Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
October 23, 2022
Hello All – Sixty years ago the world held its breath as the Cuban Missile Crisis dragged us steadily towards nuclear war. Suddenly – and luckily – President Kennedy and Russian premiere Khrushchev made an agreement, a compromise that brought peace. Today, the war in Ukraine has been called "a slow-motion Cuban Missile Crisis." As in 1962, all of the actors in today's crisis – Russia, the Ukraine, and the USA – are locked into a conflict from which no resolution or compromise seems possible. Both our own government and the Russian government have refused to accept any war aims except that The War Will Be Fought to Victory. Can the steps that Kennedy and Khrushchev took in 1962 to end the crisis provide a guide for ending the Ukraine war?
How we in the USA frame the crisis largely shapes how we see possible paths to end the crisis. In 1962, for example, Russia was clearly reckless in attempting to (secretly) install medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, missiles that would have the range to strike (and destroy) Washington, D.C. Clearly, Russia was the aggressor. Yet a larger picture would include the USA's 10 to 1 advantage in missiles that could strike the enemy homeland; and for the Cubans, there was well-deserved concern that the attempt in 1961 to launch an invasion of Cuba (the "Bay of Pigs") would be repeated. Thus, from the standpoint of Cuba and Russia, the US posed an immediate threat to end Cuba's newly won freedom from dictatorship and a longer-term threat to destroy the Soviet Union. They saw the USA as the aggressive party.
Similarly, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is both reckless and illegal under international law, and no resolution of the crisis today seems possible without a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. Russia is the aggressor. Yet, as in 1962, a wider framework allows us to understand how Russia might feel that it has come under an existential threat from the eastward expansion of NATO, now aggravated by the NATO statement in 2008 that it intended to offer NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. Moreover, Russia saw and sees the coup in Ukraine in 2014, which overthrew an elected government that had rejected prospects of a closer affinity to the European Union, as the equivalent of – in 1962 – placing enemy forces on its border. Russia sees the USA/NATO as the aggressor and Ukraine as a proxy of "the West."
In 1962 a majority of President Kennedy's inner circle favored an invasion of Cuba, as did the US military establishment. US intelligence had failed to see that there were 40,000 Russian troops on the island, and did not know that they had tactical nuclear weapons ready to use if there was an amphibious invasion. Moreover, as each day passed, more of the Soviet nuclear missiles were ready to be used. A "conventional" attack on Cuba would have triggered a nuclear war. Today, there is a similar danger that Russia might use a nuclear weapon if the "conventional" war requires it. Indeed, Russia has stated repeatedly that it is prepared to use "tactical" nuclear weapons (i.e. "battlefield" weapons with an explosive power somewhat smaller than the bomb used on Hiroshima) if the Russian "homeland" is in danger. Last week, President Putin "clarified" this statement by saying that the four newly annexed provinces of Ukraine were now part of Russia. Are they bluffing? How would we know? And what would the US/NATO do if Russia used a small nuclear weapon to block, e.g., the current Ukraine attack on Kherson? And what would Russia do if the US/NATO … and so on. This has to end.
If the Cuban Missile Crisis has lessons for today, one of them is that an "eyeball-to-eyeball" confrontation quickly gets out of hand, with accidents and surprises suddenly exposing new military dangers. A second lesson is that frequent contact – communications – between military adversaries is essential if the war is to be settled short of "final victory." The histories of the Cuban Missile Crisis show that the formal and "back channel" contacts between Russia and the USA (in an age long before the instantaneous possibilities of the Internet) eventually found a compromise that, while unsatisfactory to all parties in some ways, ended the stand-off: Russia withdrew its missiles in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba, and a (secret) promise to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Turkey.
What of today? Over the last few days, there have been several phone calls between US Secretary of Defense Austin and his Russian counterpart. We don't know what these conversations were about, but we are told that they were the first direct communications between the parties since the early days of the war. We also know that negotiations have successfully resulted in prisoner swaps and an agreement that allowed the export of Ukrainian and Russian grain. Compromises are possible.
Going forward, our government must take steps to start or support negotiations with Russia, and between Russia and Ukraine. It should support the UN in calling for a ceasefire. NATO should clarify that Ukraine will not be joining NATO's military alliance. Russia must withdraw its military from Ukraine, and allow Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territory to decide for themselves which country will be theirs. Nuclear war can and must be prevented.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held each Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. To learn about our new project, "Beauty as Fuel for Change," go here; and to make a financial contribution to the project, go here. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This week's rewards for stalwart Newsletter readers pair the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the heartwarming story of the music of the Buena Vista Social Club. The story begins with Ry Cooder, a favorite US musician with an interest in old Cuban music. And the story continues as Cooder locates some of the old stars and the German film maker Wim Wenders makes a documentary. And a few years later everybody ends up at Carnegie Hall. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
The Proto-Fascist Guide to Destroying the World
Noam Chomsky is interviewed by his collaborator David Barsamian. Their book, Notes on Resistance, was published last month.
David Barsamian: The situation in Ukraine is dire. If Putin is trapped in a corner, he may make a desperate move to use nuclear weapons, or one of the six Ukrainian nuclear reactors could be bombed (deliberately or by accident). The fate of the planet is in the hands of Putin, Zelensky, Biden. Frankly, I'm very worried. What can people do in this scenario?
Noam Chomsky: Same as always. It's a dangerous scenario. We can work to try to influence what's within our range of influence. The United States happens to be diverging right now, pretty sharply, from most of the world with regard to this crucial issue, and we can work to try to change that policy. That's hard but not impossible. Most of the world overwhelmingly wants to move directly to negotiations to try to end the horrors in Ukraine before they get even worse. It's true of the Global South, India, Indonesia, China, Africa, overwhelmingly. In Germany, according to a poll at the end of August, over three-quarters of the population want to move to negotiations right away. So that's one point of view. The United States and Britain are standing out. Their position is that the war must continue in order to severely weaken Russia, and that means no negotiations, of course. Well, we can work to bring the United States into conformity with most of the world and maybe avert worse catastrophes—maybe. I don't see anything else that we can do, but that's more than enough of a task. [Read More]
Arundhati Roy on Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: The Dismantling of the World as We Know It
[FB] – Writer and activist Arundhati Roy spoke these words three weeks ago in London, where she gave the Stuart Hall Memorial Lecture. (Who was Stuart Hall? Find out here.)
---- This has been a bad year for those who have said and done Things That Cannot Be Said. Or Done. In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed while she was in the custody of Iran's moral police for the sin of not wearing her headscarf in the way that is officially mandated. In the protests that followed and are ongoing, several people have been killed. Meanwhile, in India, in the southern state of Karnataka, Muslim schoolgirls who wanted to assert their identity as Muslim women in their classrooms by wearing hijabs were physically intimidated by right-wing Hindu men. This in a place where Hindus and Muslims have lived together for centuries but have recently become dangerously polarised. Both instances – strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries – may appear to be antagonistic, but they aren't really. Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isn't about the hijab. It's about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women. [Read More]
Chelsea Manning: 'I struggle with the so-called free world compared with life in prison'
By Emma Brockes, The Guardian [October 22, 2022]
---- Chelsea Manning's memoir opens like a Jason Bourne novel with a scene in which the then 22-year-old, on the last day of two weeks' military leave, tries to leak an enormous amount of classified data via a sketchy wifi connection in a Barnes & Noble in Maryland. Outside, a snowstorm rages. Inside, Manning, a junior intelligence analyst for the US army, freaks out as the clock ticks down. In 12 hours, her flight leaves for Iraq. Meanwhile she has half a million incident reports on US military activity to upload from a memory stick to an obscure website called WikiLeaks. The military would later argue she didn't have the clearance even to access these files – "exceeded authorised" as Manning puts it, in army parlance – but the fact is, she says, "It was encouraged. I was told, 'Go look!' The way you do analysis is you collect a shit-ton of data, a huge amount, in order to do the work on it." Everything about Manning on that afternoon of 8 February 2010 – her name, her gender, her anonymity, her freedom – is provisional and shortly to change. Three months later, she'll be in a cage in Kuwait. Three years after that, she'll be starting a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Meanwhile, the wider consequences of her actions that day will, depending on your view, topple governments; endanger lives; protect lives; uphold democracy; compromise global diplomacy; change the world in no measurable way whatsoever; or – Manning's least favourite interpretation – boil down to a cry for help from a troubled young transperson seeking the care she required. [Read More]
War and Peace
What We Should Have Learned From the War on Terror
By Karen J. Greenberg, Tom Dispatch [October 21, 2022]
---- Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. At such a moment of ever-increasing international tension, however, it seems worthwhile to recall what lessons the United States learned (or at least should have learned) from its own wars of this century that fell under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. We certainly should have learned a great deal about ourselves over the course of the war on terror, the global conflicts that followed al-Qaeda's devastating attacks of September 11, 2001. We should have learned, for instance, that once a war starts, as the war on terror did when the administration of George W. Bush decided to invade Afghanistan, it can spread in a remarkable fashion—often without, at least initially, even being noticed—to areas far beyond the original battlefield. … In the process, we learned, or at least should have learned, that our government was willing to trade rights, liberties, and the law for a grim version of safety and security. … Finally, we should have learned that once a major conflict begins, its end can be—to put the matter politely—elusive. In this way, it was no mistake that the war on terror, with us to this day in numerous ways, informally became known as our "forever war," given the fact that, even today we're not quite done with it. [Read More]
Bye-bye world: While nuclear weapons and wars exist, annihilation beckons
[FB] – Larry Wittner, from Albany, is a member of the Peace Action NYS steering committee, and the author of many books about the bomb and how people have resisted it. (CFOW is also on the PANYS steering committee.)
