Joe Lauria

JOE LAURIA—Unlike consumers of mainstream media — the majority of the population — readers of independent news outlets, like Consortium News, are well aware of  what those root causes are.  For doing its job by reporting on the causes of the conflict, CN and other alternative media, have been branded Russian propagandists. 

The root causes bear repeating here.  1) NATO expansion; 2) Forward deployment of NATO troops and missiles in Romania and Poland; 3) NATO training and equipping Ukraine as a proxy with the intention of bringing Ukraine into NATO; 4) the 2014 unconstitutional change of government leading to attacks against Russian speakers in the south and east of Ukraine; and 5) the outsized influence of Neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine.

JOE LAURIA—The U.S. relationship with Ukraine, and its extremists, to undermine Russia began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles. 

Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives. 

Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

JOE LAURIA—Twenty-eight years later, the Bill Clinton administration and every U.S. administration since, culminating in perhaps the most reckless, has proven the bankruptcy of U.S. policy by doing the exact opposite of what Kennedy advised, namely displaying a determination to humiliate and bully nuclear-armed Russia.

Today that most frightening moment has arrived, one dreaded by generations. The United States on Monday continued to provoke Russia with American and British missile attacks on Russian soil fired from a third country with American and British personnel, ignoring Moscow’s unequivocally clear warning  that this could lead to nuclear conflict.  

JOE LAURIA—Cassuto says Kostakidis should have made clear in her retweet of Nasrallah’s video that she did not agree or endorse it. He says Nasrallah was calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. 

In the retweeted video, the Hezbollah leader says: “Here, you don’t have a future, and from the river to the sea, the land of Palestine is for the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian people only …” 

Above that Nasrallah quote in the Censored Men retweet, Kostakidis wrote: “Israeli govt getting some of its own medicine. Israel has started something it can’t finish with this genocide.” 

JOE LAURIA—The issue at hand is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revanchism. Western critics purposely or ignorantly confuse the two to serve their interests.

Succinctly, the difference is this:  imperialists take control of a country that does not want them there and resists.  A revanchist wants to absorb former imperial lands where the population is largely the same ethnicity and welcomes the revanchist power to protect them from an outside threat.