PRESS RELEASE
Australian Ex-Premier Fraser Blasts
Support for Neo-Nazis in Ukraine,
Says 'Cold War Ideology' Must End
March 5, 2014 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.
With a commentary in the London Guardian yesterday titled "Ukraine: there's no way out unless the west understands its past mistakes," former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser became the first politician at such a level in the "West" to hit the regime-change in Ukraine as involving "pro-nazi, anti-Jew" elements. Fraser wrote, "After the fall of the Soviet Union, many hoped the cold war ideology could be put behind, and that the powers could work for a more co-operative and a better world." NATO, he suggested, was obsolete—it had "done its job."
Fraser said that security for former republics of the Soviet Union and Soviet allies in Eastern Europe could have been achieved in many ways, but "NATO chose to provide that security by moving eastward to the borders of Russia." He traced NATO's eastward moves through to George W. Bush's insistence of the Euro BMD system on Russia's borders. "America said this was aimed at Iran. Russia would not have believed that. The west was acting as through the cold war still persisted." Fraser said that Georgia's 2008 war as well as the current situation around Crimea "grows directly from those early mistakes made by the west," and from attempts to draw Ukraine into NATO.
Fraser then cited the January column in the Guardian by Seamus Milne, who had "described the elements then fighting the [Ukrainian] government as pro-fascist, pro-nazi, anti-Jew." He went on to discuss the historical relations between Russia and the Russian ethnic population in Ukraine, as well as the significance of the Crimean ports used by Russia's Black Sea Fleet. "There will be no way out of this," he wrote,
"unless the history and the west's past mistakes are understood by those who are trying to grapple with the present intractable, difficult and extraordinarily dangerous problem."
Regarding Asia, Fraser reiterated his past warnings about the "foolish and dangerous policy in the western pacific: a policy of containment of China" — i.e., Obama's "Asia pivot." In conclusion, Fraser said that
"Those in charge of current policy are showing an inadequate understanding of the events unfolding before their eyes, and an inability to work co-operatively to guide the world more safely."
Craig Isherwood, National Secretary of Citizens Electoral Council (the LaRouche movement in Australia), today called on Australians to "listen to the wise words of Malcolm Fraser." Said Isherwood,
"If the world is not blown up in the thermonuclear World War III toward which it is now plunging, historians may well accord no small measure of credit for that to the courage of our former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Perhaps alone among present or former 'Western' heads of state, Malcolm Fraser in his 3 March 2014 article in The Guardian has clearly identified the actual cause of the present crisis in Ukraine: that ... since the fall of the Soviet Union Western powers have relentlessly, aggressively expanded NATO to the east, including building an anti-ballistic missile system on Russia's very borders, and that the Ukraine crisis is merely one more step in that strategic design."
Isherwood contrasted Fraser's sober evaluation to the behavior of the current Australian government:
"Now, compare that strategic reality, which is escalating almost by the hour, to what Tony Abbott has done, like a 10-year old boy playing with matches among petrol cans in a closed shed in the backyard. He cancelled a visit to Australia by Russian President Putin's chief national security advisor, and puffed out his chest to inform Parliament that he had called in Russia's Ambassador to Australia 'to be told in no uncertain terms of what Australia thinks about this aggression against an independent country'. Russia's ambassador to Australia, Vladimir Morozov, rightly replied to Abbott, that Kiev's new leaders are dominated by 'ultra-Nazis ... in an anti-Russian hysterical trance.'"
