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You don't have to be a mind reader to know that for fifteen teen long years Putin has said the same thing over and over.  I have a red-line don't cross it.  NATO advancement through Ukraine to the Russian border is unacceptable.  Period.  End of discussion.  

We could at this point go to the USA's red line, the Monroe Doctrine, and point out the hypocrisy of the USA finding Putin's position untenable.  The Monroe Doctrine which we have lived by for two hundred years since 1823 says anything on our hemisphere is off-limits to foreign powers we don't like.  The Caribbean, Latin America is ours don't mess with us or else.  And, the or else is brutal.  We have sanctioned, assassinated leaders, facilitated coups, and worse to defend our red-line. 

But, Russia is not allowed to have a Monroe Doctrine or a red-line because only the USA can rule the world at will. 

When Cuba fell to Castro do you remember The Bay of Pigs?  Do you remember the CIA assassination attempts on Fidel Castro?  Do you remember that the USA was willing to consider a nuclear holocaust because communism was too close to its border?  

The USA can do anything to assure its ascendancy and protect its interests but not other countries. Putin has been requesting Ukrainian neutrality for over a decade to no avail. Not only that but he has shown he was willing to back up those demands and in 2008 and 2014 he was willing to use force to ensure this would not occur.  In December of 2021, he again said I am serious about this and the USA blew him off.  Ignored him.  And, again in a move to prove he was serious he began to amass troops on his borders.  

The insanity of this is that the USA simply does not want to be told what to do.  We want to beat our chests and wave our flags and drop our bombs and enforce our sanctions.  Ukraine was never going to qualify for NATO admission so to keep it as a buffer was a diplomatic move that would have avoided all of the current drama.  Yet the USA could never concede the obvious solution.  

Nearly every NATO nation has said it does not want to go to war with Russia for Ukraine precluding Ukraine from joining NATO.  This being said all the USA had to do was to assure Russia that Ukraine would remain a buffer zone.

What the USA has done is even worse than imaginable because with our bravado we have pushed for no reason other than our hubris Putin into carrying out his threats and left Ukraine defenseless.  No one is rushing into their defense.  

Two things need to happen to restore sanity to the situation.  The USA needs to humble itself and face reality and tell Putin that Ukraine will not enter NATO and remain a buffer zone.  Of course, that will never happen and so the next best course of action is for Ukraine to state that it will remain a neutral nation and a buffer zone.    

There is no way to convey strongly enough the disastrous results of the USAs arrogance.  What is going to happen is yet again lives will be lost, property destroyed because diplomacy and sanity were lost to ideological hubris.  The situation is only going to escalate with Ukraine having no way of defending itself. And, none of this had to happen.

None of this had to happen.  None of it.  

Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/opinion/150475-usa_arrogance/

Russia made a reasonable offer to the US and to NATO: Ukraine, through ITS government of the day, should NOT JOIN NATO. Full Stop. The arrogance of NATO — through NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg — on January 28 was beyond the pale. One can see why Russia was peeved beyond belief...

"In January, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that Ukraine's entry into NATO was a done deal, and merely a question of timing."

Though in January, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg didn't spell it out exactly in these terms, he was VERY arrogant nonetheless...: Russia can get stuffed. 

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UKRAINE JOINING NATO IS A MASSIVE THREAT TO RUSSIA'S EXISTENCE. 

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https://johnmenadue.com/gregory-clark-war-in-ukraine/

See also: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276

Few peoples define themselves through their military history more stridently than Australians. The truth, though, is that our military history primarily is one of imperial subservience, self-delusion and denial.

There’s a passage in Hilary Mantel’s brilliant historical fiction of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, in which Maximilien Robespierre is explaining to his colleague Camille Desmoulins how history is written:

‘The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good … to wipe the names [of their opponents] out of the record’

This is an overstatement. Robespierre was a revolutionary who dealt in extremes; furthermore, thousands of admirable scholars spend years labouring in archives to reveal the truth.

Nevertheless, Mantel’s Robespierre has a point. Historians can only read the records that exist and those that they find, and they then decide what to use and what to ignore. In many cases, what they choose to write eventually becomes received wisdom.

Populist Australian military history provides an example, with the allegations being raised in the defamation trial initiated by Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith shining a contemporary light on the broader historical narrative.

There is no more admired symbol in our national psyche than that of the digger – the archetypal courageous, laconic, irreverent Aussie, who for 121 years has excelled on battlefields around the world. So indoctrinated is this belief that the creator of the myth of the digger, Charles Bean, chronicler of the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War and founder of the Australian War Memorial, should be regarded not as an historian, but as our most powerful agent of socialisation.

