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Yogthos

Canada was the first western country to propose the anti-communist alliance a 🧵

fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/can

4 Apr 2023 at 19:30 | Open on mas.to
8 comments
Yogthos

NATO was expressly designed as a workaround of the newly-formed United Nations. The UN was supposed to help facilitate diplomacy, prevent conflicts like the world wars, but the UN gave communist and ‘third world’ countries the right to speak/vote. NATO didn’t have that ‘problem.’

this was effectively a union of colonial powers seeking to maintain their domination of the rest of the world; within NATO there would be no need to engage in debate or discussion with the communist countries or the decolonizing nations, which were increasingly emerging from liberation struggles against the very powers that formed NATO. Instead, this was a space where those voices could be ignored and the interests of the Western capitalist powers could be pursued unencumbered.
4 Apr 2023 at 19:31 | Open on mas.to
Yogthos

Canada was adamant about the need to construct such an alternate, in part because it sought to cement the bond between its two key allies, Britain and the United States, which had different views on his best to manage the rest of the world. (Classic colonialism vs neoimperialism)

Perhaps the most interesting note in the construction of the NATO alliance is that its chief proponent was Canada.'* In the uncertainty of the early Cold War period, Canada needed to establish the architecture through which it could guarantee its own position in the capitalist world, and key to that position was a successful alliance between Britain and the Y Tnmitad Ctatan Canadiam aficiala csanacaninad that hilatasal salatinnns srith
4 Apr 2023 at 19:32 | Open on mas.to
Yogthos

Canadian diplomats secretly acknowledged that the entire premise of NATO (the threat of imminent soviet invasion) was false and that it was the west that was disturbing the peace.

On the surface, NATO was framed as a defensive agreement to discour- age Soviet aggression, but it was well understood by Canadian diplomats that Stalin had no interest in a war with the West. Hume Wrong at External Affairs wrote in 1946 that the “Soviet threat” was exaggerated, and Dana Wilgress reported from Moscow that it was the West that needed to be more prudent with respect to preserving peace.'” Both Wrong and Wilgress were anti-communists, but pragmatically they each recognized that the Soviet Union was unlikely to launch a surprise attack against Western Europe or North America, which was the chief concern NATO was ostensibly designed to allay.
4 Apr 2023 at 19:32 | Open on mas.to
Yogthos

Of course, that’s because NATO wasn’t about preserving peace at all, it was about destroying the left (massively popular in the late 1940s around the world) and the anti-colonial movements that sought to overthrow the capitalist order that had brought so much suffering.

Rather, at its heart, the creation of NATO was about consolidating the alliance that would work to destroy the threat that had risen up to “civiliza- tion”: the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements that were emerging throughout the world in the postwar period. The colonial imagination that
4 Apr 2023 at 19:33 | Open on mas.to
Yogthos

So, NATO was always and remains a vehicle for the power of the old colonial elite. The ruling classes of the west, who have justified every genocide, famine and massacre by claiming that ‘western civilization’ was the pinnacle of human possibility.
4 Apr 2023 at 19:33 | Open on mas.to
Charlie Stross

@yogthos @pettter

Not really true.

The UN started out in 1945 as the anti-fascist alliance defined at Yalta. The USSR was one of the legs of that alliance. But then the Cold War brewed up when Stalin installed puppet dictatorships throughout eastern Europe. NATO was a direct response to fear of invasion by a bloodthirsty dictator who'd accidentally ended up on the winning side (remember he'd started out allied with Hitler? Cf. Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Invasion of Poland).

4 Apr 2023 at 19:40 | Open on wandering.shop
Yogthos
Charlie Stross

@yogthos @pettter Yeah, the US was a hegemonizing thalassic empire with a lot of very unsavoury skeletons in its closet. But in counterpart: the USSR was run by a bloody-handed tyrant with a track record for genocide in, for example, Ukraine (the holodomor, for starters), the Baltic Republics, Poland, and elsewhere.

4 Apr 2023 at 19:57 | Open on wandering.shop
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