NATO’s Shadow of Nazi Operation Barbarossa
Finian Cunningham - SCF
NATO’s
Operation Atlantic Resolve paced ahead this week with the latest
arrival of more US military forces in the Baltic region. Under the guise
of defending eastern Europe from «Russian aggression», more than 100
Abrams tanks and Bradley armoured personnel carriers rolled into Latvia.
Last month, a similar motorised display of military support was
deployed in Estonia – in the town of Narva – with American flags flown
by the US Army’s Second Calvary Regiment just 300 metres from the
Russian border.
Narva
protrudes sharply eastward – like a metaphorical blade – into Russian
territory. It is only some 100 kilometres from St Petersburg – Russia’s
second city after Moscow, and with a searing history of military assault
by Nazi Germany during 1941-44. The siege of St Petersburg, formerly
Leningrad, caused over one million Russians to perish, mainly from
hunger, before the German Wehrmacht was eventually pushed back and
defeated by the Soviet Red Army. More on that in a moment.
Back
to the present: US General John O’Conner said of the latest deployment
in Latvia that American troops would «deter Russian aggression», adding
with Orwellian prose: «Freedom must be fought for, freedom must be
defended».
The
US-led Operation Atlantic Resolve has seen a surge in American military
presence in the Baltic countries and other eastern European members of
the NATO alliance over the past year. Technically, it is claimed that
the US forces are «on tour duty» and therefore not transgressing past
agreements with Russia to limit NATO permanent forces on Russia’s
borders. But semantics aside, it is hard not to see that Washington has,
in effect, significantly stepped up its military footprint in a
geo-strategically sensitive region, in brazen contravention of erstwhile
commitments made to Moscow. NATO warplane sorties have increased
four-fold in the Baltic region over the past year, as have NATO warships
in the Black Sea.
Citing
«Russian aggression», Washington and amenable rightwing governments in
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, are giving themselves a licence to do
what they are forbidden to do under binding accords, such as the
NATO-Russia Founding Act signed in the 1990s, – namely, to expand
military forces on Russia’s western borders. Operation Atlantic Resolve
is predicated on unsubstantiated US-led claims – propaganda – that
Russia is the source of aggression, primarily in Ukraine, and to the
rest of Europe. Fact: Russia is not in Ukraine or any European country.
Such blatant inversion of reality is part of the «psyops» in the US-led propaganda offensive.
US
commanded military exercises, including live-fire drills and the
installation of Patriot and Cruise missiles, are scheduled to take place
over the next months in the Baltic countries, Poland, Czech Republic,
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, as well as Ukraine and Georgia on Russia’s
southern flank. The latter two reveal the wider non-NATO dimension of
Washington’s geopolitical agenda.
US
Colonel Michael Foster said of the forthcoming military exercises
across Europe: «So by the end of the summer, you could very well see an
operation that stretches from the Baltic all the way down to the Black
Sea.»
It
is doubtful that this American colonel understands the historical
significance of his excited military vista. Part of the problem is that
Americans and many other Westerners have such a paucity of historical
understanding. They are inebriated with Western Victors’ History, which
is bereft of real causes and effects. It is a propagandised version of
chronological events, with the causal forces omitted, and which is used
to justify the subsequent actions of Western powers. This inebriated
understanding of history explains why history seems to so often repeat.
Without understanding the real causes of events, how can repetition be
averted? And that’s just the way Western corporate rulers like it, with
their culpability obscured from public view.
Let’s
have a look at US-led Operation Atlantic Resolve in a more realistic,
historical perspective. Then we might appreciate that it has the scope
and unerring sinister resonance with a previous military development –
Operation Barbarossa – the mammoth invasion of Soviet Russia that was
launched by Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941.
Furthermore
this is not superficial analogy indulging in sensationalism. If we look
into the ideological motive forces there is a consistent continuum.
Nazi
Germany’s unprovoked assault on the Soviet Union in June 1941 was the
biggest military invasion ever in the history of modern warfare. It led
to the death of some 30 million Russians at the hands of the Waffen-SS
and Einsatzgruppen extermination squads, along with forced starvation,
disease and appalling privations, such as in the cities of St Petersburg
and Volgograd (Stalingrad).
Operation
Barbarossa, like Operation Atlantic Resolve, spanned from the Baltic to
the Black Sea, with key invasion points through Estonia, Poland and
Ukraine. And we wonder why the current Kiev regime’s onslaught on the
ethnic Russian people of eastern Ukraine is deemed so provocative to
Russia? During Operation Barbarossa, Ukrainian regiments served as
auxiliaries to the Waffen-SS in the mass murder of millions of fellow
Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Gypsies, Jews and others. All were seen as
«untermenschen» (sub-humans) to be eliminated by the «exceptional»
Germanic «Aryan race».
