Part VI: The West Wants No Sovereignty for Russia and Palestine
[This is the final part of a six part series by veteran journalist and political activist Ron Ridenour who has lived in Denmark since the 1980s. See Parts I, II, III, IV, V—Editors.]
Britain and the United States have had Russia (and the Soviet Union previously) in their sights to grab since its October 1917 socialist revolution, led by the Communist Party. Britain engaged Russia in war even before that. The British-Americans, and other nations, want to conquer Russia’s vast land and its incalculable resources, especially in minerals.
In the summer of 1918, 17 countries invaded Russia while World War I still raged after the new Russia withdrew from the war to establish its vision of Peace, Land, Bread. So subversive were they.
Another war-hungry Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, sent 13,000 troops along with some 300,000 others (70,000 Japanese) to try to prevent Russia from building a cooperative, socialist society, abolishing greedy capitalism’s winner-take-all ideology and profiteering.
The Russian aristocratic and Tsar White Army had about one million troops, and most of the Western governments, plus Japan and South African forces, allied with them.
Russian working people and a quickly organized Red Army fought those forces until total victory, in 1925.
Twenty years later, after the Soviet Union led the victory over Nazi-Fascist European forces, the UK-U.S. tried again to conquer Russia and the entire Soviet Union’s 15 republics. Even before the last bullet was fired in Europe, Prime Minister Winston Churchill devised Operation Unthinkable. Had Churchill the atomic bombs he needed from his understudy Harry Truman, he would have invaded Moscow, Stalingrad and Kiev, on May 22, 1945.
Two factors prevented such an untoward act. Labour Party leader Clement Attlee defeated Churchill in an election and took office on May 23. He treated Russia/SU as real allies. Churchill had asked President Truman for use of his atomic weapons, but Truman needed the few being made for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nevertheless, Truman heeded Churchill’s wish and started his own operations to destroy the Soviet Union. This was part of the Truman Doctrine. He devised several operations: Pincher (1945), Broiler (March 1948), Bushwhacker (1948), Frolic (May 1948), Sizzle (December 1948), Trojan (January 1949), Shakedown (October 1949), and Dropshot (1949-1959).
The latter plan called for 400 atomic bombs to be dropped upon 200 targets in 100 cities. The United States government planned to attack in 1950-51.
This would have made the U.S. an unstoppable empire to end all empires. Yet, two conscientious scientists at the Manhattan Project—Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall—gave the Soviets secret formulas, which enabled them to complete their own atomic bomb ahead of the time estimated by the U.S.
“What put a thunderous halt to the U.S.’s planned genocidal attack was the surprise on August 29, 1949, when the Soviets tested their atomic bomb, which was based on Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs’s information that they gave the Soviets. Truman, the U.S.’s intelligence apparatus, Pentagon strategists and nuclear scientists were stunned. They had not expected the Soviets to get their own bomb before 1953 or 1954.”
For the complete story, see my colleague Dave Lindorff’s co-produced documentary film, A Compassionate Spy; and his book, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2023).
Post-Cold War Warriors Still After Russia
After Truman had to stop invasion plans, he and all presidents since him fell back to what they called the Cold War until the Soviet Union collapsed on December 26, 1991.
Already before its final collapse, U.S. politicians and military leaders were contemplating how to make the final coup de grace to Russia’s sovereignty. That included extending NATO beyond Germany, which the George H.W. Bush administration promised as a condition that the Soviet Union cease existence, and preparing to take over and divide Russia into several countries easier to dominate.
“In 1991, two positions emerged in Washington. The first, embodied by U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, saw the breakup of the Soviet Union as a historic opportunity for the West to free itself from the Russian threat. The other, backed by U.S. Secretary of State Jim Baker, argued for caution, focusing on the risks involved in the disintegration of a superpower, especially a nuclear one.”
Cheney had ideas similar to Zbigniew Brzezinski and Paul Wolfowitz.
“For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” From Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard—American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.
Brzezinski had been Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser.
Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, had another plan for world domination, the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine.
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, which poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”
These plans took shape under George H.W. Bush (1989-93). Then came Bill Clinton and his government’s massive financial gains for Wall Street during the drunken and weak Russian President Boris Yeltsin regime. His term (1991-99) ended with the economy in ruins and nearly half the population in poverty.
The table below shows a major reason why the majority of Russians consistently vote for Vladimir Putin as their president, no matter that the West calls him a dictator.
Poverty rate: 1990=1.5% USSR in its last year
Poverty rate: 1999=48% End of Yeltsin
Poverty rate: 2000=42.6% Putin’s first year
Poverty rate: 2022=2% Putin 22 years in office and still running.
After Clinton helped to destroy the basic welfare of the nation, came Bush no. 2, George W. (2001-2009). His regime took over from Brzezinski, Cheney and Wolfowitz with the Bush Doctrine, whose principles included unilateralism, preemptive war, and regime changes, Middle East wars.
