https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57686.htm
Villainy In Vilnius
America’s Brobdingnagian $1.3 trillion national security budget thrives on manufactured threats and falsely demonized foes. And nothing could be more demonstrative of that proposition than the utter villainy now emanating from the NATO summit in Vilnius.
For crying out loud. Since the Munich Security Conference in 2007, the man (Putin) has said over and over, and then over again, that Ukraine’s accession to NATO is an absolute red line. And anyone with their head screwed on right would have no trouble accepting that declaration by answering one simple question.
To wit, how would Washington react if Russia put missiles and nukes in Mexico, or Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Granada or Venezuela or even Tierra Del Fuego?
Of course, President John F. Kennedy resolved that matter 61 years ago. Yet the whole Vilnius confab amounts to a wink and nod pageant telling the world that exactly what JFK said could not stand on our own doorstep back then, in fact, must stand on Russia’s now. One day soon the Great Hegemon on the Potomac will plant US/NATO missiles 40 minutes from the Kremlin and the purported "aggressor" domiciled there needs to shut-up and eat his geopolitical spinach.
Holy moly. The very idea is an affront to rationality and is a reckless invitation to permanent friction between two nations holding upwards of 12,000 nukes between them. Yet the miscreants gathered in Vilnius left no room for doubt in their declaration:
Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and today we recognize that Ukraine’s path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the Membership Action Plan. Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path.
So the question recurs. How in the whole fricking big wide world would adding the parts and pieces of Novorossiya, Poland, Lithuania, Rumania, the Cossack Hetmanates, the Crimean Khanate, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and many other historical footnotes that were slapped together by the Soviet Tyrants after 1920 to form the current unnatural borders of Ukraine contribute to the Homeland Security of America, way over here on the far sides of the Atlantic and Pacific moats?
The answer of course is that it contributes nothing, as in nichts, nada and nugatory. NATO isn’t about security, collective or otherwise, anyway. It’s an utterly vestigial relic of the Cold War that was stood-up to contain a totalitarian Soviet Empire which was armed to the teeth, but which has long since disappeared into the dustbin of history. So George Bush the Elder should have parachuted into the Ramstein Germany air base in 1991, declared victory and dismantled NATO then and there.
As it has transpired, however, the bloated now 31-nation NATO of today has actually become an enemy of peace and security. That’s because it exists mainly as a marketing forum for western arms manufacturers and a think tank for generating phony threats and scary stories designed to keep military budgets amply stocked with fiscal wherewithal and vastly oversized military establishments well provisioned with missions, mandates, war games and busy work.
So to repeat what we said in previously, there is no need for Washington’s gigantic military establishment or its extensions in NATO because there are no true threats to the liberty and security of the American homeland anywhere on the planet today that even remotely justify it.
The cold war style mega-threat ended with the Soviet Union. Today, Russia’s $1.8 trillion GDP is a veritable joke when arrayed against the $45 trillion of GDP resources embedded in the US and the balance of NATO; and its $85 billion defense budget amounts to not even 7% of the $1.25 trillion combined NATO defense budgets.
Stated differently, serious military threats in today’s world of advanced weaponry require either an overwhelming nuclear first strike checkmate capacity or the vast industrial might and $50 trillion of GDP that would be necessary to breach the great ocean moats and deliver an invasionary armada of massive conventional forces to the New Jersey shores – backed-up with vast air- and sea-lift capacity and gigantic logistics arrangements that have scarcely been imagined by even the most fervent writers of futuristic war fiction.
So what is percolating out of Vilnius, therefore, is not a rational calculation about tangible security threats posed by Russia. Instead, what we have is a witches brew of the standard lies, rationalizations, excuses and hypocrisies which keep the Washington Hegemon busy on a 24/7 basis all around the planet. These groupthink bromides and ideological nostrums include such favorites as the Rule of Law, the Post-War International Order, the Sanctity of Borders, the Responsibility to Protect and Collective Security.
But all are just cover stories for what amounts to the Washington Imperium, and in the current case the alleged sanctity of borders and requirements for "collective security" are especially egregious.
In the first place, it was Washington which violated Ukraine’s borders when it encouraged, funded and recognized the illegal coup which overthrew the country’s duly elected President in February 2014. This CIA/State/AID/NED intervention essentially blew-up the unstable state of Ukraine, which had never been built to last absent the iron fist of communist rule and which had been at war with itself as between nationalist Ukrainians in the center and west and Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas and Black Sea rim ever since the first post-communist elections after 1991. The Maidan coup was simply the coup de grace, which quickly incited a civil war.
But rather than respect Jefferson’s own admonition from the Declaration of Independence and allow the two Donbas republics to secede from the new anti-Russian regime in Kiev, Washington funded a military buildup and brutal campaign to quash the revolt. At length, on the order of 15,000 civilians were killed by the relentless military attacks on the Donbas mounted by Kiev over 2014-2022 with Washington’s dollars and weapons.
