Are You Sure You Want To Go To War?
Politics / Social Issues May 27, 2014 - 05:04 PM GMTBy: Raul_I_Meijer
Ukraine has a new president, or at least someone, Petro Poroshenko, who claims to be. One of the first things to come out of his mouth was that he doesn’t recognize Crimea as being a part of Russia. Still, the good listener knows there were no Ukraine presidential elections in Crimea either on Sunday. So Crimea is supposedly still a part of Ukraine, despite a referendum in which 89% of Crimeans chose not to be, and they get no vote in who gets to be their president either? What does all that mean?
Poroshenko also vowed to bring peace to east Ukraine, something he aims to achieve through violence, as yesterday’s 100 deaths can bear silent witness to. Ukraine has a new president and the first thing he orders, even before being inaugurated, is the killing of more of his own citizens. Petro P. had lofty words about wanting a good working relationship with Russia, but those were only words; why, or even how, would Moscow want to talk to someone who has not even officially been elected yet but already wants to kill ethnic Russians who happen to live just across the border from Russia because of a map redrawn pretty much at random 60 years ago? What about that map permits Ukrainians in one part of the country to kill fellow Ukrainians who live in another part?
If Russia would withdraw its troops, chances are there would be a massacre, if not a genocide. That it cannot do. It cannot allow it either. So what is Poroshenko’s idea? That if he can kill enough eastern Ukrainians the rest will submit to anything he wants? And that Putin will let him? Neither seems even remotely likely, and the president-to-be knows it. What then is behind this? Is he even his own man?
If on teh other hand the US and EU would withdraw from the conflict, after first having told Poroshenko to stop killing his own people, and to, after that, set up a dialogue with all parties involved, at the very least fewer casualties would be the result. But US and EU don’t seem to have any such intentions. Which should tell us all something. For real. The peacemaking efforts from the side of the west have been so few and far between you’d need a search light. Add that to what we know about the west’s involvement in Maidan and the ouster of Yanukovych, the last elected Ukrainian President, add the presence of Blackwater ops on the ground in east Ukraine and CIA and FBI advisors in Kiev, and we get a picture that does not make “us” look very pretty.
Today, unelected – or elected by the west – PM Yatsenyuk spoke for the first time in a while. Yes, he’s still there. So no, Ukraine didn’t get a new government, since none was elected. The shots are still – quite literally – called by the handpicked crew that took over in February, with a heavy presence of Svoboda, the Right Sector and other squeaky clean fine folk. For those who hoped the first thing a new president, the first person in a while with actual legitimate credentials, would tell everyone was to quiet down amidst all the turmoil caused by the different claims to power, no such luck. Willy Wonka wants blood.
It’s up to Obama, and only Obama, now to tell Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko and Blackwater and the various symbol-wielding fractions on their side of the fence to stop doing what they’re doing. They are the agressors here, not the separatists or terrorists or whatever they’re being called, and not Vladimir Putin either. There was never a chance that Putin was going to let anyone threaten the Gazprom pipelines underneath Ukraine soil, and everyone involved knew that from the get-go.
And Putin knew that Yanukovych was an idiot, but he didn’t interfere in internal Ukraine politics. He worked with the guy, to make sure the pipelines were safe. Then Victoria Nuland et al began to fund, to the tune of at least $5 billion, the movement to overthrow the president that they knew all to well included some very questionable elements. Just like the US works with many dozens of regimes that are far worse than Yanukovych when it comes to issues such as human rights. Why then was it so important to topple Yanukovych? It can’t be explained without bringing into play ulterior motives. In this case, these motives are carbon resources. Russia has lots of those, they’re amongst the last few available in the world, and the west wants them. It’s not hard to understand.
What Yatsenyuk said today was that Russia owes Ukraine $1 billion for gas stolen when Crimea chose to join Russia. Reuters quoted a Gazprom spokesman as saying.”We have no idea what he means.” Now, there probably are gas fields below the Black Sea, but they haven’t been developed. And Yats may have had dreams of developing them, but he and all his wastern banker and Big Oil friends knew all along that Russia would never give up its Black Sea access, and without that the fields would not be exploitable. So in making his ‘stolen gas’ claim, Yats gives away at least some of his, and his backers’, reasons to do what they do.
But that doesn’t explain why they feel they have the liberty to go kill fellow Ukrainians. Unless they try to evoke an all out war with Russia and/or topple the elected Russian government. After all, kill enough ethnic Russians and Putin will have to act. And he will. And then we in the west will be treated to more Goebbels inspired stories comparing him to Hitler; there are dozens of examples of that already today, just wait till they make it impossible for him not to act. But it’s not Putin who has expanded his rein westward, it’s the NATO that’s moved east, and at an aggressive pace, after having pledged it wouldn’t. I’ve said it before, we may want to be careful with what we let people do in our name. The dozens of people murdered in Odessa a few weeks ago, and the 100 yesterday in Slovensk, plus all the others in this conflict, would have been alive today if only Obama had said stop. He didn’t, and that puts us on the hook, because he’s our guy.
But perhaps we can put all this on the backburner if the Chinese government attempts to hide its utterly failing economic policies, and the violent unrest that will be the consequence of them, behind more attacks on Vietnamese and Japanese vessels and the occasional island. That sort of development could make Ukraine an afterthought in the media. Not that it should for us though: there are still people being killed in our name there, and we should should shout out loud that we don’t want that to happen. If we don’t, isn’t it obvious we lose our right to speak, let alone shout?!
By Raul Ilargi Meijer
Website: http://theautomaticearth.com (provides unique analysis of economics, finance, politics and social dynamics in the context of Complexity Theory)
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