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The Secret Back Story to Russia and Ukraine that Americans Never Learned In School
Preface: We believe that Soviet communism was an abomination. Stalin was certainly a tyrant: he killed countless political enemies or threw them into insane asylums. We also have littler tolerance for useful idiots who defend communism as a force for good. In short, we hate Soviet era communism.
And Putin also runs Russia like it’s his plaything, with little regard for the desires of his people.
But U.S. warmongers have also been hyping the Russian threat with self-serving lies – and committing atrocities and telling lies – for some 70 years. As an American, my concern is keeping America from destroying itself. And – unless we learn our history – we could get in a lot of trouble.
America Launched the Cold War Even Before World War II Had Ended
Joseph Stalin and the Soviets were key in helping the U.S. to defeat the Nazis. 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis in World War II.
And yet the U.S. started competing against Stalin – and treating him like an enemy – before WWII had even ended.
Specifically, dropping atomic bombs on Japan had a duel purpose: defeating the Japanese, and sending a message to Stalin that the U.S. was in charge.
History.com notes:
In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.
New Scientist reports:
The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
***
[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
***
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.
“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.
John Pilger points out:
The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”
University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz says:
Increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.
***
Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.
***
The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
***
Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.
General Dwight Eisenhower said, “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary” and “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
And Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, who chaired the meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claims:
The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
America Has Waged a Brutal Dirty Tricks Campaign for 70 Years
Right after the end of WWII, the U.S. backed Nazi fighters in Ukraine in an attempt to dislodge Soviet control of that country.
In late September 1947, [George] Kennan urged Forrestal to establish a “guerrilla warfare corps”—a suggestion Forrestal heartily endorsed—although the [Joing Chiefs of Staff] recommended against establishing a “separate guerrilla warfare and corps.” In December, Truman approved secret annex NSC 4-A, authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations. He had dismantled the OSS’s covert parmilitary operations capabilities in September 1945, but now he brought them back in force. In the summer of 1948, he approved NSC 10/2, which called for “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” These activities were to be done in a way that would always afford the US government plausible deniability. In August 1948, Truman approved NSC 20, which authorized guerrilla operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe ….
***
Beginning with Truman’s first day in office, his receptiveness to the views of hard-line anti-Communists, his denial of Roosevelt’s understanding with Staling, the provocative and unnecessary dropping of the atomic bombs, his spreading a network of military bases around the world, Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Truman’s call for fighting Communism in greece, the division and remilitarization of Germany, the continued testing of bigger and bigger atomic and hydrogen bombs which he used to threaten the Soviet Union, Truman’s deliberate exaggerations of the Communist threat both overseas and at home and his persecution and silencing of those who challenged these distortions. In all these matters, with few exceptions, the United states, after successfully liberating Western Europe, was now signaling fear and aggression ….
The U.S. also admits that the U.S. and NATO also used false flag terror attacks to discredit the Soviets. For example:
- The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister
- The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special
- As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960′s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
The U.S. and NATO Have Been Trying to Encircle Russia Militarily Since 1991
President George H. W. Bush promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that – if the Soviets broke up the Soviet Union and dissolved the Warsaw Pact – then NATO would not move into those former Soviet countries. This assured the Soviets that NATO would not encircle Russia.
Similarly, Germany promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east.” As Andrew Gavin Marshall explains:
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 prompted the negotiated withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe. The ‘old order’ of Europe was at an end, and a new one “needed to be established quickly,” noted Mary Elise Sarotte in the New York Times. This ‘new order’ was to begin with “the rapid reunification of Germany.” Negotiations took place in 1990 between Soviet president Gorbachev, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and President Bush’s Secretary of State, James A. Baker 3rd. The negotiations sought to have the Soviets remove their 380,000 troops from East Germany. In return, both James Baker and Helmut Kohl promised Gorbachev that the Western military alliance of NATO would not expand eastwards. West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, promised Gorbachev that, ” NATO will not expand itself to the East.” Gorbachev agreed, though asked – and did not receive – the promise in writing, remaining a “gentlemen’s agreement.”
