Op-Ed: Avoiding Wider War & Surviving 2023 in the Void of the Left
By Simon Turner
I came upon Martin Luther King Jr's “audacious faith in the future of mankind" in a very roundabout way: by reading the 480-page book-form interview of the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, "My First Life."
Chávez said of MLK, "That great visionary spoke of a utopia that is now taking shape in Venezuela.” As a socialist president, Chávez was able to create more meaningful change than the great socialist protest leader, MLK, could from outside of government.
Continuing the celebration of Hugo Chávez’s achievements to mark the 10th anniversary of his death last week, per Counterpunch, “By 2012, the lowest regional inequality: down 54%. Poverty at 70.8% in ‘96 dropped to 21% in 2010. Extreme poverty, 40% in ‘96 to 7.3% in 2010."
"In 1998, 387,000 got old-age pensions; by 2012, 2.1 million. 1998, 18 doctors per 10,000; by 2012, 58. 1998 5,081 clinics, 13,721 in 2011."
Counterpunch. It's not exactly The New York Times or even any medium-to-large outlet that could have hosted such figures. Chávez, on the contrary, suffered snide character assassinations as if the media is a blob with no character of its own, a reflection of government imperatives wherever necessary.
So, to reach Chávez, Ignacio Ramonet’s book. Like MLK, Chávez inspires hope as reality crowds in closer by the day, and the media again filters the news through government imperatives, this time about Ukraine.
A false flag chemical weapons attack by the US in Ukraine to pin the blame on Russia recently appeared to be about ready. The US continues by any means necessary, as always, this time in the case of weakening Russia through proxy war.
Adam Schiff said before the war: “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” Lindsey Graham said during the war: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.”
Schiff and Graham spell out the bipartisan support typical for foreign policy, while, on the domestic front, a couple of issues seeming to offer choice constitute the reason for believing in American democracy as democracy.
The Russians have produced satellite images of illegal BZ psychoactive chemical weapons delivered by train to Kramatorsk, Ukraine. The Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Center then followed the BZ delivery with hundreds of thousands of masks.
Sullivan as US Deputy Secretary of State
On Monday, with the opening of a session of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons' governing body, Russia distributed a factsheet on the BZ delivery among the country delegations attending.
The thing wouldn't be complete though without the former US Ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan, right on cue, having foreshadowed a false flag by claiming that the Russians are about to commit a chemical attack.
Such an attack, not recognized as a setup by the US via Ukraine, would both further obligate European governments to military action and activate the public.
The media-created perception of the Ukraine war is doing the work of the government as faithfully as its equivalent did on Chávez. We are facing the wrong way and walking backward into trouble or averting our eyes.
Another anniversary is drawing inexorably closer, that of 1 year from the projected peace deal. Ukraine was to have become a neutral state, unable to own nuclear weapons, with internationally guaranteed independence. It would have been minus Donbas, which it had anyway bombed for years, killing thousands, and Russian Crimea.
Were hundreds of thousands of lives saved? No. Like a role-play US envoy, Boris Johnson appeared on the scene to make sure the war wouldn’t end there.
Some similarly right-wing political figures and parties in Europe have seen the Russia-Ukraine war for what it is, though, and are speaking up.
In the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet, leader of the Forum for Democracie, (FvD), said at the February 21 55th session of the Dutch House of Representatives:
“Since 2007, Putin has been calling on the West to abandon the ‘Cold War’ attitude and cooperate in a normal, equal way. NATO's response followed in 2008 when it declared in Bucharest that Ukraine would join NATO.
In 2011, NATO then launched an offensive war against Libya, and not long after that, firing began in Syria. In 2014, the United States staged a coup in Kyiv. It effectively controlled Ukraine from then on.
Bombing of Russia's Donbas region began with cluster munitions. A drinking water blockade against Crimea began. Russia asked for security guarantees one last time, at the end of 2021. America responded by repeating that Ukraine would join NATO and launching a major military exercise.
Putin then decided to attack first because he believed he had no other choice. So, it was an expressly defensive move by Russia. The whole idea that it was an unprovoked attack, and that Russia wants to advance and conquer all of Europe is completely absurd and should be relegated to the realm of fables.
Ukraine is being sacrificed on the chopping block of NATO expansionism and US aggression. I say this with sincere empathy for the more than 150,000 Ukrainian victims, and I also say this to the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, who is here.
Break away from the yoke of NATO and the State Department in Washington. They are not your friend. Put the interest of your Ukrainian people first. Make peace with Russia. It can be done today. And leave all these warmongers here behind.”
