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“We are on a path of escalation to nuclear war, nothing less than that.” —Prof. Jeffrey Sachs,
Here is a distinctly minority opinion about the Ukraine war: Some people, more than a few, don’t support anything the military-industrial complex is promoting, especially since Vietnam, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia,2 Syria, Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Libya, and whatever new hegemonic expeditions are planned.
Enough is enough.
But in addition, this very quiet minority especially doesn’t rally behind anything neo-Nazis are involved with, so support for Ukraine, Bandera, and the Azov Battalion are certainly wanting. The head of the Ukrainian parliament in 2019 was a neo-Nazi named Andriy Parubiy.3
Are you kidding?
Just look at the photos of the Azov symbol and the SS Wolfsangel Nazi symbols below.4
Nazi SS Wolfsangel symbol and Ukrainian Azov battalion boasting the same symbol (Source: Prof. Jerry Kroth)
These symbols, including swastikas, actually abound, but the corporate media scrubs them with a surfeit of fervor so that we can all maintain the fantasy that we are saving democracy and freedom at any cost.
As for Russia’s invasion, yes, this is clearly a war crime, because the UN did not authorize any intervention, and, legally that makes Putin a war criminal, but no less than George Bush qualifies for the same designation for his unprovoked aggression in Iraq, similarly unauthorized by the UN, and the 300,000 plus people he slaughtered.5
Regrettably, this minority is not at all enthusiastic with the New York Times-CNN-Nancy Pelosi-Mitch McConnell festivities in Ukraine. Trying to have little Ukraine defeat the world’s greatest nuclear superpower is sheer madness. That’s our policy, and it is patently insane.
Russia will not allow the US to build military bases in Malaya Rossia (“little Russia”) which is the historic name for the Donetsk-Luhansk region.6,7.8
We wouldn’t allow Russia to build military bases in Juarez, across from El Paso either, whether or not Mexico insisted on its sovereign right to engage in a mutual defense alliance with a foreign power.
Nor going to happen . . not by the hair of our chinny chin chins!
Sadly, if the West had agreed not to expand NATO, and to keep Ukraine neutral like Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland, there would have been no war, no death, no destruction, no invasion, no war crimes, no streaming refugees. The boiling point was reached on Jan 7, 2022 when NATO told Putin it had a right to expand into any country it wished. He threw up his hands, and, for the final time said, ‘not in my backyard.’9
So the war started, followed by sanctions, followed by export controls, followed by shortages of gas, oil, wheat, and sunflower oil, which, in turn, causes inflation which then brings recession, first in Europe, then the U.S., and that leads to starvation across Africa and the Middle East (coming) with global unemployment following on its heels. . . and it all started with an American neo-con gambit to try build military bases on Russia’s back porch.
The Western media has done its best to try to confuse and disrupt understanding this causal linkage calling it “Putin’s price hike,” 10 and, while most Western news consumers believe that misdirection, history will not forget the causal chain, even as the American echo chamber does.
NATO expansion, the military-industrial complex, American insistence on its exceptionalism and hegemony, and a deeply complicit media is the cause, and inflation, recession, war, and death the effect.
Currently, one of the most dangerous aspects of this Western media connivance is how it is obscuring the Ukrainian army’s shelling of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. This bombardment could set off another Chernobyl, but media legerdemain makes it look like Russia is somehow mysteriously responsible for bombing the same facility it has been occupying.
It has occupied Zaporizhzhia since April, but the media obsessively speaks about Russia’s shelling the plant.11 Finally on Sept. 2nd, IAEA inspectors reported the Ukrainians were shelling the nuclear station, not the Russians, arguing that could endanger the whole of Europe—quite to the consternation of the Western media censors who couldn’t seem to prevent them from reporting the truth.12
The same holds true for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. Russia and Germany spent over $8 billion to build it, all with great pride, and the U.S. tried everything in its toolbox to stop it. Finally, it is sabotaged and the leak spews natural gas all over the Baltic.
But the first thing the Western Media does is to blame Russia for sabotaging its own creation.13
That’s right: Russia is blowing up its own pipeline —all they had to do was turn off the gas!— and it is bombing a nuclear power plant that it controls and occupies.
Really!14
Isn’t it just a smidgen more likely that Ukraine has been shelling the Russian occupied nuclear plant, and that the US or Britain, actually sabotaged the pipeline they wanted to close for so long?
Just how much more media misdirection do we have to endure!
To end all this nonsense, killing, mayhem, propaganda and nuclear lunacy, the solution is quite simple: Negotiate a solution and a ceasefire before the nut cases blow us all up. That’s what Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky and Professors John Mersheimer and Jeffrey Sachs advocate, and this silent minority couldn’t agree more.15 If the brutality and killing is unfathomably disgusting, as it should be, demand negotiation from your senator not escalation.
