Cold War Reloaded - Der neue Ost-West Konflikt

Chomsky: We Must Insist That Nuclear Warfare Is an Unthinkable Policy

Zitat von Noam Chomsky - Interview in Truthout (02.06.22)

[...] Proceeding with truism, to oppose or even act to delay a diplomatic settlement is to call for prolonging the war with its grim consequences for Ukraine and beyond. This stand constitutes a ghastly experiment: Let’s see whether Putin will slink away quietly in total defeat, or whether he will prolong the war with all its horrors, or even use the weapons that he indisputably has to devastate Ukraine and to set the stage for terminal war.

All of this seems obvious enough. Or it should, but not in the current climate of hysteria, where such near truisms elicit a great flood of utterly irrational reactions: The monster Putin won’t agree, it’s appeasement, what about Munich, we have to establish our own red lines and keep to them whatever the monster says, etc.

There is no need to dignify such outpourings with a response. They all amount to saying: Let’s not try, and instead undertake the ghastly experiment.

The ghastly experiment is operative U.S. policy, and is supported by a wide range of opinion, always with noble rhetoric about how we must stand up for principle and not permit crime to go unpunished. When we hear this from strong supporters of U.S. crimes, as we commonly do, we can dismiss it as sheer cynicism, the Western counterpart to the most vulgar apparatchiks of the Soviet years, eager to eloquently denounce Western crimes, fully supportive of their own. We also hear it from opponents of U.S. crimes, from people who surely do not want to carry out the ghastly experiment that they are advocating. Here other issues arise: the rising tide of irrationality that is undermining any hope for serious discourse — a necessity if Ukraine is to be spared indescribable tragedy, and even if the human experiment is to persist much longer.

If we can escape cynicism and irrationality, the humane choice for the U.S. and the West is straightforward: seek to facilitate a diplomatic settlement, or at least don’t undermine the option.[...]

Explaining U.S.-NATO goals at Ramstein, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

Let’s think about it. How do we ensure that Russia can never again invade another country? We put aside here the unthinkable question of whether reshaping U.S. policy might contribute to this end, for example, examining Washington’s openly declared refusal to consider any Russian security concerns and many other actions that we have discussed.

To achieve the announced goal, it seems that we must at least reenact something like the Versailles Treaty, which sought to ensure that Germany would not be able to go to war again.

But Versailles did not go far enough, as was soon made clear. It follows that the new version being planned must “strangle the demon” in ways that go beyond the Versailles effort to control the Huns. Perhaps something like the Morgenthau Plan.

That is the logic of the pronouncements. Even if we don’t take the words seriously and give them a limited interpretation, the policy entails prolonging the war, whatever the consequences are for Ukrainians and the “collateral damage” beyond: mass starvation, possible terminal war, continued destruction of the environment that sustains life.

Narrower questions of a similar sort arise with regard to the blockade, with its lethal effects in the Global South. Right now, Ukrainian ports are blockaded by the Russian Navy, preventing desperately needed exports. What can be done about it?

As always, there are two directions to explore: military or diplomatic. “War/War or Jaw/Jaw” in the phrase attributed to Churchill, who assigned priority to the latter.

War/War is official U.S. policy: Send advanced anti-ship missiles to force Russia to stop blockade of ports. Beyond the Russian flagship, more can be sunk. Will the Russians observe quietly? Maybe. How would the U.S. react in similar circumstances? We can put that aside.

Another possibility, proposed by the Wall Street Journal editors, is “to use warships to escort merchant ships out of the Black Sea.” The editors assure us that it would conform to international law, and that Russians will stop at nothing. So, if they react, we can proclaim proudly that we upheld international law as all goes up in flames.

The editors observe that there are precedents: “The U.S. has marshalled allies for such a mission twice in recent decades. In the late 1980s the U.S. reflagged and protected Kuwaiti oil tankers as they sailed out of the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq tanker war.”

That is correct, though there is a small oversight. The U.S. did indeed intervene directly to provide crucial support for Reagan’s good friend Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran. That was after supporting Saddam’s chemical warfare that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, and even charging Iran for Saddam’s massacre of Kurds with chemical warfare. Iran was the demon of the day. A fine precedent.[...]

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(Medienkompetenzhinweis: Das Interview ist sehr lang und sollte in Gänze gelesen werden, bevor man sich über das Zitat aufregt.)

