I don’t have much time at the moment, but wanted to post this while I’m thinking about it. I previously wrote that Seymour Hersh’s expose’ of why and how Joe Biden ordered the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline would lead to the end of NATO. That process has already begun.
In Berlin, a couple of pro-Ukrainians deposited a Russian T-72 tank which had been destroyed in battle in Ukraine in front of the Russian Embassy. It was festooned with Ukrainian flags, and the German Government expressed its support of the gauche gesture.
Thousands of Berliners felt differently, and some of them removed the Ukrainian flags and stomped on them while others decorated the tank with artfully arranged roses and signs calling for peace. Thousands of others demanded Germany exit NATO.
In Genoa, Italian longshoremen, apparently led by the Italian Communist Party, refused to offload weapons for shipment to Ukraine and marched through the city, where they were joined by other political and labor groups and demanded that Italy exit NATO and order all US forces out of Italy.
In France, for the second weekend in a row, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in at least 30 cities demanding an end to French support of Ukraine and for France to exit NATO. Vive la France, baby.
Just search YouTube, Twitter(I posted some of these reports there so if you follow me you can find them easily), or just google it. There are articles in US News and the Guardian.
Once Bakhmut falls to the Russians, and the utter futility and the astronomical costs of continuing to support US Empire policy becomes clear to a majority of Western European people, and it will if it hasn’t already, NATO is over and the repercussions in the US are incalculable to me right now. So please feel free to speculate in the comments.
Gotta go for now. Thanks for reading, good day, and good luck.
Yes, can't happen soon enough...Ray McGovern has an interesting post about this today - specifically from Germany and quotes emails directly from his friends in Germany...As for me, I'm working on a response to a more tangentially related issue and my experiences with academia - which is a major part of the problem in the US...Post Cold War politicization of Academia - to teach American exceptionalism as a substitute for political science and Russian hatred as a substitute for 'area studies'...Apparently, the latter phenomenon is due to the influx of Eastern European refugees into State/academia with little to any cross fertilization....and then dominance by same to the exclusion of other trains of thought. As you point out, the collapse is coming and I have no ability to characterize it other than to say that whatever the cure, it will have to be deep and may end up being worse than the symptom.
Great post, and not just because it was concise, an attribute in too short supply these days. ;)