- 22 Jul 2023 13:30
#15280681
Tl;dr
The international community placing blame on Russia and sanctions on ordinary Russians, takes tremendous emphasis away not only from the NATO alliances role in provoking the conflict in Ukraine but away from ongoing Western aggressions that are considerably worse and more antagonistic. We can only see this when we contextualise what is happening on the world stage globally and historically.
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Many of the justifications used by Russia, reasons that are condemned by all NATO-allied countries as inappropriate reasons to intervene in a sovereign nation have historically been used: Afghanistan/Iraq—where security concerns were cited, Kosovo—with very similar humanitarian concerns and ethnic disputes as within Ukraine (Article 51 of the UN Charter), the Cuban missile fiasco—where interference from a rival/competing superpower was present (the Monroe Doctrine).
Keep in mind, the Ukraine war not only has all of these arguments rolled into one, but that Russia has a close cultural and historical affiliation with Ukraine, begin with the Kievan Rus who relocated to Muscovy, before later taking Crimea and the now "Russo-Slavic" territories of Ukraine which later became closer tied to Russia than the now "Maidan-Slavic" territories that were historically invaded by the Polish, Ottomans, Germans and others.
After receiving much online hatred and abuse for my opinions on this subject (we discuss the existence of Russian troll farms and disinformation that comes from the Kremlin, but do not consider the very equally insidious nature of many Western institutions, troll farms like the North Atlantic Fellah Organisation, accused of crowd funding war criminals and the State propaganda that is driven by the likes of Anne Applebaum and other organisations we are very unaware of)...
After receiving so much hatred, I've realised that it is actually a lot more helpful to look at Ukraine in a bigger picture to really understand this issue and to help prevent World War 3 with Russia over NATO expansion, or China over conflicts in Taiwan and the South China Sea.
"There is no reasonable justification to consider a war can be provoked"
I think we have to stop and consider for a moment what we mean when we say something is "provoked" compared to what we mean when we say something is "justified". If a gang of bikers moves in next door and start having wild parties and barbecues, drinking all day and late into the night, blasting loud music, burning tires in their back garden, hitting birds down with catapults if they occasionally fly from your garden into theirs and then one day they decide to build a machine gun that has a very good direction at your own back window, then we can very much consider this a provocation. It is an escalation of something that could emerge into a conflict.
How you decide to handle this, for example going to your local police and council about the issue, or simply going next door and shooting everyone dead very much depends on the political culture you live in. We can argue that things are very different in a modern democracy to the way things would work for example if we were living in the Wild West.
Talking about "justified action" as a response to such escalations makes sense to us when we consider the world as if it is very much a Western Rules Driven Order with an International Criminal Court (justice) and NATO (the enforcer), but the reality is that in a relative state of global anarchy, these institutions are a lot more like the Sheriff and can be prone to a great deal more corruption than we realise, or than what they will let us know about.
If I am allowed to have this conversation at all, it is to promote the illusion of transparency, free debate and democracy, it is not because elite hawkish, neocon establishments that are very much in favour of NATO expansion want this conversation to be had. Do not be surprised if at some point in the future and with the current direction of mainstream media, opinions like these are outright censored or even penalised as hate crime for promoting some kind of perceived RussoChinese hegemony or war propaganda. I know there is a website I am on where I am accused of this daily and in the most malicious of ways.
I think that considering the mainstream media's co-ordinated resolve to repeatedly and determinedly portray Putin's invasion of Ukraine as "unprovoked" compared to other invasions like Bush's war in Iraq which have not received a fraction of the criticism, we really do have to stop for a moment and consider what it actually means to "provoke" something. Are we saying that something is "justified" because ipso facto it is "provoked" or are we just saying that there is reason to believe the event was not unilaterally aggressive?
Regardless, invoking fear or intimidation to keep a country under the economic or militaristic thumb of another large nuclear power could in many ways reasonably be considered provocation, given the former country's militaristic history. We like to assert that we are liberal democratic nations who mean no harm with the expansion of a defensive only alliance, but we have to remember here that many of our historic interventions in other countries have caused more harm than good, including those past the turn of the 21st Century.
