[Peace] News from Neptune for June 24

[C. G. Estabrook]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOdZS2Ex0jQ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOdZS2Ex0jQ>

News from Neptune for 24 June 2016 - an INVADE RUSSIA edition - a Chomskyan take on the news from Urbana (IL) Public TV 

June 24 is the anniversary of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, in 1812, which has sent me back to one of the great works of modern history and theory, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. (It’s a novel, but a supreme illustration of the News from Neptune maxim that the poets often get there first. It’s very much worth reading in the classic English translations, if you can’t read the Russian, as I’m sorry to say I can’t. A modern liberal education should begin with learning to read languages other than one’s own - Greek, Latin, Russian, and Chinese at the top of the list.

June 22 is the anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, in 1941, for which the indispensable work today is also by a novelist, a more recent book by Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” (2008), and his accompanying essay “Why I’m a pacifist: The dangerous myth of the Good War.” (I’ll put links on the NFN fb page.)

There was of course another German war with Russia between 1812 and 1941, part of the First World War, that led to the establishment of the Soviet Union. Russia was attacked twice across the plains of Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century, and today it seems to be under attack again, now from the US ‘hybrid war.”

This June we have the absolutely amazing provocations of Russia by Barack Obama, who’s risking nuclear war as viciously as John Kennedy did more than 50 years ago, in the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis.

To explain what the US is doing - and has been doing for a while - the estimable Pepe Escobar has an important article out this week, “It’s All About Eurasia Integration.”

Regular listeners to this program know that we’ve argued that US war policy is "all about Eurasia integration" - and the willingness of all US administrations to kill people to prevent the economic integration of Eurasia - principally Russia and China - because it challenges the world economic dominance of the US economic elite, the one percent.

Regular listeners have also heard that, although US government tactics may change, the strategy extends back over a century, because the 'Manifest Destiny' of US capitalism to expand across North America did not stop at the water's edge but extended across the Pacific: see the Open Door Policy (1899), Mackinder's 'Heartland' doctrine (1904), and the unpleasantness with Japan that peaked in the 1940s…

In their relations with Eurasia, dominant social groups in the US have illustrated the mid-19th-century maxim that ruling groups have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests - and continue to do so today, risking the future of the human race.

At the recently concluded 20th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) – 30 ministers from 21 nations and 880 CEOs attending [but not reported in the US media] - Obama administration economic sanctions on Russia were resisted. [Pepe Escobar reports] "It was left to Putin to joke about it with Italian PM Renzi: «Matteo, why? Why are you enduring this?» [Italians know that the sanctions on Russia are having a depressive effect on the Italian economy.]

"[But in spite of US roadblocks, it now seems] the breakneck-speed expansion of the Great Eurasian Corridor is unstoppable. And with Russia matching its land and wealth of natural resources with China’s population and virtually unlimited funds, there’s nothing Hybrid Wars [Pepe’s term for the open and hidden aggression of the Obama administration against Russia and China] can do to divert Russia’s own pivot to Asia.”

That's why the Obama administration has been so incredibly willing to provoke war with Russia and China. ("Russian aggression!" "Chinese aggression!" they cry - in a massive case of what the psychologists call projection.) It’s really American aggression - and a Clinton administration will probably be even worse.

--C. G. Estabrook, with Karen Aram & David Green
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