How the West provoked the Russian Bear
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr
An old Latin phrase goes: “Cui bono?”, which translates roughly as “to whom is it a benefit?” This, it seems, is a conclusion according to which everyone twists his own version of history (or simply omits facts), and as a result only comes to light how much the blusterers like to measure things with double standards: When two do the same thing, it is far from being the same.
The omission of facts has served the West as a justification to blame the other not only since these days. What made U.S. President Barack Obama, of all people, not only insult Russia but throw stones in his own glass house during the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague? The quote is worthwhile because it shows how arrogantly, negligently and immoderately the USA and Europe – the occasion was the Russian invasion of Crimea – railed against Russia. Obama said at the time, “Russia is a regional power that threatens some of its immediate neighbors … We [he meant his own country] do not need to invade our neighbors in order to have a strong, cooperative relationship with them.”
Pardon me?
Who else should the U.S. have attacked as neighbors after the way had been “paved” for westward expansion by wiping out indigenous peoples in violation of treaty after treaty to the point that they no longer mattered? And yet, that was not enough. Mexico, a neighbor, had been attacked in violation of the treaty for – among other things – not allowing slavery in Texas, a part of Mexico – and 40 percent of Mexican territory fell into U.S. hands “just like that” at the end of the war. Now there was no neighbor in the west anymore, for the Pacific was difficult to attack.
This is called, according to free American translation, a “strong cooperative relationship with our neighbors”?
Those who then have hardly any neighbors left but want to advance in their expansionist drive for world domination, eventually look elsewhere in the world. Where have the Americans, as the unmatched military power, not invaded to secure their influence by deposing existing governments, unjust or not, and replacing them according to their own good thinking to protect their own interests? Where have they not used their intelligence services to launch or support plots to organize coups and overthrows – all, of course, under the official guise of “democracy and freedom?” The list of affected countries is not short.
Anyone who is not very interested in history, who is not familiar with it, need only look at recent events – the criminal war in Vietnam is not even necessary in the considerations. In Afghanistan, for example – after George W. Bush’s grandiose announcements about fighting terrorism, although it was clear very soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that the majority of the terrorists not only came from the allied Saudi Arabia but had also been financed from there. A little later, weapons of mass destruction were the alleged reason for attacking Iraq – a lie for a pretense. What has become of it?
What capitalist interests, what dilettante ruthlessness was behind pelting the Russian bear with stones in the decades that followed the end of the Cold War? Doesn’t the West realize how much it is fomenting a nationalist revival in Russia?
To this day, no one seems to notice what a divided country Ukraine is – with one of the highest mortality rates in the world, by the way. Apparently, Russian tanks are already in eastern Ukraine, whose people were denied the use of their native Russian language after Ukrainian independence in 1991. There, in the Donbass, the powerful industrial center of the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, the Americans with their omnipresent McDonald stores and Coca-Cola will probably have to give up the sails for the time being. One can only hope that the conflict does not spread even further.
But the profit vultures in Stars and Stripes, who already control most of the corporate world, have long been circling elsewhere – in Germany, of all places, whose chancellor according to desire only today decreed the “interim” halt to the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. A victory for the dealmakers, hagglers and speculators: against the will of a majority of the more environmentally conscious German population, the Americans can now probably sell their dirty, overpriced fracking gas in Europe.
So, it looks as if Germany, the largest donor to the largest European country – Ukraine – will be asked to pay twice in the future, including extreme prices for liquid gas, which probably have to be subsidized. For years, German money has been seeping into dubious channels in Ukraine, for the oligarchs there are selling out their country like the Americans are selling out theirs. This means that the boomerang especially for Germany is already in the air. In the end, the sanctions against Russia might harm the Europeans more than the Russians.
As another truism says: democracy is the rule of money.
The Wind of Change 