Ukraine: Avoiding Armageddon is Simplicity Itself: Review of a Particularly Important Essay

The Essay: “War Madness,” by Michael David Morrissey (May, 2022)

Both Michael David Morrissey, the author of this insightful essay, and I lived through the Vietnam “war” (which was never declared as war by US Congress).

We remember the intense anti-Vietnam war movement (1964-1973), with its mass demonstrations, sit-ins, teach-ins, draft dodgers, and desertions and mutinies within the US armed forces.

There was no internet at that time.  

But at least there was still a functioning media, which helped to end the war by publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Today, says Morrissey, Congress and the one-voice media are united in their drumbeat that “Putin, aka ‘Hitler,’ launched an unprovoked aggressive war against plucky, freedom-loving Ukraine because he wants to recreate the Soviet Union and must be stopped by all means necessary.”

Accordingly, the US and its obedient NATO allies are waging a proxy war against Russia – even to the extent of risking nuclear war.

For the general public, few alternative voices exist:

RussiaToday.com and SputnikNews.com and official Russian government websites (with transcripts of speeches and press conferences of government officials, in English!) have been banned in the US and in Europe...Those who stray from the accepted doctrine...are being excluded not only from the MSM but also from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even PayPal with no explanation, much less justification.

There is no antiwar movement [now], just a few dissident voices on the internet that, with almost no exceptions (like Tucker Carlson), are banned from the major newspaper and television outlets. Unless you seek them out, you will not hear from people like John Mearsheimer, Stephen Cohen (RIP), Noam Chomsky, Michael Hudson, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Pepe Escobar, Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnstone, Dan Kovalik, Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, Richard Medhurst, Eva Bartlett or websites like ConsortiumNews.com, TruthOut.org, AntiWar.com, OpEdNews.com, TheGrayZone.com, MintPressNews.com, Telesurtv.net, Multipolarista.com, OrinocoTribune.com, MoonofAlabama.org, TheSaker.is, et al.

As they are banned from Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, they migrate to new, smaller outlets like Substack.com, Telegram.org, and Rumble.com.

What, then, is the most important thing we are missing?

If these ethical voices were heard through a traditionally balanced fourth estate, the relatively young post-Vietnam and post-9/11 public would learn about

“the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine government and military, the eight years of Ukrainian terrorism against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass resulting in 14 thousand deaths since 2014, the failure of the Ukrainians to implement the 2015 Minsk 2 agreement, the 32 years of NATO eastward expansion despite Russian protests and warnings, and now, bringing all this to a head, the continuing refusal of the US/NATO and Ukraine to commit themselves to excluding Ukraine from NATO.”

Yet we hear nothing of the context of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. 

Of over-riding importance is that in 1990, an international agreement between Germany and its four occupying powers during WWII (France, Soviet Union, UK, and US) allowed for the reunification of Germany if NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”  

Nonetheless, Germany – the primary beneficiary of this agreement – has stood by and watched since 1990 as 14 countries, mostly to its east, joined NATO – including five on Russia’s borders.

On April 1, 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported, at the end of a long article, that German chancellor Olaf Scholz

“made one last push for a settlement between Moscow and Kyiv. He told Mr. Zelensky in Munich on Feb. 19 that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia. The pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.”

However, Ukraine’s President Zelensky, saying that Putin could not be trusted to uphold such an agreement, had rejected it.

Morrissey interprets:

This “shows Scholz knew exactly what was needed to prevent the war. If the same proposal had been made to Zelensky by Joe Biden, it would not have been rejected. Ukraine would not have been able to fight the Russians effectively, and would not have wanted to, without American support.

However, lacking backbone, Chancellor Scholz did not allow the rejection to be reported in the German press for 40 days, until after it appeared in the WSJ.

Regarding Scholz’s “one last push,” Morrissey writes that in fact

This proposal had never been made, either to Zelensky or to the Russians, and if it had been – by the US – there would have been no invasion and no war, and everyone would have been happy except the fools and warmongers  in Washington who think the war will weaken Russia and bring about regime-change in Moscow – as well as fill the coffers of the arms industry.

A solution was there for the taking, given a little courage:

If Scholz had had the guts to announce to the world that he had made this offer to Zelensky instead of keeping it secret, Zelensky would not have been able to reject it out of hand and the US would have been forced to choose between supporting its NATO ally or supporting Zelensky…

If Scholz had accompanied his proposal by declaring formally that Germany, for one, would never allow Ukraine into NATO, that in itself might well have been enough for Russia to call off the invasion.

The astonishing simplicity of a solution the US and its puppet Zelensky clearly do not welcome

Morrissey concludes:

All it would have taken, and all it would take now, is a simple No.

No to Ukraine ever joining NATO, no to nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and no to Ukraine's refusal to implement the Minsk 2 agreement, and as Scholz quite reasonably proposed, a declaration of neutrality “as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia.”

I fail to see how any rational person can fail to see the common sense and utter simplicity of this, as an alternative to war.

Why is this simple solution so important?

As Oliver Stone has recently written, the failure to talk has brought us to the brink of Armageddon once again:

This disconnect between us and Russia is the most dangerous element in the world right now. By rejecting any such information under the catch-all, guilt-denying, feel-good misnomer of “Russian disinformation,” are we not allowing ourselves to be misled once again, as we were in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc., etc.?

Remember that, in the depths of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, it was the desperate last-minute attempts of John and Robert Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to talk that prevented a possible nuclear apocalypse.

This is exactly what President Vladimir Putin has been waiting for.