Think about this . . .
The neocons lied to us about Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo.
They lied to us about Afghanistan.
They lied to us about Iraq.
They lied to us about Libya.
They lied to us about Syria.
They’re currently lying to us about Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Colombia, and China.
So . . .
Why would we for a microsecond think that they’re telling us the truth about Russia and Ukraine?
I looked around at major Western media news recently. There’s not really that much on Ukraine now. At least, nothing compared to the deluge we were seeing back at the onset of the “crisis”. You know, back in February almost a year ago when Putin apparently snorted PCP and went on a completely unprovoked destructive rampage.
Why so little about the greatest threat to world peace since the Third Reich?
There are two reasons: 1) This latest iteration of the RUSSIA BAD campaign, which really got ramped up in 2014, has now brainwashed a sufficient number of citizens so they keep on waving their blue-and-yellow flags, certain their RUSSIA BAD/UKRAINE GOOD battlecry embraces all they believe to be noble and true, guaranteeing 2) that now there will be no public outrage over the oceans of money which will continue to flow into the coffers of the defense industry — because, you know, it’s ABSOLUTELY THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD THAT WE DEFEAT RUSSIA on the battlefield in Ukraine. More weapons, more bombs! More wasted tax dollars! More skyrocketing profits for the merchants of death. More fattened stock portfolios for the ultra-wealthy.
Yes, while everyday people are personally struggling with accelerating inflation, stagnant wages, job insecurity and shrinking opportunity, business closures, out-of-control housing costs, food shortages, energy shortages, baby formula shortages, on and on, and because of the exploding deficit — now pushing our national debt beyond the legal debt ceiling — there’s no relief in sight from Uncle Sam for us regular folks. Yet by some stroke of magic or divine intervention, there are limitless piles of money to send to Ukraine; plenty of funding to ship increasingly lethal weaponry to the psychopathic, neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, in order to keep the war going; plenty in the vault to vastly increase US/NATO military readiness in Europe; mountains of resources available to rebuild Ukraine, relocate its refugees, prop up its comedian/puppet/war-to-the-death-of-the-last-Ukrainian marketeer, Volodymyr Zelensky, and keep the sickenly corrupt, anti-democratic regime of one of the most corrupt, anti-democratic nations on Planet Earth in power. We watch dumbfounded as members of Congress fall over one another making sure that billions of taxpayer — and borrowed — dollars get dumped into the bottomless pit of this latest conflict and ostensibly “humanitarian” effort.
I won’t get into the ongoing and demonstrably vacuous debate over Russia’s “real” motives, because what Russia’s priorities and concerns been clear for decades. Here is what President Putin said to the Russian Duma (the equivalent of our Congress) this past July 7th, another critical speech which will get no mention in the Western mainstream media:
“Our proposals to create a system of equal security in Europe were rejected, initiatives on joint work on the problem of missile defense were rejected, warnings about the unacceptability of NATO expansion, particularly as concerns the former republics of the Soviet Union, were ignored.”
This should sound very familiar. Putin and other spokespersons for Russian national interests have been saying these same things for years. Putin’s historical speech at the Munich Conference in 2007 laid it out with jarring clarity. If the West wanted to understand, appreciate and respect Putin as the leader of the world’s largest country, acknowledge that as a sovereign nation, Russia, like every other nation has legitimate rights and interests to safeguard, that speech alone offered all of the needed insights and perspective, and moreover issued ample warning of what would be coming if things didn’t change. That was almost 16 YEARS AGO! As we all know — if a person’s not totally brainwashed and extends just a cursory glance at the current situation — not only did the trajectory of U.S. policy not alter course, America and its vassals in Europe doubled down in vilifying Putin and Russia, even manufacturing blatantly false news and slanderous innuendos, initiating crude and transparently illegal provocations, and instituting economic sanctions and seizure of economic assets with reckless abandon. England and the now deposed Boris Johnson, have been especially savage in this hybrid war effort and propaganda juggernaut.
Now we have a culmination of this treachery unfolding in Ukraine.
Keep first and foremost in mind that Russia was bound to react. The West knew Russia would react. There was no way it couldn’t react. If Russia were militarizing Mexico, training Mexican soldiers to fight the U.S., flooding northern Mexico with lethal weaponry, threatening to include Mexico in a hostile military alliance, flying nuclear-capable bomber sorties over Mexico, and had mounted an unprecedented propaganda campaign that stretched out over ten years to demonize the U.S. and its leaders (and throughout this entire onslaught of intimidation and hostility, those same U.S. leaders were warning over and over that Russia was crossing red lines and if the provocations in Mexico didn’t stop, there would be big problems), without time to blink, the U.S. would have reacted. The U.S. would have reacted big time! In fact, considering its record over the decades post-WWII, U.S. attempts to resolve the crisis using diplomacy would be minimal and superficial. It would have been bombs away with 300,000 troops swarming across the border. Tactical nukes would have been positioned, armed, and aimed in case our troops encountered any unexpected resistance.