It was that assault on Novorussiya (i.e. historical New Russia) and the drumbeat for Ukraine’s NATO membership that finally provoked Putin’s so-called invasion. Whether it was ultimately justified or not, the moralists can ascertain. But that it was provoked by Washington is not even remotely in doubt.
Indeed, two weeks after July 4th the irony of the actual cause of the Ukraine war could not be more stark: The triggering attack on the Donbas was surely a case of secession for we, but not for thee:
"….whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government."
Likewise, in today’s world the ideological platitudes about "collective security" – the ostensible reason for all the tom-tom beating in Vilnius – do not hold water, either. The fact is, absent a massive totalitarian menace, collective security is a bad idea, not an instrument of peace and stability.
Automatic war clauses like article 5 of NATO, which thank heaven has not yet been extended to Ukraine, are as likely to encourage hard-line politicians in smaller countries to provoke their larger neighbors for reasons of electoral opportunism than to deter aggression by the latter. In any event, the run up to World War I tells you all you need to know about automatic war clauses.
The false underlying predicate behind obsolescent institutions like NATO, in fact, holds that the global community is everywhere and always crawling with would be totalitarian monsters like Hitler, Stalin or Mao; that peaceful democracies are always imperiled by weak leaders slouching toward bad appeasement deals and the next Munich; and that nations need to be bound together in defensive entanglements, therefore, in order to keep wanna be hegemons at bay.
Not at all. Today’s world is not crawling with would be hegemons, aside from the one astride the banks of the Potomac. Hitler, Stalin and the so-called Cold War were once-in-history aberrations that rose from the carnage of World War I, Woodrow Wilson’s folly in taking America into it in 1917 and the punitive "peace" of the victors at Versailles – the nurseries which actually gave birth to the unique totalitarian evils of the 20th century.
Indeed, America’s pointless entry with 4 million fresh doughboys is what actually prevented an early end to the war and a non-vindictive peace of the exhausted and bankrupt nation’s of old Europe. In that alternative history, Lenin’s coup would never have been possible and Hitler would have remained an obscure painter of run-of-the-mill water colors.
That is to say, the homes, schools, churches, stores and industry of the long-suffering peoples of Ukraine are being turned into an armaments Demolition Derby in the name of an obsolete collective security arrangement which should have been consigned to the dustbin of history along with the Soviet Union 32 years ago.
The Vilnius confab, of course, was the work of Washington neocons and NATO’s institutionalized warmongers. And what they produced was pure villainy because there is nothing relating to American homeland security at stake in the godforsaken nation whose name means "borderlands" in Russian.
Woodrow Wilson opened the gates of hell 106 years ago with an equally threadbare justification. So the Empire never should have been launched then, and the Vilnius Declaration is a reminder – if there ever was one – that the time to dismantle it is now long, long, long overdue.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/07/john-bolton-accidentally-explains-why-us-policy-on-russia-and-china-is-wrong/
John Bolton Accidentally Explains Why US Policy On Russia And China Is Wrong
Professional psychopath John Bolton has an article out with The Hill titled “America can’t permit Chinese military expansion in Cuba” which inadvertently spells out exactly what’s wrong with the way the US empire keeps amassing heavily armed proxy forces on the borders of its large Asiatic enemies.
Citing a Wall Street Journal report from last month in which anonymous US officials claim that Havana has entered negotiations with Beijing for a possible future joint military training facility in Cuba, Bolton argues that the US must use any amount of aggression necessary to prevent this facility’s construction, up to and including regime change interventionism.
“The potential of significant Chinese facilities in Cuba is a red-flag threat to America,” Bolton writes, arguing that such activities “could well camouflage offensive weapons, delivery systems or other threatening capabilities.”
“For example, hypersonic cruise missiles, already harder to detect, track, and destroy than ballistic missiles, are natural candidates for installation in Cuba, a prospect we cannot tolerate, along with many other risks, like a Chinese submarine base,” he adds.
All of which are arguments that could be made pretty much note-for-note by Russia and China about the ways the US has been threatening their security interests with war machinery in their immediate surroundings.
Arguing that the US is “bound by no commitment limiting our use of force,” Bolton advocates “Revoking diplomatic relations with Cuba; increased economic sanctions against both China and Cuba; and far stricter implementation of existing sanctions” as an immediate response to this reported development, advocating regime change interventionism as an ultimate solution to Cuba’s disobedient behavior.
“Had Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy acted more forcefully and effectively against Castro, we might have avoided many perilous Cold War crises, sparing us decades of strategic concern, not to mention the repression of Cuba’s people,” Bolton writes, adding, “With Beijing’s threat rising, we should not miss today’s moment without seriously reconsidering how to return this geographically critical island to its own people’s friendlier hands.”
Bolton notes that Guantanamo Bay “remains fully available to us today” for any operations the US should choose to avail itself of to topple Havana.
This would be the same John Bolton who in 2002 falsely accused Cuba of having a biological weapons program in a bid to sweep the island up in the same post-9/11 war push he was helping the US construct against Iraq with extreme aggression.
