NATO and the Economic Exploitation of Eastern Europe – Beastrabban\’s Weblog (and Russell Brand)
NATO expands: On the left, the situation in 1990; on the right, the scene in 2009 – NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders.
Isn’t it interesting, how concepts coincide?
Only last night I read, in Russell Brand’s Revolution: “When Mikhail Gorbachev, who it turns out was a lovely fella who bent over backwards to prevent nuclear war and deserved to be remembered for more than that birthmark on his head, allowed a unified Germany to enter NATO, a hostile military alliance, on the condition that ‘NATO would not expand one inch to the east,’ the US agreed. Then they expanded right into East Germany, likely giggling as they went. This dunderheaded truculence persisted under every US regime change… Clinton in his tenure expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders. Chomsky says all this aggro we’re having today in the Crimea and Ukraine is because of these unreported acts of military expansionism by the West.”
Now here’s the Beast: “I … found this little piece in ‘The View from the Bridge’ column in Lobster 45, reproducing statements from elsewhere that NATO was being used to exploit the former eastern bloc countries that have joined it after the fall of Communism. Although over a decade old [bolding mine], it’s relevant now as we are in period of diplomatic tension with Russia over the civil war in Ukraine. This has been presented as a case of pro-Western Ukrainian patriots attempting to free themselves from Russian domination. The reality is somewhat murkier, as the pro-Western side themselves were guilty of considerable corruption. It also includes open Neo-Nazis.”
The stories quoted are about NATO bullying eastern European countries into selling off their national economic assets to foreigners and spending huge amounts of money on US-manufactured military hardware, under threat of losing a place in NATO military committees and command structures.
The Beast writes: “This makes you really wonder what the reality behind the ousting of President Yanukovych in Ukraine really was, and who was supposed to benefit: the Ukrainian people, or Western multinationals.”
And now Greece is rolling back the privatisation programme imposed by the West, against hugely unreasonable – yet mounting – opposition from the Troika and Western right-wingers.
The UK, it seems, is on the side of NATO, and – as long as we have a right-wing government – the privateers. This leads to a very worrying question:
When did we become the bad guys?
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The mind boggles how deep is the US intervention going to go before we all wake up an smell the coffee.?
Thanks, Mike. The passage from Russell Brand is really interesting, and whatever anyone thinks of Brand as a performer, he is right about Gorby. Gorbachev was a Communist, but he wanted Communism to dominate through winning hearts and minds and as a successful economic system, not through brutality and force. Hence he consciously withheld from military action when the satellites, beginning with East Germany, threw off the Communist yoke. And I don’t doubt that Brand is right that the West’s betrayal of the promise the Americans made to Gorby is at the root of the present problems now.
Lobster’s Robin Ramsay was of the opinion that American money and covert manoeuvring were behind the Orange Revolution that overthrew the previous pro-Soviet regime in Ukraine. I think he’s right, and will try and see if I can dig the article out.
We didn’t just become, we have always been the “Bad Guys”. It’s about time people stopped believing the propaganda dished out to us since birth about being the defenders of freedom (we want you to have democracy but only the way we like it). Russia has democracy now and a free market, just look how that turned out. Well it looks almost like the rest of the world, a product of 30 odd years of neoliberalism. An enormous amount of wealth gone to the 1% and then “capitol flight” to some nice little tax havens and Chelsea FC!