Sunday, May 22, 2016

Armenians in the Crosshairs - Propaganda Countdown to WWIII By Joachim Hagopian

Armenians in the Crosshairs - Propaganda Countdown to WWIII

While the two leaders from Armenia and Azerbaijan met this week and agreed to comply with the treaty set forth that ended their bloody six-year war back in 1994, both action on the ground along the Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) Line of Contact as well as the fierce information and propaganda war belie purported reaffirmations made by both nations’ top politicians. No one can take the Vienna talks seriously anymore between Armenia’s President Sargsyan and Azeri President Aliyev for the precise reason that moments after they were agreeing to uphold another ceasefire yet more Azeri gunfire, grenade launchers, and mortar fire were killing yet another Armenian soldier. In a similar copycat, tit for tat announcement, the Azeri Ministry of Defense claimed one of its own soldiers was also killed though unlike the Nagorno-Karabakh soldier whose name was identified, the alleged Azeri victim remained nameless. Meanwhile, the day before the Vienna meeting, the defense ministers from Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, three out of four of Armenia’s bordering neighbors, announced joint military exercises in preparation for war against their common enemy, the hated Christian neighbor they surround. Only Iran bordering Armenia to the south will not be practicing war games next spring with them, remaining sympathetically neutral to Armenia’s right to exist and self-determine its own fate.

The old “follow the money” adage to uncovering the underlying truth behind every action and development on the world stage of geopolitics is always a worthwhile endeavor. What we know from an entrenched recurring pattern is that the US Empire has obsessed over attempts to isolate and weaken Russia by cutting off its natural gas supply to Europe with new pipelines originating in the rich Caspian Azeri oil fields. President George HW Bush lied to Soviet President Gorbachev promising not to expand NATO “as much as a thumb’s width further to the East“an inch more eastward” toward the former Soviet Union and that Russia could enter NATO. No sooner said than done was US Empire’s betrayal in recruiting all of Russia’s former Soviet bloc western border nations to join NATO and aggressively installing nuclear warhead missiles aimed directly at Moscow.
These two subversive ploys, expanding the anti-Russian enemy camp along both Russia and China’s borders while engaging in energy pipeline wars have characterized US foreign policy toward Russia for over a quarter century. Additionally, the US and Europe have imposed economic sanctions against Russia after Putin reclaimed his own Crimean naval base the West was about to steal and annexed Crimea after its citizens voted overwhelmingly to join Russia again in response to the illegal February 2014 US-induced coup in Ukraine. Hence, the US Empire led by the notorious Washington neocons have willfully triggered cold war 2 with both Russia and China as the biggest threats to US unipolar global hegemony. The neocons as globalist puppets are selfishly unwilling to share power in this world and thus would rather endanger every life on the planet with a potential nuclear World War III showdown. The human race is damned, peace and stability are clearly not US Empire objectives.
This week a $45 billion investment in yet another proposed pipeline route – the TransAdriatic Pipeline (TAP) – is being christened in Greece by the Greek prime minster, US State Department officials and reps from Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria and Albania for delivery of Azerbaijani gas scheduled for flow in early 2020. Just to illustrate the prioritized significance of cutting off Russia from its number one export trade partner Europe with Azeri gas and oil, this colossal multi-national project is Greece’s largest foreign investment ever. US Empire’s been gunning to take down Russia as its chief global power rival and number one gas supplier to the entire world.
A week ago a propaganda piece entitled “The Frozen War that Threatens Global Energy Flows” featured in The National Interest, a conservative bi-monthly journal whose honorary chairman is NWO globalist Henry Kissinger, vilified Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh as ravenous aggressors destroying 256 Azeri village homes since April 2ndincluding in late April well after the April 5th truce 58 more homes that also caused power plant explosions taking out electricity to 20 Azeri border towns. The biased article slants Armenians from both the Republic of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh as a direct strategic threat to Western interests when the reality is on April 2nd it was Azerbaijan’s armed forces that attempted a surprise attack invasion in the middle of the night of Armenia’s ancient Artsakh homeland that’s belonged to Armenians through the centuries long before the Azeris were even a people or nation.
