Dissecting the cliches of Anglo-American ethnocentrism
Former US ambassador calls on Britain and the USA to ‘come to the rescue’ of the world ... ‘again’.
Robert Wood Johnson, US ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2017 to 2021, recently wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph entitled Britain and America must save Europe from humanitarian disaster. One should expect a former US ambassador to know better than to refer to the USA as ‘America’, but this is a mere hint of ethnocentricity as compared with what follows in his text. (5 August 2022)
The article’s subtitle reads: “For decades, our two countries have come to the aid of humanity in its darkest hours. We must do so again,” but it will soon be made clear that humanity has no interest in receiving any more of such ‘aid’.
Johnson’s article began with an appeal for Ukrainian refugees:
“My family and I recently visited Bursa Międzyszkolna, a boarding house in Poland which approximately 100 weary Ukrainian women and children today call home. Bringing nothing more than a suitcase with them, they have left behind their lives as well as their husbands and fathers, who have mostly stayed behind to fight for Ukraine.
“Bursa Międzyszkolna is anticipating many more refugees, but consistent aerial fire has prevented the expected arrivals from crossing the border. In the meantime, its inhabitants are suffering, and its funds are running out.”
An interesting fact about Ukrainian refugees in Poland is that while there was a large initial influx following the launch of Russia’s special military operation on 24 February, half of those who had come went back to Ukraine for the Easter holidays in April. Of course, many would have come initially out of fear and uncertainty about what might happen, but subsequently found out that it was safe to go back to their hometowns.
Whilst it is true that the men who are left behind to fight in the Ukrainian army are suffering tremendously, those who are not sent to the front, if they are from western or central Ukraine, are living in relative peace, for the simple reason that the war is not taking place in most of Ukraine, it is taking place mainly along the Donbass front. Consequently, the refugees who are really fleeing the horrors of war come from these eastern areas – and they are mainly heading east to Russia.
This inconvenient information is ignored in western media, since it leads on to the equally inconvenient fact that refugees from the Donbass feel safer in Russia since Ukraine has been waging a genocidal war against its eastern, Russian-speaking citizens for eight long and bloody years. From their perspective, Russia has finally come to save them.
The refugees in Poland, for the most part, come from the untouched parts of Ukraine that have as yet not seen any war, death or destruction. Many have not even had a power cut or internet outage. Nevertheless, in Poland they have received free housing, healthcare and transport, among other benefits.
It would be great if the same kindness were shown to all refugees. Unfortunately, it is not, as we saw last year when the army was sent to forcefully prevent a few thousand middle-eastern and Afghan refugees crossing the border from Belarus. These refugees were pepper-sprayed, water-cannoned, and forced to spend weeks in a cold damp forest without food, water or shelter.
The special open-armed reception and perks for Ukrainian refugees must therefore be a way of rewarding them for believing the west and fighting Russia – and, most importantly, to stop them inquiring into why they must give up their husbands and fathers so that the imperialists can continue to line their pockets.
As far as the ex-ambassador’s claim that “consistent aerial fire has prevented the expected arrivals from crossing the border”, it is a straight out lie. Throughout the entire duration of the special military operation to date, here has not been a single report of aerial fire near the Polish border that could prevent anyone crossing. The only times when civilians have found themselves trapped somewhere and unable to escape have been when the Ukrainian army threatened to shoot them if they did and used them as human shields.
But these things have only been happening to the aforementioned Russian-speaking Ukrainians who live in the east, and who often wait desperately in truly terrifying conditions for weeks on end for their Russian liberators – trapped in basements, hungry, thirsty, and scared for their lives. But these are refugees in whom Mr Johnson and the western media have no interest – the real victims of Nato’s proxy war against Russia.
Mr Johnson’s article continued by detailing the numbers of refugees taken by different European countries, but he omits the country that has taken the most Ukrainian refugees even according to the BBC, which is Russia.
