Spinning Anti-Russia Line
| Brian CLOUGHLEY | 15.09.2015 | 08:00 |
It was not pointed out that in 2014 the coup in Kiev had been fostered and encouraged by Washington’s overt and covert agents who had spent some five billion dollars on buying “democracy” in Ukraine. The CNN interview of Victoria Nuland, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, in which she admits the vast expenditure, was nauseating in its grovelling deference, with the interviewer failing to ask why, in her five billion dollar pursuit of a pro-US government in Ukraine, she had made the revealing telephone statement that “I don't think Klitsch [Vitali Klitschko, now Mayor of Kiev] should go into the government. I don't think it's necessary, I don't think it's a good idea… I think Yats [Arseniy Yatsenyuk, now prime minister] is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know.” (Oleg Tyagnibok, an ultra-right-wing politician, was reported in the New York Times in 2012 as referring to the “Jewish-Russian mafia which rules in Ukraine.”)
And so it came to pass: the awkward boxer Klitsch didn’t go into government – but as a Poroshenko disciple and Mayor of Kiev he can now put down anti-government protests in that unhappy capital. Yats, on the other hand, is a poppet puppet and got the second top job, while the democratic Tyahnybok remains leader of the Свободаor ‘Freedom’ Party.
This was Nuland’s — and America’s — model for “democracy” in Ukraine, and they thought it right that those appointed by the US-selected President Poroshenko should also be approved by Washington. Which they were. And one wonders from whom they now take their orders. As Forbes reported, “Prime Minister [Yatsenyuk] of Ukraine has urged US partners to actively use the investment opportunities offered by the privatization campaign in Ukraine, particularly in the energy sector.”
Ms Nuland’s favourite fixer, Prime Minister ‘Yats’, has a strange sense of history and in January 2015 declared that “All of us still clearly remember the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. That has to be avoided. And nobody has the right to rewrite the results of the Second World War. And that is exactly what Russia’s President Putin is trying to do.” His ludicrous misrepresentation of well-documented events could not be denied, although its absurdity received little publicity in the west, which is selective about reporting from Ms Nuland’s dreamland.
The true version of events is recorded in War of the Century – When Hitler Fought Stalin, by Laurence Rees, which states that “The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941… As the German armies swept further into the Russian heartland, one million Soviet troops were drafted to protect Kiev [which] fell and 600,000 Soviet soldiers were captured… Nazi rule over the territories they captured from Russia was draconian… In the Ukrainian town of Kharkov, which was administered by the German army, 100,000 people died of starvation and disease.”
But truth does not satisfy the supporters of Ms Nuland’s Yats, any more than it pleases Ms Nuland herself, and there was never any attempt by the West to set the record straight. That would have meant embarrassment for Yats, Ms Nuland’s little pet whose accession to power was facilitated by riots that sparked the US-engineered coup.
The stance of the foul-mouthed vulgar Nuland and other supporters of the rebellion was that as there had been riots that showed the unpopularity of the government, therefore the government had to go.
But after the recent riots and killings outside the parliament in Kiev there were no western pundits declaring that these disturbances should result in western-supported replacement of the present government. On the other hand, there were many western media commentators using “historical background” to try to prove that the current shambles in Ukraine is entirely the fault of Russia.
The West’s anti-Russian propaganda included declarations that there had been “annexation” of Crimea by Russia, which is now accepted as fact throughout the US-NATO military grouping.
What happened was that in March 2014 the ethnically Russian Crimea region declared itself to be separate from Ukraine. There was a referendum on sovereignty by its 2 million inhabitants of whom some 90 percent are Russian-speaking, Russian-cultured and Russian-educated, and who, in the approving words of the American Declaration of Independence, voted to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” in order to rejoin Russia. (Note the historically correct word ‘rejoin’ which never appears in the western media.) It would be strange if they did not wish accession to a country that welcomes their kinship, empathy and loyalty.
As I’ve written before: in June 2014 President Obama declared that “we will not accept Russia’s occupation of Crimea” but has not said what he intends to do to reverse the free and open accession of the Crimean people to Russia. Does he for one moment imagine that his goal of “a Europe that is whole and free and at peace” would be attainable if Crimea were to be wrenched from Russia and given to Ukraine? Does he truly believe that if Ukraine took over Crimea there would be any possibility that its inhabitants would, in the words of his own nation’s Declaration of Independence, enjoy “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? Has Obama thought about what would happen if two million people who have made it clear that they do not want to be ruled by Ukraine, were suddenly ordered to accept rule by Ukraine? And who would give such an order?
Obama’s anti-Russian speeches in the UN General Assembly and other forums have been aggressively confrontational – and they won’t be forgotten by the Russian people who don’t appreciate such absurdly bellicose slogans as “the United States is and will remain the one indispensable nation in the world.” This immature approach to international relations has become the hallmark of administrations in Washington and although regarded with hilarity by many millions around the world is nonetheless patronizing, supercilious and offensive – and potentially dangerous, because it whips up national belligerence which is in turn manipulated by such as the demented Trump, who just might become leader of the “indispensable nation.”
The energetic spinning of the anti-Russian line is going too far, and the damage will be long-lasting. But that doesn’t matter to Washington, because US investors will prosper from the wheeling and dealing of Yats and his friends. It all comes down to profit, in the end.
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| Tags: Ukraine |
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