[ How George Orwells Doublethink Became the Way of the World]
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IN UKRAINE, DIPLOMACY HAS BEEN RULED OUT  
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David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky
June 16, 2022
LA Progressive
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_ How George Orwell's Doublethink Became the Way of the World _

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_David Barsamian: Let’s head into the most obvious nightmare of this
moment, the war in Ukraine and its effects globally. But first a
little background. Let’s start with President George H.W. Bush’s
assurance to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not
move “one inch to the east” — and that pledge has been verified.
My question to you is, why didn’t Gorbachev get that in writing?_

_Noam Chomsky:_ He accepted a gentleman’s agreement, which is not
that uncommon in diplomacy. Shake-of-the-hand. Furthermore, having it
on paper would have made no difference whatsoever. Treaties that are
on paper are torn up all the time. What matters is good faith. And in
fact, H.W. Bush, the first Bush, did honor the agreement explicitly.
He even moved toward instituting a partnership in peace, which would
accommodate the countries of Eurasia. NATO wouldn’t be disbanded but
would be marginalized. Countries like Tajikistan, for example, could
join without formally being part of NATO. And Gorbachev approved of
that. It would have been a step toward creating what he called a
common European home with no military alliances.

Clinton in his first couple of years also adhered to it. What the
specialists say is that by about 1994, Clinton started to, as they put
it, talk from both sides of his mouth. To the Russians he was saying:
Yes, we’re going to adhere to the agreement. To the Polish community
in the United States and other ethnic minorities, he was saying:
Don’t worry, we’ll incorporate you within NATO. By about 1996-97,
Clinton said this pretty explicitly to his friend Russian President
Boris Yeltsin, whom he had helped win the 1996 election. He told
Yeltsin: Don’t push too hard on this NATO business. We’re going to
expand but I need it because of the ethnic vote in the United States.

In 1997, Clinton invited the so-called Visegrad countries — Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Romania — to join NATO. The Russians didn’t like
it but didn’t make much of a fuss. Then the Baltic nations joined,
again the same thing. In 2008, the second Bush, who was quite
different from the first, invited Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Every
U.S. diplomat understood very well that Georgia and Ukraine were red
lines for Russia. They’ll tolerate the expansion elsewhere, but
these are in their geostrategic heartland and they’re not going to
tolerate expansion there. To continue with the story, the Maidan
uprising took place in 2014, expelling the pro-Russian president and
Ukraine moved toward the West.

From 2014, the U.S. and NATO began to pour arms into Ukraine —
advanced weapons, military training, joint military exercises, moves
to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command. There’s no
secret about this. It was quite open. Recently, the Secretary General
of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, bragged about it. He said: This is what we
were doing since 2014. Well, of course, this is very consciously,
highly provocative. They knew that they were encroaching on what every
Russian leader regarded as an intolerable move. France and Germany
vetoed it in 2008, but under U.S. pressure, it was kept on the agenda.
And NATO, meaning the United States, moved to accelerate the de facto
integration of Ukraine into the NATO military command.

In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming majority
— I think about 70% of the vote — on a peace platform, a plan to
implement peace with Eastern Ukraine and Russia, to settle the
problem. He began to move forward on it and, in fact, tried to go to
the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what’s
called the Minsk II agreement. It would have meant a kind of
federalization of Ukraine with a degree of autonomy for the Donbas,
which is what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium. He
was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if
he persisted with his effort.

Well, he’s a courageous man. He could have gone forward if he had
had any backing from the United States. The U.S. refused. No backing,
nothing, which meant he was left to hang out to dry and had to back
off. The U.S. was intent on this policy of integrating Ukraine step by
step into the NATO military command. That accelerated further when
President Biden was elected. In September 2021, you could read it on
the White House website. It wasn’t reported but, of course, the
Russians knew it. Biden announced a program, a joint statement to
accelerate the process of military training, military exercises, more
weapons as part of what his administration called an “enhanced
program” of preparation for NATO membership.

It accelerated further in November. This was all before the invasion.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed what was called a charter,
which essentially formalized and extended this arrangement. A
spokesman for the State Department conceded that before the invasion,
the U.S. refused to discuss any Russian security concerns. All of this
is part of the background.

