Observing the news - Apr. 6
Some of it is fake; some of it is real; none of it will be remembered.
BUCHA. WHAT TO BELIEVE?
The photos and videos coming out of Bucha are about as horrifying as anything seen in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. The reports in the Western media almost read like they were written before the event. Contrarian reports in Russian media could not penetrate the Cancel Curtain that walls off Russian viewpoints in the information war. Who were the dead? Collaborators with Russia or Ukraine? Where did each of the bodies in the mass grave originate? Why were they so carefully wrapped before burial? Who buried them? When did they die? These are the types of questions that forensic investigators would ask. Such an objective inquiry is unlikely to occur. So each side will remain comfortable in the truth of its own narrative. Once all the emotional juice has been squeezed out of the event, it will have served its purpose and be forgotten.
POLAND CAN NO LONGER CLAIM THE COVER OF “STUPIDITY.”
One of the staples of humor in the US disappeared with political correctness: The Polish jokes which depicted the immigrant Poles as not very intelligent or worse. Today Polish officials always lead the chorus for harsher sanctions against Russia. Their instinct for self-annihilation reached a new level last week when in addition to calling for more armaments to Ukraine, they offered up their territory to the US for positioning nuclear missiles. Whoops, they just invited Russia to place them on the automated response list. Overwhelmed in the rush of stupidity, they demanded that all Russian culture be banned in the west -no ballet, no Tchaikovsky, no Rachmaninoff, no ice queens, no Dostoyevsky, no Tolstoy, nyet to everything. Thus they blew their cover as the leading racists in the Russophobia gripping Europe since the end of the Cold War.
THE KOREAN WAR WAS A “POLICE ACTION” - REMEMBER?
Troops cross a border. Triggers are pulled. It’s KABOOM all over the place. It ain’t a war until it’s called one, and that the job of historians. Yes there is a war in Ukraine , and it’s been going on for eight years between the Ukrainians and the Donbass rebels. Evidence exists, unreported in the West, that a huge offensive was being planned against the rebels. American arms were being transported internally to the region, and irregular neo-Nazi battalions were massing there with fresh Ukrainian troops. After Zelensky rejected one last settlement offer, Russia only had two choices : permit the Donbass offensive to begin and take up defensive positions to protect Russian residents there OR intervene in another area to draw Ukrainian forces away from the Donbass region. Both options are ugly, and the pity is that the final settlement will be the one that was available before the start of the conflict. But many cynical people believe that Ukraine was never the issue, only the means of weakening Russia and as Biden let slip “regime change.”
REMEMBER WHEN NATO WAS A CUTE LITTLE DEFENSIVE ALLIANCE?
When there was a Soviet Union, the idea of NATO made sense as an alliance drawing the United States into a defensive partnership with the WW2-weakened European states. When the need for NATO ceased to exist, it was already too big a cash cow for Western money-grabbers to let go. Not even Donald Trump’s indifference could kill the beast. It is now proving Russia’s fear as well grounded with ever more aggressive moves that will force a name change to NAPTO in order to include its clearly aggressive expansion into the Pacific. NATO has no sovereign status and can be openly opposed and punished when it exceeds the term of its charter and moves beyond Europe. This latest tid bit from RT should be an early warning sign:
Using the Ukraine conflict opportunistically, NATO has invited the ministers of Asian nations to discuss…
… for the first time the issue of China’s “growing influence and coercive policies on the global stage which pose a systemic challenge to our security and to our democracies.”
“We see that China has been unwilling to condemn Russia’s aggression and has joined Moscow in questioning the right of nations to choose their own path,” said Stoltenberg, urging that democracies must stand up for their values against “authoritarian powers.”
According to the US government-funded Freedom House, five of NATO's thirty members are not considered to be full democracies – Turkey, Hungary, Albania, North Macedonia & Montenegro.
Hope is on the horizon as a pushback against NATO’s mono-polar World concept. It is developing in the emerging BRICS alliance — Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa. They have a different idea about a New World Order.