This video is guaranteed to depress the hell out you and/or scare you to death. It also, hopefully, will spur you on to even greater anger at the reckless ruling class racketeers known as the foreign policy Blob. They're an incestuous clan of careerist Republicans and Democrats and their wealthy donors, the permanent security state, the corporate media, and Hollywood. Their de facto motto in the United States' ongoing proxy war against Russia is "We're all neocons now!"
The program features The Nation editor Katrina van den Heuvel, foreign policy critic and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, ,and Jack Matlock, the ambassador to the former Soviet Union in the Reagan and Bush I administrations.
Let me know what you think in the comments section.
8 comments:
I think Mearsheimer is spot-on in what he says, particularly:
1. That there is a constant risk of nuclear weapons. And my own take on that is that amounts to Game Over, that it would unleash WW3, that there is no such thing as limited nuclear war. Those who believe in "better dead than Red" would get their way for billions of us.
2. That our military-industrial complex would like to have a low level war to grind on for years and weaken Russia, without regard to how many Ukrainians are killed and the country destroyed. We care a little more for them because they are white-skinned, but not that much more than we care for Vietnamese, Afghanis, Yemenis, etc.
3. That the U.S. will not allow Zelensky to settle a peace/truce with Russia.
Thanks for posting this. We have every reason to be scared. The sky does seem to be falling. John Mearsheimer was correct in his 2015 lecture as to where we were headed with the tension the West was creating by continuing to promote NATO up to Russia's door.
I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis as a young teen and this seems as bad or worse. The U.S. does not seem to even consider allowing some form of peace to prevail. It looks like the plan is to create a cold war (or hot) against Russia and China in the fight for what's left of this world.
I agree with Mearsheimer: the U.S. is always willing to "fight" a war on foreign soil, with foreign fighters getting killed and maimed and foreign cities and infrastructures destroyed. I feel so sorry for the Ukrainian people who are pawns and collateral damage. The big U.S. contribution? Selling/gifting the Ukrainian government with arms to fight the war (which conveniently gives billions in tax dollars to the Arms Industry). The good guy (U.S. and its allies) and bad guy (Russia) imagery pushed by the ever collaborative MSM is so trite - yet so believed by so many of our Western citizens. We have been using the poor people of the Ukraine from the get-go. Promising them things that the U.S. had no intention of ever delivering. But . . . as always, the U.S. multi-natonal corporations had a profit plan in mind for themselves - this from Michael Hudson.
I heard some professor from Stanford on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) blabbing on about how Russia is losing the war and Putin is having to pull troops from other parts of the worldto keep it going - blah, blah, blah - Who knows? Do I trust anyone on MSM to tell the unvarnished truth? Not a chance.
I have read two books in my life that have changed my world view. One was All Quiet on the Western Front. I read it as an undergraduate in history class in my Freshman year. For some reason - probably my innocence (I was a sweet Republican back in those days who believed God was in his Heaven and all was right with the world) - it never grocked with me that the soldiers I read about and was loving like younger brothers were German. It wasn't until halfway through the book that I realised the poor souls I had grown to care about were "the enemy." Even at my young age - and in my naivete - I could understand that all young soldiers are the same. And many of them are good people, drawn into a heinous war - by oligarchs and politicians that see them as cannon fodder - on both sides. The second book was All the Shah's Men. This was the book where the scales really fell from my eyes. It taught me that the U.S. didn't hesitate to manipulate and interfere with foreign governments - siding with evil and incompetent leaders they put into power and could control. And the role of the MSM in demonizing good democratically elected leaders, all in the service of the political establishment. So now when I read all this "Putin is the anti-Christ" stuff, I wonder . . . "Am I really getting the facts and the truth about this man?" Doubtful. The fact that Putin worked for the KGB and is a political animal is evident - but what are his motives? Is he a vicious psychopath or is he a politician looking to defend his country from foreign influences that ultimately will bring about his country's demise? Given that we had our own nutcase sociopath in the White House not so long ago, I have to wonder if we, in the U.S., aren't the pot calling the kettle black.
The Stanford professor went on about how the Ukraine had the right - by U.N. Charter to "get in bed" with whatever country they wanted. But the reality is far from the truth. Can Mexico get in bed with Russia? We are still punishing Cuba and Venezuela for doing this. Australia is having a cow about the Solomon Islands getting in bed with China. The reality is the most powerful countries DO exercise their hegemony and Russia made it very clear that Georgia and Ukraine were off limits for cozy relationships with the U.S. - Just as the U.S. has made clear that South America is our hegemony.
Personally, I hold no hope. Just as you wrote, Karen, this is all so depressing to understand.
I wonder, if the dollar stops being the Reserve Currency - suddenly - would that make the U.S. more desperate and hungry for war or less?
Chris Hedges: The Pimps of War —
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/11/chris-hedges-the-pimps-of-war/
"The unaccountable coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia."
The entire article is well worth reading, but here are the first two and last two paragraphs:
"The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.
"They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including that of the U.S., leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next."
…
"I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like The Council on Foreign Relations or The Brookings Institute, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House.
"The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable. When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Dr. Strangeloves, if we don’t stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet."
Which is better for Russia, a conventional war with NATO inside Ukraine, or pre-empting that by nuclear strikes on Ukraine before NATO intervenes?
Since a long war is a long risk of US/Russia combat, then sometime before that can be realized, Russia ought to be tempted to cut it off with nuclear strikes on Ukraine.
It is a serious decision, a big risk, but so is losing an inevitable conventional war with the US in Ukraine.
Nuclear strikes? Really? Not sure if you're serious with that comment.
There was a time when it was completely understood that the use of nuclear weapons was not possible without setting off total destruction, which I think is a very real possibility with any use of that weaponry in this conflict. Leadership once had a better understanding during the last cold war that use of nuclear weapons was MAD. Guess this is a new age where logic and reason are of little value.
The only "value" of nuclear weapons is to play chicken with our opponents and brag about who can destroy life on Earth first.
mjb -- Nuclear strikes on NATO would be MAD, but nuclear strikes on Ukraine? We have not said we'd strike back, and I doubt we'd extend them our nuclear umbrella just now.
Just talk of potentially extending it might be enough to trigger a strike.
This is a very dangerous time. Russia's existential interests have been challenged, according to the Russians, and they are reacting in exactly that way. Ignore that, and die. That is the underlying truth of MAD.
So yes, I am entirely serious with that comment. We could get them killed. We could even die with them, if we bungle this as badly as we have everything else to do with Ukraine.
Great interview with Noam Chomsky on the Ukraine. His grasp of the issue and his vast knowledge are amazing. https://theintercept.com/2022/04/14/russia-ukraine-noam-chomsky-jeremy-scahill/
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