Not only has Russia taken more Ukrainian refugees, but those it is taking care of are the ones from the war-ravaged Donbass. Russia has provided vast amounts of aid to these fleeing civilians, ranging from emergency food packages to PTSD therapy for children – caring for people with serious problems that have arisen from living through a grinding war against nazi beasts who have been humiliating and torturing civilians for pleasure.
These refugees were caught in a war against misanthropic Ukrainian armed forces that refuse to acknowledge the Geneva Convention, refuse to stop committing war crimes, and have been guilty of the worst atrocities in Europe since their role models, the Ukrainian Nazis of WW2, ran rampant.
Johnson went on: “Already, the UK government has generously contributed £220m to help relieve the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe since the second world war. I, for one, am profoundly thankful to the British people. Now Americans and Britons must continue to come to the rescue.”
Without wishing to downplay the generosity and open-heartedness of the British and American people, who undoubtedly support one cause or another with the best of intentions, we can’t help but point out that any mention of the ‘generosity’ of the British government in the context of the Ukraine war, when it is this government that is in large part responsible for the war, just as it was in large part responsible for WW2, is disgustingly hypocritical to say the least.
Americans and Britons have never ‘come to the rescue’. Not through any lack of will to do so, but because of the imperialist states that govern them. They have only caused death and destruction elsewhere to serve their rulers’ class interests.
As a German reporter recently highlighted, trucks with humanitarian aid drive through Poland to the Ukrainian border, then they dump all the aid on the side of the road and load the truck with weapons to take to Ukraine. This is where the generous ‘aid’ of western do-gooders is going: to help Nato fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.
The following paragraph exposed some cliches and debunked revisions of history that absolutely must be dealt with thoroughly and in detail:
“As a former US ambassador to the UK, I know that the Special Relationship is fundamentally an alliance built on an abiding respect for human dignity. For decades, our two countries have come to humanity’s aid in its darkest hours. We fought to free Europe from Nazi tyranny, confronted terrorists after 9/11, and have aided the Syrian people in this century.”
Once we get past the initial sentence, in which Johnson invoked his experience as an Anglo-American imperialist stooge to try to convince the reader that Anglo-American imperialism is built on “an abiding respect for human dignity”, we arrive at this outrageous distortion of history: “We fought to free Europe from Nazi tyranny.”
The unpalatable fact is that US and British imperialism actually helped to create the Nazi tyranny by giving Germany consent to ignore the Versailles treaty, giving her the Rhine region needed for her heavy industry, investing vast amounts of capital in her military-industrial complex (see the Dawes plan), and feeding her more and more of Europe as part of the famous policy of ‘appeasement’ until she was powerful enough to take on the Soviet Union.
All this was done whilst ignoring the constant requests from the Soviet Union to form collective security pacts with Britain and France that might forestall German aggression.
Incidentally. the Third Reich was like a prototype of the European Union – a Frankenstein’s monster where Frankenstein was Anglo-American imperialism.
The crushing and partition of the Soviet Union had been, after all, the number one priority of imperialists everywhere since the October Revolution. The history of Europe over the past century is defined by this. The war of intervention in Russia, the Polish-Soviet war, WW2, the cold war and now the war in Ukraine all share this similar objective (even if now it’s the Russian Federation and not the Soviet Union).
As Winston Churchill put it, speaking in the House of Commons in 1949: “I think the day will come when it will be recognised without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilised world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.” (26 January 1949)
Churchill also famously praised Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini and supported Spain’s fascist General Franco.
Britain’s war with Germany was a superficial one, designed to maintain appearances. The Germans had assurances that a second front would not be opened, allowing them to focus their efforts on the eastern (anti-Soviet) front without worrying about their rear.
France, as is well-known, caved in early on and joined the Nazi war effort entirely, whereas the USA’s policy was wonderfully summed up in 1941 by future president Harry Truman when he said: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”
When the USSR had convincingly defeated the Nazi war machine, was pushing it back to Berlin, and was clearly about to liberate the whole of Europe – only then did the US and Britain open a second front. This was not to aid in the Soviets’ antifascist war, but to prevent them from liberating western Europe, to protect those Nazi remnants they could get control of, and to protect capitalism and private property.
