By Daniel Patrick Welch
The trouble with the abusers of history, like the current US regime and virtually all prior regimes—and their partners in crime—is that it is deliberately disorienting. And it takes a whole lot of effort and time to retell history on its own course and set the record straight. So you have this current thing where we are talking about the “threat that Russia poses.” Instead of starting where it starts: NATO has gobbled up something like 15 countries since 1997, all on the Eastern Front.
And I use the term “Eastern Front” on purpose because I’m sure it has felt like that to successive generations of Russians and former Soviet citizens. NATO hasn’t changed its game, or its goals, since the very beginning. The crass shorthand for NATO’s raison d’etre was “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
Not a defensive organization by any stretch of the imagination; it is to maintain regional, and now global, supremacy. Unless Afghanistan has somehow moved to the Atlantic—and the North Atlantic at that.
So here it is: this is a constant, relentless march eastward, which oozed into Ukraine with a mostly successful coup of 2014, organized by the Americans and their CIA stooges. Now, the population of Donbas has fought to a standstill against the regime that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014. And there is a line of truce, which is enshrined in international law in the Minsk agreements—except that the other side has zero intention of honoring the agreements and recognizing any need for any form of autonomy in the Southern and Eastern regions which reject the coup and are asserting their own autonomy. Their “Russian-ness,” in other words.
On one side you have literal Nazis whose goal is nothing short of wiping Russian (people, language, culture) from the face of the earth, and on the other, old ladies stopping tanks with their bodies. This is not an exaggeration, this really happened, before the Ukrainian Army basically disintegrated in the face of this resistance. Now you have Andrei "the Russian language itself is a threat to world peace" Parubi who minces no words. What's worse, the state department mouthpieces and their 'intelligence' apparatchiks know this. The only ones who actually believe their cynical narrative (the very ones spinning it do NOT, by the way) are those who are duped by unrelenting wave propaganda.
This isn’t new either. It’s very surprising that so many people who self-identify as liberals or “progressives” are duped by the same script, which is as old as time. There is a meme—I take a certain level of joy from memes as a kind of barometer of popular culture. And there is one circulating now which says “well, yes, the CIA did bad things in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. But there were no meaningful reforms and no one was ever punished or prosecuted. So they’re not doing anything bad today, and you should shut up, you crazy conspiracy theorist!” This is the thing. This is the US playbook.
Why do people think the Russian case would be different? This is what we do! And you don’t have to listen to commies like me. You can look up Smedley Butler or William Blum or Jonathan Kwitny. This has gone on since… what was it FDR said about Somoza? “He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s *our* sonofabitch.” Since the Bay of Pigs… I mean, my God! Every one of these adventures where they hook up with some reprobates or some losers. Restoring monarchies, or even completely inventing monarchies. The House of Saud. Just *somebody.* Some junkyard dog to be the proxy, act the victim, and make the US play the Good Guys by coming in and saving the day by restoring—in this case, Nazis, people who are marching in the streets honoring the Galichina, the Ukrainian SS Division. You can’t make this up! It’s not a joke about *expunging Russian* from the people who are the successors of the Ukrainian nationalism of the 30s and 40s. It’s a shame that the so-called left in the West is completely paralyzed by the culture wars that they can’t see this overarching imperialist crap which is the same as it has always been.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not cutting it, not the rabid dog that he is supposed to be. He ain’t no Somoza. He’s not going to do whatever we say just because. And now, they are going to get him for it. You can see this appearing now in Foreign Interest and other outlets: Well, that’s the trouble when you have a comedian as president… He’s suspect because he was saying ‘Wait a minute! They’re not going to invade. Jesus. Leave us alone. Because he knows the Russians have the history of the Священная войнa (Sveshennaya Voina), the Sacred War.
And now they are presenting a united front with China to NATO, to the US, to The West writ large: we know what you are up to, and we won't let you perpetrate another Libya, another Syria, another Yemen, Tehran, Venezuela, Honduras, etc ad infinitum...in Ukraine or Taiwan. Enough is enough. The arrogance of the Langley Boys is absolutely shocking. Huge military powers, China and Russia, victims of The Century of Humiliation and Operation Barbarosa, respectively, are saying flat out, in clear terms, that they will fight together against further eastward expansion and military interventionism of the West. Now why won’t the west just listen? It’s pretty simple. And they will not—cannot—submit.
Daniel Patrick Welch is a writer of political commentary and analysis. Also a singer and songwriter, he lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts with his wife. Together they run The Greenhouse School. He has traveled widely, speaks five languages and studied Russian History and Literature at Harvard University. Welch has also appeared as a guest on several TV and radio channels to speak on topics of foreign affairs and political analysis--around his day job. He wrote this article for the Press TV website.