By J.B.Browne
Winston Churchill once famously said:
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
We now live in a world of bewildering informational complexity in how we understand peoples, cultures, and geopolitics.
The Russia-Ukraine war has birthed two reactionary narratives.
The establishment narrative from the West, especially the US, presents Russia and Putin as bad actor expansionists, eager to build a neo-Russian empire.
The counter-narrative, which quickly gives way to media hysteria and Russophobe rhetoric, argues that Russia had genuine security concerns on NATO's eastward expansion, which crossed a significant geopolitical red line after repeated warnings.
Ukraine's landmass constrains Russia's access to the oceans and thus its ability to trade and project power globally. Russia is therefore permanently interested in Ukraine in a way that European powers, such as Germany, are not and in a way that is incomprehensible to most European and US citizens.
Do they have a right to invade a sovereign nation?
No.
But for the events in Ukraine in 2014, which made things extremely unstable and complicated. After months of right-wing "Maidan" demonstrations, a coup forced democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power.
The coup — surprise, surprise — was endorsed by US and European imperialists, who helped implement the power shift by using far-right shock troops such as the Right Sector and the neo-Nazi party Svoboda.
The 2014 coup represented a temporary culmination of long-standing efforts by US imperialism to install a puppet regime on the borders of Russia. Ukraine became in-all-but-name a US-controlled NATO proxy, inching closer to a face-off between the world's most stockpiled nuclear powers.
Little mentioned in the media maelstrom of now, but the US-NATO-regime change operation gave way to civil war — an armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine that has claimed more than 14,000 lives, displacing millions. The civil war pits the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian government against Russia-backed separatists to control Donbas, effectively the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. For the last eight years, the Western-backed oligarchic regimes in Kyiv have wreaked enormous austerity on the Ukrainian working class, now one of the poorest in Europe.
Why does NATO keep expanding?
There is no business without enemies.
The arms industry is one of the world's most successful corporate enterprises. And in Ukraine, they saw a multi-billion-dollar bonanza, exploiting a tinderbox in Eastern Europe to convert militaries throughout the former communist bloc to be "NATO compatible."
The underlying tragedy here is that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and even Putin attempted to build a joint security pact in the past. We also can't forget the trauma that Russia endured in WW2 when the Nazis pushed to Moscow, devastating vast swaths of the Soviet Union, harking back to Napoleon's invasion a century before.
Russia's legitimate fears of being encircled in Europe are no less different from US fears during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 should have rendered NATO obsolete.
Biden's recent State of the Union address has come at a critical time for the country. Apart from the usual off-script blunders — referring to Ukrainians as Iranians — he looked weak, clueless, and tone-deaf in his understanding of real-world politics. If any president was a physical manifestation of the US's fading unipolar hegemony, it's teleprompter Joe.
As Congress cheered "USA!" to Biden's announcement of sending $350 million in weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, to active conflict zones in Ukraine, it felt like the same script read over and over. There wasn't even one mention of the starvation of 20 million people in Afghanistan due to US embargos. Nor was the 40 percent of Afghanistan's hard currency reserves stolen by the US mentioned — presumably for "military aid" somewhere. Ukraine?
This week, the United States, its European allies, and Canada and Japan (NATO) implemented what the Americans had always wanted from this scenario going back to 2014 — expelling Russia from the SWIFT banking system and sanctioning Russia's central banks in hopes of regime change.
Short of direct US-Russia conflict, this is the most top-level assault on a country possible. The idea here is to impose massive economic "shock and awe" tactics on Russia, rapidly imposing severe hardship on the Russian people.
Sanctions like these are a time-honored imperialist tool the US uses to inflict mass suffering for working people without putting troops on the ground. As Putin escalates military action in Ukraine, many view Biden's sanctions on Russia as the lesser evil, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Of course, the big question is whether this will amplify Russian popular opposition to Putin over time or generate widespread patriotic fervor against the West.
If, however, the West, as I suspect, has engineered this situation from the start to provoke Putin into action, then the final goal design is to oust him by making his people suffer while keeping Ukraine war-torn for as long as possible for arms business and media moral grandstanding.
Unfortunately, Ukraine and its people are but mere pawns in the battle of wills between superpowers on the cusp of a fracturing world. The question of self-determination for Ukraine is moot considering that it is in between two reactionary powers squaring off in the face of increasing geopolitical contradictions.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine — in the short term, at least as the results remain to be seen — is bringing death and destruction to Ukraine and a potential economic crisis to the Russian working class. He is repressing protesters who speak out, stifling dissent.
On the other hand, NATO and the United States are illegally overreaching to make Ukraine a semi-colony under their influence and imposing brutal sanctions on Russia. Western governments are also repressing protestors who speak out and journalists who expose too much. More than that, McCarthyism 2.0 has arrived in the West as hysteria and rhetoric reaches a dissonant fever pitch.
But the IMAX context is this.
The United States is a declining imperialist power, desperate to hold on to world hegemony against China's rising economic and technological capabilities. In the last few days, several Russian banks announced their participation in China's CIPS system (Cross-border Interbank Payment System), meaning that whoever wants to buy Russian oil will now have to pay in RMB.
SWIFT is no longer required for settlements among CIPS members.
This is huge.
Russia has now been forced to circumvent the US petrodollar. But it turns out that China, India, Brazil, and other significant partners are joining this alternative banking system. These countries alone makeup almost half the world's population and can quickly push back against Western Imperialism with more development, which China's Belt and Road Initiative will provide.
Sanctions imposed by Western imperialist governments only protect their own elite interests. Sanctions are direct attacks on innocent civilians — in Russia or Ukraine, and even in America; they attack the everyday lives of innocents.
Like it or not, Russia's illegal invasion signals a new phase. It's a new era of multipolarity unencumbered by the stranglehold of a weaponized petro-dollar system that has been a destructive force across the globe for far too long.
Ukraine, my heart bleeds, but it was never about you.
As he would refer himself, J.B. Browne is a half "foreign devil" living with anxiety relieved by purchase. HK-born Writer/Musician/Tinkerer.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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