Western Imperialist Propaganda about the Invasion of Ukraine (by Paul Street)

 

1. “Putin’s invasion was unprovoked by the U.S.-led West.” In the immediate sense, this is true: the West did nothing particularly special or distinct in the few days or weeks prior to Putin’s invasion. But the relevant time frame is much bigger. Imagine Russia placing state-of-the-art offensive missiles in Central America while continuing with longstanding efforts to enlist Mexico in an anti-U.S. military bloc. Imagine Russa placing military bases and missile sites along Canada’s southern border and a missile-bearing naval presence near the United States’ Pacific or Atlantic Ocean shores. How long would Uncle Sam put up with that before invading Mexico and/or Canada and starting a naval confrontation? The question answers itself.

 

The United States and its imperialist NATO allies have obviously been poking the Russian nationalist bear across the post-Cold War era, upping the ante of their eastward march in ways guaranteed to spark an angry and violent reaction from a nation whose masters have rich historical memories of Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler sending giant, mass-homicidal armies through Eastern Europe to wreak havoc in their homeland.

 

The US-led West has broken one promise after another regarding Russia’s regional security concerns in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. The US has been politically and militarily surrounding Russia since the dismantlement of the Soviet Union in 1991. In violation of a disingenuous pledge made to the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the US has drawn numerous Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia) into the lethal NATO alliance. It has installed troops and nuclear weapons near Russia’s borders. 

Eight years ago, the United States backed and enabled the removal of a Ukrainian government friendly to Russia. It developed economic and military ties to the newly installed Ukrainian government, which declared that it wished to join NATO.

 

As the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) notes, “The U.S. has been moving rapidly and dramatically to station cutting-edge and high-powered missiles near Russia in Romania and Poland. And in the longer run, it is moving to bring Ukraine—which shares a 1400-mile land and sea border with Russia—into the U.S.-led NATO military bloc…”

 

The USA and NATO have spent the post-Cold War era poking the nuclear weaponized Russian nationalist brown bear it has created. An ugly confrontation with the beast it has fed and terrorized for years is less than historically surprising.

 

2. “The United States has moral legs to stand on when it comes to calling out imperial aggression, including illegal invasions, seizures, and absorptions of other peoples’ lands.” Okay, this statement is never explicitly made in those words, but my sentence captures the essence of a basic assumption underlying US government and media statements against the horror of Putin’s war on Ukraine.

 

The assumption is absurd, as is shown by any honest survey of imperialist, white-nationalist US foreign policy from the genocidal ethnic cleansing of North American Indigenous First Nations through the seizure of the Southwestern US and California from Mexico (in the name of allegedly God-ordained “Manifest Destiny”), the mass-murderous US occupation of the Philippines, the attempted US invasion of socialist Cuba (leading the revolutionary Castro government to request Soviet nuclear missile protection), the US crucifixion of Southeast Asia (which killed 3 to 5 million people between 1962 and 1975), the long unjust US war on Afghanistan (2001-2021), and the monumentally criminal and mass -murderous US invasion, occupation, torture, and near destruction of Iraq.

 

When the US learned that the Soviet Union was installing missiles in Cuba to help deter future US invasions of the island, by the way, the John Kennedy administration brought the world to within a hair’s breadth of nuclear annihilation in order to force their removal.

 

It has been darkly amusing lately to hear the United States’ UN Ambassador proclaim that Putin wants to “return the world to a time when empires ruled the world” and intone that “one country cannot simply redraw another country’s borders by force or make another country’s people live under a government they did not choose.” World history has never seen anything on the scale of the US-American global empire, which has overthrown dozens of governments since 1945. The American Empire accounts for 40 percent of global military spending and maintains more than 800 military bases across more than 100 countries. Washington denouncing imperial ambitions is like John Wayne Gacy denouncing serial killing.