Given the broader context of hostile relations between the West and Russia/China during the Cold War Era it is easier to understand why NATO expansion was seen as a threat at one point, but harder to understand with the dissolution of the USSR because we believe that things are different. But when diplomatic promises such as James Baker's "not one inch east" comment in Moscow of February 1990 are forgotten entirely, we can begin to understand Russia's scepticism and really that is when we start seeing this whole thing as more of a "post-Cold War Stalemate".
I would argue overall that, even if we cannot consider provocation a determiner of justification, we have to consider that there must be situations where an aggressor is in fact provoked, regardless what we think of it. So let's move to a more global basis, away from Ukraine, a country with historical ties to Banderite ideology, where CIA have trained and funded radicalised anti-Russian antagonists like Stetsko, Bandera, Lebed and Shukhevych since Allen Dulles helped them escape justice at the Nuremburg trials...
In what can only be described as a parallel to the way Mujahideen were trained and funded to destabilise the USSR before the outbreak of the Soviet-Afghan war, through the migration and panic of civil war, and the threat of assassination, terrorism and espionage from those who later became Al Qaeda. Let's consider for instance Taiwan.
And I think Taiwan is very different to Ukraine, there just isn't that same cultural integration with China, where a significant population want reintegration, so this would make things hazy in terms of radicalised American placed anti-China operatives could just cross a land border and start engaging in espionage/assassination/terrorism or a civil war could create migration and chaos. Everyone in Taiwan seems to agree on autonomy.
America's policy would surely be raging hypocrisy if after the history of US foreign policy since Kissinger, they declared Taiwan are independent because the peoples there overwhelmingly want it without a referendum approved of by China, considering their stance on Crimean independence. And I think America building military bases or nuclear bases in Taiwan could be a major escalation... I think doing military drills with Taiwan and these unathorised state department "diplomatic visits" are poorly judged to consider the decisions with the best of intentions.
It all raises questions, considering how plenty of nations act, if a ship merely steers too close to their borders. And I can give examples, for example when Thatcher bombed an Argentinian warship that decided to return from the Fawkland Isles as a "lesson". Well fuck, when we look at our own stances that are exactly the same and then we look at how the international community and mainstream media outlets are all united in condemnation of Russia right now for exactly the same type of shit, and all the pressure/scrutiny/scepticism China is being treated with over the 9 whole dash line thing... it makes you think.
Ok. If their aggression is so bad, where were the sanctions and international pressure over any number of NATO driven interventions since Kosovo and even before that really? Ok, so "the past is the past" and "past wrongs do not make rights in the present"... really? Ok! So America is still involved in 4 wars in the middle east. All the arguments about "Russia could end the war and leave today!"... how the hell does this same observation not apply to American intervention in Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Syria...? And Syria, like Ukraine is in Russia's sphere of influence.
I'm aware China is involved in building some military bases in South America right now, but overall where do we see the same levels of aggression, or antagonism towards European and American driven hegemony compared to all this undermining of Chinese/Russian global influence in the world right now? Where is the RussoChinese version of the Monroe Doctrine, how is it not equally valid to America's own vision?
Maybe stopping to look at the global context as a whole makes this a lot clearer than when focussing on Ukraine in isolation. going back to Ukraine we have to look at why it is different to Afghanistan/Iraq—where security concerns were cited, Kosovo—with very similar humanitarian concerns and ethnic disputes to Ukraine, the Cuban missile fiasco—where interference from a rival/competing superpower was present...
... you have to understand I am not making a blanket comment on whether the Ukraine war was justified. But if we consider what would ever make an intervention into a sovereign country justified, and then we take into account all of these justifications—that Western media has at one point or another gotten behind historically—are essentially rolled into one with the Ukraine, which has very close, cultural and historic ties with Russia...
