A Real Movement for Peace: The Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter Light the Way. By Peter J. Nickitas
By Peter J. Nickitas,
with deference to historian and son of Anti-Fascist struggle, Anton Chaitkin
My father’s Random House Dictionary included the Four Freedoms in the frontispiece: “Freedom of Speech”; “Freedom of Worship”; “Freedom from Fear”; and “Freedom from Want”. The Four Freedoms became the Atlantic Charter four months before Pearl Harbor and two months after the Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union. Declaring World War II as the War of the Four Freedoms, the United States supplied millions of tons of Lend-Lease materiel and sacrificed 322,000 American GI’s, while the Soviet Union destroyed the Fascist war machine at the cost of more than twenty-seven million lives of soldiers and civilians.
The Four Freedoms became part of the fabric of the nation, an indispensable lesson in civics, and the inspiration for four Norman Rockwell paintings with the title of each freedom. They declare, “Who we are and why we fight”---“self-evident truths” from the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Four Freedoms require self-determined peoples in sovereign nations to practice mutual respect, goodwill, and neighborliness, not humiliation, exploitation, enslavement, or extermination. The Four Freedoms bring prosperity and peace -- not merely an absence or cessation of war. They are relevant today in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine.
A. Ukraine:
Historically, Russia has been a friend of the United States. The United States supported Russia in the Crimean War of 1853-56 against the British, French, and Ottoman Empires. Russia’s Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 before Abraham Lincoln became President. The Tsar made the moral opening which Lincoln took in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, after the Union victory at Antietam. Of all European nations, only Russia supported the United States; Russia, acting out of her own self-interest, put her Northern Fleet off the American Atlantic Coast, and her Pacific Fleet off California, with winter quarters in San Francisco, in 1863-1864, and kept the British and French Empires from running the blockade. After 1876, Russia built her Trans-Siberian Railway with American engineers and Baldwin locomotives from Philadelphia, to strengthen herself as a productive, self-determined nation. Russia stood as an American ally in World War I and II.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 changed matters radically. Bolshevik Communism clashed with the self-determined, nation-state American System of Hamilton, Lincoln, McKinley, (and later FDR). Communism waged world revolution against nation-states which responded to their respective peoples’ needs and rights to more productive lives. Anti-communism from the outset waged a false war against communism since President Wilson’s misbegotten invasion of Russia in 1919 because, like communists, they wanted to wreck nation-states, yet instead of ruling through the Comintern or Politburo in Moscow, rule over elected rulers with unelected rulers in the City of London, Wall Street, and globetrotting banks.
Draw a line from Wall Street Fascists Allen and John Foster Dulles through the Third Reich, through genocidal Stepan Bandera, back through the “Anti-Communist” Dulles Brothers, through NATO, through neoliberals and neoconservatives alike who pushed NATO onto Russia’s borders after 1991, and the line comes to the brink of World War III, with United States arming, training, and financing the immoral Ukrainian descendants of the Third Reich and Bandera.
Russia wants to exercise her right to live free from fear and to determine her own way to make her nation productive. Every Soviet leader from Stalin to Gorbachev confirmed the simple principle: no more Stalingrads, no more Leningrad sieges, and no more world wars. The post-Stalin Soviet Union applied for NATO membership in 1954, to create a zone of collective European security at no nation’s expense.[1] The Dulles crowd in the United States and Churchillian Empire lovers in Britain, seeking to keep Britain influential, Germany down, Russia out, and the United States invested in dominion over Europe, rejected the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union responded with the Warsaw Pact of 1955. President Yeltsin, in spite of his limitations, passed the baton to President Putin with one request: protect Russia.
The Four Freedoms remain relevant. Since he took office in 2000, President Putin has sought freedom from fear at no other nation’s expense. He said so in Munich in 2007, while remarking on the United States’ and Western allies trial of broken promises not to move NATO “one inch east” and rejecting Russia’s post-2000 application to join NATO. Recent disclosures from the U.S. National Archives confirmed the promise made and broken[2]. In 2008, Georgia broke the peace in South Ossetia, killing Russian peacekeepers. Russia defeated Georgia in a short conflict – and did not reoccupy that former Soviet republic. Russia agreed to the Minsk peace agreements in 2014 and 2015 in good faith, only to see former government heads of erstwhile Western “partners” declare the agreements to be frauds in order to buy time for the 2014 Ukraine Maidan Junta.
After the start of the Special Military Operation in 2022, in support of the independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk which then requested aid and assistance against Ukrainian aggression, Russia agreed a peace treaty with assurance of Ukrainian neutrality, no NATO alliance, and semi-autonomy of Donetsk and Lugansk. Who broke the deal? Ukraine broke the deal, with the aid and comfort of the United States, the United Kingdom, and NATO, with ex-Prime Minister Johnson as the headlining saboteur. The bill is now coming due after the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack.
