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Oleg Karpovich
Russian Foreign Ministry Diplomatic Academy’s Vice-Chancellor
In April of the turbulent year 1967, exactly 55 years ago, Greece witnessed one of the most dramatic and momentous events in its recent history.
The so-called black colonels took power in the country following a government coup, plunging the people of Greece into an atmosphere of fear and arbitrary rule for seven long years. Mass repression reached an unprecedented scale for this country.
The junta launched the creeping fascistisation of all spheres of social and political life by annihilating the opposition, including both the left and the democrats, as well as by imposing pervasive censorship and stifling even the most basic of freedoms.
Having already been forced to come to terms with the lingering dictatorship of Fascist heirs in Spain and Portugal, Europe was taking a big step back for the first time since defeating Nazism and fascism during World War II.
As an alternative to the innocent dreams of democracy and post-war reconciliation, the government of the “black colonels” offered a model of political leadership based on crude force, coercion and the ideology of hatred. It was only thanks to proactive students who organised an uprising at the Athens Polytechnic in 1973 at the cost of their own lives that public opinion woke up.
When a coup similar to the one in Greece failed in Cyprus, causing the island to split into two parts, which continues to this day, this drew the line under this sad era. Today, many Greeks would prefer to simply raze all this from their memory.
For us, however, there is a lot of meaning in this story. With several decades separating us from these events, we can now say in all confidence that the overseas demiurges used Greece as a testing site for a new model of fighting Soviet influence, which in fact meant combating dissent in all its manifestations, in Europe.
By that time, the US had long been supporting radical right regimes in Latin America while turning a blind eye to their past ties with the Third Reich, collaboration with fugitive Nazi criminals and the fixation on overtly fascist practices in their domestic policy.
In fact, Washington viewed this approach as the “lesser evil” and an extremely convenient lever for achieving global dominance. Under the Monroe Doctrine, for many decades the US government did everything it could to retain control over the Western hemisphere at any cost, even if this required trampling upon all principles and conveniences.
The Truman Doctrine went even further by de facto proclaiming Greece and Turkey, among others, as spheres of special interest for the US. This is how the US embarked on the same path, but this time in the Eastern hemisphere.
They acted with extreme cynicism, paying lip service to condemning “anti-democratic manifestations,” while in fact covertly supporting the most notoriously anti-communist forces like the “black colonels.” It was only the aspiration of the European left flank to resist dictatorships that helped put the brakes on this process – without stopping it, however. After the Cold War ended, the US once again embraced the same tools by working with all kinds of fascist successors, from the Croatian Ustasha movement to the Forest Brothers in the Baltic states. From this standpoint, the 2014 government coup in Kiev and the following repression, genocide of the people of Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and efforts to destroy free speech were but one of the links in a chain the US has been building for a long time, proceeding from a concept of coercing “second tier” nations into submission.
In fact, there was a clear goal behind efforts to rehabilitate Nazism in Ukraine, which consisted of altering the ideological DNA of the Ukrainians in order for them to emerge as a nation with a new cultural code. This was done, among other things, under the banner of de-communisation (doesn’t this sound like Greece?), while also using Russophobia and a theory claiming the ethnic inferiority of the people in the Donbass region in a clear nod to the fascist theory of subhuman beings. These external curators had a tested, albeit slightly updated, method for altering the conscience of one of the branches of a single and proud Russian nation. They acted through a Ukrainian-style dictatorship of the “colonels” – oligarchic clans and their enablers who created their own “death battalions” in the spirit of the most outrageous Latin American examples – while acting under the veil of democracy. Unlike what happened in Greece 55 years ago, where the junta did nothing to obfuscate its heavy-handed rule, this time they used the most sophisticated political spin technology and informational coercion methods.
It is for this reason that the disoriented Ukrainians failed to recognise the true face of the new regime soon enough, while those who raised their heads were instantly reprimanded and forced to lie low following the May 2014 tragedy in Odessa and the aggression against Donbass.
Rather than seeking to liberate specific territories, one of the main goals of Russia’s ongoing special military operation consists of liberating the minds of the people living there from the destructive propaganda the people of Ukraine have been constantly exposed to.
The world has changed over the past half a century. It is no longer carved up into spheres of influence where might makes right, while the collective West carries out its cynical social experiments in some of the countries it “colonised.” Today, any attempts to revert to methods used at the time of the “black colonels” are poised to face a firm and uncompromising rebuke.
Russia’s steps in Ukraine must send a clear signal to the United States and its allies: We understand all too well the “rules” of global politics they keep talking about. Unlike the late 1960s, this time we refuse to put up with what they are doing, which lies squarely in line with the logic of pluralism and genuine multipolarity in international affairs.
Online Reporter