SERGIO RODRIGUEZ GELFENSTEINThe conflict in Ukraine as an expression of the change of epoch

Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein, 6/10/2022
Translated by Fausto Giudice, Tlaxcala  

During my recent visit to Argentina and Uruguay, the sponsoring institutions of my trip organized a tour in which there were 14 presentations of the book "NATO vs. the world" that we wrote together with Jorge Elbaum. Likewise, 7 talks and conferences were held on the subject. In not a few of them, attendees reiterated the query about why the book has the subtitle that I now use for this article: "The conflict in Ukraine as an expression of the change of era", and asked for more on the subject.

 

1º edición
Páginas: 160
Tamaño: 16 x 23 cm.
Precio: AR$2400.00.- / U$S15.00.
Comprar libro (papel/ebook)

Precisely, for Jorge and for me, it was a priority to make known in the book some remarks that explained why we had come to the conclusion that beyond the results obtained from the war development of the conflict, in reality the most important thing was that the main consequence of this was the confirmation of the beginning of that change of era the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa was talking about a few years ago.

In the same way, we assumed that this consequence was what gave global character to the confrontation, since its aftermath was going to impact the entire planet. Thus, the clash was much more than a confrontation of Ukraine against Russia and even of the United States and NATO against Russia.

In this sense, unlike the Second World War when the United States waited until the end for a debacle of the Soviet Union in front of the Nazi army before bursting in mid-1944 when the final result of the conflict after the Soviet victory in Stalingrad in February 1943 was indisputable and categorical, now the “new Normandy Landing” expressed in support of the coup d 'état in Ukraine in 2014, was the detonator of a war of expansion that already lasted 8 years.

In the course of the process, the United States not only supported the extermination of the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine, but also cooperated in the dismantling of the armed forces of that country to transform it into an executing body under the mandate of the Nazi organizations that, with the support of the government of that country, began the “otanization” of that armed component to turn it into a ram of the expansion of NATO, a terrorist military structure that threatens all of humanity.

The obligatory Russian response to safeguard the physical integrity of the inhabitants of the oppressed territories also added as objectives the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine, thus emulating the objectives agreed by the triumphant powers in the Second World War with regard to Germany, when they met in the German city of Potsdam between 17 July and 2 August 1945.

At the end of the meeting, the president of the United States rushed back to Washington to - just a few days later - order the launch of atomic bombs on the harmless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Japan had already surrendered. In this way, it subordinated - through the most horrible event in the history of mankind - the surrendered and disarmed Japanese empire, which until today has remained attached to the military and political device of the United States.

With Europe, the United States was more subtle: it resorted to buying the wills of the European elites by creating the so-called Marshall Plan, an instrument more susceptible than the atomic bomb to be disclosed by Hollywood as an expression of USAmerican "cooperative values". But the purpose was the same, so Europe became a useful tool of Washington's eagerness to dominate the world.

The system that began to be set up after the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad, and which was agreed at the summit conferences in Tehran (1943), Yalta, Soviet Union and Potsdam (1945) had the stamp of the USAmerican imprint from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The financial architecture of the post-war world was agreed upon in Dumbarton Oaks, United States, in the summer of 1944 while the political system saw the light of day in San Francisco, also in the United States in October 1945.

This is the world that is collapsing now because it has not been able to guarantee peace, equity and justice for all the peoples of the planet. On the contrary, it has been unable to prevent 2.8 billion poor people, 35 per cent of the world's population, while 2.2 billion citizens (27.8 per cent) have no access to water and 1.8 billion (22.7 per cent) are homeless. All this in a world that spends 2.11 trillion dollars annually on weapons, of which 46.4% corresponds to the United States.

Such resources would be enough to solve those three existential scourges of humanity (lack of food, water and housing)  that were nevertheless enshrined as rights in the UN Charter. It was not even possible to coordinate efforts to combat the Covid19 pandemic, a unified enemy that affected and attacked all of humanity. Capitalist interests of profit, gain and wealth prevailed as an absolute value, even superior to the safeguarding of human life itself. Such a system should no longer exist, but should be abolished and superseded.

For five centuries, the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe in particular, has been the area where world power has been concentrated. The emergence of the United States as a power with an imperialist vocation at the end of the 19th century began to resize this domain. On the two shores of the North Atlantic, the place where decisions were made was established. This was definitively constituted after the purchase of Europe by the United States as mentioned above.

