By Alice Slater
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 Vladimir 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 Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Soviet occupation, dissolving the Warsaw Pact, without a shot.
The United States promised him in a host of documents and testimonies that are surfacing recently, including from Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador Jack Matlock, that if Russia didn’t object to a unified Germany joining NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), it would not expand one inch to the East.
As Russia lost 27 million people to the Nazi onslaught, it 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 United States expand NATO, taking in 14 countries from Poland to Montenegro, but also bombed Kosovo over Russia’s Security Council objection, breaking its treaty obligation with the United Nations 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.
Furthermore, the United States walked out on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and left the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and a carefully negotiated deal with Iran to preclude its enriching uranium to bomb-grade. Shockingly, the United States 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 might 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 its military alliance?
The United States went berserk when the Soviet Union 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 that and save the world from the scourge of war with new programs of cooperation to end the plague, abolish nuclear weapons and save Mother Earth from looming catastrophic climate destruction.
Let us usher in a new era of cooperation to deal with the real threats.
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Alice Slater serves on the boards of World Beyond War, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. She is also the United Nations’ NGO representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. This article was published by IDN Flagship-Agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate.
