Fighting talk from the EU: Part 1

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Eight days ago ago the European Commission, executive body of the EU, issued a statement by its president, Ursula von der Leyen. This is its opening paragraph:

We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times. I do not need to describe the grave nature of the threats that we face. Or the devastating consequences that we will have to endure if those threats would come to pass. Because the question is no longer whether Europe’s security is threatened in a very real way. Or whether Europe should shoulder more of the responsibility for its own security. In truth, we have long known the answers to those questions. The real question in front of us is whether Europe is prepared to act as decisively as the situation dictates. And whether Europe is ready and able to act with the speed and the ambition that is needed. In the various meetings in the last few weeks – most recently two days ago in London – the answer from European capitals has been as resounding as it is clear. We are in an era of rearmament. And Europe is ready to massively boost its defence spending. Both, to respond to the short-term urgency to act and to support Ukraine but also to address the long-term need to take on much more responsibility for our own European security.

The threats she ‘need not describe’ – the Bogeyman being scariest when evoked in veiled terms that evade rational interrogation by allowing no space for it in mainstream discourse, and by targeting the more suggestible realms of the collective unconscious – are of Russia rolling west to grab our lands ¹ and throttle our values. For which there is zero evidence: just an Orwellian inversion by corporate media whose systemic corruption I’ve analysed many times – here and here for instance – that three years ago Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. ²

That lie, as I recently wrote:

can no more stand up to even the most cursory examination of the evidence than can flat-earthery or denial of heliocentrism. It is not possible for a rational person acquainted with even a fraction of the relevant facts, and acting in good faith, to do other than conclude that Russia was intentionally provoked to the point where her special military operation in the besieged ethnically Russian oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk (the US-orchestrated coup of 2014 having triggered eight years of civil war, empowered Neo-Nazis and posed an intolerable threat to Russia’s security) was for Moscow the least bad option.

My post drew on recent history. Here’s a little more. The Cold War ended with dissolution of the USSR and an eight year honeymoon in which the fledgling Russian Federation’s first president, the frequently ‘tired and emotional’ Boris Yeltsin, did everything the asset-strippers of London, Frankfurt and New York – and an IMF whose neoliberal dogma fig-leafed the larceny ³ – asked of him. That all ended with the accession of Vladimir Putin: socially conservative, patriotic, a far-sighted yet cautious planner and, though still too desirous of Western acceptance for some of his domestic critics, by no means the pushover his alcoholic former boss had been. ⁴

Cue for a narratorial gear-change, from Evil Reds through Cartoon Boris to Evil Putin, eloquently affirming media power to shape and reshape what is quaintly referred to as public opinion. Not that they hadn’t had practice. Over an even shorter timeframe they’d shifted perceptions of the USSR from doughty ally, paying with 27 million dead for WWII victory, to the greatest enemy of freedom since, well, Hitler.

The red peril scaremongering of Cold War I had successfully diverted, as empire narratives will, the public gaze from motives more material. The USSR had closed off a sixth of the world’s land mass, with its abundance of natural resources, to private capital whose laws of motion require relentless accumulation. ⁵ Now, with Yeltsin gone, the booming ’90s of disaster capitalism at an end and the country no longer conducting a fire sale, a new cold war began. Russia was still the world’s largest country; her natural wealth coveted by a West thirsting for her balkanisation in the name of security – and the interests of divide and loot.

Last May the hawkishly unhinged PM of the former Soviet Republic of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, said that a dismembered Russian Federation would be “not a bad outcome” of its defeat in the Ukraine. Now she’s vice president of the European Commission.

For years before February 2022, and in the heady months after, the expectation was of a Russia laid low by sanctions, defeated in battle and, with Putin ousted and an interim leader suing for peace on any terms, ripe for break-up. It would be boom-time once again, with mineral and energy rights sold at knock-down prices as apparatchiks pocketed bribes. Such was the dream of Europe’s rentiers, their heads already turned by decades of finance, insurance and real estate powering their own economies; manufacturing off-shored to the global south. Intoxicated, the financiers who’d captured government and prioritised risk-free profits over long term planning forgot, if ever they knew or cared, that GDP and wealth creation aren’t the same thing. Not in the West’s finance bloated FIRE economies they aren’t. Russian resilience, and ability to wage a war of attrition in which manufacturing and manpower are decisive, to emerge stronger than ever – with her ‘tyrannical’ president returned to office just months ago on the kind of majority and turnout Western politicians can only dream about – confounded such calculations. Yet still Europe’s leaders, in betrayal of the interests of their people, continue to deny and double down.