... meaning that the proximity of Ukraine makes all of these concerns a lot more real, and hitting far closer to concern compared to these historical NATO interventions... then I mean, if we can ever agree that such a thing as "just war theory" exists in anyway whatsoever, and we can agree for whatever reason that Ukraine is not a "just war", then what the hell does a "just war" actually look like.
And if we agree considering all these things that the Ukraine war sure as hell is not a "just war" can we also agree that American presence in Somalia/Yemen/Niger/Syria... that in no fucking sane reality are any of these "just wars" either, if that not being the case much, much more so. And if "all Putin needs to do is leave tomorrow", pack his things and leave the "sovereign country" that fell prey to his "illegal / unprovoked / unjustified war" and that ordinary Russians deserve sanctions and Putin needs to go to the ICC now...
... Then we can sure as hell make the case that there is something deeply alarming Western media is not corralled behind a position that America should do exactly the same with Somalia/Yemen/Niger/Syria right now, and that any number of historic interventions were "illegal / unprovoked / unjustified"... we should be repeating these claims again and again in our media just like we are against Russia today, we should be putting sanctions on ordinary Americans, we should start listing a number of American generals and political leaders as well as those from Europe responsible for war crimes, and demanding they all go to the ICC today.
When we realise that the international reality is not like that right now, in the same way it is as towards Russia, you start to realise that joining in on the condemnation really is a huge distraction. In a way, by doing that, you are letting all of these other agents that are very much autonomous, and responsible in the same way as Russia/Putin off the hook by joining in on this unilateral condemnation. Staying neutral on the other hand, you realise that in a global context a lot of what's coming from Russia really is not "the greater evil".
Calling people who are sympathetic to the Russian perspective in a day and age of great mass hysteria against Russia and an anti-Russian driven media narrative, and foreign policy that is just not sympathetic to Russia's security concerns or sphere of influence in the same way we consider America's own Monroe Doctrine is a great injustice against these people who are actually speaking a great unspoken truth. We do need to consider what the hell is going on in Ukraine right now. It absolutely is relevant if this war was provoked, and if Ukraine has not been used for decades—since before the 2013/14 Maidan, even, to destabilise Russia.
Looking at this from a global perspective, starting with Brzezinski's whole "global chessboard theory", or perhaps even Churchill's "Operation Unthinkable", we do this and we start to realise that whatever wrongs Russia are committing right now... in the modern global context, there is actually a lot worse coming from our side of things. And these are not actions of the past, of earlier administrations that we have evolved from, of wrongs committed now that do not right the wrongs we perceive from Russia/China.
No, these are part of what is very much an ongoing, co-ordinated attempt to reinforce the American-led NATO militaristic dominance on a global level, essentially the whole agenda is to put most of BRICS and Global South under their economic thumb as a last bid to reignite a declining presence on the world stage, while countries and blocks like Canada, Australia, UK and Europe are essentially being used as vassals to accomplish this.
---
Links/Further Reading:
Information War Over Ukraine | Novara Media
The Ghost of Zbigniew Brzezinski and NATO's War Against Russia | Harley Schlanger
Spreading “Values” With NATO Bombs And The Ukrainian Meat Grinder | Clare Daly and Mick Wallace | Neutrality Studies
US/NATO Needs to Stop Provoking World War III | Negotiate Peace In Ukraine Now | David T Pyne
The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace! | Schiller Institute
Seymour Hersh - Biden's Blackout: How America & Norway Blew Up The Nord Stream Pipelines | London Real
NUCLEAR WAR From Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant Attack Possible? | Patrick Lancaster
Colonel Douglas Macgregor - The US Government Lied About The Ukraine War | London Real
Ukraine Part 1 - A US-Proxy for the New Cold War Era Crawdads and Taters
Ukraine Explained : Everything You Wanted to Know and They Were Afraid You’d Ask | Aydin Paladin
How Pre-WW II Ukrainian Fascists Pioneered Brutal Terror Techniques; Later Improved By CIA, Now Ironically Taught to Descendants
Ukrainian Nazism | Birrion Sondahl
The international community placing blame on Russia and sanctions on ordinary Russians, takes tremendous emphasis away not only from the NATO alliances role in provoking the conflict in Ukraine but away from ongoing Western aggressions that are considerably worse and more antagonistic. We can only see this when we contextualise what is happening on the world stage globally and historically.
