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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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In an interview just before his death in 2012, Günter Grass, who limned so poignantly the horrors of war in his novel The Tin Drum, spoke ominously about America’s interference in the Ukraine, remarking,

“There is war everywhere; we run the risk of committing the same mistakes as before. Without realizing it, we can get into a world war as if we were sleepwalking.”

The sudden media frenzy over the move of Russia’s military into the Ukraine in defense of Donetsk and Lugansk, the Donbass region featuring a largely Russian-speaking population, is deeply disorienting for us. We already know from the last few years, and from the last twenty years, that journalism, globally, is dead and that little of the information that we receive is reliable.

The number of Russians, or Ukrainians, reported killed might be as accurate as the number of people infected with COVID-19, a bogus disease. We may have to wait years to get to the bottom of this conflict.

We have little idea of what is happening in the Ukraine, but we can be sure that the new fluidity in geopolitics generated by it, the unprecedented escalation, threatens all.

We have been skillfully divided by the powerful, yet again. Some rush to condemn the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia as a horrific crime, holding protests in good faith around the country. They are concerned about Russian expansionism, Russian domination, and the global influence of a state system with President Vladimir Putin at the center.

Their concerns, although at times exaggerated, are not without basis.

Others, however, see the meddling of the United States in the Ukraine over the last twenty years, and especially the US-NATO covert orchestration of the overthrow of the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 as an illegal coup d’état. They condemn the horrific shelling of the Donbass region by the far-right, anti-Russian, government installed in Kiev. And they express concern over the funding by the United States, and other Europeans, of far right, explicitly Nazi and anti-ethnic Russian groups that have been responsible for most of the violence over the last eight years.

Their concerns are not without basis.

But arguing that Russia is expansionist when the United States has spread the tentacles of empire to every corner of the globe, is silly, is laughable.

Likewise, arguing that President Vladimir Putin offers a real opposition to American expansionism, that he presents a defense of the rule of law and a legitimate internationalism, is delusional.

But you, the American citizen, empowered by the Constitution and crippled by the multinational corporation, are forced to rely on news sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or alternative news of the left and right, sources of varied quality that promote storylines meant to obscure the manner by which global financial institutions, a handful of the super-rich, are subjecting the United States economy to a controlled demolition with the intent of integrating the remaining shell-shocked fragments into a new global economy controlled by invisible forces.

Our media, with rare, rare exceptions, shies away from an investigation of deep structural contradictions, like the overproduction and false growth driven by hidden debt, that lead us to bounce back and forth between war with China and war with Russia so as to keep the billionaires in power.

All these media sources lied to you with a straight face about the 9.11 incident, about the COVID-19 scam, and they want you to forget about the trillions of dollars stolen by investment banks in 2020, and to avoid any consideration of how the super-rich are reducing our citizens to slavery.

Sadly, the media of Russia, or of China, is not much better, granted that it sometimes touches on topics that are forbidden in Washington.

What we can say today about the conflict in the Ukraine is that neither side, and there may be more than two sides involved, is aiming for incremental change or for a slight advantage.

The international community founded on the principles of the United Nations Charter, a community that had limped on, in spite of decadence and corruption, in spite of the radical concentration of wealth, in spite of the criminal privatization of government, and the reduction of education and journalism to tools for social control, that system has, at last, has died.

The international community has changed, changed utterly.

Make no mistake, the dumbing down of our citizens, the destruction of institutions of governance, education, and journalism during the COVID-19 operation, has opened the doors to a global battle, at home and abroad, unlike anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes.

This is most certainly not a Cold War ideological battle. The screaming headlines in the media about the “right” and the “left” refer power players who offer zero ideological analysis about the means of production and how power is perpetuated. The dialog on politics offers no serious ideological differences, but simply the antics of two parties in Washington D.C.: the whores and the pimps.

No, the current great unravelling resembles the days before the First World War when national governments that controlled multinational empires appealed to patriotism and created unity through a war effort, a war that was meant to generate profits and to divert attention away from social contradictions. Conflict, the bankers reasoned then and now, creates demand, increases the authority of the state, and gives reasons for suppressing open discussion.

