The Wild Reed: Three Progressive Voices on the War in Ukraine

Saturday, June 10, 2023

Three Progressive Voices on the War in Ukraine

MEDEA BENJAMIN • CORNEL WEST • MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

Last month I attended one of three talks on the war in Ukraine by peace activist Medea Benjamin, co-author with Nicolas J. S. Davies of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict.

Right: Friends and I with Medea Benjamin in Minneapolis – Sunday, May 21, 2023. From left: Sue Ann Martinson and Carol Masters of Women Against Military Madness (WAMM), Medea, and me.

The first of Medea’s Twin Cities speaking engagements was marred by violence from a small group of people protesting Medea and her perspective on the conflict involving Ukraine, Russia, and many of the member nations of NATO. Following is the Star Tribune’s Randy Furst’s reporting on the incident.

The division [in the Twin Cities justice and peace community] over U.S. policy [on Ukraine] came to a head three weeks ago in south Minneapolis, when a scuffle erupted outside a meeting hall where Medea Benjamin was appearing in a forum sponsored by WAMM and the local chapter of Veterans for Peace. Benjamin is a co-founder of Code Pink, a national peace group that’s calling for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine.

. . . Outside the meeting hall, Benjamin used her cell phone to shoot video of Kieran Knutson, an activist protesting her appearance. When someone took Benjamin’s phone, Veterans for Peace activist Craig Wood said, he waded into the crowd to retrieve it and was pushed or fell to the ground, where he was pummeled by two individuals. His arm was dislocated and will require surgery, he said. Police were called but there were no arrests.

“I have never experienced the level of aggressiveness and violence that I experienced in Minneapolis, and I have been to 70 cities [as part of my current book tour],” said Benjamin in an interview.

During the Q & A of the event I attended, I asked Medea why she thought some are protesting her and the book she’s co-written with Nicolas Davies.

In response, Medea shared that, from her perspective, most of those protesting are ultra-nationalists and seem to think that her call for peace negotiations denies or undermines the sovereignty of Ukraine. Medea’s also been accused of being a “Putin apologist,” primarily because she talks about the role of NATO and the U.S. in escalating tensions in the region in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She’s correct, of course, to talk about these tensions and the entities that instigate them. They are players in this ongoing conflict.

Highlighing such a fundamental truth and facilitating informed discussions about it in an effort to advance justice and peace does not justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an accusation and smear that one hears ad nauseam from those in opposition to anyone who believes that the role of the U.S. should be, first and foremost, to push for a cease-fire and subsequent peace talks rather than supplying a constant and seemingly neverending stream of weapons to Ukraine.

As a longtime justice and peace activist, Medea believes that individuals and governments should advocate and strategize for peace above planning for and fueling war. And again, one can hold such values and do such peace-building and still denounce the Russian government’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. For her part, Medea Benjamin is crystal clear: neither she or the book she’s co-authored attempt to justify or excuse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And the reason for this is simple: Russia’s invasion cannot be justified or excused.

With this as a foundation, one can recognize and declare the situation in Ukraine as both a proxy war between the modern-day “empires” of Russia and the U.S. and a heroic battle for survival from Russian imperialism on the part of the people of Ukraine. That some can’t hold these two realities in tension and must therefore resort to name-calling, aggressiveness and violence is pathetic.

Medea’s primary goal, in both her book and the talks she’s been giving across the nation, is to inform people of “the context, the background, and the actions of all the parties” that led to terrible crisis being experienced in Ukraine.

Medea starts each of her presentations by sharing an 18-minute video, one that serves as an invaluable primer to understanding the war in Ukraine. I share this video below. It’s followed by additional thoughts on the crisis in Ukraine by two 2024 presidential candidates: Green Party candidate Cornel West and Democratic Party candidate Marianne Williamson.

[In the crisis in Ukraine we] have the clash of two empires. The Russian empire is a deeply wounded empire. It’s had its territory cut back. Of course, its economy is shrinking. And then you’ve got the American empire, which is the most powerful empire in the history of the world. . . . And so, on the one hand, you have the promise of the American empire to the elites in the Russian empire: “We will not move an inch.” And within decades, fourteen of the satellite countries of the former Soviet Union are part of NATO. [There are now] missiles right on the borders and boundaries of the Russian empire.

