Eric Zuesse

Commonly, NATO is presented as being a defensive alliance, but that is fundamentally a lie, which might as well have been written and paid-for by ‘defense’ (offense) contractors such as Lockheed Martin and BAE, whose profits have been soaring right now with all of the tens of billions of dollars of weapons that are being shipped into Ukraine paid for with taxpayers’ money, and whose sales are entirely or mainly to the U.S. Government and to its allied governments — not to consumers, such as a regular corporation’s sales are. Its profits all go to those weapons-firms and their investors. If those investors control the U.S. Government, they control their markets. They’ve learned how to do that; so, the U.S. Government today spends around half of the entire world’s ‘defense’ expenditures.

For example, there is an extremely popular video-talk, which was posted to youtube on May 21st and received 283,975 views within its first five days, 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7qNd2U1i4g&t=1

and it received, during that short time, over four thousand viewer-comments, almost all of which were favorable, such as

I usually don’t comment, but I had to, after this excellent performance. Being swedish, I was shocked about the amount of research you must have put in, and the general in-depth knowledge on your part. Just outstanding. Myself, always been against large military spending, actually switched from ”against” to ”pro Nato” membership, like most of my fellow swedes of course, as soon as they entered Ukraine.”

and the talk’s conclusion, 53 minutes into it, near its very end, was this group of (apparently, widely accepted) lies and distortions:

The progressive democracies — they belong in the NATO camp. … Membership doesn’t mean that the Americans are going to station nukes in their country. It doesn’t mean 100,000 U.S. marines basing themselves outside Helsinki. It doesn’t mean Abrams tanks based in Karelia facing St. Petersburg. But it does mean that NATO is getting stronger, particularly as a result of the contributions that the Finns would make in the case of any large war in Europe. … I think as a result of that the risk of war probably falls, and that’s the whole damn point of NATO, at least if you don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. The whole idea is to make an alliance that is so overwhelmingly powerful, with such an ironclad defensive guarantee, that no one’s going to bum it. That no one’s going to mess with it … because the risk of conventional destruction is just too high.

That talk-video presented the NATO line — hook, line, and sinker: it was full of false assumptions that are being endlessly presented to their gullible public and that wouldn’t be credible to anyone if they were to be overtly presented by self-acknowledged paid propagandists for the U.S.-and-allied ‘defense’-contractors who derive the profits from this bloodshed and destruction. But here is the reality, which you can easily verify for yourself, because, unlike any video-talk or any mere talk in which the assertions cannot be made instantly confirmable or disconfirmable by the hearer, by means of that person’s clicking onto links that are in that form of presentation, to see precisely what the evidencebehind its various allegations is, this is going to be a written-out and online article, by means of which you and all readers can do that, via the links that are being supplied here, and so the standard of veracity here is infinitely higher than in any such mere talk-video, or any other type of merely talked (aural) presentation (which, consequently, normally tend to be full of falsehoods that appeal to the speaker’s given audience):

Neither Finland nor Sweden will be in any danger of attack by Russia UNLESS the given country joins NATO — and THAT danger will be World War III and very definitely, as member(s) of NATO. Finland and/or Sweden will then be in very real danger of being attacked by Russia’s nuclear weapons — something that has never been the case before, regarding Russia’s military posture toward either of those countries. Ukraine is being attacked by Russia’s conventional weapons precisely because Ukraine has recently committed itself to joining NATO. Russia’s attack has actually resulted from that.

History is essential for Finns and Swedes to understand in order for them to evaluate the situation here in any rational way, and this will require their knowing what has happened in Ukraine ever since 2011, and going back even earlier, to 24 February 1990. It is very different from what has been the situation regarding either Finland or Sweden:

At the very same time when Russia ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 by ending its communism, and by ending its NATO-mirroring Warsaw Pact military alliance, and by allowing its formerly U.S.S.R. member-nations peacefully to become independent nations, so that Russia would itself become simply another independent nation seeking to be peacefully surrounded by other peace-seeking nations, the United States Government secretly instructed its NATO allies (vassal-nations), starting with Germany on 24 February 1990, that NATO would continue on but with the intent now being a total ultimate U.S.-and-allied conquest of Russia. And even leading American nuclear scientists have since concluded that this is the U.S. Government’s ultimate goal: to win a WW III against Russia by blitz-invading it.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration started, by no later than June 2011, to plan a coup in Ukraine to transform that neutralist nation (which has a 1,625 mile border with Russia) into a rabidly anti-Russian onewhich would be the best-situated nation of all nations (after it becomes a NATO member) for America to position nuclear missiles there — it would be a mere 5-minute missile-flight-time away from blitz-annihilating Moscow — too fast for Russia’s command to be able to launch its retaliatory weapons. Finland in NATO would be the second-biggest national-security threat against Russia: 7 minutes away. Because it has the second-nearest border to Moscow, Finland is second ONLY to Ukraine, as being the Russia-bordering nation that would pose the  biggest  danger to Russia if added to NATO.

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America threatened to initiate nuclear war against the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union would position nuclear missiles in Cuba, 1,131 miles from Washington DC, which would be about 10 minutes away from blitz-nuking Washington (but would have required much longer to reach Washington back in 1962).