On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion. These serious
provocations provide no justification for it. If Putin had been a
statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He
would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his
tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with
Europe, to take steps toward a European common home.

The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. This goes way
back in Cold War history to French President De Gaulle’s initiatives
to establish an independent Europe. In his phrase “from the Atlantic
to the Urals,” integrating Russia with the West, which was a very
natural accommodation for trade reasons and, obviously, security
reasons as well. So, had there been any statesmen within Putin’s
narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron’s initiatives and
experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe
and avert the crisis. Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from
the Russian point of view, was total imbecility. Apart from the
criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep
into the pocket of the United States. In fact, it is even inducing
Sweden and Finland to join NATO — the worst possible outcome from
the Russian point of view, quite apart from the criminality of the
invasion, and the very serious losses that Russia is suffering because
of that.

So, criminality and stupidity on the Kremlin side, severe provocation
on the U.S. side. That’s the background that has led to this. Can we
try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it?
Those are the choices.

There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy. Now,
diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t
like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer
Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility. The other
is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how
many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many
millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much
we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where
there will be no possibility for a livable human existence. Those are
the options. Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and
most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It’s explicit.
We have to keep going to hurt Russia.

You can read columns in the_ New York Times_, the London _Financial
Times_, all over Europe. A common refrain is: we’ve got to make sure
that Russia suffers. It doesn’t matter what happens to Ukraine or
anyone else. Of course, this gamble assumes that if Putin is pushed to
the limit, with no escape, forced to admit defeat, he’ll accept that
and not use the weapons he has to devastate Ukraine.

There are a lot of things that Russia hasn’t done. Western analysts
are rather surprised by it. Namely, they’ve not attacked the supply
lines from Poland that are pouring weapons into Ukraine. They
certainly could do it. That would very soon bring them into direct
confrontation with NATO, meaning the U.S. Where it goes from there,
you can guess. Anyone who’s ever looked at war games knows where
it’ll go — up the escalatory ladder toward terminal nuclear war.

So, those are the games we’re playing with the lives of Ukrainians,
Asians, and Africans, the future of civilization, in order to weaken
Russia, to make sure that they suffer enough. Well, if you want to
play that game, be honest about it. There’s no moral basis for it.
In fact, it’s morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on
a high horse about how we’re upholding principle are moral imbeciles
when you think about what’s involved.

_Barsamian: In the media, and among the political class in the United
States, and probably in Europe, there’s much moral outrage about
Russian barbarity, war crimes, and atrocities. No doubt they are
occurring as they do in every war. Don’t you find that moral outrage
a bit selective though?_

_Chomsky:_ The moral outrage is quite in place. There should be moral
outrage. But you go to the Global South, they just can’t believe
what they’re seeing. They condemn the war, of course. It’s a
deplorable crime of aggression. Then they look at the West and say:
What are you guys talking about? This is what you do to us all the
time.

It’s kind of astonishing to see the difference in commentary. So,
you read the_ New York Times_ and their big thinker, Thomas
Friedman. He wrote a column a couple of weeks ago in which he just
threw up his hands in despair. He said: What can we do? How can we
live in a world that has a war criminal? We’ve never experienced
this since Hitler. There’s a war criminal in Russia. We’re at a
loss as to how to act. We’ve never imagined the idea that there
could be a war criminal anywhere.

When people in the Global South hear this, they don’t know whether
to crack up in laughter or ridicule. We have war criminals walking all
over Washington. Actually, we know how to deal with our war criminals.
In fact, it happened on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of
Afghanistan. Remember, this was an entirely unprovoked invasion,
strongly opposed by world opinion. There was an interview with the
perpetrator, George W. Bush, who then went on to invade Iraq, a major
war criminal, in the style section of the _Washington Post_ — an
interview with, as they described it, this lovable goofy grandpa who
was playing with his grandchildren, making jokes, showing off the
portraits he painted of famous people he’d met. Just a beautiful,
friendly environment.

So, we know how to deal with war criminals. Thomas Friedman is wrong.
We deal with them very well.

