The Next World War Won’t Just Be “Over There”

by BILL WILLERS

An assumption that wars are to be confined to foreign lands is even in our nationalistic military music. Yea, “The Yanks are coming!”, but for us it’s always supposed to be onto somebody else’s turf. It seems war is less objectionable in America’s public mind when the carnage is confined to the realm of news items and TV pictorials, and if there’s no prospect of our own home towns becoming smoldering bomb craters. After all, both coasts are distanced from all those overseas wars by oceanic barriers. Right?

In July of 2016, with this new Cold War well underway, Sergey Karaganov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy advisor and honorary head of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, stated flatly that “Russia will never again fight on its own territory” .

In the last three centuries Russia suffered three major invasions coming from her west, where now the US and NATO are carrying out military activities in the Baltic smack up against her border. The US also sent a warship into the Black Sea, where Russia has several hundred miles of shoreline. As these would be the equivalent of Russia setting up military installations along the Canadian border and having a naval presence in the Gulf of Mexico, how, in the name of common sense, can such US activity be seen as anything but threatening?

Vladimir Putin has informed the world that his philosophy was honed from a tough upbringing: “The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: If a fight’s inevitable, strike first.”. A martial artist, Putin leans toward “soft” martial arts stressing defense rather than attack, but for how long can such personal preference guide the leader of a nuclear-armed military power under unrelenting threat of the sort the US is obviously intent on making? During the Cold War (The first one, not this new one) both President Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged, in back-door communications, that control over their respective militaries was not absolute and was perhaps even tenuous.

Consider also that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of that period planned to induce the US into war with Cuba with a false flag incident, Operation Northwoods, that involved murdering American citizens. One member of that JCS, Curtis LeMay, pressed hard — thankfully without success — for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union of that era. How close in war-mongering military groupthink in the current JCS to that JCS of 1963? Moreover, how hell-bent on war is the Russian military establishment, despite what Putin’s strategy might be?

A growing number of Americans are beginning to realize that the mainstream media, both print and electronic, are the propaganda delivery system of the “Empire” that lies by commission and by omission, and that creates a warped, simplified world view, while lulling the masses with spectacle and trivia. Given the massive level of US military intervention  and subversive activity all around the globe for the past few generations, any just, intelligent entity observing events on Earth would have to conclude that the American Empire is a cancerous force seeking, relentlessly and without mercy, domination of all life and life’s resources at any cost.

Now, with every hostile American denigration of Russia, every aggressive push against Russia’s borders, every move that imperils Russia’s place on the world stage, the prospect of massive world war becomes increasingly plausible. And in this world made so small by terrifying, sophisticated weaponry, any powerful adversary of the US would make certain that “over there” was shared, so as to become “over here” from the US point of view, with major east coast cities certain to be prime targets. The Russians understand from very well from agonizing experience what modern, catastrophic war on one’s homeland is like, while we in the US do not, although we are on a path to find out. It is a path of our own creation.

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/29/the-next-world-war-wont-just-be-over-there/