Now, we know empires behave like empires. I mean, if there’s missiles in Canada and Mexico, the U.S. government would blow them to smithereens quickly. We saw it in Cuba in 1962. . . . [E]mpires behave like empires. They’re greedy. They’re driven by predatory capitalist dispositions. They’re obsessed with hierarchy. They’re concerned with domination and conquests. . . . So in that regard, there’s no doubt in my mind that the expansion of NATO has played a crucial role in the wounded Russian empire, with all of its repression, all of its regimentation.

Let us never forget about the thousands of Russian brothers and sisters who are going to jail in opposition to gangster Putin’s criminal invasion. But he’s pushed against a wall, and he responds. That’s how heads of empire respond. So we’ve got to be in solidarity with the suffering of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, but we have to recognize NATO is a instrument of American imperial foreign policy. We’ve seen it over and over again.

And so we’re witnessing a proxy war. There must be a ceasefire. There must be a stopping of that war. Why? We’re on the road to nuclear war. That’s the last thing we want to see.

[As president] I would pull back on the U.S. military support. I would sit down with the elites from the Chinese empire, given all of their forms of regimentation and repression in their own context. Think about our precious Muslim brothers and sisters in China, the Uyghurs. But I would sit down with the Chinese. I would sit down with the Ukrainians. I would sit down with the Russians [and] say, “We’re going to stop this war, and we’re going to come up with a plan, a process, with a variety of voices heard, to make sure that the suffering stops and [that] we understand and we’re honest about the larger context of the war.

– Cornel West
Excerpted from “Cornel West on Running for President,
Ending Ukraine War and Taking on the
‘Corporate Duopoly’ of Dems and GOP”
Democracy Now!
June 7, 2023

For those of us who have spent years opposing the influence of the military industrial complex on U.S. foreign policy, the war in Ukraine poses a peculiar challenge. It’s possible to believe the undue influence of the U.S. war machine is very real, and at the same time believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a criminal venture that cannot be tolerated by the world. The United States has perpetrated its own imperialistic ventures, to be sure. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions have died because of our own misguided actions. But a position of anti-imperialism should be consistent, whether it be ours or anyone else’s. Did American foreign policy contribute to the germination of the war in Ukraine? Yes. Did our actions regarding NATO, and putting Aegis missiles in Poland, only exacerbate the situation? Yes. But that does not mean we are ultimately responsible for Putin’s atrocious invasion, nor does it mean that our larger interests, the interests of the people of Ukraine or the interests of the rest of the world, are best served by our withholding support from Ukraine now.

The people of Ukraine are putting up a heroic battle for the survival of their country, and many Americans are divided here in the United States over how much, if any, support they should receive from the United States. I have heard it said that support for them at this time is “pro-war,” as though withdrawing such support is somehow “pro-peace.” But such a notion is disingenuous. A withdrawal of US support from Ukraine at this point would not lead to peace; it would lead to the most horrifying climax of the war. Russia would simply deliver its final brutal blow to Ukraine, pummeling it to the point where it would no longer exist as a separate nation.

. . . Both Russia and Ukraine are intent on winning this war. Diplomatic options are severely limited until the war begins to break one way or the other. Regardless how we got here, our only choice at this point is to either support Ukraine or to not. While the United States should do everything possible to support a negotiated settlement, our goal should also be a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine still has a chance to exist.

Denmark has offered to host peace talks in July, insisting that for such talks to be effective they must include more than Ukraine’s allies; China, Brazil and India must participate as well. The United States should enthusiastically embrace any such overtures for diplomatic efforts to end the war.

The best way to solve conflicts is to prevent them from occurring to begin with, and if I had had the choice, I would have made very different foreign policy decisions related to Russia over the last 40 years. We must set an entirely new and different trajectory of military involvement in the world, one in which we are not the world’s policeman but rather the world’s collaborator in creating a world in which war is no more.

In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, “We must end the beginnings of all wars.” And I would seek to do that.

The United States needs to be on a decidedly different path when it comes to our military posture, a subject I will be talking about in some detail over the next few months. America has over 800 military installations in over 80 countries; as president, I would exercise my unilateral authority to close those which represent nothing more than a continuation of the excessive militarization of American foreign policy. The military industrial complex has led to an obscenely bloated military budget, more of a cash cow for the defense industry than a righteous, appropriate, and sober arm of American foreign policy. I support a serious reduction of our military budget, plus I would audit every penny of the Pentagon in response to recent revelations of serious price gauging by defense contractors. I would also establish a U.S. Department of Peace to lift peace-building to the front of our foreign policy agenda. We must do more than know how to wage war. As a country, and as a species, we must learn to wage peace.