.......[In] the 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia,” the plan always was to provoke a costly Russian intervention in Ukraine to overstretch Russia and possibly precipitate a Soviet Union-style collapse. The conflict for Ukraine, the report predicted, “could produce disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace.” 

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Buried in Steel: Military Production & NATO’s Proxy War in Ukraine

 

Brian Berletic

 

The collective Western media, once replete with stories of shoddy, antiquated Russian weapons being flattened by “game-changing” NATO weapons, now features headlines about the growing gap between Russian military production and NATO’s inability to catch up. Other headlines now admit that previously vaunted NATO weapons have shortcomings exposed over the course of the past 2 years plus of fighting.

Buried in Steel: Russian Artillery Shell and Glide Bomb Production 

Among these headlines is Sky News’ late May 2024 article, “Russia is producing artillery shells around three times faster than Ukraine’s Western allies and for about a quarter of the cost,” which admits:

The research on artillery rounds by Bain & Company, which drew on publicly available information, found that Russian factories were forecast to manufacture or refurbish about 4.5 million artillery shells this year compared with a combined production of about 1.3 million rounds across European nations and the US.

Artillery is among the most decisive factors deciding the fighting in Ukraine. According to the US government and Western corporate-funded Council on Foreign Relations, an April 2024 brief titled, “Weapons of War: The Race Between Russia and Ukraine,” notes:

Artillery has been known as the “king of battle” for centuries, and this largely remains true today. In the Russia-Ukraine war, artillery fire accounts for about 80 percent of the casualties on both sides. That makes it all the more ominous that in recent months, following the U.S. aid cutoff, Ukraine went from being outgunned five to one in artillery fire to ten to one.

If Ukraine is outgunned anywhere between 5:1 to 10:1, this means its casualties will likewise reflect this disparity. According to various Western sources including the British Ministry of Defense, if Russia has suffered “355,000” casualties, Ukraine has suffered approximately 5 to 10 times more, or 1.7 million to 3.5 million Ukrainian casualties.

More realistically, Russian losses are more likely 50,000 versus half a million Ukrainian losses.

Another growing area of concern for NATO and its Ukrainian proxies is Russia’s use of precision-guided glide bombs dropped by Russian warplanes outside the range of what remains of Ukrainian air defenses, able to target and dismantle Ukrainian fortifications on a scale that even Russia’s immense artillery advantage is incapable of.

The BBC, in a late May 2024 article titled, “Russia’s glide bombs devastating Ukraine’s cities on the cheap,” would explain:

Russia is increasingly using “glide bombs” – cheap but highly destructive ordnance – to advance its offensive in Ukraine.

More than 200 of them are thought to have been used in just a week to pound Ukraine’s northern town of Vovchansk during Russia’s current cross-border advance near Kharkiv. 

President Volodymyr Zelensky said 3,000 such bombs were dropped on the country in March alone.

While Ukraine has received the US equivalent, the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), with its dwindling number of warplanes coupled with superior Russian electronic warfare (EW) capabilities, this capability has been rendered irrelevant.

The London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in a June 2023 report titled, “Jamming JDAM: The Threat to US Munitions from Russian Electronic Warfare,” would extensively explain the shortcomings of US munitions and the unlikelihood of the US solving the technical challenges of proofing US glide bombs against Russian jamming.

Even if the US were able to overcome Russian EW capabilities, the number of US and European-made glide bombs would always remain a fraction of those used by Russia due to the lack of warplanes and trained pilots able to deliver them.

NATO “Wonder Weapons” Fail to Meet Expectations

Beyond US-made JDAMs failing to hit their mark, a number of other precision-guided weapons transferred to Ukraine have also faced Russian EW jamming including the US-made Excalibur 155mm GPS-guided artillery shell, the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) fired by likewise US-made HIMARS and M270 launchers, and the US-made Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDBs) also launched via HIMARS and M270 systems.

While these weapons have been employed successfully on the battlefield, their overall effectiveness has been hindered by Russian EW capabilities. Because they are also provided in smaller quantities than the equivalent Russian munitions, this creates a decisive advantage for Russia.

Other “game-changing” weapons that have been exposed throughout the fighting in Ukraine includes German-made Leopard 1 and 2 main battle tanks (MBT) and the British-made Challenger 2 MBT, both of which were used amid Ukraine’s failed 2023 offensive.