---- It's been a long time since the atomic bombings of August 1945, when people around the planet first realized that world civilization stood on the brink of doom. This apocalyptic ending to the Second World War revealed to all that, with the advent of nuclear weapons, violent conflict among nations had finally reached the stage where it could terminate life on earth. … But, despite these concessions, the governments of the major powers weren't ready to dispense with nuclear weapons or, for that matter, with war. Consequently, as popular protest ebbed, they gradually returned to their customary behavior. Starting about a decade ago, they ceased signing nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements. Instead, they began scrapping them, including the INF Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the Iran nuclear agreement. Meanwhile, they commenced a race to "modernize" their nuclear arsenals with the production of new nuclear weapons possessing greater speed, maneuverability, and accuracy. Also, to intimidate other nations, their leaders—most notably Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, who commanded the world's two largest nuclear arsenals ― openly threatened to attack these nations with nuclear weapons. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the hands of their famed "Doomsday Clock" at 100 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting since the clock's appearance in 1947. [Read More]
Scary Stuff – Younger readers may not be familiar with the scary warnings about nuclear war that saturated the childhoods of older readers. Now the warnings are making a comeback, enhanced by modern graphics tech. Check out "Nowhere to Hide," from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [Link] and this short film, "Nuclear War Simulator Shows What War With Russia Would Look Like," from Newsweek.
The War in Ukraine
Nationwide Protest of Putin's War, and Exodus From Putin's Russia
By Boris Kagarlitsky, The Nation [October 2022]
---- Vladimir Putin, by declaring a "partial" mobilization in Russia, achieved at least one thing: Russian society finally realized that it was in a state of war. In fact, in a matter of a few minutes, the president not only destroyed the social contract that had been functioning in the country for more than two decades of his rule but also nullified the work of his own propaganda during the previous seven months of the conflict with Ukraine. and do not read political websites, neither oppositional nor pro-government ones. On September 21, the situation changed radically and irreversibly. Awareness and resistance have come. [Read More]
Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine
By Jack F. Matlock Jr., Responsible Statecraft [ Responsible Statecraft
[FB] – Mr. Matlock was the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991.
---- Four recent events have put the war in Ukraine on a distinctly more dangerous course.
• The Russian annexation of four additional Ukrainian provinces blocks compromise solutions that were feasible earlier.
• The disabling attacks on both North Stream pipelines make it impossible in the near term to restore Russia as the principal energy supplier to Germany, even if the war in Ukraine should be miraculously ended.
• The Ukrainian attack on the bridge to Crimea gave Russia a pretext to escalate attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets.
• The Russian retaliatory attacks on civilian targets are certain to do more damage to Ukraine than Ukraine can do to Russia.
The leaders of both Russia and Ukraine have set impossible goals. In fact, not a single participant in the war in Ukraine has espoused a goal that can restore peace in the area. Russia's recent incorporation of four Ukrainian provinces into the Russian Federation will not be accepted by Russia's neighbors or by most European powers.