There is no question that our soldiers, sailors and aviators have consistently fought with bravery and distinction. In the narrow setting of military campaigns that is praiseworthy. But in the broad setting of defining a national self-image it is insufficient.

In his latest book, Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945, the West’s pre-eminent military historian, Richard Overy, fundamentally redefines the context of World War II by locating it within the continuum of Imperialism. ‘Standard Western accounts [of the war]’, Overy tells us, ‘have focused on the narrative of the military conflict between the Allied and Axis states’. The problem with that approach, he argues, is that it merely deals with the how of war, rather than with the why.

And it is only by asking ‘why’ that we can understand the truth of what we did.

For over one hundred years we’ve been little more than eager, self-styled ‘deputy sheriffs’, hoping to earn the gratitude of our imperial patrons by carelessly despatching forces to a succession of unjust wars of choice, about which most of us have had no understanding whatsoever: of the cause, the people, the society, the politics, the economy, the religion, the culture, the language, the beliefs – even where the country was.

Thus, for example, in the Boer War, our troops fought for British imperial and financial interests and incarcerated civilians in the world’s first concentration camps (which we celebrate with a triumphal monument on Anzac Parade in Canberra); in China, we fought to enforce Britain’s state-sponsored opium trade; in Vietnam, we invited ourselves to interfere in what was first and foremost an anti-colonial war of national liberation. And so on, through to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Can any country other than the most avaricious Imperial powers of the 20th century, the UK and the US, lay claim to such a list of morally corrupt campaigns? To paraphrase George Orwell, the self-image we celebrate above all others was forged ‘doing the dirty work of empire’.

‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept’, Governor-General and former chief of the defence force General David Hurley famously told Australians some years ago. Which leads to our most egregious national denial.

This concerns a war most of us either know little about or choose to ignore. It was the longest, most brutal and most morally corrupt war Australians have ever fought; and it was, of course, the misleadingly titled ‘Frontier War’, waged for 140 years, from 1788 to 1928.

This wasn’t a ‘frontier war’, it was ‘The Australian War’, and it is the most important event in Australia’s 50,000 years of human settlement.

Serious historians no longer dispute the facts:

The landing of the First Fleet was an invasion; soldiers, police and settlers conducted a sustained campaign against First Nation peoples; the nature of the fighting took the form of a ‘war’; First Nations’ warriors conducted campaigns to protect themselves, their families and their land; white Australians carried out at least thirty massacres; in Tasmania those massacres were to all intents and purposes genocide; and some 60,000 First Australians were killed.

Yet the war is all but ignored by official Australia, including the Australian War Memorial, and it has little influence on our national identity. This is denial of grotesque dimensions.

At the end of his discourse, Robespierre puts his hand on Desmoulins’ arm. ‘Camille’, he says, ‘history is fiction’. Again, he’s overstated his case, but again, he has a point. Indeed, his statement that ‘bad governments … falsify … to suit themselves … wipe names out of the record … to make them look good’, might have been referencing contemporary Australia.

Most of us believe we’re lucky to live in Australia. We’d be even luckier if we confronted our past, stopped deluding ourselves about our military history, and fostered a self-image shaped by our many alternative, inspirational narratives.

read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/deputy-sheriffs-deluded-diggers-and-the-dirty-work-of-empire/

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UKRAINE JOINING NATO IS A MASSIVE THREAT TO RUSSIA'S EXISTENCE. 

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BY Marisa Kabas

This week, former President George W. Bush detonated a nostalgia bomb in my brain: In the midst of criticizing the Russian government in a speech in Dallas on Wednesday, Bush said the following: “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” He then stopped, shook his head, and said, “I mean, of Ukraine.” And under his breath, as if there was no microphone, cameras, or audience in front of him, he muttered, “Iraq, too.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I thought, “There’s absolutely no way he just said that.” And in an instant, the gaffe takes me 17 years back in time. I just got home from school, and I should really be doing my precalculus homework, but instead I’m sitting at the desk in front of my family’s charcoal-gray Dell, where I take out a list of phone numbers to call on behalf of former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. I’m not old enough to vote, live on Long Island, and honestly hadn’t heard of Senator Kerry until this year. But I’m a pissed-off high school senior, and my biggest preoccupation at the moment is making sure George W. Bush isn’t reelected president. So I pick up the cordless phone and start dialing.

READ MORE:

https://newrepublic.com/article/166555/bush-iraq-ukraine-gaffe-war

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276

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