Glenn Greenwald: It’s Toxic to Demonize Corbyn as Russia ‘Collaborator’ for Opposing Belligerence

Jeremy Corbyn, speaking at an anti-drones rally in 2013. (stopwar.org.uk / CC BY-SA 3.0)

In response to Jeremy Corbyn’s call for the “de-militarisation of the border” between NATO countries and Russia, critics have dismissed the U.K. Labour Party leader as a traitor. Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald explains why these accusations by what he calls the new “Cold Warriors” can be extremely dangerous when talking about several nuclear-armed powers.

From The Intercept:

Along with the U.S., the UK has been rapidly building up its military presence in the Baltic region, including states which border Russia, and is now about to send another 800 troops to Estonia, 500 of which will be permanently based.

In response, Russia has moved its own troops within its country near those borders, causing serious military tensions to rise among multiple nuclear-armed powers. Throughout 2016, the Russian and U.S. militaries have engaged in increasingly provocative and aggressive maneuvers against one another. This week, the U.S. began deploying 4,000 troops to Poland, “the biggest deployment of US troops in Europe since the end of the cold war.” … The compelling justifications for Corbyn’s concerns about NATO/Russia tensions are self-evident. The U.S. and Russia have massive arsenals of nuclear weapons. As Lawrence Krauss detailed in the New Yorker in October, the two countries have come horrendously close to full-on, earth-destroying nuclear war on several occasions in the past, and the systems they still maintain are conducive to apocalyptic error through miscommunication and misperception, let alone direct military confrontation. … It is not hyperbole to say that perhaps nothing is more reckless, more dangerous, than ratcheting up tensions between these two countries. That’s what makes it so repellent and toxic to demonize those such as Corbyn as “collaborators” or traitors merely because they oppose this escalation and belligerence. But this is the script that – once again – is quickly becoming mainstream orthodoxy in both Washington and London.

Let us, for a moment, imagine if this framework were applied consistently rather than manipulatively. Democrats have been alarmed – rightfully so – by the preliminary belligerence of Trump and his top aides toward nuclear-armed China: accepting a call from Taiwan’s president, openly questioning the decades-old “One China” policy, suggesting the U.S. would militarily intervene to prevent Chinese control over nearby uninhabited islands (the latter was also suggested by the current head of the U.S. Pacific fleet).

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— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata