Vel
Well-known member
The US-led imperial cabal is as reactionary and as dangerous today as it has ever been - we need to get out, and fast, writes LIZ PAYNE
THIS week foreign ministers from Nato countries are in Washington DC for a series of events to mark the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty. Signed in that city on April 4 1949 by the US, Canada, Britain, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Iceland and Norway, it was the first military treaty binding together the US, key imperialist states in Europe and their allies on both sides of the Atlantic to pursue what Winston Churchill had referred to in his Fulton, Missouri speech in 1946 as the US-led “overall strategic concept.” However dressed up, the plan was to secure the post-war world for monopoly capitalism, bring down the Soviet Union and socialist countries of eastern Europe and crush any green shoots of socialism wherever they might spring up — in the heartlands of imperialism or in the newly liberated former colonies.Article 5 of the Treaty provided for mutual assistance should any member be attacked. The Soviet Union was cast as an existential threat — though all its energy was directed towards rapid post-war reconstruction, securing international arms reduction agreements, banning the use of nuclear weapons and achieving peaceful coexistence.
The mass media whipped up fear of communism and of imminent attack through conventional warfare and weapons of mass destruction to be unleashed by the Kremlin and its Red Army. The treaty and media-induced panic facilitated the moulding of Western Europe as a vast military bloc, the maintenance of huge armies with extensive periods of national conscription, the proliferation of US and other military bases in Britain and elsewhere and the deployment of US troops and warplanes. It also stimulated soaring expenditure on research into ever more lethal warfare, eating up the government science budgets of member countries which could have been directed to meeting people’s needs.
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