Why do we \u00adtolerate the\u00a0threat of \u00adanother world war in our name? Why do\u00a0we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our \u00adindoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a \u201cbrilliant, even witty, highly successful act of \u00adhypnosis\u201d, as if the truth \u201cnever happened even while it was happening\u201d.<\/p>\n
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his \u201cupdated summary of the record of US foreign policy\u201d which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to \u00adoverthrow more than 50 governments, many democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.<\/p>\n
In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human \u00adsuffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world\u2019s most advanced communications and nominally freest journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism \u2013 \u201cour\u201d terrorism \u2013 are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9\/11, was \u00adnurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato\u2019s campaign in 2011, \u201cLibya has become a terrorist safe haven\u201d.<\/p>\n
The name of \u201cour\u201d enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the\u00a0<\/b>Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of caricature and\u00a0<\/b>vilification \u2013 think Fidel Castro, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, now Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
Washington\u2019s role in Ukraine is \u00addifferent only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is \u00adthreatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last \u201cbuffer state\u201d bordering Russia is being torn apart. We in the west are backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.<\/p>\n
Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington\u2019s planned seizure of Russia\u2019s \u00adhistoric, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.<\/p>\n
But Nato\u2019s military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained \u201cpariah\u201d role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.<\/p>\n
Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend\u2019s provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people \u2013 a third of Ukraine\u2019s population \u2013 have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country\u2019s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither \u201cseparatists\u201d nor \u201crebels\u201d but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.<\/p>\n
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park \u2013 run by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with \u201cspecial units\u201d from the CIA and FBI setting up a \u201csecurity structure\u201d that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.\u00a0A doctor described trying to rescue people, \u201cbut I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate \u2026 I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta\u2019s defence secretary \u2013 a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party \u2013 boasted that the attacks on \u201cinsurgents\u201d would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow \u201ctrying to orchestrate conflict and provocation\u201d, according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama\u2019s grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its \u201cremarkable restraint\u201d following the Odessa massacre. Illegal and fascist-dominated, the junta is described by Obama as \u201cduly elected\u201d. What matters is not truth, Henry Kissinger once said, but\u00a0\u201c<\/b>but what is perceived to be true.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as \u201cmurky\u201d and a \u201ctragedy\u201d in which \u201cnationalists\u201d (neo-Nazis) attacked \u201cseparatists\u201d (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch\u2019s\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0damned the victims \u2013 \u201cDeadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says\u201d. \u00adPropaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the\u00a0Frankfurter Allgemeine \u00adZeitung<\/i>\u00a0warning its readers of Russia\u2019s \u201cundeclared war\u201d. For Germans, it is an invidious irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.<\/p>\n
A popular truism is that \u201cthe world changed\u201d following 9\/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon \u00adcurrently runs \u201cspecial operations\u201d \u2013 secret wars \u2013 in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and hemorrhaging liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question begs: why do we tolerate this?<\/p>\n