How a Little Bit of Logic Lacerates the West’s Lies about Ukraine
By
David Gottfried
The American media reminds us, on an hourly basis, that the Russian bear is a cruel and ominous beast poised to pounce on her innocent and fragile neighbors (Most of whom aided and abetted Hitler’s slaughter of 27 million Russians in World War Two). This reminds me of what I learned from Roger Hilsman, Under Secretary of State, for Southeast Asian affairs, in the administration of John F. Kennedy. (I had taken a course with him in Columbia University in the autumn of 1980.)
Roger Hilsman underscored that foreign policy in the real world had nothing to do with the domesticated, sanitized genteel version of foreign policy that one is taught in the New York Times and scholarly journals.
He told our class that anyone who intends to be player in world politics must be prepared to be a murderer. He told us about his experiences in the Pacific Theatre in World War Two. He was occupying some territory not far from the Burma Road. He did not know if a certain group of indigenous people were working with the Japanese. He told us that he nevertheless killed them all with a huge audience before him. His rationale: He wanted to spread terror. He wanted the people to be terrified of the United States and Britain so they would not aid the Japanese. I swear to G-d that Roger Hilsman said this. So, there you have it. America believes in terror just as much as the Vietcong or the PLO. We certainly are as terroristic as the big bad Russia of our favorite nightmares.
Do you think that Hilsman was a right-wing aberration from the foreign policy establishment ? Think again. He was, if anything, a left-wing aberration. He left the government after JFK was shot, and LBJ took over, because he opposed the war in Vietnam. (He is widely regarded as having approved, along with Averil Harriman, the successful plot, of South Vietnamese Generals, to topple President Diem.).
And when you went to school, they treated you like little children and told you that everybody else was the big bad wolf and that Americas is always the prince charming of the globe.
And when we talk about our relations with Russia, you, the American people, are treated like silly little itty bitty children, with itty bitty minds, who are ready to believe whatever junk news you eat along with your often carcinogenic, empty caloric junk food.
Consider what doesn’t make sense in the news stories about Ukraine:
1) Biden has been trying to tell us that Ukraine faces Armageddon.
a) If so, then why is Ukraine’s President, Zelensky, criticizing the United States for allegedly alarmist speech, advising the United States not to get so excited and to stop throwing matches on gasoline.
b) We are we told that the antagonisms and animosity are flammable and ferocious. However, I have read that total deaths, from both pro-Russian and pro Ukrainian combatants, number about 13,000 in fighting that has been going on since 2014. This is not exactly war fought with Wagnerian gusto. Although the French, in World War Two, had a very sorry military record, falling to Hitler in a mere month’s time, it lost 40,000 men in its month of fighting. (And in World War One, the French lost, at Verdun alone, one million men.)
Do points A and B, above, remind you of the following two points:
c) When some Americans suggested that the South Vietnamese draft its 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, a member of the South Vietnamese government said, “Why should we. It’s America’s war.” (The American people had been told we were fighting to defend South Vietnam from communist aggression.)
d) Some historians have said that President Diem was mistrusted, and may have been overthrown with American support, because he was exploring the possibility of ending the conflict by making South Vietnam a neutral state which abstained from the Moscow-Washington death drive.
Has America been encouraging war in Ukraine? Why is America desirous of War in Ukraine ?
2) We are told that Russia is paranoid of the West and of NATO. If Russia were not “paranoid” of the West it would be utterly sick and worthy of the utmost contempt.
A) According to the New Yorker (January 25, 2022, Joshua Yaffa), as Germany approached reunification, James Baker, the American Secretary of State, asked Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s head honcho, what he would prefer:
A Germany that was wedded to neither the Warsaw pact nor NATO.
Or
A Germany that was a member of NATO along with a pledge that NATO would not move one inch further to the East than the Eastern border of a reunified Germany.
Gorbachev preferred the latter option as an independent Germany could always lead to the revival of a fiercely nationalistic, irredentist German state.
Apparently, George Bush disapproved of Howard Baker’s offer. However, Howard Baker apparently made the offer, and Gorbachev accepted it, before Bush expressed his disapproval.
