{"id":144220,"date":"2015-03-05T20:11:31","date_gmt":"2015-03-05T20:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=144220"},"modified":"2015-03-05T20:11:31","modified_gmt":"2015-03-05T20:11:31","slug":"crazed-washington-drives-world-final-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/crazed-washington-drives-world-final-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Crazed Washington Drives the World to the Final War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Craig Roberts\u00a0<\/em>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

John Pilger is the kind of well-informed, hard-hitting journalist with gobs of integrity that no longer exists in the Western mainstream media. He has the most distinguished career of all in the business.<\/p>\n

In the article below he brings stunning information to one of my own themes\u2014the creation by Washington and its NATO vassals of an artificial reality consisting entirely of propaganda into which Washington has placed the entire Western world and all outside who inspire to be part of it. Westerners live in The Matrix, and the presstitutes keep them there. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the TV channels perform as agents (as in the Matrix film) actively suppressing any glimmer of factual reality.<\/p>\n

Western people have no comprehension of the real reasons for Washington\u2019s murderous interventions in Yugoslavia, Middle East, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Indonesia, or Latin America. The most transparent lies are fed to people too ignorant to recognize the lies. The lies have cost huge numbers of deaths and injuries and are leading directly to war with Russia and China.<\/p>\n

It is probably too late to stop this war. The war is inevitable because Washington\u2019s doctrine of world hegemony does not permit the existence of other strong countries with independent foreign policies. Unless the House-of-Card US economy collapses, the only way Russia and China can avoid war is to accept Washington\u2019s overlordship.<\/p>\n

John Pilger himself speaks of growing up inside The Matrix as did all of us:
\n\u201cI grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine.\u201d I doubt that even the most determined of us ever become completely free of the disinformation in which we are indoctrinated. Pilger himself still shows traces of it when he assumes that Hitler started World War II by invading Europe when in fact Great Britain and France initiated World War II when they declared war on Germany. Hitler\u2019s invasion of Europe was a response to the declaration of war on Germany. From day one the propaganda was that Germany started World War II by rolling up the British and French armies. This lie was enshrined in 1946 by the Nuremberg Tribunal when the Tribunal defined \u201cthe supreme international crime\u201d to be \u201cto initiate a war of aggression\u201d and ascribed this crime to Germany.<\/p>\n

The Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes are more guilty of \u201cthe supreme international crime\u201d than was National Socialist Germany. Today the crazed Washington warmongers are driving toward war with Russia.<\/p>\n

Those pathetic Americans who think that their government is so good and pure and only commits wrongs by mistake and would never \u201ckill its own people\u201d need to remember the response of the US high command to the report that American POWs were in Nagasaki: \u201cTargets previously assigned for Centerboard (the atomic bomb attack) remain unchanged.\u201d Washington cared no more about its own soldiers than Washington cared about the innocent civilians of a country whose government was desperately trying to surrender. If you have any doubt that the entire history of the United States is one of murder and mayhem, you need to read Howard Zinn\u2019s A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Nazis have returned. They are ensconced in the governments in Washington, London, and Germany. The New Nazis have made certain that there has been war every year of this 21st century.<\/p>\n

Pilger tells the truth about these wars:<\/p>\n

Why the rise of fascism is again the issue \u2013 John Pilger<\/strong><\/p>\n

26 February 2015<\/p>\n

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo initiate a war of aggression\u2026,\u201d said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, \u201cis not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.<\/p>\n

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 \u201cstrike sorties\u201d against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that \u201cmost [of the children killed] were under the age of ten\u201d.<\/p>\n

The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a \u201crebel\u201d bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: \u201cWe came, we saw, he died.\u201d His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning \u201cgenocide\u201d against his own people. \u201cWe knew\u2026 that if we waited one more day,\u201d said President Obama, \u201cBenghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be \u201ca real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda\u201d. Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato\u2019s inferno, described by David Cameron as a \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d.<\/p>\n

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain\u2019s SAS, many of the \u201crebels\u201d would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.<\/p>\n

For Obama, David Cameron and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi\u2019s true crime was Libya\u2019s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa\u2019s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to \u201center\u201d Africa and bribe African governments with military \u201cpartnerships\u201d.<\/p>\n

Following Nato\u2019s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, \u201cconfiscated $30 billion from Libya\u2019s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency\u201d.<\/p>\n

The \u201chumanitarian war\u201d against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing \u201cgenocide\u201d against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as \u201c225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59\u00e2\u20ac\u00b3 might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and \u201cthe spirit of the Second World War\u201d. The West\u2019s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.<\/p>\n

With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia\u2019s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the \u201cholocaust\u201d. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing \u201ca semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines\u201d. A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The \u201cholocaust\u201d was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.<\/p>\n

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its \u201cnatural market\u201d in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.<\/p>\n

In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo \u201cpeace\u201d conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer\u2019s duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia \u2014 a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation \u2014 and the implementation of a \u201cfree-market economy\u201d and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations \u2014 69 countries \u2014 have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America\u2019s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as \u201csanctions\u201d. The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.<\/p>\n

\u201cTonight, for the first time since 9\/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.\u201d These were opening words of Obama\u2019s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. \u201cThe longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,\u201d said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed \u2014 civilians and soldiers \u2014 during Obama\u2019s time as president.<\/p>\n

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book \u2018The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives\u2019, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because \u201cthe pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion\u2026 Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation.\u201d He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter\u2019s National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan\u2019s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People\u2019s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.<\/p>\n

