_A silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules.

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Why do we tolerate thethreat of another world war in our name? Why dowe allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination,wrote Harold Pinter, is a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis, as if the truth never happened even while it was happening.

Every year the American historianWilliam Blumpublishes his updated summary of the record of U.S. foreign policy which shows that, since 1945, the U.S. has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the worlds most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism our terrorism are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclonein Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the U.S. state department noted that, following Natos campaign in 2011, Libya has become a terrorist safe haven.

The name of our enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to U.S. domination.

The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democratsMuhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala andSalvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered likePatrice Lumumbain the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chvez, now Vladimir Putin.

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained pariah role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Washingtons role inUkraineis different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the U.S. is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last buffer state bordering Russia Ukraine is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the U.S. and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washingtons planned seizure of Russias historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.

But Natos military encirclement has accelerated, along with U.S.-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained pariah role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekendsprovocative referendum.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people a third of Ukraines population have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the countrys ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither separatists nor rebels, as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.

Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a C.I.A. theme park run personally by C.I.A. director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of special units from the C.I.A. and F.B.I. setting up a security structure that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugsburned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.

A doctor described trying to rescue people, but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didnt even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent. [see footnote]

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev juntas defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party boasted that attacks on insurgents would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation, according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obamas grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its remarkable restraint after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is duly elected. AsHenry Kissinger once said: It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true.

In the U.S. media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as murky and a tragedy in which nationalists (neo-Nazis) attacked separatists (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdochs Wall Street Journal damned the victims Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says. Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russias undeclared war. For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.

A popular truism is that the world changed following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblowerDaniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs special operations secret wars in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?

This article was first published in The Guardian on May 13,2014 and republished in Consortium News on September 25, 2022