[Peace-discuss] FW: [ufpj-activist] Ready for Nuclear War over Ukraine?

[E. W. Johnson]

They can either take this opportunity or they can wait for the next 
explosion.

On 02/26/2015 08:53 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss wrote:
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: globalnet at mindspring.com
> To: globenet at yahoogroups.com
> Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2015 09:03:57 -0500
> Subject: [ufpj-activist] Ready for Nuclear War over Ukraine?
>
> https://consortiumnews.com/2015/02/23/ready-for-nuclear-war-over-ukraine/
>
>
>   Ready for Nuclear War over Ukraine?
>
>
>     February 23, 2015
>
> /*Exclusive:* A year after a U.S.-backed coup ousted Ukraine’s elected 
> president, the new powers in Kiev are itching for a “full-scale war” 
> with Russia — and want the West’s backing even if it could provoke a 
> nuclear conflict, a Strangelovian madness that the U.S. media ignores, 
> writes Robert Parry./
> By Robert Parry
> A senior Ukrainian official is urging the West to risk a nuclear 
> conflagration in support of a “full-scale war” with Russia that he 
> says authorities in Kiev are now seeking, another sign of the 
> extremism that pervades the year-old, U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.
> In a recent interview with Canada’s CBC Radio 
> <http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine-preparing-for-full-scale-war-says-former-envoy-to-canada-1.2964887>, 
> Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said, “Everybody is 
> afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore, in 
> Ukraine — we’ve lost so many people of ours, we’ve lost so much of our 
> territory.”
> Prystaiko added, “However dangerous it sounds, we have to stop 
> [Russian President Vladimir Putin] somehow. For the sake of the 
> Russian nation as well, not just for the Ukrainians and Europe.” The 
> deputy foreign minister announced that Kiev is preparing for 
> “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal 
> weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia.
> “What we expect from the world is that the world will stiffen up in 
> the spine a little,” Prystaiko said.
> Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable about Prystaiko’s “Dr. 
> Strangelove” moment is that it produced almost no reaction in the 
> West. You have a senior Ukrainian official saying that the world 
> should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its 
> west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to 
> maintain its historic relationship with Russia.
> Why should such a pedestrian dispute justify the possibility of 
> vaporizing millions of human beings and conceivably ending life on the 
> planet? Yet, instead of working out a plan for a federalized structure 
> in Ukraine or even allowing people in the east to vote on whether they 
> want to remain under the control of the Kiev regime, the world is 
> supposed to risk nuclear annihilation.
> But therein lies one of the under-reported stories of the Ukraine 
> crisis: There is a madness to the Kiev regime that the West doesn’t 
> want to recognize because to do so would upend the dominant narrative 
> of “our” good guys vs. Russia’s bad guys. If we begin to notice that 
> the right-wing regime in Kiev is crazy and brutal, we might also start 
> questioning the “Russian aggression” mantra.
> According to the Western “group think,” the post-coup Ukrainian 
> government “shares our values” by favoring democracy and modernity, 
> while the rebellious ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are “Moscow’s 
> minions” representing dark forces of backwardness and violence, 
> personified by Russia’s “irrational” President Putin. In this view, 
> the conflict is a clash between the forces of good and evil where 
> there is no space for compromise.
> Yet, there is a craziness to this “group think” that is highlighted 
> by Prystaiko’s comments. Not only does the Kiev regime display a 
> cavalier attitude about dragging the world into a nuclear 
> catastrophe but it also has deployed armed neo-Nazis and other 
> right-wing extremists to wage a dirty war in the east that has 
> involved torture and death-squad activities.
> *Not Since Adolf Hitler*
> No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to 
> dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but 
> the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet, across the West’s 
> media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up 
> this reality, even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well 
> established.
> The New York Times and the Washington Post have spearheaded this 
> journalistic malfeasance by putting on blinders so as not to see 
> Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, such as when describing the key role played by 
> the Azov battalion in the war against ethnic Russians in the east.
> On Feb. 20, in a report 
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/is-mariupol-the-next-target-of-the-rebels-advance/2015/02/20/146fe2ae-b888-11e4-bc30-a4e75503948a_story.html> 
> from Mariupol, the Post cited the Azov battalion’s importance in 
> defending the port city against a possible rebel offensive. 
> Correspondent Karoun Demirjian wrote:
> “Petro Guk, the commander of the Azov battalion’s reinforcement 
> operations in Mariupol, said in an interview that the battalion is 
> ‘getting ready for’ street-to-street combat in the city. The Azov 
> battalion, now a regiment in the Ukrainian army, is known as one of 
> the fiercest fighting forces­ in the pro-Kiev operation.
> “But … it has pulled away from the front lines on a scheduled 
> rest-and-retraining rotation, Guk said, leaving the Ukrainian army — a 
> less capable force, in his opinion — in its place. His advice to 
> residents of Mariupol is to get ready for the worst.
> “‘If it is your home, you should be ready to fight for it, and accept 
> that if the fight is for your home, you must defend it,’ he said, when 
> asked whether residents should prepare to leave. Some are ready to 
> heed that call, as a matter of patriotic duty.”
> The Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent 
> narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the 
> Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, 
> displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.
> The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/world/europe/mariupol-ukraine-port-city-braces-for-worst-as-rebels-close-in-again.html?_r=0> 
> from Mariupol on Feb. 11, depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as 
> barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. 
> Though providing much color and detail – and quoting an Azov leader 
> prominently – the Times left out the salient and well-known fact that 
> the Azov battalion is composed of neo-Nazis.
> But this inconvenient truth – that neo-Nazis have been central to 
> Kiev’s “self-defense forces” from last February’s coup to the present 
> – would disrupt the desired propaganda message to American readers. So 
> the New York Times just ignores the Nazism and refers to Azov as a 
> “volunteer unit.”
> Yet, this glaring omission is prima facie proof of journalistic bias. 
> There’s no way that the editors of the Post and Times don’t know that 
> the presence of neo-Nazis is newsworthy. Indeed, there’s a powerful 
> irony in this portrayal of Nazis as the bulwark of Western 
> civilization against the Russian hordes from the East. It was, after 
> all, the Russians who broke the back of Nazism in World War II 
> as Hitler sought to subjugate Europe and destroy Western civilization 
> as we know it.
> That the Nazis are now being depicted as defenders of Western ideals 
> has to be the ultimate man-bites-dog story. But it goes essentially 
> unreported in the New York Times and Washington Post as does the 
> inconvenient presence of other Nazis holding prominent positions in 
> the post-coup regime, including Andriy Parubiy, who was the military 
> commander of the Maidan protests and served as the first national 
> security chief of the Kiev regime. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine, 
> Through the US Looking Glass. 
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/16/ukraine-through-the-us-looking-glass/>”]
> *The Nazi Reality*
> Regarding the Azov battalion, the Post and Times have sought to bury 
> the Nazi reality, but both have also acknowledged it in passing. For 
> instance, on Aug. 10, 2014, a Times’ article 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/europe/ukraine.html?ref=world&_r=0> 
> mentioned the neo-Nazi nature of the Azov battalion in the last three 
> paragraphs of a lengthy story on another topic.
> “The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular 
> army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, 
> violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups 
> surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat,” the 
> Times reported.
> “Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their 
> actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry 
> and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the 
> village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as 
> its flag.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Whites Out Ukraine’s 
> Brownshirts. 
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2015/02/11/nyt-whites-out-ukraines-brown-shirts/>”]
> Similarly, the Post published a lead story 
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as-leaders-talk-peace-some-ukrainians-contemplate-guerrilla-war/2014/09/12/4e36884e-aa74-40d6-8c61-8b6fe3ffd638_story.html> 
> last Sept. 12 describing the Azov battalion in flattering terms, 
> saving for the last three paragraphs the problematic reality that the 
> fighters are fond of displaying the Swastika:
> “In one room, a recruit had emblazoned a swastika above his bed. But 
> Kirt [a platoon leader] … dismissed questions of ideology, saying that 
> the volunteers — many of them still teenagers — embrace symbols and 
> espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of ‘romantic’ idea.”
> Other news organizations have been more forthright about this Nazi 
> reality. For instance, the conservative London Telegraph published an 
> article 
> <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11025137/Ukraine-crisis-the-neo-Nazi-brigade-fighting-pro-Russian-separatists.html> 
> by correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: “Kiev’s use of volunteer 
> paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk 
> ‘people’s republics’… should send a shiver down Europe’s spine.
> “Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with 
> several thousand men under their command, are officially under the 
> control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their 
> training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men 
> use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and 
> members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.”
> Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that 
> some of the fighters doubted the Holocaust, expressed admiration for 
> Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.
> Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, “is also head of an extremist 
> Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,” according to the 
> Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: 
> “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead 
> the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A 
> crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
> The Telegraph questioned Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who 
> acknowledged that they were aware of the extremist ideologies of 
> some militias but insisted that the higher priority was having troops 
> who were strongly motivated to fight.
