Russia, Ukraine and US Resistance to the Shifting Direction of History
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Those unwilling to disbelieve in our James Bondian heroes and revered political figures must keep themselves innocently unaware of CIA-engineered coups and assassinations beginning after WWII and throughout the half-century long, now re-ignited Cold War.
Five violations of others’ sovereignty were targeted soon after WWII by avuncular President Eisenhower among whom only Ho Chi Min survived in office.
Populist and socialist governments that tried to distribute national resources to their own people in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia and the Congo were all ruthlessly destroyed. We concealed elaborate covert warfare by collaboration with dictators committing horrific genocides in Southeast Asia, Operation Condor in South America, Iran-Contra in Central America, widely throughout Africa, and numerous successful and unsuccessful “color revolutions” for regime changes including total destruction of Libya, the most highly developed and uniquely populist nation in Africa with a human development index equivalent to Western Europe.
And most recently of course we orchestrated the 2014 Maidan coup d’etat in Kiev that was quickly followed with attacks by Ukrainian neo-Nazi military formations on the Russian-speaking Donbas republics that had declared independence and requested annexation by Russia alongside Crimea, which Putin declined. Ukraine had killed 14-18,000 of its own dissident citizens before Putin finally took action in 2022. The current war was launched by these 2014 aggressions, not Russia’s eventual intervention.
Demonizing Russia
Russia, and especially President Putin, has been used as an American political bludgeon and scapegoat for the past six years, and despite our naked interference in Ukraine exposed without apparent embarrassment by Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, US media are awash with proclamations of unilateral Russian guilt for the war. All war news published in the US press is provided by the Ukrainian side and disconnected from history. We need legal scholars to remind the public that criminal guilt is determined by forensic evidence placed by both sides before an impartial panel for judgment.
Regarding the Mariupol massacre of civilians, no such process has occurred and the only credible forensic investigation I’ve seen based on satellite data and analyzed by former Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter shows fresh bodies appearing with no signs of decomposition several days after Russian forces left the area, wearing white armbands signaling their support of Russians for protection, and an intercepted communication from Azov HQ that they were preparing to take punitive measures against collaborators.
Of course the first question of any homicide detective is Cui bono? This evidence suggests that the Bucha massacre was committed by Azov Nazis for both revenge and propaganda objectives. This would also be consistent with their psychopathic MO.
CIA and NATO manipulations
The Azov Battalion, Right Sektor and associated military units are unapologetic Nazis, with tattoos, battle flags, and helmets emblazoned with swastikas and SS proclamations of identity. We need look no farther than the heroic
Lviv statue of Stepan Bandera, whose followers collaborated with Hitler in mass exterminations of Jews, Poles and Russians in WWII. Let’s remember that Russia was our ally then. Germany therefore had an extensive spy network targeting Russia, which the CIA took over with Nuremberg amnesty and full employment as part of Operation Gladio. This is described by Doug Valentine (above link) who documented our diabolical Phoenix Program for “pacification” in Vietnam and published “The CIA as Organized Crime” in 2017.
The CIA program in Ukraine has been maintained ever since with US/NATO funding, facilitating neo-Nazi insinuation into Ukrainian positions of political and military influence, and generous arming with NATO-compatible weaponry. It’s been done with familiar CIA color revolution patience and methodological efficiency for disproportionate amplification of power by a political minority supporting our predatory neoliberal objectives.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton openly re-ignited the Cold War in 1999 by admitting three new NATO members in violation of the 1990 Bush/Gorbachev agreement, also assured by other Western leaders, that Germany could re-unify as a Western state if NATO pledged to move no closer to Russia than the German border. Documents validating this agreement between heads of state and foreign ministers, which establish it as international law, are published in the National Security Archive at George Washington University and have been detailed by UCLA Political Science professor Marc Trachtenberg.
Our contract betrayal has continued ever since with 10 East European and Balkan states previously aligned with the Soviet Union joining NATO. This reached a boiling point with Georgia’s attempted 2008 takeover of buffer state South Ossetia, which Russia quickly swatted down.
The Ukraine gambit
Western disregard and disrespect boiled into evaporation of all Russian trust with the 2014 US-orchestrated coup d’etat in Kiev, facilitated as well by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky who owns Burisma Energy that provided Hunter Biden his infamously generous sinecure, and who founded the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion which ignored the Minsk accords and immediately launched attacks against Donbas communities.
