Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
The West owes Russia a hell of a lot; but what it owes Russia first is a deep apology, and a welcome into Europe, of which Russia has been and is an extremely important nation, and very unjustly denied its rightful place there. What doesn’t belong in Europe is the U.S., not in any way whatsoever, especially since the U.S. is now a dictatorship. (Anyone who says it’s not a dictatorship and who doesn’t click onto that link to find out that he’s been snookered to think it’s still a democracy, should just stop reading here right now, because this article is going to be suitable only for people with open, critical, inquiring minds — not for closed-minded or stupid readers.)
Why does America’s anti-Russia military club NATO still exist, after the Soviet Union’s equivalent Warsaw Pact disbanded in 1991 when the Soviet Union and its communism voluntarily ended?
NATO is nothing but America’s anti-Russia military club, against Russia and against any nation (such as Iraq, or Libya, or Syria) that supports Russia.
We killed Gaddafi in Libya because he supported Russia in international relations. We produced the failed state and jihadist mayhem that now exists there; we destroyed Libya and now the refugees from there are flooding into Europe, along with the refugees from our attacks to bring down Assad in Syria.
We overthrew (via a bloody coup and no ‘democratic revolution’ such as the West lies to assert) Yanukovych in Ukraine allegedly because he turned down the EU’s offer to Ukraine after learning that the price-tag for Ukrainians would be $160 billion if Ukraine were to comply with the EU’s demands. But the U.S. was already organizing the coup against him starting a year before the coup, and nine months before Yanukovych turned down the EU’s offer.
We are trying to overthrow Assad in Syria because he supports Russia in international relations.
This isn’t bullying?
This is ‘democracy’?
This is dictatorship: totalitarianism in the West, against Russia and any other nation that isn’t buckling to the U.S. aristocracy and its allied aristocracies in Europe, and (especially with the new bellicose nationalistic Abe government), also in Japan.
This is ugly.
This can’t be published in Western major ‘news’ media: it is samizdat, in the Western dictatorships, but it is all demonstrably true, nonetheless.
Here is how it started – the original sin of the post-Cold-War West, which has produced the problems of today and the future:
Let’s start with the results of a 2009 investigation by Germany’s Spiegel, or Mirror, magazine, which is a mainstream German news site, that’s a bit more honest than America’s equivalents:
They headlined, very directly: “NATO’s Eastward Expansion: Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?”
They identified what that “promise” was, which Russia claims was violated, and which Spiegel was investigating: “that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe violated commitments made during the negotiations over German reunification.” The next sentence in Spiegel’s report states unequivocally their conclusion: “Newly discovered documents from Western archives support the Russian position.”
The question Spiegel’s article discusses isn’t whether NATO’s continued existence is an evil, but instead whether NATO should have extended eastward up to Russia’s own borders – whether, to make this matter quite clear now, if the USSR had won, and its Warsaw Pact and not NATO had continued (though neither should have continued), the Warsaw Pact should have extended itself all the way to including Mexico and/or Canada?
How would the American people have felt about that possibility – nuclear missiles aimed against them at their own border? It’s so obviously disgusting (vile, actually – and what was John F. Kennedy determined to do if the USSR had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba?), but do you learn in Western ‘news’ media that this is what the United States has done and is doing to Russia, and to Russia’s allies?
Here is how even Spiegel concluded that the West lies about this history, though Spiegel is itself a Western mainstream medium and so avoids saying it outright that directly, and instead veils the truth so that only the few people with brains and open minds will get the important point:
Spiegel makes clear that their investigation of the actual paper record shows that the then merely West German side, which was negotiating reunification of Germany with the then merely Eastern half of Germany, is exactly in accord with what Russia’s allegations have been saying all along, and exactly the opposite of what West Germany’s Foreign Minister then, Hans Dietrich Genscher, has been asserting to have been the case. Here is how we learn this from Spiegel:
Jack Matlock, the US ambassador in Moscow at the time, has said in the past that Moscow was given a “clear commitment.” Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister in 1990, says this was precisely not the case.
After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m., Genscher spoke with Shevardnadze. According to to the German record of the conversation, which was only recently declassified, Genscher said: “We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.” And because the convers[at]ion revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: “As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.”