Europe’s maximalist aims were not shared in Washington. Since subsequent events in Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus bear out the uncanny prescience of a Pentagon-commissioned Rand Report of 2019, it’s worth noting how its counsel on Ukraine focused less on defeating Russia; more on overstretching her. There’s a subtle clue in the report title: Extending Russia.

In a footnoted aside to a post three months ago on Syria, I wrote:

US Senator Lindsey Graham defended the $billions sent to Kiev (to be black-holed in that mire of sleaze, though the contractors had been paid so any loss was to US taxpayers) as “the best money we’ve ever spent” since it meant Ukrainians dying to further US goals. Graham is GOP but, in the blue corner, Antony Blinken urges Kiev to lower its conscription age so 18 year-olds may bleed out in an unwinnable war to keep Russia tied down. Neither Graham nor Blinken have ever seen active service.

Let me return briefly to 2014 when a US backed coup in Kiev, discussed many times here, ousted the neutrality-seeking government of Viktor Yanukovych. Some three decades of unipolar rule (if we include the years of a dying USSR unable, post Afghanistan, to check US overreach) had empowered Beltway Neocons in a Washington drunk on Exceptionalism. For an empire now pursuing full spectrum dominance, a Russia fast regaining her national pride (unlike America’s vassals allies in Europe) was not to be tolerated. Yes, she continued – to the chagrin of critics at home and abroad who urged her to take no for an answer and forge her future in the east ⁶ – to seek peaceful and prosperous relations with the West on the basis of mutual respect.

Just not at any price. Finally the penny dropped: America doesn’t do equality. No empire does. And since the Achilles heel of a vast and near landlocked country is thousands of miles of hard to defend border, sooner or later Moscow would heed the abundance of hostile signage …

Two factors are driving the world to nuclear war. One is the constant stream of insults, false accusations and broken agreements that the West has been dumping on Russia year after year. The other is Russia’s response, or, perhaps more correctly, the lack thereof – Paul Craig Roberts, March 2018

… and draw the appropriate conclusion.

So here we are. Mine is an unambiguously materialist antidote to the idealist pantomime – with Putin its boo-hiss villain – sold to Western publics by the planet’s most skilled propagandists …

Right. Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to deliberately manipulate people’s minds using mass media has no effect on their decisions at all. I guess that’s why that whole “advertising” fad never made any money – Caitlin Johnstone

… but here’s a factor on the face of it less material, so less open to rational scrutiny. I speak of centuries of Russophobia gripping my country’s elites; evident in Lord Palmerston’s day, alive and kicking in Boris Johnson’s. Bear with me as I make an indirect approach. When Palestinian-American academic Edward Said coined the term orientalism, he had in mind the westerner’s fear and exotic ‘othering’ of all things Arabic. But while that fear lay in primaeval basements of the occidental psyche, where reason seldom leaves its calling card, the drivers are not hard to fathom. Anglo-French need to divide the Arab peoples (earth’s second largest ethnic grouping after China’s Han) was driven by post WW1 Ottoman collapse, by Arabia’s geo-location vis-a vis Eurasia, and by that game-changing treacly black stuff below the sand.

Those we bully and exploit, cheat and enslave, we fear. Both literally and figuratively, Professor Said’s term is no less applicable to Slavs – thrice plundered from the West – than to Arabs. For five centuries the nightmare of European colonialists had been of Eurasia united at its eastern and western poles to challenge Western hegemony. As in some Sophoclean tragedy, efforts by their successors in Washington to avert that nightmare ⁷ have served only to expedite it but my point stands. Even the visceral emotionality of Russophobia has, as our darkest fears always do when we drill deep enough, its rational underpinnings.

Here endeth my response to the first part of von der Leyen’s statement, the slyly oblique lie of Russia as an ever-present threat to European security and planetary peace.

The second concerns the capacity and willingness of Europe, its discredited leadership reeling from the shock of Team Trump pronouncements, to back up Queen Ursula’s bold rhetoric …

[Is] Europe ready and able to act with the speed and ambition needed? … The answer from European capitals has been as resounding as it is clear. We are in an era of rearmament. And Europe is ready to massively boost its defence spending. Both to respond to the short-term urgency [in] Ukraine but also to address the long-term need to take on much more responsibility for our own European security.

