, running ecology and Ihor Shvaika as agriculture minister.
I think the following is apt:
Anyhow, the always worthwhile Purple Library Guy decided to intervene:
So . . . if I say something hasn't happened in January, and then it happens in August, that means I've lost all credibility? I don't think that's how the arrow of time works.
I think it's safe to say that Nazis have some influence to this day in the Ukrainian government, and that a certain softer fascism has a good deal of influence, to the point of making a pro-Nazi, highly racist fascist the official national hero, with holidays and statues and celebrations and stuff. But they're certainly not the only, or even for most purposes the dominant, current in the Ukrainian government. On the other hand, their willingness and ability to use violence has gained them a certain veto power on policy matters they consider core issues, which is relevant because they've been determinedly against peace with the Donbass ever since those guys rebelled.
As to the war itself, plenty of blame to go around. One can, at one and the same time, say that Russia ultimately bears the responsibility for choosing to go to war, while at the same time noting that this was an outcome NATO was trying for, and certainly that NATO and the US contemptuously ignored all proposals for negotiation to avoid war. It's like, if you spend years grabbing a little kid in class' arm and whacking him in the face with his own hand while saying "Stop hitting yourself" and generally tormenting him, and when he complains saying "what are you gonna do about it, wimp?" and then one day he gets a kitchen knife and shanks you, well, the kid shouldn't have stabbed you with a knife, but he did not do it for no reason.
So, in the case of Ukraine, some of the very top scholars in international relations, such as John Mearsheimer, as well as quite a few prominent diplomats, had pointed out in no uncertain terms that the prospect of Ukraine entering NATO would be quite likely to start a war, because Russia considered that a core, existential security issue. So when Russia complained about this prospect and NATO and the US repeatedly refused to negotiate about it, that kind of made war more likely. And it probably didn't help on that front when Russia twice brokered peace deals between Ukraine and the Donbass intended to result in the Donbass continuing to be part of Ukraine but with some autonomy so they could keep on speaking Russian, only to find that neither Ukraine nor their NATO backers had ever had any intention of honouring either of the deals, but were using them solely to gain time to beef up the Ukrainian army. We know this is the case, because top figures in NATO and Germany have openly said so. And it seems fairly clear that Russia's security fears have some justification, both historically (not so long since they lost millions of people after an invasion through Ukraine) and currently, since NATO policies really do seem aimed at attempting to weaken or ideally dismember Russia, and bringing Ukraine into the NATO fold really does seem to have been an objective in the service of that.
So it's stupid to say Russia had no reason to go to war--they had reasons that were such that numerous top people in the know predicted that Russia would feel it had little option but to do so, and that this would be the general position of the Russian power elites, not something embarked on because of Putin's personality. And indeed, one thing we do know about Russia is that there is near consensus on the subject of the war--the only real disagreement is that there are many who think the war effort should have been more total from the beginning. Putin might have actually had trouble staying in power had he failed to attack, after the repeated rebuffing of his diplomatic overtures.
All that said, I don't approve of invasions. So it would have been better if the Russians didn't invade, despite all the provocations. But--
But--I will say that the Russians had a better reason for their invasion than the US has had for any of the half dozen or so invasions it staged over the past 30-50 years. Come to that, probably a better reason than the US has had for any of its invasions back to its founding. So if, say, Pakistan or Eritrea want to condemn the invasion, then fine, but I don't think the US and its core allies really have a leg to stand on. You can't say Russia is beyond the pale and Putin is a madman for Ukraine, but the US and (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Vietnam) is just sort of indiscretions and the relevant presidents just good old boys who made minor mistakes. If one is a villain for one invasion, the other is more of a villain for multiple invasions. Or if the US is not a villain for multiple invasions, then gonna have to find some other reason for Russia being a villain because invading people apparently doesn't do it.
I mean Jesus Christ! What is one to do with someone so ignorant and stupid attempting to hold forth on weighty questions of international relations?!?? This is the country that invaded Iraq on the basis of bald-faced lies. Which has destroyed the Middle East. Which, when faced with an agry "mad man" with nuclear weapons, told him to go fuck himself! OF COURSE they're that irresponsible!
Of course at the public level it's a consensus manufactured by the state. Just like the US consensus on all their wars. This is hardly unusual. The point is, there is ELITE consensus in Russia, and has been since the end of Yeltsin and to some extent even during, that Ukraine in NATO is, as an ambassador to Russia put it quite a few years back, "the reddest of red lines", an existential threat. No matter what government is or was formed in Russia, pretty much everyone in charge of it would have agreed about that.
As to whether NATO really is that irresponsible . . . you haven't been following the foreign policy of NATO/US that much, have you? I mean come on, the Americans are currently part way through a process of trying to goad China into a hot war over Taiwan. How irresponsible can you bloody get?!
And, being a coward and a hack, "ValJ" ignored all of that and decided to smear me as an apologist for rape again:
Thwap: “Of course I disapprove of rape in a GENERAL sense. But when a girls CHOOSES to dress like that…”
Ukraine fears invasion by Russia, the country that once occupied it.
