Wednesday 30th of October 2024
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reality appears to play no part at all in this collective fantasy......

As the war in Ukraine heads into its third winter, Western leaders appear to be sinking further every day into a delusional belief in the success of their hydra-headed attempts to first defenestrate Russia before moving on to do the same to China.

 

Delusion and defeat in Ukraine     By Les MacDonald

 

Reality appears to play no part at all in this collective fantasy. The strategy, if indeed it can be dignified with that description, is not only failing in its main purpose but is actively facilitating the rise of the multi-polar world that it so fears. The leader of the West, the US, describes itself as the “indispensable” civilisation. American public intellectuals such as Francis Fukayama have even floated the view that the US had so perfected their political, cultural and economic development that it constituted the “end of history”, a view of themselves common to defunct empires stretching back millennia.

That delusion appears to have convinced the West that its temporary military dominance of the world is both permanent and beneficial to humanity as a whole, whilst utterly ignoring the catastrophic consequences of that several hundred years of dominance for the rest of humanity.

Bureaucratic and political elites in the West are doubling down on an obviously failing approach of using Ukraine and the lives of its young men and women as pawns in their desire to invade and balkanise Russia to steal its resources, all as a prelude to invading China in a forlorn attempt to prevent its rise as a hegemonic threat to the US. Even a passing observation of reality demonstrates the sheer lunacy of such an approach.

Basic logic provides a clearer perspective. China has a population more than four times the size of the US. Since its opening up began in the late seventies, China has had a stated goal of bringing its population out of poverty. That involved making that vast population available to outside organisations as an inexpensive workforce and a rapidly growing market. The quid pro quo for that was access to Western technology.

The West, and particularly US corporate elites, could not resist. They rapidly de-industrialised their economy by sending vast numbers of US jobs to China. The failure of that can be easily judged by looking at the inability of both the US and Europe to live up to their promise to Ukraine to supply them with all the weaponry they needed to defeat Russia. They have simply lacked the industrial capacity to do so, due directly to the US corporate preference for quick profits over sustaining the industrial strength necessary to maintain US military and industrial hegemony over the rest of the world.

Given that drive by the CCP to manage its people out of poverty, it is an ineluctable fact that as their 1.4 billion people’s standard of living continues to increase, their economy will rapidly grow to dwarf the US and European economies. That is a dynamic that the West is now powerless to prevent, except by invasion and subjugation. But even that is beyond the West as history since World War II has convincingly demonstrated.

US invasions of other significant countries over that period have been failures. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria have all ended in ignominy or stalemate. Their attempt to use Ukraine as a stalking horse to defeat Russia is now being widely admitted, even by usually subservient US mainstream media, to be a devastating failure, with a vast cost in the lives of young Ukrainians and a further loss of Western credibility and respect.

The next usable pawn in the Western game of hegemony maintenance is Taiwan. For the last 50 years, the world has recognised that Taiwan is an integral part of China. That is why the UN has not accorded it membership status and why it has no diplomatic presence in the overwhelming majority of countries around the world. The US cares as little about the people of Taiwan as they have about the nearly one million Ukrainians they have sacrificed to their dream of maintaining their rule of the world. As Henry Kissinger remarked, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

https://johnmenadue.com/delusion-and-defeat-in-ukraine/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

EU financing NATO's nazism....

 

European Union morphs into NATO’s financial war machine  BY Finian Cunningham

 

Two key posts – in foreign and defense policy – reveal the militarist and anti-Russia direction of the European Union.

Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission – which works as the executive branch of the European Union – announced her new team of commissioners for the next five years.

Taking over as foreign affairs minister for the 27-nation bloc is Kaja Kallas who is a staunch Russophobe and vigorous supporter of Ukraine. Kallas has called for more EU and NATO military funding for Ukraine to “defeat Russia” and the break up of the Russian Federation.

