Ellsberg remembered for Vietnam, Ukraine warnings

The day after Daniel Ellsberg died, commentators everywhere are remembering him and his warnings against war in Vietnam – and Ukraine.

Ellsberg dropped a bomb before he died

Twitter user Thomas Fazi dropped this brief thread yesterday morning, containing a collage of extended obituaries for Daniel Ellsberg.

The most provocative revelation in that thread – with which Fazi led – was that Ellsberg believed the Washington establishment deliberately provoked Russian intervention in Ukraine. In a June 4 interview with Politico magazine, Ellsberg explained that premise, and much else. His main thrust is that the United States, through its dominance of NATO, runs a “covert empire” worldwide. Expanding NATO membership toward the Russian border was the method of provoking Putin. In fact he effectively said Americans are never the “good guys” beyond American territorial borders. Ellsberg also accused mainstream media of “allowing government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold,” according to Politico.

It may or may not be significant that neither Ellsberg nor Fazi mentioned the name of Donald J. Trump.

Fazi linked to five other extended obituaries of Ellsberg, by:

• Glenn Greenwald at Rolling Stone,
• Ellsberg’s son Roger (and Chris Zimmermann) at Plough,
• Trevor Timm at the Freedom of the Press Foundation,
• Chip Gibbons at Jacobin, and
• Norman Solomon at The Intercept.

All these articles follow a common theme: that America is running an empire, that America never has casus belli beyond its borders,and that American citizens have the duty to take it down. Trump bears mention once – when Roger Ellsberg recalls that his father greeted Trump’s election with despair.

Subject of debate

Nevertheless the Fazi thread provoked an apparently healthy debate. Most (but not all) users agreed with Fazi’s tease-out from Politico: that the American government did provoke the Ukraine war. One user commented on something Ellsberg and his eulogists missed:

Another user reminded everyone that Gore Vidal predicted in 1997 that NATO would provoke Russia: