With peacekeepers like this, who needs war?
I feel so much safer with all the "defense" I am provided by all those stalwart peacekeepers out there protecting me from harm.
The ‘peacekeepers’
On 8 and 9 July the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) held a summit in Warsaw. As always for the military alliance, defence was firmly on the agenda. At the top of Nato’s list of “challenges and threats” was Russia, billed even above the ‘existential’ threat of terrorism.
Russian aggression, according to Nato, is threatening the alliance’s “long-standing goal of a Europe whole, free, and at peace”. And so, in response, Nato has pledged to build up a hefty military presence directly on Russia’s borders. As always, those at the helm claim more aggression (and money) is essential in the pursuit of peace.
-- The Canary
As is always true, the best way to ensure peace is through war... nuclear war in this case...
For the last 25 years, Carter noted, US defence has largely focused on insurgent forces, like the Taliban or other extremist groups. But now the US is gearing up for “a return to great-power competition” with “high-end enemies”, such as Russia and China.
The US Secretary of Defense now admits that the US is preparing for direct, large scale warfare with nuclear capacity countries.
Say what? I don't get it. It can't be North Korea we are worried about. Who is it that we're going to nuke? Why, Russia of course! Seems we're pretty offended at how they interfered with the freedom and sovereignty of those poor benighted Ukrainians. I'm sure it pissed us off because it was interfering with our own meddling.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
-- John Pilger
There's more. I encourage you to give the clicks to The Canary and read the whole thing.
Comments
I am not a Christian but
between all of this political military tension building and building and the demise of the planet -- Armageddon is near.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage
NATO should be disbanded
It's a military organization in search of an enemy.
Couldn't agree more. NATO is in service to global capital which
is the system making the planet uninhabitable. NATO is the tool of the economic elite that is intentionally provoking a war with Russia by encircling that country. War with Russia? Why? Russia seems to be a mafia-like capitalist country at present with greater economic inequality than even the USA; it shouldn't be a threat to the neoliberal world order.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
Only an asshole would poke the bear
The bear has given up a huge amount of territory in Eastern Europe, willingly. Crimea becoming a Euro-Nazi occupied land with the NATO fleet stationed there was just way over the line. The USSR created lots of problems with states and state boundaries, some of which needed and may still be needed to be resolved.
Russia has been attacked so many times from the West that she feels that any hostile force near her borders are a threat. This is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you threaten the bear you will be in her cross-hairs. If you march German soldiers to Russia's Western borders as part of NATO you will get the expected response. This is all the act of lunatics, as Russia represents no threat whatsoever to Eastern Europe ... unless you antagonize her.
The US is pissed off thoroughly as the strategy of fomenting a coup in the Ukraine, using surrogate neo-nazis had worked, and that meant that Crimea was about to become a large NATO naval base. President Putin foiled this plot in a bloodless return of Crimea to her native country. All that money spent, all those NGOs working to undermine Ukraine-Russia alliance. What a waste. The Ukraine is now a basket case and a broken country and the Black Sea is still Russia's lake. The running incompetence of US administrations is truly staggering.
Buy the way, the US was already negotiating a lease on the naval base and had let out requests for bids from US companies to rebuild the base. The West's attitude, really the US-UK attitude, that Russia must return Crimea to the Ukraine is nothing more than a smoke screen to poke the bear.
As the Tee shirts in Russia say : Крым наш, Crimea is ours. There is no way that England, France, Germany and the US is ever going to steal that part of Russia and give it away to Ukraine.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
Don't really agree.
As for
"given up" E Eur territory that it illegally annexed during and after WW II. And it wasn't willingly, either --the demands of the occupied nations just became too strong. Gorbachov was willing to grant them a great deal of autonomy within the Soviet empire, the hard-liners in the Kremlin were appalled and attempted a coup which failed miserably, E Europe declared themselves free and independent, Russia returned to its "traditional" borders, Yeltsin took over Russia, the UN recognized the former SSRs and admitted them in, NATO expanded to the East as a result of the former empire's vassals requests, ...
As for this:
Evil piffle. Of course it does. Russia has been poking about the Baltic borders for ages. Just because it wants better seaports on the Baltic than St Petersburg doeas not mean it has the right to grab these nations.
As Andrey Illarionov said,,
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.
... at some point, "The Elites"
are going to decide that they are fully equipped/prepared to survive a nuclear holocaust, and that this might, in fact, represent a great opportunity to rid the planet of all the excess humanity ("the hoi and the poloi" -- thee & me). At that point, they will find and annoint someone all-too-ready to push the button -- in fact, they already may have found -- her.
When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.
Thinking the unthinkable
We are truly in deep trouble when War-criminal Obama and War criminal Medusa actually entertain such a disastrous scenarios as to initiate a nuclear war. There will be no winners, not even the selfish billionaires. We'll all be losers. Every day my opinion of Obama sinks lower and lower to the point which he is barely higher than Hillary's "stature". As commented above, and elsewhere, where was Obama speaking out out about killing of innocent AAs by police? Where was Obama on fracking?--oh, yeah, he's for it. Where was he on national sovereignty--oh, yeah, he's against it (can you spell ISDS?). Where was he when voter suppression laws made their biggest resurgence since the Civil Rights acts were passed?--yeah, he was playing golf with Slick Willie.
Fellow c99ers, We do NOT have to worry about the election of 2020 because none of us will survive until then.