XPost: alt.fan.noam-chomsky, talk.politics.misc, soc.rights.human
XPost: alt.politics.religion, alt.anti-war
June 28, 2022
‘Not a Justification but a Provocation’: Chomsky on the Root Causes of
the Russia Ukraine War
by Ramzy Baroud
One of the reasons that Russian media has been completely blocked in
the West, along with the unprecedented control and censorship over the
Ukraine war narrative, is the fact that western governments simply do
not want their public to know that the world is vastly changing.
Ignorance might be bliss, arguably in some situations, but not in this
case. Here, ignorance can be catastrophic as western audiences are
denied access to information about a critical situation that is
affecting them in profound ways and will most certainly impact the
world’s geopolitics for generations to come.
The growing inflation, an imminent global recession, a festering
refugee crisis, a deepening food shortage crisis and much more are the
kinds of challenges that require open and transparent discussions
regarding the situation in Ukraine, the NATO-Russia rivalry and the responsibility of the West in the ongoing war.
To discuss these issues, along with the missing context of the
Russia-Ukraine war, we spoke with Professor Noam Chomsky, believed to
be the greatest living intellectual of our time.
Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion
of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US
invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international
crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the
main ‘background’ of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream
media coverage, is “NATO expansion”.
“This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of
every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any
familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George
Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including
the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows
anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and
provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That
goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him;
(Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia
cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”
Though various US administrations acknowledged and, to some extent,
respected the Russian red lines, the Bill Clinton Administration did
not. According to Chomsky, “George H. W. Bush … made an explicit
promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand beyond East Germany,
perfectly explicit. You can look up the documents. It’s very clear.
Bush lived up to it. But when Clinton came along, he started violating
it. And he gave reasons. He explained that he had to do it for
domestic political reasons. He had to get the Polish vote, the ethnic
vote. So, he would let the so-called Visegrad countries into NATO.
Russia accepted it, didn’t like it but accepted it.”
“The second George Bush,” Chomsky argued, “just threw the door wide
open. In fact, even invited Ukraine to join over, despite the
objections of everyone in the top diplomatic service, apart from his
own little clique, Cheney, Rumsfeld (among others). But France and
Germany vetoed it.”
However, that was hardly the end of the discussion. Ukraine’s NATO
membership remained on the agenda because of intense pressures from
Washington.
“Starting in 2014, after the Maidan uprising, the United States began
openly, not secretly, moving to integrate Ukraine into the NATO
military command, sending heavy armaments and joining military
exercises, military training and it was not a secret. They boasted
about it,” Chomsky said.
What is interesting is that current Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky “was elected on a peace platform, to implement what was
called Minsk Two, some kind of autonomy for the eastern region. He
tried to implement it. He was warned by right-wing militias that if he persisted, they’d kill him. Well, he didn’t get any support from the
United States. If the United States had supported him, he could have
continued, we might have avoided all of this. The United States was
committed to the integration of Ukraine within NATO.”
The Joe Biden Administration carried on with the policy of NATO
expansion. “Just before the invasion,” said Chomsky, “Biden … produced a joint statement … calling for expanding these efforts of
integration. That’s part of what was called an ‘enhanced program’
leading to the mission of NATO. In November, it was moved forward to a
charter, signed by the Secretary of State.”
Soon after the war, “the United States Department acknowledged that
they had not taken Russian security concerns into consideration in any discussions with Russia. The question of NATO, they would not discuss.
Well, all of that is provocation. Not a justification but a
provocation and it’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it
is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked
invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits.”
Chomsky continued, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they
wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion. By now, censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond
anything in my lifetime. Such a level that you are not permitted to
read the Russian position. Literally. Americans are not allowed to
know what the Russians are saying. Except, selected things. So, if
Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims
about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages.
If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it.
That’s suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying. I
have never seen a level of censorship like this.”
Regarding his views of the possible future scenarios, Chomsky said
that “the war will end, either through diplomacy or not. That’s just
logic. Well, if diplomacy has a meaning, it means both sides can
tolerate it. They don’t like it, but they can tolerate it. They don’t
get anything they want, they get something. That’s diplomacy. If you
reject diplomacy, you are saying: ‘Let the war go on with all of its
horrors, with all the destruction of Ukraine, and let’s let it go on
until we get what we want.’”
By ‘we’, Chomsky was referring to Washington, which simply wants to
“harm Russia so severely that it will never be able to undertake
actions like this again. Well, what does that mean? It’s impossible to achieve. So, it means, let’s continue the war until Ukraine is
devastated. That’s US policy.”
Most of this is not obvious to western audiences simply because
rational voices are “not allowed to talk” and because “rationality is
not permitted. This is a level of hysteria that I have never seen,
even during the Second World War, which I am old enough to remember
very well.”
While an alternative understanding of the devastating war in Ukraine
is disallowed, the West continues to offer no serious answers or
achievable goals, leaving Ukraine devastated and the root causes of
the problem in place. “That’s US policy”, indeed.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine
Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains
Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in
Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a
Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Source:
https://t.co/OgwKawqcPW
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