But Bill Clinton broke America’s promise, and the U.S. has pursued a campaign of encircling Russia ever since:


And NATO has also broken its promise, and now largely encircles Russia:

In 1997 – as part of the strategy of encirclement – former U.S. national security advisor and high-level Obama policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called for the U.S. to take Ukraine away from Russia.
Cheney Has Controlled U.S. Policy Towards Russia with a Strategy of Global Domination For Decades … And Continues to Do So Today
The U.S. has also long exaggerated the “Russian menace” in order to justify its military spending and expansion.
For example, Dick Cheney made false claims exaggerating the threat posed by Russia’s weapons in the 1970s to ramp up cold war fears and justify huge increases in military spending.
Subsequent instances of fear-mongering by Cheney and his subordinates include:
- New York Times and Wikipedia, 1992: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere .… We do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others.”
- Toledo Blade, 2006: “Vice President Dick Cheney accused Russia of pursuing antidemocratic policies and using its vast energy supplies to blackmail neighboring countries”
- Wall Street Journal, 2008: “The vice president … accused Russia of seeking to reinvent the old Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, and beat back the advance of democracy in Eastern Europe …. ‘Let us make clear that the enlargement of NATO will continue as and where the allies decide,” Mr. Cheney said. ‘Allies agreed that those nations will be NATO members, and the time to begin their membership action plans has come.’ “
- Telegraph, 2008: “We believe in the right of men and women to live without the threat of tyranny, economic blackmail or military invasion or intimidation …. Ukrainians have a right to choose whether they wish to join NATO, and NATO has a right to invite Ukraine to join the alliance when we believe they are ready and that the time is right”
Todd E. Pierce – Major (ret.) U.S. Army Judge Advocate General – notes in a must-read article that “Cheneyism” has driven U.S. policy towards Russia for decades:
Dick Cheney’s ideology of U.S. global domination has become an enduring American governing principle regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, a reality reflected in the recent Ukrainian coup ….
The final form of this ideology took shape in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union when the world was then to be subjected to eternal U.S. military dominance, as revealed in the leaked “Draft Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG) devised by Cheney’s subordinates when he was Defense Secretary under President George H.W. Bush.
Since then, Cheney has been so successful in propagating this ideology of permanent U.S. domination abroad and rule by a “unitary executive” at home that it has now survived multiple changes of U.S. presidents largely intact. It is so much attributable to Dick Cheney that it merits his name: Cheneyism.
As unprecedented as Cheneyism may be – not even history’s most power-mad conquerors ever envisioned anything like “full-spectrum dominance” – President Obama has cemented Cheney’s ideological legacy by continuing his unilateralism and even expanding it ….
Cheney’s ideology combines militarism under a state of permanent war with an un-American, anti-constitutional authoritarianism. It also embraces an aggressiveness toward past, present and possibly future adversaries, especially Russia.
Robert Gates, who was CIA director in 1991, has written in his memoir Duty that with the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Cheney “wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire but of Russia itself,” so “it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”
Little wonder that Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded that denying Russian access to Crimean ports via the coup in Ukraine was just one step in a larger U.S. plan to deny Russia a means of naval defense, just as he might have seen the Kosovo War in the late 1990s as a move against a Russian ally.
***
There is virtually no deviation in the United States from the core of Cheney’s ideology. That is, the unrelenting pursuit of total U.S. global military domination as outlined in the Defense Planning Guidance.
This February’s successful subversion of Ukraine’s democratically elected government by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland is merely the latest example of U.S. policies first conceived and promoted by Cheney and like-minded ideologists, including Nuland’s husband, renowned neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century.
If there was any doubt about the continuation of Cheneyism under Obama, the activities of Nuland – a Bush-43 holdover who was promoted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then Secretary of State John Kerry – shows there was no real break in foreign policy with the change of administrations in 2009.
