Nato

Jan Oberg November 18, 2022 This was published as an Op-Ed in today’s China Daily with the title “NATO shouldn’t be a bloc on road to peace.” While most organisations are evaluated and reformed as time goes by, NATO isn’t. It has become sacrosanct and criticism of its operations silenced. In Western media, it is always called the ”defensive” alliance. It does not see itself as party to the conflict with Russia – but rather as an innocent property owner who protects himself against a burglar. This frees it from co-responsibility for the present, fateful situation. The NATO-Russia conflict that plays out in Ukraine is grossly a-symmetric: NATO is 30 members with at least 12 times higher military expenditures than Russia. The former NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, recently boasted that ”Putin knows that NATO spends 10 times more than Russia and NATO can beat him into a pulp.” Quite...

Jan Oberg November 3, 2022 Everything Ukraine has been predicted. Warnings about trying to get Ukraine into NATO tumbled down, not the least by leading US experts on Russia. They also said that Russia was not – could not be – a threat unless made into one. In all modesty, I said it too 6 years back. No one listened. The believers in the religion of militarism and the NATO Church did not have the ability to reason. Those who did not agree with NATO’s expansion were perceived as dangerous nonbelievers or heretics. As outsiders and dissidents who dangerously undermined “our” security and were the apologetics of Putin… Today the attempts to get Ukraine into NATO – while NATO has been 30 years in Ukraine and nobody respected the polls that told what the Ukrainian people wanted – has turned out to be the most enormous and most stubborn blunder...

Edward Curtin November 2, 2022 It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so. It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match. The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia,” the Biden administration and their media lackeys … will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China …. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment. Originally published...

Gordon M. Hahn October 27th 2022 The title above has been placed within quotation marks for a reason: Russian President Vladimir Putin made no nuclear threat unless one considers that a threat to respond to nuclear threats or to respond to a hypothetical nuclear attack amounts to a threat to use nuclear weapons. The West has attempted to spread the impression that Putin made an unprovoked nuclear threat, the same way it has asserted that Russia undertook an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth, sort of. Yes a repeated lie can become a virtual truth, and in our virtual times, virtual reality is having a profound impact on actual reality and not in any positive way. Quite to the contrary. Originally posted on October 11th, 2022 on Gordon Hahn’s homepage The quote that is said to have constituted...

You should ask yourself, ask friends, others and decision-makers in the West why the type of important news and conversations like the one I have here – including on nuclear abolition – is possible on Russia’s RT (and explicitly appreciated, watch the end) but not possible in the Western mainstream media. Interestingly, the conversation develops into the issue of the risks of nuclear war and why – I argue strongly – nuclear weapons must be abolished and that the nuclear weapons powers implicitly adhere – all of them – to a philosophy of terrorism. Remember how it was once called the balance of terror – a word that disappeared from the nuclear discourse after September 11, 2001. There are many definitions of terrorism, but one essential element in them all is that terrorism is about deliberately harming or killing civilians, targeting innocent people and not military forces, to achieve a...

Former US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland testifies during a hearing on Policy Response to Russian Interference in the 2016 US Elections before the Senate Intelligence Committee at Capitol Hill in Washington, USA on June 20, 2018. (Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) A Cold War true believer who sabotaged Obama’s foreign policy, Nuland is a huge risk at the State Department Medea Benjamin – Nicolas J.S. Davies – Marcy Winograd October 13, 2022 Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her, because the U.S. corporate media’s foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden’s pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.  Nor do they know that from 2003...

With neo-liberal shock therapy: Privatization, deregulation and slashing worker protections.Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland to plan harsh neoliberal economic policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labour laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.” Jake Kallio & Benjamin Norton October 6, 2022 This is an aspect of the NATO-Russia conflict that so tragically plays out on Ukraine’s territory which has not been given much attention. It was originally published on Multipolarista on July 28, 2022. Multipolarista is an independent news outlet reporting on the transition to a multipolar world. Multipolarista is edited by journalist Benjamin Norton. It starts out: “While the United States and Europe flood Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars of weapons, using it as an anti-Russian proxy and pouring fuel on the fire of a brutal war that is devastating the country, they are also...

Jan Oberg September 29, 2022 People from the Danish Defence Academy, other military experts – e.g. those of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation – most major Danish media and – of course – the Ukrainian President’s advisor uniformly point – to Russia as the saboteur of the Nordstream gas pipelines near Bornholm, the Danish island south of Sweden. The Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen and Defence Minister Bødskov, however, are a little lower than usual on Russia, pointing out how important – and difficult – it is to get clarity on this kind of thing so far down on the ocean bed. Read Denmark Radio’s always politically correct public service “take”: “Ukraine on the gas leak in Baltic Sea: Russian terrorist attack. Russia wants to create panic before winter, says advisor to Ukraine’s president” and here on the prime time news, TV-Avisen, Defence Minister Bødskov explains that we may never get clarity...

Jeffrey Sachs By Amy Goodman (*) – Democracy Now! September 19, 2022 Jeffrey Sachs: “Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative” Stoking Tensions with Russia, China GUESTS: Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, sustainable development solutions advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres, and former adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. We discuss Western hegemony and U.S. policy in Russia, Ukraine and China with Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose new article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.” Sachs says the bipartisan U.S. approach to foreign policy is “unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded,” and warns the U.S. is creating “a recipe for yet another war” in East Asia. Originally published at Other News on September 5, 2022 Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: Politico is reporting...

David Swanson TFF Associate September 6, 2022 It’s tricky to oppose both sides of a war, and rarer even than supporting both sides. The weapons dealers support both sides. In obedience to their televisions, people all over the world spend a great deal of time expressing the opinions dished out by those televisions regarding a particular war that is far from the worst war at the moment. It is the war that creates the greatest risk of nuclear apocalypse, but that does not typically enter into the opinions. Originally published at World BEYOND War on September 4, 2022 You cannot just state that you oppose both sides, because that will quite literally be understood by almost everyone as asserting the unrelated and ridiculous proposition that the two sides are identical, and that will be understood as outrageous propaganda on behalf of whichever side the listener opposes. So, you have to...

Yet ‘experts’ still cling to the narrative that Ukraine can somehow ‘win.’ If Ukraine can hang on for just a few more months. Image: iStock Cameron Leckie August 24, 2022 The more events proved them to be wrong, the stronger their defences became against admitting this to be the case’ – Norman Dixon (On the Psychology of Military Incompetence) In my last piece for Pearls and Irritations I argued that the conflict in, or more accurately, over Ukraine was rapidly accelerating the transfer of the balance of power from West to East. The progress of events associated with the conflict has resulted in a re-evaluation of this assessment. What we are witnessing is the self-inflicted demise of the West as a major power bloc. The belief in a series of delusions by Western leaders and governments is the driving force behind this demise, with the conflict in Ukraine being the focal point. Originally published...

Abolish NATOOr Convert ItTo ServePeace 30 Arguments & 100s of Inspirations This report can be reproduced or quoted freely,but only when referring clearly to TFF, the author and the link Read and download as PDF at the end of the catalogue • Read as Flipbook Media & other inquiries to tff@transnational.live or +46 738 52 52 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This Catalogue contains 30 arguments for the abolition of NATO. Each argument is based on rational peace research analysis, in contrast to the fact-resistant propaganda that NATO and mainstream politics and media promote about the ’defensive’ peace alliance. The Catalogue is based on the democratic assumption that diverse perceptions and concepts can exist – for instance, about what peace is – and that this hugely influential Western organisation is not sacrosanct and shall, therefore, not be exempt from critical analysis. While set up in 1949, NATO passed its ”best before” date long ago. The alliance of...