By Scott Ritter

The General Secretary of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, took it upon himself recently to lecture the members of the European Parliament about the need to “pay the price” necessary to keep Ukraine able to function and fight in its ongoing conflict with Russia. What he failed to admit was the major role he himself played in bringing about this conflict.

The Norwegian has an important role. In many ways, one can liken it to that of a fire commissioner whose job is to bring together various neighborhood fire departments into a large mutual aid pact, where a fire in one district automatically causes the resources of the neighboring districts to be dispatched in response. That’s Article 5 of NATO’s Charter in a nutshell.

Like any membership-based bureaucracy, joining a fire district, like joining NATO, involves a process which requires specific undertakings by all parties involved. The mutual aid pact, like Article 5, can’t be triggered unless the involved party is a member.



Now imagine a scenario where a fire commissioner was pushing for the membership of a questionable fire district, and in the middle of the processes involved in making this district a member, a giant fire breaks out. The fire commissioner encourages his constituent districts to turn over equipment and resources (but not manpower) to the non-member district to fight the fire. The fire is big. The fire commissioner asks for more resources.

And now imagine that it turns out that the fire commissioner is an arsonist who helped set the fire in the first place.

That’s pretty much the scenario which faces NATO today, where the US-led bloc is struggling to deal with the consequences of 14 years of fundamentally flawed policy which saw it promise Ukraine eventual membership, despite knowing that Russia was adamantly opposed to such a move. NATO then watched as its constituent members helped conduct a coup in Ukraine in February 2014, replacing a duly elected president with a cohort of politicians hand-picked by Washington.

The coup in question was made possible only with the involvement of radical Ukrainian right-wing nationalists whose lineage can be traced back to Nazi Germany and, post-World War Two, covert CIA backing which lasted from 1945 through the present. The involvement of these neo-Nazi elements can be likened to the fire commissioner dispatching a team of fellow arsonists to ostensibly help prepare the prospective member for joining the fire district, only to have them secretly conspire amongst themselves to instead burn down entire neighborhoods within the territory of the candidate district.

For eight years Jens Stoltenberg oversaw a system which pretended to pursue peace in Ukraine post-coup through the Minsk Accords, only to secretly conspire with Ukraine, France, and Germany to prevent closure on the accords for the purpose of buying time for Ukraine to build a NATO-standard military capable of delivering a massive knockout blow to the breakaway Donbass region, and perhaps even Crimea.

Stoltenberg helped light the match that set Ukraine ablaze. And now it turns out, during a meeting with members of the European Parliament, the secretary general of NATO chastised the parliamentarians to “stop complaining and step up and provide support to Ukraine”.

The arsonist-in-chief was lecturing the insurance underwriters of Europe to suck it up and pay the price of his handiwork.

His hypocrisy was sickening. “The price we pay as the European Union, as NATO,” he declared, “is the price we can measure in currency, in money. The price they [Ukrainians] pay is measured in lives lost every day. We should stop complaining and step up and provide support, full stop.”

Left unsaid was the fact that Stoltenberg and NATO were responsible for the conflagration which has swept over Ukraine. With Kiev gearing up for an offensive against the Donbass, only Russia’s decision to launch its own special military operation prevented the NATO/Ukrainian plan from reaching fruition.

But the arsonist cannot admit that he started the fire. Instead, Stoltenberg not only shifted responsibility for the Ukraine conflict onto Russia, but then had the audacity to state that the fire he started posed a threat to all of NATO. “It is in our interest to help Ukraine,” Stoltenberg declared to the European parliamentarians, “because you have to understand that if Ukraine loses this, that’s a danger for us.”

Ignoring the fact that he was largely responsible for the disaster that struck Ukraine when Russia initiated its military operation, Stoltenberg planted his banner firmly onto a hill of hypocrisy, proclaiming: “If you don’t care about the moral aspect of this, supporting the people of Ukraine, you should care about your own security interests. Pay for the support, pay for the humanitarian aid, pay the consequences of the economic sanctions, because the alternative is to pay a much higher price later on.”

What Stoltenberg was really saying was: “pay for my mistakes, your mistakes, our mistakes.”

But admitting a mistake is not part of the moral fiber of an arsonist.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. 

ATTENTION READERS

We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

10 COMMENTS

  1. Nam tua res agiutur, paries cum proximus ardet.
    It is Horace and was written when the people’s houses in Rome were made of wood. It means it is your duty to act if the wall adjoining yours burns. For if you do not act it will burn your house, the one next to yours … and Rome.
    You people missed a news item from Carisio that the Italian crisis was used to launch Draghi to the NATO General Secretariat. Only Draghi nobody ever challenged him and after his first resignation even Biden, Nato and Lagarde BCE begged him to stay.
    What could Stoltenberg say about that? Is Draghi more powerful than those who begged him to stay? Italy will vote on September 25.
    Back to the burning house.
    Ukraina, Stoltenberg says, is burning and our houses will burn too if we don’t put out the fire. What is the fire that Stoltenberg is worried about?
    It is the one that might break out in October-November when Europe and the U.S. will be in a corner over energy issues and the people might wake up.
    Someone told me that Draghi ran away for this reason.
    Who are the recipients of Stoltemberg’s communication? Stoltemberg says it himself: the governments who through Regime pressstitutes must control their peoples and hide that the UKR house is burning (and may burn the West as well) and they will do so by awakening the Covid.

