LETTER: Neither anti-American nor pro-Putin

May I suggest that Dr Lucas Ntyintyane do some rudimentary fact-checking before smearing both World Beyond War and myself as anti-American and pro-Putin? (” Twisting history is still a lie”, February 28). 

The use of war by states was outlawed by the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact (officially the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy), which is still binding on its signatories and which included SA, the USSR, the UK and the US. 

Many of its provisions were incorporated into the 1945 UN Charter which, sadly, both the US and UK regularly flout in pursuit of US military and financial hegemony over the entire world. 

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, then-US secretary of state James Baker in 1990 assured both Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl that  Nato “would not shift one inch eastward”. Yet again, US commitments — whether with Russia or Iran or numerous other countries — have repeatedly proved worthless.

Nato’s annual war spending is $1.2-trillion; Russia’s is $61bn (that’s just 5% of Nato’s). More than 50% of the US federal government budget is now spent on war preparations and the continuing financial costs of past wars. It is glaringly obvious which is the greater threat to global peace. 

The US and then vice-president Joe Biden recklessly provoked Vladimir Putin by orchestrating the 2014 Maidan regime change, and the removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected, albeit pro-Russian, president. Crimea’s secession from Ukraine was just one of many unanticipated blowbacks. 

Now we have further secessions from Ukraine of the Donbas region, including the loss of Ukraine’s main port, Mariupol.   Were Ukraine to join Nato the consequences would probably include US military bases and even nuclear weapons. 

Perhaps Ntyintyane recalls that the US was apoplectic in 1961 when the Soviet Union shipped missiles to Cuba following the Bay of Pigs fiasco? As the World Beyond War website confirms, the organisation is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is against war in all its manifestations. 

And so am I. Incidentally, I came to SA during the 1960s as an American university student to study apartheid. I had every intention of returning permanently to the US.  Instead, I married a South African. I relinquished my US citizenship to become involved in the anti-apartheid movement and my wife, Lavinia, subsequently became Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s executive assistant for 22 years, from 1986 until 2008. 

With Archbishop Tutu and Dr Beyers Naudé I launched the New York banking sanctions campaign in October 1985 as a last nonviolent initiative to avert a civil war and racial bloodbath in SA. We targeted the seven major New York banks that comprised the New York interbank payment system.

By 1989, even US president George Bush (snr) and the IMF supported the initiative. As banking sanctions took effect,  the UN in September 1989 set June 30 1990 as the deadline to abolish apartheid. 

Business Day excoriated me at the time, declaring that I must have “lost my marbles” if I really thought apartheid would collapse by June 1990. However, president FW de Klerk “saw the writing on the wall”, and his statement of February 2 1990 followed.  President Nelson Mandela subsequently acknowledged that the New York banking sanctions campaign was the single-most effective strategy against apartheid.

The ANC was still asleep in Lusaka, dreaming of the armed struggle, which would have been suicidal. The New York banking sanctions campaign against apartheid is nonetheless the only instance where sanctions have achieved their objective. 

The US is addicted to the use of sanctions, none of which — from Cuba to Iran, from North Korea to Venezuela — have achieved their purpose, but have had devastating economic consequences for the middle and working classes. 

Since time began, wars have been a strategy by the already rich and powerful to steal from the poor. Not only are the US and its Nato sycophants pouring more weapons into Ukraine, but the Swift and other financial sanctions imposed against Russia will backfire. 

Europe depends on Russia for 40% of its energy needs. The EU economy will collapse, and the imposition of Swift sanctions is likely to accelerate the collapse the US dollar and its role as the world’s reserve currency.

We must hope and pray that the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine now under way will quickly put an end to this madness, including the obsessions of the war business to impose US military and financial hegemony on the entire world (including Africa). 

After 20 years of senseless “forever wars”, Americans have no stomach for still more wars. The Democrats are likely to lose the upcoming November elections, and Donald Trump may even be re-elected in 2024.  May God save America and the world from presidents that are either war criminals or lunatics!

Terry Crawford-Browne
World Beyond War SA

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.​