As revealed by Nuland, there has not been a Russian policy “reset” by the U.S.; it was a mere subterfuge. And as Putin is learning, any objection to U.S. strategic expansionism is treated as “terrorism” or “aggression” and becomes a pretext for U.S. diplomatic, economic and military suppression of the “threat.”
In 1991, as conceived by Cheney and other Pentagon ideologues, such as Paul Wolfowitz and David Addington, this strategy of constantly violating other nations’ sovereignty has been waged both by military and political means ….
***
For Cheney, it was as if he saw the Cold War as having been a winner-take-all contest for global domination. When the U.S. “won,” the countries of the world were to submit to global U.S. domination. As stated in Harper’s Magazine, the United States would move from “countering Soviet attempts at dominance to ensuring its own dominance.”
***
Clinton preserved the general outlines of the force structure and strategy that had been worked out under Cheney and Wolfowitz. Cheney’s ideology of permanent U.S. dominance achieved its purest form under President George W. Bush, with Cheney as his influential Vice President. But Cheneyism also has maintained a strong foothold in the five years of the Obama administration.
***
Cheney’s geopolitical ideas have become the consensus of both Republicans and Democrats and have assumed a permanent place in “mainstream” American political thought and governance under Obama.
***
For a foreign government to anticipate how the U.S. will act, their analysts need to understand Cheneyism as a controlling ideology in U.S. policy, just as American intelligence analysts were steeped in theories of Marxism and Stalinism during the Cold War. U.S. citizens should understand the tenets of Cheneyism, too, since this arrogant ideology has the potential
for disastrous consequences.
***
Indeed, there is a German precedent for Cheney’s ideology that is not Nazism. Following the failure of the Imperial German Army in World War I, philosophical militarists such as Ernst Junger and authoritarian legal philosophers like Carl Schmitt came together in the “Conservative Revolutionary Movement.”
Celebrating war and authoritarianism, they believed that Germany was the “exceptional” nation of Europe, deserving of military expansion in both eastern and western Europe. The German Conservative Revolutionaries didn’t all become Nazis, but they created a hospitable culture for them. With hindsight, they could have been called proto-Cheneyites.
Not only are Cheney and Neocons back … they never actually left.
The neoconservatives planned campaigns of destabilization all over the world 20 years ago, and Obama is implementing the same plans today.
The Bottom Line: Putin’s No Angel … But Americans Need to Gain a Little Perspective
Putin is no angel, and Stalin really was a murderous tyrant.
But Americans also need to understand that the U.S. and NATO have been seeking domination even before WWII ended.
Dick Cheney has dominated U.S. policy towards Russia for decades, and Obama is following Cheney’s playbook.
America needs to gain a little perspective.
See this for other interesting and little-known facts about Russia.
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As I sit here in the West, I must ask, if America is doing great things in the East, when are they going to fix New York City?
Need more thermite.
Dr. Sandi, what are you talking about? Have you been to Time Square lately? I liked it better when it wasn't a tourist trap. I do miss going to the peep shows.
/sarc off
You are right in theory.
Nam was a sovereign country like Cambodia in 1965-1975; look what happened to them n Uncle Sam.
Iran was a sovereign country in 1953.
Syria and Libya were sovereign countries in 2011, 2012.
But when the big boys wage PROXY, asymmetric wars, the sovereign small guys get sandwiched and sucked into other people's wars like Pak/Afghan.
Have I given you enuff other examples of what Ukraine is now suffering?
The same thing happened to Poland in 1939.
I agree 100%, although Ukraine is actually (sadly) a failed, bankrupt state in which a coup has led to a civil war.
The U.S. should STOP MEDDLING. So should Russia.
How to do that? Let Ukraine Vote! After all, the United Nations Charter gives people the right to self-determination.
