Robert Parry nailed it then, and still, in 2015.
The relevant and most recent broken promises made to Russia.
Caitlin points out the many ironies of the recent US claim that Russia is attempting to engineer a false flag attack on Donbass to look like it was an attack by Kiev. Previously the US has denounced "false flag" claims as "conspiracy theories."
My opinion? For starters, cede the Donbass to Russia and let it go, along with Crimea, which endless polls prove had a fair referendum result (much to the error of most disinformed westerners, who despite endlessly being told otherwise, still recite the same old cants).
Update: It appears even the Council on Foreign Relations thinks letting Donbass "go" is an acceptible idea. It's not what Russians appear to want either. That originally made me feel like it was the perfect Solomanian solution (which neither side wants) but perhaps not if CFR likes it.
I've never been fond of secessionism, so maybe this is a change. But it seems to me any time a violent overthrow of a government occurs, as in the Maidan Revolution, any region out to be able to secede out by local referendum, just as Crimea has done, and/or join some other entity, with immediate recognition by the global community.
The lack of referendums in western-drawn borders, especially applied to other areas, like the middle east, is striking. Or, say, the former Yugoslavia.
Perhaps there also ought to be a referendum before any kind of US intervention. Did Syrians really want US overthrow of the Assad government through direct and indirect US intervention. Do Afghans really want destructive sanctions and non-recognition to weaken the Taliban?
NATO expansion? I've long been been for abolishing NATO, and of course not expanding it.
I would never have created NATO in the first place. It has been just another cog in US Global Domination since then.
It's just an excuse for endless provocation, interference, forced deaths, and military expenditures which are sorely needed elsewhere, especially conversion to green energy.
It's always been based on a paranoid fear of Russia, stoked by deep state media ever since 1945, driven by the US financial empire and it's dependence on Endless War to keep demand sufficiently high without letting people get "lazy" with more civilian programs instead. At first it was merely a claimed strategy in continuing the existing war spending. Later it's become the well known institution which owns the west, the Military Industrial Complex (which Eisenhower did as much to build as any President, if not the most) and most certainly this MIC includes western media, despite false notions of a "free media." It's not free, and guess who owns it.
In this case, NATO threatens EU Europe by promising endless war on Germany's doorstep. That would be a nice return on previous adventures, say, in Afghanistan (!), as well as the former Yugoslavia.
IF NATO exists at all, it should be only for protecting the central countries we would really defend, and not an excuse for arming peripheral countries for proxy wars and worrisome trip wires--which has been the case since 1991 if not before.
We needed President Henry A Wallace in 1948. We got on to a wrong path after the deep state selected Truman to replace Wallace on the 1942 ticket. Truman was never the deep state's first choice--they preferred Republicans--but he pretty much did their bidding, such as the creation of NATO in 1949, but with a few exceptions, toward the end, such as support of Mossadegh. And so the "bipartisan" foreign policy consensus began, as designed and engineered by people like Allen Dulles, who pushed both Nixon and Eisenhower into their jobs for his ends: Global Financial Empire! And controlled the state so closely after than that every diplomat, spook, President and Senator knows they can be JFK'ed for even the slightest free thinking. A tower of idiocy, and a parody of the tower of wealth--not so idiotic in the short run.
I have one of Zizek's books, I've considered him somewhat unreadable. I should have been thinking Revisionist or Trot. He wrote a glorification of the Ukranian Revolution that was published in The Guardian which I don't think has aged well. But it presents the most positive view possible, I think, of the anti-Russian position without doing what friends of mine tend to do, which is to intone EVIL PUTIN over and over. But Zizek isn't much different from that, either. He utters not a word about the most violent and destructive empire in the world today, instead considering it's eastern division, which includes NATO, the epitome of civilization.
n a 1996 book playing the same role in his life as Eisenhower's "Military Industrial Complex" speech (ie a warning about the monster he himself had created), Cold War senior architect George Kennan decried Russophobia as it has been present ever since (ever since his creating it in the 1940's):
QUOTE
“I find the view of the Soviet Union that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action.
“This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leadership of another great country; this routine exaggeration of Moscow’s military capabilities and of the supposed iniquity of Soviet intentions: this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and the attitudes of another great people – and a long-suffering people at that, sorely tried by the vicissitudes of this past century; this ignoring of their pride, their hopes – yes, even of their illusions (for they have their illusions, just as we have ours, and illusions too, deserve respect); this reckless application of the double standard to the judgment of Soviet conduct and our own, this failure to recognize, finally, the communality of many of their problems and ours as we both move inexorably into the modern technological age: and the corresponding tendency to view all aspects of the relationship in terms of a supposed total and irreconcilable conflict of concerns and of aims; these, I believe, are not the marks of the maturity and discrimination one expects of the diplomacy of a great power; they are the marks of an intellectual primitivism and naivety unpardonable in a great government. I use the word naivety, because there is the naivety of cynicism and suspicion, just as there is the naivety of innocence.
“And we shall not be able to turn these things around as they should be turned, on the plane of military and nuclear rivalry, until we learn to correct these childish distortions – until we correct our tendency to see in the Soviet Union only a mirror in which we look for the reflection of our own virtue – until we consent to see there another great people, one of the world’s greatest, in all its complexity and variety, embracing the good with the bad, a people whose life, whose views, whose habits, whose fears and aspirations, whose successes and failures, are the products, just as ours are the products, not of any inherent iniquity but of the relentless discipline of history, tradition, and national experience. If we insist on demonizing these Soviet leaders – on viewing them as total and incorrigible enemies, consumed only with their fear and hatred of us and dedicated to nothing other than our destruction – that, in the end, is the way we shall assuredly have them, if for no other reason than that our view of them allows for nothing else, either for them or for us.”
END QUOTE
Source (with more good stuff):