Chomsky says the U.S. is engaged in a proxy war with Russia down to the very last Ukrainian. No one in our government presently is advocating negotiation, nor peace. Corporate Democrats, boutique liberals, and Republicans are cheerleading us right to the doorstep of Armageddon.
Ukraine doesn’t have high tech anti-ship technology, but the US approved giving it harpoon missiles. If Ukraine succeeds in sinking a Russian ship, Putin would be an idiot not to sink a US ship in retaliation.
If one thinks this is not just as dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis, they are living in Washington Post la-la land. The corporate media is providing generous soporifics that all this talk of nuclear war is just Putin’s blather and bluster, so nothing has diminished the steady introduction of more and more venomous weaponry—Javelins, Howitzers, Harpoons, NASAMS, and even paying salaries of the Ukrainian army16 — all to the enthusiastic applause of liberals and conservatives alike:
A billion here. Another billion there. Go get em Ukraine!
But to interrupt these whoops and hurrahs and introduce a spoonful of reality-contact, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday clock to just 100 seconds before midnight, closer than the Berlin crisis of 1961, closer than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, closer than at any time since 1947.17
On June 4, Putin said of the imminent dangers of nuclear war and of the West sending more and more lethal weapons into Ukraine: “The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are already on their way, and all hope now is with the Lord God Almighty.”18
The Secretary General of the UN said on Aug. 2 “Today, humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”19 He said that almost on the very same day that the military-industrial complex sent its latest ambassador, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan this time to try to rattle the cage of the Chinese.
And she did: Chinese Premier Xi Jinping said to President Biden,
“If you play with fire, you will burn to death.”20
Go Nancy!
On Sept 21, Putin addressed his nation, looked directly into the camera and warned Western powers that this could all lead to nuclear war. “This is not a bluff,” he said.
Isn’t it time we woke up? How much closer to the edge must the hawks and neo-con maniacs in the West think they can step before this all blows up in their face and in the faces of our children?
Conclusion: Negotiate a neutral Ukraine, end the war, cut the bloated Pentagon budget, and stop this global provocation, adventurism, brinkmanship, and insanity.
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Jerry Kroth, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor Emeritus from Santa Clara University (ret) and may be contacted through his website, collectivepsych.com.
Notes
1 Bloomberg, “Surveillance,” Oct 3, 2022
2 https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2022/10/u-s-military-kills-wanted-shabaab-leaderin-airstrike-in-somalia.php
3 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/ukrainian-speaker-andriy-parubiy-slammed-praisinghitler-historys-greatest-democrat
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfsangel
5 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256
6 http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CL%5CI%5CLittleRussia.htm
7 A newer intermediate range U.S. Pershing missile travels 5800 mph. The distance from Donetsk to Moscow is 650 miles. So a U.S. Pershing stationed at a NATO base in Donetsk, Ukraine (assuming Russia said nothing, did nothing, did not go to war, and submitted to NATO expansion) would take 6.8 minutes to hit Moscow with a nuclear weapon. The fact that the U.S. got out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Treaty doesn’t help. Trump cancelled that treaty in 2019. None of this escaped Russian strategic fears. If NATO bases are put in Ukraine, what is to stop the U.S. from installing the new Pershing? Certainly no existing treaty:
8 Photo credit Bloomberg: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/06/12/world/politicsdiplomacy-world/putin-us-russia-biden/
9 https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/nato-weighs-russias-security-offer-endukraine-standoff-82134155
10 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/06/22/remarks-bypresident-biden-on-gas-prices-and-putins-price-hike/
11 https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-nuclear-plant-shelling-continuesd12ded8c3d79fe6f2a062546e5ced95b
12 https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-backs-iaea-call-shelling-near-zaporizhzhiastop-envoy-says-2022-09-09/
13 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/28/nord-stream-russia-methane-leakbaltic-sea/
14 See Youtube, “US Col Richard Black asks “ Did US/NATO Blou up the Nord,” Oct 4, 2022
15 https://www.thedailybeast.com/noam-chomsky-is-right-us-should-work-to-negotiate-an-endto-the-war-in-ukraine
16 https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3138602/us-announces-298-billion-in-aid-to-ukraine/
17 https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
18 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-warns-horsemen-apocalypse-ukraine-war-hits-100-days-1712609
19 https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1115160155/guterres-one-miscalculation-awaynuclear-annihilation
20 https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-12/Those-who-play-with-fire-will-get-burned-Beijing-warns-U-S–STCXChe5zi/index.html
Featured image is from en.kremlin.ru
“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War”
by Michel Chossudovsky
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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
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Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
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