"After all, the United Nations Charter gives people the right to self-determination." - fluff, for appearances
Let the Ukraine vote on what, exactly?
Each province gets to vote on the following choices:
(1) Stay with Kiev
(2) Stay with Russia
(3) Go totally independent
George, let's you and I grab one of those islands off the coast of Florida, you know, where the Russian oligarchs go during the summer...and declare our INDEPENDENCE! Timing will be important...let's try it just before the next Hurricane lands ground so we don't have pesky "No!" votes.
I'll bring both ballots and you bring the pen.
Better yet, lets allow a vote on whether Mexico can annex the SW.
Its "democracy" afterall, let the people decide, right? ;-)
I'm OK with that.
;-)
I'm just thinking of property values on the north side of the Red River...
lol...well, I don't think "New Spain" is in any legal (or military) position one way or the other to lay a claim.
Pretty much the same way as La Raza, unless they claim to be associated with empire builders (kings & whatnot) course I'd have to throw in with Texans and the Indian nations, just on general principle ;-)
I see, sorta like South Carolina back in the day and this will be monitored by whom?
///////
For your review:
“Under Ukrainian law, there must be a video camera at every polling place, but there was none,” said Valentina Potapova, a history professor at the Crimean University. It was 6:30 p.m, 90 minutes before voting closed, but there were few voters in sight. Of the three clear Plexiglas boxes for ballots, one was almost empty and the other two were only one-third full.
“This is one of the biggest voting stations in Yalta, where more than 2,000 people ordinarily vote,” she said. But there was a long list of people who’d signed the voting register. Also missing from the material that voting board usually collect was control tabs that are detached from each ballot before it is cast.
“I asked them where is the control tag,” Potapova told McClatchy. She said the workers responded that they were doing as instructed."
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/30/222894/reports-of-multiple-voting-falsified.html
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/30/222894/reports-of-multiple-voting-...So, the dead in that part of the world vote east, not west - meh. Voting is theater, period. And the snippet quoted an academic for fucks sake.
You are a rock star!
In 1860,Voters in South Carolina elected delegates to attend a convention, held in Charleston, for the purpose of discussing the issue of secession. On the 20th of December, 1860, the delegates voted to secede from the Union. Their next duty was to select a comission to travel to Washington to recieve the title to federal lands, forts and other property held in South Carolina.
It all seems legal and fair to me. But then, the law is of none effect without the backing of state force, so whoever has the most guns gets to make the laws.
>>>In 1860,Voters in South Carolina elected delegates to attend a convention, held in Charleston, for the purpose of discussing the issue of secession. On the 20th of December, 1860, the delegates voted to secede from the Union.
No doubt various meetings were held in Charleston, but the Ordinance of Secession was passed in Columbia, in the First Baptist Church building, which ironically is still standing to this day, one of the few structures to survive the unfortunate fires which accidentally broke out when Sherman's army was paying a call. Natives still point it out with pride (or at least they used to, back in the day).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Baptist_Church_%28Columbia,_South_Car...
Correct.
We do love to demonize monopolies don't we? But when government(s) hold the monopoly on force, we say meh, situation normal, its as it should be and we don't even give it another thought, surely they can be trusted with this monopoly.
Until of course, it drafts your ass...lol...and the local commisars come and stick a gun in your face, then all hell breaks loose. "I never voted for this! I'm a sovereign person!"
Well, no you're not, if you can't shoot them before they abduct you, that makes you a slave ;-)
i guess we will see how well that works, won't we?
in a real politick world the neocon scheme makes a lot of sense on paper. the world is a bad place. people like to kil each other over money and power. we haven't been able to stop ourselves minus one or two exceptions so the logical rational thought is to prepare for your possible annihilation by "defending" yourself. therein lies the rub, right? where is the line of defense, red lines? so, as stupid is as stupid does, you can't fix stupid and, my favorite, you dumb fuck tradition, we start shooting at each other. sometimes it gets pretty bad.
we would all like to think things will change. that is why everyone is upset about the way the usa is "defending" itself. no one likes the bully. the atom bomb analogy is perfect, but real politick nevertheless. insane, isn't it?
