By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Are we back in a new Cold War? On March 4,
Sergei Skripal and his adult daughter, Yulia, were
poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok, developed by
Kremlin scientists several decades ago.
Skripal, a Russian, had been arrested in
2006 for passing state secrets to Britain's MI6 and released
in 2010 as part of a prisoner swap. He has been living
in Britain ever since.
The British immediately claimed that the
Russian government was behind this and Foreign secretary Boris
Johnson likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler.
Since then, 28 countries, including Canada,
have joined Britain in expelling more than 150 Russian
diplomats. Russia has responded in kind.
Was Vladimir Putin involved? We don’t
really know. And the British certainly won’t allow Moscow to
conduct its own investigation.
So all of this has happened without, at the
moment, a shred of proof. In fact scientists at Britain’s
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory admitted on April 3
that they have not been able to say where the deadly agent was
manufactured.
We’ve seen plenty of “fake news” in the
past: remember the American denials regarding the downing of
an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet airspace in 1960? The
ongoing lies about the Vietnam War during the 1960s? The 2003
fabrication about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
First of all, if the Russians really did
want Skripal dead, why employ a nerve agent? Why not just
murder him in a faked robbery?
Why wasn’t he executed while he was in
Kremlin custody? Why wait until eight years after Skripal had
been sent to England?
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election,
almost everything that has gone wrong has been blamed on
Russian “meddling.” So why would Russia make things worse by
murdering a now-harmless exile?
Putin, no fool, would have known what the
political ramifications of this would be on relations with the
west.
I’d think it more likely that someone who
hates Putin, and somehow got access to the poison, was behind
this. They would know the murder of Skripal would produce a
deeper split between Russia and the west.
Moscow claims they are being framed, in
order to stir up Russophobia. It remains easy to tap into the
anti-Russian feelings that have been part of western culture
for centuries. The “bad Russian bear” stereotype is not dead.
Indeed, the reaction has been totally over
the top -- it’s as if the western powers were just waiting for
an excuse to mount a big anti-Russian campaign. But why?
There’s an old Roman question: Cui bono? Who benefits?
There are many who hate the fact that
Moscow took back the Crimea -- though it is historically and
demographically Russian and should never have been handed to
Ukraine in the first place.
They’re also angry that Russia is no longer
the pushover it was in the 1990s, when NATO attacked Serbia.
Now it’s the Russians asserting their power on the world
stage, in Syria and elsewhere.
Perhaps even more important, ever since the
2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, there are worries that
the European Union may disintegrate, because of the furor over
Muslim migrants.
The EU has very skilfully asserted control
over large parts of eastern Europe and the former USSR. But
now Hungary, Poland, and even the Czech Republic, have all
been veering towards a Euroskeptic, pro-Russian stance,
because their national identity is at risk.
Austria, France, Germany and Italy have
seen the rise of right-wing parties that favour a less
confrontational attitude towards Moscow.
This had to be stopped by the European
political elites in Brussels. The best way, of course, was to
create anti-Russian hysteria.
It has also allowed the anti-Trump forces
in the U.S. to continue to tighten the political noose around
the president.
After all, any further increase in
anti-Russian sentiment will continue to play favourably into
their narrative of Trump as a dangerous Russian stooge.
Meanwhile, on April 4, Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau suggested the efforts of “Russian
propagandists” to “smear” Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia
Freeland factored into the Canadian decision to expel four of
the country’s diplomats.
Last year, the Russians had revealed that
Freeland’s grandfather had been a Nazi collaborator editing an
anti-Semitic newspaper in wartime Krakow, something that
Freeland had at first tried to dismiss as “fake news.”
Most of the former Warsaw Pact countries
are now in NATO and the EU, and Russia’s defence budget is a
tenth of that of the U.S.
But as Serge Halimi, editorial director of
the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, reminds us in the
April edition, “a good enemy is for life.”
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