The Final, Splendid Achievement of the Late Theologian, David Ray Griffin: “America on the Brink”
Book Review
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Author of more than 50 books, Dr. David Ray Griffin has been compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King for his courage and dedication to seeking truth.
Griffin was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace prize, and was named in 2009 by the New Statesman as “one of the 50 people who matter today.”
His final book, a chilling yet deeply moving page-turner with over 500 references, recounts the history of US global domination strategies of “democracy promotion.”
A world-famous theologian, Griffin died in November, 2022, amidst media silence: As seen below, he was far too dangerous to be remembered in an obituary.
“America on the Brink,” which he completed from his death-bed, has now been published six months after his passing.
Its foreword, “In Homage,” by Princeton University Professor emeritus of international law, Dr. Richard Falk, refers to Griffin as “one of the most important thinkers and public intellectuals of our time.”
Falk suggests that the legacy media sadly ignored Griffin’s death because his worldwide stature as a theologian would have given credibility to his 12 scholarly books on 9/11.
One of these, “The New Pearl Harbor Revisited,” was named “pick of the week” by the leading-edge Publishers Weekly in 2008 (only 51 books a year receive this distinction. PW is widely read by most publishers, libraries, and bookstores.) Predictably, all other reviewers remained silent.
Now, while not overly long or complex, Griffin’s readable “America on the Brink” exposes, on one hand, the US propaganda crusades to “protect” sovereign democracies from imagined Communist threats. On the other hand, it reveals the deadly, secret US military coups that have killed untold numbers of civilians while remaining mostly in the shadows. The grisly 2002-03 Bush-Cheney tactics against Saddam Hussein in Iraq (who had been earlier financed by the US) are particularly abhorrent.
Worse was the systematic destruction of successful, bustling Libya in 2011, following the country’s nationalization of its oil industry and its development as a modern, educated nation. (Notably, Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s move towards a gold-backed currency would have weakened the US dollar.)
Not only was Gaddafi shot dead during the US/NATO involvement, but his national man-made irrigation river, which had given all of Libya self-sufficiency in agriculture, was obliterated.
Prior to 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of America as the single unipower, US regime-change operations had been limited to sovereign nations such as Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Panama, Vietnam, Greece, and Indonesia (each of which is summarized in this book).
But during negotiations after the fall of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact alliance, Russia stressed that a one-sided expansion of the surviving US-led NATO alliance would constitute a serious existential threat to Russia.
In response, the US promised in 1990 not to extend NATO “one inch eastward” than it was at that time.
However, by 1998, the US Senate had given approval to add Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO.
Griffin quotes the response of America’s top expert on Russia, historian and diplomat George F. Kennan:
“I think NATO expansion is the beginning of a new cold war…I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else…I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia…”
Heedlessly, however, the United States has sought over time, using Ukraine as its “torpedo,” to engineer regime change militarily via NATO (whose Supreme Commander has always been a 4-star US general) and US weapons:
- first, in the violent US-backed coup of 2014
- second, in an 8-year war on the two Russian-speaking Donbass republics, and
- third, in the US-provoked war of 2022-23.
The US Government/CIA/NATO have also funded and trained the Ukrainian right-wing extremist neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which carried out the tragic Odessa massacre in 2014.
In 2022, the US pledged to “move heaven and earth” to help Ukraine – yet there has been no diplomacy towards a goal of saving Ukrainian lives during a war in which “Ukraine does the dying; America does the supplying.”
Meanwhile, US-backed television-star-turned-President Volodymyr Zelensky has accumulated millions that are invested in the shadowy Pandora Papers financial system, and owns an 11-bedroom 3-storey mansion in South Florida.
Griffin reports that in March 2022, in a faux pas that made US news, President Biden publicly exclaimed about Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
It is clear from this evidence of regime change that the American aim has not been “to spare Ukraine, but to ruin Russia.”
Throughout all this, the US information warfare capability (for example, American reporters attending the staged propaganda Bucha massacre in 2022) is unmatched because it controls the Internet gatekeepers of content, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
Conversely, omission by Western media of the key causes of the Russian invasion has been likened to “describing a chessboard with only black pieces.”
The full truth can be found in the Global South, where 88% of the world’s population does not align with Washington on the Ukraine issue.
In summary, US unipolar strategy has attempted to run the world from one country, thereby sacrificing vision and support for a collaborative world in which small countries retain individuality and partnerships without interference.
Alternatively, in October 2022, President Putin referred to a “symphony of human civilization,” in which nobody thinks their sound is the best.
Cited independent Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone puts it best:
The strongest argument for a multipolar world is that maintaining a unipolar one necessarily requires endless violence and continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship. It is literally unsustainable. There’s no valid reason nations can’t just get along and collaborate toward the greater good of humanity without one of them trying to dominate the others. The unipolarist impulse to rule the earth stops this peaceful and collaborative world from emerging. There is no “Pax Americana.” Unipolarism is the opposite of peace.”
Griffin concludes:
“The true story about Ukraine is so terrible that every effort has been made to try to block every avenue of truth which would enable most Americans to see the falsity of Biden’s claims. In short, the American government is resorting to fascism to defend democracy.”
This book review only scratches the surface of the US atrocities abroad that are revealed in Griffin’s final work – about which most Americans (if they were allowed to know about them) would hang their heads in shame.
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Elizabeth Woodworth is highly engaged in climate change science and activism. She has published 42 articles on Global Research, is co-author of “Unprecedented Climate Mobilization”, “Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival,” and co-producer of the COP21 video “A Climate Revolution For All.” She is author of the popular handbook on nuclear weapons activism, “What Can I Do?” and the novel, “The November Deep”. For 25 years, she served as head medical librarian for the BC Government. She holds a BA from Queen’s and a Library Sciences Degree from UBC.
She is a regular contributor to Global Research.
America on the Brink: How US Foreign Policy Led to the War in Ukraine
By David Ray Griffin
Publisher: Clarity Press (May 20, 2023)
Paperback: 271 pages
ISBN-10: 1949762726
ISBN-13: 978-1949762723
The American government, through its media, has convinced most Americans to support the Ukrainian government. This books shows why this is a mistake: The United States promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward”; and there had been ample warnings, by George Kennan and others, that moving NATO eastward, especially moving into Georgia and Ukraine, would cause problems for Russia.
In Ukraine prior to 2014, Ukrainian and Russian speakers were coexisting tolerably well. But in 2013 and 2014, neocons in Obama’s administration engineered a coup, with help from neo-Nazis, turning Ukraine into a Russia-hating nation. The war in Ukraine began that year (not in 2022, when Russia attacked in order to protect the Russian-speaking regions under attack by the new coup government in Kiev).
Although this book is primarily about the war in Ukraine, it also shows how, in one sense, the war in Ukraine is simply one more instance in the trajectory of American imperialism. as illustrated by previous US interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, Greece, Dominican Republic, Panama and Iraq.
In another sense, this war reveals just how committed America is to maintaining a unipolar world order: Because this war illustrates that America is willing to threaten nuclear holocaust. it is almost as if people in the U.S. State Department and military believe that life is not worth living unless the US can control the world.
