Eric Zuesse

The world is more nervous about the drift toward nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia than at any time since 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. When French President Francois Hollande urgently side-tracked his return-flight from a diplomatic mission recently, in order to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, at a private room that had been scoured ahead of time to eliminate any possible bugging devices, there was speculation as to what had caused Hollande’s sudden detour, and there were even rumors of a possible cause being an American “false-flag” event in the works to be blamed on Russia as a pretext for going to war against Russia, just as Russia had been falsely blamed for the Ukrainian military’s downing of Malaysia’s airliner MH17 on July 17th. All that was publicly released about the two-hour meeting were platitudes, hardly anything that would have justified side-tracking Hollande’s flight so as to surprise intelligence agencies and be able to meet the Russian leader in an untapped room.

The level of fear is certainly rising on both sides. On the U.S. side, the CBS News Poll in summer 2007 found 6% of Americans calling Russia an “enemy”; seven years later, that same figure was 22%. However, what is not rumor nor fear, but proven fact, by Obama’s own actions as will be documented here, is that he wants a war against Russia and is trying hard to get Europe (including Hollande) onboard with this goal in order to win it; and that America’s Republican Party want this at least as much as he does, though the American public do not.

The Democratic Party (in the House and Senate) are staying as quiet as possible about a ‘Democratic’ President pushing them toward World War III, which is a goal that Republicans have always been far more eager for than Democrats. (Republicans are famous for “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” and for swinging it as hard as they can, especially against Russians.) In fact, one of the reasons why Obama won the Presidency is that he criticized his 2012 Republican opponent Mitt Romney for saying of Russia, “This is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

That dissent by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Obama appealed to the U.S. public at the time, but not to America’s aristocracy, who are a mix of people some of whom hate Russians and others of whom don’t care about Russians, but none of whom are passionate opponents of nuclear war (a diverse group that they lump contemptuously with “peaceniks”).

For example, one major mouthpiece of Democratic Party aristocrats has always been The New Republic, and on 17 September 2014 they headlined “Obama Can't Admit That Romney Was Right: Russia Is Our 'Top Geopolitical Threat’.” Another one is the National Journal, the aristocracy’s version of its companion propaganda-operation (owned by the same aristocrat as) The Atlantic. On 7 May 2014 (just five days after Obama’s people had massacred pro-Russians in the House of Trade Unions in Odessastarted the extermination-campaign against them, or “civil war” that’s still raging), the National Journal headlined “Mitt Romney Was Right: Russia Is Our Biggest Geopolitical Foe.” Conservative ‘Democrats’ are just Republicans spelled with a “D”; but, when it’s an aristocrat, they know how to spell, and are just trying to deceive the ones who don’t. This is why ‘liberal’ magazines are prized possessions of the aristocracy — to deceive the ones who don’t know the difference and who think that it’s fine in a democracy for politics to be merely a choice between two conservative parties, one of which is called by a meaningless adjective ‘liberal.’

The people who fund both political Parties are virtually united in that fascist belief: they don’t even mind backing racist facists or “nazis”; many of them are precisely that themselves.

Obama is with them (and with Wall Street, and with Big Ag, and Big Oil, and Big Military), against the public. But he’s smart enough a politician to pretend otherwise, and his aristocratic funders respect this. (There were no hard feelings for his exploiting Romney’s politically stupid public assertion; they knew that it was an Obama pose: he’s a ‘Democrat,’ after all.)

For America’s elite, the Cold War never ended, because it was never really about communism versus capitalism — not for them. They are fascists, and they want global dominance. Capitalism, shmapitalism; all they really care about is dominating the world, destroying enemies, which means anyone who refuses to be controlled by them.

Aristocracy hasn’t changed since, well, long before the Bible began. Domination is the big thing, for the aristocracy. Russia threatens the vaunted global control by America’s aristocracy, their dominance over all other aristocracies, because Russia is the second-most-powerful military nation. Russia is the only nation that can say no to U.S. aristocrats and (maybe) get away with it. That’s what this conflict is all about. It’s why they ratcheted up the “enemy” figure for Russia from 6% to 22% in just the past seven years.

As President Obama's speech at West Point, on 28 May 2014, propagandized for (i.e., rationalized) this conquer-Russia view on the part of America’s aristocracy: "Russia's aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China's economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us.” So, Obama made clear to the graduating West Point cadets that the BRIC countries are the enemy (Russia and its leading supporters of international independence, the enemies against a mono-polar or “hegemonic” world), from the standpoint of America’s aristocracy, whom the U.S. military now serves to the exclusion of any public interest. Ours want to crush the aristocrats in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Though it’s alright for those other countries to produce more, that’s true only if American aristocrats control the local ones there, like in any other international empire — not if the local nation’s aristocrats control the country. That’s not the way aristocrats in banana republics are supposed to behave. They’re not supposed to be independent countries. Not really.

