When leaders of the military pact’s member states pontificate about its invaluable role in defending democracy, you can almost hear history guffawing in the background, writes John Wight.
Opening remarks by U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday at the 75th anniversary summit in Washington. (NATO/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By John Wight
Medium
The current and ongoing conflict in Ukraine reminds us that the existence of NATO 75 years on from its creation stands as an insult to the millions who died in WWII so that the U.N. Charter could be born.
Produced as the foundational document of the United Nations upon its birth in October 1945, enshrined within the charter’s articles was a solemn pledge that henceforth justice, international law and tolerance would reign in place of brute power, force and intolerance.
Consider for a moment the first section of the charter’s preamble:
“WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, andto reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
It is impossible to read those words and not lament the gaping disjuncture between the noble ideals they pledged to uphold and the grim reality that arrived in their wake.
For rather than mankind being saved from the “scourge of war,” rather than “respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law,” the scourge of war and violation of treaties and international law have grown to become a near-everyday occurrence across the globe.
The pressing question we are required to grapple with today is the question of why? What lies at the root and what is the common denominator responsible for mankind’s abject failure to achieve the vision set out in the U.N. Charter?
Monument to U.N. Charter at United Nations Plaza in San Francisco. (Ken Lund, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Upon due consideration, we are left in no doubt that, fundamentally, the series of conflicts that have come to define our existence are a consequence of the drive by one ideological bloc to dominate and impose a particular political, economic and value system onto a world defined by its diversity of languages, cultures, histories and traditions.
The result is the normalization of war and the apotheosis of hard power, rather than war and hard power being regarded as grotesque perversions and an impediment to human progress.
Seventy-five-years ago NATO, a military alliance whose entire existence and ethos is predicated on “might is right,” emerged from the womb of the Cold War objectives devised by a Truman administration of fanatical hawks, consumed with the goal of full-spectrum dominance at the close of WWII.
In his 1997 essay, “The Last Empire,” Gore Vidal savages the official history proffered by Western ideologues when it comes to the sudden shift that took place from Moscow being viewed as an indispensable ally in the war against Nazi Germany in the eyes of the Roosevelt administration, to implacable foe when Truman entered the White House upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.
Vidal:
“The National Security State, the NATO alliance, the forty-year Cold War were all created without the consent, much less advice, of the American people… The impetus behind NATO was the United States… We were now hell bent on the permanent division of Germany between our western zone (plus the British and French zones) and the Soviet zone to the east. Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, now horrendous Communist enemy.”
Vidal speaking for the People’s Party in 1972. (Susmart, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Moving things forward, it is by now no secret that U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in a meeting on Feb. 9, 1990 that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” upon the reunification of Germany.
According to declassified documents, Baker’s pledge was made as part of a “cascade of assurances” over Soviet security given by Western leaders at that time and on into 1991, when the Soviet Union came to an end. It is the breaking of those assurances that lies at the heart of the deterioration in relations between East and West that has taken place since, and which informs the current conflict in Ukraine.
Flush with triumphalism over the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, NATO was loosed upon the world not in name of democracy but in the cause of imperialism. Neocon scribe Thomas Friedman wrote openly of the driving ethos of Western foreign policy after the Soviet Union’s demise:
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Friedman’s unabashed celebration of the economic opportunities lying open to the U.S. in the post-Soviet world was shared by power brokers in Washington on both sides of the aisle. Intoxicated with a misplaced sense of exceptionalism and virtue, the world now lay before them like a vast banquet upon which they were invited to feast.
The first course in this feast was the former Yugoslavia, which with its abundant human and natural resources, not to mention strategic location in the Balkans, was deemed ripe for the taking.
Parenti in 2012 while delivering the speech “Democracy and the Pathology of Wealth” in Berkeley, California. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)
Michael Parenti, in his definitive work on the destruction of Yugoslavia, To Kill A Nation, points out that after the fall of communism in eastern Europe
“the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system. It also proudly had no interest in joining NATO.”
The decisive role of NATO in achieving the West’s objectives in the former Yugoslavia need not detain us.