The sanctions since 2014, intended to cripple Russia and oust President Putin, have backfired. Russia increased her self-sufficiency, found strategic allies and commercial partners in China, Iran, and Asia, and now outproduces the West in armaments. Russia is gaining freedom from fear; notwithstanding Orwellian Western Ministries of Truth, Russia is prevailing over Ukraine in a conflict that is threatening to become a full-scale war. Developing her own farming and manufacturing industries while de-dollarizing, Russia is finding freedom from want, in spite of the United States’ and NATO’s schemes. Russia wants the Four Freedoms like any self-determining sovereign nation.
The war in Ukraine threatens World War Three with a direct confrontation between the United States, American firms tied to the core British imperial leadership, including banks, munitions, pharmaceutical, and agricultural corporations, against Russia. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy spoke of his fellow American veterans of World War Two who were “tempered by war [and] disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” Now, Kennedy’s phrase describes Russia, not the United States, and the United States is pressing war upon her.
B. Palestine and Israel: Freedoms from Fear and Want Are the Keys
Then there is the war in Israel-Palestine. The war in Israel-Palestine, with the most recent chapter commencing on 7 October 2023, stands as the mere tip of a spear with World War Three’s name on it.
The British Empire, not the United States, laid the foundation for modern Israel, taking land from the Ottoman Empire with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, calling the land Transjordan, separating it once again into Transjordan and the Mandate of Palestine in 1920, and setting it up as the prospective Seventh Dominion of the Empire.
By 1948, the Four Freedoms held little sway amongst the heads of governments of the United States and Britain. President Truman, by his own admission, saw himself as a new Cyrus who ended the Jewish exile. Individuals more loyal to Empire and loathing of self-determining Arab nations precipitated the Suez Crisis of 1956, ending in a humiliating retreat from Sinai, international scorn for Israel, and the most serious breach in American-British relations since 1865.
Israel has nuclear weapons; up to three hundred, according to some, in spite of Tel Aviv’s vehement ambiguity. As described by legendary reporter Seymour Hersh, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has the Samson Option to destroy her neighbors in nuclear fire, just as blinded Samson brought the temple down on himself and his enemies. Why did Israel, from Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, beg, borrow, and steal her way into the Nuclear Club? Why does any nation, after Hiroshima, covet atomic bombs? To be free from fear of nuclear attack.
In Israel-Palestine, the United States arms, finances, and supports the government of Israel in its disproportionate aggression and genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice finds a plausible case for genocide against Israel. The United States abstains on the UN Security Council’s cease-fire resolution of 25 March 2024. The descendants of the founders of the State of Israel and their fellow travelers in the foul fecklessness of fascism govern Israel today.
The current American administration reveals the schizophrenic policies that bring death and destruction in spite of the Four Freedoms. In 1986, then-Senator Joe Biden declared that, if Israel did not exist the United States would have to create it, as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Middle East. His administration arms Israel and enables the Gaza Genocide. On the other hand, in 1987 Biden introduced legislation that implemented the Genocide Convention into American law; President Reagan signed the legislation in 1988.
Israel lives the deadly schizophrenia of two traditions that have defined it since Moses’ leadership of the Children of Israel from Egypt, past the peak of Mount Sinai, and culminating in the long, forty-year walk to freedom. On one hand are the blessings of light, truth, the Law, and freedom from fear, teaching that a good and loving Creator created all peoples in the Divine Image. A Polish-born, Jewish-American lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, actually coined the term “genocide” to describe the Nazi mass murder of Jews, setting up the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. On the other hand is fear—fear that we cannot live in God’s ways; that we cannot see the mountaintop clearly; and that we cannot believe God created the peoples who pursue us. We must live now and do it to them before they do it to us. As Tom Lehrer sang of Israel in “Who’s Next”, “The Lord is our Shepherd, says the Psalm, but just in case… we better get a bomb!”
The non-Jewish peoples of Israel-Palestine live to be free from fear and free from want. Palestine has the potential for net energy exports with the vast hydrocarbon field beneath the Mediterranean in Gaza’s territorial waters. Israel’s Gaza genocide marks the most recent action in a twenty five-year project to deny these resources to Palestine.
Living on a fraction of the land they held before World War Two, their fears are exponentially greater today than 1939, when a 22 year old visiting college student named John F. Kennedy wrote his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.[3], and described a scene all-too familiar today: that non-Jewish dwellers of Palestine feared incoming Jewish settlers with advanced agriculture and capital; that the British occupiers broke promises to Jews and Arabs alike to keep their access to Iraqi oil flowing to the port of Haifa; that Jewish settlers sabotaged the telephone and electricity systems and then telephoned the British Mandate authorities to complain; and that the best solution, after exhaustion of all good faith efforts, would be an externally imposed partition.