The President who had invaded Libya and Syria, and re-invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and who perpetrated a violent overthrow and installed racist fascists (nazis) in control of Ukraine, is lecturing the world against "Russia's aggression,” for its having accepted back into Russia's traditional fold little Crimea, which craved to return to Russia.

He’s got some gall to do that, but in order to be a cadet at West Point (and thus be there hearing his speech) one needed to be either a sucker or else a cravenous tool of the aristocracy, as the military has traditionally served; so, Obama played them for being both, and they evidently liked it.

Obama knows how to speak down to an audience and fool them into thinking he respects them. But, to aristocrats, his respect is no mere act at all; he not only respects them, he lies for them, and he protects them, because he self-identifies with them, and not with the public (who just provide his voters, the people that are forced to choose between him versus Romney, or else to go for a mere token protest-vote or non-vote, such as American ‘democracy’ has degenerated into being).

Obama was enemy-izing (turning into enemies) nations that don’t want to serve as America’s banana republics. Similarly, for example, the British Empire didn’t wish for local aristocrats in India to be in control, but only for those client aristocrats to be of use. That’s what it means to be a client nation (or, in the American case, a banana republic).

Obama, in his speech, added, placing a clear hyper-nationalistic coloration on his promotion of America’s empire: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” (Hitler thought the same thing of Germany.) He promised to keep it that way: “That has been true for the century passed [sp.: past [[somebody at the White House didn’t know the difference between ‘past’ and ‘passed’]] and it will be true for the century to come.” (At least he wasn’t predicting there a Thousand-Year Reich.)

So: that’s historical background to Obama's plan for using Ukraine as a stepping-stone toward conquering Russia — one of the few favors he hasn't yet achieved for his sponsors, after having protected them from what he contemptuously calls (in private) the “pitchforks”; a.k.a., the public. (And he really did call us “pitchforks” there, in private. To him, the public were like the KKK; and the mega-bank CEOs whom he was confiding to were like the people KKKers lynched. That’s the type of ‘Black’ he actually is. Blacks should loathe him, but most people, black and white, can’t see beyond his skin-color and liberal platitudes. They’ve got their categories wrong, and the aristocracy-controlled media like that just fine. Stereotypes help aristocrats control political outcomes. It’s button-pushing for them.)

On December 11th, the U.S. Senate voted 100% (unanimously) to donate U.S. weapons to the Ukrainian Government in its war against Russia. On December 4th, 98% of the U.S. House had done likewise. Both bills also accuse Russia of having invaded Ukraine, and this accusation of an aggressive Russia provides a pretext for the U.S. to attack Russia, now that the Ukrainian Government has flipped from neutral (according to some estimations) or pro-Russian (according to others) to being clearly and publicly anti-Russian, by means of their U.S.-engineered coup that occurred in February of this year, when masked gunmen, who were actually hired mercenaries, dressed themselves as if they were instead Ukrainian security forces, and fired into a crowd of “Maidan” anti-corruption protesters and police, and the U.S. Government immediately blamed Ukraine’s then-President for doing that, and Ukraine’s parliament or “Rada,” who weren’t in on the scheme and didn’t know about it, promptly elected “Yats” Yatsenyuk, who had secretly been appointed 18 days prior to lead the country, by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department. “Yats" immediately installed a far-right Government, filled with people who had already committed themselves to a Ukrainian war against Russia. They then promptly set about terminating Russia’s 42-year Crimean lease for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which is key to Russia’s security. Crimeans, who had always overwhelmingly considered themselves to be Russians and not Ukrainians, demonstrated against that Ukrainian move against them and against Russia, and Russian troops came into Crimea, to local applause, but to the condemnation from Washington and its allies.

Russia’s taking back Crimea was not aggression at all, though America’s noise-media say it was; it was instead protection of Crimeans against the CIA’s American invasion of Ukraine. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev donated Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, it was much to the consternation of Crimeans at the time, and ever since. Yet, one of the explicit alleged ‘justifications’ for war against Russia, that are listed in the Republican House’s bill (“Whereas the Russian Federation’s forcible occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea. …”) is a blatant lie, because Crimeans overwhelmingly wanted Russia’s protection against the new, Obama-imposed, Ukrainian regime, which Obama’s State Department and CIA had just installed when overthrowing the President for whom nearly 80% of Crimeans had voted. In fact, a poll that was issued by Gallup in June 2014 showed then that 71.3% of Crimeans viewed as “Mostly positive” the role of Russia there, and 4.0% viewed it as “Mostly negative”; by contrast, only 2.8% viewed the role of the United States there as “Mostly positive,” and a whopping 76.2% viewed it as “Mostly negative.” This wasn’t much changed from a year-earlier Gallup poll. The Republican Party (and thus the Republican-controlled House) is willing to lie blatantly (about this and other crucial matters) in order to justify invading Russia, as it did in invading Iraq in 2003 (and even in 1991); and Barack Obama is willing to lie blatantly too for the same reasons — such as about the source of the sarin gas attack in Libya, etc. — but there were enough Democrats in the U.S. Senate to block Obama’s getting such blatant lies into the Senate’s bill on Ukraine, so it’s much milder, even though it does give the Ukrainian Government $450 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money. However, when Republicans take over the Senate in January, their bill will match the House’s in its warmongering lies, and Obama will get all he wants for his planned war against Russia (not just the $450 million that the Democratic-controlled Senate bill has provided).

