© AFP 2016/Janek SkarzynskiPolish troops land with parachutes at the military compound near Torun, central Poland, on June 7, 2016, as part of the NATO Anaconda-16 military exercise.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's comparison of increasing US-led NATO aggression towards Russia to the attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union is advisedly apt.
Putin was
addressing the Russian State Duma this week on the occasion 75 years ago when the Nazi Third Reich launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.
Nazi Germany's aggression, which led to the
Great Patriotic War in which up to 30 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in order to gain victory against that fascist power, was at bottom an attack by Western imperialism. As Putin reminded, this fundamental fact is often omitted in Western commentary.In that way, the significance of NATO's current military buildup - what else is that but aggression? - on Russian territory is all too often absent in Western media.
And, by extension, Western public appreciation is lacking on how sinister the unfolding situation is.
Russia's history over centuries is replete with examples of where Western imperialist powers have tried - and failed - to subjugate Russia with military attack from its Western flank.
It is consistent with historical precedent that Putin should describe "increasing aggression" by the American-led NATO military alliance in the same context as the repugnant Nazi assault on Russia.
The burgeoning US-led aggression towards Russia - in the form of provocative political campaigns to demonize and vilify with false accusations, economic sanctions and the spurning of diplomacy and dialogue, as well as the expansion of military forces, including the deployment of missile systems - is in a long, reprehensible tradition of Western belligerence towards Russia, going back to, among others, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler.This congenital aggression towards Russia stems from the dynamic of the Western economic system of capitalism, which in turns begets imperialism as its necessary tool for expropriating natural resources and subjugating foreign nations.
Russia is not the only target of Western aggression, of course. But the largest nation by land mass on Earth is and always has been a prime target.
The little-known historical record - at least in Western media - is that
Nazi Germany was fomented by American and British capitalism as a proxy with which to vanquish the Soviet Union. The subsequent Western alliance with Soviet Russia to defeat Nazi Germany was merely a cynical damage-control move by the Western powers who were witnessing their Nazi attack dog being muzzled and liquidated.How could anyone who has a sound understanding of history - as opposed to the anesthetizing non-history common in the West - be not perplexed by the current US-led military menace on Russia's Western flank?
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