Friends, what a propitious time for David Swanson to come out extolling President Kennedy’s prescient remarks some 50 years ago!

This piece is dense and long, but it gives the moral and rational roadmap we need to use today as we deal with Russia in yet another crisis point fraught with the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

Sharon

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David Swanson’s Blog
July 17, 2016

Best Speech a U.S. President Ever Gave

In planning an upcoming conference and nonviolent action aimed at challenging the institution of war, with the conference to be held at American University, I can’t help but be drawn to the speech a U.S. president gave at American University a little more than 50 years ago. Whether or not you agree with me that this is the best speech ever given by a U.S. president, there should be little dispute that it is the speech most out of step with what anyone will say at either the Republican or the Democratic national convention this year. Here’s a video of the best portion of the speech:

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CCI Friends,

Increasingly economists, etc., are emerging to “Speak Truth to Power.” Here another: Ray Kinsella in the Irish Independent. Hopefully these truth tellers will stimulate a bulwark of people power to defeat this dangerous militarization of Europe with NATO on Russia’s borders.

Sharon

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The Irish Independent
July 11, 2016

The militarisation of Europe is a far greater threat than Brexit

Ray Kinsella

The most searching challenge that the EU faces is not the fallout from Brexit – it’s from the militarisation of Europe and the US-led Nato encirclement of Russia, endorsed by the Nato Summit in Warsaw last weekend.

It is as misconceived as austerity and authoritarianism, which are at the heart of the European crisis. But it is infinitely more dangerous. If the Chilcot Report on the war in Iraq proves anything, it is that the momentum towards armed conflict, once started, becomes difficult to contain.

Militarisation will make it much more difficult to deal with the EU’s migration crisis, itself largely a consequence of the catastrophic effects of Western military intervention. A conflagration between US-led Nato and Russia would increase the numbers of refugees in Europe by an order of magnitude. As for the impact of such a conflagration on the European and global economy – well, all bets are off. We could not begin to model the impact – but we can look at post-war Europe and Iraq and Syria and Libya… Only what are euphemistically termed ‘Defence’ industries do (exceedingly) well out of war.

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ROBERT PARRY, Harvard recipient of the 2015 I.F. Stone Investigative Journalist Award, speaks out on the “Bogus Russia Narrative that NATO Reaffirms” — despite the facts showing untruths in each accusation.

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Consortium News
June 11, 2016

President Obama and NATO leaders signed on to the false narrative of a minding-its-own-business West getting sucker-punched by a bunch of Russian meanies, a storyline that suggests insanity or lies, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

It’s unnerving to realize that the NATO alliance – bristling with an unprecedented array of weapons including a vast nuclear arsenal – has lost its collective mind. Perhaps it’s more reassuring to think that NATO simply feels compelled to publicly embrace its deceptive “strategic communications” so gullible Western citizens will be kept believing its lies are truth.

But here were the leaders of major Western “democracies” lining up to endorse a Warsaw Summit Communiqué condemning “Russia’s aggressive actions” while knowing that these claims were unsupported by their own intelligence agencies.

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