One of the reasons Russian media have 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.
اضافة اعلان
Ignorance might be bliss 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
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, I spoke with Professor Noam Chomsky,
believed to be the greatest living intellectual of our time.
Chomsky told me 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.
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.”
Chomsky further argued: “George Bush 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.”
… 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 would kill him.… If the US had supported him, he could have continued, we might have avoided all of this. The US was committed to the integration of Ukraine within NATO’.
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 US began openly, not secretly, moving to integrate Ukraine into the
NATO military command, sending heavy armament and joining military exercises,
military training, and it was not a secret. They boasted about it,” Chomsky
said.
Interestingly, 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 would kill him.
Well, he did not get any support from the US. If the US had supported him, he could have continued, we might have avoided all of this.
The US 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 US 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 US 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.
The writer is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine
Chronicle. He is the author of six books, the latest, co-edited with Ilan
Pappé, “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and
Intellectuals Speak out”. He is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the
Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA).
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