The Russian embargo and the Ukrainian 'coup from below'

By Takis Fotopoulos

In the last few days, many European farmers, including Greek farmers,[1] waking from the lethargy into which they have been sunk with the decisive help of the Transnational Elite[2](TE)­­--basically the "Group of 7"--noted with surprise that not only do they not control the economy of their own country, (which has been fully under the Euro-elites' control since they joined the Eurozone, following their integration into the EU), but they do not even participate in the decisions that directly affect their own lives. Whether it is the daily lives of struggling farmers who have just discovered that the efforts of a whole year's work is just being discarded into landfills, or even the very survival of themselves and their children, which would be at mortal risk in case the present conflict (or any similar conflict in the future) leads to a military conflict.

In other words, many are just now beginning to realize that even the ultimate decision of a people - whether or not to be involved in a devastating war - is no longer made at the national level, but at the transnational level by the TE and the Euro-elites. It is clear today to every thinking person that we are no longer just talking about a trade war. It is obvious that the economic war raging now (not of course due to intra-imperialist contradictions, as paleolithic Marxists assert) may well be the prelude to a catastrophic war. In fact, a military conflict centered in Ukraine, which could easily spread well beyond it, cannot be excluded anymore, unless of course the peoples fighting the New World Order (NWO) run by the TE, and principally the Russian people, eventually capitulate to the demands of the TE--as it will be the case if Ukraine is, eventually, fully integrated into the NWO, through joining the EU. Thus, the unsuspecting European peoples may be led exactly to such a war by their own political and economic elites, which are in various degrees integrated into the NWO of neoliberal globalization. The same elites, through the world media, control and fully manipulate public opinion, in fact the very perception of reality on Ukraine, or any other issue important to them.

Yet it is obvious, for anyone who did not wake up this morning "indignant" at the news of a Russian embargo, supposedly destroying our poor farmers and by extension 'our' economy, that history did not begin with the Russian embargo. In fact, it began ten years ago with the first attempt of the TE to fully integrate Ukraine into the NWO.[3] Thus, the TE managed, through the mobilization of pro-West supporters, to 'persuade' the Supreme Court of the country to annul the election that was won by the pro-Russian Yannukovich. This development followed mass demonstrations organized by local oligarchs, with the decisive financial and other help of the TE which, as even the Guardian admitted at the time, included foreign donors such as the US State Department and USAID, as well as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the NGO Freedom House and George Soros' Open Society Institute.[4] 

In fact, the report by the Guardian (not exactly an antisystemic paper!) was frank about the methodology used by the TE, although of course it drew the inevitable conclusion that everything was done for the benefit of the people! Here is how Ian Traynor described what was involved behind the 2004 Orange Revolution which since then have been repeated again and again all over the world:

While the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box... The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.[5]

As a result of this mobilisation, the TE and their representatives in the local oligarchy managed to win the new elections and bring to power Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymosenko, "their people in Kiev". This, of course, implied a much greater western influence in Ukraine that was exploited to the full by the TE to prepare the ground for the full integration of Ukraine into the NWO, ten years later, by a 'coup d'état' from below, i.e. a new kind of 'revolution' organized by the same TE which organized the previous one in 2004. In this new version of a 'revolution', not only did the Kiev middle class and Western Ukrainians (traditionally pro-West and many of them supporters of the Third Reich in the war) take part, but also self-declared fascists (Right Sector and others), as well as people from the lower income groups fighting against corruption and poverty. However these demos soon turned violent, thanks to the efforts of the real organizers of this 'revolution' within the TE and the Euro-elites that did everything they could to encourage them, even turning up to the demos to persuade demonstrators to take action against the legitimate regime! The result was the eviction, in February 2014, of the legitimate government under Yannukovich and its replacement by a parliamentary Junta, (or better, an informal protectorate) of the TE!

The coup was then 'legitimised' through the election of the pro-West oligarch 'the king of chocolate' Poroshenko on May 25^th (an election in which most East Ukrainians did not take part) who, a month later, signed the association agreement with the EU --along with the leaders of Georgia and Moldova-- opening the road for the full integration of these three countries into the EU. Thus, within seven months from Yannukovich's refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU, the TE had managed­­ ­­(thanks mainly to the fact that Russia did not take action to de-legitimise the entire process as soon as Yannukovich was overthrown, as it had every right to do) to integrate Ukraine fully into the NWO, including the Eastern pro-Russian parts, i.e. the heart of Ukrainian industry. In fact, the TE's only loss in this battle was Crimea, a very small part of Ukraine, which was only strategically important to the TE but in no way as important as the full integration of the entire Ukraine into the NWO, which could effectively torpedo Russia's long-term project for a Eurasian Union. That is, an economic union of sovereign nations (in contrast to the members of Eurozone which had effectively lost their economic and national sovereignty since joining it). Thus, as Hilary Clinton, possibly the next US President, declared as early as 2012:

"The US is trying to prevent Russia from recreating a new version of the Soviet Union under the ruse of economic integration...There is a move to re-Sovietize the region...It's not going to be called that. It's going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that...But let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it."[6]

It is not, therefore, surprising that today, just about all of the Soviet Union's key allies, which used to be behind what Churchill called "the iron curtain", are leading members of the EU, and all of the countries that made up the Soviet anti-NATO alliance, the Warsaw Pact, are now in NATO - apart from Russia itself. This, despite the fact that, as Jack F. Matlock Jr., (ambassador to the U.S.S.R. from 1987 to 1991) recently pointed out, "the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries... seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe"![7]

However, the workers and the people of Eastern Ukraine were far from happy with these developments and inevitably were led to a heroic rebellion against the Junta and the TE, along with their self-declared fascist allies. All those, in turn, launched a real massacre against the resistance movement,[8] which could very easily  lead to a generalized war- unless the resistance collapses and the Russian leadership under Putin surrenders unconditionally, as required by the TE.

Meanwhile, the TE launched a fierce economic and propaganda war within the world media it controls. So now the Russian decision to defend itself against a TE embargo, aiming to strangle the Russian economy, through an embargo of its own mainly on agricultural products (from the EU, NAFTA and other countries partcipating in the embargo against Russia), is portrayed as a form of 'collateral damage' in the EU's effort to defend European values of independence and freedom. In other words, the same values which the EU and the TE in general, so effectively defended by slaughtering the peoples of Yugoslavia,[9] Iraq[10], Afghanistan[11], Libya and Syria[12] and Eastern Ukraine!

Furthermore, when the Russian leadership finally decided to stand up and actually impose a purely defensive embargo to protect its economy, European farmers rose up in protest. But not against their own governments, which in the past few months had been introducing one wave of sanctions after another against Russia, jeopardising not just their own livelihood but, potentially, even their own lives, but only against the EU Commission, demanding to be compensated for the financial damage! Furthermore, their trade unions did not even think for a minute to directly distribute the agricultural products banned by Russia free of charge to people who in the last few years feed themselves from dustbins in several EU countries. Instead they began negotiations for compensation from the EU, allowing in the meantime valuable food produce to be destroyed or discarded in landfills!

 Needless to add that the European "Left", like for instance SYRIZA, the second biggest party in the Greek parliament, which may well take over after the forthcoming general elections, only managed to feebly protest about the sanctions against Russia, the initial cause of the present debacle. They do not, of course, demand the immediate withdrawal of Greece's validation of the anti-Russia EU sanctions or, alternatively, immediate general elections for the people themselves to take such a crucial decision. This is not at all surprising as such an act (withdrawing Greece's approval for sanctions) would eventually lead to the unilateral exit of the country from the EU, which is of course anathema for the European "Left" (Die Linke etc.), of which SYRIZA is a prominent member with the president of the party, A. Tsipras, being the official candidate of the European Left in the recent elections for president of the EU Commission. So, they limited themselves to harmless bravado, with full knowledge that, if they were in power, they would do exactly the same as the present Greek parliamentary junta, as long, of course, as they wished to remain in power!

Takis Fotopoulos

* This article is an edited and expanded version of an article that was first published in TF's weekly column in Sunday's Eleftherotypia (a Greek daily published in Athens) on 15/08/2014. The translation into English was edited by Jonathan Rutherford

[1] "Russian food ban takes huge bite out of Greek fruit growing industry", RT, 14/8/2014 http://rt.com/business/180320-greece-hit-russian-sanctions/

[2] See on the meaning of the Transnational Elite and the New World Order of neoliberal globalization, Takis Fotopoulos, UKRAINE: THE ATTACK ON RUSSIA AND THE EURASIAN UNION, The struggle against the World Order of Neoliberal Globalization (forthcoming by Progressive Press), ch 1

[3] Takis Fotopoulos, "The Ukrainian Crisis and the Transnational Elite", The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.1, no.4 (July 2005) http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/newsletter/vol1_no4_Ukraine.htm

[4] Ian Traynor, 'US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev', The Guardian, 26/11/2004

[5] ibid.

[6] Charles Clover, "Clinton vows to thwart new Soviet Union", Financial Times, 6/12/2012

[7] Jack F. Matlock Jr, "Who is the bully? The U.S. has treated Russia like a loser since the end of the Cold War", Washington Post,14/3/2014

[8] Takis Fotopoulos, "Two parallel massacres: Palestine and East Ukraine, Pravda. Ru, 30/7/2014 http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/30-07-2014/128159-massacres_palestine_east_ukraine-0/

[9] Takis Fotopoulos, "New World Order and NATO's war against Yugoslavia", New Political Science, vol. 24, no.1, (March 2002), pp. 73-104

[10] Takis Fotopoulos, "Iraq: the new criminal 'war' of the transnational elite", Democracy & Nature ,vol.9, no.2, (July 2003) pp. 167-209; <http://www.democracynature.org/vol9/takis_war2.htm>

[11] See Takis Fotopoulos, "The global "war" of the transnational elite", Democracy & Nature (Volume 8  Number 2,  July  2002), pp. 210-240 <http://www.democracynature.org/vol8/takis_globalwar.htm>

[12] Takis Fotopoulos, Subjugating the Middle East: Integration into the New World Order - Vol. 2: Engineered Insurrections, (Progressive Press, December 2014).