> Azov fighters even emblazon the Swastika and the SS insignia on their 
> helmets. NBC News reported 
> <http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/german-tv-shows-nazi-symbols-helmets-ukraine-soldiers-n198961>: 
> “Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past … 
> when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers 
> with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.”
> But it’s now clear that far-right extremism is not limited to the 
> militias sent to kill ethnic Russians in the east or to the presence 
> of a few neo-Nazi officials who were rewarded for their roles in last 
> February’s coup. The fanaticism is present at the center of the Kiev 
> regime, including its deputy foreign minister who speaks casually 
> about a “full-scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.
> *An Orwellian World*
> In a “normal world,” U.S. and European journalists would explain to 
> their readers how insane all this is; how a dispute over the pace for 
> implementing a European association agreement while also maintaining 
> some economic ties with Russia could have been worked out within the 
> Ukrainian political system, that it was not grounds for a U.S.-backed 
> “regime change” last February, let alone a civil war, and surely not 
> nuclear war.
> But these are clearly not normal times. To a degree that I have not 
> seen in my 37 years covering Washington, there is a totalitarian 
> quality to the West’s current “group think” about Ukraine with 
> virtually no one who “matters” deviating from the black-and-white 
> depiction of good guys in Kiev vs. bad guys in Donetsk and Moscow.
> And, if you want to see how the “objective” New York Times 
> dealt with demonstrations in Moscow and other Russian 
> cities protesting last year’s coup against Ukrainian President Viktor 
> Yanukovych, read Sunday’s dispatch 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/world/europe/kerry-says-further-sanctions-on-russia-will-be-discussed-over-ukraine.html?_r=0> 
> by the Times’ neocon national security correspondent Michael R. 
> Gordon, best known as the lead writer with Judith Miller on the 
> infamous “aluminum tube” story in 2002, helping to set the stage for 
> the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
> Here’s how Gordon explained the weekend’s anti-coup protests: “The 
> official narrative as reported by state-run television in Russia, and 
> thus accepted by most Russians, is that the uprising in Ukraine last 
> year was an American-engineered coup, aided by Ukrainian Nazis, and 
> fomented to overthrow Mr. Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president.”
> In other words, the Russians are being brainwashed while the readers 
> of the New York Times are getting their information from an 
> independent news source that would never be caught uncritically 
> distributing government propaganda, another example of the upside-down 
> Orwellian world that Americans now live in. [See, for example, “NYT 
> Retracts Russian Photo Scoop 
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/23/nyt-retracts-russian-photo-scoop/>.”]
> In our land of the free, there is no “official narrative” and the 
> U.S. government would never stoop to propaganda. Everyone just happily 
> marches in lockstep behind the conventional wisdom of a faultless Kiev 
> regime that “shares our values” and can do no wrong — while ignoring 
> the brutality and madness of coup leaders who deploy Nazis and invite 
> a nuclear holocaust for the world.
> *Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra 
> stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can 
> buy his latest book, */*America’s Stolen Narrative,*/*either in 
> **print here* 
> <https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/t/12126/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=1037>* or 
> as an e-book (from **Amazon* 
> <http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Stolen-Narrative-Washington-ebook/dp/B009RXXOIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350755575&sr=8-1&keywords=americas+stolen+narrative>*and 
> **barnesandnoble.com* 
> <http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/americas-stolen-narrative?keyword=americas+stolen+narrative&store=ebook&iehack=%E2%98%A0>*). 
> You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its 
> connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy 
> includes */*America’s Stolen Narrative*/*. For details on this offer, 
> **click here* 
> <http://consortiumnews.com/2014/06/25/continuing-parrys-3-book-offer/>*.*
> **
> *Sign the petition to the US Senate "No Weapons to Ukraine"* here 
> <http://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/no-weapons-to-ukraine?bucket&source=facebook-share-button&time=1424815500>
> Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
> PO Box 652
> Brunswick, ME 04011
> (207) 443-9502
> globalnet at mindspring.com <mailto:globalnet at mindspring.com>
> www.space4peace.org <http://www.space4peace.org>
> http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
>
> _______________________________________________ ufpj-activist mailing 
> list Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org List info: 
> https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist To 
> Unsubscribe Send email to: 
> ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org Or visit: 
> https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/karenaram%40hotmail.com 
> You are subscribed as: karenaram at hotmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20150226/bfe438f0/attachment-0001.html>