A re-energised peace movement is urgently required. To date, at least $100 billion dollars in armaments has been committed by the US and its NATO allies to press for the continuation of the war in Ukraine. 

A war initiated through an illegal Russian invasion in February 2022, but a war whose fires are being stoked, because now it’s perceived to be in the US’s and NATO’s, long-term, strategic interests.

Without US and NATO intervention it’s highly likely a peace settlement would have been negotiated many months ago. That opportunity was squandered last March 2022, when a negotiated settlement brokered by Turkey was close to ratification, and when it was summarily scuttled by the then British PM, Boris Johnson, who was speedily dispatched to Ukraine to make sure that no peace settlement would take place.

Since then, the conflict has morphed into a U.S. proxy war. The US & its NATO allies are now clearly using the conflict as a strategic weapon to further weaken and destroy the Russian economy and its leadership once and for all. However, despite the admirable and fierce resistance initially mounted by the Ukrainian army, the military situation is fast spiralling out of control with no signs of finding a peaceful, negotiated ‘off ramp’ any time soon.

Clearly, the US is determined to continue the proxy war whatever the cost. It begs the obvious question: Why would that be? From the US perspective, a proxy war does not involve the deaths of any of its own citizens, so it’s viewed as the best strategic opportunity to eliminate Russia as a rising world power without, unduly, raising the ire of its own population. The U.S. appears to be quite content to see this war continue even unto the death of the very last Ukrainian, because its whole objective is focussed on consolidating its flailing grip on world hegemony.

Two months ago, Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor, revealed that the 2014/15, Minsk Peace Agreements brokered by Germany and ratified by the UN and the EU parliament, that were purportedly designed to bring about peace in Ukraine, had been a deliberate fraud committed on Russia by NATO and Ukraine. Neither NATO nor Ukraine had any intention, whatsoever, of abiding by these legal treaties. They were ratified dishonestly in order to buy time to rearm Ukraine and prepare it for the very war that is now playing itself out.

So, it would appear that the planning for this war has long been in the western intelligence pipeline as strategy reports prepared by various US military industrial ‘think tanks’ over that last decade strongly suggest.

The mainstream, corporate media would have the populace believe that this war came out of nowhere and was solely prosecuted by a madman, Putin, who had nothing better to do one winter day in 2022 but to invade his neighbour, Ukraine. That’s why every time the war is mentioned in the mainstream media the word ‘unprovoked’ always prefaces ‘war’. However, for those prepared to do even a little bit of background research, it will soon become obvious, the war had clear precedents going back to 2014 and the Maidan coup, and even earlier with false promises made to Russian leaders at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union (refer, for instance, to Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, a leading US & UN economist’s material readily available on YouTube).

Although, like most wars, the invasion was clearly unjust and certainly a crime against humanity, this war was far from ‘unprovoked’ as our media and ruling elite would have us believe.

One shouldn’t be surprised then, that the Russians have now doubled down in their military efforts to advance this war and are highly unlikely to come to the negotiating table any time soon having been betrayed by western leaders on a number of occasions in the recent past.

In the meantime, the brutal destruction and dismemberment of Ukraine and its long-suffering populace continues to gather pace as the Russian winter offensive gains momentum with literally hundreds of combat troops on both sides being slaughtered every day. The death toll on the Ukrainian side is many times higher because of the continuous and relentless bombardment from heavy Russian artillery and missiles. However, you’re unlikely to hear much about these developments in the corporate-controlled media who, despite the facts, rolls out the narrative calling for a continuation of the war laced with largely fictional stories about a brave Ukrainian army that is clearly winning the conflict when, in fact, the very opposite is the stark reality.

Unfortunately, because the Ukrainian army is so much smaller than the Russian forces, they are very likely to soon reach a stage where they won’t have the troop numbers required to impede the Russian advance. It’s a brutal fact that Russia has at least 350,000 fresh troops already trained and on the ground in the Ukraine with many more in the pipeline. Ukraine is unable to match these numbers in any meaningful way despite all the western weaponry that is being thrown at it. However, this new western weaponry is likely to go unused as Ukraine is running out of trained personnel to effectively deploy them.