Russia lost an estimated 27 million citizens while defeating Hitler. How would we expect them to react to military formations flaunting swastikas and SS regalia on their doorstep? Unsurprisingly, Russia finally invaded, executed a classic feint operation toward Kiev to freeze Ukrainian forces in a defensive posture away from Russia’s intended target, trapped a large Azov force in the steel works catacombs of Mariupol and has them increasingly surrounded in “cauldron” operations in the Donbas region. These operations provide enemies with opportunities to survive through surrender (unlike U.S. Shock and Awe and Fallujah operations under U.S. Gen. “Mad Dog” James Mattis in a war of choice involving no existential threat whatsoever to us). Russia established humanitarian corridors and transportation to safety for civilians but is likely to hold Nazis for war crimes tribunals.
Ukraine’s NATO-trained and NATO-equipped military sharing a 1200-mile border is understandably perceived as an intolerable existential threat to Russia – as the Mexican and/or Canadian borders would be to us if either country was controlled by Russia or China. Simply recall our Cuban Missile Crisis. Putin’s efforts since 2014 to negotiate a treaty have been wholly ignored. He is a leader responsible to protect his own country and is doing so. This has proven possibly prudent in view of U.S. bioweapons labs discovered in Ukraine and acknowledged by Maidan cookie dispenser Victoria Nuland, prior awareness of which is likely in view of Russia’s very effective intelligence. This may have informed timing of the invasion.
Ending Western arrogance and impunity
To end this war, President Zelensky – although reportedly under mortal threat by Azov et al. and the U.S. for any capitulation – must simply accept Russia’s very reasonable conditions: Guarantee Ukraine will not join NATO; dismantle its NATO-compatible weaponry that provides it de facto NATO membership; voluntarily disarm Nazi units and disempower Nazi leaders not already killed or captured by Russia; protect the Donbas republics and resume the Minsk process in good faith. This could have been settled long before the Russian offensive. It only requires normal human respect and good faith – at long last – from the deservedly failing Western empire before more Ukrainian lives are needlessly sacrificed.
But instead, the U.S. is shipping weapons to Ukraine and sanctioning Russia at the expense of the world economy at large. But I don’t recall any sanctions against the U.S. for any of our brutal wars of choice – “the ultimate international crime” defined by the Nuremberg tribunal – including two genocidal attacks on Iraq, innocent of any crime against us, with sanctions killing at least a half-million children, use of white phosphorous and depleted uranium weapons causing massive pain, death and destruction to civilians, and two ruthless, indiscriminate, genocidal assaults on Fallujah under Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis. Every U.S. president at least since Jimmy Carter (whose hands are also unclean, having recruited and trained the Mujahideen including bin Laden) should be in prison for life after trial in the Hague.
Let me add Israel’s crimes that we have protected 45 times to date by vetoes of UN Security Council sanctions resolutions – a long history of unabated and unpunished war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel’s brutal 3/4-century of relentless land and property theft, expulsions of Palestinians into dozens of UN-supported refugee camps established in 1948 and still operating, its UN-designated “belligerent occupation” of Palestine with many thousands of political imprisonments including children, murders by both illegal settlers and occupation forces with impunity under martial law, siege entrapment of Gaza by air, land and sea, military assaults and massacres against helpless Gaza populations, and chronic defiance of international law including the Fourth Geneva Convention defining the limits and responsibilities of an occupying power.
Injustice has reigned far too long. Let’s try some empathy.
The U.S. has never faced an existential threat to justify its serial war crimes while Russia is responding to a very real existential threat. Thus it cannot and will not lose this war. By massive weapons shipments to Ukraine the U.S. is needlessly prolonging the conflict at the expense of Ukrainian lives and potential loss of their national sovereignty. Our so-called “peace movement” should demand a halt to this escalation at increasing taxpayer and consumer expense, acknowledge our two decade-long provocation and dishonorable violations of a pledge to Russia, facilitate an immediate treaty incorporating Russia’s rightful demands, and spend our aid money not on weapons but on rebuilding.
And then, quo vadis, NATO?
Nations, like individuals, have their own needs, priorities and identities within their own histories, economies and environments. NATO is an artificially assembled conglomerate that disrespects their diverse collective identities by promoting paranoia toward an artificially constructed common enemy with which many or most of its members do essential business and have no quarrel.
It is a vestigial political organ that has become hazardous to the collective health of humanity and should be allowed to gracefully dissolve under pressure from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that has been progressively winning over the last 20 years on Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard largely unnoticed by the self-absorbed, self-important North Atlantic imperium. Russia has now initiated this dissolution, which appears irreversible.
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Jack Dresser, Ph.D. is a retired psychologist and NIH-funded research scientist, and national vice-chair, Veterans for Peace working group on Palestine and the Middle East.
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