The European Union, which has become a virtual clone of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance, is erecting a new Iron Curtain across the continent – more than 30 years since the Cold War supposedly ended.
In the new division of the European continent, Russia and Russian citizens are deemed to be unacceptable, demonized and excommunicated. The EU is proposing to ban Russian citizens from entering the EU states as innocent travelers. Cars with Russian registration plates are to be excluded from crossing national borders, at risk of being confiscated from their owners.
EU states like Latvia are moving to outlaw the speaking of the Russian language in public, even though a quarter of its population are ethnic Russian speakers. Russian cultural figures are vilified when participating in concerts, ballet or literary events.
Russian news media are blacked out and no questioning or an alternative perspective on the war in Ukraine is allowed. The historical context on how this conflict originated, the duplicitous expansion of NATO, are expunged from any public discourse. Put simply, according to the West, Russia is an evil aggressor, its leader Vladimir Putin is a Hitlerian tyrant and the entire nation is a pariah (apart from Western-approved “dissident” figures like the conman Alexei Navalny).
The exclusionary measures are unilaterally implemented by the European Union. It is the EU that is setting up what can only be described as a new Iron Curtain. This may seem somewhat ironic given a common view in the West that it was the Soviet Union, the predecessor of the Russian Federation, that initiated the previous Iron Curtain following the Second World War.
It was actually the United States and its European allies that were responsible for the sudden post-WWII freezing of relations with the Soviet Union and the instigation of decades of Cold War, which featured the relentless threat of nuclear mutually assured destruction.
The phrase “Iron Curtain” was first introduced to the Western public by Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill in a famous (more accurately, notorious) speech delivered during a visit to the United States in March 1946. Churchill darkly warned about an Iron Curtain descending across Europe and he blamed the Soviet Union for the sinister continental division.
Bear in mind this rhetorical grandstanding by Churchill was less than one year after the defeat of Nazi Germany by the “allies” of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union.
Churchill’s demonization of the Soviet Union was an unprecedented provocation towards a former ally whom many citizens in the West largely sympathized with as the main victim of Nazi imperialism and, furthermore, admired as the crucial military force among the allies inflicting the final defeat of the Third Reich in Berlin.
Soviet leader Josef Stalin responded to Churchill’s speech by condemning it as “warmongering” theatrics. The British and the Americans were henceforth serving notice to Moscow that the Second World War would de facto continue against the Soviet Union – albeit under the label of Cold War and other propaganda constructs such as “defense of the free world”. Think about that for a moment. In effect, the U.S., Britain and their soon-to-be-formed NATO alliance (established 1949) were positioning themselves as the successor of Nazi imperialist hostility towards the Soviet Union. The malevolence here is inestimable from the Russian point of view.
Churchill’s treachery was not the only contemporary signal of malign intent towards the Soviet Union. The dropping of two atomic bombs on an-all-but defeated Japan in August 1945 was also viewed by the Soviet Union as a latent terror threat by the Americans about the postwar global carve-up and the coming policy of “containment”.
Other menacing signals were the recruitment of former Nazi officers, spies and scientists by the U.S. and the British. Instead of delivering Nazi war criminals over to the Soviet Union, as the Western powers had preciously agreed to, these criminals were given refuge and a new life via ratlines set up across Europe. Many of the most vicious Ukrainian fascists (Stepan Bandera, Mykola Lebed and others) who had collaborated with the Nazi SS were also recruited by the United States and Britain. Some were deployed behind Soviet lines for the purpose of sabotage and assassination.
The Ukrainian NeoNazis of today who have been killing ethnic Russians in the Donbass region are self-declared proud heirs to the Nazi collaborators of WWII. The U.S. and NATO weaponizing of the Kiev Nazi regime and training of the Azov Nazi battalion and others is totally consistent with the covert recruitment by the United States and Britain in early postwar period against the Soviet Union.
But, but, but, it will be said, the Soviet Union and the allied Warsaw Pact states built the Berlin Wall and erected barbed-wire borders across Europe.
Well, yes, that is partly true. But just remember this: the Soviet Union was invaded by an imperialist Nazi behemoth that killed up to 27 million of its people. There is plenty of evidence that the Nazi war machine had been enabled by Western capital investment during the 1920s and 30s with the aim of destroying the Soviet Union because it was perceived as a threat to the Western imperialist order.
Given the blatant treachery shown by the West towards the Soviet Union amid the still-smoldering ashes of WWII and given the unprecedented existential threats that were being newly deployed by the West (atomic bombings, Nazi recruitment), it is hardly surprising that Moscow and its Warsaw Pact partners adopted a vigorous defensive mode. They were, after all, under attack, albeit covertly.
From the objective facts, one can conclude that it was the Western powers that were the first to instigate the Cold War and the subsequent Iron Curtain division across Europe that came into being in the late 1940s. The basic reason, and it pertains to today, is that the Soviet Union could not be tolerated as a different entity coexisting with the Western imperialist states. For the latter, it is absolutely imperative that they prevail over a zero-sum world. There can be no multipolarity, only unipolar dominance by the West. That is a definitional necessity for imperialist power.
It should be also noted that Churchill did not invent the phrase, Iron Curtain. That phrase was articulated in February 1945 by Josef Goebbels who warned that the defeat of Nazi Germany would be a disaster with an “Iron Curtain” falling over Europe.
The United States and its European NATO vassals cannot abide any dissent from their narrative of vainglorious virtue and “defense of the free world”. Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, is a threat to the Western imperialist order because it does not accept vassal status. To that end, Moscow must be excluded at all costs.
The Cold War demarcation of Europe and the wider world is back with a vengeance, promoted by the same imperialist powers that created the last one.
