By David Hill
Photos: People’s World\YouTube Screenshot
DAYTON, Ohio—As the NATO Parliamentary Assembly sat for its spring session here in the town where it promulgated its 1995 Dayton Accords, hundreds of protestors demonstrated against the ongoing expansion of its war plans..
A broad coalition of working people, environmentalists and peace activists gathered early Saturday morning on the grassy lawn of the Dayton Public Library, closed to the public for the day to accommodate the NATO meeting. Outside hundreds gathered to hear speeches from the leaders of the groups behind the protests, including Veterans for Peace, the Ohio Peace Council, the Ohio Nuclear Free Network, and the Communist Party USA.
Just next door, separated by 12-foot high portable security fencing and dozens of heavily armed police, representatives and staff of the 32-nation NATO alliance were contained within a multi-block security perimeter in the Oregon riverfront district of downtown Dayton. People looking out the windows of their nearby hotels looked out over the crowds.
As the peace forces gathered there NATO countries on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, with the backing of the U.S., were shipping troops, planes and missiles to posts in Eastern European countries that the U.S. promised at the end of the Cold War would never become part of NATO. The Soviet Union dismantled, as agreed, the Warsaw Pact which had been formed after World War II, to counter the war aims of NATO. The U.S., at the end of the Cold War, however, led a NATO push, contrary to what it had promised, eastward and into even states that were once part of the Soviet Union.
U.S. troops, under the cover of NATO, now maneuver regularly in places like Lithuania and Latvia, once part of the Soviet Union. Highways in Poland that run west to east are being widened and reinforced to accommodate NATO tanks that could use them in a future escalation of tensions with Russia.
NATO’s aiming for Russia is particularly dangerous because it, along with the U.S., possesses huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The current war in Ukraine is, in no small part, the result of NATO’s expansion up to the borders of Russia and its earlier plans to set up shop in Ukraine too….