 

“America stands up to bullies,” Joe Biden told the world four days ago. “We stand up for freedom. This is who we are.” What a joke. These were rich words coming from the mouth a man who as a Senator helped lead the charge for the monumentally criminal 2003 invasion of Iraq! At the same time, Biden’s beloved American Empire is bullying numerous nations and people around the world (Cubans, Venezuelans, Iranians for starters). It is doing nothing to stand up for the Palestinians and the Yemenis among other longstanding non-white and officially unworthy victims who are being tortured and bombed by US-funded and US-equipped terror states like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

 

3. “The old KGB agent Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union.” Not really. Vladimir Putin is a militantly anti-communist despot atop an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy. He is animated by an older, pre-Soviet Russian nationalism and imperialism that blames the hated Bolshevik leader Lenin for supposedly creating the purportedly artificial nation of Ukraine in the first place. (In reality, Lenin acknowledged the historical reality of Ukrainian nationhood and self-determination as part of his revolutionary strategy to undo the Russian Empire). Putin claims his invasion is part of “de-communization” – a cleansing of the Soviet Marxist-Leninist legacy.

 

4. “Sanctions should be imposed on everyday Russian as punishment for the crime of invading Ukraine.” That is morally problematic collective punishment for a crime ordinary Russians did not commit. Russia is an authoritarian gangster kleptocracy run by Putin in alliance with, and on behalf of a small coterie of filthy-rich oligarchs. There was no plebiscite held whereby the Russian people voiced support for the invasion of Ukraine, just as there have been no plebiscites in which the Ukrainian people asked for the invasion, or the US-American people backed the eastward expansion of NATO to Russia’s front door.

 

And indeed, there appears to be considerable popular anti-invasion/antiwar sentiment within Russia, leading to protests and arrests in numerous Russian cities. (The call for sanctions conjures up decent people’s fantasies about “good sanctions” that only target the Kremlin and Putin’s oligarch friends, ignoring the real aim: to create such hardship that people demand change. Hurting ordinary people is a feature, not a bug. It didn’t work with Saddam – in fact, it strengthened him by giving him an external excuse for the failures of his regime.)

 

5. “If you criticize NATO, you a Russian bot or a Trump supporter.” This is nonsense. Actual “radical Leftists” are internationalists who simultaneously criticize both NATO imperialism in and the petro-capitalist and kleptocratic gangster regime in Moscow. The aforementioned RCP, for example, says that “both the U.S. and Russia are oppressive imperialist powers, and both lie all the time about what they are doing and why… In a heinous act dripping with hypocrisy,” the RCP elaborates, “Vladimir Putin announced he was sending in his army to ‘demilitarize and de-Nazify’ Ukraine. This is nothing but grotesque imperialist bullshit to justify a move to protect the capitalist-imperialist interests of Russia.” Imagine that: hating two things at the same time! Code Pink also performs the trick of chewing gum and walking at the same time: it denounces both the Russian invasion and NATO presence in Eastern Europe.

 

6. “The US should send more military forces to NATO states on the borders of Russia and Ukraine to deter further Russian aggression into Europe.” No. Putin shows no sign of wanting to set the world on fire by crashing into NATO space. Beefing up the direct US military presence on Russia and Ukraine’s border adds more paranoia-enhancing fuel to Putin’s fire. It increases the chilling possibility of direct military engagement between the world’s two leading nuclear weapons powers, who together possess the capacity to blow up the planet many times over.

 

7. “The US and NATO should impose a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine.” The retiring United States Representative and apparent warmongering lunatic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) went on television last week to call for this. This wild-eyed notion is shared by other Western Ukraine- defenders. It’s an insane and reckless idea. Hey, what could go wrong after a NATO/US F-35 takes down a Russian fighter jet over Odessa? With Putin not-so subtly reminding the West that he possesses a giant nuclear arsenal and the US headed by a doddering mediocrity struggling with low approval tares as his nation’s fading global hegemony is challenged, this is no time for provoking air-battles between the world’s two leading nuclear powers! Kinzinger needs a check-up from the neck up. Any elected official calling for a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine should be forced to rescind that call or resign for advocating a policy that could lead to the end of human civilization.

Source:

15 Bad Ukraine Narratives - CounterPunch.org

Paul Street is an independent progressive policy researcher, award-winning journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois.  He is the author of ten books to date… Street’s essays, articles, reviews, interviews, and commentaries have appeared in numerous outlets… Street’s writings, research findings, and commentary have been featured in a large number and wide variety of media venues… Street has taught U.S. history at numerous of Chicago-area colleges and universities. He was the Director of Research and Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League (from 2000 through 2005), where he published a highly influential grant-funded study… 

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