The former Estonian prime minister has led the movement to destroy Soviet Red Army monuments across the Baltic states. (This is while her investor husband continues to profit from doing business with Russia.)

Working closely alongside Kallas will be another rabid Russophobe, the former Lithuanian prime minister Andrius Kubilius, who is taking up a newly created EU post as defense commissioner. The creation of that post is an alarming sign of how the EU bloc has transitioned from a trade and political union to a military organization.

But what’s even more alarming is the assigning of such an anti-Russia hawk as Kubilius to oversee military policy.

At a time when relations between the EU and Russia have become so fraught with tensions, the European bloc is giving politicians from hostile Baltic states a driving seat to push relations even further towards conflict.

Indeed, the first announcement Kubilius made as the prospective new defense commissioner was that the European Union would likely be at war with Russia in the next six to eight years. That assessment is shared by Kaja Kallas.

Kubilius said the sole focus during his tenure is ramping up military spending by the EU nations to boost NATO and aid Ukraine. He said that he will be working closely with foreign policy chief Kallas to tap funds.

What this means is that the European Union is moving towards making it mandatory for national budgets to allocate more to military procurement. That’s a breakthrough for all the worst reasons.

Kubilius is reportedly aiming for a budget of €500 billion over the next five years to be spent on the military by the EU.

That increase would represent about half of the projected EU total budget.

His comments indicate the purpose of the massive redirection of finances – to boost NATO. Kubilius noted that “the European Union has instruments to get larger financing, which NATO doesn’t.”

That implies that under his formulation and compulsory directives from Brussels, the EU will make it mandatory for member states to spend more on the military.

NATO and the EU have overlapping membership with 23 members of the EU’s 27 also being part of the U.S.-led military alliance. Non-NATO members are Austria, Cyprus, Malta, and Ireland.

NATO states are expected to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their GDP  on military. That amounts to about $380 billion for European members of NATO in 2024. That is a huge increase compared with what was spent by these members only a few years ago. But what the NATO planners want is more and more going forward. The problem is locking that expenditure in.

The trouble for NATO planners is the 2 percent figure is not mandatory. It is subject to national policy. While most members of NATO are hitting that target currently, there is no guarantee it will continue. Changes in national governments might result in spending slipping back to former levels of 1-1.5 percent of GDP as was the case before the proxy war in Ukraine blew up in 2022.

What the NATO hawks in the EU desire most is to lock in military spending year-on-year. NATO does not have the legal means to enforce such a commitment as mandatory on its members. But the EU can do it through its supranational powers as served by centralized directives from Brussels.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have upped their military spending to nearly 3 percent of GDP when Kallas and Kubilius were in office.

Moreover, Kubilius has previously proposed that all EU members devote an extraordinary, additional 0.25 percent of their GDP to make mandatory military donations to Ukraine to “ensure victory over Russia”, amounting to €100 billion a year.

This is an astounding transformation of the European Union. The organization has its roots in the 1950s as a loose trade federation of Western European nations – principally France and the Federal Republic of Germany – which proclaimed that lessons of the Second World War had been learned and would never be repeated because of commitments to good neighborliness and commercial partnership. In its earlier incarnations, the European bloc sought out friendly relations with the Soviet Union, primarily with energy trade being a cornerstone of cooperation.

Since the supposed end of the Cold War in 1991, the EU has expanded in line with the expansion of NATO. Its powers have become evermore centralized and usurping national policy. A striking feature of both NATO and the EU is the hardening of Russophobic policy that has come with the leveraging of anti-Russia Baltic states. Historically, these states were virulent collaborators with Nazi Germany in its genocidal war against the Soviet Union. The Baltic states still harbor fascists who venerate the Third Reich. Hence, the destruction of Soviet-era war monuments and the rehabilitation of public displays commemorating Nazi collaborators.

NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the continuation of Western imperialist designs on subjugating Russian territory that was previously pursued by Nazi Germany.

