By Alice Slater, World BEYOND War, March 14, 2022
NEW YORK (IDN) — It has become unbearable to observe the western media, in the grip of corrupt military contractors, wielding their undue influence on the unknowing victims of the media “news” reports as they publicly and shamelessly celebrate their enormous profits this year from the billions of dollars in weapons they are selling to keep the Ukraine war going.
The drumbeat of demonization and excoriation of Putin by the western media, as the sole provocative cause of all the current havoc and evil, with hardly a word devoted to the historical context that brought us to this tragic turn of events is unconscionable.
There is barely any reporting in the western press of the events leading up to this violence, resulting from the corrupt path the western neoliberal corporate corrupters followed, ever since the blessed ending of the Cold War when Gorbachev ended the Soviet occupation, dissolving the Warsaw Pact, without a shot.
The US promised him, in a host of documents and testimonies that are surfacing recently, including from Reagan’s Ambassador Jack Matlock, that if Russia didn’t object to a unified Germany joining NATO, it would not expand one inch to the East.
Since Russia lost 27 million people to the Nazi onslaught, they had good reason to be fearful of an expanded western military alliance.
Yet the arrogance of the United States has been breathtaking over these years. Not only did the US expand NATO taking in 14 countries from Poland to Montenegro, it bombed Kosovo over Russia’s Security Council objection, breaking its treaty obligation with the UN never to commit a war of aggression without Security Council approval unless under imminent threat of attack, which was certainly not the case with Kosovo.
Further, it walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, left the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty as well as the carefully negotiated deal with Iran to preclude their enriching uranium to bomb grade. Shockingly, the US keeps nuclear weapons in five NATO states: Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey.
The current media drumbeat for war, the glee expressed by reporters and commentators at the prospect of all the devastating economic sanctions we are inflicting on the Russian people, in retribution for what they describe as Putin’s provocative invasion of Ukraine, and the constant drumbeat of how evil and crazy Putin is, may indeed be putting us on the path to World War and nuclear war at that.
It’s as though we are all living in some nightmare scenario, like the movie Don’t Look Up, with greed-driven military contractors controlling our lamestream media and fanning the flames of war! Look up people! How would we feel if Russia took Canada or Mexico into their military alliance?
The US went berserk when the USSR put weapons in Cuba! So why don’t we urge Ukraine to back off and stop sending them even one more bullet to fuel a senseless war?
Let Ukraine agree to be neutral like Finland and Austria instead of insisting they have a right to be part of our military alliance which Putin has been pleading with us for years to stop expanding.
It was perfectly reasonable for Putin to require that Ukraine not become a member of NATO and we should take him up on it and save the world from the scourge of war with new programs of cooperation to end the plague, abolish nuclear weapons, and save our Mother Earth from looming catastrophic climate destruction.
Let us usher in a new era of cooperation to deal with the real threats. [IDN-InDepthNews – 09 March 2022]
The writer serves on the Boards of World Beyond War, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. She is also the UN NGO representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
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3 Responses
“It has become unbearable to observe the western media …. ”
Thank you, Alice.
Yes, literally unbearable.
I feel overwhelming fear and anger.
Anger because it didn’t have to be this way.
I’ve been reading a lot. So far nothing has expressed
my own thoughts and feelings as clearly as you have here.
I’m grateful for World Beyond War, and grateful for your words.
Thanks so much Dave. Just saw this! It seems to be a loosening up a bit!
An incisive summary of what has happened in the crazy and evil war that Biden & co. have initiated in Ukraine. It was all so hugely obvious that provoking armed conflict on Russia’s very border in attempts: (a) to try and position first strike nuclear weapons; and then (b) to try and destabilise Putin’s regime by the ensuing war would risk World War III and complete disaster for all humankind.
Yet we have our own government here in Aotearoa/New Zealand giving heavy weaponry to Ukraine’s neo-fascist headed forces in an ever dangerously mounting escalation. We must urgently join hands around the world in peacemaking as Alice Slater has so aptly sign-posted.