chr
Could not agree more with Stefan's comment. One more thing to consider, all the tax money the EU countries are pumping into this failed country are only a fraction of what the oligarchs are pumping out into their tax haven accounts. But it doesn't matter, the US propaganda machine has fully succeeded in painting everything and everybody into blue and yellow. The way the different realities are constructed reminds me a bit of The Matrix. I suggest to refrain from taking any pills, be they red or blue (or yellow for that matter). Wolfgang Streek wrote an excellent essay on the "Fog of War." https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fog-of-warGreetings from the Lower East Side, Wolfgang On Fri, 2022-03-11 at 10:42 +0100, Stefan Heidenreich wrote: why not cutting stuff short:
the war is going brilliantly. 3 goals have alread been achieved
1) keep the Russians out
2) the Americans in
3) the Germans down.
(Lord Ismay)
Now, please: harshest sanctions ever, in order to also reach the last
goal:
4) Fuck the EU! (Nuland)
Mission almost accomplished!
s
Am 10.03.2022 um 17:52 schrieb Ted Byfield:
Felix gets it, imo.
Not sure about elsewhere, but the 'special relationship left' — the
US certainly and the UK as well, I think — has been stuck in a rut.
OT1H hard-ish doctrinaire 'anti-imperialist' formations robotically
denounce NATO in the monolithic, one-sided terms Felix points out;
OT0H milquetoast centrists revert to form and support all kinds of
aggressive action, if not outfight belligerence (yet), with little
or no introspection about how that relates to their other earlier
stances. Both are backward-glancing in a way that Corey Robin put
well a week ago on Facebook:
God, I hate left debates about international politics. More than
any other kind of debate, they never have anything to do with the
matter at hand but, instead, always seem to involve some attempt,
on all sides, to remediate and redress some perceived failure or
flaw of politics past.
I don't think the left will make much progress until it gets over
its post-'70s anxiety over the use of force — always coercive,
sometimes violent — to achieve its political ends. Until then,
it'll necessarily marginalize itself with anti-statist denialism
masquerading as warm-fuzzy idealism. The way out? Ditch the
genealogical-moral hand-wringing and accept the fact that human
institutions, all of them, are deeply flawed, but each in their own
unique way. A bit like what Tolstoy said of families: All happy
families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The question is how can we work with the institutions we have
toward *better* (NOT 'the best') political ends — in this case,
fostering conditions that help Russian populations (very plural) to
try once again to remake their society in more sustainable, fairer
ways. If we had more than one major multilateral alliance and were
asking which would be better suited to realizing that end, fine,
let's debate whether NATO is the better choice; but we don't,
really, so scholastic debates about whether NATO is Good or Evil
lead nowhere.
Are McDonald's and Coke "Good"? No. Is their withdrawal from Russia
the right thing in moral and practical terms? Yes. That wasn't so
hard, now, was it? Why would we discuss NATO in any different way?
Because, being a multilateral entity that's ultimately grounded in
democratic national governments it "represents" us more than
McDonald's and Coke? Good luck arguing that.
Cheers,
Ted
On 10 Mar 2022, at 7:21, Felix Stalder wrote:
On 10.03.22 06:02, Brian Holmes wrote:
Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry
to all those Eastern European states that requested it?
Remember that most of those states, they had been taken over
but not absorbed by the Soviet Union. They lived for decades
under significant degrees of political repression. Did they
have a valid reason to want to join Nato after 1989? Looking at
the brutality of the current war, it seems suddenly obvious to
me that they did -- and by the same token, I have suddenly
become less certain of what I always used to say, that Nato is
an imperialist war machine that should be disbanded. Russia is
also an imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two owe each
other a lot). But maybe China is also an imperial war machine?
And India, maybe not yet?
I don't think that NATO ever was an imperialist war machine. The
US doesn't really need NATO for it's imperialist projects in
Latin America or Asia.
NATO, it seems to me, was always a "cold war" war machine, aimed
at confronting the SU/Russia, primarily in Europe. To the degree
that this confrontation was not seen as vital after 1990 (either
because the US read geopolitics as uni-polar, or the Europeans
believed in trade leading to peace) NATO languished. Irrelevant
for Trump, brain-dead for Macron, not worth investing for the
Germans.
For the Eastern European countries, for very understandable, deep
historical reasons, "confronting Russia" remained a vital concern
also after the end of the cold war, hence NATO was always seen
crucially important and they entered NATO voluntarily.
History has born them out, but was that really inevitable? Of
course not, because nothing ever is, but the miss-conception of
geopolitics as unipolar is certainly a big factor in this.
But the paradox is, to develop a real peace architecture in
Europe, NATO would have had to deny Eastern European countries
membership and work on some kind of large block-free zone between
itself and Russia. I'm not sure such a project would have been
popular in Poland, though.
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