Given the passions aroused by the war and its atrocities, Ukraine, even with NATO support, cannot create a stable, functioning state within all the borders it inherited in 1991. If Ukraine tries to regain these territories by force and is encouraged and empowered by the U.S. and NATO to do so, Russia (and not just President Putin) will very likely demolish Ukraine in retaliation. Reality trumps illusion whenever the two conflict. And if war should stop with the destruction of Ukraine — Kyiv and Lviv leveled as Grozny once was — that would assume that escalation does not involve the use of nuclear weapons. If the Russian leader feels convinced that the U.S. and "Western" goal is to take him out, what is to prevent him taking out others as he goes? [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
(Video) Egypt's Carceral Climate Summit: Naomi Klein on the Crisis of COP27 Being Held in a Police State
From Democracy Now! [October 21, 2022]
----- Egypt is preparing to host world leaders next month at the U.N.'s annual climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, a move that prominent environmentalist and author Naomi Klein calls "greenwashing." While the government embraces superficial causes to mitigate climate change such as recycling or solar panels, "what is not welcome would be pointing out this enormous lucrative network of deals that the military itself is engaged in that are linked to fossil fuels, that are linked to destroying remaining green space in cities like Cairo," says Klein. She adds that the international community should seize the opportunity to pressure Egypt into releasing its imprisoned political prisoners, who face brutal conditions. [See the Program]
The State of the Union
Who's Left Out of the Learning-Loss Debate
October 12, 2022]
---- Adding to the list of issues dogging public schools, a report released in September found that millions of fourth graders have fallen behind academically during the pandemic. There were declines across all racial and class groups, but, predictably, the largest declines have been among poor and working-class students, who are disproportionately Black and Latino. Analysts have labeled this as "learning loss," and many have blamed school closures and remote instruction in the course of the past two years as the culprit. … The sudden onset of the pandemic has been the most catastrophic event in recent American history, making the expectation that there would not be something called "learning loss" bizarre. The idea that life would simply churn on in the same way it always has only underscores the extent to which there have been two distinct experiences of the pandemic. One for people who experienced the upheaval but were able to sequester themselves away from its harshest realities, buying groceries online, contemplating buying new houses that could better accommodate working from home, and finding new ways to weather the inconveniences of the isolation imposed by potential sickness. There was another gruesome reality, reaped by poor and working-class families in the surreal numbers of people who have died. [Read More] Also of interest is "The Death Eaters: Covid in the Liberal Imagination," by Gregg Gonsalves, The Nation [October 20, 2022] [Link].
Israel/Palestine
Israel kills two youth, including an 11th grader, as Break the Wave continues
ByOctober 21, 2022]
[FB] – Like a daily drumbeat, Israeli military people are killing young Palestinians in the West Bank. Is their goal to prevent an uprising, a new intifada, or to stimulate one in order to justify another Israeli pogrom against Palestinians?
---- On Thursday, October 20, Israeli forces raided the northern West Bank city of Jenin, killing 19-year-old Salah Al-Braiki, and arresting Bara'a Alawneh in a raid on Jenin refugee camp. Alawneh is the cousin of Ahmad Alawneh, the 26-year-old fighter that was killed by the Israeli military on September 28 in another invasion of the camp.
Al-Braiki's death brings the number of Palestinians killed in the past ten months to around 175. Another Palestinian teen succumbed to wounds sustained during the invasion and others were injured with bullet wounds. On the same day that Alawneh was killed, 16-year-old Mohammad Fadi Naouri was injured with a live bullet in the abdomen during confrontations at the military checkpoint of the illegal settlement of Beit El, near Ramallah. Naouri, a student in the 11th grade, succumbed to his wounds on Thursday morning. … Under a large-scale campaign dubbed Operation Break the Wave, Israel is not only targeting members of certain factions, but any semblance of confrontation to its colonization of Palestine. [Read More] The Israeli offensive against Palestinian resistance necessarily raises "The Question of Violence," a thoughtful article by Mitchell Plitnick, a former co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace and the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.
Our History
(Video) "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks": New Film Explores Untold Radical Life of Civil Rights Icon
From Democracy Now! [October 17, 2022]
---- The new documentary "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks" gives a comprehensive look at the legacy of the woman known for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Beyond helping to inspire the Montgomery bus boycott that ended Alabama's bus segregation law, Parks was also a lifelong supporter of the Black Power movement and organized in campaigns to seek justice for wrongfully imprisoned Black people, political prisoners, and Black rape survivors like Recy Taylor, whose case Parks investigated for the NAACP in 1944. We speak to the film's co-director, Yoruba Richen, who says Parks paid a price for her activism, including having to leave Montgomery for Detroit to escape public backlash. We also speak with Jeanne Theoharis, author of the best-selling biography "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," on which the documentary is based, and a consulting producer." [See the Program]