This explains why Nazis were kept in power in west Germany after the war, and why so many were taken care of so well in the west – much as the Ukrainian refugees are now. The imperialists took care of the Nazis because they needed them to help continue waging their war against the USSR, which in its next phase became known as the cold war.
In other words, the second world war was just one (titanic) battle in which the Soviet Union defeated global imperialism; that war between the forces of anti-imperialism and those of imperialism is ongoing to this day.
Another important revelation came when, as part of the Nazi war crimes disclosure act, the CIA declassified a memorandum from 1953 on the renewal of Project Aerodynamic (originally approved on 31 June 1951).
This document stated that the purpose of the project was: “To provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UBVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in western Europe and the United States, and other organisations such as OUN …”
This is incriminating for the USA since the organisations that it was exploiting and expanding to fight the USSR were Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, guilty of some of the worst atrocities committed in WW2. The German SS apparently used them to commit the crimes they didn’t have the stomach for – like the killing of children.
Knowing the sheer terror that the Ukrainian nazis have been inflicting on the people of the Donbass since 2014, following in the footsteps of their predecessors, and knowing that the 2014 coup was backed and led by the USA, using its nazis as foot soldiers, there can be little doubt that the USA and Britain never fought to ‘free Europe from Nazi tyranny’.
As participants on the winning side in WW2, however, they have been extremely adept in manipulating history.
The next cliche of Mr Johnson’s is hardly worth dealing with. Who does not know that the 9/11 attacks were conducted by Saudi Arabians, but that the USA and Nato used them as a nonsensical pretext to invade Afghanistan? Even though Osama Bin Laden, who they were supposedly searching for, was well known to have been hiding in Pakistan at the time.
Who does not know that they used the momentum provided by this pretext to invade Iraq, and then Libya and Syria, based on lies? Did Saudi Arabia, the real sponsor of terror and US ally, ever pay for 9/11? No, instead the US and Britain continue to help Saudi Arabia wage a genocidal war against the people of Yemen that gets hardly any news coverage.
How about Syria? Did the US and Britain ‘aid’ the Syrian people recently? No, they funded, armed and provided military assistance and intelligence to branches of Isis, the Free Syrian Army, SDF, etc to wage war against the popular Syrian government. They faked a chemical gas attack using these forces in Syria to give Nato an excuse for its bombing campaigns.
In all, approximately half a million Syrians were killed because of the US and British-backed jihadi invasion – and to this day Washington continues to steal over 80 percent of Syria’s oil output every single day, as it illegally occupies the county’s northern oil-producing region. With more than $100,000,000,000 of oil stolen thus far according to Syria’s oil ministry, the death toll keeps rising – but all is well and good because Mr Johnson has rebranded this bloodthirsty piracy as ‘aid’!
The ex-ambassador then went on to blabber some more about Ukrainian refugees and how much the USA and Britain are doing to help them, before lamenting that the ‘news cycle’ is coming to an end – presumably because there are only so many lies workers can consume before they become cynical and lose interest. Also, of course, because Taiwan was next on the ‘news agenda’.
The next statement from Mr Johnson was very revealing indeed. He told us: “This mission is a deeply personal one for me and my family. My wife Suzanne’s father emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1947, marrying her mother, a first-generation Ukrainian-American.
“Seeking to honour our heritage and better understand how the war has shattered Ukrainian lives, our family travelled to Poland this summer. At one orphanage, children who ought to be at home in Kiev or Mariupol played with my sons Brick and Jack.
“Their faces boasted the widest smiles, despite all the turmoil they have endured. But beyond that moment of playtime fun, it was clear that a flood of sorrows is overwhelming Ukrainians who have fled the war.”
Given what we know about the USA and British sheltering of Ukrainian Nazis after WW2, it is extremely likely that Mr Johnson’s father-in-law was one of their number, and that his mother-in-law was at least a sympathiser. This leads to the high possibility that his wife Suzanne has nazi ideas – and if Mr Johnson has married into this family, and was given the position of US ambassador to Britain, then his ‘deeply personal’ interest in helping the nazi side in the current war against Russia becomes perfectly comprehensible.
