Peace Talk Between Nuclear Superpowers Offends America’s Assholes And Morons

By Caitlin Johnstone

July 16, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  When I was a little girl I used to end all my nightly prayers with the words, “And please no nuclear war, and peace on earth. Amen.” This was in the early eighties. The knowledge that weapons existed armed and ready which could annihilate all life on earth, including my Mum and my Dad and everyone I loved, kept me up at night.

I still marvel at the fact that these weapons exist, just as armed and just as ready, and we just go about our lives like it’s perfectly normal. They’re even more prone to malfunction than they were back then, because so many parts of the system are much older now. All it would take is something failing to work the way it’s meant to or somebody making a mistake or miscommunication that hadn’t been adequately anticipated and prepared for, and it could set into motion a chain of events from which there is no coming back. We’ve already come within a hair’s breadth of nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion due to such occurrances, and yet people still act like preventing that from ever happening isn’t the single most important priority for our entire species.

In the days leading up to the Helsinki summit between leaders of Russia and the United States, an open letter titled “Common Ground: For Secure Elections and True National Security” was published and signed by experts, activists and scholars ranging from Noam Chomsky to Gloria Steinem to Daniel Ellsberg to Michael Moore. Part of the letter reads as follows:

“At the same time, the US and Russian governments show numerous signs of being on a collision course. Diplomacy has given way to hostility and reciprocal consular expulsions, along with dozens of near-miss military encounters in Syria and in skies above Europe. Both sides are plunging ahead with major new weapons-development programs. In contrast to prior eras, there is now an alarming lack of standard procedures to keep the armed forces of both countries in sufficient communication to prevent an escalation that could lead to conventional or even nuclear attack. These tensions are festering between two nations with large quantities of nuclear weapons on virtual hair-trigger alert; yet the current partisan fixations in Washington are ignoring the dangers to global stability and, ultimately, human survival.”

Open Letter --On Common Ground: For Secure Elections & True National Security, signed by Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, Walter Mosley, Amb. Jack Matlock, Gov. Bill Richardson, Valerie Plame, Daniel Ellsberg, Alice Walker, among 23 signers/ via @thenation https://t.co/sUTHXGlRnp

 — @KatrinaNation

All of this is completely true. You can perhaps understand why, then, when #TreasonSummit became the top trend on Twitter during the Helsinki summit, little 1983 Caitlin Johnstone wanted to punch everyone spouting that moronic bullshit right in the fucking nose.

Though you’ll never hear American mass media talking about it on either MSNBC or Fox News because it doesn’t fit the narrative on either side, Trump has actually dangerously escalated cold war tensions with Russia far beyond anything his predecessor dared to do. From adopting a Nuclear Posture Review with greatly increased aggression toward Russia and blurring lines between when nuclear strikes are and are not appropriate, to facilitating the longstanding neoconservative agenda to arm Ukraine (a dangerously hawkish move which Obama adamantly refused to do), to repeatedly bombing the Syrian government and killing Russians in Syria as part of its illegal occupation of that country, to throwing out Russian diplomats on more than one occasion, to expanding NATO with the addition of Montenegro, to aggressive sanctions on Russian oligarchs and more, this administration has inflamed tensions along multiple fronts and increased the probability of something going disastrously, irrevocably wrong.

Whether the US president has been doing these things because that was his plan all along, or because he is beholden to powers which wish to advance such agendas, or because he’s caving to political pressures from his opponents in order to avoid accusations of treason, is a question that’s open for debate. Personally, I do not care. What matters is the fact that these escalations are there, and that they need to be scaled down, and that I shouldn’t have to share a fucking planet with anyone who thinks otherwise.

Is #TreasonSummit really trending on Twitter?

Where was this hashtag when Trump was canoodling with Netanyahu and Bin Salman?

— Sameera Khan (@SameeraKhan) July 16, 2018