Fantasy and NATO propaganda surrounding Flight MH17 and ‘Moscow’

This article is a translation of "Verzinsels en NAVO-stemmingmakerij rond MH17 en ‘Moskou’"

The saying, ‘the first victim of a war is the truth’, this time may also be applied to the course to war, because even before a real military conflict with Russia has erupted, insinuations and distortion are being used to keep the tension high. 

The preliminary report on the MH17 disaster over Ukraine that was released yesterday, 9 September, is so vague that a Russian newspaper headlined the conclusion as ‘Dutch report shows that the plane came down’. 


That does not mean there is nothing in the report. There is mention of ‘several projectiles’ that have penetrated the cockpit and the chairman of the commission later added that metal parts have also been detected in the bodies of crew members, and these might point to what sort of projectiles we are talking about.

However, just the day before the report was made public, the BBC produced three witnesses who declared to the journalist, John Sweeney (it is worth reading the Wikipedia entry to get an idea of the sort of journalist we have here), that they saw the BUK launcher and even spoke to the commanding officer who had a ‘Moscow accent’. What a coincidence. The Dutch daily De Volkskrant shows how a well-timed report like this works out. The newspaper in its summing up of the separate items from the report, simply includes this story under point 3 about the projectiles, although it is not in the report! Yet it confirms it was ‘the Russians’ again.

Unfortunately every attempt to arrive at one’s own conclusion in the face of the glaring absence of essential information, is dismissed in the media as a ‘conspiracy theory’. It was established in the US that until the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 the concept of a ‘conspiracy theory’ figured on average once in year in either the New York Times or the Washington Post. However, when the Warren Commission report came out, which maintained that there had only been one killer (although this conflicted with the autopsy results), the CIA sent round a memo to editors in which it recommended to dismiss doubts about the report as ‘conspiracy theory’—and as a result the concept appeared much more frequently in the newspapers mentioned, according to certain counts, once a month on average.

That has remained so. So whoever doubts e.g. the official reading of ‘9/11’, the attacks in New York and Washington, is guilty of ‘conspiracy theory’. It actually suits a journalist well to dismiss alternative explanations as such. It suffices to prove that you yourself are serious and reliable. With MH17 it is not different. Anyone who doubts the not-yet-official account…

And that account, to put it briefly, points to ‘Putin’.

So why not leave aside what actually happened, who knew something, etc. No doubt Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, the official account of ‘9/11’ contains too many factual impossibilities to even be considered as true, and so on. Yet it is far more fruitful to look at what was done with those events. So, after the death of Kennedy the Vietnam intervention was intensified to a war of world historic proportions, support for Israel’s nuclear armaments programme was resumed, and the rapprochement with Cuba suspended. The response to ‘9/11’ was a declaration of a war without end against ‘terrorism’, whatever it might mean. That war, with its attendant record defence budgets in the US, has meanwhile entered its 15th year and spawned several local wars as part of it.

It is the same with MH17. Who or what was at play can be left aside (I stick to the hypothesis of cannon fire from a Sukhoi under the command of the Ukrainian National Security Council—and IF there was an additional BUK fired, it was done by the Ukrainian army). But then, by the time the final report will come out next year, few will still be interested.

Yet the consequences are there for all to see. Immediate suspension of the secret negotiations between Merkel and Putin on a comprehensive settlement; NATO war council in Wales. The Afghanistan debacle has been forgotten, and that Libya is dissolving as a state, North Africa destabilised, and migration flows across the Mediterranean completely out of hand, is hardly being reported any longer. Instead, as John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus, points out, ‘Moscow’ once again is NATO’s top priority, and the build-up of NATO forces in eastern Europe has moved the ‘border’ with Russia towards the east by several hundred miles. The US has exploited the crisis in Ukraine to bring eastern Europe more closely into the American and NATO spheres of influence; in addition, Sweden and Finland, although not member states of NATO, are now ‘host countries’. In Sweden especially the US and NATO have held a series of military exercises over the years and there is an important electronic communication and intelligence basis in north Sweden.

That is what has been achieved by blaming all and sundry on ‘Putin’, and everybody can establish for him/herself that this is so. That is also what we should be concentrating on, however appealing it may be to dig deeper in the details surrounding MH17 and how painful it is for those left behind (and in a sense we are all in that category) to be sent home with plain propaganda and lies.

Kees van der Pijl


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