In a divide and conquer strategy shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1921 with Lenin’s authorization Stalin granted the 98% Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh and other Armenian enclaves like Nakhichevan to Azerbaijan. Just prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union when the outer state republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan were both due to become independent nations from Russia, the Nagorno-Karabakh residents in 1988 consisting of 85% Armenians voted in a referendum for independence in 1991 which then led to all-out Azeri-Armenian war. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that really began in 1988 and escalated into a full-blown war from 1991 to 1994 resulted in the loss of 30,000 lives and an Armenian victory in defense of their ancient homeland.
And ever since the Russian-brokered 1994 truce at the Line of Contact along the border with Azerbaijan there have been near-daily military skirmishes and mortar and rocket fire attacks launched mostly by the revengeful barbarians at the gate – the Azerbaijani forces. The Armenians who are safeguarding their homeland have little motivation to attack Azerbaijan unless in self-defense whereas the Azeris believe the Karabakh Armenians stole their land and they’re determined to get it back by any violent means necessary. So in all historical fairness to the sovereign Armenian citizens whose Christian churches in Artsakh date back to the 5th century, that enclave should have always rightfully belonged to Armenians and Armenia.
But The National Interest article’s pro-Western energy stance having so much invested in pumping Baku gas and oil to Europe is investing propaganda lies in an information war that’s been building in recent years. The article’s author, an Azeri energy affairs analyst, clearly paints the “Armenian occupiers of Azerbaijan’s long disputed territory” as the repeated aggressor, implying that a Western-led war against Nagorno-Karabakh would not only be in the best national interest of Azerbaijan but for energy investment purposes in the best interests of both the United States and Europe as well.
When the aforementioned National Interest article written by an Azeri oil and gas rep was published on May 10th, another hack Armenia job appeared in that same National Interest journal the exact same day entitled “Nagorno-Karabakh Isn’t Disputed Territory – It’s Occupied.” This article was also written by an Azerbaijani nationalist who had formerly served in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense. It seems obvious The National Interest is Big Oil interest which explains why the anti-Armenian Western media blitzkrieg chose to black out documenting any Azeri atrocities taking place during that first week of April against Armenian civilians living in Nagorno-Karabakh. Among the few media outlets covering the military conflict, I wrote a series of articles published on Global ResearchLew Rockwell and Sott.net based on on-the-ground eyewitness accounts from the war zone. Virtually no mainstream media coverage in the US accurately reported the attempted Azeri invasion into Artsakh for what it was. Rather than the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Forces being described as Armenians defending their ancient homeland, Western media constantly referred to them as the “occupying force” or “separatists,” avoiding any hint of condemnation toward the blatant Azeri aggression as clearly the invading force, instead simply reporting each side blaming the other for starting the worst outbreak of violence in 22 years.
Yet despite this barrage of false narrative lies, half-truths and disinformation, in the wake of the voice increasingly heard amongst EU parliament members, cities and mayors across Europe and the US recently calling for formal recognition of Artsakh as part of Armenia, Azerbaijan has feverishly countered this growing momentum by sinking millions of dollars (not unlike Turkey’s Erdogan) on a major publicity campaign using Western MSM to effectively demonize the Armenians as the heavies. In spite of all the heavy-handed lies and propaganda, demands for truth and justice cannot be silenced. Just two days prior to the Azeri incursion into Nagorno-Karabakh, Hawaii became the seventh state in America to formally recognize Artsakh as an independent state following Georgia, Louisiana, California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine.
We’ve seen this same exact rerun before every time US Empire wants war. The rhetoric and lies get cranked up and out in concentrated nonstop hype the same way the neocons’ PR campaign was used to sell the 2003 Iraq War invasion based on the pack of WMD lies falsely linking Saddam to nonexistent nukes and terrorism when in fact al Qaeda was a US-CIA invention that led to the 9/11 inside job as the PNAC manufactured means to an end called the “endless war on terror” and subsequent Patriot Act and annual NDAA’s stripping US citizens of their constitutional liberties at home. And a decade later a new and improved terrorist brand was reinvented, secretly armed, financed and supported by the US again as ISIS in order to fight Empire’s proxy regime-change war in Syria, expanding to destabilize the entire Middle East and North Africa and far beyond. The true intent of US foreign policy is one of chaos and destruction to destabilize the entire world. And as such, the true global terrorists behind jihadist patsies and their CIA handlers are the neocon traitors in Washington and their globalist puppet masters!