But unlike the political and economic spheres in which a consensus seemed to have been reached in the post-war period, in the military and security sphere there was no consensus, which is why the United States created the North Atlantic Organization (NATO) in 1949, which meant the peaceful military occupation of Europe and the obligation of the countries of the Old Continent to pay Washington to be the one to give it security. In fact, Europe became a continent occupied by the U.S. Armed Forces. So it remains until today.

But after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States - and its NATO instrument - did not stop its momentum of world domination and began to expand first towards Eastern Europe and more recently to Asia Pacific and Latin America using Colombian territory, after the debacle that meant for Washington the end of control of the Panama Canal Zone and the dismantling of the Southern Command in that area in compliance with the Torrijos-Carter agreements that forced it to withdraw its soldiers from the isthmus no later than December 31, 1999.

This process of expansion, control and world domination, which, without the counterweight of the existence of the Soviet Union, was carried out without pause for the last three decades, came to a halt when the West directly threatened the security of Russia, another nuclear power that could not allow the establishment of NATO on its borders,  the transformation of Ukraine - led by a Nazi Zionist government - into a stabbing tool of that policy and the intention to install nuclear weapons in this territory, to jeopardize its integrity and sovereignty. To accomplish the task entrusted by Washington, the Ukrainian government set out to exterminate the Russian-speaking population living in the territories adjacent to Russia, which rejected the 2014 coup d 'état by starting a war of resistance in favor of their survival without Europe, the UN or the "international system" expressing any rejection of what was evidently genocide.

Russia's inevitable response of February 24 this year has finished shaping the dynamic generated by the events that occurred after 2014 when NATO began to create the conditions for a war against Russia. In retaliation, the West has agreed to eight rounds of sanctions despite the fact that since the first rounds, there have been worse repercussions for the sanctioners than for those sanctioned.

It is in this context that the new era and the new world we are talking about are being shaped. First, the main area of world power is moving away from the North Atlantic to the large Eurasian land area in which the United States has no interference. They tried it in 2001 by militarily invading Afghanistan with the subterfuge of the “war on terror” but after 20 years of occupation of that country, they were forced to flee defeated in a shameful way, as in Vietnam 46 years earlier. More recently, they attempted a coup in Kazakhstan in April of this year and failed in the same way as when they resorted to the same expedient in January 2021 in Kyrgyzstan. Now, it resorts to the unleashing of conflicts between countries that belonged to the Soviet Union that did not care to precisely delimit their boundaries when they were part of the great Eurasian State.

Nonetheless, Eurasia is making progress in building instruments of cooperation and integration without US interference and using forms and methods that do not seek subjugation and underdevelopment while guaranteeing peace based on respect for self-determination and sovereignty. A landmark instrument has been the Belt and Road Initiative, but also the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), the Eastern Economic Forum, the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) in the economic field; as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in the field of security, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the political field. In none of them are the United States present, while the most comprehensive of all, the Silk Road, is already made up of almost 100 countries from all continents.

In a broader context, the BRICS (which already have a GDP higher than that of the G-7, the conglomerate that brings together the 7 largest capitalist economies) have received expressions of the willingness of 11 countries to join, several of them strong allies of the United States, including Turkey, a member country of NATO. In this sense, the United States were not even able to obtain a resolution rejecting the Russian military operation in Ukraine at the G-20 ministerial meeting held in Bali, Indonesia last July, which concluded without a final declaration as an expression of the existing division in this quasi-US-controlled organization in the past.

On the other hand, several allied nations of the United States, some with significant political and/or economic weight globally such as Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico among others have refused to comply with the Western sanctions policy against Russia.

Perhaps, as relevant breaking news that expresses this change of epoch, it would be worth saying that Russia and Saudi Arabia reached an agreement to counter the oil price limit decided by the European Union (EU) as a result of which OPEC+ will cut production by 2 million barrels per day to increase the price and thus compensate for that cap decreed by the EU as part of its eighth package of sanctions against Russia for its military operation in Ukraine. As a sign of Washington's inability to continue laying the groundwork for the planet's functioning, we must quote the statement of the US government in response to the aforementioned fact: “President [Biden] is disappointed by OPEC+ 's short-sighted decision [sic] to cut its production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continuing negative impact of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.”

No words are necessary, while Biden is disappointed and the peoples of Europe suffer from the consequences of the sanctions that their governments have agreed upon against Russia, the world is moving towards a new configuration. Once again, as in the Second World War, it was Russia that bore the main responsibility for this fact, once again the Russian people - on the battlefields - are sacrificing the lives of their best men and women to save humanity from fascism, nazism and imperialist expansion.