---
Many of the justifications used by Russia, reasons that are condemned by all NATO-allied countries as inappropriate reasons to intervene in a sovereign nation have historically been used: Afghanistan/Iraq—where security concerns were cited, Kosovo—with very similar humanitarian concerns and ethnic disputes as within Ukraine (Article 51 of the UN Charter), the Cuban missile fiasco—where interference from a rival/competing superpower was present (the Monroe Doctrine).
Keep in mind, the Ukraine war not only has all of these arguments rolled into one, but that Russia has a close cultural and historical affiliation with Ukraine, begin with the Kievan Rus who relocated to Muscovy, before later taking Crimea and the now "Russo-Slavic" territories of Ukraine which later became closer tied to Russia than the now "Maidan-Slavic" territories that were historically invaded by the Polish, Ottomans, Germans and others.
After receiving much online hatred and abuse for my opinions on this subject (we discuss the existence of Russian troll farms and disinformation that comes from the Kremlin, but do not consider the very equally insidious nature of many Western institutions, troll farms like the North Atlantic Fellah Organisation, accused of crowd funding war criminals and the State propaganda that is driven by the likes of Anne Applebaum and other organisations we are very unaware of)...
After receiving so much hatred, I've realised that it is actually a lot more helpful to look at Ukraine in a bigger picture to really understand this issue and to help prevent World War 3 with Russia over NATO expansion, or China over conflicts in Taiwan and the South China Sea.
"There is no reasonable justification to consider a war can be provoked"
I think we have to stop and consider for a moment what we mean when we say something is "provoked" compared to what we mean when we say something is "justified". If a gang of bikers moves in next door and start having wild parties and barbecues, drinking all day and late into the night, blasting loud music, burning tires in their back garden, hitting birds down with catapults if they occasionally fly from your garden into theirs and then one day they decide to build a machine gun that has a very good direction at your own back window, then we can very much consider this a provocation. It is an escalation of something that could emerge into a conflict.
How you decide to handle this, for example going to your local police and council about the issue, or simply going next door and shooting everyone dead very much depends on the political culture you live in. We can argue that things are very different in a modern democracy to the way things would work for example if we were living in the Wild West.
Talking about "justified action" as a response to such escalations makes sense to us when we consider the world as if it is very much a Western Rules Driven Order with an International Criminal Court (justice) and NATO (the enforcer), but the reality is that in a relative state of global anarchy, these institutions are a lot more like the Sheriff and can be prone to a great deal more corruption than we realise, or than what they will let us know about.
If I am allowed to have this conversation at all, it is to promote the illusion of transparency, free debate and democracy, it is not because elite hawkish, neocon establishments that are very much in favour of NATO expansion want this conversation to be had. Do not be surprised if at some point in the future and with the current direction of mainstream media, opinions like these are outright censored or even penalised as hate crime for promoting some kind of perceived RussoChinese hegemony or war propaganda. I know there is a website I am on where I am accused of this daily and in the most malicious of ways.
I think that considering the mainstream media's co-ordinated resolve to repeatedly and determinedly portray Putin's invasion of Ukraine as "unprovoked" compared to other invasions like Bush's war in Iraq which have not received a fraction of the criticism, we really do have to stop for a moment and consider what it actually means to "provoke" something. Are we saying that something is "justified" because ipso facto it is "provoked" or are we just saying that there is reason to believe the event was not unilaterally aggressive?
Regardless, invoking fear or intimidation to keep a country under the economic or militaristic thumb of another large nuclear power could in many ways reasonably be considered provocation, given the former country's militaristic history. We like to assert that we are liberal democratic nations who mean no harm with the expansion of a defensive only alliance, but we have to remember here that many of our historic interventions in other countries have caused more harm than good, including those past the turn of the 21st Century.