Then as now, global finance had no commitment to a specific nation, and sought advantages in England, Germany, Russia and France by encouraging war.

The current two systems, represented at this moment by Washington and Moscow, are not competing for simple political influence.

Those gathered around Joseph Biden in the White House, those gathered around Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street, and their followers in the corporate world, threaten military attacks and impose extreme sanctions such as closing airspace to Russian planes, and ending communications for Russians via mobile phones.

NATO and the United States, through recent actions that shut Russia out of the international monetary and logistical systems, are committed to completely dismantling Russia, and leaving behind only cultural rubble. The demands for a no fly zone in the Ukraine are demands for war with Russia, demands for nuclear war. When Senator Lindsey Graham demands that President Putin be assassinated, when the Russian general Andrei Sukhovetsky is killed, we are in a war that must be stopped.

But something else is going on here. These sanctions on Russia are suddenly announced in the media without any discussion of the process by which they were generated or description of who will implement them. The argument promoted is that an authoritarian Russia threatens democracies. But the actions of these democracies are rendering them as dictatorships.

As a result, global institutions like the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations, as well as IT corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Oracle, are being militarized as we speak now.

What they have been authorized to do to Russians today they will do to you tomorrow, and there will be no appeal precisely because the policies were formulated and implemented in secret.

Your bank account, your automobile, your every action, can be shut down by these hidden forces. The oppression of citizens in Canada, New Zealand and Austria was the front line of this war against the citizens of the Earth. Now something far worse is slouching towards Kiev to be born.

A shadow government lurks behind the titles “US Government,” “German government,” “NATO,” “World Bank,” or “United Nations” and it will be able to seize everything you possess, and to put you in jail, without any due process.

The Russians are planning their own response on the global stage, and they will work most likely with Iran, and perhaps with factions in China, and with the dissatisfied in Europe and in the United States.

The Russians will not tell us what they are planning, and our corrupt media will not explain what steps Russia will take to dismantle the United States.

But we can be sure that the mansions of government, finance and journalism in the United States have such weak foundations, and such rotten beams that there will be plenty of havoc the Russians can wreak.

How sad that we will devote such effort to tearing each other apart when we should be building global institutions for disarmament and nonproliferation, for the response to the climate catastrophe, and to end the rule of private finance, and technological tyranny, over the good citizens of the United States, of Russia, and of the rest of the world.

The sanctions on Russia are presented as devastating. But from the position of Russia, sanctions make necessary self-reliance and economic independence which is healthy. They reduce the poisonous touch of vampire financial institutions like BlackRock, Vanguard and Goldman Sachs, institutions that are sucking the lifeblood out of the United States.

What happened on February 19th? Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which she called out to all members of NATO (which she referred to as “the greatest military alliance the world has ever seen,” to join the United States in preparing to confront Russia on all fronts.

When Harris said that “national borders should not be changed by force,” when she promised “unprecedented economic costs,” when she called for NATO to “move forward with consequences,” she was issuing a declaration of war against Russia, perhaps a war by means other than tanks and fighter planes.

The Munich Security Conference, funded by NATO, by global finance and by military contractors drooling over the potential for war, had a thin veneer of legitimacy that allowed Harris to speak with confidence.

She represents perfectly the culture politics employed to mask the emergence of class warfare and to render the Democratic Party as a public relations firm devoted to convincing Americans that the fusion of corporate and government power is good because minorities play key roles.

Harris was touted in the mass media (a media that could not care less about the realities faced by working class people of all colors) as “breaking barriers” by being the first woman, the first Indian American and the first African American to rise to such a prominent position.

There is value in her rise to prominence, but if we look at her role as San Francisco district attorney, we see that she destroyed the lives of young people, mostly black, who were locked up as her service to private prison franchises.

Harris serves us the poison whipped up by the criminal class of bankers in a bright multicultural cup, with a touch of progressive rhetoric so that bitter taste is bearable.