The US propaganda war machine has always invented new enemies. Dating back to the British in the Revolutionary War (right after they served as allies helping American colonists defeat the French in the French and Indian Wars), globalists likes of Henry Ford and the Bushes financing the rise of Hitler only to then become the enemy of the “civilized world,” then the next designated enemy the Communists (right after Russia was a WWII ally) whose revolutionary leader Lenin was also financed by US globalists and more recently al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists, all the while purposely starting virtually every US wars with false flag operations. There’s a longtime pattern in US history of using and supporting other nations, dictators and terrorists as allies until deemed no longer useful for US self-interest and they suddenly become the demonized enemy by design. Saddam, Muammar, and Putin come readily to mind. Osama and his al-Qaeda terrorist crew were proxy war allies fighting to break up the Soviet Empire in Afghanistan throughout the 1980’s, then redeployed in the 1990’s Balkans to break up Yugoslavia, and then used as 9/11 stooges that the US further created in Iraq (where al Qaeda never existed prior to the 2003 invasion) and the rest is history.
And now this new round of imperialistic hyped up bullshit is once again being repeated targeting history’s first Christian nation the Armenians who find themselves in Empire’s crosshairs for the sake of dually protecting the Western elite’s oil/gas as well as anti-Putin interests. History keeps repeating itself on a do-loop to infinity until an educated public finally wakes up and learns from past history lessons that every war, every enemy and every up and down economic turn including the impending system collapse are merely preplanned, meticulously engineered events perpetrated by the criminal ruling elite. As owners of the world’s largest corporations and central banking system, they also have owned and controlled the Western international crime cabal consisting of the United Nations (the predesignated one world government precursor) and all the national governments that of course include the US Empire, Israel, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Europe, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
And right after last month’s military fighting flared up, within a couple weeks after the latest uneasy ceasefire that’s been regularly violated by the Azeris, it didn’t take long for the US to try and stir up more anti-Russian protests. If it’s not the Turks and Azeris vowing to finish the genocide started a century ago, it’s Hillary’s Victoria Nuland making her South Caucasus rounds sinking her imperialistic claws into manipulating another 2014 Ukraine-style color revolution in Armenia. Reminiscent of last year’s “Electric Yerevan” protests, a couple weeks ago the US State Department NGO vultures were at it again. Anything to drive a wedge between Armenia and Russia as one more hostile Western puppet at Putin’s doorstep. Despite Russia selling arms to Azerbaijan used to kill Armenians, Armenia knows that without the Russian air and military bases, the mutual defense pact, the additional Russian troops assembled at the Turkish border that includes an S-400 antimissile system along with $200 million worth of promised armaments from Russia, the Muslim wolves licking their chops at each border where the sunrises and sunsets would be finishing the genocide stated a century ago.
Also as part of the anti-Armenian blitzkrieg of lies, Azerbaijan last week accused the Armenians of using internationally outlawed chemical weapons last month. After the Armenians turned over solid evidence of ISIS-like beheadings, reflecting a strong presence of Azeri Islamic State jihadists along with Turkish Grey Wolves joining the Azeri army in the invasion, cutting off ears of elderly Armenian gunshot victims to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the International Court of Justice for further investigation, the tit for tat Azeris felt compelled to make false accusations against Armenian soldiers. The Baku government is now claiming that a round of white phosphorus was discovered in a field. Of course, if the round is, in fact, real, it could be used by either side for any number of purposes other than as a flesh burning poisonous weapon. Unlike how US military used this chemical warfare to kill civilians in Fallujah, Iraq or Israelis killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza, white phosphorus can also be used for illumination or for troop cover. But merely the accusation alone that Armenians were potentially using it against Azeris is great publicity fodder to demonize Armenians and a win for Azeri-US Western oil interests against their “growing Armenian threat.” The Council on Foreign Relations as the prime US foreign policy architect made sure that the AP article that ran the white phosphorus story was posted on its website.
