Lies, Damn Lies, and NATO

By David Swanson, July 16, 2024
Remarks on Stop the War Coalition webinar July 16, 2024

After someone shot Donald Trump, Joe Biden said, indignantly, “we resolve our differences at the ballot,” which is classic propaganda, taking something obviously true (namely: it’s evil to shoot people) and using it to make seem true something obviously false (namely: you can use a ballot in a U.S. election to choose policies you support and have them enacted). When Trump and Biden debated, they debated who would destroy Gaza faster and who would make Europe move more money into war. No election ballot in the U.S. will resolve any war. And of course, when Biden says he is running the world, at least 96% of the world doesn’t get any say in that on any ballot.

Here’s another bit of Biden propaganda. See if you can spot any problem with it: “We support NATO in order to work together with the world.” Spot anything?

If you spotted the fact that there are ways to work with the world other than mass-murder, or the fact that NATO is only part of the world and is heartily despised by most of the world in polling, or the fact that NATO decisions are mostly made by the U.S. government and not by all of its members or all of its members and partners, or the fact that the United Nations — deeply flawed as it is — exists and that the most serious longstanding violation of its charter is the existence of NATO as a gang that drags nations into participation in wars, then you win the prize. The prize is getting to go explain things to other people.

Here’s another bit of Democraganda: “We stand with NATO, not with Trump.” Notice anything wrong with that? Personally, I have no trouble denouncing both NATO and Trump. If Trump opposed NATO I wouldn’t support NATO. I didn’t oppose campaign violence eight years ago because Trump was telling rallies to drag protesters out and beat them, and I don’t support election violence now that Trump opposes it. But does Trump oppose NATO? The fact is that Biden’s great accomplishment of getting Europe to take more money out of schools and hospitals and dump it into weapons was done more by Trump than by Biden. Nobody likes to notice this, but Trump’s “Buy more weapons or I’ll tell Russia to attack you,” worked better on the heroic leaders of the free world than did Biden’s “Buy more weapons or I’ll mumble incoherently.”

The U.S. Congress passed legislation to prevent Trump from leaving NATO. But the point wasn’t to prevent Trump leaving NATO. The point was to teach us that leaving NATO is something only a fascistic buffoon who has people at his rallies beaten would do, and to reinforce the lesson, already internalized by millions, that Trump is a servant of the Dark Lord, Vladimir, er I’m sorry, He Who Shall Not Be Named. In reality, of course, Trump and Biden are servants of weapons dealers, and very good ones. As a servant of Russia, Trump was not very good. He sent weapons to Ukraine that Obama wouldn’t, evicted Russian diplomats, sanctioned Russian officials, put missiles practically on Russia’s border, lobbied European nations to drop Russian energy deals, left the Iran agreement, tore up the INF Treaty, rejected Russia’s offers on banning weapons in space and banning cyberwar, expanded NATO eastward, added a NATO partner in Colombia, proposed adding Brazil, splurged on more nukes, bombed Russians in Syria, oversaw the largest war rehearsals in Europe in half a century (now outdone), condemned all proposals for a non-NATO European military, and insisted that Europe stick with NATO.

While NATO is thought of as an alliance of existing militaries, it also expends much of its energy on the NATO Support and Procurement Agency, which lines up weapons deals between manufacturers and governments. The NATO Support and Procurement Agency is headquartered in Luxembourg with “operational centers’’ in France, Hungary, and Italy. It has a greater number of staff and handles greater amounts of money than does NATO itself. According to NATO’s 2023 annual report, NATO’s international staff consisted of 1,352 civilians, but the NATO Support and Procurement Agency employed “more than 1,400 international civilian personnel’’ and in 2023, “the value of the Agency’s business activity exceeded EUR 5 billion,” which is greater than NATO’s total budget. NATO also raises money from its partners to spend on weapons. In January 2024, the prime minister of Japan committed $37 million to NATO for the purpose of buying weapons for Ukraine. NATO’s main purpose now is increasing weapons spending, while trying not to increase non-U.S. weapons manufacturing too much.

Here’s something else Biden says: “We support NATO, not surrender to Putin.” Of course the thought that you could oppose NATO -AND- oppose surrendering to anybody occasionally enters a few heads, and the thought that you could do something else with Putin, such as speak with him, enters many more. At his only press conference this year, last week, Biden was obliged to say “I see no point in speaking with Putin.” Well, people who want life on Earth to survive see a point in it. We’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve ever been, and we know better than we’ve ever known that there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. That NATO is the world’s leading nuclear war planner gets lost in NATO’s unofficial name. I’ve been at fault perhaps in simply calling it NATO. In the U.S. media its name is usually “the defensive alliance NATO.” As with calling the most openly provoked war in living memory “the Unprovoked War on Ukraine,” you can be sure of one thing right away: NATO is not a defensive alliance. In fact, not a single NATO war has ever even pretended to be defending a NATO member against a foreign invasion. Only once has NATO even claimed to be calling all of its members into a war, the U.S. war of revenge, punishing the people of Afghanistan who had mostly never heard of the crimes of September 11th for the crimes of September 11th. Every other NATO war has lacked even the U.S.-coerced consensus of NATO members, as well as even any pretense of defensiveness.

Here’s another word that, if used properly, can mean nothing whatsoever, what Orwell might have called pure wind. The word is “irreversible.” Sadly, as far as I know, dementia is irreversible, climate collapse is irreversible, unless we learn otherwise. But announcing that the process of Ukraine joining NATO is irreversible isn’t even false. It’s meaningless. It’s a means of neither making Ukraine a NATO member nor refusing to make Ukraine a NATO member, and yet vocalizing certain sounds that resemble human speech.

Sometimes the propagandists start believing their own lies, but for the most part political speech and even political action is a show, put on by the rulers for the ruled. There were times during the early decades of the Cold War when Soviet or U.S. militarists timed incidents to boost the other side’s efforts at increasing military spending. Such symbiotic relations need not be discussed or even thought, but when the day before NATO holds a conference, Russia sends missiles into Kyiv and Belarus threatens to nuke somebody and China has troops do war drills in Europe, the weapons dealers and their corrupt government lackies who thrive on conflict and hatred benefit, and everybody else doesn’t. When government officials obey NATO rather than the people of their nations in shaping their budgets, the world is worse off. When the U.S. blows up your pipeline or puts nukes in your country and your champions of democracy bend over and shout “Thank you, Sir! May I have another?” hope for humanity dies a little bit. Friends don’t let friends use their names to provide NATO’s pseudo-legitimacy for wars.

When people from around the world, working together, without NATO, recently met in Washington DC for a counter-summit and rally, we met as citizens of the world united in opposition to the normalization of mass killing. You can see everything we did at nonatoyespeace.org.

Next June we’ll do the same, but more of it. And we’ll bring indictments with us, because NATO will be conveniently gathering in The Hague. I look forward to seeing you there!