Im Südpazifischen Ankerplatz des British-American Empire sieht's mit der kritischen Analyse in der veröffentlichten Meinung auch nicht besser aus:

CONTROLLING THE UKRAINE NARRATIVE

Zitat von Simon Cooper - Arena (21.04.22)

[...] There are several ways dissent has been closed down over the Russia-Ukraine war. Firstly, to the extent that there is any exchange of ideas in the public sphere, we see a policing of ‘left opinion’ so that anti-imperialist voices that question the role of the United States or NATO, or trace the history of conflict in the region, are written off as Putin supporters. Secondly, there is the censorship of Russian media, for example RT and Sputnik, the popular ‘Russians with attitude’ Twitter account (known for its sometimes sceptical take on Russian power), and many others. In Australia, radio programs carrying Russian content have been removed, and many universities have shut down research links with Russian scholars and research centres. A few weeks ago host Stan Grant’s expulsion of an audience member questioning the prevailing narrative on the ABC’s Q&A program indicated the unwillingness of the National Broadcaster to even debate alternative perspectives on the war. Grant’s justification that it was a ‘rogue question’ that caused psychological ‘distress’ to audience members revealed the administered nature of public debate as well as the weaponisation of emotion as a means to control what can be said. Finally, the continuous images of the war on televisual news generate emotional reactions while embedded reporters offer little by way of analysis. What impact does this sort of journalism have if it is primarily there to generate affective responses? Viewers are asked to witness scenes of suffering day after day but are unable to act. The combination of emotional distress and lack of agency disposes them towards supporting the single narrative offered—the further arming of Ukraine and the escalation of war with a nuclear power.

This means it is almost impossible within mainstream opinion to simultaneously acknowledge Putin’s insupportable actions and forge a path out of the war that does not involve escalation, and the further destruction of Ukraine. Cutting off access to Russian voices may stop propaganda, but it also stymies dissenting voices within Russia, and further marginalises Russian citizens so that pressure for change within Russia becomes more difficult because of their isolation. The narrowness of representation shapes a good/evil distinction that cuts off any prospect of negotiation out of the war. How can war be de-escalated now that Putin is labelled a war criminal who commits ‘genocide’, together with the demand that he be dragged to the Hague for war crimes? (The ready acceptance of ‘genocide’ as an accurate description of what is happening in Ukraine is especially egregious: it patently does not accord with any officially accepted definition, and detracts from those other contexts in which genocides have indeed been carried out.) Moreover, the suggestion that sections of the US military and intelligence services might welcome a protracted war, one that undermines Putin at the expense of Ukraine as it is slowly destroyed (as in Afghanistan in the 1980s) —is labeled by commentators as ‘pro-Putin’, diverting attention from the US military interventions and proxy wars of the last sixty years that have been carried out exactly with that level of extreme cynicism.

Like the neocons of the early 2000s, admittedly more through enactment of their structural position in the new economy than by any specific ideology, many of those who might be called the intellectually trained assume that the world is something that can be reshaped by intellectual technique—technological power/information/economic flow—transcending any historical or material resistance or limit. After all that’s how knowledge capitalism has taken hold of the world, regarding embedded social structures and established ways of life as things to be taken apart, albeit often with the aim of undoing past prejudices or exploitative patterns.

Putin’s ‘gangster capitalism’ was tolerated for a long time to the extent that the breakup of Russia and the flow of billions of dollars in and out of Russia could contribute to this new global setting. His invasion of Ukraine is the most awful kind of response, emerging out of this context—a revenge of history, though not the version Putin is using to justify his actions.. At the same time, other forces of reaction, in the United States, the Unite Kingdom, Hungary and France, have emerged. Will there be any attempt to understand what has created this reactive politics or will it simply be dismissed as bad information while the trajectory of global capitalism rolls on?

Zitat von Hohli

Frage mich, wie viele auf Twitter Chomsky nach dem Text als Antisemiten bezeichnen würden, wenn man sie nicht googlen lassen würde.

Bei weiten Teilen der "links"-liberalen Twitteria ist Chomsky seit der Zeitenwende jedenfalls ohnehin schon gecancelt.

Zitat von Blechmann

Deutschland ist aber nicht "der Westen". Selenskyj ist ständig verhandlungsbereit und Selenskyj macht großzügige Angebote

Selenskyj ist "der Westen"?

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