Eric Zuesse

A typical example is Christophe Leclercq’s Euractiv website, news for Europeans. (Leclercq “was EU Commission official with DG Competition (coordinator for Information Society). Before that, he was a management consultant with McKinsey.”)

On Thursday October 8th, his euractiv bannered, “NATO says will defend Turkey against Russian airspace violations” — a headline that suggests perhaps World War III will be sparked by Russia’s military campaign against the Sunni extremists in Syria, and that Russia had therefore better stop it right now. This article opened: “NATO said today (8 October) it was prepared to send troops to Turkey to defend its ally after violations of Turkish airspace by Russian jets bombing Syria, and Britain scolded Moscow for escalating a civil war that has already killed 250,000 people” (as if all of those 250,000 were killed by Assad’s forces instead of by the ones that America/NATO is backing).

Turkey has, in fact, been supporting the Islamists — Sunnis who demand that sharia law be imposed on Syria — and NATO is supposedly (according to this article) threatening to send “troops” into Turkey in order to stop Russia’s military campaign against that jihad. But nowhere in the article itself is any evidence provided to back up that allegation of NATO’s considering “to send troops to Turkey.” Instead, the article is sheer scaremongering in order to get the site’s sucker-readers to demand that Russia stop so as to avoid ‘provoking’ a nuclear conflict with the good guys: NATO. NATO is presented as the peace-advocate, Russia (which had nothing to do with starting this war) as being the war-monger. “‘There has to be a political solution, a transition,’ [NATO Secretary-General Jens] Stoltenberg said.” (As if NATO and Turkey should determine Syria’s leader, not the Syrian public, whom all polls show would win a democratic election in a landslide. The hypocrisy of the Western press is blatant. Even Obama’s constant allegations that Assad was responsible for the August 2013 sarin gas attack are blatant lies: whereas Obama might have been behind that attack, Assad couldn’t even possibly have been. The rocket had been fired from the U.S.&Turkey-controlled area.)

A reader-comment to this euractiv article is a far more accurate representation of the reality than is the article itself:

"Russia is making a situation much more dangerous" - yeah, the US has been putzing around for 2 years, invading Syrian airspace without the permission of their government, and now these Russian strikes at the behest of the Syrian government (and it doesn't matter what Obama THINKS about the legitimacy of the Syrian government, or how much of a bad guy Assad is) have laid bare that the CIA has trained militants and is very possibly at least partly in bed with some elements of ISIS. So of course NATO has to ratchet up the rhetoric, because the USA agenda (which is all NATO is really about anyway) is being compromised - Russia has done more damage to ISIS in a week than the USA has in many months. The USA hates when someone plays their own game in foreign affairs, and plays it better than they do. The hypocrisy of it all in light of the interventionist disasters that are Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and the "Arab Spring" would be humorous were it not so dangerous for the whole planet.

One of the basic problems that hasn’t yet been rectified in democracies, is that inevitably the news-media (such as euractive, but also including, of course, Rupert Murdoch and other major operators) are owned by aristocrats — people who are, or else are in service to, the controlling stockholders in large corporations, the advertisers in the successful ‘news’ media and therefore the determinants regarding which media will thrive and which ones will simply fade away. They advertise not only in order to boost their products against those of the competition (the competiton between aristocrats), but in order to sustain and promote the agenda that each one of them shares and cooperates in order to promote to the general public: The system in our society is just and fair, and our nation are the good guys and our enemies are bad guys. (It’s the competition between aristocracies.) In other words: though they sell different products, they sell the same system. It’s the system that sustains their own privileged position, their wealth. Anything other than that is, to them, theft — from them, not by them (which is actually far more comon).

A publication such as euractive, therefore, is almost always owned or controlled by an individual who knows what the aristocracy want the public to think, and the ‘news’ medium sells that, if it’s at all a successful ‘news’ medium. Obviously, aristocrats want the public to think that large wealth reflects their own large merit, not their large criminality — they don’t want the public to think that aristocrats
are generally a rather scummy lot. And, therefore, the powers-that-be are represented in the ‘news’ media as the opposite of what they are — as being generally well-intentioned. You don’t sell ads by raising questions, suspicions, or distrust, regarding large advertisers. This fact is basic knowledge in order to be able to survive as a ‘news’ medium in any ‘democracy.’

What that reader-comment shows is: some of the readers aren’t suckers such as the media-owners are hoping constitute their audience. Some of the public see through the aristocracy’s sham. (Perhaps these are the few who have encountered the few news-media in the West that honestly report international news, such as this. And any of them that start succeeding, get crushed by the aristocracy. This is, in a sense, the basic problem in any country that even aspires to be a democracy.)

CLOSING NOTE

However, though the idea of a NATO-Russia war resulting from the Syrian conflict might be overblown, there does exist a realistic possibility of a nuclear war resulting from this conflict; it’s just not via NATO (at least not directly) so much as it’s via the Saudis, who have been the main financial backers of the jihad movement, in Syria and elsewhere. On October 3rd, the Guardian bannered, “Gulf states plan military response as Putin raises the stakes in Syria,” and reported a much more serious direct threat:

“There is no future for Assad in Syria,” Saudi foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir warned, a few hours before the first Russian bombing sorties began. If that was not blunt enough, he spelled out that if the president [Assad] did not step down as part of a political transition, his country would embrace a military option, “which also would end with the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power”.

The Saudi royal family is there essentially promising to supply its Syrian jihadists with surface-to-air missiles to shoot down Russian jets. (That’s what would be required in order for them now to be able militarily to establish “the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power.”) NATO (mainly the U.S.) would then face a choice of whether to back the Saudis on that, or else let Russia conquer both the Sauds and the Syrian Islamists. At that point, the propagandists (‘news’ media) in the West would have a field day, trying to whip up public support for going to war against Russia (which would expose U.S. aristocrats as serving Saudi aristocrats, not the other way around — as is commonly supposed).

Who has dominated the West: America’s aristocracy, or Saudi Arabia’s. It’s not something that’s likely to be investigated in Western ‘news’ media; but, in the crunch, we might find out, despite them, by experiencing the results.

If it does come down to that, a lot will probably be riding on the decisions that will be made by three heads-of-state: the ones in U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Russia.

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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, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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