75 years ago this week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded. It emerged in the wake of some of the most turbulent events in human history.
The Soviet Union lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazi Germany. China lost over 20 million in a much longer war against the Japanese empire. The British had been blitzed; their colonies starved, partitioned, and abandoned. Europe was in ruins.
The United States, on the other hand, emerged economically stronger and, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shielded by the terrible power of the atom. It moved quickly to apply its newfound power to a project of global hegemony. “Preponderant power must be the object of US policy,” a State Department memo said in 1947.
NATO was a critical piece of that puzzle — founded on 4 April 1949 with the explicit mission of “deterring Soviet expansionism” and establishing a permanent “North American presence on the [European] continent.”
NATO insists that it is a force for democracy. But, from its inception, it has armed, protected, and elevated some of the most reactionary forces in European society. António Salazar's brutal Estado Novo regime in Portugal was a founding member of NATO — and remained a core member until it was toppled in 1974. Adolf Heusinger, a senior Nazi officer and close ally of Hitler wanted by the Soviet Union for war crimes, would become Chairman of its Military Committee.
NATO insists that it is a guarantor of freedom. But we do not have to look far back to find its fingerprints in attempts to crush popular aspirations for sovereignty. Pointing at NATO’s support of the Salazar regime and his colonial wars in Africa, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru condemned the Alliance at the 1955 Bandung Conference, calling it “one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism”. Indeed, every founding member of NATO was a major colonial power. And, by the 1960s, there were over a dozen NATO bases in North Africa — including a nuclear testing site.
NATO insists that it is a defensive alliance. But through the course of its history, NATO has destroyed and dismantled entire states. According to research carried out by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, the post-9/11 wars that have been imposed on the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia have claimed 4.5 million lives, and forced tens of millions into poverty and involuntary migration.
Now NATO is going global. Its recent Strategic Concept referred to Africa and the Middle East as its “southern neighborhood”. And, at its 2023 Summit in Vilnius, NATO issued a communiqué that doubled down on the organisation’s strategic posture outlined previously: China’s “stated ambitions… challenge [NATO] interests, security and values” necessitating a NATO pivot from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
As NATO’s expanding ambitions raise tensions to boiling point on several fronts, it has become imperative to challenge its violent mission and dismantle the war machine.
That’s why this week, the Progressive International worked with partners around the world to call for a global day of action on NATO’s 75th birthday. Over the past week, activists in six countries — US, Germany, Belgium, the UK, Italy and Colombia — took a range of actions to challenge NATO and break through its propaganda.
Last month, we produced, alongside Jacobin magazine and Abby Martin, a video on the history of NATO. Please watch and share it here.
For Turkey’s 2023 elections, the Progressive International dispatched an electoral observer mission to the Kurdish-majority city Van to monitor threats to the democratic process. The delegation met the former co-mayor of Van, Mustafa Avcı. Avcı was democratically elected in 2019, but was detained and replaced — along with the entire Van municipal council — by a state-appointed trustee without investigation or justification. In municipal elections held on 31 March, the city’s progressive forces won once more. And once more, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to disqualify an elected co-mayor.
Following mobilisation by the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), the Supreme Election Council (YSK) ruled in favour of Van co-Mayor Abdullah Zeydan, granting him his mandate.
26 trade unions and 42 civil society organisations and movements came together in a joint statement rejecting the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) phoney consultation process. The groups are understandably concerned by the stringent conditionalities the current IMF-Sri Lanka agreement places on the South Asian country. They argue that much of Sri Lanka’s debt is odious and, therefore, illegitimate. There has been no willingness by the IMF to seriously consider this and the other critical issues raised by civil society. Read their full statement here.
Art of the Week: The Spanish Civil War politicised Picasso, which led him to painting the famed depiction of Guernica — the Basque town decimated by German bombers. Subsequently the artist himself became a symbol of antifascism, and in 1944, he joined the Communist Party stating: “these years of terrible oppression have shown me that I must fight not only through my art, but with all of myself”.
Early in 1949, the year NATO was founded, Picasso created a lithograph of a Dove for the inaugural World Peace Congress. The image became known as the Dove of Peace and was recurrent motif in his work until his death in 1973. During the artist’s lifetime, the Soviet government twice honoured him with their national peace prize, and posthumously, in 1981, the Dove was included on a stamp alongside his portrait.
In the same letter published by L’Humanité in 1944 Picasso spoke of the liberation he felt having joined the Communist Party: “How could I have hesitated? For fear of committing myself? But on the contrary I have never felt freer, more complete!”
