While Putin is hardly a 'good guy' our news is in hyper-spin mode right now. It's madness watching it all unfold. It's surreal as we watch the WWI commemorations taking place at the same time. Whether we're talking about the tensions in Eastern Europe or the wars in Syria and Palestine, we are still haunted by its ghosts.
Apart from a handful of news outlets the whole Russian-Ukrainian crisis is being misrepresented. One of the key ways to do this is to ignore the context.
I've written extensively about US aggression toward Russia since the 1990's. Yeltsin was a corrupt joke but perhaps his parting shot was to groom Vladimir Putin for the job. It was his way of spitting in the face of the Americans he had befriended but who in the end betrayed and used him. Putin has certainly been a source of grief for American aggression and expansion. It's interesting to speculate how things might have gone if Yeltsin or someone like him had remained in power throughout the 2000's.
I noted the other day that our media was having a fit about Russian missile tests which violated the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty in the 1980's.
They neglected to mention that Bush unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002!
The Nixon-Brezhnev détente was the foundation stone that ended the arms race and set the stage for future negotiation. The Reagan-Gorbachev meeting couldn't have happened without the ABM treaty.
To do that to Russia in 2002 couldn't have set a clearer signal. The post Cold War peace is over. We are not your friend.
Putin got the message and has acted accordingly.
Our media won't even report the story.
Though I do not in any way endorse Lew Rockwell and many of the ideas he promotes, Pilger's recent piece found at his website is well worth the read:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/08/john-pilger/big-brothers-war/
