Who Defeated the (First) Nazis?

By Scott Ritter & Larry Wilkerson
May 6, 2020

Who Defeated the Nazis: a Colloquy

As the anniversary of VE-Day approaches, it is helpful to call to mind the reality that Russia and the U.S. have been natural allies. Together, 77 years ago they defeated Nazi armies, including those who attacked Russia by coming through Ukraine. Nazi collaborators there, led by Stepan Bandera, did the Nazi SS work in killing tens of thousands of potential resisters to the German invasion.

Fast forward to Feb. 2014 and the West used Bandera’s successors (today’s “neo-Nazis”), to spearhead the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government and the shelling of two Russian-speaking provinces. There 14,000 were killed and countless wounded since the coup d’etat in Kyiv — the “most blatant coup in history”.

As Berlin began to contemplate deeper military involvement in Ukraine earlier this year, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov pointedly reminded his German counterpart about what happened the last time. It seems that, in Germany, “NEVER AGAIN” (Nie wieder Krieg) has become an empty slogan — at least in today’s “ruling circles”. (See: https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=83432

Ukraine Update on The Critical Hour

Ray interviewed May 2, 2022
(13 minutes)

The May 1 VIPS Memorandum for the President — perhaps our most important so far — provided the initial peg for the discussion. In that Memo we advised President Biden NOT to dismiss as idle threats President Putin’s public reminders that Russia has nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles to deliver them. ( See: https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2022/05/01/intel-vets-nuclear-weapons-cannot-be-un-invented/ .)

If the experienced military officers I trust are correct in predicting substantial Russian advances in Ukraine in the next few weeks, this will come as a rude shock to Americans conditioned to believe the emerging corporate media narrative that Ukraine government forces have all but won.

What then?  I speculate that this might be the time for a (false flag) chemical attack blamed on the Russians — and further escalation.

The Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Soviets tried to put nuclear missiles in Cuba was cited in the interview as an apt analogy. (I included a related episode from my own personal experience as a newly arrived 2/Lt at the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning in the autumn of 1962.)

Most will remember that President Kennedy saw Khrushchev’s daring move as an existential threat that the U.S. could not tolerate. Similarly, a preponderance of evidence suggests, to me at least, that Putin saw an existential threat from U.S. missiles being emplaced in Romania and Poland (but not in Ukraine — yet) and decided that Russia would not tolerate this threat in its own backyard. Putin apparently got a nihil obstat from his powerful ally, Xi Jin-ping; waited until the Beijing Olympics were over; and launched the invasion. 

I am not suggesting that the Cuban-like existential threat, together with a waiver on Westfalia (so to speak) given by Xi to Putin, were the only things prompting Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. I think “denazification” played a significant role in his decision. In addition, there were signs early this year that Kyiv was about to mount a major attack on Donetsk and Lugansk in March. The bulk of the Ukrainian army were in position to do so at very short notice. And OSCE observers reported in February an uptick in the kind of shelling in Donetsk and Lugansk that had already killed some 14,000 people since the coup d’etat in 2014.

Serious Discussions: “Ukraine: Stop the Carnage, Build the Peace”

By Ray McGovern, April 24, 2022

An extraordinary series of thoughtful webinar conversations arranged by Helena Cobban and Richard Falk of “Just World Educational” is described below in Helena’s recent letter to participants. Included are links not only to the final report, but also to the video and podcast of the live and lively discussion among some of the participants on the April 19 “zoom”, to launch and add comments to the report. The participants in that launch are listed below.

I was asked to put my two cents’ worth in twice: minutes 22:20-25:10 and minutes 54:36-58:14.

My first comments struck a discordant, but I believe, realist note.

That video and the others are quite good. I admit, though, that I can identify with that hungry goat rummaging around in an old Hollywood lot who said to his partner, “I enjoyed the book more than the film.” I encourage you to purchase or download the very well put-together, 32-page report summarizing this series of highly relevant conversations.

__________________________

Message from Helena Cobban
Executive Director, Just World Educational
justworldeducational.org
April 21, 2022

Dear friends–

The war, the killing, and the suffering in Ukraine all continue… And the often-deadly sequelae of this conflict– including its toxic effects on the environment in Ukraine and much further afield– are still roiling much of the world, especially in the Global South. …

On Tuesday [April 19], we held an excellent online launch for Just World Ed’s report, “Ukraine: Stop the Carnage, Build the Peace!” In this event, my colleague Richard Falk and I had the honor of hosting eight clear-eyed leaders of the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements. You can see the 66-minute video of our discussion here, or if you’re an audio person, you can listen to it on our podcast platform here.

Participating with Richard and me in the launch were the following:
–Medea Benjamin, representing report co-sponsor CODEPINK. (Medea also participated in one of the webinar sessions on which the report was based.)
–David Swanson, representing report co-sponsor World Beyond War
–Gar Smith, representing report co-sponsor Environmentalists Against War
–Cynthia Lazaroff and David Barash, our guest experts in the webinar session on the nuclear dimensions of the Ukraine Crisis
–Katrina vanden Heuvel and Ray McGovern, guest experts on Russian affairs in two of our other webinar sessions, and
–Rick Sterling, a member of JWE’s board and board chair of the Mount Diablo Peace & Justice Center.

Our discussion was fairly unstructured. We covered topics such as the list of Policy Recommendations that were included in the report and the challenges of explaining the realities of Cold War-era “mutually assured destruction” to a whole new generation of Americans who did not need to think much about such matters during the decades of the United States’ hegemonic dominance of the world.

You can download the whole text of our report in PDF format (1.2 MB) at this link on our website. Or, you can buy copies of the printed report from Amazon for $5 each, here. If you just want to look at our Policy Recommendations, you’ll find them in this PDF. Remember, too, that this report is complementary to the Online Learning Hub we released April 4, that presents the full multimedia records (videos, audio, transcripts) of the eight webinars on Ukraine we presented in March, along with links to other related materials.

We hope you’ll find that, between them, the printed (or print-at-home) report and the Online Learning Hub can spark thought-provoking discussions and engagement in your community group, classroom, or congregation.

What an honor and a great intellectual journey it was for me to plan and then work with Richard Falk to host all those smart and gripping online conversations.