 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The issue on the Ukraine-Russian border, but perhaps also on the discussions taking place in the various western capitals and at NATO headquarters, very pleased to be joined by Lindsay German, a convener of the Stop the War Coalition in Britain. NATO has recently written a powerful article, Keir Starmer, who those who don't know is the leader of the Labour Party. Keir Starmer's cynical embrace of NATO is a sad sight indeed. Lindsay, welcome to People's Dispatch and Globe Trudder. Thanks very much, BJ. It's good to be here. Yeah, in this important article where you've really gone after the leader of the Labour Party for his quite craven attempt to curry favor with Washington DC and perhaps also with Boris Johnson, you make a very strong point about how NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization set up in 1949 is not really a purely defensive organization. Can you tell us a little bit about NATO and this claim by NATO itself, but also Keir Starmer that it's a defensive organization? Well, I think if you look at the whole history of NATO, when it was set up, it was set up very, very clearly in order to make sure that America, the United States dominated the supposed defense of Western Europe. And that was the aim of the NATO Alliance. It was deliberately designed to keep the Russians out of it. And it was deliberately, it was always structured so that the US and Europe each had a key figure heading up NATO. So it was very much integrated into the Cold War world if you like. This was a period when it was set up where Europe was recovering from the Second World War and the Cold War had really begun by then. So it was seen as an alliance to promote Western values, as they might call it. And of course, its role then was very much against the Warsaw Pact. You know, you had the United States on the one hand, you had the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union on the on the other hand and the Warsaw Pact was the military alliance of Eastern Europe. But of course, when you had the collapse of that block, when you had the fall of the Berlin Wall and after that in 1989 onwards, then you had a very different situation where the Warsaw Pact fairly soon was dissolved. And NATO really by any kind of logic should have been dissolved as well, but it wasn't. And at the time it was promised to Mikhail Gorbachev, the then Russian leader that NATO would not expand eastwards. So it was the reunification of Germany for people who don't know Germany was divided after the Second World War and the smaller part of it was called the GDR and was was affiliated to the Eastern Bloc and to the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The country was, it took a couple of years, but the country was reunified. The promise was NATO would not go further than East Germany's GDR borders. And of course, what we've seen since then is that there has been a quite conscious and quite deliberate aggregation of various countries, both as NATO members, but also as people who work much more closely with NATO. And when you look at those two things combined, you've got very large numbers of the countries that were either formerly part of the Soviet Union or part of the Eastern Bloc, now inside NATO, including the Baltic States, including Poland, and so on and so forth. But of course, there are many other NATO partners as well, including some of the former Soviet republics, and so on, who have a close and ongoing relationship with NATO. So if you're going to talk about expansion, the people who've been expanding over the last 30, 40 years have actually been, has actually been NATO and it's been involved in aggressive wars in the former Yugoslavia against Serbia in Afghanistan, and of course the bombing of Libya in 2011. All of them aimed at regime change actually, but particularly with Libya and with Afghanistan. You saw NATO playing an absolutely key role. So this kind of idea that this is a defensive alliance strikes me as completely disingenuous. It just simply flies in the face of the facts as we understand it. I mean, you know, I read the document and don't ask me why I read documents like this, but it's called NATO 2030. Seems to me that NATO is quite openly talking about itself as, well, brand global NATO. No longer spelling it out the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but global NATO is a new brand and, and part of this is perhaps the desire of NATO countries to get involved in the South China Sea, not only aggravating tension on this side of Russia, the border of Ukraine, but also that side of Eurasia. And tell me if I'm wrong but I believe that the United Kingdom. Well, I don't know how united it is but Great Britain. I don't know how great it is but still that London has sent warships, but not flying the NATO flag itself right into the South China Sea. Well, you've had, as you say, NATO has developed this idea that it's going to be a global force and this is its projection for 2030. It's had, it's talking about much more intervention in what it calls the Indo-Pacific and therefore this is very much aimed at China. That's the central question here. As you know, there's the whole, there's the Orcus Alliance, there's the whole development of new military alliances in the Pacific. So you've got all those. The British government built an aircraft carrier, which perhaps, if you want to look at the sort of status of the British of British society and of the British military, doesn't have, doesn't have enough British planes to go on the aircraft carrier. So it's had to rely on the American planes in order to fulfill its function. But that's one, the Queen Elizabeth II, which was launched last year. Its maiden voyage was to, eventually to Japan, but essentially it was a series of staging posts in the Middle East, in India, and then to Japan, which was very much about pouring up alliances against China in particular. And of course, one of the difficulties was that if you look in some ways at what the United States has been talking about in the last few years, very much increasingly seeing China as the main enemy both economically and militarily. And in a way, talking about maybe Russia wasn't such a problem or maybe it could be contained by the European allies taking on some of these roles. But of course, this latest situation over Ukraine has led to greater closeness towards between Russia and China. And we saw that with the joint statement that they produced during the early days of the Olympics, the Winter Olympics recently. So it's actually had the opposite effect from the one that perhaps the United States and NATO perhaps wanted to have. But nonetheless, we're now in an extremely dangerous situation with Ukraine. And although, you know, as you say, the day, you know, we were told it was going to happen on the 16th, it hasn't happened on the 16th. So nonetheless, there's still a very real chance I think that there can be a confrontation or the people in the people in Donetsk and Lugans have now been, they're now evacuating those people today because they think there's a lot of shelling happening on the border and they think this may have caused a Ukrainian, some sort of Ukrainian attack. Biden is saying, essentially what Biden is saying is if the Russians invade, that's bad. But also he's saying, if it looks like Ukraine are attacking, that's not really Ukraine attacking that will be doing a false flag operation. So kind of they're building up to either way, the people responsible for any conflict in Ukraine. And I think we have to be against absolutely any conflict