Russia invades the Crimea. Promises not to invade any more.
Russia invades again.
Russia’s not really doing much to demonstrate its respect for Ukrainian sovereignty, not to reduce Ukraine’s interest in a military alliance for its own defense.
Again, handing power in Ukraine over to nazis who think that Russians are subhuman and making threats to include Ukraine in an anti-Russian military alliance and rejecting all of Russia's efforts to deal with the subsequent concerns is not the equivalent of a woman getting dressed up to go to a nightclub.
Russia's "invasion" of Crimea wasn't the crime Western hypocrites and pearl-clutchers are trying to make it out to be. Most of Putin's troops were already in Crimea. As well, there is the real-world fact that the Russians have a very important naval base in Crimea. In "ValJ's" fantasy-land powerful countries are expected to meekly surrender such things in compliance with "the rules-based international order." In reality, serious people would accept that powerful countries will do what they feel is necessary to preserve their power and they would pursue diplomacy based on the world as it actually is rather than the dream world that exists in the heads of idiots like "ValJ" or the team of psychopaths surrounding the demented Biden.
The same holds for the Russian government's objections (not just Putin, because most non-stupid commentators have said that ANY Russian government would object) to Ukraine in NATO. Furthermore, US intelligence KNEW that the USA's actions were leading to an inevitable Russian invasion:
In an interesting speech about the way US imperial aggression provokes violence around the world, antiwar commentator Scott Horton made reference to an April 2022 article from Yahoo News that had previously escaped my attention.
The article is titled “In closer ties to Ukraine, U.S. officials long saw promise and peril,” and it features named and unnamed veterans of the US intelligence cartel saying that long before the February 2022 invasion they were fully aware that the US had “provoked” Russia in Ukraine and created a powderkeg situation that would likely lead to war.
“By last summer [meaning the summer of 2021], the baseline view of most U.S. intelligence community analysts was that Russia felt sufficiently provoked over Ukraine that some unknown trigger could set off an attack by Moscow,” a former CIA official told Yahoo News’ Zach Dorfman, who adds, “(The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.)”
Dorfman writes that initial support provided to Ukraine during the Obama administration had been “calibrated to avoid aggravating Moscow,” but that “partially spurred by Congress, as well as the Trump administration, which was more willing to be aggressive on weapon transfers to Kyiv, overt U.S. military support for Ukraine grew over time — and with it the risk of a deadly Russian response, some CIA officials believed at the time.”
...
So while we members of the public were blindly speculating about whether or not Russia would attack Ukraine, the US intelligence cartel was fully aware that the US was taking actions ensuring that that would happen. That’s the environment the US security state knew it was operating under when it continued to taunt the idea of adding Ukraine and Georgia to NATO right up until the final moments before the invasion.
This war wasn’t just provoked, it was knowingly provoked. Off ramp after off ramp was sped past by the US war machine at a hundred miles an hour on its beeline toward a horrific proxy war, because empire managers had calculated that such a war would serve US interests. And now we routinely see US officials like Mitch McConnell openly saying that this war serves US interests.
They really couldn’t be more obvious about it if they tried.
It’s been funny to watch the response of empire apologists to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s surprising refutation of a year and a half of empire propaganda by openly admitting that NATO expansion provoked the invasion of Ukraine and acknowledging that NATO powers rejected Moscow’s proposed compromises which could have averted the war. Basically the only argument they now have after this admission is to say that Russia should not have viewed NATO expansion as an existential threat.
Their only remaining trick is to argue with reality; to basically say that yes it’s reality that NATO expansion provoked this war because Moscow saw it as a threat, but reality shouldn’t have been what reality was. They argue that Russia should have felt completely different feelings about a military threat on its border than nations like the United States would feel, since as we’ve discussed previously the last time there was a credible military threat near the US border the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended.
And, besides knowing they were provoking Russia; knowing that they were asking Russia to accept things that they would never accept for themselves; it's also the case that the USA is the last country in the world to be complaining about other countries invading each other. They invaded Afghanistan by choice. They invaded Iraq based on brazen lies about WMDs. Their troops remain in Iraq even after the Iraqi parliament demanded that they leave. US troops are illegally occupying one-third of Syria (the part with the oil). They attacked Libya and let it fall to pieces. They subsidize Israel's illegal occupation and outright theft of Palestinian lands.
Well, ... that'll do'er. Again, this wasn't because I was upset with "ValJ." I'm upset with the widespread mental and moral failure that has caused so many millions of North Americans to think the way that "ValJ" does. For the life of me I don't see how people can forget what is such recent history of past US lies and deceptions and hypocrisies and contradictions. I can't see how people can't grasp the very real danger of nuclear war that this US-fomented tragedy has caused. I can't see how people are shrugging their shoulders and inventing stupid rationalizations for our support for actual goddamned nazis!!!
I
No comments:
Post a Comment