LARRY JOHNSON—The American overseas military missionary adventures always required a villain. In Vietnam it was International Communism. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria it was international terrorism, with Iran regularly mentioned as the uber villain that needed to be stopped. Now we have a new, reconstituted villain — the Russians.
Russia, unlike the United States, has a long and bloody history of fending off invaders. That fact has conditioned the Russian people to be pretty prickly when they are confronted with a foreign threat. They dealt with Napoleon, stumbled when attacked by the Ottoman Empire, the Brits and the French in the Crimea War, and defeated the Nazis. More recently, Russia beat back Islamic insurgents in Chechnya. This history makes Russia deadly serious when it believes it is threatened by foreign invaders.
-
-
EDWARD CURTIN—There are many explanations for every public issue and personal problem under the sun that tell us why this or that is true or false. But since we live in an age of non-stop lies and propaganda, determination and the willingness to do our homework is essential.
-
KIM PETERSEN—Kishida’s “shameful subservience to the US” (as Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, put it, according to the Guardian) is odd considering that the US is the country that firebombed Tokyo and dropped nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Yet, one can deduce from Kishida’s words that Japan accepts being a vassal of the hegemon.
-
DEBORAH ARMSTRONG—Yesterday, I was honored to be interviewed by Filmmaker Regis Tremblay for his Up Close and Personal series. We talked about what it was like when I lived in the USSR in 1991, what the people were like, my TV news career, what got me started writing about the Donbas, and American apathy. Regis is best known for his film The Ghosts of Jeju, a shocking documentary about the struggle of the people of Jeju Island, S. Korea. Set in the context of the American presence in Korea after World War II, the film reveals horrible atrocities at the hands of the U.S. Military Government of Korea.
-
It is not Russia that is “wasting men and equipment”, it is the Ukraine, because no matter what the Ukraine does, it is unable to change the outcome of the current conflict. At this point it will surrender unconditionally or be utterly defeated. Adding weapons to the mix will simply cause more Ukrainian deaths and destruction, and a greater financial burden on those counties provisioning them. The US has expensive but vulnerable bases and interests all around the world. The cost of defending all of them from any possible attack is astronomical, while an attacker need to find only one weakness at one point at one time to inflict a major defeat on the USA.
