Finian CUNNINGHAM | 23.05.2014 | 08:27
Britain’s heir to the throne Prince Charles this week added his voice to Western propaganda effort demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin. That’s a royal use of historical distortion considering the past pro-Nazi sympathies of Britain’s House of Windsor and the personal friendship between Hitler and former King Edward VIII – Charles’ granduncle.
According to media reports, the British monarch compared Putin to Adolf Hitler. He made the public remark while on a visit to Canada this week where he was attending a World War II memorial ceremony in the naval city of Halifax.
A staff member at the Canadian war museum told Charles that her European Jewish family had fled from Nazi aggression. The British royal then opined: «And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler».
Prince Charles, who his first in line to succeed as Britain’s titular head of state, has thus lent official British weight to the relentless vilification of Vladimir Putin and Russia over the Ukraine crisis.
American politicians, pundits and media have for weeks been accusing Russia of «aggression» and «expansionism» in a gratuitous reference to the past crimes of Nazi Germany. US Secretary of State John Kerry has made comparisons with Russia and Nazi Germany’s annexation of European territories during the 1930s. Putin has even been portrayed as the «new Hitler» by such prominent US politicians as Hillary Clinton, who has her sights on the next American presidency.
This crass distortion of history by Western officials, political leaders and media is not only devoid of facts and historical understanding. It is much more sinister than that. Demonizing Putin over the Ukraine crisis is out-and-out propaganda to mislead the Western public, by concealing the real cause and perpetrators of the turmoil in Russia’s strategically important neighbouring country. This inflammatory deception is recklessly setting the stage for an all-out war…
It is not Russia that is «land grabbing» Ukrainian territory and violating the country’s sovereignty – it is Washington and its NATO allies. The Western-backed regime in Kiev, led by so-called Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is in power illegally precisely in order to turn Ukraine into a pressure point inimical to Russia’s geopolitical security interests. The Kiev regime, comprised of self-declared fascists and neo-Nazis, is currently trying to terrorize a large swathe of the Ukrainian population in the east and south into submission to its illegal hijacking of government power.
The Western comparison of Russian leader Vladimir Putin with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler is a brazen inversion of reality. The comparison applies more accurately to the US and its British, French and German allies who have fomented the illegal regime change in Kiev as part of the long-term encroachment of NATO expansionism on Russian territory.
The ongoing collusion between Western governments and neo-Nazi paramilitaries of Ukraine’s Right Sector, Svoboda and other «ultranationalists» underlines the real historical analogy.
As documented in the White Book, published earlier this month by Russia’s foreign ministry, the regime-change operation in Kiev that took place on 23 February with the ousting of elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a carefully coordinated assault on the state by the Western-backed fascist forces. The illegal occupation of government buildings in Kiev and other west Ukrainian cities was integrated with a massive campaign of vandalism, violence and intimidation against opposing media, politicians, civic leaders and members of the public. Scarcely reported in the Western media were several murders of politicians and members of the state security forces.
In one incident, among hundreds compiled in the White Book, on the 18 February – days before the eventual coup – buses ferrying civilian supporters of the Yanukovych government back to Crimea were hijacked by the Western-backed fascists. The people were marched off the buses, beaten with bats and shovels and doused with petrol. They were threatened with immolation by the militants, who shouted: «We are coming to get you in Crimea».
This campaign of terror by self-proclaimed neo-Nazis who openly glorify the earlier collaboration of Ukrainian fascists with Hitler’s conquest and mass extermination during the Second World War, but which Western politicians and media lionize as a «pro-democracy movement», is how the present regime in Kiev came to seize power. That reign of terror, and it is ongoing, gives accurate meaning to why the people of Ukraine voted to secede and join with the Russian Federation on 16 March. It also explains why Russian-speaking people in the eastern regions of Donetz and Lugansk – whom the Kiev junta and its supporters despise as «Untermenschen Slavs» – have set up self-defense zones and also voted for independence from Kiev on 11 May.
The Western criminal enterprise in Ukraine is so audacious it has to be covered up by Washington and its European allies, with the compliant propagandizing assistance of the corporate news media, because the implications are so disturbing. The West has to turn reality on its head in order to distract public opinion by making outlandish and baseless comparisons between Putin and the Third Reich.
Britain’s Prince Charles is the latest propaganda mouthpiece in this gross distortion of the truth. But the intervention by the House of Windsor has a particular irony.
Charles’ granduncle, the former King Edward VIII, was an arch Nazi sympathizer, who stands accused of passing British secrets to the Nazis during the war. The disgraced royal had to be sent into exile in the Caribbean Bahamas by Prime Minister Winston Churchill because he was «undermining the British war effort». And after the war, British intelligence went on a special mission in defeated Nazi Germany to retrieve incriminating correspondence between Edward and the Fuhrer.
Edward’s collusion with Nazi Germany was typical of Western capitalist rulers’ pro-Nazi views. During the 1930s, the ruling class of Britain and the US were colluding with Hitler and European fascism as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and socialist revolution in their own countries. Of course, the fascist formula turned out horribly wrong.
Just as then, Western imperialism is once again finding common cause with fascism, this time in Ukraine. And the target of their machinations is once again the geopolitical power of Russia.
That is why the propaganda stakes are so high. In their fitful efforts to deceive, the Western political, financial and media establishments are twisting history into a grotesquely false analogy.
That a member of the Nazi-admiring House of Windsor – formerly the Germanic House of Saxe-Coburg – should also engage in this aggressive Western demonizing of Putin and Russia is particularly odious. These people are shameless in their ignorance, arrogance or downright stupidity.
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