Make no mistake: The West is now beating drums of war over MH17 for the sake of new fascism: to make the world safe for fascism's return

The MH17 massive demonization campaign directed mainly against President Vladimir Putin is deliberately played against the background of the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of World War I on July 28, 1914. We are now just about a week from the anniversary. Can the false flag attack on MH17 be an equivalent of the shots from Sarajevo one hundreds years ago?

1. Religiously and culturally, the West has been for most of its time Manichean--with a need for and belief in a personified evil. This personification is thus regularly brought back when the Western powers wish to make a war on someone. Today, the so-called coverage of the MH17 tragedy is not just brutal propaganda, it is a massive beating of the drums of war.

2. The crash of MH17 came right on the heels of the conclusion of the historic summit of the BRICS countries, which began to form a new anti-hegemonic alternative.

3. The crash of MH17 is also coming at a moment when NATO started to be panic over losing the information war over Ukraine.

4. The crash of MH17 is also coming at a critical moment to save fascism in Ukraine and to make the fascist dictatorship appear as a victim of antifascist "terror." Antifascist resistance is thus demonized as the worst kind of terrorism. Europeans and Ukrainian fascists are now called upon to feel solidarity with each other and to unite for their new would-be "common cause"--against Putin personally and Russia as a whole.

5. The vicious propagandist campaign over the crash of MH17 is the institution of a new type of sanctions against Russia. The key word-trigger-label introduced by the Western corporate media and Western (corporate) leaders is "outcast" and "pariah." Economic sanctions are or can be serious. However, an aggressive attempt is being at presenting Vladimir Putin and the Russians as standing outside of the fold of humanity and morality itself. In other words, if the junta's Prime Minister Yatsenyuk called the people in east Ukraine and those who are helping them "subhumans," which ought to be exterminated, the West is now effectively adopting and making into its official policy. There is also a talk about some "ultimatum" that is to expire in the next few days. Alas, that too is reminiscent of how World War I started.

(Back in 1988 when the US shot down the Iranian airliner, President Bush, Sr. declared that he would never apologize for anything the US does, whatever the facts could be.)

6. In accusing Putin for the downing of the plane over Ukraine, the US, its allies, and the media are unapologetically going to extremes, throwing away remaining restraints and objectivity.

7. In contrast with the West, and now especially the US, the characteristic of Russia has been a great reluctance to go to war and to make war. This, besides the influence of the oligarchs and bureaucratic inertia, explains, in my view, also the great restraint and also apparent vacillations with respect to Ukraine and the crisis there. One of the consequences of this restraint, almost completely dismissed by the West (unless it was perceived as a sign of weakness), has been also the political restraint towards the fascist junta in Kiev. And, so if the West is now in full gear painting Putin as a new Hitler, Satan, and the "subhuman" leader of new "subhumans" (I am now thinking of the words used by Timothy Garten Ash in the New York Times yesterday, but other examples of this demonization abound), the Russia government did really make a case for unmasking the highly dangerous and aggressive merger between Ukraine's thieving oligarchs and its fascists. This was left almost entirely to the antifascist resistance in Donbass and alternative and Russian media.

8. Sadly and tragically very instructive is the vast, enormous difference between the anti-Russian and anti-Putin hysteria over MH17 now and the Western reactions to the Odessa massacre, when unarmed, peaceful civilians were trapped in a building and then chopped, burned alive, and beaten to death by 1,500 thousand fascist paramilitaries protected by the police. Russian leaders not acting resolutely enough back then are now in the weaker, more dangerous and more vulnerable position now. When you let fascists and war criminals get away, the danger of their crimes, provocations, and false flag attacks is not diminishing, it is only further increasing.

9. The Kiev fascist regime is also trying to use the tragedy of LH17 as a new blank check for its ongoing atrocities, terror and systematic targeting of the civilians. It wants to finish off the antifascist resistance and its national-liberation struggle. In this respect, the West is trying its best to criminalize and demonize not only antifascism, but also any effective assistance to and support for the antifascists' just struggle.