The masses crave an opiate. Their political overlords know how to exploit the attendant and innate tendency for groupthink. As soon as the usefulness of one faith (Covid) expires; another takes its place (Ukraine), courtesy of the ruling elites, and with the complicity of the crowds. Now that Covid conformity has been replaced with the requirement that we all find religion on Ukraine, debunking the bunk becomes all the more important.

The finding of American-installed WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) laboratories located in Ukraine, near the Russian border, is certainly a reminder of the extent, the depth and the gravity of the American State’s lies about this conflict and its genesis. Put it this way: If Russia had American privileges, namely the right to invade sovereign countries while retaining its virtue; these biowarfare facilities—copped to by Victoria Nuland, one of the American architects of the February 2014 coup in Ukraine—would have served as casus belli (provocation) for war.

I abhor what is, on its face, a Russian war of aggression. However, knowing the history of the conflict leaves no room for doubt: The Russian Bear was poked, and poked and then some.

I had framed the duty of diplomacy and statesmanship at which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has failed so miserably and with such grave consequences for his countrymen as realpolitik.

Realpolitik is practical politics, the art of getting along, differences and all, in a real world in which reality, especially power differentials, is accepted and dealt with. The onus was on the Ukrainian president to practice realpolitik with his powerful neighbors, the Russians, I argued. Zelensky ought to have shown Putin respect and negotiated an agreement with him, one that would have appeased Russia with respect to Ukraine’s outsized, idiotic NATO and EU aspirations. Promise the Russians “a non-aligned, neutral Ukraine,” is how Colonel Doug McGregor put it.

What I call realpolitik, political scientist John Mearsheimer terms “great-power politics.”

“When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia,” he posits, “you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. … States in the Western hemisphere understand [great-power politics] full well with regard to the United States.”

With his fatigues, simplistic jingoism and facility with TV optics and social media—Zelensky certainly appeals to the war channel females (Fox News) and to distaff worldwide. But he has been worse than useless in the grander scheme of things. As Mearsheimer points out, matter-of-fact, Ukraine is going to lose more territory, its economy has been wrecked as are its cities and infrastructure in ruins. Eastern Europe is becoming more unstable. China and Russia have been thrust into each other’s arms.

The West claims the blame lies solely with Putin, to whom are attributed assorted phantasmagoric expansionist programs and projects. According to this angels-and-demons Disneyfied storyline, Putin plans on claiming the Baltic states of Eastern Europe “out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire,” even though the Russian president has disavowed the creation of a greater Russia and certainly doesn’t have the economic wherewithal to mount protracted invasions and occupations.

The truth is that, starting in 2006, the West made the decision to continue to expand NATO to the Baltic states and eventually to Ukraine. Russia had “swallowed” this initial NATO expansion, but made it clear as early as 2008, that thereafter, expansion would constitute an existential threat to it. But the West had always intended to include the former USSR territories within NATO and the EU and turn them into what Mearsheimer dubs “pro-American liberal democracies” in the (miserable) mold of the USA, usually nudging them in that direction rather energetically and certainly manipulatively via color-coded revolutions.

To all intents and purposes, America had made Ukraine a de facto NATO member, arming and training them, explains Mearsheimer. So it was that in February of 2014, a coup, supported by the USA, in Ukraine, saw a pro-Russian president being replaced by a pro-American prime minister.

Indeed, prior to Russia’s invasion, the US had been arming the very Ukrainians who had been clashing regularly with the Russians in the Donbass region. And while by necessity “America has [in recent weeks] rushed to reinforce eastern Europe with thousands of troops and dozens of warplanes”—still more revealing is that, “American special forces had been training potential partisans in eastern Ukraine” for some time now.

Come 2021, in what was the height of provocation, the US flew strategic bombers over the Black Sea, forcing Russia to scramble its fighter jets. There were other such showy provocations along “the NATO-Russia frontier,” performed with U.S. Air Force B-1 bombers. For their part—also in 2021—the British had set sail in destroyer vessels in Russian territorial waters. “Innocent passage” they called it. However, the Black Sea incident, “[a]ccording to leaked classified documents,” “was a calculated decision by the British government…”

Said a Russian military official:

“We don’t have a border with Ukraine. It is America’s border, because they are the masters there, and all these…are vassals. And the fact that they are pumping them up full of arms and are trying to create nuclear arsenals—all this will cost us in future. …”

* Image of Victoria Nuland, whom Fred Reed likens to a fireplug with leprosy

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, March 10
Unz Review, March 10
The New American, March 11

WATCH: David Vance and I discuss further on “HARD TRUTH.” WATCH

“True Story: Russia Finds WMD In Ukraine!”  https://rumble.com/vx058f-true-story-russia-finds-wmd-in-ukraine.html PLEASE SUBSCRIBE HERE:

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Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of “The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” have been touted by some in the press as “two of America’s top scholars.” The academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and his co-author of the University of Chicago may occupy prized perches, but that doesn’t make them scholars.

However you slice it, the half-baked folderol that is “The Israeli Lobby” isn’t “scholarship.” Scholarship appeals to evidence and reason. Theirs is a randomly yoked together bit of pamphleteering in the postmodern tradition—its authors don’t reason or argue. Instead, they propagandize, promoting as axiomatic a belief in the superiority of certain moral or political positions, one of which is the idea of Israel’s foul founding.

