Joti Brar, vice-chair of the CPGB-ML, discusses the ongoing war crime propaganda operation to discredit Russia whilst at the very same time Ukraine‘s Nato-backed and directed forces are committing actual and verifiable war crimes that go unreported in western media.
Before going into some detail on the history of fascism as a tool for controlling Ukraine and attacking Russia (read the full article on this here), Comrade Joti puts the Ukraine war into its all-important context: context that has been completely disappeared by western corporate media.
It is precisely because context is the most important tool for understanding the situation in Ukraine, she says, that the disappearing of context is the chief weapon of the psychological operation being perpetrated against their own people by the western imperialist states.
This psychological operation is being carried out by the coordinated efforts of the US and British secret services in particular, in concert with the western corporate media (including big tech, which has been assiduous in removing voices of dissent and evidence of western crimes), western politicians, western academia and with the western commentariat in general, who are all singing a remarkably well-rehearsed chorus about Russian aggression, Russian imperialism, Russian barbarity … and, of course, about the unknowable and unsurpassable evil and brutality of Russia’s dictatorial president Vladimir Putin.
So what is the context that has been disappeared from our media?
- The context of Nato’s ceaseless drive to war against Russia, its rapid expansion to Russia’s borders and Ukraine’s vital role in the imperialists’ war plans;
- the context of an entire century of imperialist meddling in Ukraine;
- the context of western sponsorship of Nazis against the Soviet Union before, during and after WW2 – and then against the Russian Federation after the fall of communism
- the context of not one but two west-backed coups in the post-Soviet era to remove governments that wished to maintain friendly relations with Russia;
- the context of the recolonisation of a formerly socialist state, the corporate looting of Ukraine’s economy and the consequent immiseration of her people;
- the context that both the imperialist-imposed coup regimes (2004, 2014) were committed to facilitating western plunder of the country and were trying to cover this crime in the eyes of the people by presenting Russia and Russians as the eternal enemy of the Ukrainian people;
- the context that in order to present Russia as Ukraine’s enemy the west-backed forces were being aided and funded by western secret services to rewrite Ukraine’s history, rehabilitate WW2 Nazi collaborators, scapegoat Russian speakers, ban the Russian language and create a two-tier ethnic state;
- the context of eight years of antifascist war waged by the people of the eastern Donbass region who refused to accept the imposition of the coup government (a war in which 14,000 deaths have excited almost no interest in western media);
- the context of a seven-year failed peace process (the Minsk accords) that had been officially ‘guaranteed’ by France and Germany, but whose terms Ukraine’s fascists, armed and emboldened by the USA/Britain/Nato, had made it clear would not be allowed to be implemented and which they openly declared to be merely a delaying tactic;
- the context that when puppet president Volodymyr Zelensky made a small show of going to the border of the liberated areas to ‘talk peace’ (the only reason he had been elected, after all), the Azov battalion sent him back with a flea in his ear, demonstrating clearly that Nato would not allow the implementation of the Minsk terms;
- the context of the complete takeover of Ukraine’s economy and government by western corporations and spy agencies (see the multiple visits of then vice-president Joe Biden to the country, and the numerous revelations about his son Hunter Biden, which are merely the tip of the iceberg of western economic looting), leaving the country at the mercy of outside forces and leaving Russia with no one to talk to about matters of mutual concern;
- the context of the west trying to sabotage the trading of Russian oil and its ability to pass through Ukrainian territory;
- the context of the USA using Ukrainian territory for a biological weapons development programme;
- the context of the Zelensky regime’s repeated assertions that Ukraine planned to join Nato (whose sole European target is Russia) and was aiming also to develop its own nuclear weapons programme (which could only be aimed at Russian cities just a few minutes’ flying time from Ukraine);
- the context of the huge massing of Ukrainian armed forces on the borders of the Donbass that took place in early February, along with a massive escalation of shelling, indicating that a large-scale operation to retake the region by force was about to be launched (this has led some commentators to reason that the latest phase of the war was in fact started by the west a week before the Russian operation was launched);
- the context that the Ukrainian military’s escalating artillery bombardment of the Donbass population forced President Putin to agree to the repeated requests of the Duma to recognise the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk and to sign friendship and assistance treaties with them;
- the context that, on 23 February, the two republics asked for military assistance from Russia, leading President Putin to invoke Article 51 of the United Nations charter (which provides for mutual military assistance within the framework of a defensive alliance) the next day.
These are basic facts without which no-one can make sense of what is happening in Ukraine today. Which is precisely why these are just the facts that have been absent from endless reams of hyperbolic press copy in the west.
But facts are powerful things. In the end, they cannot help but leak out. And the bigger the lies that have been told to the people to manipulate them into believing they should ‘stand with Ukraine’, the greater will be their anger when they realise they have been duped into ‘standing with’ fascist thugs – against their own real interests, fueling further the inflation and energy crises in Britain and elsewhere … and all in order to keep the imperialist profit machine running.