  2. Scott is the reason I’ve got Billy Joel’s Who Starts the Fire playing in my head. Seriously though many of us knew it would eventually come to this after the Maiden Coup. It was just a question of when. That said. Soon Ukraine will be out of the headlines as Taiwan takes center stage thanks to the arsonist and thief in the Whitehouse.

  3. Stoltenberg being head of NAZO, his job description in Ukraine better put as
    “Director of Ethnic Cleansing”

  4. Jonas, am I indeed banned from VT? Jack Heart seems to think so. I made the mistake of posting one of Gordon’s COVID-19 articles from June 3, 2020 and that rubbed Jack the wrong way. He deleted my post with the following…

    Jack Heart July 7, 2022 at 4:39 pm
    To “Tommy Apiron” or whatever do not come anywhere near my comment sections you reject, if I ever saw you in the world, you would leave it. You got Me? VT would do themselves a service if they would ban commenters like you, the sooner they do the sooner we can get back to being an authentic force on the internet.

    More recently, like today, he deleted my comment on his latest screed with… you can read it yourself.

    • Hi Tommy
      JH pretty much off his rocker.
      I just made comment about it would be a good idea to just ban all guns in the USA, lots of other countries do this and it works out fine.
      He reacted by calling me a Chinese Communist Party agent, and party with Biden and the gay parades.
      Then I added that it would be a good idea to put all gun owners in prison, give them their guns there with ammunition too and let them kill all who threaten them right there inside the prison.
      Meant as joke as of course impossible to do, but I guess this really set him off and he mentioned that I am “banned” too.
      WOW too much smoke not enough sympathy eh.

    • My first run-in with JH, the one that I was ostracized for involved pointing out to him that Gordon Duff pretty much said that Donald Trump was complicit in spreading the COVID-19 bioweapon, “first in China, then Iran and Europe, and finally in the USA (June 3,2020). For some reason that rubbed him the wrong way and he deleted my comment with…

      Jack Heart July 7, 2022 at 4:39 pm
      “To “Tommy Apiron” or whatever do not come anywhere near my comment sections you reject, if I ever saw you in the world, you would leave it. You got Me? VT would do themselves a service if they would ban commenters like you, the sooner they do the sooner we can get back to being an authentic force on the internet.”

    • Hi Tommy
      JH “banned” me too, but then apologized for calling me a CCP troll and unbanned me.
      I think authors of articles, or the “editors” who put up someone elses articles are allowed to moderate and ban posts in that particular VT post that goes up.
      But overall ban of not getting to comment anywhere anytime I think is beyond one author’s power but who knows who wields that big hatchet on VT.
      I think Gordon and Jim taking it easy I remember Gordon saying the “publisher” of VT were putting down some restrictions on the site, and he was not happy.
      I dont know whats going on all I do is put up my stupid comments here and sometimes I can rub people wrong way…

      Probably you and JH see eye to eye on most issues, but for some reason he picked you out as a troll from somewhere out there.
      I know you bring up the Chrisian-right all the time how they are looking for armegedonn/rapture so their souls can all go to heaven at sacrifice of the entire planet,
      and I know JH is anti-religion and slammed someone bible thumping once so again I dont know its just strange.
      Could be a general pissed off attitude about everything there is to be pissed off at these days and you caught the flack for no particular reason thats probably it.

    • For the life of me, Konehead, I can’t figure out what set JH off. All I did was to post an article by Gordon Duff from June 3, 2020 that concluded that Trump was fully aware of what was coming down with COVID-19 and had actually been vaccinated for it in December of 2019. Thin-skinned?

  5. Putting out a fire with gasoline is criminal. Which is what we are observing. And why should people pay for it? Why should Germans save on electricity? Why should the British save on food? Why should Americans switch to bicycles or horses? Why should Finns now consider Russians as enemies? And there are thousands of such questions. Political senile crippled the world order system, although it was not perfect before that. Yes, of course, Russia has suffered a little from the sanctions. But it is the largest country in the world with a huge resource base. And Russians have a lower pain threshold for various kinds of economic and social suffering. But I see that my country has survived. Cities, hospitals, schools, bridges, and other infrastructure are being built. A comfortable environment is created not only in big cities, but also in small villages. And we will not give up our traditional way of life and will not allow our moral compass to be taken away from us. Edgar Cayce absolutely correctly foresaw the future of Russia in his predictions.

    • As the nature of ‘living’ changes so must tradition and morals. Advances in civilization, communication, connectivity and changes in our environment how and what we eat and breath, the energy we utilize and density and diversity of our population should alter our realities and beliefs. We must adapt to changes it appears that if we do not nuke or pollute ourselves to oblivion Russia and its people are well suited to carry goodness forward. It appears that most of the West has gotten much to full of it’s self.
      Any tradition and even morality that can not adapt to universal and cosmic changes let alone terrestrial changes will become obsolete. I am thinking 2000 years of Abrahamic law 2000 too many.

Comments are closed.