So, now, both the Senate and the House, plus the U.S. President (via his State Department, CIA, FBI, and entire Administration), are actually at war, a hot war not a cold war, against Russia, through their proxy, their made-in-Washington, racist-fascist or nazi, Government of Ukraine, which currently is doing the fighting and the killing and the dying, but which couldn’t do it but for that Western backing.

This should be analogized to Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba and his and Soviet leader Khrushchev's attempt to base near the U.S., Soviet nuclear missiles aimed against America. At that time, in 1962, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said that we’d go to war against the USSR if necessary to prevent this; and today Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has implied, but not yet said, that his country will likewise go to war against the United States if necessary to stop its attempt to do against Russia what Khrushchev had been stopped from doing against the U.S. in 1962.

However, the U.S. is now already farther along the warpath than the USSR had been in 1962. Already, many thousands of deaths have resulted from Ukraine’s war against Russia and against its supporters inside what had previously been parts of Ukraine. In 1962, Cuba was at peace, except for a few bands of U.S.-backed Cubans, who were trying to overthrow Fidel Castro. Ukraine is today’s Cuba, but even more of a danger. And, this time, the United States Government is trying to impose nuclear supremacy; the Soviet Union and its communism no longer even exist, and Russia is up against the mortal threat that is being wrongfully perpetrated by the U.S. against them.

Clearly, U.S. President Obama was serious when he tossed out Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych; and clearly he has the full backing of the U.S. Congress (though with some hesitation on the part of Democrats) to go to war against Russia and finish the job that he has begun.

If it weren’t for the ongoing donations — officially loans, but ‘loans’ to an already-bankrupt Government are donations — by both U.S. taxpayers and EU taxpayers, that are channeled mainly through the U.S. and EU and IMF, Ukraine would simply stop its hot war against Russia and against its own ethnic Russians; and the Ukrainian Government that we installed in February would just collapse. The IMF and EU seem likely now to have ended their donations, but U.S. taxpayers certainly haven’t ended ours. We’ve barely even started, though, ever since 1991, U.S. taxpayers have already invested “over five billion dollars” in this scheme to bring ‘democracy’ to Ukraine, even before Obama’s successful February coup provided the capstone to that entire Orwellian effort: America’s aristocracy and its hired hands call this ‘democracy.’

The investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has published his analysis of the American aristocrats, ranging from the Kochs on the right to the Soroses on the left, who are lobbying for this campaign to get taxpayers to fund the American aristocracy’s military take-over of other nations’ aristocracies and resources. Madsen sees as being the few politicians in Washington who are resisting that, both Ron Paul (and definitely not his son Rand Paul) libertarians, and Dennis Kucinich progressives.

Madsen doesn’t note, however, that both of those men are now retired; so, they can afford to speak the truth without losing their jobs, since they’ve already lost them. Among the U.S. aristocracy that finances politicians into federal offices, there is no visible support whatsoever for such dissidents challenging the aristocracy: when one of them somehow manages to get into the political system, they’re removed from it, in one way or another, before they can do any damage to the U.S. aristocracy.

This is how it came to be that 98% of the House and 100% of the Senate voted for war against Russia, even though at least 67% of the American public who expressed an opinion about that in a Pew poll were opposed (and this 67% figure might have been far higher if the question had been more directly asked, such as: “Should the U.S. go to war against Russia in order to enable Ukraine to get back Crimea and conquer the rebelling regions in Ukraine’s own former southeast?”).

This America is supposed to be a ‘democracy,’ in which 99% of Congress and the President want taxpayers to be required to donate to the Ukrainian military, but less than one-third of the American public want to make those donations. Is it instead actually taxation without representation — a modern fascist form of the very oligarchy that America’s Founders went to war against and defeated in order to create America? How much more of a demonstration needs to be made that today’s America is a dictatorship, not a representative democracy or republic? Only media pretend it’s not a dictatorship, because they’re part of it, owned by the same people who heisted our Government and who trade favors with one-another against us. Clearly, this is an us-versus-them situation in which oligarchs are the aggressors, who destroyed American democracy, and from which a democracy now must again be seized, because it has been stolen from us and will not be retaken without a fight.