Yet another deceptive ploy in the Azeri-Big Oil arsenal to turn Armenia into a US Empire enemy is a documentary entitled “The Endless Corridor” narrated by renowned British actor Jeremy Irons to be released next month in June making a case that back during the Nagorno-Karabakh War the Armenians committed the infamous Khojaly “genocide massacre” of Azeri civilians. Again, the facts prove that the Azeris cold-bloodedly allowed their own people to be killed in a false flag designed to first pin it on their Armenian enemy and secondarily a convenient ploy to remove the first Azerbaijan president from office. The film has already made the international film festival circuit in conjunction with the “Justice for Khojaly Campaign” organized by Leyla Aliyeva, granddaughter of Haydar Aliyev and vice president of the Haydar’s Foundation, the same opposition leader who helped engineer the false flag, the impeachment of his predecessor and whose corrupt despotic son just unilaterally attacked Nagorno-Karabakh a day after meeting with John Kerry last month.
The truth is four years prior to Khojaly the Azeris were repeatedly engaging in pogroms, ethnic cleansing Armenians living both in NK as well as in other Azerbaijan cities. In the suburb of Sumgait 15 miles outside of Baku, Azeri agents provocateurs incited riots in February 1988 spreading false rumors that Armenians were murdering Azeri civilians in NK. According to Soviet reports, 26 Armenians were killed during the ensuing 3-day rampage and Armenian residents in Azerbaijan were forced to migrate to Armenian safe zones outside of Azerbaijan. Roving angry Azeri mobs were allowed by local police to indiscriminately kill Armenians both on the streets as well as break into homes and beat, rape, burn alive and mutilate tortured victims. What came to be called the Sumgait syndrome was repeated over and over again in a number of cities and towns in Azerbaijan leading up to the Nagorno-Karabakh War. So true to their well-documented pattern, the Azeris felt compelled to come up with their own propagandized version of non-reality to show that they too can be victims of genocide committed by Armenians.
In recent years with its boo koo oil bucks the Baku government has been pushing and lobbying hard for Khojaly to be officially recognized as an Armenian genocidal massacre against an Azeri civilian population. As an example of the fictionalized spin trying to pass itself off as the truth, a London Post article says it all. Counter accusations of crimes against humanity help to absolve the Azeris’ guilt for their own genocidal ethnic cleansing against Armenians similar to the revisionist claim that Armenians massacred Turks in the last century’s first genocide against Armenians during World War I that to this day Turkey still refuses to admit. This latest bogus documentary coming out at this particular time is specifically intended to strategically win over hearts and minds in the court of world public opinion to create Armenia as the new vilified enemy in the Azeri-Turkish-oil driven Western publicity campaign setting the stage for a new Western-backed proxy war against both the Republic of Armenia and its “illegitimate” Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh in yet another war directed at Putin’s Russia.
Overwhelming evidence demonstrates that the current extremely corrupt, ruthless and deceitful Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev who inherited his oppressive regime that’s among the world’s worst human rights violators from his tyrannical father Heydar has only stood to gain from the lies resurrecting the “Khojaly massacre” misnomer. Azerbaijan’s staging the false flag event that began just before midnight on February 25, 1992 played a major role in the removal from power of the then first president of Azerbaijan, forcing him to flee for his life exiled in Russia, making it convenient just a year later for Heydar Aliyev to secure his family dictatorship’s reign of power. Journalists and photographers at the Khojaly scene immediately following the staged crime that dared to report and show the truth of what really happened at Khojaly have all been systematically assassinated to ensure that the official false narrative lies continue to be propagated and utilized for propaganda purposes to this day. This is a very old repeated pattern of murderous despots silencing both the truth and their enemies similar to LBJ’s sinister role as a JFK murdering conspirator and the long list of once close associates murdered by the criminal Bush-Clinton cabal. Mankind’s bloody history on earth throughout the ages has been made by evil, power-hungry, psychopathic leaders committing murder of perceived rival threats to gain and maintain their power.