When
Adolf Hitler wrote his infamous manifesto, Mein Kampf, in 1925, he
postulated that Germany’s imperial greatness would be realised by
crushing Soviet Russia. The necessary «lebensraum» (expansion) would be
by conquest of the eastern region, which he disparaged as being
populated by «untermenschen slavs ruled by Bolshevik Jews». Hitler’s
hatred of Jewry was only matched by his utter detestation of Communist
Russia. Both had to be exterminated, in his view.
Western
conventional history tends to focus on Hitler’s anti-Semitism and Final
Solution as being directed primarily at Jews. The truth is that Hitler
and Nazi Germany was equally obsessed with destroying Soviet Russia.
This obsession with Soviet Russia was intimately shared within Western
ruling circles in the years preluding the Second World War.
In
1918 at the end of the First World War, and despite all its horrors and
20 million death toll, US Secretary of State Robert Lansing was vexed
by quite another matter when he wrote: «Bolshevism is the most hideous
and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived… it is worse,
far worse, than a Prussianised Germany, and would mean an ever greater
menace to human liberty.»
Russia’s
October Revolution of 1917 and the threat of communist insurrection
worldwide presented Western rulers with a staggering nightmare. This was
underlined by the crisis in capitalism at that time and its quagmire of
economic recession, social collapse and the looming Great Depression,
not unlike today’s crisis.
Fascism
in Europe – from Portugal, Spain, Italy to Germany – was courted by
Western elites as a bulwark against the spread of socialist movements
inspired by Russia’s October Revolution. Hitler’s Germany with its
industrial prowess was seen as a particularly favourite strong-arm,
anti-Soviet regime, which would crush a growing European labour movement
as well as the perceived geopolitical rival of Russia to Western
capitalism.
It
is a matter of record that US corporations, from Wall Street banks to
Ford and General Motors, invested heavily in building up the Nazi war
machine during the 1930s. The Fuhrer was also covertly engaged by the
British Conservative elite, led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, whereby he was given a
«freehand» to expand eastwards. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria and
Czech Sudetenland in 1938, that was just the beginning of the eventual
intended assault on the Soviet Union that the Western rulers were
quietly rooting for. (See The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion by Alvin
Finkel and Clement Leibovitz.)
When
Operation Barbarossa came in the summer of 1941, the largest military
invasion in history was thus fulfilling a deeply held strategic agenda
to crush Russia as a geopolitical rival, not just to Germany but to the
Western powers who had covertly built up the Nazi war machine.
A
quirk in the historical matrix saw the Western governments go to war
with Nazi Germany for their own tactical interests. But the telling
point is that as soon as the Second World War closed these same Western
powers began recruiting Nazi agents, intelligence and assassins to
assist in the new Cold War against the Soviet Union. Ukraine and the
Baltic countries were again instrumental in the postwar subterfuge
against Russia as they had been under the Nazi’s Operation Barbarossa,
only this time they were recruited by the CIA, MI6 and US-led NATO,
formed in 1949.
Today,
Russia may no longer profess Bolshevism as a state ideology. And we are
not predicting here that the current US-led NATO manoeuvres around
Russian territory are going to precipitate into an all-out military
attack. That is beside the main issue. The point is that Russia still
presents a problematic rival to American and Western hegemony. Moscow
under Vladimir Putin is seen as an obstacle to US-led capitalist
domination of Asia and the rest of the world. Russia’s stolid insistence
on abiding by international law is an irksome impediment to
Washington’s «exceptional» petulance to use military force whenever and
wherever it wants to underpin its putative global hegemony.
International popular support for Putin as a respected world statesman,
together with widespread disdain for US rulers, is also another source
of intense chagrin to Washington. This is the context in which we should
assess the US-led hostility toward Russia and the latent war signals
that emanate from Operation Atlantic Resolve.
The
historical resonances over the past century are the same. Operation
Barbarossa and Operation Atlantic Resolve are part of the same continuum
of Western aggression towards Russia. Russia is deemed to be a
countervailing force to Western hegemony, and therefore must be removed.
For
Russia, the menacing military encirclement of Operation Atlantic
Resolve has profoundly bad resonance with the past, and for good
reasoning. Operation Barbarossa – only 74 years ago – is seared into
Russian consciousness through immense human suffering. Russia was then
on the brink of extirpation and was only saved by the heroic sacrifice
of millions of its people; any nation would never allow such a danger to
ever come close again.
The
West has never suffered in history to the depth that the Russian people
have; and therefore many in the West, especially the pampered elite
rulers, have no idea of how resolute Russians are in defending their
homeland. Vladimir Putin’s home city is St Petersburg, the city where
one million died from Nazi siege.
When
Western leaders talk breathlessly about «defending freedom» and glibly
pillory Russians for being «paranoid» their Godawful inebriated
ignorance of history is just cause for even more alarm.
Russia can perceive, rightly, the continuum of aggression.
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