JORGE MAJFUD Russia and NATO: the world's most dangerous game

Jorge Majfud, 5/4/2022

Translated by Lena Bloch

 While with one hand, the world's major media are constantly reproducing the horrifying images of hundreds of corpses scattered in Bucha, Ukraine - with the other hand they are stoking the fires of an escalation of war that could lead us to a nuclear holocaust in a course of months.

 

Tasos Anastasiou, Greece

Whoever committed the massacre (it seems most likely to have been Russian soldiers), it will go down in the annals of history as an unforgivable crime. But I think the smoke is obscuring the horizon. We can't see where we come from and worse, we can't see where we are going. Although I have repeated it in different media since long before the war, wrong or not, I will focus on these two sides of the road that the fire does not let you see.

Let's start with a simple and more immediate question: instead of continuing the endless, dangerous, and notoriously useless game of arbitral sanctions, why not impose the obligation to negotiate a resolution to the conflict between Russia and NATO once and for all and before innocent people continue to die?

A reasonable solution would be the dissolution of NATO in exchange for Russia's withdrawal from Ukraine, but that would be labeled radical. The owners of the business do not negotiate.

There are many other options, such as the most obvious and pragmatic one, i.e. Ukraine's neutral status (with provincial autonomy of the Donbas), which is where it should start instead of provoking Russia by integrating Ukraine into NATO and deploying missiles four minutes away from Moscow.

The neutrality or non-membership of NATO has always been the case of Austria, Finland, Sweden and other neighboring countries, some of which have just expressed the possibility of joining NATO, showing where the business of the old war merchants is going and demonstrating, once again, that the fight against communism - and not only in Latin America - has been nothing more than the perfect excuse to maintain geopolitical dominance and protect corporate, class and capital interests.

What do they intend, apart from expanding militarization more and more in a world, now that they have run out of the excuse of communism and, more recently, of Islamic terrorism, which in Afghanistan alone left eight trillion dollars in profits to the big companies specialized in "security"?

Do they think that having Russia surrounded by that anachronistic and mafia-like NATO organization would make Europe and the world a safer place?

You have to be under the influence of alcohol to forget that we are talking about one of the two atomic superpowers and imagine such stupidity. Or such wickedness of organized crime. If it were really about "security", if they were really sincere about "the right to defend themselves" that countries have, they would never have tried to break this order which, judging by the ongoing war, has not made the world, much less Ukraine. safer, but quite the opposite.

Of course, those who have that bargaining power are not being splashed with the blood of Russians and Ukrainians but, on the contrary, are doing their business, so it may take a few weeks, if not months, for them to stop shedding crocodile tears over the whiskey and get down to serious negotiations.