Israel is bringing the world to the brink of biblical nuclear Armageddon with the genocide in Gaza, attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, and the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Russia, which has the consent of Syria to place military forces in the country to assist Syria’s defense, has sensors at the edge of the Golan Heights. Russia has not forgotten Israel’s role in the downing of the IL-20 in 2018 over Syria. China rebuked Israel in the UN as a nation who suffered losses of life in the American attack on her Belgrade embassy in 1999.
The United Kingdom, in spite of her imperial support of Israel, castigated Israel for causing the death of British subjects amongst the seven recently murdered Gaza aid workers. Senator Chuck Schumer recently delivered the first speech by a powerful Jewish-American public official that called for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s exit, and did not reject, as an abomination, a transition from Israel to a secular nation embracing Jews and Palestinians.
What will mitigate freedom from fear and freedom from want for Israel and non-Jewish Palestine? First, pay Israel not to produce nuclear weapons, by international investment in common interest development programs for all the Eastern Mediterranean peoples. Then open Israel up to inspection by the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France – five of the nine nuclear powers and all the permanent UN Security Council members. The United States cannot afford it all by herself; she needs Russia and China to help foot the bill and win the trust of the rest of the world. The U.S. may save money not spent in repeatedly arming and enabling Israel.
Breaches of the deal by Israel will come with sanctions that ostracize and exile the government of Israel from the family of nations. The peoples of the world continue to be blessed by the biblical people of Israel; they do not need to be cursed by the Israeli government. The UN Security Council and Germany made the same deal with Iran – to keep Iran from building nuclear weapons. That deal worked, until the United States broke the deal with Israeli encouragement.
Second, Palestine must be free from want. Israel must pay the tab to rebuild Gaza. Palestine must have unrestricted freedom to use its water, land, and hydrocarbon energy productively, to end the poverty and famine that have bedeviled Palestine for seventy-six years, within an economic confederation with Israel that protects both from each other by the outside forces of the United States, Russia, and China. Consider it a Middle Eastern Economic Community imposed from the outside, the best solution after decades of blood, tears, toil, and broken dreams, similar to the solution a young John F. Kennedy suggested to his father.[4]
The war in Israel-Palestine is one point of a deadly spear that threatens global war. The war in Ukraine is the conflagration flashpoint between the Anglo-American juggernaut and Russia, who is supported by her strategic ally China; the BRICS nations; and the Global South.
The bill for poverty, racism, and militarism, which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described so eloquently and plainly in his April 4, 1967, speech “Beyond Vietnam”, comes due with frightening urgency never seen before in our lives. The interest on that bill increases geometrically daily. One American airman burned himself to death to stop the genocide in Israel-Palestine, like the Buddhist monk who burned himself to death to stop the Vietnam War. Another American soldier engages in a hunger strike, “for the duration” of the genocide.
We must meet the real, but unreasoning fear within each and every one of us; refuse to cooperate with the forces of darkness; and say “NO!” to oppression, “NO!” to war, and “NO!” to business as usual, just as the 1940 leader of Greece said “NO!” to Fascist Mussolini, and threw Il Duce thirty miles deep into Albania. Each of us, and all of us, must say “YES!” to every act – economic, political, and moral-- that promotes life, productivity, self-determination, and the family of nations, and denies energy to forces perpetuating poverty, militarism, and racism. As Dr. King stated:
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries…. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism….Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies….This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.
The Four Freedoms – freedom from fear; freedom of speech; freedom of worship; and freedom from want -- illuminate the historical, revolutionary spirit which FDR championed in World War Two, and which President John F. Kennedy championed for “a thousand days” in his administration. This is our vision. This is Moses pointing upward to the light and truth above Mount Sinai; this is Ben Franklin harnessing electricity in the midst of a storm. The Four Freedoms light the way back from the imperial horror shows in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, in the renewal and rebirth of liberty, freedom, and good neighborliness at home and abroad.
8 April 2024
Peter J. Nickitas
Peter J. Nickitas, @pjnickitas.substack.com, pjnickitas@protonmail.com
[1] https://archives.nato.int/uploads/r/null/3/7/37267/RDC_54_215_BIL.pdf; 24 April 1954 letter from Executive Secretary of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Secretaries of Delegations
[2] Ilya Tsukanov, “Declassified Docs Reveal Explicit NATO Pledge Not to Meddle in Russia’s Neighborhood,” Sputnik News, April 6, 2024, 0958 a.m.; https://sputnikglobe.com/202400406/declassified-docs-reveal-explicit-nato-pledge-not-to-meddle-in-russias-neighborhood-1117781799.html
[3] https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkpof-135-001#?ima... JFKPOF-135-001. At that time, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. was the United States Ambassador to Britain.
[4] Query: Did Israel make all this necessary when Prime Ministers Ben-Gurion and Eshkol refused to open Dimona to inspection, as President Kennedy insisted to the day of his assassination?