Also transferred to Ukraine were American-made M1 Abrams MBT. These were held back during the 2023 offensive, and instead made their battlefield debut during fighting in Avdeevka this year, amid which Russian forces prevailed.

Images and footage of M1 Abrams burning on the battlefield demonstrated they were no exception to the outcome of other Western MBTs in Ukraine.

CNN, in a recent article, interviewed Ukrainian crews attempting to use the M1 Abrams, reporting their frustration and disappointment.

Titled, “Soldiers in Ukraine say US-supplied tanks have made them targets for Russian strikes,” the article admits:

Crews trained in Germany said the vehicles – the US military’s main $10 million battle tank used in Iraq against Saddam Hussein’s forces and insurgents – lacked armor that could stop modern weapons. 

“Its armor is not sufficient for this moment,” said one crew member, callsign Joker. “It doesn’t protect the crew. For real, today this is the war of drones. So now, when the tank rolls out, they always try to hit them.”

This contradicts claims made by Western analysts and commentators praising the “survivability” of Western armored vehicles.

The article also discusses the logistical and maintenance challenges of the tank, rendering many of those remaining inoperable.

The article admits:

…they appear to have technical issues too. 

One, parked under a tree, was almost immobile during CNN’s visit, due to an engine problem, the crew say, despite the vehicle having just been shipped in from Poland. They also complain of how, in rain or fog, condensation can fry the electronics inside the vehicle.

CNN also reported that the ammunition provided to Ukrainian M1 Abrams crews was meant for tank-on-tank warfare, which the article admits is a rarity. The tanks are instead used as assault guns to fire on infantry positions, meaning that a high-explosive round would be more appropriate, but apparently were not provided in sufficient numbers.

Finally, CNN admits that the failure of US-made M1 Abrams tanks may also be owed to the fact that Ukraine is expected to use them in a manner the US and NATO never intended, without sufficient artillery and air support.

CNN notes:

The Ukrainian crew expressed frustration the tanks were made for a NATO style of warfare, in which air power and artillery prepare the battlefield before tanks and infantry advance. Kyiv has long bemoaned its lack of artillery and air power.

Ukraine has neither, making all of the complex, heavy, unreliable Western tanks transferred to Ukrainian forces particularly vulnerable, including the M1 Abrams.

A Predictable Outcome 

Contrary to the many Western headlines heralding the transfer of Western weapons to Ukraine anticipating “game-changing”outcomes, the failure of US-European hardware was entirely predictable.

The myth of Western military superiority was based entirely on the series of mismatches spanning multiple conflicts over the course of several decades where the US and its allies waged war on nations with poorly trained, poorly equipped forces. While many of these nations were supposedly operating “Soviet” or “Russian” military equipment, it was multiple generations behind the state-of-the-art and operated by poorly organized units unable to use the equipment to its full potential.

Even with these many disadvantages, nations targeted by US wars of aggression over the decades did demonstrate that, at least in theory, US and European weapons had limitations and would be vulnerable in battle against a peer or near-peer adversary. Because of this, and other factors including challenges regarding training and logistics, the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Western weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine was predictable.

The myth of Western military superiority has now been fully shattered in Ukraine, where Western weapons are turning out to suffer both quantitative and qualitative limitations, giving Russian forces a decisive advantage on the battlefield, and an advantage the West is incapable of seizing upon for itself.

The aforementioned Sky News article, discussing the vast and multiplying number of Russian glide bombs, also noted shortages of Western-provided weapons owed to insufficient military industrial production across the West.

The article includes a section titled, “Factories could win the war on frontlines,” admitting:

The importance of producing weapons and ammunition is why many experts say factory production lines – rather than the frontline – could be where the war in Ukraine is won.

This reflects the adage, “amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics.” 

The article explains that Western arms manufacturers only expand production capacity when sufficient orders are placed. This maximizes profit, but at the expense of readiness. Expanding production is a costly process, requiring resources, and more critically, time.

Russia’s state-owned arms manufacturing enterprises prioritize readiness and maintain excessive capacity regardless of orders, meaning it is capable of ramping up production in a relatively short period of time measured in months versus Western factories which require a year or more.

It is clear that Ukraine’s current crisis is a result, at least in part, of Russia’s long-term focus on military industrial production and logistics, years before the SMO was launched, versus a collective West whose proxy war is being fought with weapons and a military industrial base never meant to operate on this scale, at this intensity, and for this long.