Never does Spiegel state outright that Genscher was lying; but, an intelligent person recognizes that if “the non-expansion of NATO … applies in general,” then the promise made was excluding any eastward expansion of NATO at all. Not only “NATO will not expand to the east,” but NATO will not expand. How much clearer can it be than that?
In other words: Genscher lies when he says that there was no “clear commitment.”
For some reason, Russian officials don’t accuse the West of having “lied.” Perhaps they feel that it would only exacerbate relations even further than the West itself has already done by its constant lying. However, wouldn’t it be better for the confrontation to come upon the battlefield of truth, than upon the battlefield of war?
The U.S. and its allies have been lying through their teeth in order not only to continue NATO, but to extend it up to Russia’s borders – in other words: for conquest.
For more about this key historical reality, the reader can click here, to see that there’s lots more than just the record disproving Genscher’s lies, but especially the record disproving the lies by U.S. officials.
Let me then summarize that here: George Herbert Walker Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev were the principals (Bush for the U.S. aristocracy; Gorbachev for the populations of the Soviet Union). Genscher and James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze, etc. were merely agents; and Bush had his agents lie to Gorbachev’s agents, to say that NATO would not expand at all eastward. But he then, only later, instructed them not to follow through on what they had said, not to behave truthfully – but instead to set things up so as to allow the U.S. military alliance to extend right up to Russia’s borders. Here is how he instructed them to perform in this shameful (and potentially catastrophic) manner in private:
West German transcripts from the two leaders’ February 24—25 summit at Camp David show [that] Bush made his feelings about compromising with Moscow clear to Kohl: ‘To hell with that!’ he said. ‘We prevailed, they didn’t.’… In April, Bush spelled out this thinking in a confidential telegram to French President François Mitterrand… Bush was making it clear to Mitterrand that the dominant security organization in a post—Cold War Europe had to remain NATO.
The puppetmaster, Bush, sprung upon Kohl and Mitterrand the instruction for them to just keep up the lie, but that it would be a lie. They had believed what they had said when they said it, but were now instructed not to fulfill on it. What they had said would be a lie; they were instructed about this, only after they had said what they had believed to be true. From that point on, the anti-Russia thrust of the U.S. aristocracy, which controls the aristocracies (such as Europe’s) that are its allies, was clear; and the only way to disobey would be to become blackballed and trashed. Their careers would have been destroyed if they had disobeyed Bush.
Both in my own article there, and in the Spiegel one, the ancillary questions, such as why this promise had never been made in writing (though Gorbachev wanted it to be), are also discussed. However, something should be pointed out here regarding the Spiegel article, namely that Gorbachev’s Foreign Minister Shevardnadze was also shown there to be lying to Spiegel’s reporters, and not noted there to have been lying to them. Shevardnadze, “speaking in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, says that there were no such assurances from the West.” In other words: he told, to Spiegel, a thing that was contradicting what Spiegel found in their own examination of Genscher’s papers from the period of the negotiations. Genscher had been negotiating then with Shevardnadze, and according to Genscher’s papers, Shevardnadze had indeed been informed by Genscher that NATO wouldn’t expand, at all. What Shevardnadze’s motive was for this, is not known, and Spiegel’s reporters didn’t even bring up to Shevardnadze the fact that what he was telling them was in direct contradiction of the written record. (Perhaps Shevardnadze, now retired after having become Georgia’s President, was hoping in 2009 to be favorably viewed by aristocrats in the West. Keeping up the lie would have fit for that purpose. But, even if he had been asked, he wouldn’t have given that explanation.)
George Herbert Walker’s having instructed his agents to lie and to avoid any signed treaty on this crucial historical matter, was the West’s Original Sin.
Europe’s remaining allied with the U.S. and participating in NATO, especially after having been instructed by America to lie, and to have deceived Gorbachev, who behaved honorably throughout and afterward, is Europe’s great shame.
And truth is Russia’s great case.
The U.S. is, in fact, Europe’s enemy – not merely Russia’s enemy. Not merely the truth’s enemy. Not merely democracy’s enemy.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.