Mr. Gleason’s letter in the March 7th Addison Independent regarding U.S. support of the elimination of the Palestinian people from their traditional homeland was a poignant reminder of our complicity in the majority of death and suffering going on in the world today, including Ukraine. 

What Independent editorials have consistently failed to acknowledge is how U.S. policy has provoked and maintained the violence. In Ukraine it started when our government worked to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into the eastern bloc countries, even though President Reagan promised that we wouldn’t do so if Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union. Things in Ukraine escalated dramatically when Russian eavesdropping recorded a conversation between U.S. and European officials gloating over how well U.S. manipulation of Ukraine’s presidential election was going. This resulted in Russia invading Ukraine and occupying Crimea in 2014 to create a land barrier between the new U.S. puppet government in Ukraine and the Russian border. 

The recent full scale Russian invasion and war in Ukraine came about primarily because the Trump and Biden administrations both began pushing hard to make Ukraine a NATO member nation. U.S. diplomats informed the administration that NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line for Russia, so our support for it appears to be primarily because America wants to weaken Russia while letting the Ukrainian people do most of the dying and suffering. 

For those who may not realize it, NATO is a military alliance whose stated enemy is Russia. NATO membership allows the U.S. to participate militarily in conflicts involving NATO members and even station nuclear weapons in NATO countries. For those who believe that Russia should be content with such a prospect just consider how much the island nation of Cuba has suffered from over 70 years of U.S. economic sanctions (economic warfare) and a failed invasion attempt by the CIA when the former Soviet Union attempted to set up a military base and deploy nuclear missiles on the island.

Over 70 years ago Dr. Martin Luther King noted that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own government, and this remains true to this day. How long will we remain silent and fail to heed President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial-congressional complex that seeks to enrich and empower itself off the death and suffering of our fellow man?

The Addison Independent fails its readership when it publishes editorials that fail to fully educate and instead parrots U.S. government propaganda. Propaganda designed to mislead the American public and suppress opposition to spending obscene amounts of taxpayer dollars on death, destruction, and terrorism rather than education, health care, food, housing, and the critical infrastructure we will need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and prevent the end of organized human existence.  

Ross Conrad

Middlebury