I remember learning this kind of thing in Junior High School, it was called "MAIN": Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism. It was great to make a single word for this, as they are not separate things. For example, one doesn't have Alliances without Militarism, and Alliances only operate effectively through Imperialism. Alliances virtually always operate as a combination of Imperial states and Vassal states. The Vassal states seek 'protection' and the Imperial states seek expansion. They go hand in hand. (There is actually no military form of 'protection' from war. Foreign bases or even weapons are automatically international targets. There is no greater strength than from weakness, and no greater weakness than from strength. The safest man goes without weapons, and without need of them.)
In virtually every conflict, it is virtually impossible to determine who "is in the right." Every "war crime" has a precedent, and every precedent has a precedent. Who is in the wrong depends entirely on which facts are highlighted and which are excluded, including especially when to start counting.
(There's a fabulous cartoon which expresses this thought perfectly, showing two sides that look identical, but the 'terrorists' of one side are the 'freedom fighters' of the other, etc)
Every side to a conflict quickly convinces itself of its own righteousness, and the evil of the other side.
And so it now appears leaders and most subjects in the West believe that Russia is the most Evil of All for Invading Ukraine and starting this latest hot phase of World War 3. It was wrong, they say, for Russia not to honor the 'sovereignty' of Ukraine to choose which alliance (ie, murderous gang) to be a part of.
But to do this, they must discredit US involvement in the Maidan Revolution. If it is true, as I believe, that the US was involved in creating this Revolution, which was actually a Coup...how was that respecting 'Ukrainian Sovereignty.'
I prefer to go back much farther, to at least the beginning of when the US started protecting and funding 'Ukrainian Nationalists' (either terrorists or freedom fighters depending on your POV...and there's that Nationalism word too) at the end of World War 2. That was an example of strategic meddling (ie warmongering) which the US has done continuously since that time if not long before.
Or one could even go back to the Russian Civil War, when the West also allied with Ukrainians to fight Russia.
There should be no doubt that the Hegemonic Western Empire, led by the USA since the end of World War 2, is the most Evil Empire the world has ever seen, and unarguably in this time frame. The incredibly long list of coups and wars and people killed is almost mind boggling. Just to list a few
Atomic Weapons used on Japan
Korean War
Vietnam War
Invasion of Panama
Invasion of Iraq
Invasion of Afghanistan
Destruction of Libya
War on Syria
Coup of Iran
Coup of Guatemala
Coup of Chile
Coup of Honduras
(I've seen 83 such successful regime change operations listed, and that's not counting all the unsuccessful ones, like the Tiananmen Square attempted Color Revolution, and the more recent attempted Color Revolution in Hong Kong.)
But US war cheerleaders like Lawrence Tribe or Timothy Snyder either ignore all this or bogusly explain it away.
Most often, what we get from western warmongers--virtually the entire establishment government, media, and corporations, as well as most but not all of the people--is de facto racism of the kind "Russians are brutal," or "Chinese have no concept of individual soul." Not the least bit of self reflection or contextualization. No thought of how, for example, the US conducted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or on what even more flimsy pretexts.
The latter set of imperial US invasions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria) were actually NATO wars, disproving the claim that NATO is a peace keeping alliance.
Furthermore, they involved non-aligned countries specifically because of their friendliness and geographic proximity to Russia! In other words, as is also clear in official policy documents, the US has been Dominating the world, and doing so very much like a mob boss, by wiping out the friends of its potential rivals. A particularly psychopathic mob boss like the world has never seen before.
When the friends and other countries adjacent to a rival are acquired, the next step is to fill them with bases pointing offensive weapons at Russia.
Whenever this cut too close to the bone, aggravating long settled Russian speaking peoples, Russia has tended to respond, eventually. And so we come to Ukraine, which has regions which were part of Russia for hundreds of years, until recently, until the 1991 'dissolution' of USSR which was long sought and ultimately supported by the USA. And that's very sensitive to Russia, because those regions filled with Russian speakers are very close to Moscow as well.
The right and peaceful thing to do is never ever meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. And if that fails, never become involved in the wars of other countries. The only country honorably worthy of fighting for is one's own (and perhaps not that one, either--if you think the other guys might run it better--by definition it is for the people of any country to decide how hard it is worth fighting for--states have no metaphysical 'right' to exist independent of the people within and affected by them).
The moment you are fighting for someone else's country, is the moment you have become part of an evil empire (if not the head of the snake).
This is what happened in WW2. In successfully destroying murderous imperialism in Europe--with the heavy lifting being done by USSR who was actually fighting for their own country, the US became the primary murderous empire of the world, virtually taking the place of Nazi Germany if not improving on it, just with a slightly different cast of villains, though starting with Communists, which were the first and primary villains of Nazis too! (They mainly hated Jews because they associated ethnic Jews, like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin--who were actually atheists, with Communism. It was Communism that was the root of all evil, as explained by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf.)
A good peacemaking person should be an apologist for foreign countries, contextualizing (context is a key part of the whole truth) their excesses, and a critic of one's own in an attempt to make it better (I explained the Ethics of this 2 years ago...which is the same as the ethics described by Jesus Christ...and in fact demanded by the 9th Commandment). Highlighting the excesses of other countries (even if they didn't pale in comparison to one's own) is soft warmongering.
NATO is the root cause of World War 3 and it must be abolished.
Here is Glenn Greenwald making a similar point on Twitter/SystemUpdate. (Sadly I'm not sure his really good tweets like this one get as many likes as his bad ones like I dissed yesterday, so I'm trying to help. And no, I don't find that if someone gets some things right and other things wrong that means they are always wrong and I'm just not understanding fully. Entropy itself predicts people will get some things right and other things wrong.)
*This is not the usual argument for WW2, although sometimes westerners mention specific agreements I'm not going to dwell on now. But from fairly early on, behind the scenes, FDR was telling foreign leaders that he would find a way to give them US support. He was telling them not to negotiate with Hitler. Therefore, contrary to the usual description of WW2, as based on German aggression, it was primarily expanded by US offers of military help (aka Alliance). As far as we know, it might have been settled by restoring a few small regions of German speaking peoples, which had been removed by the very unfair Treaty of Versailles, to German possession. Ah, but states have rights, some would say, guaranteed by this or that, blah, blah. The states, that is, that we created in our last victory or coup.
Coup is also what I consider the 1991 Soviet Union 'dissolution' as well--Yeltsin had help, and Gorbachev's effort to hold the SU together was thereby undermined.
The ground is littered by our dead corpses in the tens of millions and our toxic munitions and our toxic geopolitical legacies. We would do best, and be lucky to just walk away from it all. More and more is only the greater tragedy.
What is to keep the worst aggressors from keeping on aggressing? Well, we should look ourselves in the mirror to answer that question. The answer is, in the long run, it costs too much.
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