Will America risk a war with Russia to keep it’s war based economy going to prevent the continuing downward spirat of its economy? This article by Eric Zuesse is worth a read. Listen to our podcast “The War if Words Against Russia Could Turn Hot” (following the story below) for some thoughtful commentary. [Ed.-TEC]
 

Eric ZUESSE | 05.05.2016 | Popular Resistance

America’s Biggest of All Big Lies. We’re Not Threatening Russia

On April 26thReuters headlined from Romania, “We’re Not Here to ‘Provoke,’ Say US Pilots on Putin’s Doorstep,” and gave as an example: ‘We’re not here to provoke anybody, we’re here to work with our allies,’ says Dan Barina, a 26-year-old pilot on his first trip to a region where tensions have risen markedly since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Romania’s neighbor Ukraine two years ago.
How can it not be ‘provoking’, when Russia now faces a threat from Obama and America’s NATO alliance, that’s vastly worse than what America had faced from the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the USSR’s Warsaw Pact alliance in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis? That was just one missile-base, 90 miles from the US – not dozens of them, some right on Russia’s border. Are those American pilots idiots to believe their superiors’ absurd statements about what their mission is, or is insanity the explanation here – or, is there even some third explanation possible for this oblivious statement from the American pilot? Perhaps those soldiers and airmen are simply drowning in (or drunk with) US propaganda? They really believe that Russia is moving too close to NATO, not that NATO has already moved too close to Russia? Really? The Reuters report said that NATO countries were doing this to protect themselves from an increasingly aggressive Russia. Wow. But that’s the line promoted by US President Barack Obama. And he’s accepted as a decent person not only by the millions of voters in his own Democratic Party (though not in the Republican Party, which blames him for everything except the truth: that he is governing so far to the right that they have to concoct false ‘leftist’ reasons to criticize him); but, he’s also respected even by the public in Europe, where they suffer the flood of refugees from the invasions he leads. After all: one must never underestimate the power of propaganda, to warp the public’s minds.
On February 2nd, the US ‘Defense’ Secretary, Russia-hater Ashton Carter, announced – and the equally Russia-hating NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed and endorsed – America’s quadrupling of its troops and weapons on and near Russia’s northwestern borders; and America’s pilot Dan Barina is part of this extremely hostile action, by the US and NATO, against the people in Russia.
Russia is now surrounded, on and near its borders, by numerous US nuclear weapons – weapons and troops that are as close to St. Petersburg and Moscow as they can possibly get without actually invading Russia.
In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the USSR and ended its Warsaw Pact, upon a promise from the regime of US President George Herbert Walker Bush to the then-Soviet (soon-to-become merely Russian) leader, that NATO would move “not one inch to the east” – a promise which the American President told his people in private was actually a lie, but which they, and all subsequent US Presidents, have accepted as Western policy founded on that lie, by expanding NATO not merely “one inch to the east,” but right up to Russia’s very borders. That’s what this February 2nd policy by US President Barack Obama and his NATO stooges is bringing substantially closer to culmination.
How can this not be provocative? What type of idiot can believe his superiors when they say “We’re not here to provoke anybody?” Of course, it’s not to ‘provoke’ Russians: it’s to downright terrify them. They’d have to be crazy not to be terrified, at being increasingly surrounded by these WMD, from what is increasingly clearly their enemy.
This big lie, that what America is doing there is ‘defensive’, is stanched up by other, lesser, lies, such as Obama’s lie that the reason why he’s expanding America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (anti-ballistic missile, or ‘star wars’) system, in Europe, has been to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles. Iran never had nuclear weapons, and Obama reached an agreement with Iran that will for decades prevent Iran from having them, but he still expands the SDI system right up to Russia’s borders, as ‘protection against Iran’. The people who protest against Obama’s lies are then marginalized as mere kooks, which is the way to get idiots to ignore even the most barefaced facts (such as Western terrorization of the Russian population), because only idiots can continue to believe such liars as the Obama regime, when their lies are as obvious as this. These protests against Obama and NATO and all of Western aggression, aren’t coming from America’s Republicans or other right-wingers: the smearing of these protesters with that broad-brush taint can be believed only by idiots – people who are willingly suckers, suckers notwithstanding the blatancy with which the facts run against the lies they swallow.
From the very get-go, in 1983 – when the Republican US President, Ronald Reagan (with the active support of Ashton Carter at MIT), started the SDI project, under the lie that disabling a combatant’s retaliatory ability isn’t profoundly aggressive against that opponent (basically checkmating him) – the SDI concept was aimed at achieving an invasion of the Soviet Union which couldn’t be effectively countered; it was aimed ultimately at replacing the balance-of-power system of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD), by a gross imbalance of power that would enable conquest of the opponent; it would enable a blitz-attack against the Soviet Union, an attack to which it would be impossible to respond via a counter-attack; it would enable an attack which would pre-emptively disable that response. In other words: it’s all a con, a lie, to say that SDI is ‘purely a defensive measure’. It can be the most decisive aggressive measure, the only way that’s even conceivable to ‘win’ a nuclear war (as some of the West’s aristocrats think can be done).
Wikipedia notes about Ashton Carter: ‘Carter was a supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as an advocate of preventive wars against North Korea and Iran. In response to increase in tension in Ukraine, Carter considered proposing deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe that could pre-emptively destroy Russian weapons.’ That’s a ‘hawkish’ background just as Hillary Clinton’s is, virtually indistinguishable from that of George W Bush and Dick Cheney; and yet, when he was starting his political career in a region where the opposition to invading Iraq was strong, Obama claimed that he opposed invading Iraq. Yet, somehow, once he was finally inside the White House, suddenly the people he was surrounding himself with were Wall-Street-backed individuals who had supported invading Iraq (and any other country whose leader was friendly toward Russia). He did to Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, what George W Bush did to Iraq. If that’s not fraudulent ‘democracy’, then what is? The public had been given no indication they would be getting, with Barack Obama, merely a more-articulate version of George W Bush.
America has been lying not only regarding its aggressive designs against the Soviet Union, but (and this is far more heinous) – afterward, when the supposed ‘ideological’ reason for the Cold War had ended – it is lying even more blatantly in its ‘justifications’ for its (and NATO’s) anti-Russia policies despite communism having ended and the Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact) disbanded.
How much longer will the aristocracy that control the US Government be able to get away with such obvious lies, such continuation and even escalation of the ‘Cold War’ after its very raison d’etre (anti-communism) is long-since gone? If it turns out to be too long, then only a matter of time will pass before those buttons get pushed and those nuclear weapons are released, to destroy the world. Horrific as those weapons are, they are built, and manned, to be used. If this seems unimaginable, then the question has to be this: Is it as unimaginable as is the manifested-existing evilness of America’s aristocracy (such as Barack Obama, Ashton Carter, George W Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, George Soros, the Koch brothers, etc.) and of the aristocracies (in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) that are allied with it?
(To be continued)
Commentary by Chuck Carlson and members of We Hold These Truths