Medea Benjamin will discuss her book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict with Mickey Huff at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA. This event is free and open to the public!
About the book:
Russia’s brutal February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has attracted widespread condemnation across the West. Government and media circles present the conflict as a simple dichotomy between an evil empire and an innocent victim. In this concise, accessible and highly informative primer, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies insist the picture is more complicated.
Yes, Russia’s aggression was reckless and, ultimately, indefensible. But the West’s reneging on promises to halt eastward expansion of NATO in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union played a major part in prompting Putin to act. So did the U.S. involvement in the 2014 Ukraine coup and Ukraine’s failure to implement the Minsk peace agreements. The result is a conflict that is increasingly difficult to resolve, one that could conceivably escalate into all-out war between the United States and Russia—the world’s two leading nuclear powers.
Skillfully bringing together the historical record and current analysis, War in Ukraine looks at the events leading up to the conflict, surveys the different parties involved, and weighs the risks of escalation and opportunities for peace. For anyone who wants to get beneath the heavily propagandized media coverage to an understanding of a war with consequences that could prove cataclysmic, reading this timely book will be an urgent necessity.
About the speakers:
Medea Benjamin is a co-founder of CODEPINK and the fair trade advocacy group Global Exchange. She is the author of Drone Warfare, Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.–Saudi Connection and Inside Iran. In 2012, she was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation’s Peace Prize; she is also recipient of the 2014 Gandhi Peace Award and the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Mickey Huff is the director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. To date, he has co-edited 14 editions of the Project’s yearbook, including most recently Project Censored’s State of the Free Press (2022), with Andy Lee Roth. He is co-author with Nolan Higdon, of Unites States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and what we can do about it) (City Lights, 2019) and Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (Routledge, 2022). He is the executive producer and host of The Project Censored Show on KPFA/Pacifica Radio and a professor of social science, history, and journalism.
WHEN
-
WHERE
Diablo Valley College
321 Golf Club Rd,
Humanities Building room 110,
Pleasant Hill, CA 94523,
United States,