Any time there’s the faintest whisper of a foreign power setting up a military presence in Washington’s neck of the woods, hawks immediately begin pounding the drums of war and exposing the hypocrisy of the US empire’s insistence on its right to form military alliances and amass proxy forces on the doorstep of its geopolitical rivals. Empire apologists always dismiss Russia and China’s claims that US military encroachments on their surroundings are an unacceptable security risk and say that no nation has a right to a “sphere of influence” which its enemies are forbidden to enter, yet we can plainly see that the US reserves a right to its own sphere of influence from its own doctrines and behaviors.
Earlier this year Senator Josh Hawley ominously asked an audience, “Imagine a world where Chinese warships patrol Hawaiian waters, and Chinese submarines stalk the California coastline. A world where the People’s Liberation Army has military bases in Central and South America. A world where Chinese forces operate freely in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.” Which is exactly what the US military has been doing to China.
The single dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression. The idea that the US militarily encircling Russia and China is an act of defense rather than aggression is so in-your-face transparently idiotic that anyone who thinks critically enough about it will immediately dismiss it for the foam-brained nonsense that it is, yet because of propaganda that is the mainstream narrative in the western world, and millions of people accept it as true.
The point of highlighting hypocrisy is not that being a hypocrite is some special crime in and of itself, it’s to show that the hypocrite is lying about their motives and behavior, and to dismantle their arguments defending their positions. If the US would interpret a Chinese military presence in Cuba as an incendiary provocation, then logically the far greater military presence the US has amassed on the borders of Russia and China is a vastly greater provocation by that same reasoning, and the US knows it. There exists no argument to the contrary that doesn’t rely on baseless “well it’s different when we do it” assertions.
Demanding that Russia and China tolerate behavior from the US that the US would never tolerate from Russia or China is just demanding that the world subjugate itself to the US empire. Those who argue that Russia should have tolerated Ukraine being made into a NATO asset or that China should just accept US military encirclement because something something freedom and democracy are really just saying the US should be allowed to rule every inch of this planet completely uncontested.
If what you really want is for the US to dominate every inch of this planet completely uncontested, don’t try and tell me that your actual concern is for the people of Ukraine or Taiwan or anywhere else. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Just be honest about what you are and where you stand.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/biden-calling-up-military-reserves-your-kids-next/5826179
Biden Is Calling Up Military Reserves…Are Your Kids Next?
As a rule, US war reporting since Vietnam has been mostly mainstream media cheerleading the mission rather than digging beyond government war propaganda. After all, it was images of American boys coming home in body bags shown on the six o’clock news across America that finally galvanized mainstream opposition to that war.
The Pentagon learned its lesson by the first Gulf War, and it severely restricted up-close media coverage. Only “trusted” journalists were able to report from the front lines. Most of the press corps wrote up stories based on US military press releases from luxury hotels in Baghdad.
By the time of Gulf War II the Pentagon came up with the concept of “embedding” select journalists with the troops. This allowed the story to be framed by the Pentagon with the false impression that actual journalism was taking place. It felt authentic, because the journalist was with the troops and close to the action, but the story presented what the Pentagon wanted to be presented.
This is perhaps a long way of pointing out that US mainstream media coverage of the war in Ukraine leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, sometimes the truth does slip out in publications like the New York Times, which reported last week that in just the first weeks of Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” at least 20 percent of the weaponry and equipment donated by the US and NATO has been destroyed.
However, usually what the mainstream media serves up are Pentagon and neocon talking points. Russia is losing, they report. Russia has already lost, as Biden said recently. Most Americans don’t go out of their way to listen to actual experts like Col. Doug Macgregor, who from the beginning has been telling a very different story. Thus Americans continue to be fed propaganda.
There is a funny thing about propaganda, though. Sometimes it comes face-to-face with contradictory reality and is shown to be nothing but a pack of lies.
Take for example last week’s shocking report that President Biden has signed an order to mobilize 3,000 US military reservists for deployment to Europe in support of the 2014 “Operation Atlantic Resolve.” What is Atlantic Resolve? It was launched in the aftermath of the US-backed coup in Ukraine and the ensuing unrest under the US-installed puppet government.
So, if Russia is losing – or has already lost, as Biden said last week – why has it suddenly become necessary to call up US reserve forces? Well, in the midst of one of the most serious US military recruiting crises ever, it seems Washington does not have sufficient troops for its anti-Russia mission in Ukraine. So what is the mission and why does it seem to be creeping toward sending more Americans close to the battle zone? No one in the Administration seems interested in explaining it and no one in the US media or Congress seems interested in asking.
We
are on a very slippery slope, with Biden’s neocons continuing to
escalate in the face of massive Ukrainian losses and an apparent
shortage of US troops. Make no mistake, if the US/NATO proxy war with
Russia is not halted the next step will be to look at the US Selective
Service. That means they are coming for your kids. How long before
America wakes up and says “NO”?
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