FuzzyLumpkins
08-12-2016, 06:09 PM
The escalating situation in Crimea and the U.S. presidential campaign have more than a few things in common, but two of them are Russian President Vladimir Putin and a dearth of facts.
It remains unclear exactly what happened on the occupied peninsula to trigger such a strident response from Russia, which accuses Ukraine of supporting terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing its hold over Crimea. The confusion is by design.
“It looks like the people who have seized power in Kiev and continue to hold on to it, instead of looking for the compromises that we have talked about…instead of looking for ways to reconcile peacefully, they have resorted to terrorist practices,” Putin said.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement that it had successfully “eliminated an intelligence network” of the Ukrainian Ministry of Intelligence after several alleged attempted “terrorist” attacks, resulting in the death of one FSB officer. Ukraine denies the allegations, and there seems to be little evidence that the events occurred as the FSB claims. As the journalist Leonid Bershidsky points out, the whole operation could be a false flag designed to give Russia an excuse to make further incursions into Ukraine.
Russia devised similar excuses to justify the 2014 annexation of the peninsula and the subsequent campaign in eastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin successfully painted as a “civil war” through its propaganda outlets in much of the world. Having seen how easy it is to fabricate its way through territorial expansion, it makes sense that the Kremlin might want to push a little farther into its southern neighbor.
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Hannah Arendt warned that rewriting history, recasting the attackers and the attacked, is not a difficult proposition. In her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics,” Arendt tells the story of how French statesman George Clemenceau, in the final years of his life, was asked by a Weimar Republic representative what he thought future historians would make of World War I. “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany,” Clemenceau replied.
“A factual statement — Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 — acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context,” Arendt writes. “But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance. It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of action.”
http://www.politico.eu/article/why-donald-trump-is-dangerous-for-eastern-europe-ukraine-baltic-russia-crimea/
It remains unclear exactly what happened on the occupied peninsula to trigger such a strident response from Russia, which accuses Ukraine of supporting terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing its hold over Crimea. The confusion is by design.
“It looks like the people who have seized power in Kiev and continue to hold on to it, instead of looking for the compromises that we have talked about…instead of looking for ways to reconcile peacefully, they have resorted to terrorist practices,” Putin said.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement that it had successfully “eliminated an intelligence network” of the Ukrainian Ministry of Intelligence after several alleged attempted “terrorist” attacks, resulting in the death of one FSB officer. Ukraine denies the allegations, and there seems to be little evidence that the events occurred as the FSB claims. As the journalist Leonid Bershidsky points out, the whole operation could be a false flag designed to give Russia an excuse to make further incursions into Ukraine.
Russia devised similar excuses to justify the 2014 annexation of the peninsula and the subsequent campaign in eastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin successfully painted as a “civil war” through its propaganda outlets in much of the world. Having seen how easy it is to fabricate its way through territorial expansion, it makes sense that the Kremlin might want to push a little farther into its southern neighbor.
* * *
Hannah Arendt warned that rewriting history, recasting the attackers and the attacked, is not a difficult proposition. In her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics,” Arendt tells the story of how French statesman George Clemenceau, in the final years of his life, was asked by a Weimar Republic representative what he thought future historians would make of World War I. “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany,” Clemenceau replied.
“A factual statement — Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 — acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context,” Arendt writes. “But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance. It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of action.”
http://www.politico.eu/article/why-donald-trump-is-dangerous-for-eastern-europe-ukraine-baltic-russia-crimea/