[How can too many of my fellow progressives, who marched against
Bush’s “preemptive” war in Iraq, now find preemptive war by
Putin justified by “NATO provocation”? ]
[[link removed]]

PUTIN’S MEIN KAMPF: AN INVASION FORETOLD  
[[link removed]]


 

Greg Palast
February 24, 2023
Buzzflash
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ How can too many of my fellow progressives, who marched against
Bush’s “preemptive” war in Iraq, now find preemptive war by
Putin justified by “NATO provocation”? _

,

 

As Russian tanks rolled across the border, some of our fellow
progressives called it a justified attack in response to a threat from
Western military imperialists.

The year was 1939.

That year, some on the Left, a minority for sure, bent themselves into
moral pretzels to justify the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the
Russian-German murder-drenched conquest of Poland.

As a New York Tribune columnist, the abolitionist Karl Marx, wrote
before the US Civil War, when some Britons supported the slavers:
“History speaks twice; the first time as tragedy, the second as
farce.”

Indeed, there is a nauseating, horrifying humor watching one-time
fighters against injustice, self-proclaimed “anti-war” activists,
dancing cheek to cheek with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Tucker
Carlson and fascist pin-up Silvio Berlusconi sharing their love, or at
least, their sad excuse-making, for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine.

At its core, these strange bedfellows’ sympathy for the Russian
invasion rests, ultimately, on the canard that it was NATO’s
expansion that provoked Putin to attack.

Pay attention to Putin’s own words.

On July 12, 2021, months before his tanks rolled, Putin issued a
detailed statement of his casus belli, his justification for total
seizure of Ukraine, not just the Donbas, in a 21-page-long essay
[[link removed]], “On the
Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” No one should speak of
this war unless they have read this, Putin’s _Mein Kampf_.

_Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere in his essay does Putin say one word about
NATO expansion._

The meandering screed boils down to two points: First, Ukraine has
always been an inseparable part of _Russkiy Mir_, the soul and body
of Mother Russia, for more than a thousand years.

But it’s not true. Putin’s phantasmic claim reaches back to the
10th century, to Volodymyr, Grand Prince of the Kievan-Rus
principality — founded, not by the Slavs they conquered, but as an
extension of the Viking Empire. The rulers of Ukraine and this
proto-Russia were Swedish. Volodymyr (namesake of both Zelensky and
Putin), ruled from the metropolitan capital of Kiev over a vast land
including the swampy little village of Moscow.

Volodymyr put to the sword those who would not worship the giant icons
he erected to Thor and Loki — until, in 988AD, he converted to
Christianity and put to the sword to those who would not destroy the
old icons and swear to the new one, the Crucifix.

Thus was founded the Orthodox Church, based in Kiev, not in a
“Rus-sia” that did not exist. Nevertheless, here is the germ of
Putin’s second _casus belli_, reason for invasion: religion,
specifically, restoration of the one and true Orthodox Church.

It would be a deep misunderstanding to call Putin’s once and future
Russia a dictatorship. It is a theocracy, ruled now and forever, in
Putin’s mind, by the one and only Holy Muscovite Patriarch. Today,
that crown, to which Putin bows, is the Moscow-based Patriarch Kirill,
the ultimate source of Putin’s political power and Putin’s hold on
rural believers.

It was Kirill who taunted and demanded Putin “save” the Muscovite
faithful in the Donbas who side with Kirill in the Orthodox schism
— and blesses what the Patriarch sees as a Crusade to restore the
rightful church and cast out the heretics, the Ukraine and Greek
Patriarchs.

Putin’s and Kirill’s quest is medieval, truly a new Crusade to
restore the Church and its Empire. NATO? Putin only gives passing
mention at the end of his anti-historical fever dream as a new locus
of attack against the values of the true church. More on this later.

Putin’s tale of the unbroken, Christ-blessed rule of Ukraine by
Russia has a problem. It’s bullshit. The Kievan-Rus empire shredded
and disappeared in the pinwheel of history nearly a millennium ago, in
1242.

For most of the vast expanse of centuries between, Ukraine was an
independent and voluntary member of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth. It is a great shame that this huge empire, often called
the Golden Freedom, has little mention in history books because its
member states ruled in peace by consensus, a proto-democracy that
elected its leader and whose constitution demanded only peaceful
coexistence among its states and religious freedom.

History prefers its conquistadors, as does Putin, who picks up the
tale of Ukraine as _Russkiy Mir_ when Catherine The Great conquers
its Eastern edge in 1793. (I’ve an inkling Putin takes note that
“The Great” is only bestowed on those who grab territory by blood.
Does he look in the mirror each morning and whisper, “Vlad the
Great”?)

Ukraine, in Putin’s fantasy, was overjoyed to be occupied, given as
a gift to Prince Potemkin, Catherine’s lover, a fiction worthy of
the happy “Potemkin villages” the Prince created to hoodwink his
visiting randy Empress. (When the Russians fled Kherson, they
abandoned some of their soldiers to die — but carefully carted away
Potemkin’s skeleton.)

Kiev was devoured by the Hapsburgs and spit out after World War I. It
was never part of Russia. But that truth is niggling detail to Putin.

In Putin’s essay, his bloviating fury is not aimed at NATO, but at
“the Bolsheviks,” those Commie traitors who, from day one of the
1917 Revolution, recognized Ukraine as an independent nation. Indeed,
in 1945, Ukraine won its own seat at the United Nations based on
Soviet insistence that Ukraine is a sovereign state.

