On June 10, 1963 President Kennedy delivered a monumentally important speech on world peace. He said that peace is something “on which ignorance abounds and the truth is too rarely heard.” He spoke of peace as “not a pax Americana imposed on the world by American weapons of war”, but something that makes life better for everyone. He understood that in the nuclear age the only true security is mutual security.
This speech was crafted by three people directly: the President, Ted Sorenson (his speech writer), and Norman Cousins a founder of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and Kennedy’s emissary to Nikita Khrushchev and Pope John in the last year of his presidency. This speech represented a radical departure from the Cold War policies that the United States had been pursuing. In my opinion, anyone who wishes to rid the world of nuclear weapons would be wise to study this speech and master its principles. I say this because in this speech Kennedy lays out principles for conventional as well as nuclear disarmament. Conventional disarmament is a part of nuclear disarmament, because no nuclear weapons state will give up its nuclear weapons if it is threatened with conventional war.
Following President Kennedy’s assassination his policies were abandoned, and we find ourselves today with a government that is moving in a direction 180 degrees the opposite of what President Kennedy urged. In other words we have a government that is pursuing war.
From my point of view you cannot understand what is going on with the Ukraine war without understanding what is going on in the world in general and the United States in particular.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led the “powers that be” in the United States to dream of a new unipolar world order dominated by the United States. One expression of this is the “Project for a New American Century,” a project aimed at US military domination of the world, the opposite of peaceful coexistence.
Now if you are going to set out to dominate the world, you need a variety of operations overt and covert, military and non-military. You need a vast military budget and you need covert regime change operations designed to create instability in nations who do not cooperate with your imperial order. And in addition to all this you need a vast vast system of propaganda that is designed to disguise what you are doing as something other than domination, something that dresses up your imperial system as a “democratic order.” As a result we have in the United States today what Ray McGovern has termed the MICIMATT complex – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank complex.
For this reason when it comes to international relations I don’t trust anything I read in The New York Times or The Washington Post or hear on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, etc. Anything coming from sources such as these must be checked with independent non-corporate media sources, as well as sources which provide the words of what is being said on the other side. Amongst independent non-corporate sources I include—Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and the individual blogs of a number of their members, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Scott Ritter, Lawrence Wilkerson, as well as a number of others. I would include Covert Action Magazine, Consortium News, The Intercept, Awful Avalanche, Simplicius the Thinker, and Johnson’s Russia List. I could go on....
In pursuit of this world domination the US has abandoned an array of agreements that were designed to provide mutual security. It has pursued an expansion of NATO that incorporated the former countries of the Warsaw bloc. It has treated the security concerns of any nation that was not an ally as unworthy of consideration.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the US was happy to have a Russia that could be looted. When Vladimir Putin came into the Presidency of Russia, he put an end to the looting. He told the oligarchs that they would have to start paying taxes, and he began to oversee the rebuilding of Russia into a major power. As a result Russia began to oppose the plans for a US unipolar world order, and the flames of the Cold War against Russia were rekindled. Under these circumstances it was inevitable that the MICCIMAT complex would seek to systematically portray President Putin as an evil enemy.
The expansion of NATO to Russia borders, completely disregarding the advice of wise statesmen such as George Kennan, was not a mistake. It was a necessary part of the program for world domination. Russia repeatedly warned the US about its disregard for Russia’s security concerns. It warned the US about the implications of the abandonment of arms control treaties.
Most American are unaware that ever since the end of World War II the CIA has been working with Ukrainian Nazis to foster regime change in Eastern Europe. See Professor Gerald Sussman article, Ukraine: The CIA’s 75-year-old Proxy.
In 2014 a coup took place in Ukraine that the US helped orchestrate and which brought neo-Nazis into positions of power. That coup, of course, was dressed up by the MICIMATT as a “democratic revolution”.
Here is how Australian diplomat Anthony Kevin described the situation in April 2022:
[T]he crisis in Ukraine and the breakaway republics in the east has been coming slowly to a boil since the coup d’etat in Kiev eight years before this, in February 2014. This coup removed an admittedly imperfect but elected, pluralist government and replaced it with a violently anti-Russian nationalist regime, which thereafter enjoyed United States protection and support. There were momentous consequences in Crimea, Donbass and Odessa, during 2014 and subsequently.