… in the face of realities the said discredited leadership shows no sign of recognising.

But that’s one for another day.

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1. A mix of (a) Russia’s natural wealth, (b) her already long and hard to defend borders, (c) her demographic headache of low population density give the lie to the land-grab motive attributed to her by Europe’s corrupt leaders and media. That said, her need of a buffer zone – and the reality, now conceded in Washington, that neither Donetsk nor Luhansk (far less Crimea) will be “returned” against the will of their peoples – means the Ukraine can never regain territories it would have kept under Minsk and, just weeks into Russia’s SMO, Istanbul peace talks torpedoed by Boris Johnson. Ukraine’s tragedy – hundreds of thousands of needlessly dead, to achieve worse than nothing – is at the same time just another item on the blood-soaked ledger of Western crimes against humanity. (No, I’m not a self-hater. Just a realist who sees no future for tomorrow’s children if we persist in denial of the folly and worse of our rulers, their stewards and narrative managers, and the grotesque furrow all insist on ploughing.)
2. Not just Ukraine but the brief 2008 conflict in Georgia is routinely invoked as ‘evidence’ of a Russian threat. But as with Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, Georgia’s ethnically Russian South Ossetia had been denied a say in its future. Flouting a principle enshrined in the Minsk Accords – that when one nation secedes from another, as Ukraine and Georgia had from the USSR, large ethnic populations in clearly identifiable territories should have a say in their nationhood – was a valid casus belli. Triply so when both seceding states were, with Washington in the shadows, set to join a NATO predicated on an encirclement of Russia whose like the USA would not for a moment tolerate on its own borders. That’s one response to the charge of “Russian aggression”. Another is that by any objective metric – number of invasions, bombings, coups d’etat, lethal sanctions and more covert interference when countries displease Washington – the USA, backed without question on all these things by the West at large, and with an arms-spend exceeding the next ten countries combined, is by a huge margin the most aggressive power on earth. That such realities seldom feature in mainstream discourse attests, once again, to the triumph of narrative over truth in a West more successfully propagandised than any other society, past or present. See Caitlin’s withering sarcasm as cited in the main text.
3. See Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, Chapters 10-11, for how ordinary Russians saw living standards plummet and mortality rates soar, as their welfare safety net was pulled from under their feet in IMF prescribed ‘austerity’ while Yeltsin hit the vodka and an overnight oligarchy got stinking rich. The bonanza was brief but, while it lasted, neoliberal crystal meth.
4. Prior to and for some time after February 2022, Putin’s Kremlin critics were incensed by his peace overtures – even, said some, endangering his soldiers to minimise Ukrainian losses – to a West intent on war.
5. The forces driving the cold war also drive carnage in the Middle East and privatisations within the West. All serve, under cover of this fairy tale or that, to transfer wealth from the many to the few, though that’s too simple a truth for the sophisticatedly brainwashed liberal mind to take in.
6. It’s forgotten that hawks like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had truly thought the cold war ended with the fall of the USSR. As had Reagan appointees Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts. Dismayed by US policy towards Russia from Bush Senior on, Roberts, Cohen and other gamekeepers turned poacher warned against ‘containing’ Russia. Their warnings went unheeded as Neocons crowed of a New American Century, and the State Department was purged of Russian speakers and cultural experts now dubbed Not One Of Us. Mocked as ‘Putin apologists’, some jumped and some were pushed as philistines and crazies strutted the corridors of power.
7. In January 2022, one month before Russia’s SMO in eastern Ukraine – see Eurasia’s Ring of Fire: the Epic Struggle Over the Epicenter of US Global Power – Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wrote:

   In the late 1990s, at the absolute apex of U.S. global hegemony, President Jimmy Carter’s [former] National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, far more astute as an armchair analyst than an actual practitioner of geopolitics, issued a stern warning about the three pillars of power necessary to preserve Washington’s global control. First, the U.S. must avoid the loss of its strategic European “perch on the Western periphery” of Eurasia. Next, it must block the rise of “an assertive single entity” across the continent’s massive “middle space” of Central Asia. And finally, it must prevent “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral.