Long Read

On Western propaganda—and why NATO was never a defensive alliance

Lê Thanh Trúc

Lê Thanh Trúc

— 16 min read

On top of having the means to routinely destroy the hopes and aspirations for peace, liberation, self-reliance and self-determination of peoples around the world through taking their lives, their homes, their resources and their land, the West has a wicked propaganda network.

It is strange, to say the least, that the all-powerful ones who are the real threat to the world, who actually wage destruction on the rest of the world, who actually launch state-sponsored assaults on the rest of the world with the highest grade military weapons of the day, who actually kill and maim and displace millions of innocent others are always projecting themselves as the victims of supposed communist and dictatorial and terrorist threats and whatnot around the world. The West is apparently always somehow ""defending"" itself from those who are liberating themselves from the shackles of imperialism and colonialism — i.e. by murdering all of them. This is the present-day equivalent of saying that the rest of the world comprises people of ""inferior, backward races"" depending on the colour of their skin.

But of course for them it is imperative to keep having to justify their never-ending daily & centuries-long atrocities inflicted on the rest of the world, to keep covering up for their crimes, to punish those who reveal those crimes, to kill and slander those who dare to fight back, so that they can keep committing atrocities to satisfy their thirsts for greed and power.

Noam Chomsky says, in interviews for the book How The World Works:

Once you've become a raving racist in self-defense, you've lost the ability to understand what's going on.

So instead of amassing and organising people, and instead of advocating for the liberation of peoples around the world, these days we dissidents in the West and elsewhere often find ourselves relegated to spending most of our time and energies that are reserved for verbal endeavours on just dismantling and combatting the endless barrage of propaganda and narratives from the West powerhouses and the "raving racists", rather than on supporting dynamic and kinetic projects of liberation from the peoples of the world, and providing agitations and propaganda associated with these projects.

One of the most enduring narratives of the last decades from the Western centres of power and thought is the mantra that "communism is a threat to the world", and from that has sprung many other ones like "NATO is a ""defensive"" alliance against the Soviet Union". We have spent too much time on this latter narrative. So let me provide my debunking of it, once and for all.

Some dissidents argue that, according to that as a basis, "NATO should have been dismantled after the Soviet Union collapsed". As Stephen Bryen argues in Asia Times:

Fire Jens Stoltenberg now before it is too late

Not only is Stoltenberg an uber hawk, but he totally misunderstands NATO’s purpose.  If he is allowed to stay in office, he will lead NATO into a European war that might well include nuclear weapons. Above all, Stoltenberg doesn’t grasp that NATO is a defensive, not an offensive, alliance.

NATO has been drifting in the wrong direction for years.  It has got involved in wars outside of NATO’s defensive domain, based on a rude sort of politics that gratifies the US and Europe’s otherwise inert and short sighted leaders. These wars, that now include Ukraine, are draining NATO’s defenses and weakening the core responsibility of the alliance, which is to protect the territory of its members.

There are no provisions in the NATO Treaty authorizing offensive, outside-the-boundary operations.

[Source: Asia Times]

NATO should not be treated seriously as a defensive alliance – hardly after the bombing of Belgrade, Serbia in 1999, the destruction of Libya from 2011, the ongoing hot war with Russia via Ukraine and the various overthrows of democratically-elected governments on the territories of the former Soviet Union prior. It is another configuration of major imperialist and colonialist military powers assaulting the rest of the world. It is no more a defensive alliance than ANZUS was defensive (invading Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq) or AUKUS is defensive (preparing to attack China).

The word "defense" should really be "offense". It's the same with various commentators on Pearls and Irritations saying that the US Department of Defence should really rather be renamed to the "Department of Offense" (and also how we are institutionalising rather Orwellian Ministries of Truth in the West). None of the active major colonial and imperial powers – the US, Australia, UK, Canada, France, Israel, Germany, Norway, Sweden – are currently at any risk of military threat of major invasion on their own home soil. Everything they do that they say is in the name of defence is in reality military offensives against the rest of the world.

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) was to supposedly ""defend"" Europe initially against the Soviet Union, which had supported other countries especially in the Third World in their Marxist and anti-colonial revolutions, and forwarded at least some kind of real global alternative to rampant, imperialist capitalism.

NATO started with the US and Western European powers. Far from victims needing defending, these are traditionally colonialist, imperialist and expansionist powers, and historically they had slaves. Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, brought this up, via TASS:

"[Russia and African countries are united] by freedom, the understanding of freedom. We perceive it differently. They do through the prism of their historic path of fighting colonizers. They have been following this path with difficulties, for a long time. It’s a long path. Yet they feel this freedom and fight for it. For us and for them as well, freedom is above all the issue of the freedom of spirit, of free will," she said.

According to Zakharova, there have been constant attempts to conquer or exploit Russia and Africa and nowadays this trend continues. She noted that in conversations with representatives from African countries she stressed that Russians significantly differ from other Europeans. "The key difference <...> is that they in Western Europe used to be slave merchants, while we weren't. They had slavery while we did not," she pointed out.

[Source: Maria Zakharova, during Russia-Africa Summit 2023, via TASS]

Look at the founding members of NATO: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

NATO is not a defensive alliance – it has always been a coalition of colonial and imperial powers who are willing to fight Russia. (Just as how now the US is trying to forge the QUAD and AUKUS as coalitions of members who are willing to fight China.)

Other countries in the world still remember assistance from the Soviet Union, especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia. To name a few, see what the Vietnamese people say, see what the president of Eritrea says. And see how Latin American countries refused to condemn Russia in the 2023 CELAC (Conference of European & Latin American countries) statement, and refused to have Zelenskyy at the summit.

“Whatever difficulties Russia faces, Vietnam always supports Russia,” the general [Vietnamese Deputy Defense Minister Hoang Xuan Chien] told Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu on Thursday. Later in the day, he reiterated the message to Deputy Prime Minister for Tourism, Sport, Culture and Communications Dmitry Chernyshenko: “Vietnam will be with you under any circumstances.”

[Source: RT]
Now, we have to look at this in the historical context. This is a continuation of classical slavery. After slavery came colonialism. Slavery was exterminating populations. Nine million people were exterminated in the Congo, Indians were exterminated in North America and in Canada. They were exterminating indigenous populations and grabbing control of their land. 

And when they got control of the land, they had to bring slaves from Africa for their cotton plantations in the United States. That was slavery, and it continues. Then the industrialisation came. That was a matter of grabbing other countries’ resources and the continuation of slavery. Then a different form – colonialism – came: they colonised territories so that they could grab control of the land, and then they controlled labour and enslaved everybody. 

Then there was neo-colonialism and the Cold War. Russia was the hope of the people of the world during the period of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, leaders in the Soviet Union made mistakes that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a historic tragedy, as you [President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin] said at one point. That was a historic tragedy: in the course of the history of humanity that was a catastrophe.

[Source: President of Eritrea Isaias Afwerki, during Russia-Africa Summit 2023, via Kremlin website]
Volodymyr Zelensky is accustomed to being the star guest, whether in person or on-screen, at just about every Western international summit, though his shine does appear to be fading. But at the summit that took place in Brussels early this week between the European Union and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the president of Ukraine was nowhere to be seen. This was despite the best efforts of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who is current holder of the EU Council’s rotating president, to get his name on the guest list.

At a bare minimum, Zelensky’s participation would have required the endorsement of the governments of Latin America’s three largest economies, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, all of which have taken a largely neutral stance on the war in Ukraine. Which is why it came as little surprise that the EU’s dogged attempts, not just during the two days of the summit but in the preceding weeks, to include in the final declaration a paragraph condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also come to nothing. The move faced opposition from a host of CELAC members including Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Another Failure By Collective West

Once again, an attempt by the Collective West to isolate Russia from the rest of the world — the so-called “Jungle,” as the EU’s chief “diplomat” Josep Borrell calls it — has failed. From AP:

"European Union and Latin American leaders concluded a summit that was supposed to be a love-in after eight years of separation, but instead ended Tuesday with aggravation over the failure to unanimously support even a bland statement on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Europe’s fervent support of Ukraine clashed with the more distant or neutral approach pervasive in the 33-nation Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. What should have been a mere detail in a landmark summit celebrating economic ties and fresh investment became its encompassing theme."

In the end, the heavily diluted paragraph (#15) not only did not mention Russia but merely expressed “deep concern” about — as opposed to “condemnation” of — the “ongoing war…, which continues to cause immense human suffering and is exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy, constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity and elevating financial stability risks.” And even then, Nicaragua, a close ally of Russia, refused to join the 59 other nations, including Cuba and Venezuela, in signing the statement.

[Source: naked capitalism]

During the time of the Soviet Union, one can see that many national liberation projects draw upon some class element alongside nationalism, albeit even if only to get the support of the Soviet Union, like was the case in Viet Nam.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s movie ‘Apocalypse Now’, the character Hubert de Marais has this very important line which he delivers with a typical French accent: “The Vietnamese are very intelligent. You never know what they think. The Russian ones who help them – ‘come and give us their money. We are all communists. Chinese give us guns. We are all brothers.’ They hate the Chinese! Maybe they hate the American less than the Russian and the Chinese. I mean, if tomorrow the Vietnamese are communists they will be Vietnamese communists. And this is something you never understood, you Americans.”

Coppola had, in the ‘70’s, understood something that former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara only came to understand in the ‘90’s when he met with Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. With astonishment, he suddenly realized that the Vietnamese were fighting a war of independence, not an ideological war. The 20-year conflict in Vietnam had never been about the spread of communism in the world. Concerning US foreign policy, the elderly and experienced politician went on to say: “We don’t understand the Bosnians, we don’t understand the Chinese, and we don’t really understand the Iranians.” With the exception of colonized Western Europe, it seems to be a good summary of Washington’s policy towards countries all over the world.

[Source: RT]

And of course people are highly aware that the support of the Soviet Union can be conditional or lukewarm:

We Represent Africa's Interests

We saw the emergence of the phony communists from within the African Liberation Movement and other struggles, and I call them phony communists because who else would somebody who was dominated and colonized by the apartheid regime of South Africa, by Portugal or England or any of these forces, turn to for any kind of assistance?

They couldn’t turn to the U.S., to England or the other colonial powers, but there were these powerful bodies out there in the form of China and Russia, who were offering up a different kind of narrative, a different kind of relationship, with a modicum of power.

We saw people who wanted to have out of this relationship of total colonial domination from the Europeans, move toward Russia. In fact, that’s where our struggle with Russia first emerged, because Russia had determined that there were only six authentic revolutionary organizations in all of Africa. They trained them, brought money and did stuff like that because they met Russia’s interests. Who was meeting the interests of Africa?

The African Socialist International was created, in part, contending with Russia for who should be leading the struggle of black people in the world.

[Source: African People's Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela, on The Burning Spear]
From 1957 to 1965, we lived in Moscow. These were good years for the Soviet Union. In 1956 Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, released political prisoners and ushered in an era of openness and peaceful cohabitation. Asia, Africa and Latin America were shaking off their colonial shackles and getting rid of fascist dictatorships. I was on the Red Square in 1961 to greet Fidel Castro. The Soviets were conquering space and humanity was marching towards progress and a world free of oppression, poverty, disease, racism and all the other ills that have plagued the world since the dark ages. Vietnam was resisting American imperialism and my dad was reporting the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people from the jungles of South Vietnam. There was no doubt in my young mind that with the support of the Soviet Union and all of progressive humanity, Vietnam and all of Asia, Africa and Latin America would be liberated from oppression and poverty. That’s how the world looked to me back then: bright and beautiful. 

In 1965, we moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, so that my dad could be close to Vietnam and as far away from Moscow winters as possible. As I later learned, he was getting extremely disillusioned with the USSR and its lukewarm support for the resistance in South Vietnam. He also sided with China when the Sino-Soviet split occurred. 

Cambodia in 1965 was pure heaven, despite the escalating war in neighbouring Vietnam. 1965 marked the beginning of what Tariq Ali called "the glorious decade". Yes, there was war, misery and oppression, but there was also tremendous international solidarity, an explosion of hope, optimism, and creativity. The Civil Rights movement in the US and the growing anti-war movement worldwide were energising people across the planet. Revolution was in the air and it had the faces of Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevera, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Tse Tung, Martin Luther King and other legendary revolutionaries and freedom-fighters. My dad was at the centre of the anti-war movement. His books and dispatches from Indochina, published weekly in the New York National Guardian and reprinted around the world, were informing the world about the struggle of the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The world was still full of optimism, hope and passion. It also looked incredibly sexy, what with rock & roll, flower power and all. It was a great time to be a kid! […]

In 1985 I moved to Australia with my wife Ilza and our son Graham to reclaim my birthrights and give our son a warm place under the sun to grow up in. […] Suddenly the world I knew and loved became evil, communism and socialism became dirty words, the USSR was evil, Vietnam was evil, Wilfred Burchett was evil, the Khmer Rouge were evil, but deserved support because they were less evil than the Vietnamese, who had freed the Cambodian people from its killers and enslavers. For the sake of sanity, I simply switched off. "Let historians sort it out", I thought. And they did, brilliantly. But the media doesn’t like history, it likes catchy headlines like "Comrade Burchett Was A Party Hack" or "Burchett: Moral Traitor To Western Civilisation" and other such rubbish.

[Source: George Burchett on the Ten Principles of Bandung]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union especially, groups have gravitated towards other shared social beliefs and foundations for liberation and also revenge. Some groups in the Middle East and North Africa, whose people are at currently at the front of facing the most brutal Western colonialism, imperialism, sanctions and starvation and torture over the last few decades, have variously gravitated towards religion as a natural basis for some projects of liberation, or for violence.

Others in Africa recently toppling neo-colonial puppet regimes — in Niger, in Burkina Faso, in Guinea, in Gabon — have drawn upon national liberation as well as from figures in their past (like Thomas Sankara for Burkina Faso). Though as Marxist historian Vijay Prashad points out, today's revolutionaries do not draw upon the exactly same social thread of the previous ones:

Their communities have been utterly left out of the hard austerity programs of the International Monetary Fund, of the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and of the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded populations with no real political platform to speak for them, these communities have rallied behind their young men in the military. These are “Colonel’s Coups”—coups of ordinary people who have no other options—not “General’s Coups”—coups of the elites to stem the political advancement of the people. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. When I traveled to these regions before the pandemic, it was clear that the anti-French sentiment found no channel of expression other than hope for a military coup that would bring in leaders such as Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, who had been assassinated in 1987. Captain [Ibrahim] Traoré, in fact, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction. It would be a mistake to see these men as from the left since they are moved by anger at the failure of the elites and of Western policy. They do not come to power with a well-worked out agenda built from left political traditions.

[Source: Vijay Prashad on People's Dispatch]

But anyway, even so – even with the support of the Soviet Union not always being there, even with the flaws of the Soviet Union, even with aspects of the influence of the Soviet Union waning – for the act of supporting movements and revolutions from colonised peoples to be independent and for the act of trying to promote some kind of alternative to capitalism, the Soviet Union and Russia was and is an enemy of the colonial powers.

So who would be majorly against the Soviet Union? Who would want to stop the liberation of peoples around the world from colonialism? Who would want to stop real revolutions towards fairer socialist societies? Who would want to rob the nations of the world of their wealth?

It was always the imperialists and capitalists of the world and their imperialist and capitalist allies, regardless of whether each configuration of countries is in a "formal treaty" or not.

It was first France, then the US, Australia and New Zealand in Viet Nam. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech, one year to the day before he was assassinated:

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

[Source of transcript: American Rhetoric]

It was NATO bombing Serbia in ‘99.

It was the US, Britain and Australia in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US supported Saddam Hussein when he was useful for their needs and then threw him out when he wasn't. Sweden also used Afghanistan as a grounds for weapons testing, according to journalist Vijay Prashad. (I can't seem to find the video where he mentioned this, but will link it when I can - it may have been on an interview with BreakThrough News.) And of course Sweden helped in the persecution of Julian Assange.

It was the US and NATO in Libya. Libyans had reparations from Italy.

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NATO destroyed Libya and Somalia.

In other words, whenever the colonial powers get together – no matter what the configuration is or whether they draw up a nice little treaty between themselves or not – we should basically always view it as them preparing to launch an assault on the rest of the world.

It doesn't matter whether it's the US and Australia one year in Afghanistan or Iraq or Viet Nam, or the US and France another year in the Sahel, or the US and Israel every year in Palestine, or the US and NATO another year in Ukraine. It doesn't matter what the Western Propaganda Of The Day is: it doesn't matter whether they provide a formal treaty document cautiously naming themselves as victims who are defending themselves against various supposed threats, it doesn't matter when they say they are defending democracy, it doesn't matter whether they are expanding their alliances.

All of it is the same thing – colonial powers seeking to attack the rest of the world, to divide and conquer, to massacre and plunder, to tear all of us asunder.

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