Given the broader context of hostile relations between the West and Russia/China during the Cold War Era it is easier to understand why NATO expansion was seen as a threat at one point, but harder to understand with the dissolution of the USSR because we believe that things are different. But when diplomatic promises such as James Baker's "not one inch east" comment in Moscow of February 1990 are forgotten entirely, we can begin to understand Russia's scepticism and really that is when we start seeing this whole thing as more of a "post-Cold War Stalemate".
I would argue overall that, even if we cannot consider provocation a determiner of justification, we have to consider that there must be situations where an aggressor is in fact provoked, regardless what we think of it. So let's move to a more global basis, away from Ukraine, a country with historical ties to Banderite ideology, where CIA have trained and funded radicalised anti-Russian antagonists like Stetsko, Bandera, Lebed and Shukhevych since Allen Dulles helped them escape justice at the Nuremburg trials...
In what can only be described as a parallel to the way Mujahideen were trained and funded to destabilise the USSR before the outbreak of the Soviet-Afghan war, through the migration and panic of civil war, and the threat of assassination, terrorism and espionage from those who later became Al Qaeda. Let's consider for instance Taiwan.
And I think Taiwan is very different to Ukraine, there just isn't that same cultural integration with China, where a significant population want reintegration, so this would make things hazy in terms of radicalised American placed anti-China operatives could just cross a land border and start engaging in espionage/assassination/terrorism or a civil war could create migration and chaos. Everyone in Taiwan seems to agree on autonomy.
America's policy would surely be raging hypocrisy if after the history of US foreign policy since Kissinger, they declared Taiwan are independent because the peoples there overwhelmingly want it without a referendum approved of by China, considering their stance on Crimean independence. And I think America building military bases or nuclear bases in Taiwan could be a major escalation... I think doing military drills with Taiwan and these unathorised state department "diplomatic visits" are poorly judged to consider the decisions with the best of intentions.
It all raises questions, considering how plenty of nations act, if a ship merely steers too close to their borders. And I can give examples, for example when Thatcher bombed an Argentinian warship that decided to return from the Fawkland Isles as a "lesson". Well fuck, when we look at our own stances that are exactly the same and then we look at how the international community and mainstream media outlets are all united in condemnation of Russia right now for exactly the same type of shit, and all the pressure/scrutiny/scepticism China is being treated with over the 9 whole dash line thing... it makes you think.
Ok. If their aggression is so bad, where were the sanctions and international pressure over any number of NATO driven interventions since Kosovo and even before that really? Ok, so "the past is the past" and "past wrongs do not make rights in the present"... really? Ok! So America is still involved in 4 wars in the middle east. All the arguments about "Russia could end the war and leave today!"... how the hell does this same observation not apply to American intervention in Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Syria...? And Syria, like Ukraine is in Russia's sphere of influence.
I'm aware China is involved in building some military bases in South America right now, but overall where do we see the same levels of aggression, or antagonism towards European and American driven hegemony compared to all this undermining of Chinese/Russian global influence in the world right now? Where is the RussoChinese version of the Monroe Doctrine, how is it not equally valid to America's own vision?
Maybe stopping to look at the global context as a whole makes this a lot clearer than when focussing on Ukraine in isolation. going back to Ukraine we have to look at why it is different to Afghanistan/Iraq—where security concerns were cited, Kosovo—with very similar humanitarian concerns and ethnic disputes to Ukraine, the Cuban missile fiasco—where interference from a rival/competing superpower was present...
... you have to understand I am not making a blanket comment on whether the Ukraine war was justified. But if we consider what would ever make an intervention into a sovereign country justified, and then we take into account all of these justifications—that Western media has at one point or another gotten behind historically—are essentially rolled into one with the Ukraine, which has very close, cultural and historic ties with Russia...
