Who are the Collaborators in the New Cold War?
“I don’t like Americans, nor their films or their culture. They have constantly destroyed other nations... How can I not feel more Russian than French with the president that we have now in France?” – Gérard Depardieu
“Russia and Germany have each made it clear:
There will not be any Nordstream rebuilt. This is a permanent shift. [Russia]
has ended its reliance on Germany, France, Italy, and the rest of Europe.
They've shown that they can't be trusted... European progress has ended. We are
seeing the end of a one-thousand-year take-off... We've seen the end of
European prosperity that's irreversible for at least a century, and I don't
think the population has understood that.” – Michael Hudson,
Systemic Sponsors of Self-Interest, 2023/01/17, 1:00:08~.
“The world has mainly two problems now:
global warming and the United States.” - Emmanuel Todd, Face aux crises : Fixer le cap et reconstruire, 2023/01/29,
37 :07~.
Francois Asselineau is the leader of the
French political party UPR (Union
Populaire Républicaine).
In the most recent presidential elections in 2022, he and his party were ignored
or dismissed by the mainstream media, but he carries on and continues to
develop the party’s base of support through conferences and video lectures. The
core of the party’s policy is the establishment of a true form of national
sovereignty, one that would require withdrawal from the European Union, the
Euro currency, and NATO. Emmanuel Macron won two presidential elections as the
candidate with the blandest and most platitudinous speeches, but in stark contrast,
the intelligence, knowledge and articulateness of Francois Asselineau is
sidelined by the merchants of mediocrity in the media corporations that
promoted Emmanuel Macron.
Mr. Asselineau has been critical of NATO’s
destabilization project in Ukraine, its criminal overthrow of the Ukrainian
government in 2014, and the numerous provocations of Russia before February
2022. For these positions, Mr. Asselineau is often called a Russian
“collaborator.” To respond to this slander, he produced an excellent response (Qui
sont les vrais collabos? Who are the real
collaborators? 2023/02/04) that teaches his critics the true meaning of this
word. His lecture also delivers an astute analysis of the war in Europe in the
1940s and relates it to the war that is occurring now.[1]
In the most basic sense, collaborate
means simply “work together,” but in political discourse it has a pejorative
meaning that came from the people and governments who collaborated with Nazi
Germany after they had been defeated or occupied. The collaborating nations
were Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Latvia,
Lithuania, Norway[2],
Poland, Romania, Slovakia, The Netherlands, and Ukraine. There were varying
degrees of enthusiasm for Nazi policy, and varying degrees of passive and
active resistance in these countries, but their governments were all
collaborators. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes as follows
the collaboration of various countries under Nazi rule:
Axis governments,
police, and military authorities aided in the roundup and deportation of Jews
to killing centers, actively participated in the murder of Jews, and in several
cases committed atrocities against their Jewish fellow citizens within their
own national borders. In territories they occupied (particularly in the east)
the Germans depended on indigenous auxiliaries (civilian, military, and police)
to carry out the annihilation of the Jewish population. Axis government
authorities and local auxiliaries in German-occupied regions were key in
implementing expropriation, deportation for forced labor, and mass murder of
non-Jewish populations.[3]
In addition, the collaborating nations
committed their own citizens to labor for German industry and to fight in the
war for Germany.
With this history in mind, it is clear that
Mr. Asselineau is not a collaborator because the meaning of the word is to
submit to and cooperate with the power that has conquered your nation. He can’t
be a Russian collaborator because Russia has not conquered France or any other
country. He is simply analyzing and interpreting the state of international
relations.
Another element of Mr. Asselineau’s history
lesson deals with the contradictions that arise when one speaks of Russia’s
“illegal aggression.” In September 1939, France and Britain declared war on
Germany because of its invasion of Poland. This was before the UN Charter
existed, but it was nonetheless illegal to wage war on a sovereign nation. France
and Britain launched a preventive illegal war because of Germany’s obvious
intent to expand throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. It
threatened to take control of the critical oil supplies and colonial holdings
of France and Britain. At the time, neither country was overly concerned with
the atrocities being committed against German citizens and the people in other
nations that Germany was legally bound to protect under the laws of occupation.
That justification came later. Germany made the Holocaust “legal” by changing
its own domestic laws, and at the time no international laws existed to allow a
nation or an alliance to attack another nation in order to protect persecuted citizens
within it. Christopher Simpson’s The Splendid Blond Beast describes how
the US State Department used this reasoning to take no action against Germany
until Germany declared war on the US in December 1941.[4]
In retrospect, there is a consensus that
France and Britain were on the right side of history. They were justified in
declaring war, even though doing so was illegal. Along with the major
contribution of the USSR, that war, joined later by the United States, put an
end to genocide and the misanthropic ideology of the Third Reich.
In his lecture, Mr. Asselineau suggests
there is an analogy between the preventive war declared in 1939 and the
preventive military operation launched by Russia in February 2022, and there is
nothing “collaborationist” about saying so. Russia is on the right side of
history.
In early 2022, there was nothing happening
in Europe comparable to the Nazi invasion of Poland and its associated
atrocities, but Russia saw a similar aggressive formation arising in Europe. It’s
not the lightning strikes of 1939-41 but rather the low, rumbling thunder of a
different kind of storm, the soft Reich that George Carlin warned us about when
he said, “... it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with
jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.” For Russia, the NATO
alliance creeping toward its borders looks an awful lot like the alliance of
nations that attacked it in 1941. One nation leads it; dozens of others submit
and collaborate. Just as the Nazi regime suppressed labor and forced lower
wages and longer hours on workers, NATO is now inflicting energy shortages and
inflation on its own citizens while it is increasing military budgets and
sending billions of dollars and weapons to Ukraine. They are eating their own
to feed their war machine. Russia sees that this alliance has spoken often for
many years of a need to wage a long war against Russia, remove the Russian
leader, install a new government, or repeat in Russia what was done to the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It is understandable that Russia would see this as
an echo of WWII and eventually decide to launch a pre-emptive war—a blocking
maneuver, as John Mearsheimer describes it—rather than wait for this alliance
to act on its threats.[5]
NATO has proven itself to be an aggressive
alliance that acts on its own without approval from the United Nations. The
doctrine was stated specifically in 1999 in NATO’s new “Strategic Concept”. NATO
declared that it would take military action “out of area”; that is, “operations
outside of Allies’ territory where there may be little or no host-nation
support.” In other words, NATO would invade other nations when doing so was
deemed necessary.[6] The
legality of NATO actions, or even its right to exist, is complicated by the
fact that the UN Charter had nothing to say about the legality of alliances
such as NATO. It did not exist at the time the Charter was drafted.
NATO has expanded steadily toward Russia’s
borders since the 1990s, even though the founding reason for its existence
vanished in 1991. This time there are not tanks and millions of soldiers
marching toward Russia, but there are massive nuclear arsenals involved, and
this is a unique danger for which there is no analogy with WWII. The nuclear
powers have always had their tacit understandings—especially since the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962—that there should be buffer zones and great care taken
to not threaten the security of a nuclear-armed rival. This is not codified in
international law. These are simply the rules and doctrines that the nuclear
superpowers have made up for themselves since the 1950s.
This traditional caution was tossed aside this
century as the United States withdrew from two nuclear arms reduction
treaties—the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002 and the Intermediate
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 2019. Caution was discarded further when the US
announced that Georgia and Ukraine would be welcomed as NATO members. Russia
said it would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO. The US called this bluff, and
in February 2022 the world learned that Russia was not bluffing.
In 2013-14, the US fomented a coup
d’etat with the Maidan protests, with American officials recorded in a
famous phone call selecting who would be the new leader of Ukraine. No attempt
was made to impeach the elected president through constitutional means. He was
simply chased out of the country. Instead of impeachment, the revolutionaries
could have waited until the scheduled elections in 2015, if they truly believed
they had the support of the people. Robert Parry reported on it thus when the
coup occurred in 2014:
NED [National
Endowment for Democracy] funded a staggering 65 projects in Ukraine, according
to its latest report... [They] created for NED what amounted to a shadow
political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir
up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.... working in
concert with domestic opposition forces, [it] had the capability to challenge
the decisions of Yanukovych’s elected government, including the recent coup
spearheaded by violent neo-Nazis that overthrew him. Presumably, NED wanted the
“regime change” without the neo-Nazi element. But that armed force was
necessary for the coup to oust Yanukovych and open the path for those
IMF-demanded economic “reforms.” ... a policy dispute about whether Ukraine
should accept the European Union’s trade demands or go with a more generous $15
billion loan from Moscow escalated into violent street clashes and finally a
putsch spearheaded by neo-Nazi storm troopers who took control of government
buildings in Kiev. With Yanukovych and his top aides forced to flee for their
lives, the opposition-controlled parliament then passed a series of draconian
laws often unanimously, while U.S. neocons cheered and virtually no one in the
U.S. press corps noted the undemocratic nature of what had just happened.
After the coup, American citizen and
Atlantic Council member, Natalie Jaresko, was installed as minister of finance,
then given Ukrainian citizenship. Before this time, she had held various
positions in the State Department, including that of First Head of the Economic
Section of the US Embassy in Ukraine from 1992 to 1995. She had also been CEO and
founder of the investment fund Horizon Capital, holder of $600 million in
assets in Ukraine.[7]
Nothing better illustrates the usurpation of sovereignty than this example.
There has been a lot of talk in Europe
about Russia having violated the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances
(1994), but the US invasion (the Maidan coup) was the initial violation of the
Memorandum which obliged Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to
not interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs and economy.[8]
One of the stipulations of the Memorandum stated that the signatories shall
“Refrain from economic coercion... to secure advantages of any kind.” The six
points agreed to in the Memorandum were:
(1) Respect the
signatory’s independence and sovereignty in the existing borders. (2) Refrain
from the threat or the use of force against the signatory. (3) Refrain from
economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by
the signatory of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure
advantages of any kind. (4) Seek immediate Security Council action to provide
assistance to the signatory if they “should become a victim of an act of
aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are
used”. (5) Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against the signatory. (6)
Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.[9]
The third and fourth elements of the
Memorandum (economic coercion undermining sovereignty and the overthrow as an
act of aggression) came into play with the events of 2014. Russia was obliged to seek assistance
from the Security Council when Ukraine became the victim of this act of
aggression. However, Russia would receive no support from Britain, France, or
the US at the Security Council. One option was direct assistance to the
elements within Ukraine who wanted to resist the new regime. This was the sort
of unilateral action that NATO and the US permit themselves regularly. It is
not an ideal solution, but Russia had to take such action in a situation in
which international law had been violated so consistently as to make it
meaningless. It is analogous to Britain and France deciding to declare war on
Germany in 1939. The other strategy was to appeal to other states to support
new agreements that would resolve the conflict peacefully, and this was done
with the Minsk Accords. If Ukraine had upheld its obligations under these
accords, and its NATO backers had forced Ukraine to uphold them, the “special
military operation” begun in 2022 would not have happened. It’s that simple.
It would be impossible for Ukraine to not
feel dominated or coerced to some degree by the economic power of NATO/EU/US on
one side and Russia on the other, so the third part of the Memorandum was bound
to cause problems of interpretation in the future. However, there was nothing
balanced or restrained about the US regime-change operation. It was an
egregious violation of the Budapest Memorandum. Since the situation was never
rectified by the United Nations or the other signatories, it should not be
surprising that armed conflict was the result.
Since 2014, the US program has advanced. Ukrainian
national assets have been privatized according to the standard neoliberal program,
and the agricultural and energy sectors have been sold off to Western investors.
Ukraine’s weapons purchases started to come from NATO suppliers. Several US
bioweapons labs were built, a move that was another provocation threatening
Russian security. Though Ukraine had become an economic vassal before 2022, if
it imagines it can now win the war against Russia, what will such a victory be after
having taken massive amounts of aid from NATO countries? It will be completely
owned by Western capital.
The “international community” has laid
heavy emphasis on the fact that Russia violated the geographical sovereignty of
Ukraine. This is the ultimate crime, supposedly. But this concept of
sovereignty is an anachronism, one which perhaps stopped being relevant in the
18th century. For example, one can find records of opposition politicians in
the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 1870s claiming that the nation would lose its sovereignty
by entering into exclusive favorable trade agreements for sugar with the United
States. They saw that if the kingdom did not get out of that dependence and
reduce the influence of “big sugar,” loss of territorial sovereignty would soon
follow.[10]
That is indeed what happened in a process very similar to what happened in Kiev
a century later. This is the reason I argue with my friends in the occupied
Hawaiian Kingdom that they should view the present government in Ukraine as the
equivalent of the insurrectionists who established the short-lived Republic of
Hawaii (1893-98) that existed before vote in the US Congress for annexation. The
US doesn’t annex anymore because doing so is costly and too blatantly illegal,
and also because it doesn’t have to. Sovereignty can be stolen more abstractly
without taking territory and without the burden of being responsible for the
inhabitants’ welfare and granting them rights as US citizens.
Another dimension of the conflict was that
the new Ukrainian government was virulently anti-Russian. Thus, it is not only
the Budapest Memorandum that comes into play but also UN resolutions on
genocide and ethnic cleansing. Speeches made by President Poroshenko in 2014, as
well as discussions on popular media channels, showed clear genocidal intent of
the government and various militias and groups that had gained prominence. The
Nazi-era war criminal Stepan Bandera was restored in school textbooks as a
national hero. Nazi militias were integrated into the army. Quite predictably,
the Russian populations in the east protested against the revolution in Kiev and
the rise of this ethnic hatred, so they vowed to secede. When the civil war
broke out, Russia provided some support, but the factor that is seldom reported
in the NATO bloc is that forces in the Donbass gained most of their power from defecting
Ukrainian soldiers and officers who took their weapons with them.[11]
Russia did supply some arms, and Russian “volunteers” were found to be involved
in the fighting, but unlike others who say this proves Russia’s venality, I say
this intervention was a justified humanitarian intervention to protect those
Ukrainians who were endangered by a US invasion disguised as a popular revolt.
Russia minimized its involvement and sought
peaceful resolution through the Minsk Accords. This limited the fighting, but
still 14,000 civilians died over the next eight years under constant shelling
by Ukrainian forces. Are those people’s kin supposed to be outraged by Russia’s
actions in February 2022?
The civil war should have made it clear to
the international community that there were serious ethnic fault lines in
Ukraine that should have been attended to in 1991 when Ukraine’s independence
was too hastily recognized. In one sense, the problem is finally being attended
to now, unfortunately through armed conflict.
With the borders it had at the time as a
Soviet Republic, Ukraine had never existed as a sovereign state. A Soviet
referendum conducted in 1991 had shown that all fifteen republics favored
staying in the Soviet Union, but somehow a few months later the leaders of
Belarus, Ukraine and Russia conspired over a weekend to declare independence
simultaneously.[12] It
is a rarity for any independence movement to gain recognition from the United
States and other leading powers, but in this case the recognition was
instant—no questions asked about regional stability, ethnic conflict, the will
of the people and so on. President Bush had to act surprised when Gorbachev
called him a few weeks later to tell him the Soviet Union was over.
If the Ukraine of the 2014-2022 period had
been led by a government that NATO wanted to eliminate, the fascist militias,
corruption, and the criminality of the Ukrainian state would be a constant
theme in the media of NATO countries. (Refer to coverage of Serbia in the 1990s
as an example.) However, when the strategic interests line up in the opposite
direction, state crimes of a favored nation can be overlooked. Anyone who
points them out will be labelled a useful idiot, an apologist for, or a
collaborator with an evil despot. The examples are easy to find, from Indonesia
in the 1960s to South and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, all of them
victims of the “Jakarta Method” applied so effectively after 1965.[13]
In late 2021, Russia saw that Ukraine had
become a de facto NATO member because it was using NATO military hardware
and its soldiers were being trained by NATO forces. It might never join NATO
because it was more useful for NATO to keep it in this unofficial status.
Ukraine had lost its political and economic sovereignty and become an American
vassal, the next Afghanistan. Russia also saw that Ukraine was preparing for a
massive offensive against Donbass to end the civil war. All of the factors discussed
herein prompted Russia’s preventive military operation.
In the aftermath of WWII, the lesson learned
by the nations that fought fascism was, supposedly, “never again.” In order to
honor the sacrifices of our ancestors who died fighting fascism, we were
supposed to never let this happen again. This the is the background to what
Scott Ritter said in an interview on February 14, 2023, which I will use to conclude
this essay:
What we’re doing
now in Ukraine is evil. Pure evil. We claim to be the friends of Ukrainian
people, and look at what we’ve done to them… We don’t care about Ukrainian
people. We put the flags on our social media. Everywhere I see flags flying.
But really? That’s how you treat your friends? You allow them to be slaughtered
on the battlefield? There won’t be a Ukraine when this is done. How much do you
love Ukraine? You don’t. You want to know why? Because you have no clue what
Ukraine is. Anybody who puts up that flag I could interrogate for two minutes,
and it would be clear they don’t have a clue what they are talking about. They
don’t have any grasp of history. They don’t have any understanding of the
underlying issues… They’re trying to project “I’m a good person,” but they are
not. They are morons… The vast majority of people don’t have a clue.[14]
Further reading
Stavroula Pabst, “In
A Compromised Media Environment, Western Intelligence Agencies Escalate NATO’s
Proxy War In Ukraine Unchallenged,” Propaganda in
Focus, February 10, 2023.
For a detailed description of the economic
takeover of Ukraine, see: Laura Ruggeri, “Marketing
Ukraine’s Reconstruction to Fuel the War,” Strategic
Culture, February 23, 2023:
Since its
independence in 1991, Ukraine’s GDP has lagged behind the level it reached in
Soviet times, industry declined, and the population decreased by about 14.5
million people in 30 years due to emigration and the lowest birth rate in
Europe. Ukraine has also become the third largest IMF debtor and Europe’s
poorest country. These negative records cannot be blamed solely on Ukraine’s
systemic and staggering corruption: the corrupt networks bleeding Ukraine are
truly transnational.
Ukraine was
targeted by two US-funded color revolutions that led to regime change and civil
war, and was wrestled away from its largest economic partner, Russia. Its
history was erased and rewritten, neoliberal prescriptions destroyed its
economic and social fabric and led to a neocolonial form of governance.
Ukraine joined
Europe’s nefarious Eastern Partnership in 2009 (1) and has been teeming with
Western NGOs, economic and political advisers since its independence. The
country’s indentured servitude and captivity to Western interests was cemented
after the last Ukrainian government to object to the IMF’s harsh conditions was
overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014.
On 10 December,
2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich stated that the conditions set by
the IMF for loan approval were unacceptable: “I had a conversation with U.S.
Vice President Joe Biden, who told me that the issue of the IMF loan has almost
been solved, but I told him that if the conditions remained we did not need
such loans“. He then broke off negotiations with the IMF and turned to Russia
for financial assistance. It was the sensible thing to do but cost him dearly.
You can’t break the shackles of IMF debt with impunity: not only does this
lender of last resort impose its usual shock therapy of austerity,
deregulation, and privatization so that the vultures can swoop in, it also
furthers and protects U.S. interests.
If those who
destroyed a country are allowed to be involved in its reconstruction, then reconstruction
will inevitably be just a point on the continuum of conquest, occupation and
looting, but with better optics. Destruction produces that blank slate on which
the occupier can write his own rules: “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things
they misname empire: they make a desolation, and they call it peace”. Tacitus
knew both the reality and the spin of Roman imperialism. One can only wonder if
those who talk about ‘reconstruction’, ‘recovery’, ‘reform’, ‘rules-based
order’, ‘reset’ or whatever buzzword is fashionable at the moment are aware of
the brutal reality or truly believe their own propaganda. In any case, they
promise a future utopia worth killing and dying for.
Notes
[1]
From
the Union
Populaire Républicaine website: “In this new video
(2023/02/04), François Asselineau denounces the inverted accusation that
consists of calling anyone a “collaborator” when he or she expresses doubts
about the official narratives distilled by Western governments and repeated
endlessly by the subsidized media. When one knows the history of France,
especially the history of the Second World War, one knows that “collaboration”
was always a matter of submitting to and serving the power that dominated
France: England during the Hundred Years War, the German Empire after 1870, and
Nazi Germany in 1940... This video answers two questions: 1) Which power dominates
France today? and 2) Which French people collaborate obediently with this power
without offering the slightest resistance?”
[2]
Norway’s
prime minister at the time was named Quisling. This name became a word in the English
dictionary that means “a collaborating puppet head of state”.
[3] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Collaboration, Accessed February 16, 2023.
[4] Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Common Courage Press, 1995).
[5]
John J. Mearsheimer:
Great Power Politics in the 21st Century & The Implications for Hungary,
December 5, 2022.
[6]
Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (New
York: Monthly Review Press, London: Pluto Press, 2002), 265-269.
[7] The Atlantic Council, “Natalie Jaresko” (profile), accessed February 16, 2023.
[8] The Budapest Memorandum was a step for Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to relinquish the Soviet nuclear weapons on their territory and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. There were six stipulations that the US, UK, and Russia were to abide by: (1) Respect the signatory’s independence and sovereignty in the existing borders. (2) Refrain from the threat or the use of force against the signatory. (3) Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the signatory of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind. (4) Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they “should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used”. (5) Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against the signatory. (6) Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.
[9]
Robert Parry, “A
Shadow US Foreign Policy,” Consortium News, February 27, 2014.
[10]
Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (University
of Hawaii Press, 1968), 202-206.
[11] Jacques Baud, « Débat / La situation militaire en Ukraine » Bon Pour La Tête, 23 mars,
2022.
[12]
Mikhail Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (Columbia University
Press, 2000), 151-152. Gorbachev had no kind words for Yeltsin’s betrayal of
the Soviet Union at the Belovezh meeting where Yeltsin and the heads of Ukraine
and Belarus plotted to announce their withdrawal from the Soviet Union, in
spite of the pro-union results of the New Union Treaty held just a few months
previously.
[13]
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and
the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Hachette Book Group, 2020).
[14]
Danny Haiphong (interviewer), “Scott Ritter on Ukraine’s Future...” February 14, 2023, 22:00~.
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