Voice of Russia
January 25, 2014
Recorded in late December
US/NATO objective: expulsion of Russian forces – Rick Rozoff
John Robles
Photo: EPA
Since its creation in 1949, NATO has gone from an organization founded to protect against an imaginary self-conceived attack by the USSR to a global aggressive attack organization. In the final installment of a 2013 year-end-summary interview with the Voice of Russia’s John Robles, Rick Rozoff, the owner of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list, discusses the moves by the alliance and what they are planning for the future. According to Mr. Rozoff the alliance was stopped dead in its tracks in Syria in 2013, an event that may portend peace in the future and an end to the US/NATO aggressive wars.
This is John Robles, you are listening to an interview with Rick Rozoff, the owner and manager of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list. This interview is in progress.
Rozoff: There are now 500 Swedish troops in northern Afghanistan, 500 Swedish troops! First time, again, in 200 years they are engaged in combat operations. 200 years. They have been killed, they killed. They’ve engaged in lethal combat in Afghanistan under NATO command.
Again, they supplied a number of warplanes for NATO’s air war against Libya two years ago. But what happened two or three years ago was in the name of professionalizing, this is the euphemism, the Swedish arm forces – and this is a demand of NATO – that conscript armies go out, no more draft, strictly professional army and so forth, that every single member of the Swedish arm forces had to sign a waiver that they could be deployed overseas for the first time.
I mean, there was formally a requirement up until then if you went to Afghanistan it was presumably voluntarily. Now every single member of the Swedish army forces has to sign a waiver acknowledging they’re prepared to be deployed anywhere in the world. And this is in conjunction with, of course, Sweden officially announcing it’s joining the NATO Response Force.
Robles: So basically they’ve given cannon fodder to NATO’s army, basically, right?
Rozoff: That’s it exactly: to be deployed any place in the world.
Robles: Any time they want? So NATO can just grab soldiers from all these countries which is why they need to expand, isn’t it?
Rozoff: Yes. But they do not need necessarily that each country becomes a full NATO member. I think this is a misconception. Georgia under Saakashvili, Ukraine under Yushchenko and company were perfectly fulfilling NATO’s demands short of full NATO membership.
The ultimate objective as we talked about a few minutes ago was the expulsion of Russian military forces from Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea in Ukraine and Georgia.
But it’s good enough sometimes simply to be a NATO partner. We talked about the Asia-Pacific pivot – accidents don’t occur except in the movies, as somebody once told me – bad movies – where too many coincidences occur.
And at the very time that the Obama administration announces its Asia-Pacific pivot – that is a shift away from Europe primarily to Asia, that is to contain China after having encircled Russia – there is no other way of interpreting that, encircling Russia through NATO expansion.
Robles: Sure.
Rozoff: Immediately before the May Summit of NATO in Chicago last year NATO announces a new international program called Partners Across the Globe.
I don’t know, if anyone in 1949, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was set up ostensibly to defend against a very unlikely if not impossible Soviet assault across the plains of Central Europe, were to be told that decades later NATO was going to institute a program called Partners Across the Globe without changing its name to what it ought to be, which is a Global Aggressive Treaty Organization.
And those eight countries, the initial ones, and there are going to be more following them, are all in Asia. They are – Asia-Pacific rather – they are: Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. These are the members of NATO’s new program, exactly at the time when the US announces its Asia-Pacific pivot.
Robles: I see. So, Scandinavia, the Arctic, Iraq and the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region are all places that NATO is looking to expand.
I’d like to back up just a little bit, because you didn’t say too much about the military-industrial complex’s relationship with NATO. How important is that relationship? And is that the true driving force of global militarization by NATO? Is it just the military industrial complexes or is it something else?
Rozoff: Several of your guests, in conjunction with yourself, have been very good at addressing this issue. I would argue Bruce Gagnon, who you’ve interviewed again recently, has made this point repeatedly and very trenchantly me . But behind it all, yes, are the merchants of death, behind them all are the Raytheons and the Lockheed Martins and Northrup Grumman and the other arms manufactures. There is no question about that.
