From Moscow to Washington, the Barbarism and Hypocrisy Don’t Justify Each Other
Russia’s war in Ukraine, like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev up the nationalism to go with the militarism. While the world desperately needs adherence to a single standard of nonaggression and human rights, some convoluted rationales are always available in a quest to justify the unjustifiable. Ideologies get more twisted than pretzels when some people can’t resist the temptation to choose up sides between rival forces of terrible violence.
In the United States,
with elected officials and mass media intensely condemning Russia’s killing
spree, the hypocrisy can stick in the craw of people mindful that the
Afghanistan and Iraq invasions started massive protracted carnage. But U.S.
hypocrisy in no way excuses the murderous rampage of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
At the same time,
hopping on a bandwagon of the U.S. government as a force for peace is a fantasy
journey. The USA is now in its twenty-first year of crossing borders with
missiles and bombers as well as boots on the ground in the name of the “war on
terror.” Meanwhile, the United States spends more
than 10 times what Russia does for its military.
It’s important to shed
light on the U.S. government’s broken
promises that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” after the fall
of the Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO to Russia’s border was a methodical betrayal
of prospects for peaceful cooperation in Europe. What’s more, NATO became a
far-flung apparatus for waging war, from Yugoslavia in 1999 to Afghanistan a
few years later to Libya in 2011.
The grim history of
NATO since the disappearance of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance
more than 30 years ago is a saga of slick leaders in business suits bent on
facilitating vast quantities of arms sales — not only to longtime NATO members
but also to countries in Eastern Europe that gained membership. The U.S. mass
media are on a nonstop detour around mentioning, much less illuminating, how
NATO’s dedication to avid militarism keeps fattening
the profit margins of weapons dealers. By the time this decade began,
the combined annual military spending of NATO countries had hit $1
trillion, about 20 times Russia’s….
Sergei
Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film-maker who refuses to be cancelled
