We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, October 5, 2018

Ron Ridenour’s ‘Pentagon on Alert: The Russian Peace Threat’

Click here to access a book review by Dave Lindorff from This Can't Be Happening!.

After the German Third Reich was defeated in WWII, the Anglo-American alliance of necessity with the Soviet Union was quickly dropped, and the old enmity toward any system that refused to allow capitalist exploitation fueled a revived vendetta against the Soviet Union. As the end of WWII neared, the leaders of the exhausted British Empire saw that their only hope was to integrate with the powerful USA. In this book Ridenour, the author of a new book, discloses some little known facts about this vendetta that was instigated by Winston Churchill, a dedicated arch-enemy of any nation that hoped to choose an independent path from the new capitalist US Empire.
As someone [Lindorff] who studied modern Russian history, I found myself nonetheless being continually surprised as I read The Russian Peace Threat, by shocking new facts about this enduring US hostility that I had clearly not been fully aware of. For example, at the end of Chapter 10, writing about the launching of the Cold War by then Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Harry Truman as World War II was ending, Ridenour describes how Churchill proposed a plan to the US called “Operation Unthinkable.” This criminal nightmare vision had the combined forces of the US, Britain and Canada, along with some 100,000 rearmed Nazi troops, attacking the presumably exhausted and over-extended Soviet Red Army then still battling remnants of the Wehrmacht in eastern Germany.