Wednesday, september
10, 2014
Fantasy and NATO propaganda surrounding Flight MH17 and 'Moscow'
The saying, 'the first victim of a war
is the truth', this time may also be applied to the course to war, because
even before a real military conflict with Russia has erupted, insinuations
and distortion are being used to keep the tension high.
The preliminary report on the MH17 disaster over Ukraine that was released
yesterday, 9 September, is so vague that a Russian newspaper headlined
the conclusion as 'Dutch report shows that the plane came down'.
That
does not mean there is nothing in the report. There is mention of 'several
projectiles' that have penetrated the cockpit and the chairman of the
commission later added that metal parts have also been detected in the
bodies of crew members, and these might point to what sort of projectiles
we are talking about.
However, just the day before the report
was made public, the BBC produced three witnesses who declared to the
journalist, John Sweeney (it is worth reading the Wikipedia
entry to get an idea of the sort of journalist we have here), that they
saw the BUK launcher and even spoke to the commanding officer who had
a 'Moscow accent'. What a coincidence. The Dutch daily De
Volkskrant shows how a well-timed report like this works out. The
newspaper in its summing up of the separate items from the report, simply
includes this story under point 3 about the projectiles, although it
is not in the report! Yet it confirms it was 'the Russians' again.
Unfortunately every attempt to arrive
at one's own conclusion in the face of the glaring absence of essential
information, is dismissed in the media as a 'conspiracy theory'. It
was established in the US that until the assassination of John F. Kennedy
in 1963 the concept of a 'conspiracy theory' figured on average once
in year in either the New York Times or the Washington Post. However,
when the Warren Commission report came out, which maintained that there
had only been one killer (although this conflicted with the autopsy
results), the CIA sent round a memo to editors in which it recommended
to dismiss doubts about the report as 'conspiracy theory'-and as a result
the concept appeared much more frequently in the newspapers mentioned,
according to certain counts, once a month on average.
That has remained so. So whoever doubts
e.g. the official reading of '9/11', the attacks in New York and Washington,
is guilty of 'conspiracy theory'. It actually suits a journalist well
to dismiss alternative explanations as such. It suffices to prove that
you yourself are serious and reliable. With MH17 it is not different.
Anyone who doubts the not-yet-official account…
And that account, to put it briefly, points to 'Putin'.
So why not leave aside what actually
happened, who knew something, etc. No doubt Kennedy was the victim of
a conspiracy, the official account of '9/11' contains too many factual
impossibilities to even be considered as true, and so on. Yet it is
far more fruitful to look at what was done with those events. So, after
the death of Kennedy the Vietnam intervention was intensified to a war
of world historic proportions, support for Israel's nuclear armaments
programme was resumed, and the rapprochement with Cuba suspended. The
response to '9/11' was a declaration of a war without end against 'terrorism',
whatever it might mean. That war, with its attendant record defence
budgets in the US, has meanwhile entered its 15th year and spawned several
local wars as part of it.
It is the same with MH17. Who or what
was at play can be left aside (I stick to the hypothesis of cannon fire
from a Sukhoi
under the command of the Ukrainian National Security Council-and IF
there was an additional BUK fired, it was done by the Ukrainian army).
But then, by the time the final report will come out next year, few
will still be interested.
Yet the consequences are there for all
to see. Immediate suspension of the secret negotiations between Merkel
and Putin on a comprehensive settlement; NATO war council in Wales.
The Afghanistan debacle has been forgotten, and that Libya is dissolving
as a state, North Africa destabilised, and migration flows across the
Mediterranean completely out of hand, is hardly being reported any longer.
Instead, as John Feffer,
director of Foreign Policy
In Focus, points out, 'Moscow' once again is NATO's top priority,
and the build-up of NATO forces in eastern Europe has moved the 'border'
with Russia towards the east by several hundred miles. The US has exploited
the crisis in Ukraine to bring eastern Europe more closely into the
American and NATO spheres of influence; in addition, Sweden and Finland,
although not member states of NATO, are now 'host countries'. In Sweden
especially the US and NATO have held a series of military exercises
over the years and there is an important electronic communication and
intelligence basis in north Sweden.
That is what has been achieved by blaming
all and sundry on 'Putin', and everybody can establish for him/herself
that this is so. That is also what we should be concentrating on, however
appealing it may be to dig deeper in the details surrounding MH17 and
how painful it is for those left behind (and in a sense we are all in
that category) to be sent home with plain propaganda and lies.
Kees van der Pijl