If and when the collective West makes serious efforts to expand military industrial production, Russia is already working from a multi-year head start. Collective US-European artillery shell production, for example, is projected to expand to between 2.5 and 3 million shells a year between 2025-2027. This is still less than Russia produces currently. By 2025-2027, Russia will almost certainly have expanded production even further.

Ultimately, Ukraine’s “victory” amid this conflict was never a genuine objective among policymakers in Washington, London, and Brussels. As admitted in the 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia,” the plan always was to provoke a costly Russian intervention in Ukraine to overstretch Russia and possibly precipitate a Soviet Union-style collapse. The conflict for Ukraine, the report predicted, “could produce disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace.” 

Today we see what the aftermath of Washington’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine is, an Eastern European nation, once balancing itself between East and West, benefiting from doing business with both worlds, being buried by Russian steel for the benefit of allies who are unable and also unwilling to genuinely assist Ukraine.

Much of the rhetoric coming out of the collective West is designed to encourage Ukraine to irrationally fight on despite the obvious outcome of the fighting – an outcome well-known even as early as 2019. While a deep hatred has been deliberately bred in the hearts and minds of many Ukrainians against Russia, their real enemy has always been the leadership of the collective West. The shortsighted nature of Western policymaking, predicated on the perpetual but ultimately unsustainable procurement of profits, power, and influence, makes the collective West its own worst enemy as well.

Only time will tell just how far this self-destructive process continues before wiser counsel prevails, a more appropriate Western foreign policy adopted, and Ukraine finally sits at the negotiating table to end a war it not only can’t win (and was never expected to win in the first place), but one the longer it fights, the less “Ukraine” there ultimately will be if its conclusion is allowed to be decided entirely on the battlefield.

In the meantime, Russian military industrial production only continues to grow. Artillery shells, armor, airpower, glide bombs, drones, air defenses, and missiles of all kinds not only continue to be produced in greater quantities, but are being developed toward greater quality. In many instances, Russian military hardware exceeds the capabilities of its Western counterparts. Because there is simply more of it, regardless of quality, it can simply “bury” adversaries on the battlefield with steel.

https://journal-neo.su/2024/06/03/buried-in-steel-military-production-natos-proxy-war-in-ukraine/

 

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BY Henry Kamens

 

Locking Horns with the Georgian Government: US Proposes Strict Visa Restrictions on its Strategic Partner, Certain Individuals and their Family Members

 

The U.S. is now proposing stringent visa restrictions targeting individuals in the Georgian government and their families, despite Georgia being considered a strategic partner. That is only for starters, considering the Georgia is unwilling to toe-the-line as a US-styled banana republic. 

In fact, from a Georgian perspective, they are pushing us to Russia and to the East, as one retired school teacher explained. “It is becoming a life and death struggle. Yes, it seems that the situation is getting very interesting. Can you imagine 5–6 years ago if someone could predict what is happening now?”

Apparently the US is getting very desperate, to have to revert to such low-level blackmail and arm-twisting tactics, of all things, to impose Visa sanctions over domestic transparency of foreign funding legislation. Tensions have growing between the United States and Georgia, and this is just the latest, due to the Georgian governments’ unwillingness to back down on what it deems to be essential legislation.

The latest move by the US to impose Visa restrictions on Georgian government officials and their families is a response to Georgia’s new “foreign influence” law, which the U.S. perceives, quite unreasonably, as a threat to democracy and freedom of expression. It is also reviewing its relationship with Georgia, whatever that means!

The US State Department claims that passed law stifles civil rights and independent media in Georgia. Hence, US policy will be adjusted to target those who it claims are closely involved in undermining democracy in Georgia, however, no public list of sanctioned individuals will be provided. Such a scheme, regardless of so-called “good intentions”, will likely lead to potential arbitrary visa denials amongst those who apply, including ordinary Georgian citizens.

Nonetheless, these proposed sanctions are considered by a large segment of Georgia society to be nothing but a knee-jerk reaction of the US government, which highlights the deteriorating relationship with its erstwhile strategic partner. This standoff increases the likelihood that such actions could push Georgia even closer to Russia and Asia, and further from Europe.

The mouthpiece media sites of the West even claim, as a result of the will of the Georgian people, which solidifies state sovereignty—that it is a win for Russia. The West just can’t bring itself to accept that The Georgian Parliament has overridden the President’s veto on the Transparency of Foreign Influence law.

