(Photo Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)
Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our
name?
Why do we allow lies that justify this risk?
The scale of our
indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly
successful act of hypnosis," as if the truth "never happened even while
it was happening."
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy,"
which shows that since 1945 the US has tried to overthrow more than 50
governments, many democratically elected; grossly interfered in
elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30
countries; used chemical and biological weapons, and attempted to
assassinate foreign leaders.
In many cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The degree
of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the
West, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications
and nominally freest journalism. That the most numerous victims of
terrorism - "our" terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable. That extreme
jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American
policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US
state department noted that, following NATO's campaign in 2011, "Libya
has become a terrorist safe haven."
The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from
communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of
Western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich
territory.
The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually
violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran
and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered, like Patrice
Lumumba in the Congo. All are subjected to a Western media campaign of
caricature andvilification - think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and now
Vladimir Putin.
Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its
implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan
years, the US is threatening to take the world to War.
With eastern
Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of NATO, the last "buffer
state" bordering Russia is being torn apart. We in the West are backing
neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
Having masterminded the coup in February against the
democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure
of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed.
The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every
threat and invasion from the West for almost a century.
But NATO's military encirclement has accelerated, along
with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can
be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role
will justify a NATO-run guerrilla War that is likely to spill into
Russia itself.
Instead, Putin has confounded the War party by seeking an
accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing troops from the
Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to
abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and
bilingual people - a third of Ukraine's population - have long sought a
democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and
is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither
"separatists" nor "rebels" but citizens who want to live securely in
their homeland.
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been
turned into a CIA theme park - run by CIA Director John Brennan in Kiev,
with "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security
structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the
February coup. Watch the videos, read the eyewitness reports from the
massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade
union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police
standing by. A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was
stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away
rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to
meet the same fate ... I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent."
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When
Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the
Kiev junta's defense secretary - a founding member of the fascist
Svoboda party - boasted that the attacks on "insurgents" would continue.
In Orwellian style, propaganda in the West has inverted this to Moscow
"trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation," according to William
Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to
the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" following the Odessa
massacre. Illegal and fascist-dominated, the junta is described by Obama
as "duly elected." What matters is not truth, Henry Kissinger once
said, but "but what is perceived to be true."
In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as
"murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked
"separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a
federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the
victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government
Says." Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's
"undeclared war". For Germans, it is an invidious irony that Putin is
the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.
A popular truism is that "the world changed" following
9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel
Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant
militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" -
secret wars - in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and
hemorrhaging liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war
state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question begs: Why do we
tolerate this?
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