Now to Putin’s _casus belli #2: the existential threat to Russia
from the West_. The West, says Putin, will not rest until Russia is
destroyed. The threat is not from NATO’s cruise missiles, but from
NATO’s _homosexuals_.

Like the Ayatollahs of Iran, to Putin and Kirill, the poison of
cultural, moral decay reaches its zenith in the vile desecration of
the nuclear family and all the intellectual freethinking, freakery and
vices that come from it.

Putin defenders in Washington, D.C. at a Rage Against The War Machine
rally holding Russian flags with the Russian Empire emblem favored by
white nationalists.
Photo: © Zach D. Roberts, February 19, 2023.

The Lord and his Patriarch are threatened — and indeed they are —
by heretical freethinking that leads from liberty to libertinism. And
like the prior restorers of the faith Grand Inquisitors and their
armed wing, the Crusaders, there can be no vote, no newspaper
chit-chat, when the word of God is defied and threatened. The
post-Gorbachev orgies are over. Pussy Riot must be jailed. It is why
Putin is the pin-up for the Christian fascist parties of the West,
from Golden Dawn in Greece, Marine Le Pen in France, to the Proudboys
and US Christian fascists, including Holocaust denier, January 6
suspect and Trump dinner guest Nicholas “Nick” Fuentes.

How odd, how tragic that some of my friends on the US Left, who will
quibble over pronouns, defend Putin who made simply advocating for
LGBTQ rights a crime and empowers “gay-hunting” pogroms.

Putin accuses the West of poisoning Russians with the
“monstrosity…that a boy can become a girl and reversely, [that]
they can play five or six gender roles.”

Read carefully Putin’s declaration of the invasion of Ukraine and
the his true cause is declared:

“[The West] sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us
their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the
attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries,
attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration
because they are contrary to human nature.”

Putin, at his grand ceremony annexing Ukraine provinces, linked it
directly to his war on Western-inspired transgender rights which he
termed, “pure Satanism.”

I suppose that is provoked by NATO as well.

* * *

In theocracies, the will of the people is not so important as the
purity of the people. How strange to me, how sad, that some of my
readers, rightly enraged at my revelations of vote suppression in
Georgia, think nothing of Putin’s unique method of electioneering.

His presidential opponent, Alexei Navalny, after Putin’s bumbling
assassins failed to kill him with the poison Novichok, is now in the
IK-6 penal gulag commonly known as the ‘Torture Prison.’ Putin’s
prior challenger, Boris Nemtsov, was shot in the back of the head,
right in front of the Kremlin.

In 2018, I exposed GOP Gov. Brian Kemp’s vicious suppression of the
Black vote in Georgia, denying Stacy Abrams the governorship. But,
Kemp didn’t shoot her in the back of the head. How can anyone decry
Kemp and excuse Putin?

And if Putin’s panzers had succeeded in occupying Kyiv and
installing his puppet, would that not be the ultimate in “vote
suppression”?

* * *

Let me quickly dispose of the remnants of the canard that NATO
expansion threatened Russia’s very existence, that Putin’s cause
is justified. Yes, Ukraine sought to enter NATO. That was _two
decades ago. And NATO turned them down_.

And how is NATO’s presence in Hungary, led by Putin’s boy-toy
Viktor Orban, an existential threat to Russia?

But what about NATO in Poland? I’ve searched and searched, and I
cannot find evidence that Poland launched its missiles into Russia.
And when Poland was part of Russia’s Warsaw Pact, would that have
justified NATO’s invasion of Russia?

And if the threat is NATO, why is Russia bombing Ukraine? Why not bomb
Poland? You know why.

Russia’s killing 130,000 in Ukraine because of a chimerical threat
from Poland is like me having a shouting match with the guy in
Apartment 2 so I knife the daughter of the guy in Apartment 4.

How can too many of my fellow progressives, who marched against
Bush’s “preemptive” war in Iraq, now find preemptive war by
Putin justified by “NATO provocation.” Thankfully, Putin has few
such useful idiots.

* * *

In 1939, after the Munich “peace” accord, when the Germans and
Russians invaded Poland, they hunted down those who supplied weapons
to the Polish Army.

They found my great-uncle Solie who supplied horses to the Polish
cavalry, horses that fought the Panzer tanks. You know how that ended.
The Nazis gathered the locals, and shot Uncle Solie in the head. Some
cheered. He was, after all, like Zelensky, a Jew.

At the Dachau Concentration Camp is a plaque that says simply: _Never
again_.

And today, it seems, some of my once-comrades have added an
asterisk: _Well, maybe, sometimes._

_ZACH D. ROBERTS AND LENI BADPENNY VON ECKARDT-MANZONI, WHO HAVE
REPORTED FROM KYIV AND KHERSON, CONTRIBUTED RESEARCH FOR THIS
ARTICLE._

_Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New
York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and the book and
documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
[[link removed]].
His latest film is Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman
[[link removed]]_

_Support The Palast Investigative Fund
[[link removed]] and keep
our work alive. Become a monthly Contributor
[[link removed]]._

_Join the Buzzflash mailing list._ [[link removed]]

* Ukraine
[[link removed]]
* Russia
[[link removed]]
* Vladimir Putin
[[link removed]]
* Adolf Hitler
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]