The latest National Defense Authorization Bill is for a reported $633 billion. $633 billion.This is 23 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.
Robles: We are always talking about US-NATO as if it is one organization because that is what it seems like it has become to me. Would you characterize that, in that manner?
Rozoff: Yes, of course. Except there is a master-slave relationship obtaining between them, or a ventriloquist-dummy relationship.
I remember once the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche referring to certain theologians as God’s ventriloquists, people presuming to speak in the name of, right, throwing their voices so to imitate.
What you see when Barack Obama, the president of the US or any president in the US, or a Secretary of State of the US, you can count the hours before the Secretary General of NATO parrots or mimics exactly the same thing; you are going to hear slightly different words adjusted for the audience, but almost identical. Because they are reading off the same script, inevitably.
Robles: That was very clear recently in Ukraine. Do you remember that?
Rozoff: NATO comes out and says: “Ukraine’s future is in Europe.” Think about the unmitigated audacity to make a statement like that.
Robles: And then, at the same time he said: (I think you published it on Stop NATO or maybe it was even in the same speech that you are referring to), he also said that European countries need to throw (he didn’t say throw – I’m paraphrasing), more money or need to invest or whatever he said, more money into NATO or the US may decide it is not too interested in being a member of NATO.
Rozoff: That is a common statement by Rasmussen; his job is to hold up the whip hand and crack the whip on the European NATO members to make sure they cough up the minimum of its 2% of Gross Domestic Product that is required of NATO members. That’s his job, on behalf of the Pentagon and on behalf of the arms manufactures in the US, Britain, France, Germany and Sweden.
He has been engaging in the most disingenuous, the most dishonest characterization I can imagine. Again, that if we don’t supply more men and women to kill and die overseas, if we don’t put US interceptor missiles on our soil, if we don’t spend 2% of our Gross Domestic Products on offensive weapons to be used in wars of aggression abroad; if we don’t, the US may abandon us to the big bad bear. No?. Isn’t that the inevitable? I mean, it is subconscious, but isn’t that the inevitable threat he’s making?
Robles: But it is a completely ridiculous one. It is a completely false one. Is there any other threat in the world that you know about, so called, that justifies anything about NATO?
Rozoff: No.
There is no justification, was not in my estimate, but certainly is not now any justification for the first attempt in history to build an international aggressive military formation, because that’s what NATO is.
The US has not had a serious military threat, it has not had a serious military challenger, it has not had a country outside of perhaps Russia that has even been able to defend itself since the end of the Cold War, over 25 years ago.
Let’s be clear about that: there is no adversary that necessitates the expansion of a US-led military bloc from 16 to 28 countries and, if you include NATO partners around the world, 70 or more countries, which is over a third of the countries in the world, are either full members of NATO or members of various NATO partnership programs, sometimes members of two or three or more.
Robles: So, I would dare say that the US has never been attacked or never been attacked where it could have prevented the attack, with the case of Pearl Harbor there was forewarning but anyway…
Rozoff: Let’s agree on this. The continental US has never been attacked by another nation except when the British came in from Canada and burned down parts of the capital in Philadelphia at the time after, at least according the Canadian interpretation, the US threatened to appropriate British Canada by launching an invasion thereof. But with that exception and that exception only the continental US has never been the victim of military attack by another nation.
Robles: So you’ve got the strongest nation in the world, that has never been attacked and it is constantly saying that everybody is a threat. It is insanity. Maybe this year we will see some sanity returning to the world. What do you think, Rick?
Rozoff: Yeah, I think the fact that there has been success against what had been an unbroken string or succession of acts of political but particularly military strong-arming and aggression around the world, and that really has characterized the post-Cold War period: It starts with a war against Iraq in 1991, the military intervention by the US in Somalia shortly thereafter, then the US bombing of Serbian forces and positions in Bosnia in 1994-1995, then the war against Yugoslavia, then the second war against Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan and on and on and on.