Even more to the point of understanding the cauldron in Ukraine — and here’s what is commonly completely missed or ignored — the West wanted Russia to react. It was the plan from the beginning and that beginning got its start almost twenty years ago.
This was back in the early 2000s. Once the U.S. realized that Vladimir Putin was not a malleable drunk like Yeltsin, who would do the bidding of the neoliberal predators unleashed on Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992, once the U.S. and its partners in predation in the EU realized that Putin was going to rebuild Russia as a world-class power, protect Russia’s economy and vast resources from further plunder by the West, and without resorting to extreme communist-style socialism, restore the government’s vital role in raising the standard of living for the Russian people, Russia was viewed in a hostile light, and increasingly portrayed as an adversary in the Western press. Russia as a military power — and yes, it still had a huge nuclear arsenal comparable to that of the U.S. — represented a real and menacing threat. Reminders of the Cold War, the extremely tense standoff with the Soviet Union which lasted four decades, became more frequent. Coexistence and cooperation were increasingly declared out of the question by the usual suspects, the bellicose and belligerent Project for a New American Century crowd and their puppets in the media. These world conquest, anti-Russian fanatics, which coalesced into the vitriolic neoconservative cabal now running U.S. foreign policy, mobilized and unleashed their longstanding hatred for Russia. Topping the list were influential insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Destroying Russia has been priority #1 for these psychopaths. Take it apart, fragment it, eliminate any possibility of its functioning as a nation, then go in, loot its vast resources, raid its economy with predatory neoliberalism, chalk it up as another conquest. Next move on to China.
All part of the plan, to push Russia to the point where it had to engage its military resources.
More to the point of this article, it’s all part of a huge con. The biggest fraud and ripoff in human history.
I wish I could use words other than ‘fraud’ and ‘con’ and ‘ripoff’. I sound like I’m talking about the Mafia. Street gangs. Thugs and scammers.
But it is what it is. I am talking about thugs and scammers. That’s exactly how the treacherous scum deciding our foreign policy operate. They threaten and bully. They use fear and intimidation.They lie with every breath they take. They manipulate and yes . . . they con and defraud us. We are subjected to deception and theft polished to a high sheen. And we innocently and naively keep falling for the propaganda. We let the warmongers continue with their wars, looting our national wealth along the way. The Mafia could learn a lot from the current crop of criminals in power.
The psychopaths behind this heist — of the truth and our future — are the neocons, who now swarm like a weaponized pathogen all over Washington DC. Their “gain of function” and increased lethality is the direct result of a ruthless power grab stretching over three decades, leveraging every means and mechanism available to promote their foul, destructive policies to the forefront. The neocons are now fully in control of our foreign policy. This equates to nothing less than endless war, the destruction of our political system, and ultimately the collapse of the U.S. as a world power and potentially its demise as a functioning nation.
We have no choice as citizens. These insane scumbags must be removed from power. PERIOD!
That begins with replacing our current legislature — both House and Senate — every last one of them. Why? Because for a host of reasons, everyone we have elected supports, enables, and is fully complicit with our corrupt, neocon-infested foreign policy establishment, with U.S. military aggression, our disdain for diplomacy, our arrogant chest-beating exceptionalism. The only means available to we the people of getting rid of the neocon cabal is electing a Congress that reflects OUR VALUES — we the people — not the priorities of the war industries, investment banks, the ruling elite. If we can gain control of Congress — total control, at least 300 in the House and 67 in the Senate — we can start to flush out our governing institutions and begin to reverse our disastrous, catastrophic direction as a nation, both at home and across the planet.
We achieve this takeover by creating real choice at the polls. No more having to choose between a war-promoting/military expanding Democrat and a war-promoting/military expanding Republican. WE MUST be able with our votes to choose between war and peace. This means running candidates in every election at every level who are 100% committed to ending the wars, significantly reducing the DOD budgets (by 50% or more), and creating a military engineered and equipped to defend our borders and national interests, not conquer the world for Wall Street and our predatory corporate interests.
Here’s my plan for creating just such real choice at the polls . . .
WHAT IS THE PEACE DIVIDEND STRATEGY?
If you have something better — a serious plan that’s not just more whining or dreamy-eyed fantasy but could actually work — let me know.
— John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project