President Vladimir Putin delivered his formal response to Harris, and more broadly to the United States and NATO, on February 21 at the Kremlin. His speech formed a notable contrast. Putin presented the historical context of the American and NATO interventions in the Ukraine in a lucid, and largely accurate manner. He gave more detail about policy than any American politician would do.

He upheld diplomacy, international institutions and the need for concrete dialog. He deserves credit for this effort.

But there were ominous signs as well.

Putin sat at a desk in the icy Kremlin, with its high ceilings and marble walls, addressing a small group of government elites. His poise was perfect, wearing a meticulously prepared jacket and tie and watching every detail of the process like an eagle.

Behind him hung two flags: the flag of the Russian Federation, and the flag of the Presidency of Russia. Putin’s personal flag features a double eagle grasping the symbols of state power and the image of Saint George slaying a dragon. It is a flag that represents the authority of the emperor to punish.

Putin resembles most Napoleon Bonaparte, a self-made emperor who was determined to bend the world to his will. Napoleon held up the Napoleonic code in 1800 that granted basic rights to all men, and he opposed the power of the Catholic church and of the nobility. But his gambit in Europe was a means of increasing his power and the power of the state.

Similarly, Putin has advocated for international treaties and diplomacy, for rational dialog between nations, while at the same time relying on a tight-knit group of billionaires who have no interest in the common man.

There has been a surge in puppy love for Putin around the world. But before we get carried away, let us check the facts.

Did Putin note that COVID-19 is a scam that enables the super-rich to take over the global economy? No, he presumed that both Russia and the United States are run by functional governments and suggested that a few meetings with American secretary of state Anthony Blinken could clear up the misunderstandings.

Although Putin has, to his credit, discussed the concentration of wealth and the privatization of government, still he is fine with the United Nation’s system being reduced to a toy for the superrich. He did not even hint at the rising power of multinational banks, the war on money, privacy, and autonomy over one’s body.

Let us remember that the Russia presented as an alternative is an active member of the World Economic Forum and has implemented many COVID-19 policies, if perhaps not as severely as other countries.

Putin’s speech was about blood ties, family ties, between Russia and the Ukraine. He spoke like a Czar and he laid blame for Russia’s problems at the feet of the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks.

Although the failures of Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Communist Party are well documented, Putin’s suggestion that the Communist Party was hopelessly out of touch with reality, that it signed a humiliating treaty with Germany for peace during World War I out of cowardice, was misleading.

Lenin and his followers wrestled with the issue of class and the concentration of wealth. They may have been misguided, but they, unlike Putin, were right on the money.

Lenin was an imperfect politician and thinker, but his understanding of class struggle and of the hidden crimes of global finance is directly applicable to the crisis we face today.

What do we need to do in response?

We are looking at a war in the Ukraine that is part of a larger world war, a war intended to transform human society into a prison, into a digital nightmare wherein unaccountable techno-tyrants can track, and punish at will, anyone for any reason. Silent weapons to destroy the body and the mind are employed in this quiet war waged by supercomputers. No one, no one, in the corporate media will ever tell you this truth.

The war has already started. It will be a war unlike any war we have encountered before. Most likely, many of the expensive weapons we have purchased will prove useless.

It is a basic rule of history that we are always preparing to fight the last war. The cavalry charges of the 19th century proved useless in the face of machine guns in the First World War, and the biplanes of the 1930s were no match for the fighter planes, aircraft carriers, and long-range bombers of the Second World War.

We have been preparing for some version of the Second World War for a long time. Even today, experts struggle to fit the Ukraine war in the box of the Second World War or the Cold War.

This war is like the Second World War in that is consists of axis and allied powers around the world engaged in a global struggle for absolute control.

This war is like the Civil War in that it pits brother against brother, and state against state–just as we witnessed in the COVID-19 campaigns.

This war is like the Vietnam War. The enemy is everywhere.

And, this war has new elements. The massive destruction, retention, and manipulation of information means that tens of thousands can be killed and most people would never know anything had ever happened.

The militarization of money, of medicine, of communications and of journalism and education present us with unprecedented challenges. Military experts are not able to grasp this new reality because they are caught up in the WEF’s Great Reset themselves. Many are more concerned about their retirement benefits than about the long-term security of our people.

