IF I WERE RUSSIAN, ON THE UKRAINE
September 4, 2014
I’m a bit appalled at current US
press coverage of events in Ukraine, where Putin is cast as the imperialist and
leader of the Russian military, who must be backed down as by moving US troops
and arms into Baltic NATO members, and by Western economic strangulation will
eventually, we hope, be forced to be reasonable and get out of Ukraine. It is one of a history of military-economic siege
of Russia that President Woodrow Wilson first declared on the heels of the
Bolshevik Revolution. After Russia lost
20 million lives to crush the Germans from the East, President Truman declared
a cold war upon them. Now we resume the
war rhetoric on one front, while Vice President Joe Biden makes a religious
declaration to send ISIL leaders to hell, in turmoil in Iraq and Syria that
began when the US invaded, killed Saddam Hussein, and blocked all members of
the former Sunni majority Baathist party from holding office. ISIL is to a large degree a creature of the
US. For the moment, it builds ties of
common military interest with Shiites in Iraq and with Iran itself. ISIL brutality is intolerable, and it is
possible that regional military alliances will help build a force for religious
tolerance and ecumenism in the region.
To me, making peace with one’s
adversaries requires empathy, a capacity to understand the reasons another
behaves as s/he does. In the face of the
one-sidedness of US press coverage, I offer my take on how I would feel if I
were Russian. I would accept President
Eisenhower’s prophecy as come true, that today a US-led global
military-corporate economy is gaining supremacy, and with the fall of the
Soviet military-economic Union, the pressure grows for Western capitalists to
penetrate the economy of Mother Russia, once again at its borders, a land where
so many died defending the motherland against the German military-industrialists. From Ukraine to the Baltic, former parts of
the Soviet military-economic union have fallen to the German-dominated European
Union.
In a sensible world, NATO and
the EU and Russia would have agreed already in negotiation with the Ukrainian
government that Ukraine become a Switzerland of Eastern Europe, unaligned
militarily and economically, its neutrality guaranteed. It is not too late for the West to consider
backing off offering Ukraine NATO membership, and to let Ukraine negotiate its
own trilateral trade agreements with Russia and the EU without belonging to the
EU.
I find the US still now, in 2014,
once again leading the military-economic charge to strangle and isolate the
Russian economy, and the Ukrainian government bombarding and killing many of
its own people. I find the US once
against trying to spread the growth of global privatization and corporate
accumulation of wealth and militarily-backed power. If I were Russian, the ownership of my
motherland’s own means of production, of its own economy, would be at stake, threatened
to be imposed and enforced by NATO on behalf of predatory Western
capitalism. Coming from the US as I do,
I empathize, and wish my leaders and media would get their moral high horses
and let Ukraine have her independence. Love
and peace, hal
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