The left and right agree about Ukraine

People who admire Putin, back his invasion of Ukraine or think him a standard-bearer for Christianity are horribly mistaken, but mistaken too are people who see wars simply as crimes, rather than the continuation of diplomacy by other means.

"Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine'. It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA."

Noam Chomsky. (I absolutely hate to agree with a crazily left-wing figure who once praised Pol Pot's 'noble experiment', but here he is right.) 

"When you ignore all the empty narrative fluff and really boil it down to the raw language of actual behaviour, NATO's existence really does seem to be premised on the circular reasoning that without NATO there'd be nobody to protect the world from the consequences of NATO's actions. It goes out of its way to threaten powerful nations and then justifies its existence by their responses to those threats. It's a self-licking ice cream cone, or, if you prefer, a self-licking boot."

Caitlin Johnstone, another left-winger. She has a point, at least up to a point. I am ashamed of agreeing with her, though. She thinks the poverty of Africa and Asia is the result of theft and oppression by white men.

“In order to maintain its hegemonic position, the US supports Ukraine to wage hybrid warfare against Russia…The purpose is to hit Russia, contain Europe, kidnap ‘allies,’ and threaten China.”

Professor Lyle Goldstein

“The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons.” A 'senior official' quoted by Politico on 24th November.

In case you missed this, which I linked to long ago, here are quotations from people, including George Kennan and Dr Kissinger, who warned that Nato expansion would or might lead to war.