in Ukraine. But they're definitely saying the only people who can be possibly responsible for this are the Russians. You know, when we've talked about NATO expansion, when we've talked about all these things, this doesn't make sense in any sense at all, you're seeing a huge military conflagration on both sides. And I suppose then the West is going to say it's quite acceptable to have ethnic cleansing in the eastern provinces of Ukraine. It's quite acceptable to have population transfers. Effectively, Russian speaking people are going to Rostov across the border and so on. That I suppose now the West is going to tell us that violation of the Geneva Convention, perfectly acceptable. Let's see. Stop the war has put up a statement on your website, which calls for countries not to go to war. It's a pretty balanced statement. I should admit that I've signed it. It's not against my place to sign a statement like that. But the statement has come under attack. I watched a particularly unimpressive newscaster really lose his cool talking about the statement. Give us in a few minutes a sense of why stop the war is taking all this heat in the British context. I think the guy you're talking about was the one that I was on his radio program the other week and he kind of, you know, he can't really deal with rational argument and so therefore he put forward a whole number of points that he said were false actually they weren't false he just didn't agree with them which is a different, a different thing. I think with stop the war I think with Starmer and with him and he's a right wing radio presenter and obviously they're always they talk in terms, he talked in terms of we're a fifth column which is a, you know, it was it came from the Spanish Civil War where, you know Franco said didn't he that there's a fifth column inside Madrid there's four columns and then there's a fifth column which is the collaborators with us you know the people are going, going to support us so we're traitors, fifth columnists, we love right you know why do they never condemn the Russian government actually we do all the time we're not saying we side with Russia we make it very very clear that people in stop the war have very different positions on this but it's not about supporting some other government it's about being against war. I think with Starmer it's partly he wants to distance himself. Evermore from Jeremy Corbyn that's one of the, that's one of the things, but I think it's also the Blairites are increasingly back in charge of the Labour Party and of course, Tony Blair took us into repeated wars if you if you look at Kosovo if you look at Afghanistan if you look at Iraq and of course would have taken us into more if he hadn't been forced out actually he agreed to go after the Lebanon war which he was in 2006 which he was a great fan of. So there's that. I also think it signals that the world is getting a more dangerous place so one of the things that you'll do if you're a pro war politician is to start to attack the anti war movement for a whole range of reasons you know that we're ideologically you know whatever that we're ideologically in somebody else's camp or that we're naive is the thing that you know I mean really coming from Starmer when he supported you know he well he didn't support the Iraq war but he supported all these these later things and really coming from him to accuse us of naivety is a bit much really. Well in the peace in the Guardian, you say the following you say everything we and Starmer thought at the time you're talking about Iraq, my goodness, the UN Secretary General a year into that US war of aggression against Iraq called it an illegal war. I'm talking about Kofi Annan, you know who was very close to the US anyway and yet he called it an illegal war but you write in the Guardian everything we and Starmer thought you're talking again here about the head of the Labour Party at the time Iraq war has been proven proved correct by events and every criticism he makes of the anti war movement now has been made before and revealed as false. Well yes, the second part of it, I think is correct but I'm interested in having you reflect a little on this has been proved correct you talked about Iraq you talked about Libya has been proved correct tell us a little about that. Well, I'd say this because, as I'm sure you'll recall that in 2002, in the autumn of 2002, the British government produced a dossier which was supposed to be the case for war. And actually at the time, it was it was embargoed, but MPs got it a few hours earlier and Jeremy Corbyn was involved with us obviously from the beginning and we said to him will you go and get a copy and give us some idea of how you know how much evidence they've got and he phoned and said look. I've just had a quick look at it and really it's got very little in it it there's no firm evidence of any sort. This was the dossier that led to the infamous headline in the London newspaper even standard newspaper, which said, it can. Amsterdam can strike British interest in 45 minutes you know this idea. And so we absolutely refuted that from day one when Colin Powell just before the war happened in 2003 went to the UN had to cover up the picture of Picasso's Gernica. So we could, you know, we wouldn't perhaps associate it with another war and was and came out with all this supposed evidence again another say another dossier taken from a PhD thesis somewhere. So these sorts of things we were very, very systematic and not just us in Britain there were anti war campaigners around the world. There were former politicians diplomats and so on people like Hans von Sponek, people like Dennis Halliday who've been involved in all the procedures about about Iraq or people like Tony Ben like Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter these were all people who said there is no evidence for this so yes we were right but and I think on the basis of looking at the facts and saying, none of this is proven. And I think now when you look at the stories about Ukraine. What can you believe from what the American government or the British government, or any of the other governments that use their sources say it is just simply not credible to believe the sorts of stories that they've been putting out. And so I think we were right then we said that bombing of Libya would be a catastrophe. We said in Afghanistan. Nobody likes the Taliban. But if you do what you're going to do, you will create terrorism on a new scale and what do we find 20 years later you've got the Taliban back again. So, you know, I think on all of those if you look at any of the record of the anti war movement, compared to the mainstream politicians, there's really no contest and they only managed to maintain this one fiction that these wars have all been right because they are in control of the media the establishment, government sources and so on so they keep repeating it, even though lots of people know it's wrong and it's interesting in Britain that public opinion, which may change if things get worse but public opinion are quite is quite hostile to the idea of war, largely I think because they simply don't take this information at face value anymore. Washington Post 3rd of December 2021 published some very fuzzy looking aerial photographs saying that these are Russian troop movements. That gets magnified the next day and so on and so forth the drums of war begin to play the fog of war covers up our brains. Lindsay German, stop the war coalition. Thanks for joining us at People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. Thank you very much.