The Hill, the democrat newspaper—where James Carville, Dick Morris, and CIA spook Michael Hayden acted as staff—has posted yet another delusional op-ed on Ukraine, this time by an ethnic Ukrainian, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.
Alexander J. Motyl appears to be confused. He has a problem digesting the fact the “global South” wants nothing to do with Biden’s flirtation with thermonuclear destruction. Mr. Motyl, billed as a “specialist” on Ukraine, argues the simplistic good versus evil mantra used to demonize Russia is a good thing.
While it’s true that many geopolitical issues are characterized by shades of gray, it is also true that some, perhaps even many, are black and white. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is one such case. Ukraine posed no imaginable threat to Vladimir Putin’s imperially minded, nuclear-armed, and fascist Russia: Ukraine’s army, economy and population were all significantly smaller than Russia’s and Kyiv harbored no aggressive designs.
I’m not sure how this guy became a Ukraine “specialist.” Kyiv in fact does harbor “aggressive designs” against ethnic Russians. It has killed 14,000 of them since Vicky Nuland and the neocons embedded in the USG State Department engineered a coup in 2014, overthrowing an elected president.
The “imaginable threat” is everywhere in western Ukraine. Is it possible Mr. Motyl is unaware of Stepan Andriyovych Bandera and his legacy of torture, rape, murder, and genocide?
Is he unaware of Svoboda, Right Sector, C14, and Azov Battalion? Is it possible he never heard of Andriy Biletsky and the Patriot of Ukraine?
Is he unfamiliar with Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B? He was recruited by the CIA.
Does Motyl recall the crimes of Yaroslav Stetsko? He oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv. Stetsko was personally invited to the White House by then-President Reagan. But then, as Operation Paperclip revealed, the USG and its CIA have an affinity for neo-nazi thugs.
Maybe this academic USG narrative-pusher does not know the neo-nazi war criminal Bandera is an official “Hero of Ukraine.” So loved is the memory of this murderous thug, there are streets in Kyiv named after him and torchlit parades (reminiscent of the Nazi procession on Adolf-Hitler-Platz in Nuremberg) are held in remembrance of his crimes.
It is possible many folks reading this op-ed in The Hill know virtually nothing about the history of Russia and Ukraine. Motyl’s mischaracterizations (more accurately, war propaganda) about Russia will undoubtedly be accepted as fact. Only the “alternative” media distorts, not corporate “news” behemoths, most demanding payment to read war propaganda.
Moreover, everyone — including the Russians — knew full well that Ukraine stood no chance of joining NATO for at least two decades. Everyone also knew that the United States and Ukraine had no plans to deploy missiles on Ukraine’ eastern border. It’s certainly possible that the Russian elite was delusional and paranoid and perceived a threat where none existed. But the psychological maladies of criminals surely cannot be blamed on the victims of their violence.
NATO membership is not on the table because Ukraine is the most corrupt and poverty-stricken nation in Europe. Despite this, “Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro and North Macedonia said they ‘firmly stand behind’ a NATO decision made at the 2008 Bucharest summit on Ukraine’s membership prospects to the alliance,” reports Euractiv.
Last September, Ukraine applied for fast-track NATO membership. It should be noted, however, one of the requirements for membership is “the fair treatment of minority populations.” No doubt the USG’s corporate propaganda conduits will paper over Ukraine’s racial discrimination, xenophobia, and racially-motivated violence against ethnic minorities (see “Ukraine: Treatment of ethnic minorities, including Roma; state protection”).
Perhaps this stenographic “editorialist” forgot about the HIMARS missiles supplied by the USG. “The weapons system, known as the ground-launched Small Diameter Bomb, is a rocket-launched maneuverable glide bomb with double the range of the HIMARS missiles Washington has already provided,” writes Andre Damon. In other words, they will be used to kill Russian citizens.
But it is not missiles, per se. It is NATO’s military presence in 14 Eastern European nations. NATO began as “deterrence” against an unlikely Soviet invasion of Europe during the Cold War.
Lloyd Austin, Biden’s war secretary, spelled out the rationale for the continued presence of NATO in Eastern Europe—to “weaken” and intimidate Russia. Left unmentioned is the plot to overthrow the Russian Federation, the elimination of Putin, and the division of the country into malleable little bantustans.
Mr. Motyl is apparently not much of a specialist if he fails to realize the Russian people will not overthrow Putin’s government. In January of this year, 80 percent of Russians supported Putin, according to Statista. This figure increased from 77 percent in September 2022.
Back to the Global South. Motyl refuses to accept reality. Millions of people oppose arming Ukraine and tempting a thermonuclear war. But, according to Motyl, the reason is not opposition to war and nuclear winter, but rather “ignorance.”
Brazil’s president identifies the real reason for the Global South’s attitude toward the war, Ukraine and Russia: ignorance. And since policymakers in the Global South know too little about Russia and Ukraine to make informed judgments, they appear to rely on Cold War-era ways of thinking — according to which the West is still an overbearing imperialist and will always remain so, while Russia is the champion of the Third World.
See, those stupid South and Latin Americans don’t know anything about the “rules-based” order and the primacy of the indispensable nation. The fact of the matter is, the USG is “an overbearing imperialist and will always remain so” (that is until it falls and multipolarity between nations becomes the norm instead of coercive sanctions and terror bombings).
Over the last two decades, I have covered the manifest crimes of the USG, crimes stenographers, and historical revisionists such as Alexander J. Motyl ignore. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya and Syria, and Somalia to Yemen, the USG has caused more destruction and death than Russia has since the end of the Soviet Union.
The age of Western imperialism is largely over. The age of Russian imperialism soon may be over. The Global South needs to recognize these facts if it wants to be on the right side of history by helping Ukraine to decolonize, resisting Russian empire-building, and thereby constructing a more just world order.
Indeed, the “age of Western imperialism is largely over,” but not in the way Motyl would have us believe. The hegemonic and criminal drive of the USG to control national assets, natural resources, and people of other nations (and kill those who do not go along) will soon implode under its own unsustainable weight and contradictions.
Motyl is not on the “right side of history.” He is on the wrong side, the side that supports neo-nazis, death squads, funds apartheid (in Israel), illegally occupies other countries (eastern Syria), steals natural resources and cash from frozen bank accounts (no legal requirements necessary), and encourages its death merchants to sell weapons far and wide, weapons responsible for killing millions of people since the end of WWII.
The Hill, the NYT, Washington Post, et al, all are in the business of telling lies—falsities worse than those told by neocons prior to the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
It should come as no surprise a regular contributor to the Kyiv Post, the “bipartisan defense, national security, and military-focused publication,” 19FortyFive, and the Graham Holdings Company (viz., the CIA’s The Washington Post) would be invited to repeat easily debunked lies in the service of the national security state and the “rules-based” elite.
Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
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