This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Reprinted from caitlinjohnstone.com
Listen to a reading of this article:
-
On a recent interview with the Useful Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word "unprovoked" every time anyone mentions Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.
"Right now if you're a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it 'the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine," Chomsky said. "It's a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it 'the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.' In fact I don't know if the term was ever used "- if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine."
"Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked," Chomsky said. "That doesn't justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA."
Chomsky is of course correct here. The imperial media and their brainwashed automatons have spent half a year mindlessly bleating the word "unprovoked" in relation to this war, but one question none of them ever have a straight answer for is this: if the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the actions of western governments would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?
Because, as Chomsky notes, that is indeed the case. A few days after the invasion began this past February a guy named Arnaud Bertrand put together an extremely viral Twitter thread that just goes on and on and on about the various diplomats, analysts and academics in the west who have over the years been warning that a dangerous confrontation with Russia was coming because of NATO advancements toward its borders, interventionism in Ukraine, and various other aggressions. It contains examples like John Mearsheimer explicitly warning in 2015 that "the west is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked," and Pat Buchanan warning all the way back in 1999 that "By moving NATO onto Russia's front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation."
Empire apologists love claiming that the invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansionism (their claims generally based on brazen misrepresentations of what Vladimir Putin has said about Russia's reasons for the war), but that's silly. The US war machine was continuing to taunt the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine right up until the invasion, a threat it refused to take off the table since placing it there in 2008 despite knowing full well that this threat was an incendiary provocation to Moscow.
Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path.
No-one listened to them and here we are.
Small compilation degreesŸ of these warnings, from Kissinger to Mearsheimer.
"- Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) March 1, 2022
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
4
2
