Robert Bridges
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s words strengthen the case for Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg may have said the quiet part out loud on Wednesday when he revealed to reporters that NATO’s push into Eastern Europe since 2014 was done specifically with Russia in mind.
“The reality is also that we have been preparing for this since 2014,” he said. “That is the reason that we have increased our presence in the eastern part of the alliance, why NATO allies have started to invest more in defense, and why we have increased [our] readiness.”
The NATO chief went on to insist that Russia has been “using force in the eastern Donbass since 2014.”
What he neglected to mention, though, was the role Western powers played in the outbreak of civil violence in Kiev on February 24, 2013 that led to the Maidan coup and, ultimately, to the current situation. The US and its influence on the ground in Ukraine, channelled through “civil society” groups it bankrolled, was largely responsibility for that mess.
Even Victoria ‘F**k the EU’ Nuland (then-US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs) admitted as much in April 2014 when she said Washington had invested $5 billion dollars into “spreading democracy” in Ukraine – apparently because such efforts worked so well before.
Russia’s greatest ‘crime’ at the time was to provide an alternative route to national development for Kiev. The US Diplomatic Forces flew into swift action on November 21, 2013 when the government of then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych made the sudden decision not to sign the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement (AA), which the West had been insisting upon, opting for closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Here is where all the talk about “building democracy” was exposed as the lie it was.
“It would be a huge shame to see five years of work and preparation go to waste if the AA is not signed in the near future,” Nuland said at the December 13, 2013 US-Ukraine Foundation conference. “So it is time to finish the job.”
That sounds more like an implicit threat than any sort of call to democratic principles. As Ukraine would soon discover, Washington considers as ‘democratic’ only those countries that obey its will.
While Nuland was taking multiple trips to Kiev in the midst of the Maidan melee, passing out snacks alongside John McCain and the US Ambassador, very strange things were happening that have never been adequately explained.
To this day no definite result has come from investigations into the infamous ‘Maidan snipers’ that killed dozens of both protesters and police officers. Conflicting reports and claims by various sides name them as working for the embattled government, the protesters, Russia – all in the name of stoking tensions further. According to some of the snipers themselves, they received direct orders from a US officer. Would that be something that NATO (or someone linked to NATO) could have sanctioned? It’s impossible to say with any certainty, but the killings went far towards enraging the masses, which ultimately drove Yanukovych out of the country.
Meanwhile, Reuters, then not yet so sure of Kiev’s innocence, asked (back in 2014) why no one was charged with killing policemen, especially when it is considered that the prosecutors and the minister in charge of the investigation all played a part in fueling the uprising. By way of evidence, the General Prosecutor of Ukraine Vitaly Yarema was videotaped striking a traffic cop in the face during the protests. To what degree was Yarema and numerous other Kiev officials were corrupted and compromised by Western money will never be known, but it’s a question still worthy of asking.
Another thing to question is why the Western media barely reported Kiev’s shelling of the Donbass, home to millions of Russian speakers and passport holders, over the course of the last eight years? At the same time, numerous reports – many of them from Ukrainian citizens caught up in the fighting – describe atrocities and war crimes being committed by Ukrainian forces, many of them outright neo-Nazis, such the Azov Battalion. These forces have been indiscriminately bombing schools, hospitals and residential areas, and, to emphasize, these eyewitness accounts are coming from the Ukrainian people themselves.
Back to NATO and Ukraine. The brutal reality, as summed up by Jens Stoltenberg’s remark, is that Ukraine is already a de facto proxy member of NATO, and has been since at least 2014.
As the scholar John Mearsheimer explained, “The alliance began training the Ukrainian military in 2014, averaging 10,000 trained troops annually over the next eight years.”
The arming of Ukraine happened regardless of who was in the White House. In December 2017, the Trump administration, together with other NATO states, began sending ‘defensive’ weapons to Ukraine, while Kiev took a major role in military exercises held on the Russian border.
