Listening to various Western political leaders at the recent Munich Security Conference is both laughable and cringe-making. We heard from the likes of US top diplomat John Kerry and British foreign secretary Philip Hammond holding forth on issues of international law and peace, while NATO's Jens Stoltenberg and General Philip Breedlove assured that there was no Cold War.
The EU's foreign affairs chief Federica Morgherini also made the stupendous denial that the world was not witnessing a new Cold War towards Russia, as did German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
This is exactly the sordid scenario that Russian president Vladimir Putin warned about back in 2007 when he addressed the Munich conference. Putin said it would end in tears, from lawlessness and state-sponsored terrorism, instigated and justified by Western leaders who hypocritically speak as if they are paragons of virtue.
In Syria, let's cut to the chase. The alleged pro-democracy uprising that the Western media have been spinning for the last five years is this: it's a covert war of aggression on a sovereign country for regime change. NATO powers and their regional client regimes have weaponized the proxy assault forces who are comprised of myriad terrorist mercenaries.
That is standard operating procedure for the United States and its NATO allies, when outright conventional military attack on countries is politically unpalatable.
NATO member Turkey is now openly firing into Syrian territory. How's that for the organization that claims to maintain global security?
We should not even dignify Ankara's claims for its violation of international law. The fact is that it is attacking a neighboring country with artillery barrages. This is simply aggression, as the Syrian government has protested this week to the United Nations Security Council.
The irony of Turkey violating Syria's sovereignty at the very same time that NATO leaders were pontificating in Munich about "security" is too much for words.
NATO member Turkey and the US-British client regime Saudi Arabia are threatening to send military ground forces into Syria. That threatened invasion -- itself an act of aggression -- is to salvage the Western-backed war for regime change in Syria, which Russia's five-month-old intervention is brilliantly thwarting.
Western media -- the brainwashing system that it is -- will of course tell lies and distort, reducing the bigger picture to the nonsensical fragment of daily events, which are, in turn, riven with fabrications and omissions. Like the US military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren's claim last week that Russian warplanes bombed two hospitals in Syria's northern city of Aleppo. Russia clarified that claim by saying it had no warplanes in the city, and that it was in fact two US aircraft that carried out bombing raids.
Let's not even go there: the claim, counterclaim and endless minutiae. That is only letting other people dictate the narrative to suit their ends.
The fact is Syria has been brought to near-destruction by a US-led covert war that was long in the making before the official eruption of violence in mid-March 2011. The war was prosecuted with terrorist proxies who are now being destroyed by Russian air power in combination with Syrian army and Iranian and Hezbollah ground forces.
The US and its European partners tried to destroy Ukraine with a regime change operation that installed a Neo-Nazi coup in February 2014, which then proceeded to wage a war on the people of eastern Ukraine, simply because the latter refused to recognize the impostor-junta that the West orchestrated.
The historical consistency is that NATO was formed in 1949 to wage war on the Soviet Union -- the real victor of the Second World War against fascism in Europe. The powers behind the rise of Nazi Germany and European fascism were the Americans and the British in an attempt to keep the world safe for capitalism. NATO just took up where Nazi Germany failed.