Good summary of the deep difficulties within militarism, besnook!
Considering the historical timeline of WW2, I thought it was the other way around, i. e. U.S. was helping Soviets to defeat Nazis.
If anyone liberated Europe it were the Russians, I agree.
But, the US was not helping the Russians, at least out of free will. The war was running out of hand and the goal was achieved, so the Allied Forces ultimately "liberated" Europe.
If the US wanted to help Europe then they could have stopped American companies from assisting Hitler coming to power and certainly stopping their support when the atrocities started.
IBM: streamlining the extermination process
Ford: donating all profits from its German car sales to Hitler
Bush and other bankers: laundering Nazi money
Even the word liberated is totally out of place: Europe wasn't "liberated" by the Allied Forces as you cannot liberate people whom you put in a war at first.
@ Jorgen
Yes Indeed!
If an American such as GW can be so far detached from the reality of that sentence there is NO other solution than to ' kill them ALL ' for the sake of WORLD PEACE of course!!!!
It's absolute truth and VP's 80+% approval rate among Russia's citizens proves the above golden thought without any doubts...
Here's why, in part, the Russian people gave Putin that 80+% aproval rate.
There can be no argument that Validmir Putin, who turned the tables on a handful of largely Jewish oligarchs in Russia and began assembling an engine of power in Russia to bring the oligarchs to heel, has challenged what is known as the New World Order and its war on Christianity, and that’s why he has to go.
At the same time, Putin has made in the past 14 years “astounding” progress since he “took over a country that was flat on its belly.”
Sharon Tennison, President and Founder ofthe Center for Citizen Initiatives and a program developer in the USSR and Russia for the past 30 years, explains just what Putin has been up against from the West’s leaders and media that demean and demonize him and Russia, and how he is “using sheer wits to try to do the best he can to deal with Washington under extremely difficult circumstances.”
She also is author of The Power of Impossible Ideas.
These excerpts from Tennison’s excellent article on Global Research, Who is Vladimir Putin? Why Does the US Government Hate Him?, document Putin’s dedication to both his country and his people. Writes Tennison:
I’ve stood by silently watching the demonization of Putin grow since it began in the early 2000s –– I pondered on computer my thoughts and concerns, hoping eventually to include them in a book (which was published in 2011). The book explains my observations more thoroughly than this article. Like others who have had direct experience with this little known man, I’ve tried to no avail to avoid being labeled a “Putin apologist”. If one is even neutral about him, they are considered “soft on Putin” by pundits, news hounds and average citizens who get their news from CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
I don’t pretend to be an expert, just a program developer in the USSR and Russia for the past 30 years. But during this time, I’ve have had far more direct, on-ground contact with Russians of all stripes across 11 time zones than any of the Western reporters or for that matter any of Washington’s officials….
From 2001 up to today, I’ve watched the negative U.S. media mounting against Putin …. even accusations of assassinations, poisonings, and comparing him to Hitler.
No one yet has come up with any concrete evidence for these allegations. During this time, I’ve traveled throughout Russia several times every year, and have watched the country slowly change under Putin’s watch. Taxes were lowered, inflation lessened, and laws slowly put in place. Schools and hospitals began improving. Small businesses were growing, agriculture was showing improvement, and stores were becoming stocked with food.
Alcohol challenges were less obvious, smoking was banned from buildings, and life expectancy began increasing. Highways were being laid across the country, new rails and modern trains appeared even in far out places, and the banking industry was becoming dependable. Russia was beginning to look like a decent country –– certainly not where Russians hoped it to be long term, but improving incrementally for the first time in their memories.