The point is that today — bearing in mind NATO’s role in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, its role in helping turn Afghanistan into a failed state, its critical role in toppling Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and turning that country into a failed state, and its stance in threatening Russia’s security in Eastern Europe — it is no longer feasible or possible to harbour any lingering belief that NATO is anything other than a tool of U.S. hard power, deployed not to protect and defend, but to destroy and dominate.
Whenever you hear U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders and officials of NATO-member states pontificate about the invaluable role NATO plays in defending democracy in an evermore dangerous and volatile world, you can almost hear history guffawing away in the background, what with NATO’s inarguable role in creating this danger and volatility.
NATO’s disbandment and the embrace of the principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter are long overdue. Because if the decades since the demise of the Soviet Union have confirmed one thing above all others, it is that the overriding challenge facing humanity is not the lack of democracy within certain states, but the lack of democracy among all states.
Until the latter is achieved the former will always remain the product of the asphyxiating effects of Western imperialism and its bastard child, hegemony.
NATO is not a shield it is a sword, covered in blood.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
This article is from the author’s Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
John Wight says: “… the overriding challenge facing humanity is not the lack of democracy within certain states, but the lack of democracy among all states. Until the latter is achieved the former will always remain the product of the asphyxiating effects of Western imperialism and its bastard child, hegemony.”
This is a powerful message for the peoples of the global south. Rather than engaging in a never ending quarrel among themselves over the lack of “democracy” within each state, they should direct their struggle for the creation of a democracy among all states. This is particularly true of the countries such as Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, which are suffering from brutal sanctions in the hands of the western countries causing poverty, inequality, human rights violation and sometimes violent political conflicts.
In light of the failures of the UN Charter, the introduction of BRICS and its relative successes is a good starting point for establishing the democracy which is lacking among the states of the world.
After World Wars they craft an end to war to defuse the blood lust and then begin the profit motives for the next war and better more expensive arms technology based on the weapons test of the previous war..
The NATO 75th anniversary summit in the beltway swamp was a trainwreck, exposing the moral bankruptcy, psychosis and dementia of the collective West. Biden is a porridge-brained Ahab, Putin is his Moby Dick and the only sane character, Orban, is Starbuck.
We are on the Pequod, being sunk by their collective obsessive stupidity. Keir Starmer is a fool, a non-entity, just a shitbucket in the head.
hxxps://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-duran-podcast/nato-summit-funeral-to-circus/
hxxps://podbay.fm/p/the-critical-hour-461766/e/1720843260
NATO was originally formed as a defensive agreement between countries that fought and won the battle against the fascist Nazis of WWII after so much carnage .It was a pact among Western nations that never again would allow such destruction of human lives and countries .
Today NATO has morphed into an offensive organization ,right under the nose of an unsuspecting public which has been lulled into believing that Russia is the new enemy all the while big monied interests are getting very rich manufacturing armaments .This is the new economic driver .The moment of waking up to what has been perpetrated on all of us is past the hour . Outside of the few news reporting agencies ,such as Consortium News ,the main stream is playing the drums of war . No one will save us .It is left to us to finally wake up.
Thank You John
I despair for the West.
Western idiots cheer NATO while declaiming Russia and the soaring cost of living. They somehow forget that NATO sanctions against Russia caused the spike in their cost of living and the subsequent sharp increase in Russian prosperity.
Adding insult to injury they cheer Western politicians who confiscate their hard-earned money and give it to Ukraine so that it won’t contribute to the inflation in the West that their sanctions created in the first instance.
Calling those Westerners ovine is an insult to sheep. Gnats have eidetic memory in comparison.
No wonder propaganda flourishes.
All very true but it is all paper money and the presses are running hot . Mind you ,today it is computer generated . I have come to believe that the only way out of our dilemma unfortunately IMHO is for a complete failure of the monetary system as it exists today. BRICS + provides an option that could work and for all of us ,including the US /Western world .Going back to the gold standard might be the way forward .Gold and other assets ,for each sovereign country as a source of trade among peaceful and respectful nations might be the way forward . Just my thoughts.
They all assume that the rest of us are as dumb as them, that we actually believe the tripe they serve up. Even a 4-year-old can tell it’s absolute crap.
