By Finian Cunningham
November 17, 2021:
Informationclearinghouse.info
--Europe should give up
supplies of natural gas from Russia and instead
defend Ukraine and Poland. That’s the plucky advice
of Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson who counts
wartime leader Winston Churchill as one of his
political heroes.
Addressing a City of London banquet this week,
Johnson
warned Germany, France, Italy and other European
governments: “We hope that our friends [in Europe]
may recognize that a choice is shortly coming
between mainlining ever more Russian hydrocarbons in
giant new pipelines and sticking up for Ukraine and
championing the cause of peace and stability.”
Note the pejorative use of the word “mainlining”
which implies Europe’s trade with Russia for gas is
a sordid addiction, rather than a mutual commercial
partnership.
Johnson also pointed to British troops being
deployed to Poland helping that country construct
barbed-wire barriers for halting the flow of
refugees from Belarus as an example of “defending
Europe”.
In the facile, elitist world of Boris, whose
slapstick hairstyle is a reflection of disarray in
the grey matter beneath, he has an “easy” solution
for Europe’s energy supply shortages and soaring
prices. That is, cut off potentially abundant,
affordable exports of natural gas from Russia –
which will plunge European households into freezing
conditions and ramp up consumer inflation.
But don’t worry about that grim hardship. Boris’
noble defense of Poland and Ukraine against alleged
Russian hybrid warfare and aggression will likely
start a hot war that in turn will spiral into a
thermonuclear conflagration engulfing the continent
of Europe. That’s one way of “solving” freezing
conditions, we may suppose.
Johnson’s advice to Europe is like listening to a
clown smoking a reefer near a gasoline spigot.
His rosy British war history paints Poland and
Ukraine as victims of aggression. The current
scenario is contrived to evoke memories of Britain
declaring war on Nazi Germany after the Third Reich
invaded Poland in September 1939. Never mind that
Britain and Poland’s fawning over the Fuhrer
in the run-up to the Second World War was a major
precipitating factor in eventually igniting that
war.
Johnson’s cartoon-history speech at the City of
London banquet implies that Russia is the
contemporary incarnation of Nazi aggression. Those
horrible Ruskies are supplying Europe with up to
half of its natural gas fuel which is keeping
European homes warm. How utterly fiendish of the
Ruskies! So, in Boris’ logic, we must cut off this
nefarious gas “weapon” used by the Russians to stop
Europe from freezing.
While we’re on the subject of freezing, it is the
Polish military with the help of British troops who
are drenching hapless refugees in the middle of
winter with water cannons to prevent them from
entering the European Union from neighboring
Belarus. The predominantly Middle Eastern refugees
are in Belarus largely as a result of criminal wars
waged by the United States, Britain, Poland and
other NATO members over the past two decades.
Britain and its NATO partners have weaponized
Poland and the Baltic states to antagonize Belarus,
as well as Russia. While the Polish military erects
razor-wire fences against freezing, huddled women
and children, it is barbarous acts like this that
evoke the heinous memory of fascism and aggression
in Europe. Poland, the Baltic states of Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia, and Ukraine are steeped in
complicity with past Nazi crimes, despite their
obdurate denials. The cruelty being meted out to
refugees today is shockingly consistent, although
dimwits like Britain’s Johnson arrogantly pronounce
on history with an upside-down distortion.
It’s not just Johnson though. European Union
leaders are decrying Russia for “masterminding
hybrid warfare” with Poland, the Baltics and
Ukraine. When it is the EU that is funding the
rolling out of barbed wire concertinas and
militarization of borders across Europe. This effete
cowardice and duplicity of Europe’s political class
have echoes of the past too in the face of fascism.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron this week
reportedly
warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin that NATO
will defend Ukraine if the latter is invaded by
Russia. Such hypothetical hyping is insulting.
Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine or
any other European country. Where’s the evidence?
Where’s the reasoning? This shrill scenario is
entirely dreamt up by NATO propaganda and
Russophobia.
The Ukraine has been a NATO spearhead for
aggression towards Russia ever since the U.S.-led
military bloc backed a coup d’état in Kiev in 2014.
The Kiev Neo-Nazi regime is waging a low-intensity
war against the ethnic Russian population of
Southeast Ukraine. NATO is arming the regime to the
teeth, the latest weaponry including attack drones
from Turkey.
The U.S. and other NATO members are also
increasingly conducting war drills in the Black Sea
on Russia’s border. The tensions with Russia are
compounded by the militarization of the refugee
crisis between Belarus and Poland and the Baltic
states.
If an analogy is to be made between the Second
World War and the present it is that Russia is once
again being subjected to aggression. Instead of the
Nazi Wehrmacht over-running Poland, the Baltics and
Ukraine it is the U.S.-led NATO axis.
Clowns like Britain’s Boris Johnson and France’s
Emmanuel Macron are fanning aggression and the
danger of war with fatuous speeches about
“defending” Europe.
As the saying attributed to Karl Marx goes:
history repeats itself first as tragedy then as
farce. Another axiom cited by Boris’s hero Winston
Churchill is: those who fail to learn from history
are doomed to repeat it.
Lamentably, we are living in such a time.
Finian Cunningham
has written extensively on international
affairs, with articles published in several
languages. He is a Master’s graduate in
Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of
Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a
career in newspaper journalism. He is also a
musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he
worked as an editor and writer in major news
media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish
Times and Independent.
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