Noam Chomsky has no truck with those who would explain away the brutality of the war in Ukraine, but he does warn that there only two outcomes of the seven-week conflict.
"One possibility is to move on to facilitate the destruction of Ukraine and possibly a nuclear war," Prof Chomsky told The National. "That's one possibility.
"So when you read a headline in a main journal in the United States calling for Russia delenda est (we must destroy Russia), what that is saying is I want to kill everybody in Ukraine and I want to move on to a nuclear war which will end human life on Earth.
"The other possibility is to abandon that stance to move in the direction that [French President] Emmanuel Macron was moving towards in his abortive discussions with [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin."
The phrase "Russia delenda est" is an echo of Cato the Elder's formula that declared Carthage must be destroyed to stop the enemies of Rome and was indeed published in recent weeks in Washington publications.
It is not an irony that it was updated by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy in 1899, in a famous attack on militarism and promotion of pacifism by the writer of the epic War and Peace.
For Prof Chomsky, 93, whose father was born in what is now Ukraine (his mother was born in what is now Belarus), the obvious path forward has been well promoted as an alternative to the Cold War settlement for more than 15 years.
To give Mr Putin the kind of security landscape he seeks for Russia avoids a bleak escalatory pathway with a country that has an enormous nuclear arsenal."Now that kind of settlement will be ugly," he said. "That's a fact. It will have to offer President Putin some kind of escape hatch.
"If it doesn't offer an escape hatch then, when the hard men in Moscow have their backs to the wall and are told there's nothing left for you, the only choice for them is to use all their power.
"So the settlement will have to have an escape hatch. And everyone knows pretty much what it is.
"It will have to be a settlement that agrees on the neutralisation of Ukraine and some diplomatic finesse to put aside for the time being the status of Donbas and Crimea to be negotiated at a later stage, and a ceasefire and withdrawal of troops.
"That's basically the framework and it's understood out of all sides."
Read More : https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/uk-news/2022/04/08/noam-chomskys-nuclear-war-fear-fight-to-last-ukrainian-or-choose-macrons-dialogue-path/
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