Or take probably the major war criminal of the modern period, Henry
Kissinger. We deal with him not only politely, but with great
admiration. This is the man after all who transmitted the order to the
Air Force, saying that there should be massive bombing of Cambodia —
“anything that flies on anything that moves” was his phrase. I
don’t know of a comparable example in the archival record of a call
for mass genocide. And it was implemented with very intensive bombing
of Cambodia. We don’t know much about it because we don’t
investigate our own crimes. But Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, serious
historians of Cambodia, have described it. Then there’s our role in
overthrowing Salvador Allende’s government in Chile and instituting
a vicious dictatorship there, and on and on. So, we do know how to
deal with our war criminals.

Still, Thomas Friedman can’t imagine that there’s anything like
Ukraine. Nor was there any commentary on what he wrote, which means it
was regarded as quite reasonable. You can hardly use the word
selectivity. It’s beyond astonishing. So, yes, the moral outrage is
perfectly in place. It’s good that Americans are finally beginning
to show some outrage about major war crimes committed by someone else.

_Barsamian: I’ve got a little puzzle for you. It’s in two parts.
Russia’s military is inept and incompetent. Its soldiers have very
low morale and are poorly led. Its economy ranks with Italy’s and
Spain’s. That’s one part. The other part is Russia is a military
colossus that threatens to overwhelm us. So, we need more weapons.
Let’s expand NATO. How do you reconcile those two contradictory
thoughts?_

_Chomsky:_ Those two thoughts are standard in the entire West. I just
had a long interview in Sweden about their plans to join NATO. I
pointed out that Swedish leaders have two contradictory ideas, the two
you mentioned. One, gloating over the fact that Russia has proven
itself to be a paper tiger that can’t conquer cities a couple of
miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens’ army. So,
they’re completely militarily incompetent. The other thought is:
they’re poised to conquer the West and destroy us.

George Orwell had a name for that. He called it doublethink, the
capacity to have two contradictory ideas in your mind and believe both
of them. Orwell mistakenly thought that was something you could only
have in the ultra-totalitarian state he was satirizing in _1984._ He
was wrong. You can have it in free democratic societies. We’re
seeing a dramatic example of it right now. Incidentally, this is not
the first time.

Such doublethink is, for instance, characteristic of Cold War
thinking. You go way back to the major Cold War document of those
years, NSC-68 in 1950. Look at it carefully and it showed that Europe
alone, quite apart from the United States, was militarily on a par
with Russia. But of course, we still had to have a huge rearmament
program to counter the Kremlin design for world conquest.

That’s one document and it was a conscious approach. Dean Acheson,
one of the authors, later said that it’s necessary to be “clearer
than truth,” his phrase, in order to bludgeon the mass mind of
government. We want to drive through this huge military budget, so we
have to be “clearer than truth” by concocting a slave state
that’s about to conquer the world. Such thinking runs right through
the Cold War. I could give you many other examples, but we’re seeing
it again now quite dramatically. And the way you put it is exactly
correct: these two ideas are consuming the West.

_Barsamian: It’s also interesting that diplomat George Kennan
foresaw the danger of NATO moving its borders east in a very prescient
op-ed he wrote that appeared in _The New York Times_ in 1997._

_Chomsky:_ Kennan had also been opposed to NSC-68. In fact, he had
been the director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. He
was kicked out and replaced by Paul Nitze. He was regarded as too soft
for such a hard world. He was a hawk, radically anticommunist, pretty
brutal himself with regard to U.S. positions, but he realized that
military confrontation with Russia made no sense.

Russia, he thought, would ultimately collapse from internal
contradictions, which turned out to be correct. But he was considered
a dove all the way through. In 1952, he was in favor of the
unification of Germany outside the NATO military alliance. That was
actually Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin’s proposal as well. Kennan was
ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Russia specialist.

Stalin’s initiative. Kennan’s proposal. Some Europeans supported
it. It would have ended the Cold War. It would have meant a
neutralized Germany, non-militarized and not part of any military
bloc. It was almost totally ignored in Washington.

There was one foreign policy specialist, a respected one, James
Warburg, who wrote a book about it. It’s worth reading. It’s
called _Germany: Key to Peace_. In it, he urged that this idea be
taken seriously. He was disregarded, ignored, ridiculed. I mentioned
it a couple of times and was ridiculed as a lunatic, too. How could
you believe Stalin? Well, the archives came out. Turns out he was
apparently serious. You now read the leading Cold War historians,
people like Melvin Leffler, and they recognize that there was a real
opportunity for a peaceful settlement at the time, which was dismissed
in favor of militarization, of a huge expansion of the military
budget.

Now, let’s go to the Kennedy administration. When John Kennedy came
into office, Nikita Khrushchev, leading Russia at the time, made a
very important offer to carry out large-scale mutual reductions in
offensive military weapons, which would have meant a sharp relaxation
of tensions. The United States was far ahead militarily then.
Khrushchev wanted to move toward economic development in Russia and
understood that this was impossible in the context of a military
confrontation with a far richer adversary. So, he first made that
offer to President Dwight Eisenhower, who paid no attention. It was
then offered to Kennedy and his administration responded with the
largest peacetime buildup of military force in history — even though
they knew that the United States was already far ahead.

The U.S. concocted a “missile gap.” Russia was about to overwhelm
us with its advantage in missiles. Well, when the missile gap was
exposed, it turned out to be in favor of the U.S. Russia had maybe
four missiles exposed on an airbase somewhere.

You can go on and on like this. The security of the population is
simply not a concern for policymakers. Security for the privileged,
the rich, the corporate sector, arms manufacturers, yes, but not the
rest of us. This doublethink is constant, sometimes conscious,
sometimes not. It’s just what Orwell described,
hyper-totalitarianism in a free society.

_Barsamian: In an article in _Truthout, _you quote Eisenhower’s
1953 “Cross of Iron” speech. What did you find of interest there?_

_Chomsky: _You should read it and you’ll see why it’s
interesting. It’s the best speech he ever made. This was 1953 when
he was just taking office. Basically, what he pointed out was that
militarization was a tremendous attack on our own society. He — or
whoever wrote the speech — put it pretty eloquently. One jet plane
means this many fewer schools and hospitals. Every time we’re
building up our military budget, we’re attacking ourselves.

He spelled it out in some detail, calling for a decline in the
military budget. He had a pretty awful record himself, but in this
respect he was right on target. And those words should be emblazoned
in everyone’s memory. Recently, in fact, Biden proposed a huge
military budget. Congress expanded it even beyond his wishes, which
represents a major attack on our society, exactly as Eisenhower
explained so many years ago.

The excuse: the claim that we have to defend ourselves from this paper
tiger, so militarily incompetent it can’t move a couple of miles
beyond its border without collapse. So, with a monstrous military
budget, we have to severely harm ourselves and endanger the world,
wasting enormous resources that will be necessary if we’re going to
deal with the severe existential crises we face. Meanwhile, we pour
taxpayer funds into the pockets of the fossil-fuel producers so that
they can continue to destroy the world as quickly as possible.
That’s what we’re witnessing with the vast expansion of both
fossil-fuel production and military expenditures. There are people who
are happy about this. Go to the executive offices of Lockheed Martin,
ExxonMobil, they’re ecstatic. It’s a bonanza for them. They’re
even being given credit for it. Now, they’re being lauded for saving
civilization by destroying the possibility for life on Earth. Forget
the Global South. If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they
existed, they’d think we were all totally insane. And they’d be
right.

_DAVID BARSAMIAN is the founder and host of the radio program
Alternative Radio and has published books with Noam Chomsky, Arundhati
Roy, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn, among others. His latest book with
Noam Chomsky is Chronicles of Dissent
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Books, 2021) Alternative Radio [[link removed]],
established in 1986, is a weekly one-hour public-affairs program
offered free to all public radio stations in the United States,
Canada, and Europe._

_NOAM CHOMSKY is institute professor (emeritus) in the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms
Haury chair in the program in environment and social justice at the
University of Arizona. He is the author of numerous best-selling
political books, which have been translated into scores of languages,
including most recently Optimism Over Despair
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Precipice
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Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism
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* Ukraine Crisis; Ukraine History; US Ukraine Policy; Russia;
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* diplomacy
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* NATO
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