If I earned a cent every time I noted and wrote a post about an obvious lie from a European politician about Russia and Ukraine I would be a very rich man. And, I am not even talking about von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas and António Costa, (the Council President) – whose utterances are so delusional they can no more be considered ‘lies’ that you would consider it a ‘lie’ if a patient in a mental hospital with a delusion that he was Napolean said “I won the battle of Waterloo”.
This is Czech president Petr Pavel:
Drawing on his security experience, Pavel also said that the collective west should be looking to settle some broader issues with Russia, renewing treaties on arms control and regulating military exercises.
But he stressed:
“I have never seen any idea within my time in Nato – and I spent in Nato many years – I haven’t seen any single plan that would suggest attacking Russia.
I asked the Russians, when they were still in Nato, in a number of Nato-Russia Council meetings, if they seriously mean that there is anyone in Nato who would like to invade Russia.
We only act to defend the territory. We don’t have any interest in controlling vast Russian territory with so many problems. They will have to deal with their problems themselves. … It’s to protect against a country that proved number of times to be aggressive.” [1]
I’ve included the Guardian’s reference to Mr Pavel’s “security experience”, (he had a role on a NATO committee at one point), to heighten the sense of irony.
First of all; the point isn’t whether or not NATO intends to invade Russia. The point is that Russia, like any other Great Power, does not feel comfortable with another Great Power establishing a strong military intelligence presence on their very border. If China set up shop in Mexico the US would react; whether or not they believed that China was actually planning to invade the US via Mexico. Great Powers like to have some space around them. This is the strategic point. One is surprised that Mr Pavel, a former ‘NATO general’ does not grasp this.
Secondly; NATO may well not have been planning to attack Russia from Ukraine; but the CIA was certainly using the situation to set up spy bases spying on Russia, leveraging the advantage that proximity to Russia gave them, along with using Ukrainians who had good Russian language skills. [2] This was a direct threat to Russia.
Thirdly; the claim that “We only act to defend the territory” is preposterous. Serbia was illegally bombed by NATO to force them to leave Kosovo in 1999. Libya was bombed by NATO in 2011, destroying a functioning society, on the basis that Gadhafi had been going to massacre some oppositionists. He may or may not have been. Had he done so, it would have been with EU and UK supplied weapons, which would have been embarrassing. NATO’s Libya operation was based on a sophist reading of the UN Resolution to protect civilians. They claimed this allowed them to perform regime change and establish a “prosperous and free society”. This specific abuse of a resolution which Russia had agreed to, was one more nail in the coffin of international cooperation. NATO was heavily involved in the West’s absurd and bloody attempt to turn tribal Afghanistan into a Western style parliamentary democracy. NATO by no means acts “only act to defend the territory”. On the contrary, it is a rogue organisation which since its raison d’être vanished, has been involving itself in a series of often failed and always bloody military adventures, far from its own territory, inspired by the dubious ideology of international liberalism.
Russia “proved number of times to be aggressive’. It would help to have details because then one could argue the point. The 2008 Georgian war was, of course, started by Georgia, not Russia. If Mr Pavel is thinking back to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, that was another era, and another country – one with a specific globalist political ideology, which it has since completely abandoned. What other examples does Mr Pavel have in mind? Ukraine crisis aside I can think of no candidates.
Notice the snide remark about Russia, almost a trope, with “so many problems”. Yes; Russia has its own set of problems. War aside; there is still a dependence on energy revenues. Social spending is still relatively low compared to European norms, independence of the judiciary is not yet a reality. But, if you compare Russia with many European countries, war aside, Russia has no more problems than any other. For example; war aside, it is far less indebted than France or the UK.
Mr Pavel is lying. And he is one of the more plausible of the bunch. Why do these people lie so much? In some cases the explanation may not lie in personal evil, but in a kind of careerist necessity. The edifice on which they sit, in some position in proximity to the top, is a large machine based on making money, devoid of moral purpose. It considers the world as a whole the territory it can exploit. The machine lumbers along and has its own logic. Mr Pavel may have set out to build a political career, with, if not noble intentions, at least, perhaps quite decent ones. He may, simply not have realised that the machine towards whose zenith he set himself to climb is itself amoral and capable of great evil. Having reached his high position, it is humanly natural to want to hold onto it. He cannot allow himself to see the true nature of the beast he sits atop of because, being a decent man, he would have to get off. And so, he tells these little lies, essentially to defend his own personal self-image and enable himself to hold onto his position, money, security and career. I am using Mr Pavel, for illustrative purposes, of course.
Notes