Reprinted from Paul Craig Roberts Website
My warning that the neoconservatives have resurrected the threat of nuclear Armageddon, which was removed by Reagan and Gorbachev, is also being given by Noam Chomsky, former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, and other sentient observers of the neoconservatives' aggressive policies toward Russia and China.
Daily we observe additional aggressive actions taken by Washington and its vassals against Russia and China. For example, Washington is pressuring Kiev not to implement the Minsk agreements designed to end the conflict between the puppet government in Kiev and the break-away Russian republics.
Washington refuses to cooperate with Russia in the war against ISIS. Washington continues to blame Russia for the destruction of MH-17, while preventing an honest investigation of the attack on the Malaysian airliner. Washington continues to force its European vassals to impose sanctions on Russia based on the false claim that the conflict in Ukraine was caused by a Russian invasion of Ukraine, not by Washington's coup in overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a puppet answering to Washington.
The list is long. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), allegedly a neutral, non-political world organization, has been suborned into the fight against Russia. Under Washington's pressure, the IMF has abandoned its policy of refusing to lend to debtors who are in arrears in their loan payments to creditors. In the case of Ukraine's debt to Russia, this decision removes the enforcement mechanism that prevents countries (such as Greece) from defaulting on their debts. The IMF has announced that it will lend to Ukraine in order to pay the Ukraine's Western creditors despite the fact that Ukraine has renounced repayment of loans from Russia.
Michael Hudson believes, correctly in my view, that this new IMF policy will also be applied to those countries to whom China has made loans. The IMF's plan is to leave Russia and China as countries who lack the usual enforcement mechanism to collect from debtors, thus permitting debtors to default on the loans without penalty.
In other words, the IMF is presenting itself, although the financial media will not notice, as a tool of US foreign policy.
What this shows, and what should concern us, is that the institutions of Western civilization are in fact tools of American dominance. The institutions are not there for the noble reasons stated in their founding documents.
The bottom line is that Western Capitalism is simply a looting mechanism that has successfully suborned Western governments and all Western "do-good" institutions.
As in George Orwell's 1984, the IMF is dividing the world into warring factions -- the West vs. the BRICS.
To avoid the coming conflict that the neoconservatives' pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and much louder voices. Consequently, it is Washington's lies, not Russia's truth, that most of the Western sheeple believe.
In other words, Russia was misled by believing that the West respects and abides by the values that it professes. In fact, these "Western values" are merely a cover for the unbridled evil of which the West consists.
The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understood that the "war on terror" is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington's unilateral, hegemonic power.
The problem for the neocon unilateralists is that Russia and China -- although misinformed by their "experts" educated abroad in the neoliberal tradition, people who are de facto agents of Washington without even knowing it -- are powerful military powers, both nuclear and conventional. Unless Russia and China are content to be Washington's vassal states, for the neoconservatives, who control Washington and, thereby, the West, to press these two powerful countries so hard can only lead to war. As Washington is not a match for Russia and China in conventional warfare, the war will be nuclear, and the result will be the end of life on earth.
Whether ironic or paradoxical, the US is pushing a policy that means the end of life. Yet, the majority of Western governments support it, and the insouciant Western peoples have no clue.
But Putin has caught on. Russia is not going to submit. Soon China will understand that US dependency on China's workforce and imports is not a protection from Washington's aggression. When China looks beyond its MIT and Harvard miseducated neoliberal economists to the writing on the wall, Washington is going to be in deep trouble.
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