Alternate reality seems to have infected Atlanticist media as much as it has officialdom in NATO capitals, writes Prof. Madhav Nalapat
Apart from those who live in a reality manufactured by themselves, it has been some time since the concept of war was expanded to include hybrid and unconventional warfare. Judged by this standard, which is far more accurate than the narrow kinetic prism still clung on to by NATO officials, NATO has already declared war on Russia.
It is not television anchors or the usual gaggle of extreme voices of one tendency or the other who several times a day are openly admitting that their purpose is to finish off Russia through choking its economy to death. And as they are finding their lives smashed at the altar of protecting the image of NATO, it is expected by the geniuses in that organisation that tens of millions of Russian citizens, or Russian generals, will rise in revolt against President Vladimir Putin and turn to the US, the UK, France and Germany for help in choosing their new leader. So confident is NATO of such a strategy succeeding that not once but twice, Emmanuel Macron spoke to Vladimir Putin expecting him to buckle under the sanctions and other measures imposed by NATO members.
To prevent their own people from hearing the alternative point of view from such voices of reason as Boris Johnson and Jens Stoltenberg, NATO members have banned Russian media channels from beaming their transmissions across the Free World, i.e., themselves. Not that allowing RT or Sputnik would have made any difference to the policy of France and Germany, who nearly eight years ago undertook the responsibility of ensuring that the Ukrainian government implemented the Minsk Agreement. Neither Berlin nor Paris appears to have noticed that Kiev did not even try to implement the agreement reached at together with Russia, although Moscow did.
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As for the Ukrainian leadership that assumed charge of the country after President Viktor Yanukovich was deposed through “election by the street” in 2014. From then on, there was decreasing space for Russian-speaking people in Ukraine, who were regarded by Ukrainian-speaking citizens as “not European enough” to qualify for EU membership, a view that has remained unopposed by countries to the west of Ukraine.
To the uninitiated, the understandably desperate calls of President Zelensky from an “undisclosed location” in Kiev appeared to have been answered by the emphatic vote in the European Parliament to admit Ukraine into the EU post haste. Ursula von der Leyen, the German aristocrat who speaks these days on behalf of the EU, has made it all but explicit that Ukraine would get fast-tracked as a member of NATO as well as the EU once conditions permit. This is a less than opaque code for “when President Putin is toppled in Moscow the way President Yanukovich was”.
The number of times that Putin has warned that admission of Ukraine into NATO or even the EU was a red line for the Russian Federation, or the warnings of respected Atlanticist strategists including the doyen of that group, George F. Kennan, is too big to count. None of this seems to have had an impact on President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Macron and Chancellor Scholz, the most important figures in the Atlantic alliance, now newly revived now that Biden has shifted the focus of Washington away from the Indo-Pacific to what has become a secondary theatre, the Atlantic.
There will be immense damage to the US, Europe and the rest of the world by the unity in irresponsibility shown by the Atlanticist leaders in their making it impossible for Putin to avoid fighting the war that is being thrust on him by the trans-Atlantic alliance. And this is not a relatively minor conflict (in global terms) between Russia and Ukraine. It is the conflict that the EU, UK and the US are entering into with a Russia that since Putin’s takeover has become a formidable military power. If GDP could have decided the outcome of wars, Vietnam would never have prevailed over the US. It has been said that the European powers sleepwalked into the First World War, while Adolf Hitler made the Second World War inevitable from the time he took over Germany in 1933.
In 2022, the US, UK and the US are stumbling towards a third world war that would inevitably involve almost all the great powers of the globe, and cause destruction on a scale not seen before. Not to say that Putin did not warn of this, but as he is a madman in the eyes of the leaders that have so horribly misunderstood his staying power and his propensity for action, they appear to have ignored this warning, and are daily intensifying their war on Russia through more and more measures against that country on an almost daily basis.
During the period when foreign nationals were seeking to leave Yemen, it was India that stepped in to rescue US nationals. This was made possible by incoming Prime Minister Narendra Modi refusing to follow Washington’s advice to join hands against the Houthis. New Delhi maintained links with that group, and as a consequence was able to extricate not just its own nationals but US nationals as well from the conflict zone. Once the debris settles over a Ukraine neutralised through military intervention, it would be because Prime Minister Modi is resisting pressure from Joe Biden, Scott Morrison and Fumio Kishida (who should have known better) to condemn Russia for doing exactly what the country’s leaders stated they would do in the event that Kiev remained a Russophone’s paradise.
The target of the neo-Nazis that Putin is referring to are not the Jews but the Russians, and although this has long become obvious in streets across the country, such a development has been ignored by Free World media such as CNN, BBC, the Guardian and the Washington Post. During the ongoing conflict, when Indian and other students were prevented from leaving the country by a section of Ukrainian officialdom, it was only after Al Jazeera finally broke the silence that had hitherto blanketed pro-Atlanticist media outlets that an African-American correspondent of CNN finally reported about the racism that was on display in the treatment of Ukrainian officials towards those who had complexions far duskier than their own. Alternate reality seems to have infected “global” i.e., Atlanticist media as much as it has officialdom in NATO capitals.
The initial reports were that sanctions were stopping Putin from using military means, then the refrain changed to his being bogged down and losing to the Ukrainian side, and after that to his regime being on the edge of collapse. Propagandists are churning out story after story on these lines, predicting a Russian collapse. Meanwhile, the world is increasingly at risk of facing economic pain on a level last encountered during the first year of the SARS2 pandemic, a situation caused less by the disease than by the WHO-recommended responses to it, none of which succeeded in even slowing down the spread of the virus.
Once the war becomes larger as Russia reacts to NATO’s so far non-kinetic warfare against the country, the rest of the world will be collateral damage. By setting off the fuse that has ignited a war that could spiral into World War III, the elected leaders of NATO are ensuring that an electorate that would become painfully aware of what their leaders have done to them in the process of getting into a conflict that was entirely avoidable, if only they had listened to their own experts. Meanwhile, in US, UK and EU media, a form of blood lust against Putin and Russia is being created among the public through the frenzy that has been caused by their statements and actions against Russia and Putin.
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