The left's Irish Member of the European Parliament, Mick Wallace, could not have put it better or as straight. Baudet is, however, a declining force in Dutch politics.
Populism in the Netherlands has swung from Euroscepticism to increased opposition to tackling the Netherlands' oversized part in climate change. The FvD is projected to be the biggest loser of the provincial elections that happened on Wednesday.
As for the several Dutch center-left to left-wing parties, you would think they would have less in common with a US government than the right. They would presumably be aware of the fate of politics like theirs in the face of US subversion in countless countries.
As Brian Becker, the American anti-war organizer and a founder of the US Party for Socialism and Liberation, says, “The question is how did we get here.”
But where comprehension should be, a full year on to find out, there is a void in the Dutch left:
"It is bizarre to see Putin blatantly blaming others for this war this afternoon." (SP - The Socialist Party)
"From Fantasia, he blames his own aggression on the victim and on those who want to come to the rescue." (Groenlinks - Green Left)
"Dutch support for Ukraine is also about protecting our democratic values" (PvdD - Party for the Animals)
"...crucial that promised military resources are actually delivered." (PvdA - The Labour Party)
“Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” (DENK - Think)
The Dutch left may be dead, but its representation of anti-imperialists in the provincial elections is definitely absent, even now.
Only the tiny, intersectional BIJ1 has even called out US responsibility for the Nord Stream pipeline explosions. But BIJ1 didn't take part in the elections.
The other left parties in the Netherlands are no more informed than the average man or woman in the street, saturated in Western propaganda.
Look how The New York Times, pushed into a corner by the facts of the Nord Stream sabotage matter, produced an outlandish theory of responsibility for the act.
When given almost no room to maneuver, however, corporate media is at its most instructive. Positions that reflect government policy but are nonsensical, when held nevertheless, push the media into view as a state actor for all to see.
But believing the media’s version of wars, entry-level viewers have been startled into action over Ukraine, and furiously activated, by something they’ve never seen before—a bad attack on a country. All attacks have been good. (We did them.) From the “shock & awe” positive spin on immediate huge destruction, onward.
Whereas this is how it’s been:
2013—Carl Gershman, then President of the National Endowment for Democracy, the US regime change operator, named Ukraine the “biggest prize.”
2014—The US regime-change coup in Ukraine duly followed, featuring the famous caught-in-the-act audio of then Assistant US Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt choosing the coup government.
May 2014—The Donetsk and Luhansk Donbas referendums returned 90% and 96% majorities for independence, respectively, and were followed by the request to become part of Russia.
But Putin deescalated, refusing the request. He called for dialogue with the Ukraine government, from which came the Minsk Agreements:
2014-2015—The Minsk Agreements; Angela Merkel and François Hollande recently admitted that the agreements were never meant to be implemented but were to buy time to arm Ukraine.
2015—NATO trained approximately 10,000 Ukrainian troops annually.
2018—The US publicly pivoted from its War on Terror, with excess deaths of anywhere up to six million people, to "countering China and Russia."
2019—The US government tore up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
2021— “20,000 NATO troops were on Ukrainian soil, dozens of American aircraft were rotating through, and hundreds of American military staff had established a permanent mission— didn’t want to call it a base as they would have to put it through Congress. But it was a base training Ukrainian military on NATO tactics.” (Scott Ritter)
Dec 2021—Russia produced draft security guarantees and requested negotiation, which was refused point-blank by Washington.
2022—By now, 14,000 people had been killed in the Ukrainian government’s war on the Donbas.
Mid. Feb 2022—60,000+ Ukrainian troops massed near the border of the Donbas and the artillery bombardment increasing from a handful to more than 2,000 explosions per day were the provocations that finished it—got it started, following statements by the US that Russia was about to invade. We now know how they knew.
Geography has so much to do with it. Safely ensconced thousands of miles away, in the Americas, US elites have never felt, or needed to feel, militarily threatened by all those faraway countries: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and so many more with governments and sovereignty subverted, if not countries destroyed. War never touches the distant US.
The world is played as a treasure-gathering game for business elites while the media faithfully provides the smokescreen for imperialism with an Orwellian world in which up is down, and hate is love.
Voters are the engine of the machine. They provide the mandate to destroy while turned inward, divided, and conquered today via women’s rights, when not binging on TV series and superheroes that aren’t coming to the rescue.