A genuine democracy has no need of censorship, or mass surveillance, or election rigging, or lawfare against political opponents, or endless lies, misinformation and disinformation. It listens to and respects its citizens. It is transparent in its actions on behalf of the voters, it lets itself be held accountable.
Or, at least, it strives to be most of these things.
But how can NATO pretend to defend something that doesn’t exist in the west, and likely anywhere?
China has, over the past 40 years, produced near miraculously good results for it now 1.4 billion people. China is not a Democracy. Based on China alone, Washington DC should give up its demand that every country become a “democracy” . To each his own. History, culture and other things determine what is the best form of government for a particular country.
Democracy is not a panacea for anything. It is not the presence or absence of democracy that is causing our problems, it is the failure to implement Zhou en Lai’s 5 principles for peaceful coexistence that causes our problems.
Comment on the 1st section of the UN charter: “It is impossible to read those words and not lament the gaping disjuncture between the noble ideals they pledged to uphold and the grim reality that arrived in their wake..” That sentence says it all without the grim details, at least for those of us who have questioned the “truths” laid before us, and those truths that are told when a journalist or media outlet has a commitment to truth. I call alternative truths. writings. reporting, Integrity Media and there will probably be some monolithic POS that rises and calls itself that. However, there’s plenty out there that are alternative but haven’t much integrity. So don’t be fooled by a name. Look for the writers who’ve been slandered, blocked, taken down. That’s what they are doing to integrity theses days and that’s what they intend to do to integrity media. You can identify integrity media by those who’ve lost their income for a higher order of reporting and have faced their inner questions of what brought them to journalism in the first place.
What ‘democracy’ are we talking about? “The will of the people” vanished long time ago, replaced by the will of the ‘untouchables’. The West is destroying itself…
“the series of conflicts that have come to define our existence are a consequence of the drive by one ideological bloc to dominate and impose a particular political, economic and value system onto a world defined by its diversity of languages, cultures, histories and traditions.” (oh, and those words that define our world are what makes it so beautiful, healthy and medicinal). The value systems of that “ideological bloc” propose to defend is a lie, all smoke and mirrors. That “ideological bloc” is a master of subterfuge, false flags, and tracking and trapping you. The driving economic and value systems behind “the series of conflicts” is capitalism, which also embraces a class system or to say differently, it is only when you embrace “capitalism” do you have any “class.” Capitalism as a financial system that leans towards death, if “birthing” death machines equals capitalism and death of billions equals capitalism or at the very least is occurring under capitalism, then it appears to be a system being militarily and clandestinely enforced upon the world. “Rat Race” and “Dog Eat Dog” phrases didn’t come out of nowhere. We mistakenly call them “elites” while they are the true “deplorables.”
NATO has become the US’ foreign legion! How else to explain NATO in IRAQ, in Afghanistan, the South China Sea …. Wasn’t it supposed to counter a Soviet Union which no longer exists?
Vidal and Parenti!
Two of the people I’ve admired most in the world.
Vidal’s big fat book, “United States Essays” is an absolute must. Well over a thousand pages, it ranges from the early 1950s into the ’90s and adroitly focuses on American literature, history, and politico-sociological insights.
Parenti’s written a slew of books that are all very highly recommended. My favorites of his: “To Kill a Nation”, “Assassination of Julius Caesar”, “Sword and the Dollar”, “Blackshirts & Reds”, and “Inventing Reality”.
NATO should have been shut down after the Cold War. It’s a war machine.
NATO is not a Shield, but a machine to extract Tax Payers Wealth and the Wealth of the planet.
Excellently stated:
“Because if the decades since the demise of the Soviet Union have confirmed one thing above all others, it is that the overriding challenge facing humanity is not the lack of democracy within certain states, but the lack of democracy among all states. Until the latter is achieved the former will always remain the product of the asphyxiating effects of Western imperialism and its bastard child, hegemony.”
A moment’s reflection corroborates the obvious causality thus expressed.
I had not seen that quote by Friedman before. It is one of those instances where the secret part is blurted out for all with ears to hear. Sadly, too many Americans, if they did/do read it would simply responds, “Hell, yes!”