My 2013/14 Trips to Russia: In addition to St.Petersburg and Moscow, in September I traveled out to the Ural Mountains, spent time in Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Perm. We traveled between cities via autos and rail––the fields and forests look healthy, small towns sport new paint and construction. Today’s Russians look like Americans (we get the same clothing from China). Old concrete Khrushchev block houses are giving way to new multi-story private residential complexes which are lovely. High-rise business centers, fine hotels and great restaurants are now common place––and ordinary Russians frequent these places. Two and three story private homes rim these Russian cities far from Moscow.
We visited new museums, municipal buildings and huge super markets. Streets are in good repair, highways are new and well marked now, service stations looks like those dotting American highways. In January I went to Novosibirsk out in Siberia where similar new architecture was noted. Streets were kept navigable with constant snowplowing, modern lighting kept the city bright all night, lots of new traffic lights (with seconds counting down to light change) have appeared. It is astounding to me how much progress Russia has made in the past 14 years since an unknown man with no experience walked into Russia’s presidency and took over a country that was flat on its belly.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-vladimir-putin-why-does-the-us-government-hate-him/5381205
Hmmmm, I wonder who led the nuclear arms race:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/US_and_USSR_nuclear_s...
And although I don't agree with some of what this guy has said on various topics, he sure nailed this prediction:
NATO Expansion: Unnecessary and Provocative (Thursday - April 30, 1998)
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-nato-expansion-unnecessary-and-provocative-273
Excerpts:
"NATO expansionists argue that by bringing Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in, we consolidate the gains of our Cold War victory. Do they not realize that it was not NATO that drove the Red Army out of Europe? That army was ordered out by Moscow on an understanding, given by a U.S. secretary of state, that NATO would not be moved east to the border of Mother Russia.
Today, we are in violation of that understanding and dishonoring our word. If a second Cold War comes, and it appears on the way, the responsibility will rest as much with Washington as with Moscow.
Feeling deceived and humiliated, Moscow is now opposing U.S. policy almost everywhere — lining up with Serbia in Kosovo, taking Saddam’s side on sanctions, selling anti-aircraft missiles to Cyprus to deepen the Greek-Turkish rift, bullying Latvia, shipping nuclear technology and missile components to Iran, and forming a strategic partnership with China.
By extending war guarantees to Eastern Europe, America gains nothing in the way of security yet adds enormously to its risks and obligations.
With NATO expansion, we give up forever our freedom to decide when and whether to go to war. We give up forever the opportunity to bring the boys home, and we lock ourselves forever into virtually every future European war.
NATO expansion takes away from future generations the right to decide themselves when and where to go to war, and ensures the enmity of a revived and nationalistic Russia. And how does that make America more secure?"
How ironic!
Ukraine gave up all its Nukes in 1994 after Russia, USA, Britain, and France agreed to repect the autonomy and territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Winston, you are most certainly FSB. All the bullshit arguing about what Russia's rights are or are not, all the references to what the USA should or should not have done...? it all misses the point.
This is about Ukrainian people and their rights and Sovereignty!... and NOT about Russia or the USA.
.
Then why the fuck did the US pay to overthrow the elected government of the Ukraine?
This is the crux of the biscuit.
Apostryphal reference. Very good.
A lot of Zappa fans on ZH. Also increasing levels of Cosmic Debris from you know where. ;-0
This guy has lost the plot, cast some thoughts without bothering to know if they are cogent (he does not have to care, he will get paid) and taunts his opposition as a diversion.
Ukrainian Nazi Junta Citizenism trash talking. This guy is an intellectual failure whose all mode of thinking depends on actions like that.
I think, however one comes down on this, this part of the world puts Chicago politics to shame ;-)
...or reveals Chicago politics as it really is behind the veil of "law and order".
I think I'm about over this whole law & order thingy they've been pushing lately and I'm sorry I wasted so much time on it.
It is never applied evenly ;-)
.
'Tis passé, non?
Cliff Notes Version:
America has done bad things and so Ukraine should not have independence.
