Big Activist Demonstration
Unwelcomes NATO to The Hague
David Swanson / World BEYOND War
(June 22, 2025) — Crowds of thousands bearing flags and banners, singing and chanting for peace, wound their way through the streets of The Hague, Netherlands, on Sunday, past the Peace Palace where the International Court of Justice meets and slowly contemplates how many years should go by before it prosecutes genocide.
The demonstration was part of an effort to protest the upcoming NATO summit at which NATO is expected to demand of its members an even larger shifting of resources from human and environmental needs to weapons.
It is to the credit of Spain that it is claiming to be an actual nation able to make its own decisions on what it spends its people’s money on, and perhaps to the Italian minister of so-called defense who has blurted out the obvious, that NATO really should not exist. But most European governments are giving every impression of working for NATO and not for their own people.
The day before the demonstration in The Hague, hundreds of people gathered for a counter-summit, to discuss strategies for moving away from NATO. And then the US government bombed Iran. The march against NATO also became a march against war on Iran.
Amire Kiyaei from World BEYOND War in the Netherlands talks about Iran:
In the coming days, in Europe and around the world, rallies are being planned for peace in Iran. World BEYOND War is taking part in a big peace conference in Belgium, a colloquium on neutrality in Geneva, and a protest of the enormous US military base in Ramstein, Germany. Details on these events are here.
Some Thoughts on NATO,
Governments, and New Wars
(Remarks drafted for Belgium)
They used to put some real effort into lying to us. They hunted through several agencies and handed out big bonuses to find someone who would lie about Iraq having a nuclear weapons program. Now they let professional government liars, for a fee of many billions of dollars a year, stick with the truth that Iran has no nukes, because apparently Trump thinks its more powerful for him to simply issue a royal decree to the contrary. Evidence is so out of fashion.
US media outlets will find a way to provide support regardless. The Washington D.C. newspaper called Politico wrote “Is Iran close to developing a nuclear weapon with its vast stockpiles of highly enriched uranium? The answer depends on who you ask.” In the olden days, the answer depended on proof.
On June 13, the New York Times had a headline “A Miscalculation by Iran Led to Israeli Strikes’ Extensive Toll” explaining that Iran’s failure to predict an Israeli attack was to blame for damage done by the Israeli attack. Of course some people will see through lies that stupid. And some people will even spot that the nuclear weapons question is the wrong one.
If having nuclear weapons justified having your people killed, then someone would be justified killing the people of the United States — or of Belgium for that matter. And who knows where else. Belgium has been done the courtesy of being told (or at least having a document leaked) there are nuclear weapons in it. Australia has been told it has no right to know whether or not there are nuclear weapons in it.
During the war on Iraq, Belgian courts threatened to prosecute a US general for his crimes, but then dropped the matter after the US threatened to move NATO out of Belgium. Can you think of a better occasion to have shouted “Good riddance! Take your world-destroying weapons with you! Don’t let the door hit you in your CIA assets on your way out!”
Recently, Spain tried to explain to NATO that Spain is a nation. It claimed the right to decide how much of its resources it would take from healthcare, education, retirement, the environment, etc., and dump into weapons. I wonder, if you were walking by NATO headquarters at that time if you would have heard the laughter inside.
Germany probably knows what I’m talking about. In May its war minister expressed hesitation about dumping 5 percent of an economy into wars, and in June its top government liar announced that Russia was planning to attack Germany. After all, anything could be true, and truth varies depending on whom you ask.
The propagandists now have two golden tickets, the widespread popular misconceptions about WWII and the widespread popular misconceptions about the war in Ukraine. They can of course be combined in the form of “Russia is the new Hitler who is coming to get you.” This combination is a serious matter. A significant number of people in the United States would probably tell you that WWII was fought by the United States against Russia.
Prior to a few years ago, we had been making progress. The Iraq war had been made shameful. There had been talk of an Iraq Syndrome, on the model of the Vietnam Syndrome, meaning resistance to more wars. And then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If you were paying attention, you knew that some in the US government had long sought such a war, that many had predicted it, that the US had rejected perfectly reasonable settlements, that the US and Europe had lied about having accepted perfectly reasonable settlements, that the US and UK were working hard to prevent any new settlement, and that the war had long been underway, fueled in part by a US-backed coup.
If you’d been walking by NATO headquarters when Russia invaded Ukraine I wonder if you could have heard the champagne corks popping. The NATO Secretary General agreed with the peace activists: it was insistence on NATO membership for Ukraine that had caused the invasion.
If you’d been paying super close attention, you knew that nonviolence could resist an invasion, and you saw many Ukrainians nonviolently resisting the invasion with no help from their government. But I’m pretty sure almost nobody was paying attention. In fact, it became a civic duty to actively avoid paying attention.