The European Union has subverted its earlier ideals of pacifism and cooperation to become part of NATO’s war machine. Crucially, what the EU brings to the war machine is legalized enforced funding, even for nations that are not part of NATO.

Added to that is the EU is being directed by people who drool about war with Russia: Von der Leyen, the former German defense minister and descendant of Nazi ideologues, is aided and abetted by Kaja Kallas and Andrius Kubilius who cannot think of Russia without fantasizing about its “defeat”.

The Nazi specter is resurrected in NATO and its EU financial wing.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/09/24/european-union-morphs-into-natos-financial-war-machine/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

 

 

gold and weapons....

 

Thirst for money enriches oligarchs, but bankrupts Europe  BY Lucas Leiroz

 

There are many reasons why Europe wants to prolong the war in Ukraine. Irrational liberal ideology and commitment to the project of a unipolar global order are undoubtedly the most important reasons. However, business and private profit cannot be ignored. According to many recent reports, there has been a huge increase in the profits of military-industrial companies in a number of Western countries, which explains the thirst for war of the pro-Ukrainian oligarchies.

One of the most notorious cases of this war profiteering is taking place in Germany. The military giant Rheinmettall is seeing its profits growing amid a wave of systematic support for the Kiev regime. By continuously and incessantly sending weapons, the German company has managed to escape a serious financial crisis and now has a chance to once again rank among the world’s leading defense companies.

Rheinmettal ‘s business was in a bad way. The company was on the verge of abandoning the military sector to focus on civilian production, since most of its profits were coming from the production of automobile parts. However, Germany’s participation in military assistance programs led the corporation to revitalize its production of weapons and ammunition, once again becoming a global giant in the sector.

Armored vehicles, tanks, ammunition, artillery pieces and air defense systems are some of the products in Rheinmettal’s current industrial catalog. After making adventures into industrial base projects on the Polish-Ukrainian border, the company is now working on opening a new factory in Saxony, where it expects to produce more than one hundred thousand artillery shells per year.

Obviously, the German state is interested in these profits. Recently, an action plan by the German government was announced to use part of the profits of Rheinmettal for reindustrialization projects – which seem more necessary now than ever, since Germany has been the country most affected by the anti-Russian madness. It only remains to be seen how this reindustrialization will be possible without Russian gas and cheap energy.

In short, Germany believes it is profiting from the war. But this calculation is wrong – as well as dangerous and irresponsible. The profits do not go to the German people, but to a small number of defense oligarchs who employ an absolute minority of German society. Furthermore, the real economic revival is minimal, since the constant demand for weapons requires a systematic production routine that hinders any research project in technological innovation. In other words, Rheinmetall – as well as the entire Western military-industrial complex – is doomed to continually produce the same type of equipment according to its current samples, without any relevant innovation.

Industry without innovation has little chance of long-term success. Western weapons, which have already proven to be largely unsuitable for the Ukrainian battlefield, are likely to become increasingly obsolete, and there will be no capacity for technological renewal, since, thanks to anti-Russian sanctions, the precarious European society is reaching a pre-industrial stage of development.

And, still on the subject of sanctions, it is important to emphasize that increased spending on the military industry could be a ticking time bomb for a country without reliable sources of cheap energy. After the blockade of Russian gas, Germany has been experiencing a period of profound energy instability, depending on unusual alternative sources to meet its needs – such as burning wood or buying American gas at exorbitant prices. This scenario is completely inconsistent with a situation of economic development and stability.

Germany will discover an old lesson in economics: the private profits of the oligarchies do not reflect a real situation of economic development and social well-being. Without solving the problems generated by sanctions – which obstruct technological innovation – and without relieving the pressure on the systematic production of weapons, not even constant demand will be able to save Germany and the whole of Europe from a deep crisis.

Despite the profits, aid to Ukraine remains an obstacle to European economic progress, pleasing only transnational oligarchies.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/09/24/thirst-for-money-enriches-oligarchs-but-bankrupts-europe/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.