Let’s suppose an enemy is out to get you.
He bought houses on your
street and amassed his armed gangs on the edge of your property, despite
promising not to.
He also attempted to ruin you financially, by trying to get
businesses and banks not to deal with you.
You respond to this bullying by placing missiles in your garden and get
your friends round to defend your house.
Your enemy then plays the victim and
accuses you of ‘aggression’ and trying to start a conflict.
Sounds like pretty outrageous behavior, don’t you think?
But that's
exactly what NATO is doing today to Russia.
Last Sunday, 4,000 troops from the NATO alliance took part in Operation Iron Sword 2016 in Lithuania, the largest such maneuvers to date.
Also, 4,000
more troops are being deployed in Poland and the Baltic states.
Now, if I were a Russian citizen, I’d be pretty alarmed by
NATO’s Drang Nach Osten.
The NATO deployments are after all the largest massing
of foreign troops on Russia’s borders since 1941, when the Nazis invaded and
killed 27 million Russian and Soviet citizens.
There’s still quite a few
Russians around who can remember those dark days and don’t want them repeated.
But, guess what, when Russia responds to NATO’s hostile
acts by sensibly deploying Iskander missiles and air defenses in Kaliningrad,
the US State Department says Russia has nothing to worry about!
NATO, we’re
told, is only responding to Russian ‘aggression’.
We’ve entered the
looking-glass world of Lewis Carroll when those threatening the peace are
posing as the good guys, while those who are defending their country from
attack are billed as ‘aggressors’ who we have to be terrified of.
Everything about the NATO ‘defensive’ narrative is false,
in the same way, that everything about the Nazi narrative in 1941 was too.
Any
objective analysis of the situation, which takes in the historical background,
will arrive at the conclusion that it’s NATO which is threatening Russia, and
not the other way round.
Take the events in Ukraine, which are cited as a
justification for NATO’s recent troop build-ups.
In NATO and the EU, the
toppling of the Yanukovych government was depicted as a victory for ‘people
power’.
Russia then ‘invaded’ Ukraine to seize Crimea.
That ‘aggressive’ act by
the Big Bad Bear showed us that not only Moscow needed to be sanctioned, but
that we needed more NATO deployments in Eastern Europe to stop further Russian
land-grabs.
In fact, Ukraine was an example of Western, and not Russian,
expansionism.
The US and EU choreographed and financed the ousting of a
democratically elected government, to bring ‘their’ favored politicians to
power and push the country into the NATO/EU orbit.
Here we can listen to
Victoria Nuland of the State Department and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt
discussing who should and shouldn’t be in the new, ‘democratic’ Ukrainian
government.
With the government, many of them had voted for being
illegally overthrown, and violent neo-Nazi thugs rampaging on the streets, the
predominantly Russian population of Crimea quite understandably said ‘Enough is
Enough’ - and voted to rejoin Russia in a referendum.
This exercising by the
people of Crimea of their democratic rights was portrayed by NATO propagandists
in the West as Russian aggression, but it was the imperialist NATO powers,
and not Moscow, who had provoked a crisis.
And not for the first time.
NATO poses as a guarantor of peace and security, but in
fact its warmongering has made Europe and the world a much more dangerous
place.
Think back to 1999 and the 78-day
bombing of socialist Yugoslavia.
Then the alliance
broke not only
international law but its own constitution, which only allowed the use of force
when a member state was attacked.
The bombing caused a humanitarian
crisis and left much of the infrastructure of Yugoslavia destroyed.
The people
of the region are still dealing with the
after-effects of NATO dropping around
15,000 tons of depleted uranium on them.
And remember, this was supposed to have been a humanitarian intervention.
Then in 2011, NATO attacked Libya, transforming the country
with the highest living standards in Africa into a failed state.
The toppling
of Gaddafi turned Libya into a haven for ISIS and other extremist groups, and
helped to instigate a refugee/migrant exodus of Biblical proportions.
It also
destabilized surrounding countries such as Tunisia, where, in 2015, 38
tourists, 30 of them British, were slaughtered on the beach in a terrorist
attack.
NATO helping to keep us safe? What a sick joke.
As many old Cold War 1.0 warriors have argued, NATO should
have been consigned to the dustbin of history in 1991, at the same time the Warsaw
Pact was torn up.
But instead, it morphed into the expansionary war machine
it is today.
Just imagine for a moment if the situation had been
reversed.
That back in the 90s, Russia had kept the Warsaw Pact going, while
NATO had been scrapped.
Imagine if Russia, breaking promises it had made to the
West, had spent the past 20 years expanding the Warsaw Pact right up to the
borders of the US.
And that in 2014, the Kremlin had orchestrated a coup in
Canada to bring to power a new pro-Russian government, with extreme
anti-American forces at the forefront of the revolution.
Would establishment
commentators be saying Russia was acting in self-defense, and that the US and
its allies had nothing to worry about?
I think not.
Probably the most obnoxious thing about Western policy
toward Russia is the refusal to acknowledge the country which suffered more
than any other in World War Two has any legitimate security interests at all.
We can put our troops right on Russia’s borders, but if the Kremlin responds
by deploying missiles, well, they’re the ones who are paranoid.
This is the psychology of the schoolyard bully, who thinks
he can harass, taunt and threaten all he likes, while his victim has no right
to retaliate.
Only the bully has rights, not those whom he persecutes.
The victim’s concerns are haughtily dismissed.
And so it is with Russia.
If things were bad enough before
the US Presidential election, since November 8 they’ve got a whole lot worse.
The possibility that President Donald Trump might reset relations with
Moscow, and work together with Vladimir Putin to smash ISIS, which most sane people
around the world would love to see, seems to have induced something of a wild
panic among Western bear-baiters
We’ve had McCarthyite reports from the
NATO-linked Atlantic Council and the Henry Jackson Society, and an increase in anti-Russian rhetoric from the usual suspects.
But the problem the Russia-bashers have is public opinion.
Americans and Europeans want jobs, decent well-paid jobs and not policies which
will propel us into World War Three.
Western politicians who have called for better relations
with Russia have been doing extraordinarily well in elections, with Donald
Trump only the latest example.
Rather than turning the public against them
elite attacks on those who reject Cold War 2.0, and the labeling of them as Putin stooges or Russian agents, only seems to increase their appeal.
France is likely to break with its current anti-Russian
stance after next year’s Presidential election, with both François Fillon and
Marine Le Pen opposing NATO’s aggressive policies.
While in Britain, Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran peace campaigner, has called for Western leaders to
demilitarize the borders between Russia and Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, the man
most likely to be the next leader of UKIP, Paul Nuttall, has also made his
position on Russia clear, and it’s not a neocon one.
In Germany, Angela
Merkel’s popularity ratings have slumped jeopardizing her chances of winning a
fourth term in office next year.
The anti-Russian hawks are in trouble as the political map
in the west is being redrawn, and ‘extreme center‘ politicians receive their
marching orders from disgruntled voters.
NATO’s Drang Nach Osten can be
reversed, and hopefully genuine people power will achieve it.