Madsen also has an interesting explanation as to why Israel is so passionately supportive of the racist-fascist, or nazi, Ukrainian political parties that the Obama Administration has placed in control of Ukraine.

Regardless of such speculations and evidence, however, there is nothing speculative about the American Government’s drive to nuclear war.

It’s part and parcel of the same deal that just passed in the U.S. Congress and was signed by the President, that in the event of any future U.S. financial crash, FDIC-insured bank accounts won’t be paid until and unless the mega-banks that hold derivatives contracts get full payment on all of those gambling policies they had bought — i.e, never. Granny’s savings account will get emptied out to pay Wall Street’s gambling-debts. (Not that the U.S. ‘news’ media ever made such things clear to the public. But how do you think we had managed to obtain a Congress and a President like these are? The public had to be fooled by the aristocrats’ propaganda, and the ‘news’ media had to help aristocrats fool them about it, because the ‘news’ media receive their funding from aristocrats, both as their owners and as their advertisers. The public are just pawns on their chessboard. This is what became of democracy: it’s merely the residual verbal shell — ‘democracy’ — an Orwellian opposite of the original meaning.)

As Obama told the mega-bank chiefs on 27 March 2009 in private, “I’m protecting you … My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

He’s going to teach those granny-bank-account “pitchforks,” and such, a thing or two about “the one indispensable nation.” Namely: those people in it, the public, are dispensable, even if not quite as much so as are the people his forces are slaughtering (ethnically cleansing) in southeast Ukraine and other such places, where the ‘real riffraff' live. The people in those areas are punished and killed for the crime of living where “the right people” want them simply to be gone (preferably dead, but otherwise refugees in Russia, until the ICBMs kill them).

“Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.” But it’s long since gone, and is now aiming to clear out land elsewhere, especially southeast Ukraine, to place nuclear missiles there.

America’s ‘entrepreneurs’ have work to do, across the globe; and all the charred remains of the nuclear ‘victory’ will be passed on to their proud heirs.

It’s the new American way, the way of ‘entrepreneurs’ — a.k.a. “the aristocracy” — but actually only the ‘entrepreneurs’ who have been able to grab the most, who are billionaires. Only insiders can apply for admission. Outsiders can apply for a job, nothing more.

Obama had it all figured out. Everything else from him was just an act. He is the personification of cynicism, and of lies.

If you don’t think so, then how do you explain this, and this, and this, and this? Are those just innocent tragedies; and, if not, then who was the most indispensable person toward causing them to happen — causing them to be imposed by the Ukrainian Government that Obama’s coup imposed upon Ukraine? Obama’s decisions were essential in order to empower the people who are perpetrating this extermination-campaign, which is the bait intended to draw Vladimir Putin into a Ukrainian conflict so as to provide a pretext for an American nuclear attack against Russia — as if Russia doesn’t have even more of a legitimate national-security interest in its Ukrainian neighbor than the U.S. had in its Cuban neighbor in 1962, when we rightly threatened nuclear war over that type of provocation.

If the next U.S. President protects Obama from criminal prosecution for Ukraine like Obama protected Bush from criminal prosecution for Iraq, then the U.S. is hopelessly a lawless nation, no democracy at all.

Unfortunately, the nuclear bombs in the war that Obama and the other stooges of America’s aristocracy are building up to, will not be targeted against themselves and their psychopathic (often billionaire) sponsors. Those people will instead have their bomb-shelters, and their corporate jets.

Oligarchs are foreign to a democracy. Consequently, their servants in government, especially America’s current and former President, are foreign to the U.S. Constitution, and to their Oath of Office, and thus to this country, irrespective of their technical citizenship as ‘American.’ They should both be brought up on charges of treason against the United States of America; for, if they are not, then truly democracy is ended in this country, with no hope of restoration, and America’s Presidents are not subject to American Law, but instead stand above it, beyond it, and immune from it. That makes them dictators, but for whom, and against whom? The record speaks for itself.

Reader-comments to this commentary, pro-and-con, are invited regarding this conclusion, especially because a public forum to discuss this severe matter is needed now — a turning-point in American, and (sad to say), perhaps also (if a nuclear attack occurs) a turning-point in global history. That’s the case regardless of which side of this debate one is on. The fundamental character of this country is at stake now. The public should have a say in it (if that’s still even possible, given that 99% of the media are in the hands of oligarchs — the very same aristocrats who benefit from the status-quo).

Nuclear war is a serious matter, and the American Government must immediately halt their plan to provoke it. The time to force a halt to that is now, or else it will be never. Every step we get closer to nuclear war makes reversing the direction, which is toward war, even more difficult, and less likely, and makes nuclear war even likelier than it was before.

If the public is to take charge (assuming that doing so is still possible), it will happen sooner rather than later.

The public discussion will begin now, if it begins at all.

We’re close to the precipice. Will the public remain quiet?

-###-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .