By Dr Ramzy Baroud
June 26, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- One of the
reasons that Russian media has been
completely blocked in the West, along with
the unprecedented control and censorship
over the Ukraine war narrative, is the fact
that western governments simply do not want
their public to know that the world is
vastly changing.
Ignorance might be bliss,
arguably in some situations, but not in this
case. Here, ignorance can be catastrophic as
western audiences are denied access to
information about a critical situation that
is affecting them in profound ways and will
most certainly impact the world’s
geopolitics for generations to come.
The growing
inflation, an imminent global
recession, a festering refugee crisis, a
deepening food shortage crisis and much more
are the kinds of challenges that require
open and transparent discussions regarding
the situation in Ukraine, the NATO-Russia
rivalry and the responsibility of the West
in the ongoing war.
To discuss these issues, along
with the missing context of the
Russia-Ukraine war, we
spoke with Professor Noam Chomsky,
believed to be the greatest living
intellectual of our time.
Chomsky told us that it “should
be clear that the (Russian) invasion of
Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He
compared it to the US invasion of Iraq,
seeing it as an example of “supreme
international crime.” With this moral
question settled, Chomsky believes that the
main ‘background’ of this war, a factor that
is missing in mainstream media coverage, is
“NATO expansion”.
“This is not just my opinion,”
said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every
high-level US official in the diplomatic
services who has any familiarity with Russia
and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George
Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s
ambassador Jack Matlock, including the
current director of the CIA; in fact, just
everybody who knows anything has been
warning Washington that it is reckless and
provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear
and explicit red lines. That goes way before
(Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with
him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same
thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO,
this is the geostrategic heartland of
Russia.”
Though various US
administrations acknowledged and, to some
extent, respected the Russian red lines, the
Bill Clinton Administration did not.
According to Chomsky, “George H. W. Bush …
made an explicit promise to Gorbachev that
NATO would not expand beyond East Germany,
perfectly explicit. You can look up the
documents. It’s very clear. Bush lived up to
it. But when Clinton came along, he started
violating it. And he gave reasons. He
explained that he had to do it for domestic
political reasons. He had to get the Polish
vote, the ethnic vote. So, he would let the
so-called Visegrad countries into NATO.
Russia accepted it, didn’t like it but
accepted it.”
“The second George Bush,”
Chomsky argued, “just threw the door wide
open. In fact, even invited Ukraine to join
over, despite the objections of everyone in
the top diplomatic service, apart from his
own little clique, Cheney, Rumsfeld (among
others). But France and Germany vetoed it.”
However, that was hardly the
end of the discussion. Ukraine’s NATO
membership remained on the agenda because of
intense pressures from Washington.
“Starting in 2014, after the
Maidan uprising, the United States began
openly, not secretly, moving to integrate
Ukraine into the NATO military command,
sending heavy armaments and joining military
exercises, military training and it was not
a secret. They boasted about it,” Chomsky
said.
What is interesting is that
current Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky “was elected on a peace platform,
to implement what was called Minsk Two, some
kind of autonomy for the eastern region. He
tried to implement it. He was warned by
right-wing militias that if he persisted,
they’d kill him. Well, he didn’t get any
support from the United States. If the
United States had supported him, he could
have continued, we might have avoided all of
this. The United States was committed to the
integration of Ukraine within NATO.”
The Joe Biden Administration
carried on with the policy of NATO
expansion. “Just before the invasion,” said
Chomsky, “Biden … produced a joint statement
… calling for expanding these efforts of
integration. That’s part of what was called
an ‘enhanced program’ leading to the mission
of NATO. In November, it was moved forward
to a charter, signed by the Secretary of
State.”
Soon after the war, “the United
States Department acknowledged that they had
not taken Russian security concerns into
consideration in any discussions with
Russia. The question of NATO, they would not
discuss. Well, all of that is provocation.
Not a justification but a provocation and
it’s quite interesting that in American
discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer
to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion
of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will
find hundreds of thousands of hits.”
Chomsky continued, “Of course,
it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t
refer to it all the time as an unprovoked
invasion. By now, censorship in the United
States has reached such a level beyond
anything in my lifetime. Such a level that
you are not permitted to read the Russian
position. Literally. Americans are not
allowed to know what the Russians are
saying. Except, selected things. So, if
Putin makes a speech to Russians with all
kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the
Great and so on, then, you see it on the
front pages. If the Russians make an offer
for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That’s
suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what
they are saying. I have never seen a level
of censorship like this.”
Regarding his views of the
possible future scenarios, Chomsky said that
“the war will end, either through diplomacy
or not. That’s just logic. Well, if
diplomacy has a meaning, it means both sides
can tolerate it. They don’t like it, but
they can tolerate it. They don’t get
anything they want, they get something.
That’s diplomacy. If you reject diplomacy,
you are saying: ‘Let the war go on with all
of its horrors, with all the destruction of
Ukraine, and let’s let it go on until we get
what we want.’”
By ‘we’, Chomsky was referring
to Washington, which simply wants to “harm
Russia so severely that it will never be
able to undertake actions like this again.
Well, what does that mean? It’s impossible
to achieve. So, it means, let’s continue the
war until Ukraine is devastated. That’s US
policy.”
Most of this is not obvious to
western audiences simply because rational
voices are “not allowed to talk” and because
“rationality is not permitted. This is a
level of hysteria that I have never seen,
even during the Second World War, which I am
old enough to remember very well.”
While an alternative
understanding of the devastating war in
Ukraine is disallowed, the West continues to
offer no serious answers or achievable
goals, leaving Ukraine devastated and the
root causes of the problem in place. “That’s
US policy”, indeed.
– Dr. Ramzy
Baroud is a journalist and the
Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the
author of six books. His latest book,
co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our
Vision for Liberation: Engaged
Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak
out”. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior
Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and
Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is
www.ramzybaroud.net
