(ANTIMEDIA) In August of 1991, members of the Soviet Union’s government — who were also hard-line members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) — attempted to take control of the country. What many call a coup attempt failed in just two days.
NATO has just announced a plan to send troops to the alliance’s eastern flank, close to the Russian border. NATO says it is attempting to deter potential Russian aggression.
The UK, the US, Canada and Germany will lead four battle groups to be based in Poland and the Baltic states. Diplomats say the troops will be a deterrent to Russian aggression by acting as a “tripwire” that would trigger a full response from the alliance if necessary
Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as a ‘puzzle wrapped inside an enigma’. The same could be said for Russian President Vladimir Putin today. From the intricate and sometimes unpredictable diplomatic maneuvers of his foreign policy to his contradictory and sometimes ambiguous pronouncements on the legacy of the USSR, enigmatic is perhaps one of the most apposite words to describe him. This enigma is particularly evident in his approach to the politics of the Middle East and Israel in particular.
Because of Japan’s unconscionable open-ended new secrecy law, it is very likely journalism in the nation has turned tail, scared of its own shadow. Nevertheless, glimmers of what has happened, of what is happening, do surface when brave people come forward.
On May 22nd 2015 Hiromichi Ugaya, a photojournalist who is well-informed, insightful, and engaging, was interviewed about what he witnessed in the aftermath of one of the world’s most horrendous disasters.
The Russian European dreamers have included Pushkin, Lenin, Gorbachev and, until relatively recently, President Vladimir Putin. They have all seen their country’s future as part of the “European house”.
But history and events have not been kind to Russia. Napoleon’s invasion, revolution, two world wars, Stalin’s communism and, most recently, the expansion of NATO, have shattered the dream again and again.
February 20, 2015, marks the one-year anniversary of the heinous slaughter of protesters and police by neo-Nazi snipers who transformed a relatively peaceful protest against Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, into a violent anti-Russia coup. To this day, the illegitimate regime ruling in Kiev has done virtually nothing to bring their sniper allies to justice.
During the early 1950s American warplanes dropped some 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea. In April 1961, the U.S. bombed targets in Cuba. During the 1960s and early 1970s the U.S. devastated Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with approximately 6,000,000 tons of bombs.
I live in Philadelphia. There was a time when I wrote book reviews and op-eds for the Philadelphia Inquirer. That period ended, however, thanks to the intemperate language I hurled at its editors for the far too many articles and columns they published that attempted to justify an invasion of Iraq. Subsequently, whenever I was moved by something in the Inquirer that was egregiously lousy, I would write an article about it. Some of these articles eventually were given the title, “Stinky Inky.”
During frantic post-Second World War planning sessions in the West, the British Foreign Office noted its fears of “ideological infiltration” from the Soviet Union, a terrifying possibility it described as “something very like aggression.” This near-hysterical fear of independent nationalism has been the hallmark of Western foreign policy ever since. Lately it has been restored to its natural fever pitch by the crisis in the Ukraine.
