Remarks in Göteborg, Sweden, November 11, 2024.
It's wonderful to be here with many of you whose work I've known but whom I've rarely if ever been with in person. I am very grateful to John Jones and Tomas Magnusson and all those involved in arranging this event.
It's wonderful to be in a country which -- like Norway, where I was yesterday -- some of my great-grandparents came from, including here in Sweden the ones who gave me my last name. I imagine some of you are too polite here in this beautiful land to ask the obvious question of whether I plan to go back to Trumplandia or just stay here. I imagine others of you are too optimistic and good to completely resist the fantasy of Trump the peacemaker, dismantler of NATO, and bringer of harmony and stability to the Earth.
I do plan to go back home for at least three reasons: my family is there, I can't speak Swedish worth a darn, and if everybody runs away from things there will very soon be nowhere left to run to. Good people have been fleeing the United States for decades, probably enough of them to have decided last week's election. I'm sure they feel the exact opposite of responsible, and I don't blame them. But I'm going home.
I'm going home even though Donald Trump is a hateful fascistic demagogue who instigates violence against various groups of people. I'm going home even though Donald Trump moved more money from human and environmental needs into militarism last time, just like Biden, just like Obama, and promises to do so again. Trump sent missiles into numerous nations killing a great many people, armed the Saudi-U.S. war on Yemen, supported coups in numerous countries (including his own), promised to end the war on Afghanistan and then refused to when the U.S. generals told him to keep it going, and broke with the Obama policy of not sending weapons to Ukraine and started sending the weapons that helped create the current war. Trump escalated weapons sales to brutal dictatorships, just like the guy before him and the one after him but with open celebration. He even tried to have Soviet-style weapons parades in Washington. He also badgered NATO members into more military spending increases than Biden did, and Biden had the help of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden wants your country to spend 2% of its economy on war, Trump wants 3%, and there's no logical reason someone won't soon say 4%. Just close some schools and hospitals! What's the problem? It's your duty as world citizens and NATO members! With enemies like Trump, NATO doesn't need friends.
A huge number of people in the United States actually believe that Trump works for Putin. In reality, Trump evicted Russian diplomats, sanctioned Russian officials, put missiles on Russia's border, sent weapons into Ukraine, lobbied European nations to drop Russian energy deals (Biden used a more explosive sort of lobbying), left the Iran agreement, tore up the INF Treaty, rejected Russia's offers on banning weapons in space and banning cyber war, expanded NATO eastward, added Montenegro as a member (where an inspiring popular movement nonviolently prevented a massive new NATO base), added a NATO partner in Colombia, proposed adding Brazil, demanded and successfully moved most NATO members to buy significantly more weapons, splurged on more nukes, bombed Russians in Syria, oversaw the largest war rehearsals in Europe in half a century (not the largest anymore), condemned all proposals for a European military and insisted that Europe stick with NATO. Putin should really get better servants. Russiagate was mostly made up around a few grains of truth, including the truth that Israel had gotten Trump, prior to his inauguration last time, to appeal to Russia to vote Israel's way in the United Nations.
U.S. presidents are not servants of Russia. They are servants of the Israel lobby, of weapons dealers, of banks, of corporations, of media outlets, of those who legally bribe them by paying for their campaigns, of those who provide jobs through pretty much the only means the U.S. government supports (the war industry), of those who control the major media cartel, and of those party bosses who decide who can be nominated to be one of the only two people you can choose between for the job that Biden calls running the world.
The U.S. has a winner-take-all election system and way of thinking. Having said bad things about Donald Trump, in the United States it would simply go without saying that I must therefor be a huge supporter of Kamala Harris. If I oppose U.S. warmaking, it's assumed that I'm a big fan of Russian warmaking. But, of course, Kamala Harris was a disastrous presidential candidate who preferred losing over opposing genocide. And Russian warmaking is mass-murder under a different flag. The U.S. is going more fascist, and it is not alone, and this problem cannot be fixed by getting a girl to kick a hornet's nest. It has to be fixed with a massive popular movement for democracy.
