Ridenour, quoting Western sources, says the "invasion" in truth only involved Russia sending over to Crimea six helicopters and two small boats with 500 so-called "little green men" -- actually Russian Special Forces acting as "polite police." The Ukrainian garrison in Crimea was given the option of leaving or fighting, and in the event many, including senior officers, defected to Russia, while the rest of the garrison left for Ukraine peacefully.
There were six killings during the transfer of Crimea to Russia, he reports: two were Crimean ethninc Russian civilians, one a Crimean ethnic Ukrainian civilian, one Russian soldier, one Ukrainian soldier and one Crimean self-defense soldier. He adds that the Russian soldier was killed by a Ukrainian Right Sector militant who fled to Ukraine and that none of the other deaths was reportedly caused by a Russian soldier. While Hillary Clinton was comparing the Crimean re-annexation by Russia to Hitler's march into Sudetenland, Ridenour quotes Forbesmagazine as writing: "The US and European Union may want to save Crimeans from themselves. But the Crimeans are happy right where they are. One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there -- be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars, are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine."
While Trotsky may have disparaged the use of anecdotes in his History, Ridenour, who spent eight years living in Cuba (he famously burned his passport and renounced his US citizenship after the US launched the Gulf War against Iraq, throwing the ashes at the US Interest Section compound in Havana, eventually moving to Denmark where he now lives), provides many anecdotes, some critical, about his life in Castro's Cuba. He also recounts his experience as a US Airman stationed in Japan, and about his experience as an activist in the US. These accounts enrich the book and allow the reader to understand where the author is coming from.
Example: In his chapter the US War on Vietnam, he describes how on May 1, 1975, he took out a promotional recording he had been given years earlier that had been intended to be performed at early anti-war marches and rallies. Called "War is Over," he says he felt it was too optimistic for the times so for years he'd never played it. "After 15 years of anti-war activism, Vietnam won so now I could play it," he writes, "and I did repeatedly, crying on and off for hours." He writes in his book that even just reading those sentences back out loud as he writes them, "I break out in tears and heartache."
That's the Ron I remember from the days back in 1976 when he and several other Los Angeles journalists, myself included, founded a feisty if short-lived worker-owned-and-run alternative left news weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard. A committed socialist revolutionary, Ron has always been radical journalist, an excellent writer and a passionate believer in the pure evil of war and in the need for a re-ordering of global society on the basis of real socialism, not capitalism or welfare-statism.
His book The Russian Peace Threat is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what is driving the insane US effort to gin up a new cold war with both Russia and China at a time when the real threat facing humanity is of either nuclear annihilation or the destruction of the very planetary ecosystem that allowed the human species to evolve and thrive. As Ridenour meticulously documents, mostly drawing on western news sources, from the end of World War II the US has been the driving force for increasing enmity between itself and first the Soviet Union and today Russia (and increasingly towards China too). It is also the US, not Russia, he writes, that has been responsible for tens of millions of mostly Third World deaths since the end of that last horrific global conflict.
'Pentagon on alert: The Russian Peace Threat' is available as a paperback and an ebook at Amazon
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively-run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. He is also a former colleague of, and is an old friend of Ron Ridenour. Dave's work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR., and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on September 24, 2018 at 21:21)
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