Two European Thorns in the Empire’s Side: Rightist Orban and Leftist Fico (and Look What Happened to Him)
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban may be a far-right politician, but he also opposes the west’s proxy war in Ukraine and that, much more than his extreme conservatism, is what infuriates imperial henchmen. The European Union is in a constant snit over Orban, because every time that organization turns around, he blocks funds or weapons to Kiev. Another war opponent is leftwing Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico – and we all know what happened to him. On May 15, he was shot five times. The attempted assassination failed, but he’s still recovering; and his fate was used by an EU official, Oliver Varhelyi, who warned the Georgian prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, that if Georgia approved a foreign agents’ bill, something Washington and Brussels vehemently oppose – since it interferes with a Georgian color revolution and opening a second front against Russia – he should bear in mind what happened to Fico. Varhelyi claims his remark was taken out of context. Ho, ho!
This alleged attempted intimidation of the Georgian prime minister comes at a time of great tensions between the EU and Georgia. So no surprise that Kobakhidze would charge that what Politico May 23 predictably tarred as “his increasingly authoritarian government,” was basically receiving EU threats and faces “abusive blackmail” from the west. Indeed, the U.S. has already imposed sanctions on dozens of Georgian officials. “In my conversation,” Kobakhidze wrote on Facebook, “the European Commissioner listed a number of measures Western politicians can take after [Georgia passes] the transparency law and…[the Commissioner] said ‘look what happened to Fico, you should be very careful.’” If that doesn’t sound like a threat to you, you need to doublecheck your grip on reality.
In this context of western war-on-Moscow insanity, Washington regards countries like Georgia, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Moldova as chess pieces it must either eliminate or bring to its side via color revolutions, lawfare, sanctions, other financial extortion, electoral chicanery or outright meddling in those nations’ internal affairs. Perhaps not chess pieces, because Washington doesn’t play a strategic game like chess. Let’s just say, the imperial view is that these countries are weaklings to be bullied.
Such bullying comes in a bleak landscape of ever more dangerous escalation between two superpowers, the U.S. and Russia, escalation that could lead to nuclear war. Perceiving this mad peril, the third superpower, Beijing, recently weighed in, announcing that it would support Moscow militarily. So much for the Beltway hallucination about driving a wedge between China and Russia, in order first to defeat the latter then the former, a delusion the hubristically over-confident United States never bothered to conceal but instead shouted from the rooftops early on in the Ukraine War. You’d think this Sino-Russian publicly proclaimed defense pact would convince Washington’s rulers that their hyper-aggressive belligerent approach has failed, so it’s time for diplomacy. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.
The 40- and 50-somethings ruling the roost at the state department and who form a despotic cadre of neocon government advisors have little experience of the terrors of the cold war and evidently less realistic grasp of what a hot one would mean – 90 million dead Americans in the first few minutes and tens of millions more shortly thereafter. These so-called leaders are a lethal, planetary menace. And don’t look to Donald “Fire and Fury” Trump for salvation: He recently proclaimed he’d bomb Beijing and Moscow. If one of these two presidential candidates, Trump or Biden, doesn’t come to his senses fast, humanity’s ranks could soon be thinned to those who had the foresight and money to build bomb shelters.
The Biden gang’s insane journey toward Atomic Armageddon is all the loonier, because these hacks seem to forget that in a nuclear war there are no winners. Even if the fanatics at, say, the neocon Institute for the Study of War convince the white house to attempt to destroy all Russian nuclear command and control centers, it is pointless, as Moscow knows. That’s because Russia has a “dead hand” nuclear launch system. In the very unlikely event that the west decapitates the Kremlin, the nukes launch automatically at Europe and the United States, even if Russian leadership is all dead.
That the psychopaths in supposed institutes and think tanks in Washington might advocate such a move is simply an argument to end their influence. But Biden has assembled a globally lethal bunch of neocons to run foreign policy, no surprise from the president who greenlit the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline. However, they now play a terrifying game, pushing as close as possible to Moscow’s red lines. A no-fly zone in western Ukraine? F-16s for Kiev? Western boots on the ground in Ukraine? Any of these would be an end-times disaster. Yet feckless, reckless Biden has shown repeatedly that what he swears never to do one month, he implements a few months later. In short, given the war-mongers he packed the white house with, he’s not to be trusted with humanity’s fate.
Leaders like Fico and Orban come right out and say the west is crazy for war. But such honesty is not allowed. Nor is it permitted to utter the truth that Moscow was massively, deliberately provoked into invading Ukraine, a provocation that the west cultivated for nearly a decade, starting with a 2014 CIA-backed neo-Nazi putsch in Kiev. And Biden was one of the most gung-ho Ukraine-in-NATO boosters. Now, as Kiev (with American satellite surveillance and targeting) damages the Russian early warning nuclear defense umbrella, what will Washington say if this leads – as enough such damage could – to an atomic holocaust? That Moscow’s launch was unprovoked? If so, Beltway survivors, if there are any, will be shouting into the wind: because hundreds of millions of humans will already be dead and five billion others will soon follow them into the grave, via nuclear winter.
Meanwhile, the west’s provocations never cease, be they immense or small. The latest less gigantic one involves Serbia, a country bullied by NATO for its perceived pro-Russian stance. This latest insult was the Germany- and Rwanda-backed UN designation of Serbia as having committed a genocide, when in fact many others (Croats, for instance) committed mass atrocities during the 1990s Balkans fighting. But the most egregious bullying of Serbia dates back to 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia – a country that, in its previous communist incarnation, was much hated by covert fascists in the west.
Why? Because Yugoslavia was long led by former WWII partisan Josip Tito, a wily and seriously far-left ruler; and not only did western crypto-fascists despise leftists, they also detested their own erstwhile allies – the anti-Nazi partisans. How else to explain Allen Dulles’ first post-war act as OSS head, namely hunting down partisans in the forests of Europe, partisans who had fought alongside the west against Hitler? Those communist or Jewish or anti-fascist partisans were simply too unbowed to be trusted. Instead, the U.S. preferred to deal with and protect former Nazis, like the 1500 Nazi scientists that it imported to NASA in the U.S. in Operation Paperclip.
Back in the present, here and there glimmer faint signs of rationality from Washington, namely Biden’s recent remark that Ukraine won’t join NATO or his comments to ABC News June 6 that American weapons must not be used against the Kremlin. The former has been obvious to the realists who heard Moscow’s furious retort to the 2008 western vow to put Kiev in NATO – nyet means nyet. But the U.S. Empire is not led by realists. It’s led by a very unfortunate combo of neo-con fanatics and wishful thinkers, whose grip on the nation’s steering wheel must be shaken, because they ignore those faint common sense road signs and thus speed us all toward a crash.
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Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Busybody. She can be reached at her website.
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