A scholar, moreover, builds his case. These two declare their case open and shut on page two of the screed. “Readers may reject our conclusions,” they grandiosely state, “but the evidence on which they rest is not controversial.”

The logically invalid argument from authority undergirds “The Israeli Lobby”—and in particular, our authors’ assertion that the facts they present “are not in serious dispute among scholars,” because these rely “heavily on the work of Israeli scholars and journalists.”

Jews—Israelis included—are leaders of the new anti-Semitism, which consists in the demonization of Israelis (often described as Nazis vis-à-vis the Palestinians) and the delegitimization of the Jewish State. Blaming Israel or the Israeli lobby for America’s foreign policy blunders, and alleging that Israel was founded through systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft are the centerpieces of their campaign.

Because a Jew—Israeli or other—has espoused these positions against Israel, Harvard’s Tweedledumb and UChicago’s Tweedledumber would like their readers to believe that they must be true. The Capos of the concentration camps were Jews; did their Jewishness make their depredations against their own people correct or commendable?

While our “scholars” both demonize and delegitimize Israel, they are mere dwarfs standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants. Noam Chomsky, “The Godfather,” Steven and Hillary Rose, Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Tanya Reinhart in Tel Aviv, and Michael Cohen in Swansea—these are but a few of the new anti-Semitism’s leading Jewish lights.

The real rock stars of the Israeli intelligentsia—Israel’s own Ward Churchills—are the pretentiously self-styled “New Historians.” This is a group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted: “We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas”), who’ve cocked a snook at the liberal country in which they’ve thrived, so as to gain admittance into the fashionable Palestinian pantheon.

They claim “Zionist imperialists” cheated Palestinian peasants out of their land (which was, in fact, bought fairly and legally), and that these interlopers conducted a systematic and deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing with respect to the “indigenous population.” (There undoubtedly have been sporadic acts of aggression and even terror against Palestinian Arabs by Jews during the War of Independence. But there is simply no historical evidence that they have been the result of a concerted or systematic campaign.)

The “New Historians'” rendition is fast becoming the received wisdom on Israel’s history in the court of public opinion. This historical revision of Israel’s birth, incidentally, resembles the way the Left has distorted and reduced America’s history to a narrative of the oppressed and the excluded. As Efraim Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London, has noted, “Partisan rewriting of history has apparently become the accepted norm in those fields of research dealing with highly contentious political, social, and historical phenomena, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

The Harvard philippic defers to the “New Historians'” most flamboyant and fishy associate, Benny Morris. In fact, it was Morris’s bowdlerization of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s words that first prompted Karsh to investigate the fraud perpetrated by these hip historians, and expose it in his masterful book,  “Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians.’”

While perusing the English-language version of Morris’ doctored-to-death book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” Karsh happened upon a quote from a letter Ben-Gurion wrote to his son, allegedly stating that, “we must expel the Arabs and take their places.” Karsh “recalled the letter saying something quite different.” On examination, it transpired that the Hebrew text read as follows: “We do not wish, we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place … All our aspiration is built on the assumption that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”

Initially Karsh, a gentleman and a scholar, read Morris charitably, attributing the mangled citation to an innocent mistranslation or typo. Still, to allay his worst fears, he proceeded to plumb all primary source-material Morris used to shore-up his allegations.

Parroted by Walt and Mearsheimer, Morris has charged that the “Zionists” systematically “drove Palestinians into exile,” and “that the Zionist and Israeli establishments have systematically falsified archival source material to conceal the Jewish state’s less-than-immaculate conception.”

It turns out Morris was projecting. For, as an incredulous Karsh discovered, “Morris not only fails to show rewriting by [the Israeli founding fathers], but he himself is the one who systematically falsifies evidence.”

Indeed, “there is scarcely a document that he does not twist.” As Karsh demonstrates in detail, Morris and his cohorts have “violated every tenet of bona fide research”: they misrepresent documents, resort to partial quotes, withhold evidence, make false assertions, and rewrites original documents. Such is the incompetence of these Arabists that they even neglect Arab archival material, relying almost exclusively on Western—often only secondary—sources.

“Through documentary manipulation,” observes Karsh, the Israeli “scholars” (lauded by Walt and Mearsheimer) have turned “Israeli history on its head.” Although Karsh has been attacked personally and stigmatized, the blistering, textual bitch-slap he dealt these charlatans remains unassailable. A dejected Morris even wrote to the Times Literary Supplement to admit that “Karsh has a point. My treatment of transfer thinking before 1948 was, indeed, superficial.”

The Arab-Israeli debate, however, doesn’t hinge on the “professional and intellectual integrity” of the interlocutors. Irrespective of whether they are true or false, certain positions in contemporary Middle-Eastern Studies and history departments are automatically deemed virtuous, and veracity be damned. Their proponents are published in prestigious journals and by distinguished publishing houses and become media darlings.

Popularity, fashion, and the booming “bash-Israel business” account for the “new historians'” tenure, not scholarship. Ditto the Harvard hucksters who promote them.

©2006 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
March 24

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