Where Are We Going?

The Iraq Study Group was designed with two purposes in mind: first, to offer a cover for Bush heading into the election ("see, I'm trying"); second, to coopt Democratic opponents. For the first it failed big-time. Americans want out of Iraq. For the second it was successful in winning noted Democrats (Hilary et al.) to the fold, though this wasn't a difficult assignment. Almost without exception Congressional representatives are the mouthpieces of big business and the banks, not tribunes of the people, and the goal of hegemony over the earth's resources will end when the capitalists cry uncle (never) or the people force the issue. And while we are all fussing over the death and destruction in Iraq and threats against Iran, our rulers have their eye on their real enemy: Russia.

Lugar of Indiana is calling for NATO commitment to protect energy resources for member countries. For this read Russian control over natural gas etc. to Poland, Georgia or the Ukraine. (Would that he had called for action for witholding medical care from Americans!) Think that Putin had that former FSB spy Litvinenko killed? Think that all those news reports making those accusations are an accident? I certainly don't know who killed the guy but using Polonium seems a bit exotic unless one wanted to implicate a government which raises the suspicion of a frame-up. The whole story has a bit of a smell to it. Think news reports recapitulating the Ukrainian famine of 74 years ago is happenstance? The accusation is that Stalin starved 10 million people (out of less than a 25 million total population) in 1932-3. To quote a BBC report from 11/24/06: "It was one of the bleakest moments in Ukraine's history. The famine which happened between 1932 and 1933 killed up to 10 million people. It is widely believed to have been caused by the actions of the communist regime. The harvest was confiscated and people starved to death."

Of course the evidence never existed for this assertion, which arose initially with Adolf Hitler and continued with American expatriate criminals, provable liars and CIA assets. It was, and seemingly once again is, considered necessary to make Stalin into history's most evil monster and murderer, and derivatively all succeeding Russians. Books and articles going back decades (eg, Conquest's book) repeat undocumented and even proven-false assertions and use famine photos that weren't even taken in the 1930's but in 1922! Since the breakup of the USSR 15 years ago, a dissolution with a whimper, not a war, I wanted to find out just how "evil" that "empire" was, since it stole so quietly into the night. Yes, there was a famine and yes it was connected to collectivization but documented total deaths range from 1 to 2 million and the starvation wasn't caused by Stalin's confiscation and subsequent starvation of the masses but by the owners of animals and grain destroying their own holdings to keep the state from acquiring those supplies for distribution. Sort of an "if I can't have them, you can't either." Bad times indeed but less severe and more nuanced than western propaganda. Americans killed over 1 million Vietnamese in that war and since Gulf War I sanctions and the Bush occupation many more than 1 million Iraqis. But as an acquaintance of mine put it during tv news out of Iraq: "Those damn Iraqis!" Such is how our American minds work: we invade a country, topple the government, change their laws, kill them in large numbers, and yet we feel that somehow this is the Iraqis' fault! As a poet once wrote: If the world has a brain, where is it?

US capital and its government wants to control the world and its wealth and that mandates control over energy supplies: the base alignment in Afghanistan follows the proposed oil pipeline from central Asian (formerly republics of the USSR) sources to the Indian Ocean. Pipelines from the Caspian through Turkey bypassing Russia. Their problem is that Russia is the most populous European country with a large nuclear arsenal. Russia ain't Iraq. It's not paranoia to sense that the politicos and their controllers are setting the stage for a confrontation with Russia which could kill many, many millions of us. The United States is the world's rogue nation and it threatens the lives and livelihoods of us all.