NATO Dinosaur Plods On

By Finian Cunningham December 06, 2019 “Information Clearing House” –  The splits and rancor at the NATO summit this week could not be concealed, even by strained calls for “unity”. The US-led military alliance is a dinosaur well past its extinction date. Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, did his best to rally a sense of unity as the two-day summit hosted by Britain came to a close. The event was supposed to be a celebration, marking the 70th anniversary of NATO’s founding. Far from being a “happy birthday” party, the NATO gathering descended into embarrassing farce with bickering and jibes. Video footage appeared to show the French, British and Canadian leaders making fun of American President Donald Trump over his rambling press conferences. Trump then hit back, accusing Canada’s Justin Trudeau of being “two-faced”. There were other spats, between France and Turkey over Ankara’s military incursion into northern Syria against Kurdish militants, whom France and the US regard as allies. Turkey was also chided for buying the S-400 air defense system from Russia. However, the biggest clash came between Trump and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who was taken to task by the American leader for his recent media remarks about NATO being “brain dead”. Trump said those comments were “very, very nasty” and “disrespectful”. Macron bridled at their joint press conference, saying he stood by his earlier critical comments. It was toe-curling stuff, especially the lecture on politeness coming from Trump who himself has several times in the past disparaged NATO as “obsolete”. Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian secretary-general, tried to smooth over the ruffled relations by claiming: “NATO is the most successful alliance in history because we’ve changed at the world has changed.” He went on to describe the 29-nation military bloc as “agile, active… adapting.” That was after he pointed out that the combined NATO military spend was set for massive increases. An extra $400 billion will be forked out by the alliance by 2024, said Stoltenberg, on top of the current $1 trillion. Already NATO’s total budget is 20 times that of Russia and five times that of China. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter No Advertising – No Government Grants – This Is Independent Media This is not about being “agile” or “adapting”. It’s about what NATO has always done: actively expand its military forces on a global scale in a way that deliberately destabilizes security and thus creates “challenges” that “need” to be responded to. At this year’s summit, the NATO leaders have “for the first time” discussed China as a collective security challenge. They also discussed making “space an operational domain” for military technology. And, of course, Russia featured as the time-honored “bogeyman”, with Stoltenberg talking about increasing battalions on Russia’s borders to “protect Poland and the Baltic region”. There were also a few token statements about “fighting terrorism” thrown into the mission mix during the two-day summit near London. But the “anti-terror” platitudes can’t hide the fundamental purpose of NATO which is expansionism and the creation of international tensions, conflicts and enemies, or more politely “adversaries”. When NATO was founded in 1949 until 1991 it comprised 12 members. The organization was supposed to “defend” Europe from attack by the Soviet Union. That was always a much-overblown claim even back in the Cold War decades. Since the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact dissolved, NATO has more than doubled its size with 17 new member states, most of them proximate to Russia’s borders. The recruitment goes on, with talk of Georgia and the Ukraine joining in the future. Yet NATO inverts Russia’s legitimate concerns over an increasing security threat, by absurdly claiming that Russia is threatening Europe. It wasn’t Russia that attacked the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans in the late 1990s, nor conducted regime-change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. It wasn’t Russia that oversaw a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. In all the mayhem over the past three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has relentlessly ramped up foreign wars, destabilizing the entire globe. Adding China and the militarization of space as new remits to its mission, this is NATO seeking to expand its real “insecurity agenda”, in contrast to its official claims of maintaining global security. The truth is NATO is a front organization for the military-industrial complex that drives the corporate-capitalist economies in North America and Europe, but primarily in the US. Without NATO’s annual $1 trillion spend – soon to escalate further – the militarized economies of the US and its allies would flounder from the lack of massive public subsidy year after year. If NATO were disbanded and the war economies of the US and its allies were to cease, then more civilized economies would lead to greater social equality and democracy, which would not be tolerated in Western plutocracies. The NATO dinosaur plods on… for now. But the disaster of poverty and unsustainable international tensions that it leaves in its wake suggest that the beast is soon heading for long-overdue extinction. Either that, or the planet could very well be made extinct from its reprehensible rampaging. Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. This article was originally published by “Sputnik” – – Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here

==See Also==

Trump abruptly cancels NATO news conference after summit turns sour: Hours before it was set to start, video emerged of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau caught on a hot mic apparently mocking Trump.

Trump Was Laughed Out of the NATO Summit: Trump seemed surprised that, after three years of crapping all over America’s allies, they do not hold him in high regard.

NATO’s Dirty Little Secret Is Out : The pro-NATO case is built on a fundamental deception.

Trump to seek $250M in new lethal aid to Ukraine

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The Delusions Of The Impeachment Witnesses Point To A Larger Problem

“You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can’t get there obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can’t get there kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn’t disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.” Richard Grossman

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” – Steve Jobs

By Moon Of Alabama December 06, 2019 “Information Clearing House” –  During yesterday’s impeachment hearing at the House House Judiciary Committee one of the Democrats’ witnesses made some rather crazy statements. Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor, first proved to have bought into neo-conservative delusions about the U.S. role in the world: America is not just ‘the last best hope,’ as Mr. Jefferies said, but it’s also the shining city on a hill. We can’t be the shining city on a hill and promote democracy around the world if we’re not promoting it here at home.As people in Bolivia and elsewhere can attest the United States does not promote democracy. It promotes rightwing regimes and rogue capitalism. The U.S. is itself not a democracy but a functional oligarchy as a major Harvard study found: Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.But worse than Karlan’s pseudo-patriotic propaganda claptrap were her remarks on the Ukraine and Russia: This is not just about our national interests to protect elections or make sure Ukraine stays strong and fights the Russians so we don’t have to fight them here, but it’s in our national interest to promote democracy worldwide. That was not a joke. From the video it certainly seems that the woman believes that nonsense. For one the Ukraine is not fighting “the Russians”. The Kiev government is fighting against east-Ukrainians who disagree with the Nazi controlled regime which the U.S. installed after it instigated the unconstitutional Maidan coup. Russia supplies the east-Ukrainians and there were a few Russian volunteers fighting on their side but no Russian military units entered the Ukraine. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter No Advertising – No Government Grants – This Is Independent Media But aside from that how can anyone truly believe that the Ukraine “fights the Russians so we don’t have to fight them here”? Is Russia on the verge of invading the United States? Where? How? And most importantly: What for? How would that be in Russia’s interest? One must be seriously disturbed to believe such nonsense. How can it be that Karlan is teaching at an academic level when she has such delusions? And how is it in U.S. interest to give the Ukraine U.S. taxpayer money to buy U.S. weapons? The sole motive behind that idea was greed and corruption, not national interest: [U.S. special envoy to Ukraine] Volker started his job at the State Department in 2017 in an unusual part-time arrangement that allowed him to continue consulting at BGR, a powerful lobbying firm that represents Ukraine and the U.S.-based defense firm Raytheon. During his tenure, Volker advocated for the United States to send Raytheon-manufactured antitank Javelin missiles to Ukraine — a decision that made Raytheon millions of dollars.The missiles are useless in the conflict. They are kept near the western border of Ukraine under U.S. control. The U.S. fears that Russia would hit back elsewhere should the Javelin reach the frontline in the east and get used against the east-Ukrainians. That Trump shortly held back on some of the money that would have allowed the Ukrainians to buy more of those missiles thus surely made no difference. To claim that it hurt U.S. national interests is nonsense. It is really no wonder that U.S. foreign policy continuously produces chaos when its practitioners get taught by people like Karlan. In the Middle East as well as elsewhere Russian foreign policy runs circles around U.S. attempts to control the outcome. One reason it can do that is the serious lack of knowledge and realism in U.S. foreign policy thinking. It is itself the outcome of an educational crisis. U.S. ‘political science’ studies implement a mindset that is unable to objectively recognize the facts and fails to respond to them with realistic concepts. The Democrats are doing themselves no favor by producing delusional and partisan witnesses who repeat Reaganesque claptrap. They only prove that the whole affair is just an unserious show trial. In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing about it. Their majority in the House could have used the time it spent on the impeachment circus to prevent that and other obscenities. Do the Democrats really believe that their voters will not notice this? This article was originally published by “Moon Of Alabama” – –Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here

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♪Collective Soul – “The World I Know” + Lyrics

Has our conscience shown?
Has the sweet breeze blown?
Has all kindness gone?
Hope still lingers on.

I drink myself of new-found pity
Sitting alone in New York City,
And I don’t know why.

Are we listening?
Hymns of offering.
Have we eyes to see?
Love is gathering.

All the words that I’ve been reading
Have now started the act of bleeding
Into one, into one.

So I walk up on high,
And I step to the edge
To see my world below.
And I laugh at myself
While the tears roll down
‘Cause it’s the world I have known.
It’s the world I have known.

I drink myself of new-found pity
Sitting alone in New York City
And I don’t know why.
Don’t know why.

So I walk up on high,
And I step to the edge
To see my world below.
And I laugh at myself
While the tears roll down
‘Cause it’s the world I have known.
It’s the world I have known.

Yeah, I walk up on high
And I step to the edge
To see my world below.
And I laugh at myself
While the tears roll down
‘Cause it’s the world I have known.
It’s the world I have known.