PressTV – NATO spooks and phantom enemies.
Nov 08, 2014
We can expect more Russian specters to haunt British shores in the coming years, as the valiant so-called “west” wages a fevered and completely unjustified Cold War 2.0 against enemies who don’t exist.
Recently, on 29 October, the Royal Air Force swept to the rescue when a supposed Russian bomber came into British airspace. The bomber, which the RAF even threatened to destroy, turned out to be a Latvian Soviet-era cargo plane, on a routine flight.
Latvia, which used to be part of the Soviet Union, is officially a member of NATO. Officially, that means, an ally of the United States and the United Kingdom. This seems to have been of little interest to the RAF, who threatened to shoot down the poor plane and thereby do more damage to their own supposed ally than the Soviet (now Russian) menace ever threatened to do.
The incident in British airspace follows a similarly pointless chase in the Baltic Sea for a Russian submarine that never materialized. Foolishly, Sweden’s navy wasted huge amounts of military spending chasing a supposed underwater intruder due to rumor and hearsay. Media were quick to identify the intruder as a Russian vessel, despite there being no evidence to support the existence of any vessel whatsoever, and no reason for a dispute between Russia and Sweden. The sole beneficiary of the entire situation is the United States, which seeks to enlarge and continue its military occupation of Europe and will invent any excuses and any enemies it needs to justify its presence.
Rather than being the huge embarrassment that it should have been for the UK’s paranoid armed forces, the mistaken interception of the Latvian plane was described in some media sources as evidence in itself of the growing Russian threat to the United Kingdom. In other words, the very fact that we can’t find evidence of a threat is being submitted as evidence of a threat. This is part of a larger trend in which Britain and other so-called “allies”, in their sycophantic attempts to impress the powerful US regime, risk more military and political damage to themselves than any enemy inflicts on them.
Amidst the bogus “threats” the United States is feeding us, Britain can have no confidence in the commitment of its armed forces to protect British citizens. The careerist, spineless puppets in command of Britain’s forces place supreme value on American lives and American interests rather than British, and are willing to endanger and sacrifice their own people in pointless wars to impress this single foreign regime.
The United States is not an ally of Britain, but a ruthless and capricious enemy that has infiltrated its way to the top of Britain’s once-capable armed forces as they deteriorate under US control. From crashed US military jets and recklessly misplaced nukes, to the wasted soldiers’ lives in Afghanistan and innocent bystanders shot dead by terrorist “counter-terrorism” police, the “special relationship” with the US endangers and kills more Brits than it saves.
Neither Russia nor the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIL) terrorist group are having a deleterious effect on Britain’s security, but Britain’s unthinking cooperation with the US is eroding our security and killing Brits. The same can be said of all the major NATO “allies”, who are deployed as human shields by the United States to reduce its military casualties in its reckless wars of aggression and expansion.
The kind of negative, fear-based politics that place a supposedly “independent” media in the same camp as the paranoid state are rivaled only by similarly vile collusion between the press and the warmongers following the 9/11 attacks. Psychopathic war hawks at the top of British and US media and government are once again laboring to legitimize their bigotry, hate, ignorance and fear as instruments of public policy, now just as they did against the Muslim community in the post-9/11 political climate.
The politics of fear are not new, and they include the same tactics today as we have already seen in the so-called war on terror. In his award-winning 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis explained how fantasy enemies have been used, in the absence of any compelling evidence, by certain foreign policy elites to maintain the relevance and credibility of their nationalistic ideologies. In explaining the hijacking of US foreign policy by the neoconservative movement, the documentary still serves to enlighten us on the kind of nightmare-based politics that the US pushes on Europe now.
In its treatment of such issues as the ISIL terrorist group, alleged Russian involvement in Ukraine, and even the spread of Ebola, the US administration relies on exaggerating and distorting popular fears to give its country the role of “leading” the world. What is most ironic about this list of threats to humanity, which Obama used during a speech at the United Nations, is that the US tried to utilize at least two of them as weapons: Ebola and ISIL. Will the world be lectured on threats to humanity, by the very same Doctor Frankenstein who cultivated and hyped these threats to humanity in the first place?
The threat to humanity is a powerful US regime responsible for terrorizing, detaining and torturing the American people behind the outrageous farce of a two-party “democracy”, and creating fantasy enemies to distract them from their true enemies. A malevolent circle of neoconservative policy-makers, persisting in the White House like a malignant tumor, is the source of each of these crises, abusing them to enlarge the shadow of their country’s military and economic blackmail against humanity.
Contrary to US foreign policy arguments, NATO is not safeguarding Europe’s security. If we attempt to name a single NATO-led war that protected the national interests of a country other than the United States, we find that there are none. Many NATO states have been endangered throughout their history, yet only in cases where the United States was in peril did NATO actually act. We must consider this as an indication about how much the “collective security” promised by NATO to its member states is worth. This has only ever been about a single regime’s security, to the negation of all others.
The Pentagon and NATO are the spooks they’re chasing. Their obsession with making up fictitious problems and villains to confront, whether diseases, rival states or terrorist groups, is part of their negative campaign to support the colossal waste of money that is their military budget. They have nothing positive or progressive to offer, which makes them the gravest threats to peace in Europe.
HJB/HSN
Harry J. Bentham is a British political futurist writer. He is currently on the advisory board at the Lifeboat Foundation think tank and his work can be found at a number of online publications, including the radical newsletter Dissident Voice and the transhumanist publication h+ Magazine. His work, which has been favorably received by readers, has placed emphasis on global economic disparities and the benefits of technology-driven social change.