Anytime now, when it is clear to the U.S. and NATO that all will be lost in Ukraine, it is highly likely that NATO’s armed forces will enter the fray.

Then we are potentially looking at a European-wide war on a scale not seen since the second world war.

Inevitably when, one side or the other believes that it is likely to lose this conflict, the temptation to deploy battlefield nuclear weapons will rise exponentially. The stark truth is, if this scenario comes to pass (and I sincerely hope it never does), the likelihood of a global nuclear war will also escalate exponentially with other nuclear powers such as Britain, France, China and Israel potentially being drawn into the conflict.

The dreadful scenario I’ve outlined is even more possible at this juncture in history because, unlike the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when, for the first time, the world came so very close to a nuclear conflict, no lines of direct communication between the US and Russian leadership exist today. The direct, daily, phone communication between Khruschev and Kennedy during the 1962 crisis was one of the main factors in narrowly averting a nuclear conflict at that time but, unfortunately, there is nothing positive happening in the communication space between the current belligerents, apart from extreme hubris, ignorance and deeply ‘dug in’ positions on both sides.

What we have today is an even more precarious and dangerous situation than at any time since the cold war and that doesn’t bode well for the future of humanity.

This gruesome scenario could well take humanity to the edge of extinction even more swiftly than global warming whose consequences, whilst dire and obvious to all even now, doesn’t presage such an immediate extinction event.

A world-wide, large-scale, peace movement is urgently required. Like the massive gatherings that were witnessed in the 80’s and 90’s during the ‘cold war’ when a significant cross-section of the global population came onto the streets in all the world’s capital cities to demand peace, a ban on all nuclear weaponry and an end to all war. It was effective, and world leaders heard the message clearly and acted: non-proliferation treaties were signed and all sides agreed to reduce nuclear arsenals, whilst missile ranges and payloads were highly restricted.

Encouragingly, there are already signs of the peace movement’s re-emergence in the US and UK with large peace rallies and demonstrations planned for February and March in London, New York and other capitals around the world.

Australians also urgently needs to reenergise their own peace movement and call on our government to encourage UN settlement of the current conflicts, not only in Ukraine but, in Yemen, Palestine and Syria too.

We also need to collectively hold the Albanese government to its preelection promise to sign the nuclear, non-proliferation treaty currently before the UN.

Australians should encourage the Albanese government to create a far more independent foreign and defence policy that does not automatically cement Australia into all US wars, no matter the circumstances of their purpose and creation.

Unfortunately, the Albanese government is following the exact same policies as Morrison and Dutton with the Defence Minister, Marles having clearly become an enthusiastic champion for the total integration of Australian military forces into the US military machine.

The large-scale purchase of US weaponry designed solely for offensive purposes such as nuclear submarines, long-range missiles and aircraft are being acquired to pursue the policy of ‘interoperability’. This policy is designed to ensure Australian military forces can be seamlessly integrated into the US, UK and NATO war machine as needed. This was the rationale and thrust for the creation of the so-called AUKUS treaty whose purpose is yet to be fully sketched out by our government. 

Once the policy of military ‘interoperability’ has been fully implemented, Australia will have completely surrendered its foreign and defence policy agenda to the US/NATO war machine. Some people argue that this process is inevitable given the current, dire, geopolitical situation. However, most countries in south east Asia and, of course, New Zealand have chosen a much more independent foreign policy stance so, in fact, there is no real reason for Australia not to follow their example and join their ranks.

Without doubt, being independent and non-aligned would, at least, give Australia some chance of survival in any European nuclear war outbreak. However, a global outbreak might be another matter altogether.

Surely, though, better to take our chances standing on our own two feet as an independent country rather than shackle ourselves completely to the most dangerous and war-obsessed, hegemonic power our planet has ever witnessed.

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/our-planet-is-on-the-very-cusp-of-the-third-world-war-a-re-energised-peace-movement-is-urgently-required/

NOTE: I DID THE CARTOON ABOVE TO ANNOY PEOPLE LIKE STEPHEN COLBERT WHOSE HERO, SENILE JOE BIDEN, IS TAKING THE ENTIRE PLANET TOWARDS WW3 WITHOUT BLINKING....

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