What followed the 2014 coup were eight years of deceitful negotiations with Russia, and eight years of attacks on Russian ethnic populations in Ukraine, people who refused to go along with the coup. It was in this context that Russia finally decided it had no alternative but to take military action.
The attempt to use the war in Ukraine as a way of weakening Russia, of causing Russian regime change, of isolating Russia diplomatically and economically has failed. In other words the project of US world domination is dying. All those who want to get rid of nuclear weapons should be glad that this project is dying. Nuclear disarmament will never occur so long as that project is alive.
In his American University speech President Kennedy warned:
[N]uclear powers must avert those confrontations, which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of a bankruptcy of our policy – or a collective death wish for the world.
What worries me today is that our current leaders don’t understand what Kennedy was saying. We must do all we can to see that this is not the case.
Finally, I wish I to include a reference to a Statement on the War in Ukraine issued by the No Cold War Working Group of Mass Peace Action on October 10, 2022.
Resources:
Reporter’s question:
“You talked about respect for the UN Charter. What respect for international law were you showing when you sent troops into Ukraine on February 24?”
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:
“The question of respecting the UN Charter is much broader than your simple question suggests. It may be an easy sell for an average person in the United States, but in front of a serious audience, the approach must be somewhat different....
“The UN Charter is not that big a document. You can read it, if you are interested. It sets forth sovereign equality of states and self-determination of nations, which comes first in the text, as the main principles, along with the territorial integrity of states. The Charter mentions these two principles – self-determination and the territorial integrity of states – as being at the same level. There have been questions as to which of the two comes first and has priority over the other ever since the early days of the United Nations, as soon as the Charter was approved, ratified and came into force. A special procedure was instituted, and all UN members spent several years discussing this issue, along with other matters related to interpreting the Charter.
“Finally, this paved the way for the adoption, in 1970, of the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, which remains in full force and effect to this day. In it, there is an entire section on self-determination saying that this is a universal principle, which means that respecting territorial integrity is a principle that everyone must respect when dealing with countries whose governments comply with the principle of self-determination and represent the interests of all peoples living on the territory in question. Under the Charter, we must respect the territorial integrity of states representing the entire population of their countries.
“A coup against the government happened in Ukraine in 2014 .... The putschists who came to power said they would expel Russians from Crimea. When Crimea and eastern Ukraine refused to obey, the people who came to power illegally after staging a bloody coup, the coup organizers, declared war on them. They went to war against their own people. They burned 48 people alive in Odessa’s Trade Union House. There is video evidence out there for everyone to see. You don’t even have to institute a tribunal. Just look at the footage and hand down a guilty verdict. There are the last names of people firing their guns at civilians trying to save themselves from the fire by jumping through windows. It is all there. Instead, the Ukrainian authorities opened criminal cases against those who perished in the fire. And all the progressives in the international community follow America’s rules by turning a blind eye to this entire situation. Many of the events there constitute war crimes. How can those who came to power be considered a government representing the interests of the entire Ukrainian population within its borders? How can the Poroshenko administration be considered such a government, if he became president thanks to his promise to make peace in Donbas, [and] within a week... started claiming that they would finish the Donbas people off, that their own children would go to schools and kindergartens while children in Donbas would shelter in basements. This was said by the president of the country Donbas belonged to. Did he represent the interests of the people he insulted?
“Some hoped that with Vladimir Zelensky, everything would change. He also came to power as a “president of peace,” implying in every way he [would] ... act on behalf of ordinary people.... But in a November 2021 interview ...when asked about people living in Donbas, he said that there are people and there are creatures. Earlier, in August 2021, he suggested that all people who live in Ukraine and identify as Russians should get out and go to Russia for the sake of their children and grandchildren. If you tell me now that, with these views and with his actions in general, Vladimir Zelensky represents the interests of the entire population of Ukraine he wants to see within the borders set in 1991, then perhaps there is not much point in continuing this conversation. But it is the only interpretation recognized by the international court for the relationship between the right to self-determination and respect for territorial integrity....
“I gave you a justification of our actions from the perspective of international law. The Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics could not exist under a government that openly declared them terrorists, savages, subhumans and daily bombed their kindergartens and schools....
“Of course, history will see that justice is served, but international law must not be ignored.”