Another perspective
The headline news couldn’t be more categorical. Putin has lied to give himself an excuse for invading Ukraine.
In 1964, the USA launched a large-scale invasion of South Vietnam. The propaganda justified the invasion by saying that 2 US vessels were attacked in the Bay of Tonkin. It was a lie. President Lyndon Johnson KNEW it was a lie. The USA escalated its invasion anyway, until 10 years and 2 million horrible civilian deaths later, the USA were thrown out. On a scale of 1 to 10 in shocking-ness, Johnson’s decision rated a solid 12.
The Monroe Doctrine
Once upon a time in 1823, the USA had a President called James Monroe who proposed a Doctrine, according to which the USA would consider as potentially hostile any intervention by international powers in the affairs of the two Americas. You will notice that’s a very wide geography, covering not just the border countries to the USA, but others 10,000 km away like Argentina and Chile! Already 200 years ago, America aspired to be top dog in the Western hemisphere, and had started marking for itself a huge territory going way beyond its own fences, denying sovereign nations in the Americas the freedom to choose their international allegiances. That was 40 years after the USA won its own freedom from the Brits. The slave would turn very quickly into a ruthless master. Over the years the USA applied the Monroe Doctrine with brute force (except for one of its tenets – see below). They supported terrorists in El Salvador, in Honduras, in Guatemala, in Nicaragua and elsewhere, terrorists who were fighting democratically-elected Governments. The USA even invaded tiny Granada with its 200,000 population. These were countries on or near its doorstep.
Like Ukraine with Russia.
A few examples In Guatemala, the CIA helped to remove Arbenz Guzman, elected President, someone from a rich family but with a social conscience who favored policies to uplift the poorest in his country. He was replaced by a slew of dictators, who carried out widespread torture and murder, but were backed by the US Government because they supported the plunder of the country’s resources by American corporations. Nicaragua is a classic case of hypocrisy on a galactic scale. In the 1980’s, the Reagan / Bush Administration sold arms to Iran (its mortal enemy since Ayatollah Khomenei overthrew the USA’s puppet, the Shah of Iran in 1979), using Israel (another sworn enemy of Iran) as a conduit for the arms sales, and for channeling Iran’s payments to the Contras who were fighting the Sandinistas. Does it get any more perverse than this? The dealings also breached US Congress resolutions to stop funding the Contras. Many in the Reagan / Bush administration were condemned, but were soon pardoned. Of course. They were criminals, but they were “our criminals”!
The first 9/11
People associate 9/11 with the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in 2001, killing some 2,800 people. There was a first 9/11 in 1973, when the CIA backed Pinochet to overthrow democratically elected Salvatore Allende in Chile. Nixon had called for his ouster several years before, and the CIA duly obliged. Pinochet turned out to be one of the most brutal dictators in history, and was subsequently convicted of crimes against humanity. But he was America’s brutal dictator, so that’s ok then! Hundreds of thousands died under his regime. A hundred times more than the second 9/11, but nobody is interested in the first 9/11.
I mentioned earlier the Vietnam war. Nowhere near the Americas! In Vietnam, America used chemical weapons like napalm and white phosphorus to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. When Allen Dulles took over as CIA boss in 1953, he raised another false flag. Decrying the bad boy behavior of the USSR, he announced that the USA would develop its own program of biological and chemical warfare, as if “in defense”. In truth, the Americans were already advanced in their mind control experiments, and just wanted to legitimize their own development of these devastating weapons, which were subsequently unleashed on the poor civilians of South Vietnam. Is Russia less trustworthy than the USA, and are they more likely to lie to justify their interventions? The answer is a resounding no. The Russians had good teachers, and they learned fast.
