America is once again drawing Britain into conflict
Freedom journalist Steve Johnson warns against being duped by our Government's interpretation of ‘right' and ‘wrong' and our media's deliberate anti-Russian propaganda about the conflict in Georgia.
THE long-standing Labour and Tory policy of blindly following the wishes of American Presidents and entangling our country in unwise foreign alliances could just involve our country in a major - possibly nuclear - war.
If obscure former Soviet republic and now American client state Georgia, had waited a few months until it had signed up to NATO before picking a fight with its Russian neighbour, our own NATO membership would have dragged us into war with the second-biggest nuclear-armed power on Earth over an obscure patch of the Caucasus mountains.
Georgia is one of a ring of countries surrounding Russia in which the Americans have installed puppet governments following CIA-sponsored colour-coded 'revolutions'. It was Rose in Georgia, Orange in the Ukraine and so on. Washington then trained and funded these client states' armed forces, and began a process of signing them up to NATO and the EU.
The aim is to encircle and ‘contain' Russia, which has had the temerity to elect a nationalist government. As it already has with former socialist countries in Eastern Europe such as Poland and the Czech Republic, NATO membership then leads to US military bases on their territory and is leading to American missiles bordering Russia. This was something the US understandably nearly went to war with the old USSR over when Moscow tried the same trick in Cuba in 1962.
Georgia is especially valuable to the US as it now hosts the only pipeline connecting oil and gas fields in Central Asia with Western Europe that does not pass through Russian territory, the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipe, which links the oil of Muslim Azerbaijan with another US puppet state, Muslim Turkey, whose government, though Islamist, has been careful not to offend Washington.
Allegations of dictatorship and human rights abuses against Georgian leader, US-educated lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili, have received curiously little media publicity in the West, but then that is because he has sent Georgian troops to take part in the American occupation of oil-rich Iraq.
However Saakashvili jumped the gun by attacking South Ossetia before he had been signed up to NATO. The Ossetians, one of dozens of tiny peoples inhabiting the Caucasus region, had their homeland cut in half by the old Soviet border. When Georgia broke away from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ossetians wanted to stay loyal Russian citizens. Most of those trapped inside Georgia took Russian passports and refused to accept Georgian rule. For many years Georgia left them alone . . until now. Thinking he had US military backing in the bag, Georgian dictator Saakashvili launched a devastating attack on the Ossetians, and the Russian peacekeeping forces to whose presence Georgia had previously agreed.
Hardly surprisingly, Russia hit back to protect its own citizens and soldiers. Whereupon the Georgian leader broadcast an appeal for Western help, in American-accented English, with a photograph of US President G.W. Bush on one side of him and an EU flag on the other which was blatant propaganda as Georgia is not a member of the EU.
Had Saakashvili waited actually to join NATO before counting on its help in his armed adventures, Britain would have been compelled under the provisions of the NATO treaty to joining the US and many other countries in a war on Russia, with incalculable and potentially horrendous consequences, unleashing the nightmare of nuclear confrontation we had thought died with the Cold War (as should NATO as well as the Warsaw Pact!). Millions of Britons could have died over a quarrel between two tiny tribes on the other side of Europe.
It is often said that 'nationalism causes wars', but if nationalism ruled Britain we would keep well clear of this conflict. As we would have kept out of all the wars over the last ten years into which the liberal internationalists Blair and Brown have dragged us at the behest of their American masters. Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and so on. Thus keeping hundreds of brave young Britons from giving their lives heroically without benefitting our country in the least.
In this as in other such issues, nationalists would have kept the peace. Refusing to surrender our sovereignty to alliances that can drag us into wars against our interests - as nearly happened over South Ossetia and did happen disastrously over a Serbian nationalist shooting an Austrian Archduke in Bosnia in 1914.
Putting the interests of one's own country and people first - especially where, as in this case, we can sympathise with our fellow patriots in Russia wanting to protect their own folk and worried about a ring of hostile puppet states being built around their homeland - is what nationalism is all about. Even if we did not see kindred spirits in Messrs Putin and Medvedev who now lead it, Britain's interests in regard to Russia would to us be governed by two principles of self-interest.
In the short term, thanks to Tory and Labour Governments squandering the North Sea reserves that could have bought us time to become independent of such needs, we are now dependent on Russian gas to heat our homes and power our cities. Making our country dependent for such a vital resource on another nation and then deliberately annoying it, both by supporting American provocations and by safehousing Russian gangsters like Boris Berezovsky wanted for crimes in their own country , as Blair and Brown with full Tory backing have done, merely shows the lack of vision and intellect of those now governing Britain!
In the long-term, Britain, like the other nations of Europe, needs a strong and friendly Russia as a bulwark against the Third World hordes to Russia's South and East. Whom famine, overpopulation, climate change and resource exhaustion will some time this century push west and north in their billions, as happened on a smaller scale in the last days of the Roman Empire.
Once already, 700 years ago, Russian bravery and sacrifice saved the rest of Europe from the orc-hordes of the East - Genghis Khan's Mongols. Russia paid a terrible price - 250 years of slavery under Mongol tyranny. And got small thanks from the rest of us for it, alas.
To use an analogy from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, if Britain is the Shire, Moscow is Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard warding us from the Easterling hordes and the darkness they would draw over all the Western lands. When the time comes for the Men of the West to stand and fight, Russia must stand with us. The laughter of the Chinese and Indians will be our only reward if instead stupid and outdated alliances and America's greed for oil drag us into a war with Russia instead. Perhaps not over Georgia this time - but another Washington puppet-regime on Russia's borders, in the Ukraine, which is also being groomed for NATO membership too . . .