The US and Ukraine have been co-hosting Exercise Sea Breeze, yearly naval drills in the Black Sea. The July 2021 iteration was the largest to date, including navies from 32 countries. In September the same year, the Ukrainian army led ‘Rapid Trident 2021’, which the US Army describes as “A US Army Europe and Africa-assisted annual exercise designed to enhance the interoperability among allied and partner nations.”
The key word here is “interoperability,” which would give ‘non-NATO partner’ Ukraine much of what was already being given to regular paying client states. Yet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just keeps asking for more, and NATO is happy to oblige.
Some may argue that Ukraine was absolutely right to join forces with NATO, considering that Russia had ‘annexed’ the Crimean Republic and absorbed it into its ‘empire’. That’s the view being sowed across NATO and its partner states. In reality, the Crimean population held a democratic referendum that asked whether they wanted to rejoin Russia as a federal subject, or if they wanted to restore the 1992 Crimean constitution and peninsula’s status as a part of Ukraine.
The result should have silenced the critics, but instead it just infuriated them more: a 97% vote for integration of the region into the Russian Federation with an 83% voter turnout. Consequently, President Putin signed a decree, after its formal ratification in the State Duma, recognizing Crimea as a sovereign state –without so much as a drop of blood being shed.
It would take a dyed-in-the-wool Russophobe to take in all of the above and not, at the very least, understand why Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine.
Here we go again. Same type of face different place. “What the hell…they’ll believe anything we tell them now”. It just never ends.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/multiple-people-shot-during-4th-july-celebration-chicago-suburb
Attachment
America Is Being Suicided
Published: Friday, 01 July 2022 00:27
Happy 4th of July,
you faithless fools
Belief in the big lie
is how you will die
A country gone bad,
a government gone mad
Americans are too stupid
to be ashamed of themselves
LATE BREAKING BULLETIN:
700 million will die from vaccines
Happy birthday, America. It very likely could be our last. It has become completely impossible to ignore the fact that we suddenly find ourselves in a country gone bad run by a government gone mad, making war on a country we don’t have to fight that is destroying our own country in the process.
An idiot president trying to start World War 3. Doctors killing people for money. Newspapers cheering black thugs burning down American cities and robbing stores at random. Police putting white people in jail for demanding freedom and honesty.
Fixed elections. Supply lines deliberately sabotaged. Food processing plants being burned down. Crops and farm animals being purposely destroyed. Borders open and insecure and a government strategically distributing foreign strangers into vulnerable American communities.
The psychotic zombie state known as the United States of America celebrates the worst birthday in its entire history this coming week, as it careens toward oblivion unchecked by rational norms of human sanity while making war on the entire world, including its own loyal citizens.
America is a nation without honor which conspicuously doesn’t even keep its promises to its own people. It has displayed to the whole world it cannot be trusted in anything it says and now deliberately plans to start World War 3 at the behest of billionaire madmen who control the fate of humanity by their control of money, media and mind bending, child killing drugs.
This utter absence of human conscience and compassion has led America to break every treaty it ever made with anybody and this lack of character has produced the crippled entity this disintegrating country is today, sabotaged by individuals who have robbed it of its riches, fouled its reputation and murdered its own residents for the curdled profits of a despicable few, who rape children, dishonor the people who trusted them, and present a danger to the entire world with their never-ending dishonesty.
Read the rest…
https://www.johnkaminski.org/index.php/john-kaminski-american-writer-and-critic-2/422-america-is-being-suicided
So, is that it? Are we destined to dry up and blow away. OR, do we do something? Anything? Do we die on our knees or do we stand and fight with every last breath?
An excellent, short article also available on this mornings ZH, highly appropriate for this July 4th:
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/06/28/we_the_people_need_to_stand_up_for_our_nation_839597.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-people-need-stand-our-nation
‘We The People’ Need to Stand Up for Our Nation’
By Jack Miller
June 28, 2022
Our Constitution begins, “We the People, of the United States.” “We the People,” not some of the people or some groups of people – but all of the people.