Even so, the new and (too) friendly Russian President Putin aided Bush in Afghanistan by allowing his use of military bases and intelligence. He even asked to join NATO, as had Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev before him. However, Wall Street, the Pentagon and CIA said no thanks—enemies are in demand for weapons profits and territorial grabbing.
Nevertheless, Bush thought well of Putin: “I looked into his eyes and I saw a soul… I trusted him.”
Yet Denmark’s former queen, Margrethe II, took an opposite view from her international leader. In February 2023, she told a Danish newspaper (Weekendavisen): “I can remember [from visits in 2011 and 2012], that I thought…he is not pleasant. I had never seen such cold eyes in my life.”
This queen spoke as she should not have done, since the modern constitution forbids royalty from expressing anything political. Nevertheless, as the media reported then, a year into the current war, the people would forgive her for this. As a newspaper source explained: “She becomes closer to the gathering point of the population—all the rest of us think the same.”
And so it goes throughout most of Europe, especially in Scandinavia, Bernie Sanders.
Economic Union chief of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas bluntly told the truth of what U.S. oligarchs and their presidents want when she said Russia should be broken up into several states—perhaps five just as U.S./NATO did to Yugoslavia.
“Russia’s defeat is not a bad thing, because then you know there could really be a change in society. …I think if you would have more like small nations…it is not a bad thing if the big power is actually [made] much smaller,” PM Kallas so proposed in a speech, May 21, 2024, a month before she resigned as prime minister to work full-time for EU and war.
A year before Kallas advocated what is the U.S. goal, Tass reported what Russian leaders know: “The United States is hatching plans to carve Russia up into several different territories, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said at the Znanie [Knowledge] educational marathon on Tuesday.”
From Bombs to Bread
Remember Russia’s vision a century ago: Peace, Land and Bread. They might well have achieved that vision had they not needed to constantly defend their sovereignty, squandering trillions of dollars in doing so. This war alone has already cost at least $2 trillion.
As of March 2024, 57 “coalition of the willing” countries have spent, at least, $400 billion, including U.S. $175 bn in military expenditures alone. Plus many billions in “humanitarian” aid. The U.S. estimates that Russia has spent $211 bn plus the theft of $1 trillion in assets abroad. In addition to recent extra EU Ukrainian funds of $9 bn + $11.8 bn promised. Then there is an unknown amount of Ukraine’s own funds, around $60 bn in the first year of war.
Today, there are 828 million people on the planet living in hunger, 2.5 times the population of the United States—345 million are barely alive, starving.
UN World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley stated in July 2021, that it would take around $40 billion a year over a ten-year period to end world hunger. That is $400 billion. Just this war alone, if it had been avoided, could have eradicated poverty at least five times. The rest of the sum of $400 billion could have been used to assure a decent standard of living for all eight billion of us.
Besides using government money to end poverty, there are 2,781 billionaires in the world, according to Wikipedia, 2024 (3,194 according to Statista). Their total worth is ca. $14.2 trillion.
Does the planet really need extremely wealthy persons who cannot possible use all that they have?
Denmark’s total capitulation to U.S. wars
As far as I can surmise, no organizations or political parties in Denmark, including the few communist-Trotskyist ones, support Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. No one takes into account the history of aggression and attempts to, not only suppress, but to destroy and overtake the nation. The countless invasionary and illegal wars the U.S. conducts are never criticized by the government or the mainstream media.
The fact that the Zelensky government and U.S./NATO not only sought to make Ukraine another member at Russia’s very border, there is a real threat that it would be armed with nuclear weapons. We are not told where the U.S. has all of its nuclear weapons but we know that Russia is nearly surrounded by its armies. Ukraine was the last straw.
In my judgment—I have written critically about President Putin—the Russian governments have been too lenient with the U.S., trying to be friends and even a member of NATO so that there would be no wars between the West and Eurasia.
They should have known long ago that that is not what the U.S./NATO/EU want. The latter want war and all the profits they can accrue. Loss of lives is irrelevant. There are too many homo sapiens anyway, I imagine warmongering leaders think.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen even tried to make it illegal to demonstrate against Israel, as it is in Germany. She wanted to call them “terrorists” for supporting Hamas. Demonstrators here do not directly support Hamas and constitutional experts persuaded the PM it would be unconstitutional to forbid such protests.
Many countries aside from Germany—UK, France, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Austria, for example—either forbid pro-life-for-Palestinian demonstrations or have severe restrictions on them.
While there have been no protests directed against the proxy war in Ukraine, there have been a few people who seek less NATO support overall. That goes for the parties calling themselves communists, and pacifists such as the Peace Watch folk who have had a table in front of the government’s Christiansborg Palace for the last 23 years. They began October 19, 2001, when the “peaceful Danes” sent troops to Afghanistan to please Uncle Sam. These Peace Watch people want an end to all wars without focusing on who is to blame.