We witness an interference pattern wherein the traditional imperial struggle of a world war is projected on an unprecedented form technological class warfare.

That means that we cannot rule out the possibility that the war in the Ukraine will ultimately be a “rich man’s game” meant to further the enslavement of the common man.

The richest man on Earth, Elon Musk agreed to requests from the Ukraine government to supply internet services via his Starlink satellites. What a humanitarian! Or is this war just a more effective way of pushing through the great reset, of taking possessions away from citizens and stripping them of the means of production? Will we all be forced, sooner or later, to use Musk’s Starlink for communications because of a war, if not because of a pandemic?

The sudden sanctions on Russia without due process or debate, parallel the seizure of the assets of Canadians for questioning government policy.

Money and assets form the next front in this war. Assess to money will become a privilege granted by the corporate state to those who follow the rules.

Our response to this crisis must have two sides: a security side and an economic side.

On the security side, we must create a global arms control and disarmament regime that is democratic and transparent in nature and that takes the power to promote war away from arms merchants and the banks that support them. The regulations must be without exceptions and must be global.

The competition to develop nuclear weapons, and other dangerous devices, has already started in earnest between Germany, Turkey, Iran, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam, Brazil and other nations. Ukraine was clearly being encouraged to take that path.

We must be firm in presenting an alternative to this nightmare that threatens humanity—nuclear war is far, far, more dangerous than any bogus pandemic.

The United States will be the first to commit to a serious disarmament program.

Such a commitment will show that the United States is following the Nonproliferation Treaty and will do more than anything else to change the mood around the world and to open a window for true diplomacy.

On the economic side, we must end now the rule of parasitic finance that is trying to destroy Russia, as it has destroyed many other nations, and as it is preparing to destroy the United States.

We must separate the military and intelligence permanently from finance and profit-driven efforts, and end the deadly privatization of security that has allowed multinational investment funds like BlackRock to seize control of the Earth’s economy using the authority of the military and techno-tyrants like Facebook and Amazon to buy up chunks of the intelligence system.

Critical to ending this drive for world war by a handful of psychopaths will be taking back control of money in the United States. Bogus currency and financial manipulation must end. Fake money generated by supercomputers and called “derivatives” should be considered worthless. And stock markets and futures markets must be places run as cooperatives by citizens in which ordinary people can build enterprises with their neighbors.

There is no room for an elite untouchable class of the rich.

If the multinational investment banks intend to seize our money, we must make it clear that the definition of money, and its valuation, is a right that belongs to the citizens, and not to multinational investment banks. If they deny us access to our money, or manipulate its value in any way, we will make our own currency tied to assets that we define as local communities.

We need real security. We need self-sufficiency in renewable energy and in food. We need to an end the death cult of free trade and growth, and undertake a massive scaling back of these eternal alliance relations.

NATO is a monster in search of a war, a progeny of overproduction and financial speculation. It must be dismantled and the United Nations Charter used as the foundation for shared security treaties that span the Earth and the deal with the threats to the climate, to the oceans, and to food with the seriousness we would adopt to respond to war.

Along the way, we must set up an international constitution of information to assure that all citizens are entitled to the truth and that massive distortions of information do not lead us into needless conflicts.

We must rush to the front line in this global battle, establishing binding treaties to end nuclear weapons and to end the creation of deadly robots and drones that can so easily misused. We also need binding treaties on the use of nano-technology as a weapon, and of biotechnology as a weapon—as we witnessed in the case of vaccines.

We will do so by creating, and by defending with our lives, a global commons that belongs to all of us and that is off limits to the billionaires. That global commons will include most of our oceans, forests, rivers and natural wildlands.

There is so much we can do to offer hope, rather than despair, life, rather than death, understanding, rather than ignorance, and truth, rather than lies. We must start a great transformation, not a Great Reset, that will sweep across our nation, and the Earth.

We stand firmly at this critical moment and we order the money changers and mercenaries that they cannot set loose these dogs of war.

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This article was originally published on US Provisional Government.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Rise Up Times