Bang the War Drums. Rattle those Sabres. Mental Mobilization for War Proceeds Apace.

It's a form of conditioning, something we're not very good at detecting. We are being mentally mobilized for war, something that begins by demonizing our adversary.

The warning came in the form of an editorial in the German financial paper, Handelsblatt. It offered the chilling observation that, in the wake of the Russian takeover of Crimea, the people of the West were being "mentally mobilized for war."

No mention of NATO's decade long march to Russia's doorstep.

No mention of how Washington fueled the uprising in Ukraine.

Now Russia is playing the same game. This time it's former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev taking to Russian airwaves warning that the US is trying to provoke war.

"The world has got to a dangerous phase," former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview with state news service RIA Novosti on Monday.

Now America seems to be drifting into a muzzle-to-muzzle confrontation with Russia in Syria. Having already been outmaneuvered by Putin in the Syrian civil war, partly a function of America's war fatigue with its 15-year long and no end in sight conflicts in the Middle East, Washington may not have as many options remaining as it would like.

Is the United States trying to provoke war with Russia? Probably not. Is the United States deliberately trying to menace Russia? Absolutely. The map above illustrates how close NATO forces in the Baltics are to Moscow. Imagine a similar deployment of Russian forces that close to Washington. Yet we treat it as tantamount to an act of war when Russia deploys Iskander missiles to its sovereign Baltic territory of Kaliningrad.

This nonsense, this drift, has to stop. We have to revisit the idea that we are responsible for creating the very conditions in which nations have backed themselves into protracted and bloody wars in the past.

Banging the War Drum - Washington Post

It was earlier this month that the German financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, warned of the dangerous spread of war fever throughout Europe.  The paper found that Europeans were being "mentally mobilized" for war.

Something eerily similar is happening in America.  In today's Washington Post, columnist Anne Applebaum questions whether the European people today are all that different from the complacent, care free Polish population in the summer of 1939.

Instead of celebrating weddings, they [the Poles] should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to U.S. or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now. In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova. Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state — Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here — Novorossiya can grow larger over time.

Applebaum foresees not merely a Russian invasion and conquest of Ukraine but outright genocide of the sort visited on Jews by the Nazis.

Russian soldiers will have to create this state — how many of them depends upon how hard Ukraine fights, and who helps them — but eventually Russia will need more than soldiers to hold this territory. Novorossiya will not be stable as long as it is inhabited by Ukrainians who want it to stay Ukrainian. There is a familiar solution to this, too. A few days ago, Alexander Dugin, an extreme nationalist whose views have helped shape those of the Russian president, issued an extraordinarystatement. “Ukraine must be cleansed of idiots,” he wrote — and then called for the “genocide” of the “race of bastards.”

Applebaum even warns of a sinister plot whereby Putin will rain nuclear weapons on Eastern Europe.

...the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes — perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city — to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.

Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But “Mein Kampf” also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.

But Stalin kept to his word and carried out the threats, not because he was crazy but because he followed his own logic to its ultimate conclusions with such intense dedication — and because nobody stopped him. Right now, nobody is able to stop Putin, either. So is it hysterical to prepare for total war? Or is it naive not to do so?

Wow from conquest to genocide to nuclear war, Applebaum beats that war drum to death.  Hers is a self-fulfilling prophesy.