As one Georgian, from Batumi on the Black Sea, who has been very politically active, wrote to me:

… it is a very wrong decision… France adopted the same law, Turkey is adopting it, and in many countries this law is already in effect…that Mr. Blinken will restrict the political leaders of these countries and members of their families…ridiculous…this kind of behavior in relation to a friendly country spoils the image of the United States. We understand perfectly the true reason for these steps by the US leadership…this is because of insubordination on a number of issues, and is not for the benefit of Georgia or any of the claims they are using to justify their actions. 

More is involved than meets the eye

I would propose much more is involved, and most has little to do with Georgia and its domestic affairs, but this is being done as a ploy, a distraction, from the ongoing disaster for the US and EU in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. The collective refusal of the core of Georgia society to “give into” concerted efforts to diminish it religious, cultural, family and historic values, despite all the money being pumped the West to push these to the side, has obviously infuriated policymakers in both the US and EU.

The NGO community wants Georgians to accept gay marriage and alternative lifestyles as being normal. That just is not going to happen, as recently demonstrated by a pro family march … and there will be push back. It seems to me that the “foggy Bottom” boys (Yes, I assumed their gender) and the Brussels “gender confused” have completely misread the mood of the Georgian public.

The Georgian people have survived so long by refusing to back down over fundamental core values. The US and EU foothold in the Caucasus is imperiled by their assault on the cultural values, as seen by the May 17th parade, the biggest gathering of Georgians in history, in response to the ill-advised decision by Germany to send a gay man to lecture Georgians on the meaning of faith.

Regardless, at least according to the US State Department, there is justification for foreign, including European, meddling in the domestic affairs of Georgia

Over the past few months, the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party has developed and passed a “foreign influence” law that would stifle the exercise of freedoms of association and expression, stigmatize organizations that serve the citizens of Georgia, and impede independent media organizations working to provide Georgians with access to high-quality information.

Cut to the Chase 

The US Department of State is going to implement a new visa restriction policy for Georgia that allegedly will apply to individuals who are responsible for, or complicit in, undermining democracy in Georgia, as well as their family members, i.e., mostly those working in policy positions in the GOG as well as with the ruling GD political party.

This is wide sweeping, as it will apply to “individuals, whether current or former state or non-state actors who are responsible for, or complicit in, undermining democracy in Georgia, including through the use of violence, force, or coercion to impede the exercise of civil or political rights, [including but not limited to] immediate family members of such individuals.” 

With friends like this, who needs enemies! 

What is really enlightening is that the US State Department will not publish the list of sanctioned people under this scheme, and anyone in the government, even a minor official, family members, etc., will be subject to the time, hope and expense of applying to visit the US and then be arbitrarily turned down. This already is standard operating policy, SOP, as now is the case for most Georgians, including the immediate family members of US citizens, even for the issuance of a simple tourist visa.

What is the real impact of visa restrictions?

One can only think that the US feels that denying visas to government officials will have some sort of major impact, and force Georgian politicians to “return to the fold” like good little sheep. The fact that the US has said that such sanctions will apply to both the Politicians who have voted for the law, and overridden the Georgian president’s attempt to veto it, AND their family members seems to imply that the US wants to affect those not involved in the decision-making process to apply pressure on elected Georgian officials.

I suspect that such an overbearing response will have exactly the opposite effect. The Europeans and the Americans need to understand that Georgians will not accept the infringement of their national sovereignty, and that any attempt to impose western demands on the country will result in many turning towards Russia.

It can be seen in the fact that the current protests against the law appear to be rapidly diminishing in size, particularly since the ill-advised intervention of the Baltic Foreign Ministers and Michael Roth of Germany, and the ill-tempered, even insane, attempts by both the US and EU to promote revolution in Georgia.

https://journal-neo.su/2024/06/06/locking-horns-with-the-georgian-government-us-proposes-strict-visa-restrictions-on-its-strategic-partner-certain-individuals-and-their-family-members/

 

 

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D-Day 2024by Diana Johnstone*, Paris

 

In retrospect, it becomes clear that the Cold War “communist threat” was only a pretext for great powers seeking more power.