Russia says it had no choice but to resist NATO by invading Ukraine, knowing full well that it would thereby give an incredible boost to NATO, that it would see more NATO funding, more bases, more missiles, that the frightened people of Finland and Sweden would finally let their warmongering politicians join NATO, buy junk airplanes that crash, and give US troops license to their entire nations with dozens of new bases — in Norway too — and immunity from prosecution should they crash jets into ski lifts or rape anyone.
NATO, for its part, tells you that you have no choice but to do more of what got us here, with a promise that if you do more, if you obey NATO’s commands to the letter, you’ll have World War III within five years.
If you start to object that this all makes very little sense, remember Adolf Putin is coming to get you. And if that doesn’t work, Adolf Putin must be funding you. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the multiple war problem. The very best politicians are opposing the war on Gaza. Yes it’s a war on Gaza. It’s also a genocide, as many wars are. And you cannot expect a politician to oppose more than one war at the same time. In the United States that’s almost never been done.
When some of them opposed the war on Iraq, they celebrated the war on Afghanistan. When some of them opposed the war on Vietnam, the glorification of World War II really took hold. But opposing more than one war at once is actually the key to human survival. Opposing all wars and all preparations for any wars is our way out.
The more Europe ignores its own achievements to copy the United States’ failures, the more it puts its treasure into weapons, the more those weapons will go to every war, the bad ones and the supposedly good ones. But NATO answers to nobody — nobody but Trump. Imagining you can oppose Trump by supporting NATO and the march to nuclear apocalypse is the most tragic sort of error.
Governments can be made to answer to people, but first they have to be told that they do not answer to NATO. They’re going to do that best, when NATO closes shop. Its your city, and I think you should decide the matter of what to do with NATO’s headquarters democratically, but I think it could make a fine library, and that education rather than weapons dealing will set us free.
A sign at the Hague demonstration said “5% — Is that what’s left of your brain?”
I’m old enough to remember when they counted how many dollars or Euros they were spending on weapons and bases and ships and planes and bombs and troops as dollars or Euros. If they wanted to say how many dollars they were going to spend on organized mass murder and destruction in next year’s budget, they would just tell you in dollars. As mass insanities go, this made a certain amount of sense.
You could compare what various governments spent on hellish slaughter in either absolute amounts, such as number of Euros, or in Euros per capita.
Both of those ways of looking at the matter — simple numbers, and numbers per capita — have gone completely out of fashion. It’s not so much that they are incorrect as that speaking in such terms is at best backward, most likely indicating that you are funded by Putin, and at worst a sign that you are anti-Semitic.
No, the preferred, enlightened, dare I say woke, way to measure military spending is as a percentage of an economy. You don’t need to spend based on past spending, or someone else’s spending, or the size of your population, or as required by your belief in military defense and the current propaganda about your supposed enemies. None of that matters. Military spending is a public service. It’s like, you know, spending to protect the natural environment, or to prevent diseases, or to assist immigrants, or to foster global cooperation — I mean, you know, if we spent money on any of those outlandish ideas.
In other words, military spending needs to be maximized. There is no limit. The more money a nation has, even if a small number of its people are hoarding most of it, the more it must spend on stealth nuclear bombers that can only be upgraded to the latest failures by US personnel.
What was wrong with the old way of just counting how many dollars you’re spending? Well, for one thing — even when you adjust for inflation — the numbers keep going up up up, and most of the spending is done by a very small number of countries, and in fact most of it by just one country — which I’d better not name since I want it to let me back in.
Most wars are in places with very low military spending and most of that on weapons from the handful of big military spenders. It just doesn’t look good. It gives the wrong impression. People might think the rich places are imposing wars on poor places, the way they are doing with climate collapse.
What was wrong with per capita comparisons? Well, there, the United States is in second place, and naming the first place country could get you convicted of Nazism. Plus you have to scroll to the second screen before you find any evil enemies on the list. That won’t do at all.
A percentage of government spending is no good either, since people tend to get upset to learn that 60% of their taxes goes to wars. It works much better to demand, as they did at the last NATO summit, 2% of each economy.
Even then, a whole year ago, Trump was talking about 3%, and I was asking what could prevent them saying 5%. Now they’re demanding 5% — not of the US itself but of its colonies. At that rate of growth, of 250% per year, in three years they’ll be demanding 78% of each economy for war — of each economy, meaning 100% of government spending many times over. The year after that they’ll want 195% of each economy.
Sounds unlikely, I know. But so is human survival unless we get our friends and loved ones to stop listening to the insane ways of thinking that emerge from the headquarters of NATO, and choose instead to think for ourselves!
