This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
The old anti-Vietnam War song that began, "War, what Is It good for? Absolutely nothing!" couldn't be more on the mark these days. Just imagine that you live on a planet where the truest "war" may be the one we're waging against nature and that nature is increasingly waging on us. That "war" could, in the end, simply broil us all.
This summer, the war in Ukraine has finally started to take a backseat to endless headlines about heat waves, fires, floods, and record extreme weather of more or less every sort. As we broil and sweat, as communities are burned down or flooded out, who even notices the latest casualty figures from that other war? Yes, the New York Times recently reported that, based on the estimates of American officials, an almost unimaginable 500,000 Ukrainians and Russians have already been killed or wounded in that conflict which, despite recent lame peace efforts, shows not the faintest sign of resolving itself any time soon.
In fact, escalation continues to be the rule of the" well, under the circumstances, let's not say "game." Russian bombardments of Ukrainian ports and grain storage facilities have worsened recently, while the Ukrainians have begun using god save us all American cluster bombs in quantity on the front lines of the war. (The Russians had already been doing so.) And the latest news is that the Biden administration has once again (as with those cluster munitions and before them Abrams tanks, among other weapons systems) decided to up the ante on the Ukrainian side by allowing Denmark and the Netherlands to provide that country with F-16 fighter planes. And so it seems to go" and go and go and go some more.
As TomDispatch regular David Bromwich suggests all too vividly today, we now find ourselves on a war planet and whether that war is among humans or with nature, it only seems to be escalating by the month. Tom
Living on a War Planet
And Managing Not to Notice
A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war the one that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after our Afghan War ended so catastrophically there is a hidden benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary climate disruption. This technique of distraction obeys the familiar mechanism that psychologists have called displacement. An apparently new thought and feeling becomes the substitute for harder thoughts and feelings you very much want to avoid.
Every news story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's latest demand for American or European weaponry also serves another function: the displacement of a story about, say, the Canadian fires which this summer destroyed a forest wilderness the size of the state of Alabama and 1,000 of which are still burning as this article goes to press. Of course, there is always the horrific possibility that Ukraine could pass from a "contained" to a nuclear war, as out of control as those Canadian fires. Yet we are regularly assured that the conflict, close to the heart of Europe, is under careful supervision. The war has a neatly framed villain (Vladimir Putin) and thanks to both the U.S. and NATO a great many good people containing him. What could possibly go wrong?
A fantasy has taken root among well-meaning liberals. Ukraine, they believe, is the "good war" people like them have been searching for since 1945. "This is our Spain," young enthusiasts have been heard to say, referring to the Spanish Republican war against fascism. In Ukraine in the early 2020s, unlike Spain in the late 1930s, the Atlantic democracies will not falter but will go on "as long as it takes." Also, the climate cause will be assisted along the way, since Russia is a large supplier of natural gas and oil, and the world needs to unhook itself from both.
That theory got tested a year ago, with the underwater sabotage of Russia's Nordstream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. President Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland all welcomed that environmental disaster. In an eventually deleted message the former Polish foreign minister and war advocate Radislaw Sikorski tweeted thanks to the U.S. for what he took to be a transparently American operation. The American media, however, treated the attack as an imponderable mystery, some reports even suggesting that Russia might have destroyed its own invaluable pipeline for reasons yet to be fathomed. Then, in a February 2023 article, the independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh traced the attack to the U.S., and later Western reports would come halfway to his conclusion by assigning credit to Ukraine, or a pro-Ukrainian group. As of late summer, all reporting on the Nordstream disaster seems to have stopped. What has not stopped is the killing. The numbers of dead and wounded in the Ukraine war are now estimated at nearly half a million, with no end in sight.
The Nordstream wreck was only one attention-getting catastrophe within the greater horror that a war always is. An act of industrial sabotage on a vast scale, it was also an act of environmental terrorism, causing the largest methane leak in the history of the planet. According to a report in Forbes, "The subsequent increase in greenhouse gases" was equivalent to as much as 32% of Denmark's annual emissions."
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an illegal and immoral act, but the adjective that usually follows illegal and immoral is "unprovoked." In truth, this war was provoked. A contributing cause, impossible to ignore, was the eastward extension of NATO, always moving closer to the western borders of Russia, in the years from 1991 to 2022. That expansion was gradual but relentless. Consider the look of such a policy to the country -- no longer Communist and barely a great power which, in 2013, American leaders again began to describe as an adversary.
With the end of the Cold War in 1991 (the very global conflict that gave NATO its reason for being), the eastward projection of the alliance accelerated dramatically. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Soviet bloc, were brought into NATO in 1999; and 2004 witnessed an even richer harvest of former satellites of the USSR: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all either near to or bordering on Russia. Then came the Bucharest Summit Declaration of April 2008: Georgia and Ukraine, the NATO heads of state announced, would be given the opportunity to apply for membership at some future date. If you want to know why Putin and his advisers might have considered this a security concern for Russia, look at a map.
Counterfeit Solidarity
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
