By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
Sometimes, upon reading what the US Secretary of State, Mr. Antony Blinken, is saying or writing, one wonders what the talks between Americans and Russians and the phone calls between Presidents Biden and Putin are all about. One hopes, of course, that what Mr. Blinken says are not the final positions of President Biden himself, to whom his Secretary of State sometimes seems to be in opposition. (The same, by the way, seems to happen in Germany with the theoretically green, in practice quite “black” Foreign Minister of this country. She seems to believe she can save humanity’s natural environment in the midst of escalating Cold Wars that threaten to go hot and nuclear, which is a rather strange kind of “green pacifism”.)
The US Secretary of State, like the vast majority of the western state, media and political personnel, belongs to the category of “neo-Bourbons”, having “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. With their arrogant policies, they literally forced Putin’s Russia, which was not at all willing to do so, to turn against them and reach out to China. Mr. Blinken, it should be noted, has Ukrainian Jewish roots but, surprisingly, he does not seem to be bothered unduly by Kiev’s dealings with the neo-Nazis – Empire über alles! In the past, Blinken has actively supported the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the sending of weapons to the Syrian rebels and the Saudi war that ended in the genocide of the Yemeni people, i.e. all western interventions, decided by US Neocons under Netanyahu’s guidance and planning in the Middle East that were justified with the use of blatant lies and led to untold disasters in an entire region of the world, finally becoming also a disaster for the US Foreign Policy itself and for the global prestige of Washington.
Blinken went even further when he tried – without success – to implement the ideas of the Israeli extremist strategist Odet Yinon, by cutting Iraq into three pieces. One wonders why he does not apply those ideas to the Donbass and Crimea where, if they were to be applied, they would also go a long way to solving the problem in the Ukraine. Why must the Russians who inhabit these regions be ruled by the Ukrainian government? Why not apply to them the principle of self-determination? And if those Russians must be under Kiev’s rule, then why Albanian Kosovars do not have also the obligation to return to Belgrade’s rule?
And why, anyway, more than two hundred years after the great French Revolution and thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington must have a say on the frontiers and the national composition of the European states? Why governments in Europe, including the governments in Berlin and in Paris, are permitting such a situation?
Unfortunately, the generation of western politicians to which Biden belongs is facing a unique problem. They have grown up in the very special environment created by triumphs which they did not win themselves nor deserve, but were served up to them on a plate by the Soviet and then the Russian leaders. As a result they think that every day is New Year’s Eve and some Santa Claus must come and give them presents. They are also the children of a post-1991 Capitalism more deprived than ever of any social and historical philosophy and reference.
Moreover, they have themselves been trapped in their own rather ridiculous views and propaganda about Russia, propagated by a quite totalitarian politics and communication system. For instance they say there is a supposed danger of a Russian invasion of the Ukraine or of the rest of Europe. Why would Russia, which, on its own initiative, without anybody pressing it to do it, or even imagining it would do it, withdrew from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, do such a thing? It would risk a global nuclear confrontation to gain what exactly? Fortunately there are serious people in Washington, like the CIA chief William Burns, who was quick to clarify that his agency, contrary to what the Washington Post writes, has not determined that President Putin has decided to invade the Ukraine (http://www.defenddemocracy.press/cia-director-says-us-intelligence-hasnt-concluded-russia-will-invade-ukraine/). Except that the readers of the American newspaper cannot know this. On the Washington Post’s site you can read the allegations about Putin being ready to invade the Ukraine, but not Burns’s dismissals.
The “Hungary 1956” scenario
It is encouraging, however, that Biden did not do with the Ukrainians what some probably did with the Hungarians in 1956, namely to assure them of the US support in case they cross Moscow’s red lines. Based on such “signals”, the leadership of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 did announce the withdrawal of the country from the Warsaw Pact. Nikita Khrushchev had no any other option left than to order the bloody soviet military intervention in Hungary. This intervention has dealt a huge blow to the democratization – destalinization experiment which was beginning in Moscow and, also, to the still very high prestige of the Soviet Union in Western Europe, as a result of its determining and enormous contribution to the victory over Hitler.
Now Biden, speaking of the terrible economic sanctions he would impose in the event of a Russian “invasion” of the Ukraine and omitting to let open any window for a US military intervention to support Kiev, has explained in fact, implicitly but clearly, to Mr Zelensky that he will let him fight alone, if the Ukrainian President decides to provoke Russia and send his army and his Far Right militias of “volunteers” to Donbass and Lugansk, threatening the security of the Russian population living there and provoking then a Russian intervention. A serious problem, of course, is that Mr Zelensky does not make his own decisions and God knows who makes him do what he does and what he says every time.
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