The sorrow he describes among Ukrainians could be explained by the fact that they are losing the war, and that what is left of their country is being destroyed by the Ukrainian nazis in the process of losing this war. Not only do they insist on throwing even more men and materiel into battles they can’t possibly win, forcing the Russians to bombard the positions in which they are holed up, but scorched earth tactics of their own are commonplace.
Mr Johnson went on to talk about the kindness of Poles, and all the different charities and ways to support Ukraine. Spending some considerable time in Poland has given this author the opportunity to visit and carefully study the information provided at concentration camps.
At Majdanek camp, for instance, there is a plaque with an interesting story about how, during the jewish holocaust, British and US societies had begun to hear about the horrors of the camps. but their governments refused to acknowledge them in case this should give power to the demand for a second front. In the absence of official action, charities were set up to allow well-meaning citizens to donate their money to help feed the starving and malnourished prisoners of the concentration camp.
Where did this money go? Straight into the pockets of the Nazis who were running the camps, of course, on the assumption that they would use it to provide more food to the prisoners. What was the result in practice? The Nazis continued to provide the same amount of food to the prisoners, but now had a slightly bigger budget for running their holocaust and war efforts. In effect, charities were helping to subsidise the holocaust.
Sometimes the worst things can be done with the best intentions. To what extent ignorance excuses wrongdoing is a matter for each to settle with their own conscience.
Of course, the very existence of ‘charity’ presupposes a situation whereby some have an excess that they can afford to give away whilst others are forced to rely on this ‘good will’ for survival. The existence of such a situation in the first place is what really needs to be addressed.
Objectively, the role of charity is not to fix the situation but to facilitate and prolong it. Charity is a way for the better-off to salve their consciences by applying a small sticking plaster that – at best – might serve to disguise the worst of the problems lurking beneath.
Mr Johnson offered a long list of ways to ‘help’ Ukraine, but where is this money actually going? It is going to prolong the war: to ensure that more Ukrainians killed and more citizens are tortured. It is going to subsidise Nato’s nazi project in Ukraine.
Finally, Mr Johnson revealed his own nazi sympathies in his closing paragraph:
“In these dark days, I am reminded of a signal moment in history when the United States and the United Kingdom joined forces to help a people suffering at the hands of Russian aggression. In 1948 and 1949, our nations airlifted 2.3 million tons of food, fuel, and supplies to West Berlin, defying a Soviet blockade of the city.
“Just as Britons and Americans came to the rescue then, so we must continue to do so now. The Ukrainian people are depending on us.”
This is a damning indictment of Mr Johnson as well as of the USA and Britain. His statement confirms what was previously mentioned in this article, that is, that the USA and Britain were doing everything they could to protect the Nazis from the Soviets, to help them lick their wounds and regroup under US and British supervision, to bide their time and build strength and prepare to be used again in the future against the USSR.
In case anyone is wondering whether the Anglo-American imperialists cared about civilians, one only has to look up the bombing of Dresden – a brutal and totally unnecessary massacre of German civilians perpetrated by British and American bombers before the Red Army got to the city.
The official excuse for this barbaric blitzkrieg was that the bombers were taking out German railway infrastructure; in reality, the imperialists wanted to destroy the city’s industrial capacity and rail infrastructure, to keep postwar Germany down and to stop it falling into the hands of the Soviets. In this case, they were doing the earth scorching for the Nazis.
So much historical revision has been dealt with in this article, and this is necessitated by the times in which we live, when imperialism is not yet vanquished but is visibly in decline. It is because the winners write history that we have stooges like Mr Johnson spouting such blatant lies, and that these are unquestioningly broadcast across western mainstream media.
But what is in decay will die, and what is growing is invincible. We look forward to a future in which the workers of the world will share their own history, from their own perspective, without need for distortion. When the misanthropic ideology that stems from the need to justify capitalist exploitation and imperialist brigandage will be a thing of the past, and when humanity will flourish as never before.
