Black Ops in the Black Sea

The Royal Naval destroyer, HMS Defender

Having a jail sentence hanging over him is doing nothing to stop courageous whistle-blower Craig Murray from calling out an increasingly criminal empire, and the willingness of its John Bull junior partner to do the bidding of its epicentre.

It beggars belief that a British warship would not only enter one of the planet’s three likeliest WW3 flashpoints¹ but, for good measure, cruise in disputed territorial waters² without a very clear steer from Washington. Here’s WSWS today:

The incident with HMS Defender must be seen in the context of a ramping up of militarism by British imperialism and its NATO partners, with Moscow and China in their crosshairs.³

For his part Dimitris Konstantakopoulos – less sexy than his former Syriza colleague, Yanis Varoufakis, but no less insightful – has this to say in a Defend Democracy piece today:

We have no independent way of determining what happened. But we do have an independent way to know that, for centuries, lies have been the most perfect weapon of the British Empire, being the world champion regarding this sport. ⁴ In fact, when the Americans needed to construct the story of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, they … resorted to Tony Blair and the British secret services to help them!

The British [have] signed a huge agreement to modernise the Ukrainian navy that will cost the extremely impoverished Ukrainians a few billion. The only mission this navy could serve is a war against Russia, the first victim of which will be Ukraine itself.⁵

But back to Craig Murray, who offers this on his site today:

Black Ops in the Black Sea

Sometimes it is worth stating the obvious. The United Kingdom does not have a coast in the Black Sea. British warships are not infesting the Black Sea out of a peaceful intent, and there is no cause for them to be entering disputed waters close to anybody’s coast. This is not a question of freedom of navigation under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. There is nowhere that a British warship can be heading from the UK under the right of innocent passage that would require it to pass through coastal waters by Crimea. The Black Sea is famously a cul-de-sac.

I expect we will now be in for a mad frenzy of Russophobia, yet again. I shall comment further once I have more details of why and exactly where Russia was firing warning shots. But just remember this, it was not Russian warships near the British coast, it was British warships in an area where they had no business other than ludicrous, British nationalist, sabre-rattling.

The UK needs to lose its imperial delusions. Sending gunboats to the Crimea is as mad as – well, sailing an aircraft carrier expressly to threaten the Chinese. There are those who see this activity as evidence of the UK’s continued great power status. I see it as evidence of lunacy.

I don’t entirely share that last assessment. UK’s behaviour may be madness, but there’s method in it. I’ll be posting soon a sixty-three minute video by Tim Anderson on the US Empire’s eight 21st century wars on the Middle East. The context for those wars is the same as that for NATO’s provocations on Russia’s western borderlands – imperial determination to stop Eurasia Rising.

Let me get my most overworked map out yet again.⁶

Yes, the Orwellianly named HMS Defender’s Black Sea brinksmanship, on behalf of its masters in Washington, is indeed ‘lunacy’. But the criminal insanity on display is of a higher order, a play in a Greater Game, than Britain’s ‘imperial delusions’.⁷

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1. The other two flashpoints are the Middle East and South China Sea.
2. It is not necessary here to consider whether Crimea – Russian speaking and Russia leaning, but ‘donated’ by the USSR to one of its component nations – is Russian or Ukrainian. Treatment of the issue in Western corporate media is simplistic to the point of risibility, as though Crimea were part of Ukraine the way Thanet is of England, but such intrinsics may be bypassed by this extrinsic question: how would Washington respond to Russian (or Cuban) warships in the Gulf of Mexico; within or without US territorial waters?
3. WSWS is good on some things, weak on others. Its report on the Black Sea incident is both. It houses useful facts, and a decent appraisal except for this: “[the] incident in the Black Sea is a stark indication of how the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and the interests of competing imperialist powers [make the region] a powder keg that could ignite a worldwide conflagration.” That’s a disgraceful equivalence (look at my NATO map again) – byproduct of the ‘vanguard’ notion that Western workers will one day rise up to overthrow capitalism, and with it imperialism. (Spoiler alert: they won’t because, with capital-labour relations now global, Western workers no longer have economic clout.) WSWS are of the view, unproven and some say refuted, that Russia and China are imperialist in the sense they and I understand the term. I see Eurasia’s rise as posing dangers from “our” response, to be sure, but still humanity’s best hope via such as Belt & Road and AIIB (touched on in sources linked from footnote 7). Think me extreme to say so? I’m outside the Overton Window. Study Harold Pinter’s Nobel Acceptance Speech. Read this site’s posts on the systemic incapacity of corporate media to be honest with us precisely when honesty most matters. Consider that by ‘full spectrum dominance’ the US Empire of Chaos means not just in every military and geopolitical arena but in that of narrative too. Then come back and tell me just what it is that makes me the extremist.
4. Here Dimitris underestimates Washington’s own mastery of deceit. Mike Pompeo: we lied, we cheated, we stole …
5. Let me use the Britain-Ukraine arms deal as an example of how we go seriously astray when we confuse nation with class. (A bigger example is given here.) Clearly, Britain’s arms suppliers – and, in a smaller if tautological way, workers at their factories – will benefit. So too, in ways brought briefly to light in the Saudi bribes investigation Blair halted in its tracks, will sections of the Kiev elite. Those who assuredly will not benefit – by the diversion of taxes needed elsewhere, and by being put in a firing line they’ll have no way of dodging – are ordinary Ukrainians who had zero say in the matter.
6. [Heavy irony alert] damned if I can see from that map what possible cause Putin and Lavrov could have for objecting to Ukraine joining NATO [End irony]. I know of no crisper response to the ludicrous charges, by those whose knowledge of the region could be written on the back of a stamp, of ‘Russian aggression’ than this map.
7. See also, Perilous Days … The late great Michael Hudson … Biden-Putin Summit: rhetoric & realpolitik … the recent interview with Vladimir Putin.