Our Constitution continues by noting that it was instituted “in order to form a more perfect Union,” meaning that the Founders recognized the great imperfections of the union under our first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation. They then formed a government that was “more perfect,” meaning one that was better equipped to realize our nation’s vision.
What is that vision? It is embodied in the stirring words of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Those words set forth the vision that underlies the “more perfect union,” and the Constitution our Founders gave us lays out the means to secure that vision.
Did we achieve that vision in 1776 when the Declaration was written or in 1787 when the Constitution was created? Hardly. Has America achieved it now, almost 250 years later? No. But building on what our Founders gave us, we are much, much closer to living up to our Founding principles of equality and liberty for all.
The Founders knew that the Constitution they drafted was not perfect. It didn’t eliminate slavery, although it limited its spread. Even after the 13th Amendment officially outlawed slavery, the Ku Klux Klan embarked on lynching campaigns, and many Americans held prejudices of all kinds against those of other races.
Americans of certain races and religions weren’t allowed in many hotels, resorts, and other places and were barred from some universities. Fortunately, that historic type of prejudice has all but disappeared today.
Yet we are now at a moment in our history when the progress we have made is being reversed. Instead of getting closer to “We the people,” coming together as individuals, there is a movement fueled by some extremists to tear us apart.
We are a nation of over three hundred and thirty million people, the vast majority of whom are focused on living their lives, working hard, raising their families, and seeking to find happiness and fulfillment.
For the most part, they have been vaguely aware of the extremist fringe movement that has taken over and changed much of the curriculum and culture of our educational institutions. The same extremist fringe movement has taken our First Amendment right to peaceable assembly and turned it into violent mob rule. Our nation, which Americans always proudly said was dedicated to protecting the rights of all individuals, is now on the road to becoming a nation without respect for laws.
But that sliver of extremists and their nihilistic agenda now have gone too far, and many Americans are beginning to push back. Brave, concerned parents are campaigning for the recall of radical school board members and state attorneys general who have implemented “social justice” policies that are fomenting crime, violence, and anti-law enforcement sentiment.
Even some college professors are resisting the extremists. Recently it was a big news story when law scholar Ilya Shapiro resigned from an executive director position at Georgetown Law. After a four-month suspension for criticizing President Biden’s discriminatory rationale for a Supreme Court justice (poorly chosen words notwithstanding), Georgetown’s report effectively warned Shapiro that “corrective measures” would be taken for future “offensive conduct,” which would be judged by how people react, not the speaker’s intent.
As Shapiro wrote in his recent Wall Street Journal piece, “The freedom to speak is no freedom at all if it makes an exception for speech someone finds offensive or counter to some nebulous conception of equity.”
Our Declaration of Independence envisioned a free people exercising their rights responsibly, and it’s what we have been striving to achieve throughout our nation’s history. I don’t blame people for peaceably assembling to fight for their rights. But I vehemently resent their attempt to cast America as a failed nation. America is the freest, most prosperous nation in the world – a nation that has and is progressing toward realizing its vision, enshrined in our Declaration, of equality for all.
We’ve come a long way, and we can achieve much more if we continue to build on what our Founders gave us. So it’s now time for that vast silent majority within those three hundred and thirty million to speak out and push back. If we want to preserve this great nation of ours, silence is no longer an option.
Jack Miller is the founder and chairman of the Jack Miller Center, a 501(c)(3) organization that promotes the teaching of America’s founding principles and history by supporting professors and programs on campuses nationwide as well as courses for K-12 teachers that help them build engaging lessons for their students.
ME…SO, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
As an aside, I want to thank Jim and his webmaster whom have seemed to fix the registration snafu….so if you now have anyone who would like to join our crew, let them know it’s open for new commentors.