... meaning that the proximity of Ukraine makes all of these concerns a lot more real, and hitting far closer to concern compared to these historical NATO interventions... then I mean, if we can ever agree that such a thing as "just war theory" exists in anyway whatsoever, and we can agree for whatever reason that Ukraine is not a "just war", then what the hell does a "just war" actually look like.
And if we agree considering all these things that the Ukraine war sure as hell is not a "just war" can we also agree that American presence in Somalia/Yemen/Niger/Syria... that in no fucking sane reality are any of these "just wars" either, if that not being the case much, much more so. And if "all Putin needs to do is leave tomorrow", pack his things and leave the "sovereign country" that fell prey to his "illegal / unprovoked / unjustified war" and that ordinary Russians deserve sanctions and Putin needs to go to the ICC now...
... Then we can sure as hell make the case that there is something deeply alarming Western media is not corralled behind a position that America should do exactly the same with Somalia/Yemen/Niger/Syria right now, and that any number of historic interventions were "illegal / unprovoked / unjustified"... we should be repeating these claims again and again in our media just like we are against Russia today, we should be putting sanctions on ordinary Americans, we should start listing a number of American generals and political leaders as well as those from Europe responsible for war crimes, and demanding they all go to the ICC today.
When we realise that the international reality is not like that right now, in the same way it is as towards Russia, you start to realise that joining in on the condemnation really is a huge distraction. In a way, by doing that, you are letting all of these other agents that are very much autonomous, and responsible in the same way as Russia/Putin off the hook by joining in on this unilateral condemnation. Staying neutral on the other hand, you realise that in a global context a lot of what's coming from Russia really is not "the greater evil".
Calling people who are sympathetic to the Russian perspective in a day and age of great mass hysteria against Russia and an anti-Russian driven media narrative, and foreign policy that is just not sympathetic to Russia's security concerns or sphere of influence in the same way we consider America's own Monroe Doctrine is a great injustice against these people who are actually speaking a great unspoken truth. We do need to consider what the hell is going on in Ukraine right now. It absolutely is relevant if this war was provoked, and if Ukraine has not been used for decades—since before the 2013/14 Maidan, even, to destabilise Russia.
Looking at this from a global perspective, starting with Brzezinski's whole "global chessboard theory", or perhaps even Churchill's "Operation Unthinkable", we do this and we start to realise that whatever wrongs Russia are committing right now... in the modern global context, there is actually a lot worse coming from our side of things. And these are not actions of the past, of earlier administrations that we have evolved from, of wrongs committed now that do not right the wrongs we perceive from Russia/China.
No, these are part of what is very much an ongoing, co-ordinated attempt to reinforce the American-led NATO militaristic dominance on a global level, essentially the whole agenda is to put most of BRICS and Global South under their economic thumb as a last bid to reignite a declining presence on the world stage, while countries and blocks like Canada, Australia, UK and Europe are essentially being used as vassals to accomplish this.
---
Links/Further Reading:
Information War Over Ukraine | Novara Media
The Ghost of Zbigniew Brzezinski and NATO's War Against Russia | Harley Schlanger
Spreading “Values” With NATO Bombs And The Ukrainian Meat Grinder | Clare Daly and Mick Wallace | Neutrality Studies
US/NATO Needs to Stop Provoking World War III | Negotiate Peace In Ukraine Now | David T Pyne
The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace! | Schiller Institute
Seymour Hersh - Biden's Blackout: How America & Norway Blew Up The Nord Stream Pipelines | London Real
NUCLEAR WAR From Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant Attack Possible? | Patrick Lancaster
Colonel Douglas Macgregor - The US Government Lied About The Ukraine War | London Real
Ukraine Part 1 - A US-Proxy for the New Cold War Era Crawdads and Taters
Ukraine Explained : Everything You Wanted to Know and They Were Afraid You’d Ask | Aydin Paladin
How Pre-WW II Ukrainian Fascists Pioneered Brutal Terror Techniques; Later Improved By CIA, Now Ironically Taught to Descendants
Ukrainian Nazism | Birrion Sondahl