About the Biden Speech on the Cuba Missile Crisis
13.10.2022
U.S. President Biden said on 6 October, in a widely reported speech, while raising funds for his party, “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Biden and his audience all kept straight faces instead of laughing out loud as they should have, what with Biden accidentally exposing so deftly the reversed roles between the USA and Russia in Cuba and in Ukraine. The USA usually keeps this comparison hidden under a thick blanket of deafening silence.
Biden is talking about the President Kennedy’s response in 1962 following the USA’s failed Bay-of-Pigs coup-d’état the year before, when the sovereign state of Cuba then called on its ally from across the Atlantic, the Soviet union, for missiles to defend itself against its big American neighbour aggressor, the USA, and President Kennedy, Biden’s fellow Democrat, threatened Armageddon through nuclear war in response to this sending of missiles so provocatively near to its borders.
In 2022, exactly sixty years later, the present war in Ukraine is in response to the USA arming the sovereign state of Ukraine so that it can defend itself against its big neighbour aggressor, Russia, and it is the turn of President Putin of Russia to raise the spectre of nuclear war when armaments are supplied so near its borders. (There are two relevant differences: Firstly, Cuba is some 150 kilometres away from the US border, while Ukraine is 0 (zero) kilometres from the Russian border. Secondly the USA had, in fact, backed a far-right bloody coup-d’état in the Ukraine in 2014 ousting the elected President and leading to the war, and the USA had also backed the Batista military dictatorship from 1952-58 in Cuba that the revolution there, in fact, finally overthrew in 1958.)
What is shocking is not so much that Biden utters the words, “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” nor even that he and his bank-rollers do not laugh at the juxtaposition. What is shocking is that Western journalists do not mock the hell out of Biden for not seeing what hypocrisy the comparison exposes.
Western journalists fail to see, let alone point out, the absurd double-standards in Biden’s statement. Worse still, Western journalists refuse to see why so many third world countries (indeed over half the world’s population) do not support the US and NATO position on the war in Ukraine. It is simply because the reasons being furnished by the USA and its Western allies for criticizing Russia also apply to the USA in the Bay-of-Pigs and missile crisis, not to mention the US-UK illegal war on Iraq, in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to split this small state into six countries, and in NATO and the USA’s bombing of Afghanistan for 20 years for no credible reason whatsoever. And also that NATO, led by the USA, is encircling Russia and has been for years despite agreement with Gorbachev not to do so. These realities need to be acknowledged for the USA position not to be absurd to the point of provoking guffaws of laughter. For Mauritius, the USA-UK’s theft of part of Mauritius, the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia, makes all the American statements on Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, annexing the Crimea, all sound so hypocritical as to be a bit mad.
So, Biden’s speech, if the Western Media were not so totally brain-washed or brain-dead, could only be a joke – a joke in the darkest of humour and the worst of taste.
Except that Western Journalists are like the servile courtiers in the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. They pretend not to see what is staring them in the face: King Biden has taken off his clothes and is standing there naked in his suit made from invisible cloth.
Joe Biden has his imperialist “reason”, his “might is right” reason, to pretend he is wearing invisible clothes, as he spreads US propaganda – precisely because he is President of the country that is arms-supplier to Ukraine, and he is the real head of NATO, a military outfit that operates the puppet strings so ham-handedly on puppet, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, who jerks about for TV cameras as the USA pulls his strings. But, what is the possible extenuating factor for Western journalists not to point out this exact role-reversal 60 years later? Instead they pretend it is always the “other”, in both cases Russia, which is “in the wrong” – whichever role it plays.
To make Biden’s “joke” all the more sick, here is what President Zelensky said in the name of Ukraine, the very same day that Biden addressed his funders. He called for the USA or NATO to use a pre-emptive nuclear strike. He said this to the Lowy Institute in Australia in a video-call prepared speech, available in transcript: “… we need pre-emptive strikes, preventive actions, so that they’ll know what will happen to them if they use nukes, and not the other way around. … Don’t wait for Russia’s nuclear strikes, and then say, ‘Oh, since you did this, take that from us!’” Politico reports that the Ukrainian authorities quickly went into damage-control mode and blamed the interpreter for an initial translation of “pre-emptive strikes” instead of “pre-emptive actions” and said Zelensky was referring to actions like sanctions. The whole quotation does not quite make sense, if Zelensky were not calling for pre-emptive nuclear strikes. But let us accept his word.
Well, Biden is right that this is an Armageddon moment. It is an existential threat to the world, just as Kennedy’s threat of nuclear war was. And it took two to tango their way out of the Cuban missile crisis, and it will take two for the USA and Russia to tango their way out of the Ukraine crisis.
It seems, too cruel to be true, to all to depend upon how many Ukrainian lives the USA is prepared to sacrifice for the USA’s military stature – relative to Russia in the short run, and China in the long run. But, neither short-run nor long-run may exist. Nuclear war can see to that faster than even the impending climate change, what with fossil fuel consumption sky-rocketing as a result of the war.
Biden, in his speech added: “We are trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off ramp?” adding, “Where does he find a way out?” (NY Times).
What everyone else is trying to work out is both that question, and the other of the two-in-the-tango, the USA, “What is the USA’s off ramp? Where can it find a way out?” The Bay-of-Pigs followed by the Cuban Missile crisis reminds of the two it took to tango their way out of Armageddon then.
Just to be fair, it is worth recalling which countries in the world have, in fact, dropped nuclear bombs. And which countries have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations.
It is a list of one.
The USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, wiping out civilian populations when the war was already over.
LALIT