This has been a steamroller that has been allowed to violate international law, threaten not only regional but ultimately world peace and that it seems to have stopped, it seems to have been stopped in its tracks as of last summer in Syria. Appears to have been stopped.
And if politically an equivalent of that in the Ukraine has been accomplished recently than what are we seeing is, I don’t want to be too fast and loose with historical analogies, so I won’t to revert to the obvious one, but it almost seems like a certain power in Europe that also went from victory to victory from 1939 to 1943 was eventually stopped in Southern Russia.
Robles: And it was the same thing – preventive invasion, aggressive invasion of course those guys you are referring to didn’t have a “responsibility to protect” clause, but..Rick, would you like to give our listeners a holiday greeting?
Rozoff: Yes, I certainly would. I first of all it would be remiss if I didn’t thank you and Voice of Russia for the unbelievably generous opportunities you’ve provided me and so many other people whom I greatly respect to be able to speak freely on a wide range of issues, to address concerns that simply are not being addressed any place else truthfully, nowhere else, at least as consistently as your show permits us to do.
And I’m astonished, really. You’ve had people from Michael Parenti to George Galloway to Michael Ratner to Bruce Gagnon. This is only within the last week. And I cannot think of any other program anywhere in the world where people of that caliber, with so much to say, so much expertise who are denied most every other opportunity to speak about this and now get to have their voices heard around the world. That is such an amazing contribution, not simply to something as abstract as the impartial dissemination of information, though that’is important, but to the fact that it is voices that are calling for end of militarism, as you mentioned, who imply strongly that $643 billion can be put to the better use in the US than building weapons, and that a new world where there’s some mutual respect and fraternity between nations, a real comity of nations, instead of this winner-takes-all sort of attitude where’s there’s competition, as we have had opportunity to talk about in this show, in this program, this episode, where we can almost take a map of the world and plot out where the next scramble for oil or for raw materials or for military bases or missile sites or so forth is going on right now. That has to come to an end and we need a forum in which to have those opinions, counter-opinions, expressed and you’ve provided a truly unparalleled opportunity for so many of us to be able to speak to that. And I thank you and I thank your employer.
Robles: I’m very grateful, humbled by your words, Rick. It is very nice to hear that a lot of the stuff that you hear here does not get said in the West, it does not get said in the media, it does not get said anywhere.
Rozoff: You’re correct. Unfortunately, and I’m offering this is an encouragement for other nations to follow suit, it is unfortunately not being heard in the Chinese media, it is not being heard in the Indian media, it is not being heard in Latin America – in English. It is not being heard other places where it needs to be heard. In Africa.
When more and more programs start emulating your own and providing a similar opportunity; particularly because of the language you’re broadcasting in, English, of necessity where people from the anglosphere, from the US and Britain, Canada and maybe, Australia and New Zealand. But we need something comparable where experts from around the world, especially in those countries and regions most immediately affected by the topic or by the crises that we oftentimes are talking about, need to have an outlet also, because they don’t have one. And they don’t have one in any language. But the fact that they could have it in English, which reaches the world market, is an almost inestimable opportunity for them to be able to speak the truth in the way they are unaccustomed to do. And if there is one advantage (but there are many of course) to the worldwide web it is providing exactly that opportunity for the voiceless, right, for those who thought about things and talked about privately but now have the opportunity to formulating their thoughts in a give-and-take exchange as what we are doing right now where the end product is something more than what we thought when we began the discussion.
Robles: You are absolutely right. Once again I’m humbled by your wisdom, the way you are able to connect the dots and express the deep and complex thoughts better than I usually can even if I sit down and think about them for a long time.
Rozoff: You are too self-effacing, I won’t accept that. Thank you, John.
Robles: Thank you, Rick.
That was the end of an interview with Rick Rozoff, the Owner and Manager of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at Voiceofrussia.com. Thank you very much for listening and as always I wish you the best wherever you may be.
PART 1,PART 2,PART 3, PART 4