Cuba – the ultimate irony
The most glaring and egregious application of the Monroe Doctrine was the Cuban missile crisis. Two nations, the USSR and Cuba, agreed to position missiles in Cuba. It was their sovereign right. The USA blockaded Cuba, and took the world to the brink of war, because it felt threatened by the missiles. There was firstly no legality in this blockade, an action which is valid only when two states are at war, and one wishes to stop the other receiving shipments from external sources. The USA and Cuba were NOT at war, so the USA was in breach of international convention. But the ultimate irony was that years earlier, the USA had installed missiles in Turkey capable of striking the USSR. Who’s the aggressor? As always, the narrative to justify this and other deployments was that the USSR had developed huge capabilities to hit the USA with. The reality was that never in history has the USSR ever achieved the military might to launch a first strike and defeat the USA. They were always trying to play catch up, until Gorbachev, visionary as he was and with the USSR unable to sustain massive military spending, proposed large scale demilitarization and denuclearization. This did not suit the aggressively hawkish US Governments (Republican and Democrat), and threatened the profits of the defense contractors who make billions because they have lots of US Congressmen in their back pockets. America spends more than the next 10 countries combined on defense, 9 of whom are its allies, and presumably buy lots of American weaponry! It pays to add that the USA has not yet learnt that trillions of dollars spent on ballistic missiles did not prevent them from being kicked out of Vietnam in the 1970’s and Afghanistan last year. In the long run, wars are won by hearts and minds. The USA has some 800 military bases around the world. Some say the figure exceeds 1,000. Russia has a fraction of that number. Who’s the aggressor? I have set the scene above to show how ruthlessly the USA has interfered and intervened not only in countries along its borders, but others far away like South Vietnam and Iran, financing terrorists, removing democratically elected heads of state, sometimes even resorting to assassination. In all these cases, the victims were not some crazy communist ideological bigots, but merely nationalists who wanted to use the rich resources of their country to alleviate the misery of their citizens, rather than allow plunder by American corporations. All this time, not so much as a whisper of dissent from Europe. We can judge Russia in Ukraine against this backdrop. Ah yes! There is one tenet of the Monroe Doctrine which the USA decided not to follow. Monroe said not to interfere in Europe. Well, you can cherry pick what you like in any doctrine, and throw the rest out!
America turns military bully
The aftermath of World War II marks the beginning of global bullying by the USA. There was NO NEED to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan was beaten already and had made several overtures through the Russians for a negotiated surrender. But the USA wanted to show the world, especially the USSR, just who was the boss, and don’t you mess with us! The cost was millions of Japanese dead or maimed for life by the radioactive fallout. That’s a crime against humanity!
The USA would argue that it did not trust Russia, especially with Stalin at the helm, hence the flexing of muscles and the saber-rattling. We need ask whether Russia can trust the West at all. If you aspire to lead the world, as the USA does, and be a model for other nations to trust and follow, you must come with clean hands, not with the sordid baggage the USA carries with it.
There is another reason why the Russians are so distrustful of the West and of America. All the narrative around WWII was about VE Day, the Normandy landing, Omaha Beach, the French Resistance, etc. etc. In truth, Russia bore the brunt of that war. You could say Russia won the war for the West, and saved the West’s bacon.
Other Assassinations
About one million Britons died in WWII, civilians and soldiers. A few hundred thousand Americans died. The Russians lost 24 MILLION lives. Yes Sir! Nearly 1.2 million Russians died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone. Russia was screaming for the Allies to open a second front in the West as early as 1942, which would have squeezed Germany much earlier, and shortened the war by one year at least. The USA and the Allies were happy to see Russia weakened and brought to its knees slogging away against the mighty Germans, and the Brits and Americans were more interested in gallivanting in North Africa, to carve up the oil resources there. If you were Russian, you wouldn’t touch the West with a ten-foot pole.
Other assassinations
I mentioned Allende in Chile. The CIA assassinated the duly elected Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, because he was “too socialist”, replacing him with the brutal regime of the Shah. As JFK was taking office as President in 1961, the CIA delivered Patrice Lumumba, duly elected Prime Minister of the Congo, into the hands of his opponents, sending him to certain death. Lumumba had asked for UN support against the rebels who coveted the resource-rich Katanga region, backed by the Belgians, who wanted to continue the plunder started under Léopold IV. The UN agreed to support Lumumba.
Lumumba turned to the USA, who turned its back on Lumumba. He then looked towards the USSR. In the eyes of the USA, that was “betrayal”, and Lumumba was labelled a “communist” with a death sentence virtually guaranteed. He was eventually killed by Mobutu’s gang, with the backing of Belgium and the USA. Mobutu became very famous eventually. His personal wealth was apparently equal to the National debt of his country.
The USSR created the Warsaw Pact, uniting the communist countries under its control. What is forgotten is that the Warsaw Pact was created SIX years AFTER NATO was formed to unite the Western countries under USA’s leadership, as a bulwark against the USSR. Of course, NATO also enabled the USA to sell billions of dollars of arms to Western Europe. Most notably, Eisenhower, outgoing Republican US President in 1960, a 4-star General who was Commander of the Allied Forces in WWII, lamented the power of the “military industrial complex”, which was feeding on lucrative defense contracts, and which exported more arms to kill and to maim than any other country in the world. Who’s the aggressor?
Propaganda
The USA invaded Iraq in 2003 under Bush 43 with the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld winking at the camera and saying he knew where to find the weapons of mass destruction. None were found. The invasion was motivated by highly flawed (more likely deliberately doctored) intelligence, to justify the “regime change” which had been the talk of Washington for years. Another Gulf of Tonkin false flag? Hundreds of thousands have died, and the place is still a mess! Who’s the aggressor?