The facts behind Khojaly are as follows. The Azeri villages of Khojaly and Shusha were the military headquarters for the Azeri armed forces operating inside Nagorno-Karabakh. The Khojaly residents were mostly Meskhetian Turks that had settled there during Soviet times. The Azeri forces had blockaded the only NK airport also located in Khojaly, cutting off food, fuel, and medical supplies to the Nagorno-Karabakh capital of Stepanakert ten miles away. After months of daily artillery shelling of Stepanakert killing hundreds of Armenian civilians since October 1991, the Azeri military was about to move onto the last NK village prior to attacking Stepanakert itself. In order to prevent what would have been a decisive crushing blow for the NK Armenians, the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Forces knew they must fight the Azeri army in Khojaly to break the Azeri blockade and thwart the advancing threat to their NK capital. So for ten straight days prior to the attack on Khojaly, the Armenian forces broadcasted over loudspeakers warning the villagers of the imminent attack. This was confirmed independently by Russians as well as surviving Azeri-Turk villagers.  However, the Azeri military did not ensure the Khojaly civilians’ safety by enforcing their evacuation from the town. The Armenian troops had extended a safe corridor for civilian departure from the village yet few in Khojaly took advantage.
So with more than fair enough ample warning, the Armenian soldiers attacked the village on the night of February 25th. The Azeri soldiers used the civilian population as human shields as they fled. Eyewitnesses also documented Azeri troops were firing on their own citizens as they frantically attempted to escape through the safe passage corridor that night. Though Armenians had successfully neutralized Azeri firepower, the village remained under Azeri control for the next several months. The day after the Khojaly battle, the Azeri Ministry of Interior released the death toll at 100 casualties. But soon after by early March 1992, the Azerbaijan authorities began grossly inflating the numbers to over 1000 dead. Without any investigation or attention to Armenian accounts of what had transpired, the Western press sensationalized the false flag event that then gave the Baku government the notion to proclaim it a massacre and genocide including false accusations that Armenian soldiers had mutilated the dead bodies.
However, a Czech journalist viewing Khojaly videos of the deceased on February 29th and again on March 2nd observed that the latter video displayed corpses that had been scalped. When the former Azeri president heard about this during an interview with the Czech reporter, in April 1992 he asserted that his political opponents led by daddy Aliyev had “organized” the Khojaly massacre to force his resignation. Moreover, the Czech journalist was soon murdered. Azeri human rights activist Ari Yunusof wrote in July 1992 in an Azerbaijani newspaper, “The town and its citizens were deliberately sacrificed to the political goal,” referring to the president’s opposition having the objective to ruin his career.
The number of alleged civilian victims varies widely. The Armenian count maintains that only eleven were killed and that the Armenians the next day readily permitted Azeri forces access to the dead bodies. Two Azeri journalists from a helicopter claimed no more than 60 civilians killed. The independent group Helsinki Watch based on the Baku parliament report published a list of 181 total Khojaly Azeri-Turk casualties, 130 of them men and 51 women. Among the 181 dead were 13 children.
The lies behind Khojaly were then used a mere month and a half later to provide a justification under false pretense to carry out revenge in yet more Azeri campaigns to ethnically cleanse civilians starting in the Armenian village of Maragha in April 1992. Shortly after the atrocities, crime scene investigators came upon civilians still in shock outside their smoldering burnt homes, discovering sawn off human heads, charred remains, and vertebrae where victims were burned alive in front of their families. 45 civilians were confirmed dead and another 100 had gone missing. Yet this tragic atrocity that was actually well documented (unlike the Khojaly fabrication) was never publicized in the Western press. Ironically and incredibly a year short of the quarter century anniversary of this horror shows the Western media again was strategically absent from reporting more Armenian heads being chopped off last month by the next generation of Azeri soldiers, terrorist militants, and Turkish Grey Wolves.
It’s déjà vu all over again. Lies covering up the truth designed to blame Armenians for atrocities they did not commit have been pushed by Azerbaijan and swallowed up whole by the Western press have attained political victories of sorts in subsequent years while the Maragha and Sumgait ethnic cleansings among others remain buried and rarely reported by the six oligarch owned mega-media news corporations. With Big Oil and corruption ruling the day, it’s not difficult to figure out why. And for that matter, it’s no surprise every April 24th Obama can’t say the g-word because the US-Israel-Turkish crime cabal will never say it either.