Ceremonies were held last week commemorating the 80th anniversary of Operation Overlord, the Anglo-American landing on the beaches of Normandy that took place on 6 June 1944, known as D-Day. For the very first time, the Russians were ostentatiously not invited to take part in the ceremonies1.
  The Russian absence symbolically altered the meaning of the festivities. Certainly, the significance of Operation Overlord as the first step in the domination of Western Europe by the English-speaking world was more pertinent than ever. But without Russia, the event was symbolically taken out of the original context of World War II.
  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was invited to give a video address to the French Parliament in honour of the occasion. Zelensky pulled out all the rhetorical stops to demonise Vladimir Putin, describing the Russian president as the “common enemy” of Ukraine and Europe.
  Russia, he claimed “is a territory where life no longer has any value […]. It’s the opposite of Europe, it’s the anti-Europe.”
  So after 80 years, D-Day symbolically celebrated a different alliance and a different war – or perhaps, the same old war, but with the attempt to change the ending.
  Here was a shift in alliances which would have pleased a good part of the pre-war, British upper class. From the time he took power, Adolf Hitler had many admirers in Britain’s aristocracy and even in its royal family. Many saw Hitler as the effective antidote to Russian “judeo-bolshevism.”
  At the end of the war, there were those who would have favoured “finishing the job” by turning against Russia. It has taken 80 years to make it happen. But the seeds of the reversal were always there.

D-Day and the Russians

In June 1941, without so much as a pretext or false flag, Nazi Germany massively invaded the Soviet Union. In December, the United States was brought into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
  As the war raged on the Eastern front, Moscow pleaded with its Western allies, the US and Britain, to open a second front in order to divide German forces. By the time the Western Allies landed in Normandy, the Red Army had already decisively defeated the Nazi invaders in Russia and was on the verge of opening a gigantic front in Soviet Belarus that dwarfed the Normandy battle.
  The Red Army launched Operation Bagration on 22 June 1944, and by 19 August had destroyed 28 of 34 divisions, completely shattering the German front line. It was the biggest defeat in German military history, with around 450,000 German casualties. After liberating Minsk, the Red Army advanced on to victories in Lithuania, Poland and Romania.
  The Red Army offensive in the East undoubtedly ensured the success of the Anglo-American-Canadian Allied forces against much weaker German forces in Normandy.

D-Day and the French

As decided by the Anglo-Americans, the only role for the French in Operation Overlord was that of civilian casualties. In preparation for the landings, British and American bombers pounded French railway towns and seaports, causing massive destruction and tens of thousands of French civilian casualties.
  In the course of operations in Normandy, numerous villages, the town of St Lô and the city of Caen were destroyed by Anglo-American aviation.
  The Free French armed forces under the supreme command of General Charles de Gaulle were deliberately excluded from taking part in Operation Overlord. De Gaulle recalled to his biographer Alain Peyrefitte how he was informed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill:
  “Churchill summoned me to London on 4 June, like a squire summoning his butler. And he told me about the landings, without any French unit having been scheduled to take part. I criticised him for taking orders from Roosevelt, instead of imposing a European will on him. He then shouted at me with all the force of his lungs: ‘De Gaulle, you must understand that when I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I’ll always prefer Roosevelt. When we have to choose between the French and the Americans, we’ll always prefer the Americans.’”
  As a result, De Gaulle adamantly refused to take part in D-Day memorial ceremonies:
  “The June 6th landings were an Anglo-Saxon affair, from which France was excluded. They were determined to set themselves up in France as if it were enemy territory! Just as they had just done in Italy and were about to do in Germany! […] And you want me to go and commemorate their landing, when it was the prelude to a second occupation of the country? No, no, don’t count on me!”
  Excluded from the Normandy operation, in August the Free French First Army joined the Allied invasion of Southern France.
  The Americans had made plans to impose a military government on France, through AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories).
  This was avoided by the stubbornness of de Gaulle, who ordered the Resistance to restore independent political structures throughout France, and who succeeded in persuading supreme Allied Commander General  to allow Free French forces and a Resistance uprising to liberate Paris in late August 1944.

