What 2024 Hopeful Cornel West Has Said About Ukraine

Progressive activist and philosopher Cornel West unexpectedly announced Monday his formal bid for the 2024 presidential election with the left-wing People's Party, saying in his now-viral announcement video that neither major party is telling the truth about Ukraine.

West, 70, a professor of philosophy and Christian practice at the Union Theological Seminary and former professor at Harvard University, said he's entering the presidential campaign in "the quest for truth" and that he's running as a third-party candidate because "neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about Big Tech."

"I come from a tradition where I care about you," West said in his video. "I care about the quality of your life, I care about whether you have access to a job with a living wage, decent housing, women having control over their bodies, healthcare for all."

On his campaign website, one of West's campaign policies—titled "End the Wars"—advocates disbanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance, stopping all foreign military aid, bringing U.S. troops home and investing "those trillions of war dollars into American communities," and banning nuclear weapons globally.

West has been vocal about Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine since it was launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022.

In March 2022, weeks after the conflict began, the activist told The New Yorker that the western world must "try to stop the war."

This must be done while "recognizing that the American empire has little or no moral authority when it comes to violation of international law and the overthrow of national sovereignty, as in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia," he said.

In an interview with U.S. attorney Dr. Malik Zulu Shabazz in the same month, West, describing Putin as a "gangster", echoed the Kremlin line that Russia launched what it calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine in part due to NATO's expansion in the past couple of decades.

"NATO has expanded [by] 14 countries including some of those countries that were once part of the Soviet Union," he said, but emphasized that this does not give Russia the right to protect its sphere of influence by the use of military force.

"I don't think that any empire has the right to protect their sphere of influence in the name of self-defense. That's another rationalization of gangster activity," West said. "Every empire, every nation can rationalize mistreating folk, killing, in the name of self-defense. We see it in the Middle East, we see it in different parts of the world."

A month later, in an interview with the Real News Network, he pushed similar rhetoric, saying that the U.S. has "no moral authority whatsoever when it comes to the violation of international law, the undercutting of national sovereignties of other countries" in discussions about the ongoing war in Ukraine.

"For example, years ago, [Former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail] Gorbachev was promised that there would not be one inch added to the NATO countries, and now 14 are added. If in fact there's missiles in Poland and Romania, and no missiles in Canada and Mexico, then we have to be very honest in terms of not in any way justifying, excusing the barbaric criminal activities of Putin and the Russian army, but recognizing that the United States has no moral status given its history, given its record of doing similar things," said West.

"And not a mumbling word of the mainstream press, not a mumbling word of one congressman or woman when you look at the situation of our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank. How many was it in 50 days? Over 2,000 Palestinians killed. 550 babies. That's more in number than Ukraine. A Palestinian baby has exactly the same moral status as a Ukrainian baby or any other baby. Jewish baby. Precious Palestinian baby. Precious. Sounds so simple, but we get in trouble by trying to be consistent, my brother."

West has also described Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a "crime against humanity."

"Russia has its own deep authoritarian and neofascist elites who are in control and concerned about the Russian empire being gloriously based on its past, Ukraine being a part of it, and Ukraine not existing," he told U.S. magazine Jacobin in November 2022.

"This is the typical colonizing language that you get going back to the early moments of the age of Europe—the people are not there, the land is ours, etc."

West will need to gather enough signatures in a petition to each state as well as the District of Columbia in order to secure a spot on the 2024 ballot.

Newsweek has reached out to West's campaign via email for comment.

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