Along with the upcoming propaganda film painting Armenians in a negative, bloodthirsty light, other recent events also are transparently politicized events reflecting this same overt bias against Armenians. Take the recent Eurovision affair that’s supposed to be a talent contest showcasing competing national artists. When after her performance the Armenian contestant waved a Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh flag, Armenia was instantly disqualified from the competition. Meanwhile last Saturday’s winner in Stockholm was a Ukrainian Tartar singing the ballad “1944” about Crimean deportations under Soviet dictator Stalin took as a modern swipe at Putin over his “aggression” to reclaim by consent the ethnic Russian residents of Crimea’s choice to rejoin and become Russian citizens like their ancestors had been since the 1700’s. Ukraine only became a separate sovereign nation when Ukrainian-born Soviet Premier Khrushchev as a favor to his homeland granted Ukraine its independence from the Soviet Union in the 1950’s. Yet despite her anti-Russian song when the Eurovision winner claimed her trophy, she preached only “peace and love” of all people. Of course, while the Armenian singer was banned and raked over the coals for her unpopular political sentiment, the Eurovision winner was lauded and rewarded for hers while another US Empire friend, oil-rich Azerbaijan’s singer also placed high among the finalists. The West’s over-the-top political hypocrisy even in “nonpolitical” affairs like the arts is so thoroughly tainted, co-opted and corrupted, last weekend “something is rotten in the state of [not] Denmark” but Sweden.
In a related affair in the competitive world of sports, a Kung Fu martial arts competition held in Ukraine a few days ago was badly marred when sore-losing Azeri adults supporting their athletes were defeated by a 12-year old Armenian boy from Nagorno-Karabakh. His Azeri competitor who had just lost the second match in the semifinals to an Armenian kept fighting after the bell which then incited a brawl caused by 30 Azeri men aggressively jumping into the ring. Eleven Armenian men and even the president of the Kung Fu Federation of Europe jumped into the fray to defend the Armenian winner. The disgraceful sore losers’ violent aggression was caught on video resulting in several men injured during the ensuing fight including the Kung Fu president.
This debacle from the current sports world is a fitting metaphor for the Azeri-Armenian conflict. The Armenians defending their homeland in the Nagorno-Karabakh War were also outnumbered by this same 3 to 1 margin yet managed to win the war. 20,000 Armenians (8,000 from Armenia) prevailed against a total of 64,000 combatants composed not just of Azeris but Turks, Afghans, and Chechen militants as well. And during last month’s 4-day war the Azeri invasion was successfully thwarted where initial Azeri gains for high ground inside Nagorno-Karabakh territory were lost two days later to the defending Armenians, which prompted the Aliyev to “magnanimously” call for a ceasefire after falsely claiming his forces had been attacked by Armenians. Clearly it was more disingenuous propaganda war courting world public opinion against Armenians. And then true to his deceitful character, instead of actually cease firing, Aliyev’s forces only intensified their fighting.
Again and again, Armenians have victoriously stood the moral high ground and met their ongoing life-and-death challenges to survive having to constantly defend themselves against genocide at the hands of warring, violent, hostile Muslim neighbors in the face of relentless Turkish-Azeri ethnic onslaughts. And what’s disturbing is that truth has once again been largely lost and obscured by the almighty dollar. Baku oil investments by the West have conspired with corrupt Azeris to once again create more rationale for yet more war against the latest designated enemy the Armenians, not for any Armenian wrongdoing but simply for existing where they’ve existed for over a millennium. But they are a hardy, tenacious, enterprising survivors who refuse to lay down as the latest sacrificial lambs so that unethical wealthy American and European investors along with bloodthirsty Empire neocons can make billions in profit at their expense while weakening Russia as a global power. It’s finally time for the truth to prevail and the evil ones be exposed for their ongoing countless crimes against humanity.
Email Print

No comments:

Post a Comment