Consequently, Russia is now in at least as dangerous a situation if Finland joins NATO as America was in during the Cuban Missile Crisis when America was threatening to launch a nuclear invasion against Russia if the U.S.S.R. placed missiles in Cuba. This is why Russia invaded Ukraine (on 24 February 2022, after, on 7 January 2022,  both America and its NATO said no to Russia’s offer to negotiate a peace-settlement), so as to protect itself from a danger that is even bigger now to Russians than Soviet missiles in Cuba would have been to Americans in 1962.

Unlike the situation in 1962 when both America and the Soviet Union, during the Cuba Missile Crisis, were willing to negotiate a peaceful end to that Crisis, Russia is willing to (and tried to) negotiate a peaceful settlement this time around, but America is not willing, and has repeatedly refused to accept Russia’s demands, which are essential for Russia’s national security. Clearly, America is heading for conquest.

Here is how fast and drastically America’s control over Ukraine’s government and news-media transformed that country from being a friendly-to-Russia but geopolitically neutral Russia-bordering nation, prior to Obama’s grab of it via his 2014 Ukrainian coup, to becoming a rabidly hostile-to-Russia, and pro-U.S., nation, afterwards:

During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

This shows what happens after a country’s government becomes couped and its billionaires and their media propagandize for the post-coup regime. Elections become s‘elections’ by the billionaires so that the installed government will serve the billionaires who are allied with the billionaires that actually control the country which has actually capturedthat couped nation for its billionaires (in this case, perhaps mainly the ones who control the ‘defense’ contractors).

The video-talker’s statement that “I think as a result of that the risk of war probably falls, and that’s the whole damn point of NATO, at least if you don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories,” assumes that there is no interconnected network of extremely wealthy individuals who are actually controlling the Government, but his viewpoint ignores the reality that politicians can be bought and sold, and can sell themselves in order to stay in ‘power’ (as puppets to those billionaires) even if his/her top financial backers have actually s‘elected’ them to ‘lead’ the country. But that assumption (that the Government isn’t profoundly corrupt) seems unrealistic, in light of history — especially post-WW-II American history.

On 31 March 2014, the Poynter Institute’s ‘non-partisan’ “PolitiFact” ‘truthfulness’-rating website headlined “Viral meme says United States has ‘invaded’ 22 countries in the past 20 years”, and rated that “meme” as being plain “False,” by, for example, their not including as having been and still being an “invasion” and military occupation, America’s invasion and occupation of Syria, and saying — blatantly falsely — that “the United States has not committed troops during the ongoing civil war in Syria,” and by ignoring that those U.S. troops and advisors were providing the training and direction and armaments to the imported hundred thousand or so jihadists who constituted the vast majority of the ‘freedom fighters’ to overthrow Bashar al-Assad there. (Separatist Kurds in Syria’s north were the other force to Overthrow Assad.) The “PolitiFact” article mentioned “Yemen” only twice, in passing, as “Evacuation or protection of American citizens,” and as “drone attacks against alleged terrorist targets in countries such as Yemen. While these are clearly aggressive acts by the United States, they do not fit any conventional definition of invasion.” Well, America didn’t “invade” Ukraine, either, but instead grabbed it by a very bloody coup, which sparked then a civil war, which continued for eight years and finally produced a Russian invasion.

There is no similar history with either Finland or Sweden, and they will be inviting their own destruction if they join NATO. If they don’t join NATO, then they’ll have nothing to worry about from Russia. But the U.S.-and-allied armaments firms and their owners will be delighted if one or both of them do join.

NATO and the U.S. and its allied governments routinely lie to the entire world, and are not held to account by anybody for doing so, even when the lies are ludicrously obvious. Here are just two examples: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”  “NATO has tried to build a partnership with Russia, developing dialogue and practical cooperation in areas of common interest. Practical cooperation has been suspended since 2014 in response to Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, which NATO will never recognise.”

NATO will never recognize that Crimea is (and between 1783 and 1954 was) part of Russia, not (as it had been during only 1954-2014) an autonomous region within Ukraine (autonomous because Crimeans were outraged at Nikita Khrushchev’s arbitrary transfer of them to Ukraine, which Crimeans overwhelmingly rejected) because NATO wants their weapons-sales to soar even higher — and because harping on their Crimea lies is a good way for them to keep up the hatred by their suckers.

Furthermore, notwithstanding the eulogy to NATO, which was addressed to Finns and Swedes, and which that talk-video linked-to near the start of the present article delivered, multiple international polls have shown consistently that America scores way at the top globally in national publics’ ratings of which nations pose the greatest threat to world peace. Only in Europe has Russia been feared a bit more than America. Perhaps that’s because so many trillions of U.S. dollars have been spent, via the CIA and many ‘charitable’ foundations, propagandizing there, against Russia. But do Finns and Swedes really want to ally themselves with the world’s most aggressive and war-making and couping and sanctioning country? If they do, they will earn the results, which won’t be good.

NOTE: The above article had, starting in late May, been submitted for publication to leading Finnish and Swedish news-media as an exclusive, but was rejected without explanation by each of them, and is therefore now being distributed to all English-language newsmedia, especially in the hope that ultimately it will be able to be accessed by residents of those two countries.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.