Do you believe everything / anything you are told by the Western media, and Western politicians? The media companies are controlled by large corporations, who toe the Government line. This makes them no different from state-controlled media in Russia and elsewhere. No objectivity. Perhaps we should listen to them with a huge bag of salt, as they push a narrative to promote the status of America, the most powerful country on earth, as the defender of democracy and freedom. Is that what the USA really did when they got rid of Arbenz Guzman, Allende, Mossadegh, Lumumba, and countless others? And whenever you hear that Putin or Brezhnev, or Yeltsin, or any Russian, cannot be trusted, ask yourself whether most Western politicians, and Western media anchors, can be trusted with telling the truth.
To return to Ukraine, Putin is applying his own Monroe doctrine! Let’s call it the Monrov doctrine, to add a touch of Russian-ness. He is faced with an expanding NATO, which has gradually encircled Russia. Would America tolerate a Russian satellite state on its borders?
Putin’s invasion cannot be justified on any grounds, legal or humanitarian. It can be “explained” though. He has been pushed into a corner by an expanding NATO, despite repeated pledges given since the disintegration of the USSR that NATO would NOT continue to expand. I don’t know why the Russians trusted the USA and Western Europe to deliver on their commitments, but there you are. Putin is literally now like a cornered animal, and that’s extremely dangerous. The outlook is dire, at the macro level in terms of global tensions and spiraling oil prices, and at the local level by the thousands of refugees who will lose their homes and become citizens of nowhere. More instability, more human misery. Huge threats to world peace. Putin will not win hearts and minds by this invasion, and has just created yet another cauldron of conflict and tension which will simmer for decades.
Double Standards
Violent interventions are to be condemned, by whoever perpetrated, including Putin. On the other hand, most US Presidents since World War II presided over administrations which sanctioned CIA killings overseas, interfered blatantly in other nations’ affairs, financed terrorist activity against democratically elected governments, practiced torture including water boarding on a massive scale. In Guantanamo Bay, most of the detainees who were eventually tried were released for lack of evidence, which says a lot about the presumption of innocence so dear to our sense of justice. Let’s not forget Abu Ghraib as well. All this was in breach of all imaginable laws and conventions on human rights. Does the USA have the moral right to give lessons to anybody else? You judge. In any event, the USA chooses which laws and conventions it abides by, and the rest of the world can stuff it.
I will finish with a question. Israel has ignored dozens of resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the UN Human Rights Commission. Israel has breached international law, been deemed by the UN to be an “occupying force” in the West Bank, guilty of land confiscation, racial and ethnic discrimination, and suppression of freedom of movement. It has created what Amnesty International describes as a regime of apartheid. Do we hear any calls for sanctions against Israel, the freezing of its assets? Come on USA, EU, (post-Brexit) UK, where is your sense of justice? This is not an apology for Russia. But one needs to denounce the blatant hypocrisy prevailing in the USA and the West, the lies, the propaganda, the false flags, by countries who have lost the moral high ground. I have loads of American and European friends, lovely people, many of whom agree wholeheartedly with the above, and who denounce the extreme right militaristic turn made by the USA since the end of WWII, and even more later under Reagan. The mainstream media will not report on the above facts, but they are reported regularly in writings by American authors themselves, brilliant men and women who have a conscience, and who are shocked by the double standards practiced by their own country.
The USA makes me angry, but it also makes me sad. The world needs leadership, but the example needs to come from the top dog. The world does not need watchdogs as much as it needs a true champion of democracy and freedom. The USA has long ago forfeited any claim to this role.
The model has been simple: Might is right.
The behavior of the US is typical of a civilization in decline. It peaked in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and now Hubris has set in. Irrational arrogance. A sure sign that the slide is on its way. The rot has taken root. The USA will lose its status as the World’s Number 1 economic power within 10 years. China is already more advanced in 5G technology, and recently in Hypersonic space flight. Already 5 of the 10 largest banks in the world are Chinese, with only 2 US banks in the top 10. Just imagine what will happen to the US when (not if) the US Dollar loses its status as the world’s main reserve currency. Who will finance the huge deficits required to fund even more defense spending, as the frantic and desperate struggle to remain top dog spirals out of control?
India will overtake the USA for the number 2 economic power slot within 25-30 years. And they will be joined in the top 10, a few steps further down admittedly, by Russia, by some of the Latin American countries who are waking up and asking relevant questions about their past, and Asian economies which are turbocharged for growth. Within the lifetime of our children, certainly our grandchildren, the USA has to address a very important question: how would it like to be treated by the new superpowers once it loses its number 1 and 2 slots. Or will it just carry on bullying the weakest, trampling on human rights by supporting the most brutal regimes around the world, until, as will inevitably happen, it gets a taste of its own medicine. I can’t wait to find out!
Kyrios