Portside

It is long past time to learn the lessons of World Wars I & II and of global warming which, more gradually than nuclear weapons, threatens the human and other species. The commitment to unending economic growth is killing the planet, and the competition for resources, markets and financial wealth is the driving force of military competition, arms races, and ultimately murderous war.

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Yesterday Portside ran Timothy Snyder's "The Battle in Ukraine Means Everything." Many readers responded (see today's Tidbits post). Anatol Lieven in the New York Review of Books and Roger Annis in an original Op-Ed for Truthout here present very different views.

Is the Russian occupation of the Crimea a case of aggressive expansionism by Moscow or aimed at at blocking a scheme by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to roll right up to the Russia’s western border? WikiLeaks has revealed a secret cable describing a meeting between French and American diplomats that suggests the latter, a plan that has been in the works since at least 2009.

The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.

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When military spending goes up, domestic spending goes down.

Why, given the failure of austerity economics, haven't we seen a policy shift to stimulation of the economy?...the push for yet greater austerity has less to do with a deep concern by Europe’s elites over debt—it is high but manageable—than as part of a stealth campaign aimed at dismantling rules and regulations that protect worker rights, unions, and the environment. Meanwhile Washington is concerned with the effect of the economic crisis on the viability of NATO.