(*unstated...even though Russia, France, Britain, USA all signed an agreement to uphold Ukrainian Independence and Territorial Claims.)
If this flies for you as just and fair treatment of Ukrainian citizens seeking to maintain their homeland from the "Little Green Men" (Russian 5th Columnists) then you are lost.
The logic of linking American misdeeds as an argument against Ukrainian autonomy is essentially an argument that attempts to use Ukrainians as whipping boys for American actions from the past.
Yet even the reference attempting to slander the Independence of Ukraine as "NAZI" makes reference to a independence movement in Ukraine that fought against MANY occupiers.
Fascist is the biggest BOGEY MAN charge made here and that falls flat as no party in the Ukraine claims to be fascist. I recall that Mussolini and Hitler and Franco had no qualms about making the statement of their own fascism...so what shall we do with this charge, a charge that fails to even have credible evidence of significance? This is just another pile of steaming shit produced from the Princess Putin butt-hole in the Kremlin.
Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine?
The Vicious Wolves that control the government of the USA appear willing and able to employ any pack of Wild Dogs that could advance their overall agenda, despite that often, afterwards, the more Vicious Wolf pack then has to wipe out that Wild Dog pack too.
One of the hardest things to understand is the degree to which those at the highest levels of the social pyramid systems may be able to control their opposition. In the case of the Ukraine, it appears quite desperate to resort to backing "Neo-Nazis," (whatever the hell that might mean, which I am not sure about.)
But nevertheless, in general, these things appear to be done by people who believe that any means whatsoever are justified by their longer range goals of total consolidation of a globalized social pyramid system. To me, it looks like they have already about 80% succeeded? (Although, the deeper problem is that the "success" of systems of enforced frauds has built right into it the seeds of its own mad self-destruction.)
It is hard to comprehend the minds of people who are the product of a long historical process to select for them to become dominate because their ancestors, and/or cultural predecessors, were the best at being dishonest, and resorting to violence. Metaphorically speaking, they may as well be aliens or demons, compared to the vast majority of other people whose lives are not based on thinking and behaving like that.
The two BIG PROBLEMS that I see are that the best organized gangs of criminals control the government, and often do that by controlling lower levels of criminals in paradoxical ways, AND, the longer range results of controlling civilization through the methods of organized crime drive civilization as a whole to become madly self-destructive. Those BIG PROBLEMS appear to be runaways now, because the vast majority of people are being controlled by governments which are dominated by the best organized gangs of criminals, advancing their criminally insane agenda through all possible means, while the vast majority of people do not understand that, and do not want to understand that, because IF they did, then they would not like the way that they then felt, and would even like less the logical conclusions regarding how they should respond to that situation.
In my opinion, almost everything that any different gang of criminals believes CAN be traced back to the chronic political problems which are inherent in the nature of life, and which therefore, sprouted and cultivated that particular set of "solutions" to those problems, in the form of some particular gang of organized criminals. In that context, the "solutions" to the chronic political problems have become thoroughly paradoxical, in that by far the worst gangs of organized criminals are those who control governments, with the biggest gangsters now being the banksters. They deliberately drive more lower levels of organized crime to flourish, so that those can be used by the banksters to advance their overall agenda in various ways.
In that context, it should not be too surprising to discover that the people who control NATO are employing dangerous and demented lower levels of organized criminals to do their dirty work. As my previous post pointed out, the chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life have resulted in civilizations which became based on the development of the maximum possible deceits and frauds, because those civilizations were always built on the basis of the principles and methods of organized crime, with the governments of countries like the USA, and those in NATO, becoming the biggest forms of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals, who are in conflict with other big forms of organized crime, controlled by other well-organized gangs of criminals, both of which are entangled in hyper-complicated relationships with other lower levels of organized crime gangs, which are their proxies, to one degree or another.
Meanwhile, one of the most basic aspects of the BIGGEST POLITICAL PROBLEM is that the vast majority of people have been taught to not understand real politics, and to not want to understand, but rather to believe in some sort of the various biggest bullies' bullshit social stories. Generally speaking, our sort of society is able to maintain attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance towards the EXISTENCE OF CHRONIC POLITICAL PROBLEMS, and that then enables all of the crazy "solutions" to those CHRONIC PROBLEMS to be developed in ever more hyper-complicated ways, since the basic real solutions MUST BE some death controlling murder systems, but those ARE DONE through the methods of organized crime maintaining the maximum possible deceits about themselves, which also appears to include corresponding degrees to which they have also deceived themselves too!
Some of the greatest ironies are the ways that the various controlled opposition groups may believe that they are advancing their own agenda, while they are actually advancing another agenda. Of course, it is easy to get lost in that maze, and therefore, perhaps I have too? But nevertheless, it is my current opinion that the things that Putin says make more sense than the things that the various "leaders" in NATO are saying. Relatively speaking, I regard the NATO group, and their controllers, as bigger, and more criminally insane, than the Russian group, but still, they are all entangled together, in the same runaway social insanities of operating social systems based on their own historical kinds of developing frauds and deceits.
"...the vast majority of people do not understand that, and do not want to understand that, because IF they did, then they would not like the way that they then felt, and would even like less the logical conclusions regarding how they should respond to that situation."
Beautifully clear.
Thanks, Optimusprime!
I have read and watched a lot of stories about people who belatedly "woke up" to the degree that the government was really being controlled by criminals. What I wrote above was simply a summary of what they said.
SO? David Duke was a Klan member...and what does that say about the USA? NOTHING.
Referenced in this heaping, giant pile of bullshit is the struggle by the Ukrainian people for autonomy from Poland and Moscow going back centuries.
That is the big picture. And you are no George Washington!
Please read a little more carefully: The LEADER of the “protests” in February 2014 which ousted the president of Ukraine is a neo Nazi and follower of Stepan Bandera
ThePEOPLE of the Maidan OUSTED the KLEPTOKRAT, not one man!
The lie you are trying to perpetrate is to reduce the popular uprising (Orange Revolution 2.0) to one evil man.
IT IS BULLSHIT STRAIGHT FROM THE KREMLIN
People in the know say that Yan was - indeed a Kleptocrat and stooge - but SO IS YAT.
My bias as an American (born and raised and lived my whole life in the US) is simple: It's NOT OUR FIGHT, especially since
War Makes Us Poor.
This statement confirms for me you are George Washington.
This is not your country's or my country's quarrel. We need to learn to be more like Switzerland and less like Rome.
Peace through armed neutrality.
But mostly Peace.
Carry on George.
it not about nations - its never about nations; its the perceptions of beliefs and arbitary geography drawn to suit those pulling the strings.
we need to learn to cut the head off the snake that is running your country and my country into a planned war
we need to stop thinking of history as nations; most borders were drawn by victors and power brokers; we need to see that we are not being primed for a fight against another nation (eg Russia) we are being primed for a fight to serve an agenda that has no nationality, no loyalty, no borders and zero interest in common humanity living well.
we need to recongise this is a quarrel every nation on earth is being drawn into, its a global split. If you have not read the financial aspects you miss the picture, if you look at history you may get the wrong picture - they are moving forward using history for and against us as suits.
The Anglo-American alliance was never for the American or western people, its was for an extension of power and control; now that they have (created) a "justifiably moral" standing over Americans they are set to bring about the end of the USD. Its not karma for you and I - we never sanctioned this bullshit. Its certainly not about nations at war, its purely about the destruction of wealthier nations as defind by their middle class i.e. the West.
upvote for re-cognising,
oh, and
I'd go further, and say that nationstates are imaginary notions embedded in the minds of the penned-in puppets, so as to give 'em a back-story to act on when certain strings are tugged.
but that's just me. I tend to pick up thermals, not so bound to land-Mass worship-ings.