Even though these people demonstrated, they did not oppose the U.S./NATO proxy war. Unions make it clear they see Russia as wrong for the invasion/special military operation. Rather, the national unions protested, on February 5, 2023, the government’s decision to eliminate a favorite holiday, All Saints’ Day, on the pretext of needing the money for this war, which it would save if workers went to work.
The anti-union coalition government, led by Bernie Sanders’ favorite Social Democrats, maintained that the savings would amount to $550 million. This sum could be used to buy nine Lockheed Martin F-35 jets, according to former Defense Minister Jakob Ellemann-Jensen.
Denmark had already signed on for 27 such jets, in 2016. Only four have arrived after eight years and six more are permanently at the U.S.’s Luke Air Force Base in Arizona to train Danish pilots.
The unions picketed and went home. I was the only one with a banner/picket sign calling for all nations, including Russia, to keep their sovereignty without U.S. interference. No protests since concerning the theft of the national holiday achieved in 1686. Originally, it was a day of fasting and prayer. Priests prayed for peace. Priests today pray for the neo-fascist government-led Ukraine to join the U.S./NATO war machine, in order to overthrow Russia.
Incidentally, there was some vocal and even media criticism of the coalition government’s decision to scrape this religious holiday for just half-a-billion dollars when it was learned that the government had a surplus of $13.5 billion at the end of 2022.
All 12 parliamentary parties, from far right to lukewarm progressives, support whatever funds and weapons their government and the U.S./NATO want to send to Ukraine.
Ole Ryborg is a highly respected DR media (TV, Radio, online) EU correspondent. On February 25, 2023, just three weeks after the unions’ last demonstration and one year since the war began, his analysis was published: “The war in Ukraine will change EU forever.”
“Europeans must rearm militarily. That requires enormous investments in all forms of modernizing defense and in warehousing weapons.” “There are still in Europe—both politicians, businesses and citizens—who hope for a quick end to the war, and that the old world with Russia as a partner returns. But that time is dead. Now EU must prepare for decades to come where its neighbor Russia is an enemy. It will be expensive, difficult and uncomfortable.”
As we go to press, the Social Democrat-led coalition government proposes a “war tax” for even more “military defense” of Greenland and the Artic.
On January 31, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said: “During my administration we have doubled our military expenses…We live in a dangerous world. Now we see the need for greater defense. We escalate to prevent to prevent war and secure peace. It will be expensive.”
The government suspects an escalation reaching 3.5% on GNP over the current 2.4%. That would mean a cost of $15 billion for six million people, over the current $9.5. An average family would pay an extra $6,000 annually in taxes.
TV2 television station conducted a poll, which shows 21% in favor against “55%” against.
Although the vast majority of workers oppose even more war costs following an increase just a month ago, their 68-union federation, LO, supports its government and the USA war machine. LO director Morten Skov Christiansen told the media, “We are open to that for our members, citizens and businesses.” LO allegedly represents 1.3 million workers.
If the West wins this war and pushes Russia closer to a corner with Ukraine and more nukes surrounding it through NATO, then it will be Moldova and Georgia’s turn. Russia has borders with 14 countries. NATO has six already at its borders: Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Norway and now Finland.
Ryborg left out the greatest discomfort: more than a million human beings killed, and millions more refugees dispersed around the world. Russia must win this war. It is an existential struggle for survival. Defeat means that the U.S. wins and occupies the world’s largest nation.
More hundreds of thousands killed and displaced in Palestine, and a widening war throughout the Middle East, which the U.S./NATO/Israel started a generation ago. But, what the hell, the West is always at war anyway. The West has opted to donate their sovereignty to the U.S. Russians and Palestinians never will!
Lullaby
Little war child, where are you going?
East or west?
Where in the world do you believe you can find a friend?
Little war child, what suits you best:
A worn blanket?
A plywood coffin?
A life jacket?
Little war child, where will you die:
Where the bombs fall
Or in the open sea?
Little war child, where do you want to go?
Choose yourself
Just we Shall never see you again.
(By Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt. Author’s translation with permission.)
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About the Author
Ron Ridenour is a U.S.-born author and journalist, anti-war and civil rights activist since 1961. After joining the U.S. Air Force at 17, he saw the inner workings of U.S. imperialism first hand and resigned. In the 1980s and 1990’s he worked with the Nicaraguan government and on Cuban national media.
He now lives in Denmark and, in addition to writing a dozen books, has served as a special correspondent and freelance investigative journalist for many publications in the U.S. and several Latin American and European countries—among them: The Morning Star, New Statesman, The Guardian (U.S. and England), Playboy, Liberation News Service, Pacific News Service, Coast Magazine, Qui, Skeptic, Seven Days, and Pacifica Radio.
CAM co-founder Philip Agee wrote commentaries to two of his dozen books: Yankee Sandinistas: Interviews with North Americans Living and Working in the New Nicaragua, and Backfire: CIA’s Biggest Burn. See also: The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert and Winding Brook Stories at Amazon and Lulu. Other work can be found at ronridenour.com.
Ron can be reached at ronrorama@gmail.com.
