NATO: A Terrorist Organisation that Mayor Rahm Emanuel Invites to Chicago for May Summit

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By Peter Kirstein

Peter Kirstein is a professor of history at St Xavier University in Chicago, U.S.A. He was profiled as one of the 101 most dangerous professors in David Horowitz's book, The Professors. He is Vice President of the American Association of University Professors, Illinois Conference and chair of its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He supports persecuted faculty who are silenced for their views and an end to American militarism, imperialism and immoral capitalistic system.

The greatest threat to international security and justice should be resisted with non-violent civil disobedience. It is a disgrace to the City of Chicago to host this violent, selfish, remorselessly aggressive organisation.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was formed in 1949 as the Kennan-containment policy began to crystallise as a global-terrorist threat in defence of capitalism and the maintenance of nuclear superiority. It followed the 1947 Truman Doctrine of waging war against communism in southern Europe, the 1947 Marshall Plan of buying allies in war-torn Europe through reconstruction aid (none arrived in the east), and the end of the citizen-soldier with a permanent “peacetime” military establishment that has basically snuffed out democracy in the Unites States. NATO is a vile organisation dedicated to war, racism, empire and death and was countered six years later with the Warsaw Treaty Organisation (Warsaw Pact) in 1955–the Russian response to western nations’ formation of this gang. It proved wars, in this case World War II, lead to more wars and a greater militarisation of society as President Dwight David Eisenhower emphasised in his military-industrial complex farewell address in January 1961.

This dreaded organisation that even the French shunned and appropriately rejected for decades, was the principal factorto in the spread of nuclear weapons. It led to not only the return of 250,000 American troops to Europe, but also transformed the inner-German border into a cascade of conventional and nuclear weaponry that defied even the most sanguine approach to balance of power strategy. While the Russians, until Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War, were hardly blameless for the failure of World War II to accomplish anything meaningful and permanent in the advancement of international peace and security, they were primarily reactive to NATO imperialism and brinkspersonship. It was NATO who MIRVed atomic rocketry; it was NATO that moved intermediate-range nuclear weapons into Europe; it was NATO, basically a US branch of the military, threatening massive retaliation and global nuclear destruction if the Russians were to attack American-occupied Germany or other western interests.

At my university’s commencement exercise tomorrow, May 13, I will be wearing attached to the stupid caps that are still worn at graduation exercises, a message in red: NATO EQUALS TERROR WAR EMPIRE & DISREGARD OF GLOBAL NEEDS. I will be the only one protesting war at this event I am sure but will probably encounter little or minimal criticism. If it is more than a little, I am prepared to defend my rights and academic freedom of expresssion. I am certain none of the speakers will even mention the topic of peace and war in even a remotely substantive manner and if I am wrong, I will update and correct this prognostication.

1) Where is the path forward to a future of new thinking and less arms? NATO is the symbol of a world gone wrong: not a hope for a new tomorrow with less emphasis on weapon modernisation, strategic vital interests and perpetual war for perpetual theft from the treasury for the military monsters that run this country.

2) Where is the path forward for a more irenic future? Does anyone have a plan for disarmament? Does anyone have a plan to abolish NATO that was established for a cold war gone away, a nation (USSR) that has disappeared and a threat that never materialised? So why perpetuate this “alliance” twenty-one years after the Cold War ended?

3) Hopefully NATO will get a warm welcome of protest and civil disobedience during its summit here in Chicago. It is a shameless organisation and its privileged members are utterly incapable of moving beyond the old thinking of allies, geostrategic advantage and a desperation to wage the next war to justify its farcical and meaningless mandate of collective national security. It is collective pillaging from the world’s poor and licking their chops for maybe a new containment devil: China?