ERIC ZUESSE | 15.06.2016 | WORLD
The Movement Toward Nuclear War (I)
Antagonizing Western Publics Against Russia
During a recent interview that former Soviet – then subsequently Russian – President Mikhail Gorbachev gave in Moscow at his namesake Foundation (to be published in Rupert Murdoch’s London Times), Gorbachev publicly approved of Crimea’s return to Russia. He said there, «I’m always with the free will of the people and most in Crimea wanted to be reunited with Russia». This statement, when it was published in the Times on 22 May 2016 (and then the next day posted to the Gorbachev Foundation site copying the Times’s version), was surrounded in the so-called ‘interview’ by propaganda from Murdoch’s ‘interviewer’ the ‘journalist’ Mark Franchetti, arguing there against Gorbachev’s statement concerning this important matter. Franchetti’s article (his ‘interview’ of Gorbachev) allowed very little of direct quotations from Gorbachev; so, it didn’t enable the presumed interview-subject to provide any evidence in support of the interviewee’s viewpoint – evidence such as, for example, even the Western-sponsored polls of Crimeans, which always have shown overwhelming support for Crimea’s transfer back to Russia. (Not even the mere fact that Crimea had been part of Russia until the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred it to Ukraine, in 1954, was mentioned in the Murdoch propagandist’s article, though this fact too is a crucial one in the entire matter.)
Nonetheless, this mere statement by Gorbachev was enough to cause Gorbachev to become banned in Ukraine – that is, in the new, rabidly anti-Russian, fascist and pro-fascist, regime in Ukraine, that had been installed there in February 2014 by US President Barack Obama’s agents under the cover of public anti-corruption demonstrations.
Just four days after the Times’s ‘interview’, on May 26th, Ukrayinska Pravda («Ukrainian Truth») then bannered, «Gorbachev denied entry to Ukraine for 5 years», and reported that, «Security banned the ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev from Ukraine for a period of 5 years. This was reported to ‘Ukrayinska Pravda’ by a source in the SBU [Security Bureau of Ukraine], who wished to remain anonymous». This article mentioned that Anton Gerashchenko in Ukraine’s parliament had in 2014 originally called for Gorbachev to be banned. And now it was finally being done.
This Pravda article didn’t mention that Gerashchenko was a close advisor to Arsen Avakov, who was head of the SBU in the new American-installed regime in Ukraine, and that Gerashchenko had, himself, in October 2015, been supporting ISIS to defeat Assad in Syria so as to weaken Russia. In other words, Obama could hardly have installed a more rabidly anti-Russian regime in Ukraine than he did. Merely the fact that ISIS were seeking to oust an ally of Russia was enough for the US-installed new Ukrainian regime (the one that ended democracy in Ukraine) to support ISIS.
And, so, Gorbachev, who had ended the Cold War against America, was now being rewarded with contempt not only from the Russian public (as Franchetti in his article noticed and accurately reported there) for his naiveté in having accepted as being honest America’s repeated assurances (lies) that NATO would not move «one inch to the east», but with his outright banishment from the newest member of the US empire, Ukraine. And, of course, when Gorbachev was allowed in the Western press to get a word in edgewise to argue for the Russian position, his statements were now being surrounded and drowned out there by the comments from an ‘interviewer’ (if that propagandist can even honestly be called such). So, Gorbachev is now, in effect, dumped upon, even within the American empire (no longer just by the Russian people), though nobody can deny that he is an honorable and profoundly decent human being, who did the best he was capable of, for his people, and for the world-at-large.
But this is only the propaganda in countries where the Soviet Union and communism had never presented really a danger of invading by traditional, non-nuclear, forces – tanks rolling across borders, etc. The Warsaw Pact countries – Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and of course the core Russia – were in constant fear that the core country, Russia, might invade (along with some of the others in their alliance) to quell popular movements to join the democratic (it was authentically so then) West. These are countries (Russia’s traditional «buffer states» against potential invasions coming from the west) where a real fear of Russian conquest is a living memory, from recent generations. In addition, there are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were conquered by the USSR in 1940. Ukraine, Georgia, and some other states within the USSR, had been conquered by Russia shortly after the Russian Revolution and so there were emigre communities abroad that were supportive of either the Nazis or else the democratic nations during World War II. All of these countries therefore have a much more fearful relationship with today’s, the post-Soviet, Russia, than do the core countries of the West (such as the UK, and the now master of them all, the US), which used to be democratic.
The issue of Crimea is part of the issue of Ukraine, only because, in 1954, the Soviet dictator Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea from Russia, of which Crimea had been a part since 1783, to Ukraine – the Crimean population had nothing to do with it: they overwhelmingly considered themselves to be Russians, and still do. Consequently, the issue that the US aristocracy and its associated aristocracies are alleging to be the basis for their economic sanctions against Russia and for their surrounding Russia with surges of weapons and soldiers against Russia, happens to be, by long standing, a part of Russia, not only by centuries-long tradition, but also by constant showings as such in all opinion polls of the Crimean public – the people themselves (the publics whom the once-democratic Western nations used to respect as being the very foundation stone for democracy – but obviously no longer do, because the Western nations are no longer authentic democracies, not even as close to that as they once were).
But the evil here, on the part of The West, goes beyond even that. The US government is now feeding the fear that the publics in all of the former Soviet and Soviet-allied subjugated states very naturally but also entirely unjustifiably feel against the successor Russian state; and this understandable residual fear, in turn, is being responded to by Russia, by means of its pouring tens of thousands of troops and associated armaments toward their borders in order to protect against a potential US invasion from US-allied soil.
This mutual buildup along Russia’s European borders can easily get out of control, and so Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has many times quietly urged Washington for there to be private communications between himself and US President Barack Obama to reach a peaceable conclusion to this escalation, but Obama repeatedly refuses.
The real function of Western propaganda in Western Europe, such as Rupert Murdoch’s recent propaganda using Mikhail Gorbachev in this way, is not so much in order to stir his countrymen’s fears of an invasion against their country by Russia, but is instead to stir sufficient support by Brits for UK to join with the US invasion of Russia that increasingly likely will be precipitated under the Article V provision of the NATO Treaty as a ‘justification’ to escalate to all-out war if and when Russia provides a ‘provocation’. That may not happen this year (and the US military sends signals that they won’t be prepared for that until 2017), but the buildup is happening right now.