D-Day in Hollywood

France has always celebrated the Normandy landing as a liberation. Polls show, however, that views of its significance have evolved over the decades.  Soon after the end of the war, public opinion was grateful to the Anglo-Americans but overwhelmingly attributed the final victory in World War II to the Red Army. 
  Increasingly, opinion has shifted to the idea that D-Day was the decisive battle and that the war was won primarily by the Americans with help from the British.2 This evolution can be largely credited to Hollywood.
  The Marshall Plan and French indebtedness provided the context for post-war commercial deals with both financial and political aspects.
  On 28 May 1946, US Secretary of State James Byrnes and French representative Léon Blum signed a deal concerning motion pictures. The Blum-Byrnes agreement stipulated that French movie theatres were required to show French-made films for only four out of every 13 weeks, while the remaining nine weeks were open to foreign competition, in practice mostly filled by American productions.
  Hollywood had a huge backlog, already amortised on the home market and thus cheap. As a result, in the first half of 1947, 340 American films were shown compared to 40 French ones.
  France reaped financial benefits from this deal in the form of credits, but the flood of Hollywood productions contributed heavily to a cultural Americanisation, influencing both “the way of life” and historic realities.
  The Normandy landing was indeed a dramatic battle suitable to be portrayed in many movies. However, the cinematic focus on D-Day has inevitably fostered the widespread impression that the United States rather than the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany.

Alliance Reversal No. 1: The British

By June 1944, with the Red Army well on the way to decisively defeating the Wehrmacht, Operation Overlord was hailed by Soviet leaders as a helpful second front. For Anglo-American strategists, it was also a way to block the Soviet Westward advance.
  British leaders, and Churchill in particular, actually contemplated moving Eastward against the Red Army once the Wehrmacht was defeated.
  It must be recalled that in the 19th century, British imperialists saw Russia as a potential threat to its rule over India and further expansion in Central Asia, and developed strategic planning based on the concept of Russia as its principal enemy on the Eurasian continent. This attitude persisted.
  At the very moment of Germany’s defeat in May 1945, Churchill ordered the British Armed Forces’ Joint Planning Staff to develop plans for a surprise Anglo-American attack on the forces of their Soviet ally in Germany.
  Top-secret until 1998, the plans even included arming defeated Wehrmacht and SS troops to take part. This fantasy was code-named Operation Unthinkable3, which coincides with the judgment of the British chiefs of staff, who rejected it as out of the question.
  At the February Yalta meeting just three months earlier, Churchill had praised Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as “a friend whom we can trust.” The reverse was certainly not true. One might assume that Franklin D. Roosevelt would have dismissed any such plans had he not died in April.
  Roosevelt seemed confident that the war-exhausted Soviet Union was no threat to the United States, which was indeed true.
  In fact, Stalin always scrupulously respected the sphere of influence agreements with the Western allies, refusing to support the communist liberation movement in Greece (which angered Josip Broz Tito, contributing to Moscow’s split with Yugoslavia) and consistently urged the strong Communist Parties in Italy and France to go easy in their political demands. While those parties were treated as dangerous threats by the right, they were fiercely opposed by ultra-leftists for staying within the system rather than pursuing revolution.
  Soviet and Russian leaders truly wanted peace with their erstwhile Western allies and never had any ambition to control the entire continent.  They understood the Yalta agreement as authorising their insistence on imposing a defensive buffer zone on the string of Eastern European States liberated from Nazi control by the Red Army.
  Russia had undergone more than one devastating invasion from the West. It responded with a repressive defensiveness which the Atlantic powers, intent on access everywhere, saw as potentially aggressive.
  The Soviet clampdown on their satellites only hardened in response to the Western challenge eloquently announced by Winston Churchill 10 months after the end of the war. The spark was lit to a dynamic of endless and futile hostility.
  Churchill was voted out of office by a Labour Party landslide in July 1945. But his influence as wartime leader remained overwhelming in the United States. On 6 March 1946, Churchill gave an historic speech at a small college in Missouri, the home state of Roosevelt’s inexperienced and influenceable successor, Harry Truman.
  The speech was meant to renew the wartime Anglo-American alliance – this time against the third great wartime ally, Soviet Russia.
  Churchill titled his speech, “Sinews of Peace.” In reality, it announced the Cold War in the historic phrase: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
  The Iron Curtain designated the Soviet sphere, essentially defensive and static. The problem for Churchill was the loss of influence in that part of the world. A curtain, even if ‘iron’, is essentially defensive, but his words, were picked up as warning of a threat.
  “Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies.” (This despite the fact that Stalin had dissolved the Communist International on 15 May 1943.)
  In America, this uncertainty was soon transformed into a ubiquitous ‘communist threat’ that needed to be hunted down and eradicated in the State Department, trade unions and Hollywood.

Alliance Reversal No. 2: The Americans

The alleged need to contain the Soviet threat provided an argument for US government planners, notably Paul Nitze in National Security Council Paper 68, or NSC-68, to renew and expand the US arms industry, which had the political advantage of putting a decisive end to the economic depression of the 1930s.4
  Nazi collaborators throughout Eastern Europe could be welcomed in the United States, where intellectuals became leading ‘Russia experts’. In this way, Russophobia was institutionalised, as old-school WASP diplomats, editors and scholars who had nothing in particular against Russians made way to newcomers with old grudges.
  Among the old grudges, none were more vehement and persistent than that of the Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia, the far west of Ukraine, whose hostility to Russia had been promoted during the time that their territory was ruled by the Habsburg Empire. Fanatically devoted to denying their divided country’s deep historic connection to Russia, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists were nurtured for decades by the C.I.A. in Ukraine itself and in the large North American diaspora.5
  We saw the culmination of this process when the talented comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, in his greatest role as tragedian, claimed to be ‘the heir to the Normandy’ invasion and described Russian President Putin as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, out to conquer the world — already an exaggeration for Hitler, who mainly wanted to conquer Russia. Which is what the US and Germany apparently want to do today.

Alliance Reversal No. 3:
Germany

While the Russians and Anglo-Americans joined in condemning the very top Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trials, denazification proceeded very differently in the respective zones occupied by the victorious powers.
  In the Federal Republic established in the Western zones, very few officials, officers or judges were actually purged for their Nazi past.  Their official repentance cantered on persecution of the Jews, expressed in monetary compensation to individual victims and especially to Israel.
  While immediately after the war, the war itself was considered the major Nazi crime, over the years the impression spread through the West that the worst crime and even the primary purpose of Nazi rule had been the persecution of the Jews.
  The Holocaust, the Shoah were names with religious connotations that set it apart from the rest of history.  The Holocaust was the unpardonable crime, acknowledged by the Federal Republic so emphatically that it tended to erase all others. As for the war itself, Germans could easily consider it their own misfortune, since they lost, and limit their most heartfelt regret to that loss.
  It was not Germans but the American occupiers who determined to create a new German army, the Bundeswehr, safely ensconced in an alliance under US control.  Germans themselves had had enough. But the Americans were intent on solidifying their control of Western Europe through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
  NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay – who had been Churchill’s chief military assistant during World War II – succinctly defined its mission: “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
  The United States government wasted no time in selecting qualified Germans for their own alliance reversal. German experts who had gathered intelligence or planned military operations against the Soviet Union on behalf of the Third Reich were welcome to continue their professional activities, henceforth on behalf of Western liberal democracy.
  This transformation is personified by Wehrmacht Major General Reinhard Gehlen, who had been head of military intelligence on the Eastern Front. In June 1946, US occupation authorities established a new intelligence agency in Pullach, near Munich, employing former members of the German Army General Staff and headed by Gehlen, to spy on the Soviet bloc.
  The Gehlen Organization recruited agents among anti-communist East European émigré organisations, in close collaboration with the CIA. It employed hundreds of former Nazis. It contributed to the domestic West German political scene by hunting down communists (the German Communist Party was banned).
  The Gehlen Organisation’s activities were put under the authority of the Federal Republic government in 1956 and absorbed into the Bundesnachrichtendienst(BND or Federal Intelligence Service), which Gehlen led until 1968.6
  In short, for decades, under US occupation, the Federal Republic of Germany has fostered the structures of the Alliance Reversal, directed against Russia. The old pretext was the threat of communism.  But Russia is no longer communist. The Soviet Union surprisingly dissolved itself and turned to the West in search of lasting peace.
  In retrospect, it becomes crashingly clear that the “communist threat” was indeed only a pretext for great powers seeking more power. More land, more resources.
  The Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, like the Anglo-American liberals, looked at Russia in the way mountain-climbers proverbially look at mountains. Why must you climb that mountain? Because it’s there. Because it’s too big, it has all that space and all those resources. And oh yes, we must defend ‘our values’.
  It’s nothing new. The dynamic is deeply institutionalised. It’s just the same old war, based on illusions, lies and manufactured hatred, leading us to greater disaster.
  Is it too late to stop?  •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2024/nr-13-25-juni-2024/d-day-2024

 

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171