I was curious what Oliver Stone thought about the war in Ukraine and dug this article up from March. His comments have been printed elsewhere. It comes from an interview with Robert Scheer for KCRW, an LA member station of NPR. He had made himself into a contrarian by defending Putin's invasion of Crimea back in 2014, feeling it was justified. However, he no longer seems to be so supportive of Putin after invading the whole country. He had claimed the US and NATO had no evidence of this massive troop build up along the border, likening it to the WMD claims as a pretext for invading Iraq.
Of course, it hasn't changed his position on the US and NATO. He believes Putin was "baited" into this war, "empowering the worst conclusions the West can make." For the past eight years, NATO has been giving Ukraine a substantial amount of military assistance and logistical support in its ongoing war in the Donbas.
Stone isn't alone in his view. John Pilger believes NATO, and in particular the US, antagonized Russia by lending support to their civil war in the Donbas, considering it a bridge too far in this interview with Talking Post. He talks about the massive troop build up on the Ukrainian side, some 60,000 troops flanked along the demarcation line, which Russia considered a palpable threat. He doesn't mention that this build up was in response to the Russian build up, which had been going on since last summer. The "bloodthirsty media" had only started reporting it at the beginning of 2022.
We've seen similar troop build ups all along the Russian border and into Belarus, which Putin has secured as a staging ground for his operations. The beleaguered country which has essentially been at war with itself after the controversial election of 2020, has signed over virtually all autonomy to the Kremlin. This allows Putin to strike out in numerable directions. He can attack Kyiv, Warsaw or Vilnius at a moment's notice. Lukashenko even went so far as to grant Putin the ability to move nuclear warheads into his country, ridding the constitution of such pesky restrictions.
I'm not sure why Stone, Pilger, Mearsheimer and other Western journalists and filmmakers continue to make apologies for Putin. We've long known his imperial ambitions. However, they seem to feel that the world needs Russia to counter the United States in terms of manifest destiny. They seem to think that it is the US that is overreaching here, not Russia. Mearsheimer argues that Ukraine, or any former Soviet republic for that matter, is in Russia's sphere of influence. He doesn't seem to care that these countries want to be part of "the West." In his addled mind, we should leave them to Russia, as if the Yalta agreement still stands.
These pundits like to cite historic references for Russia's claims to these countries, ignoring the fact that Moscow colonized vast stretches of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. They took advantage of collapsing empires to claim these territories as their own. It's not like these territories were originally part of Russia or even Slavic for that matter. How does one explain Chechnya or Dagestan for instance?
The Baltic countries were never Slavic, but Russia conveniently labels Lithuanian as Proto-Slavic. Not that the language bears much similarity to Russian, but rather a way to absorb the form Grand Duchy ideologically, given the cross pollination between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (LDK) and the local Slavic territories of Old Rus in the 13th through 15th centuries. The LDK used ancient Ruthenian as its lingua franca, or maybe I should say lingua russa in this case. Finland, Latvia and Estonia remained in German and Swedish control throughout much of this time. Latvia is similar linguistically to Lithuanian, but Estonian and Finnish have an entirely separate language.
Anyway, it is safe to say none of these countries ever wanted to be under Russian or Soviet control. They spent centuries trying to break free of various imperialistic nations, but given their relative anonymity in world geography no one paid much interest to them other than as curiosities. Now, we read and see more about them on the internet, but for historians like Mearsheimer they are still anomalies. They don't factor into the broader geopolitical scheme of things, don't you know.
This is the inherit weaknesses of all these arguments excusing Putin's actions. These pundits see the world as a giant chessboard played by two sides: The US and Russia. In Oliver Stone's troubled mind, the US had always baited the Soviet Union, and in turn Russia, into this aggressive behavior by threatening its hegemony in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He even devoted an entire documentary series for Showtime on the subject, and has added to it with his Putin Interviews, but I didn't have the stomach to watch any more of this tripe.
It is indeed all part of the propaganda war, as John Pilger laments, but he and Stone and Mearsheimer are simply contributing to it. They aren't offering any real valuable insights. Rather they are cashing in on their notoriety to spread the Kremlin line, either as tools or useful idiots. At least, Stone has enough humility to admit he was wrong about the invasion, thinking like so many others that Russia would never go so far as to try to usurp Ukraine. Pilger thinks he is so morally in the right that he believes Russia had the right to invade given the role of the US in building Ukraine's military in the intervening years between invasions. Not surprisingly, neither he nor Stone view the annexation of Crimea as an invasion. Rather, a historical correction.
It is really hard to accept these views when you see the war rage into its sixth month with no end in sight. Yet, we now have Jeremy Corbyn entering into the fray by suggesting that NATO countries should quit supplying weapons to Ukraine and allow the African Union or League of Arab Nations to negotiate a peace settlement. I kid you not.
Pilger argues that the US doesn't give a damn about Ukraine. Well, judging by the massive destruction we have seen, Russia doesn't give a damn about Ukraine either. Russian forces have literally leveled cities all along the coast, displacing millions of people, most of them Russian-speaking. One can go a step further and say Russia doesn't give a damn about Russian-speaking Ukrainians, as these persons are bearing the brunt of this war.
Anyway, I thought I would toss all this out for my friend Trippler, who I haven't heard from in awhile, and for any others who might be interested.
Comments
Post a Comment