Why is the United States so intent on proving that it is a liar by constantly moving East, adding to NATO many nations which are East of Germany’s eastern border, including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria.
B) Russia has told the West what it wants: A commitment, by NATO, not to include Ukraine in NATO. News reports indicate that the west tendered a response in writing. Why can’t the West tender its response orally? The west orally averred that it said no to the Russian request to keep Ukraine out of NATO, but what written responses are being withheld.
C) NATO was organized to stop perceived Russian and communist advances. In 1989 and 1990, the cold war came to an end. Since the cold war came to an end, hasn’t NATO’s purpose come to an end as there is no communist world to continue to fight. Isn’t its renewed existence proof positive that the West is desirous of striking at Russia.
D) Why has NATO turned into a reunion of Nazi affiliated fiefdoms.
Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovakia were all aligned with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland were also hostile to the Soviet Union. All or most of these states were allied with Hitler. Russia lost 27 million people in World War Two. Russia would be psychotic if it were not upset about the formation of a vast anti-Russian coalition from the very same people who murdered millions of Russians in the 1940’s.
E) Russia has always been the West’s favorite punching bag:
i) Since the end of World War Two most Americans were sold on the idea that Russia stole Eastern Europe shortly after the demise of the Third Reich. This is a fabrication as the evidence demonstrates that the West knowingly anticipated and agreed that the Soviet Union would dominate Eastern Europe.
a) Some sources indicate that Churchill and Stalin, at Yalta, sat down with an envelope and started to scribble down their proposed settlement of Europe. Since we have the same system of numeration, it was quite simple. For example, they agreed that Britain and America would have a 90 percent interest or controlling interest in Greece and that Russia would have a 90 percent interest in Rumania. The British weren’t “too soft” on Russia by giving it 90 percent of Rumania as Rumania was allied with Hitler and attacked Russia, 27 million Russians were killed in the war, and Rumania became a free state only because of Russian fighting to liberate Balkan Christians from the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Rumania became a free state per the treaty of San Stefano, executed in 1878, which settled fighting between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. (Incidentally, although Russians fought to ensure the freedom of Rumanians to pray as they pleased, Rumanians were not terribly keen on giving this right to the Jews. During World War Two, Rumania ran an ad, in the New York Times, offering to sell Americans Jews at the price of one hundred dollars a Jew. If Americans did not buy the Jews, we Jews were slated for slaughter.)
b) Secretary of State James Byrnes offered to give the Russians a free hand in territories they had liberated from the Nazis.
ii) Before World War Two, Great Britain consistently condoned German lunges to the East (See footnote 1)
iii) When the Bolsheviks ascended to power, 17 nations attacked Russia because they feared the spread of socialism
iv) In the Crimean War, England, France, Germany, Austria Hungary and the Ottoman Empire all attacked Russia
v) Britain consistently opposed the attempts of Eastern Orthodox Christians, to free themselves of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, as it feared that if the Balkans were free, Russian power would move closer to the Mediterranean and if the Russians fleet were in the Mediterranean the Russians would threaten the British-controlled Suez Canal and the Jewel in the Crown: India.
This was sheer paranoia as it feared that if a occurred, b, c, d and e would all follow in swift succession. Some scholars opine that this geographic paranoia was the consequence of faulty maps in Eton which made the Black Sea appear closer to Suez than it really was.
---------
Footnote 1: In the 1930’s, Britain and France made numerous concessions to Hitler, most of which consisted of Britain permitting Germany to move further East, presumably because Britain wanted to slay Bolshevism in its cradle. Russia eventually beat the British at the appeasement game by entering into the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Interestingly enough, the New York Times predicted that this pact would arise almost one year before, on October 11, 1938, claiming that Russia must fear that London and Berlin had entered into an accord at Russia’s expense. The Times concluded that Russia may very well enter into a pact with Berlin to beat the British at their own game, See my substack article from May 4, 2021,
IF YOU LIKE THIS, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THIS NEWSLETER
PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES