What is all too frequently forgotten in the West is that Stalin doesn’t stand apart from history like some mummified object, suspended in time, To the contrary, his attitudes were, in part, the consequence of a long history of Russia’s dealing with the West, not to exclude the adventurism of the Allies following Brest Litovsk. And who could forget the arrogance with which the Soviet Union was treated during and immediately following the Czech crisis in 1938. If memory serves, it was a lower level negotiating team that Great Britain sent to Moscow in 1939 to cut a deal with Stalin regarding Germany. Hitler sent Ribbentrop, his Foreign Minister. These faux paus were not forgotten.

In every war, there is an issue of reality control and perception management. CNN and Fox News in the US sought to portray or present the war as “aggression” or an “invasion” by Russia. In fact, it was Georgia that invaded the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has been de facto independent since 1992. Which view is correct and the “truth”? It depends on which paradigm or lens you use.

The first paradigm is: Georgia is a sovereign country that has UN recognized borders. Based on this assumption, Georgia can do no wrong. Everything it does will be legitimate and legal. Georgian troops can murder 200,000 Russian civilians or 2,000 South Ossetians and that will be seen as legitimate because Georgia was safeguarding its UN recognized borders. This is the paradigm the US media used, following the marching orders of the US Government and US State Department. The US government tells the US media what paradigm they must follow. In this regard, US media is state-run or state-controlled media.

Of course, the US did not apply this paradigm to Serbia. Serbia too is a sovereign nation that has UN recognized borders. But then why did the US dismember Kosovo and detach it from Serbia outside of the UN and international law? Based on the UN and international law, what the US diod was illegal and against international law.

The issue here is: Who gets to decide? The US gets to decide these matters. It is selective. The US can arbitrarily and subjectively decide what is legal, legitimate, and adheres to international law. In other words, the US is the “international community”. This is a bit of a smokescreen but the US can get away with it because it has the largest army in the world and controls all media.

The second paradigm is: Georgia committed an act of aggression by launching a planned war against Russian peacekeepers in a region with de facto independence and an international peacekeeping mission. Like Kosovo, the South Ossetians should be allowed to vote in a democratic referendum on whether they want to be independent. Moreover, the principles of self-determination apply to South Ossetia. Of course, the US Government rejects this paradigm vis a vis South Ossetia but accepts it vis a vis Kosovo. The US is just applying an arbitrary standard based on whether the parties are proxies or adversaries. The US applies one paradigm to Albanian Muslim separatists and another one to Ossetian Christian separatists. The scenarios are identical. But in one case the parties are proxies and in the other they are adversaries.

There is no critical media literacy in the US. This is because the corporate and military and political interests in the US want to keep Americans dumb and stupid, walking zombies. This is for obvious reasons. People must be out buying all sorts of things they do not need, they must rush to the next movie blockbuster, and they must support the latest US “humanitarian intervention” to save mankind.

What struck me about this presentation is the comment about Joseph Goebbels and propaganda techniques. What the “expert” neglected to mention about Goebbels is that the Nazi propaganda machine was based on American models. Goebbels based much of his propaganda techniques on the pioneering work of American Edward Bernays. In fact, Goebbels studied Berenay’s books on propaganda and had at least one on his shelves. Not many Americans know that Joseph Goebbels based his propaganda techniques on US media persuasion techniques developed by Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann. That is a fact we subconsciously reject and repress and deny.

All wars entail propaganda and media wars because all wars present epistemological issues. How we see a war depends on the lens we use. And all lenses distort and alter reality.

(BTW – one good example of US/UK arrogance – is is only ONE letter S in Osetia. Also, is it not Moscow, but in fact Moskva. Do we care? Not that much. But the new “non-states” like Estonia is making a very big point that their capital name – in Russian – should be written something like Tallinn (or some such nonsense, inconsistent with Russian language), whereas it was always written Tallin before. I’m so upset to see that even spell checker in Mozilla insists it is 2 ns. This is one good example of WHAT RUSSIANS ARE FED UP WITH. And if need be nuclear war is a good way to stop this humiliation :-)

Now, the world at large can say thank you to Stalin for 45 years of global peace (1945-1990), while the US Imperial ambitions were contained.

So – Stalin’s bad deeds are long gone, his good deeds are still with us.

Well, not quite, his geopolitical creativity in slicing territories and creating countries that give much trouble is not a good legacy, but it is not pure evil – most notably Israel and Georgia would not exist without his involvement.

Contrast that to Hitler – I can’t think of any good legacy from him. That includes of course genocide of Jews, which is bad on both humanitarian and political (Zionism fuel and justification) counts.

That article by Stalin is VERY reasonable. It is so reasonable, contradicts completely with later Communist Party of USSR line. Basically, very short – “We don’t care about these territories, we don’t want them to be used as a base for next aggression against Russia. Capitalism or Communism these – is secondary to the military concerns.

That is so true – look at Finland that decided to not engage in being anti-Russian base – and lives quite nicely, not even member of NATO….

And every Russian can sign under that Stalin’s idea – “We don’t care about these territories, but West shall not dare to make them base for aggresson – AGAIN!”

The American long range strategy is to get control of Russia’s natural wealth in order to limit China’s access to it, not to mention to enrich politically connected U.S. corporations. The best way to accomplish that would be for Russia to mimic Yugoslavia and fracture into many statelets, each vulnerable to an American embrace. This could be provoked by covertly encouraging an economic meltdown via financial machinations such as during the Yeltsin era. Or by covertly financing secessionist puppet political movements lusting for power. Arming and inviting former Soviet republics into NATO is a means of applying pressure on Russia’s borders as well as justifying the continued existence of this obsolete military institution. And, of course, we mustn’t overlook the financial collateral benefits of such national global ambitions to the well connected. Bankers will collect their fat fees, the elites’ will advance their careers, bonuses will be ladled out and military contractors will continue to gorge themselves on no bid contracts, all at taxpayers expense.

The Achilles’ heel of this imperial fantasy is America’s own economic meltdown now underway. Empires are built by productive nations on the way up, not by indebted beggars in a tailspin. Russia and China are two of America’s major creditors. It is “generosity” such as their’s that’s financing America’s ruinous criminal enterprise in Iraq. Why would they want to finance their own ruin too?

I’m not ruling that out, mind you, but note how much isn’t at stake for the US. We send some aid, we make some noise, we tell Russia ‘we don’t want to play with you anymore,” and life goes on. Nobody’s starting a war between major powers just yet, and what we’re sending Georgia is a drop on the bucket, comparatively speaking.

Plus, as you point out, the US gets to play the ‘international community’ card, which looks good to everybody but China, and which should have started looking like a lifeline to the US a few years back, when we all started catching on to the fact that American ‘hegemony’ was slipping, and ultimately doomed. I agree the world isn’t, and never was as multipolar as it started looking in the ’90s. Butif international pressure can be used to keep Russia from violating non-intervention norms any more than they already have, that’s not a bad thing.

Yes, soon we’ll be “standing firm”.

The idealist/moral case is that we should fight against Russian “aggression.” As readers of this blog and this website know, Russia is far from the only aggressor in this case. S. Ossetia, morally speaking, should have had the right to secession with Abkhazia in 1991 – and diplomatic negotiations (such as what was done with Abjara) would have been the way to go for achieving some kind of deal on the province. I don’t see the moral case for intervening on the side of Georgia (or Russia) and there are a long list of sins on both the Georgian and Russian sides. Russia also provoked Georgia for the past few months on S. Ossetia.

The realist case is that we should fight against Russian expansion and for U.S. interests. There are no U.S. interests however in Georgia. Even if Russia occupied Georgia it would not give it a substantial increase in power. Russia’s GDP is 1/13th of the U.S.’s and 1/16th of the combined GDP of all EU countries. Even with China added as an ally, both are regional powers at best. A true “multipolar world” is not truly emerging, at least right now, and has been exaggerated.

If Russian aggression had reached into Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, and was going on without resistance – then the realists might have an argument. But the fact of the matter is that Russia is not a potential aggressive hegemon, and preventative war with Russia would be an enormous counterproductive disaster. Putin is no Hitler.

Both cases for American intervention, moral and realist, are off. And although both camps of international relations (such as liberal internationalist Michael Walzer and neoconservative Bob Kagan on the “moral, idealist” side and Zbigniew Brzezinski on the realist side) have been cheer leading for U.S. intervention, they are off course, both strategically and morally.