Last week people were screaming in the United States about how they had lost democracy. If we'd lost democracy we'd know how to retrieve it. Unfortunately we've lost corporate oligarchy with identity tokenism, and that taught us no useful skills. Two states voted for a higher minimum wage. A few states voted for this or that policy. Those are little bits of democracy. But for the most part people in so-called democracies do not vote on any policies. They choose misrepresentatives from a criminal line-up of proudly fascist buffoons and respectable corporate servants and warmongers who claim to oppose racism and any violence that is too close to them. Should people have voted against someone like Trump? Of course! But to do so they would have had to vote for someone who tried to be crueler to immigrants than Trump, who tried to be more accommodating to corporate monopolies than Trump, who wasn't going to tax the rich, and who was only going to escalate the wars -- someone who was working to get opposition to a genocide labeled "anti-Semitism" and criminalized. Trump is surrounded by actual anti-Semites in the sense of bigots who dislike Jews and all sorts of other groups. But for a peace advocate to support Kamala Harris, he or she had to be willing to be falsely called a bigot. That was a hard sell.
This shift we're seeing in many parts of the world to rightwing authoritarianism is not a shift away from democracy but a shift away from an offensive pretense of democracy. I would happily let the people who elected Trump vote on every single policy decision and let Trump himself go golfing every day. The people would get a lot more right than Biden did or Trump will. They'd end the wars. The United States almost created the requirement for a public vote prior to any war. That was in the 1930s. It's not been heard about since. But it sure would be in line with what NATO claims to stand for. Of course war is now illegal, and people shouldn't be voting on it any more than parliaments should. But at least they'd be more likely to vote the right way.
Some countries have more to lose, have more investment in useful things, have more organized labor, more organized protest movements, more unarmed civilian resistance to misgovernance. Some of us in the United States have always wished we could have things that people have in Scandinavia, things like healthcare, public transit, retirement, vacations, and long lifespans. Now I imagine there are people at Raytheon and Northrup Grumman laughing as the unelected leader of NATO travels the globe instructing presidents and prime ministers to pull money out of human and environmental needs and dump it into war preparations. At the Pentagon too, I imagine a great deal of levity. After all, they're building their own bases here -- dozens of new bases across Scandinavia. Their troops can go anywhere they want here. They can even drive drunk, vandalize, and rape without being subject to local laws. They can poison the drinking water with forever chemicals and not tell anyone. They can refuse to tell anyone whether they are bringing nuclear weapons in and out. Australians have asked and been told it's none of their business. They can use bases here to assist in some future war quite regardless of what anyone here thinks of that war. They can use bases here to sabotage pipelines or whatever else they like. All things are justified. And all things can be sacrificed -- the bases make this beautiful place a target, and good intentions won't change that.
But didn't Trump promise to immediately negotiate peace in Ukraine on Day One, and isn't that wonderful? Maybe. Most promises by U.S. presidential candidates are never kept or even mentioned again after the election. But we should demand that that promise be kept. We should demand that fans of Trump and opponents of Trump both insist on it. When George W. Bush was president, people who identified with the Democratic Party opposed his wars. We need them to start opposing wars now -- wars that can be labeled Trump's wars for purposes of bringing them around -- not to the right opinion, which many of them already have, but to caring enough to get active, to protest and compel action. At the same time, we need to push Trump to end wars that should be labeled Biden's wars for that purpose.
But our goal in Ukraine should be a just and lasting peace and demilitarization as part of global demilitarization for purposes of nuclear survival and environmental survival. A peace that gives Ukraine or Russia everything it wants will not last. A peace that gives the people of the separate provinces of Ukraine as much self-determination as is still possible might last -- and, again, would be in line with what Western governments and NATO claim to stand for: democracy.
Biden won't even speak with Russia. If Trump will speak with Russia, that's a start. But neither Trump nor Putin cares about the lives of the people of Ukraine. So we need some wiser planners in the room. And we need to learn the lesson that predictably pushing toward war gets you war, the lesson that international law applied equally to all is the path to safety, not the lesson that China is a better enemy than Russia, not the lesson that BRICS and NATO can balance each other with opposing forces, not the lesson that Palestinians and Sudanese should be killed instead of Russians and Ukrainians.
There have always been sensible people around, even in our militarized culture, people who have said "If you keep expanding NATO to Russia's border, if you keep putting missile bases on Russia's border, if you keep fueling violence by rightwing forces in Eastern Ukraine, if you keep tearing up treaties and abandoning disarmament agreements, you're making war more, not less, likely." Others have pointed out that if the U.S. government and NATO support and arm the Ukrainian government and refuse to allow peace negotiations, even while blowing up Russian pipelines, ending communications with Russia, and expanding NATO further yet, peace will be very difficult.
But the clever retort has always been heard: "What do you mean -- the Russian government is a saintly force for peace and prosperity that has never harmed a soul?"
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