ERIC ZUESSE—Russia’s first strategy against further enlargement of NATO was to demand, on 15 December 2021, to the U.S. Government; and, two days later, to America’s main anti-Russian military alliance, NATO; that NATO would never add any new member-nations — especially not Ukraine. This demand was firmly rejected, on 7 January 2022, by both America and its NATO arm. Worse yet for Russia: after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, hoping thereby to prevent at least that country joining NATO, both Finland and Sweden were so scared that they might be invaded next, that both countries expressed in early April 2022 a desire to join the anti-Russian alliance, and were welcomed by America and its NATO arm to apply to join. So, even if Russia wins its war in Ukraine, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will have actually failed, because NATO seems now more likely even than before to increase — exactly the opposite of what Russia had been intending.
US EXCEPTIONALISM
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Colonel McGregor: “Putin set out to honor his word from 2007 at the Munich Security Conference where he said ‘We will not allow the expansion of NATO to a point where NATO is touching our border, specifically, Ukraine and Georgia. We see these as Trojan Horses for NATO’s military power and US influence… He repeated that (warning) over and over and over again, in the hopes that he could avoid taking action to effectively clean-out eastern Ukraine of any opposition forces whatever, and to put his forces in a position vis-a-vis NATO to deter us from any further attempts to influence or change Ukraine into a platform for the projection of US and western power into Russia.
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—It is a half-century since Arendt published “Lying in Politics.” And it is to that time, the 1960s and 1970s, that we must trace the formation of what now amounts to America’s great bubble of pretend. The world as it is has mattered less and less since Arendt’s time, the world as we have wished it to be has mattered more and more.
Nine years before Arendt published her NYRB piece, Daniel Boorstin brought out The Image: Or, What happened to the American Dream, an unjustly neglected work. “I describe the world of our making,” he wrote, “how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.”
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BRETT REDMAYNE-TITLEY—Despite my current proximity barely a day goes by that I don’t receive videos and pictures of the horrors taking place in the Donbas and the East. My contact info is easily found and since the start of this series, I have received scores of Instagram, Telegram, Tick Toc or Whatsapp messages asking that I share these images with the reader.
But I refuse to look at any of them. Videos and pictures can be doctored and used to sway a reporter’s work in the wrong direction away from objective reporting. This war is now a media-inspired shit show and I will not be a part of it. So, I file these many solicitations away, never looking at a one, for I already know what they contain, horror. I do not need to look… or listen.
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China-Russia, Wars, Racism, A Conflict of World Visions
6 minutes readEric Arnow (Chiang Mai, Thailand) and Jeff J. Brown (Normandy, France) join me on an incredible, historical journey. It’s been a millennia old story of racism, conquest, extraction and genocide. Are we seeing the “communal” nature of these two large civilizations in a battle with the “WEST” for the future order of the world?