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan\u2019s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. \u201cEvery girl,\u201d recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, \u201ccould go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.\u201d<\/p>\n

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, \u201cthere was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]\u201d. Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the \u201cthreat of a promising example\u201d.<\/p>\n

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised support for tribal \u201cfundamentalist\u201d groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan\u2019s first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that \u201cthe United States\u2019 larger interests\u2026 would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.\u201d The italics are mine.<\/p>\n

The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar\u2019s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a \u201cfreedom fighter\u201d.<\/p>\n

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and \u201cdestabilise\u201d the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, \u201ca few stirred up Muslims\u201d. His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan\u2019s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called \u201cOperation Cyclone\u201d. Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah \u2014 who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help \u2014 was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.<\/p>\n

The \u201cblowback\u201d of Operation Cyclone and its \u201cfew stirred up Muslims\u201d was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the \u201cwar on terror\u201d, in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer\u2019s message was and remains: \u201cYou are with us or against us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its \u201cfree fire zones\u201d, \u201cbody counts\u201d and \u201ccollateral damage\u201d. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (\u201cgooks\u201d) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.<\/p>\n

Today, the world\u2019s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama\u2019s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA \u201ckill list\u201d presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each \u201chit\u201d is registered on a faraway console screen as a \u201cbugsplat\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor goose-steppers,\u201d wrote the historian Norman Pollock, \u201csubstitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.\u201d<\/p>\n

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. \u201cI believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,\u201d said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, \u201cThe sovereign is he who decides the exception.\u201d This sums up Americanism, the world\u2019s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.<\/p>\n

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the \u201ctragedy\u201d of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places \u2014 just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood\u2019s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, \u2018American Sniper\u2019, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a \u201cpatriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days\u201d.<\/p>\n

There are no heroic movies about America\u2019s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens \u2014 as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the \u201cfather\u201d of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its \u201cnew wave\u201d hailed by the enforcer as \u201cnationalists\u201d.<\/p>\n

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include \u00a0Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the \u201cMoscow-Jewish mafia\u201d and \u201cother scum\u201d, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.<\/p>\n

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get \u201cthe USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry\u201d. If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.<\/p>\n

No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe \u2014 with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama\u2019s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as \u201cthe minister for defeatism\u201d. It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading \u201cneo-con\u201d luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.<\/p>\n

Nuland\u2019s coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia\u2019s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea \u2014 illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 \u2014 voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping \u201cthe violence\u201d caused by the \u201cRussian invasion\u201d. The Nato commander, General Breedlove \u2014 whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick\u2019s Dr. Strangelove \u2014 announced that 40,000 Russian troops were \u201cmassing\u201d. In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.<\/p>\n

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine \u2014 a third of the population \u2014 have long sought a federation that reflects the country\u2019s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not \u201cseparatists\u201d but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous \u201cstates\u201d are a reaction to Kiev\u2019s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.<\/p>\n

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as \u201canother bright day in our national history\u201d. In the American and British media, this was reported as a \u201cmurky tragedy\u201d resulting from \u201cclashes\u201d between \u201cnationalists\u201d (neo-Nazis) and \u201cseparatists\u201d (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).<\/p>\n

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington\u2019s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims \u2014 \u201cDeadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says\u201d. Obama congratulated the junta for its \u201crestraint\u201d.<\/p>\n

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained \u201cpariah\u201d role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine\u2019s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: \u201cThe Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army\u201d. \u00a0There were \u201cindividual citizens\u201d who were members of \u201cillegal armed groups\u201d, but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev\u2019s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for \u201cfull scale war\u201d with nuclear-armed Russia.<\/p>\n

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan\u2019s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell\u2019s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.<\/p>\n

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America\u2019s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, \u201cNo European government, since Adolf Hitler\u2019s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West\u2019s media\/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established\u2026 If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three \u2014 much as it did into world war one a century ago \u2014 all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: \u201cThe use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack\u2026 In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.\u201d In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. \u201cPutin must be stopped,\u201d said the headline. \u201cAnd sometimes only guns can stop guns.\u201d He conceded that the threat of war might \u201cnourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement\u201d; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that \u201cAmerica has the best kit\u201d.<\/p>\n

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, \u201chas, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.\u201d He lauded Blair as a \u201cGladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist\u201d. In 2006, he wrote, \u201cNow we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outbursts \u2014 or as Garton-Ash prefers, his \u201ctortured liberal ambivalence\u201d \u2014 are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash\u2019s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: \u201cThe F-35. GREAT For Britain\u201d. This American \u201ckit\u201d will cost British taxpayers \u00a31.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. \u00a0In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.<\/p>\n

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev\u2019s new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas \u201cinvestment\u201d. She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden\u2019s son is on the board of Ukraine\u2019s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine\u2019s rich farming soil.<\/p>\n

Above all, they want Ukraine\u2019s mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia\u2019s long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country\u2019s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.<\/p>\n

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/johnpilger.com\/articles\/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts\u00a0was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West<\/a> and How America Was Lost<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Craig Roberts\u00a0 RINF Alternative News John Pilger is the kind of well-informed, hard-hitting journalist with gobs of integrity that no longer exists in the Western mainstream media. He has the most distinguished career of all in the business. In the article below he brings stunning information to one of my own themes\u2014the creation by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1220,"featured_media":136482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-144220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1220"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}