Engaged in the real world, it's frightening. Ahead of the May election in Turkey, Jeff Flake, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, will be talking to the pro-EU Republican People's Party, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, (CHP), with messages for leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
A CHP win would mean the inevitable removal of Turkey’s block to Finland joining NATO, which would, in turn, mean US missiles on Finland’s border with Russia similarly following.
Putin, December 23, 2021:
“Are we deploying missiles near the US border? No, we are not. It is the US that has come to our home with its missiles and is already standing at our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home? What is so unusual about this?”
Putin, February 21, 2023:
"There is one circumstance that everyone should be clear about: the longer the range of the Western systems that will be supplied to Ukraine, the further we will have to move the threat away from our borders. This is obvious."
The Turkish president, and block to NATO (US) expansion, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has an uphill battle ahead despite being the incumbent, with criticized disaster response to the earthquake, which took over 40,000 lives, and still 55% inflation.
If Russia acts to preempt the threat, potentially, of US nuclear missiles with a flight time of a few minutes to Moscow from a NATO country (Finland), we have WWIII.
All is ultimately due to capitalist accumulation: greed for the Russian and European markets and resources, the self-same greed that would reduce the US population to renters.
But Russia, the perennial pretext for the US’s ideological extremism, is not even the no. 1 perceived foe.
Why is China considered the still greater "threat"? Because China is the first country the US has regarded as an economic competitor since it took out Japan with its Plaza Accord? More than that, China is the antidote to US corporate class greed.
Win-win investment in infrastructure worldwide provides countries with the bedrock for industrialization to pay back loans rather than live in IMF debt slavery as nonindustrialized resource-extraction economies for the West.
The trouble is that the West has less to gain and wants to continue its wealth creation off of the poverty of others.
So, we may not get out of this year alive, with hundreds of thousands more dead, or millions of dead, and/or a planet in nuclear winter killing us all. Don't turn away.
Recall President Eisenhower's prophetic 1961 farewell address:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”
The threat was not heeded.
The Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service lists 250 US military interventions, only since 1991. Excluded are entire books of countries, globally, treated to covert regime change: from back/front yard favorites, Nicaragua in 2018, Bolivia in 2019, Ecuador in 2021, through Peru this very second.
We must broaden and deepen the left in recognizing the continuity of elite action worldwide against non-elites. The jargon isn't difficult: CIA sociopath, think tank sociopath, government frontmen/women sociopath and corporate sociopath behind the government.
Hugo Chávez showed the way in word and deed to rising leaders at this moment and to all who similarly rose from an earth floor surrounded by adobe walls of straw and mud or who started with more.
Now is the moment for the anti-imperialist left to bloom, not shrivel, fed by the culmination of US efforts with Ukraine. Recall the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.) activist support as enabling MLK’s socialist audacity in invoking the “other-centered” to replace the self-centered to triumph over “war and bloodshed.”
Vladimir Putin’s December 23, 2021, address from his annual news conference:
“Look, back in 1918, an aide to US President Woodrow Wilson said that it would be a relief for the entire world if instead of one huge Russia, that a separate state in Siberia and another four countries in the European part be created. In 1991, we divided ourselves into 12, I believe, parts, and we did this ourselves. Still, it seems that this was not enough for our partners.”
Take the 1990s, for example. The Soviet Union did everything to build normal relations with the West and the United States ... They should have treated Russia as a potential ally and made it stronger, but it all went in the opposite direction; they wanted to break it down even further.
And then they started expanding NATO eastwards. This continued year after year, every time we showed our teeth and tried to prevent something and voice our concerns. But no: they did not want to hear anything, saying they would do what they considered necessary.
There were one, two, three, four, five – five waves of expansion. What is it they don’t understand? I don’t know. You can say that this is all abundantly clear. I do believe that it is clear as daylight: we want to ensure our security."
But treating Russia as a “potential ally” and agreeing to the Russian request to join NATO, would not have allowed US business interests to maintain an oppositional relationship between Europe, led by Germany, its strongest economy, and Russia.
For the US, it wasn’t enough to break up the USSR and plunder the Russian economy, as this impacted only Russia, not Germany, which would, if not itself impacted, naturally gravitate to its near neighbor, taking its business with it and leading the way.
What Mr. Putin didn’t realize was that there could be nothing Russia could fix about itself if it were Germany, and German agency, which was the imperial US's problem.
Meet the Writer
Simon Turner is a part-time writer, cultural centre and squatted building film programmer, outsider environments witness and photographer, and self-taught world hitchhiker.
