Canadian diplomats secretly acknowledged that the entire...

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.

Like 4 Apr 2023 at 19:32 | Open on mas.to

2 comments

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

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