The Nature of Foxes
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Patrick Lawrence: The Impotence of Antony Blinken
April 29, 2024
With the U.S. unable to compete in the EV market and desperate in Ukraine, the Secretary of State traveled to China to talk at Beijing for his domestic audience.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken waves as he arrives at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai on April 24. (US State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
By Patrick Lawrence
Scheer Post
Antony Blinken was in China for his second such journey as secretary of state and his third encounter with senior Chinese official. This is our news as April marches toward May.
I have to say, it is a stranger state of affairs than I can figure when the State Department and the media that clerk for it told us in advance that America’s top diplomat is going to fail to get anything done as he sets out for the People’s Republic.
“I want to make clear that we are realistic and clear-eyed about the prospects of breakthroughs on any of these issues,” an unnamed State Department official said when briefing reporters last week on Blinken’s agenda. This is how State warns in advance that the secretary will be wasting his time and our money during his encounters in Shanghai and Beijing.
What was this if not an admission of our secretary of state’s diplomatic impotence? Or do I mean incompetence? Or both? This is the man, after all, who arrived in Israel five days after the events of last Oct. 7 to announce, “I come before you as a Jew.” Does this guy understand diplomacy or what?
The media followed the State Department’ lead, naturally, in advising us of the pointlessness of Blinken’s sojourn in China—this at both ends of the Pacific. “Washington is realistic about its expectations on Blinken’s visit in resolving key issues,” said CNBC. “While crucial for keeping lines of communication open, the visit is unlikely to yield major breakthroughs,” the Japan Times commented.
Matt Lee, the very able diplomatic correspondent at The Associated Press (AP), got it righter than anyone in his April 22 report: The point of Blinken’s three days of talks with top Chinese officials, he reported, was to have three days of talks with top Chinese officials. “The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip might be seen by some as encouraging,” Lee wrote, “but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider.”
This is our Tony. As the record makes pitifully clear, there’s no mileage in predicting success when Blinken boards a plane for the great “out there.” This is unequivocally so in his dealings with the western end of the Pacific.
There is a long list of the topics Blinken was set to raise with Chinese officials, notable among these Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Taiwan and the South China Sea, military-to-military contacts, artificial intelligence applications, illicit drug traffic, human rights, trade: These are standards on the American menu when a U.S. official addresses Chinese counterparts.
The last is especially contentious just now, given the Biden regime’s disgraceful determination to subvert those Chinese industries with which the U.S. cannot compete. With plans to block imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles already afoot, last week President Biden announced new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel.
And it is now “investigating” China’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, which sounds to me like prelude to yet more measures to undermine China’s admirable economic advances.
Nonsensical Times 10
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is met by Kong Fuan, director general of the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office (left), ambassador Nicholas Burns and consul general Scott Walker as he arrives at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport. (US State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
But the premier question Blinken addressed has to do with Sino–Russian relations. As he made clear before departing, the secretary of state would more or less insist that the Chinese stop selling various industrial goods to Russia because the U.S. considers them “dual use,” meaning the Russians could use such things as semiconductors in their defense industries—so implicating China in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.
Before going any further, let’s try one of those “imagine if” exercises. Imagine if Beijing sent Foreign Minister Wang to Washington to tell the Biden regime to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine as this implicates the U.S. in Ukraine’s war with Russia and this is not on because China and Russia are friends.
It is not even fun, this “imagine if,” so nonsensical is it. Any such exercise would turn Wang, an acutely skilled diplomat, into another Blinken—the thought of which is nonsensical times 10.
But never mind sense and nonsense. Blinken and those who speak for him at State boldly previewed the secretary’s presentation in the days before his departure. Here is Blinken speaking to reporters last Friday:
“We see China sharing machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defense industrial base that sanctions and export controls had done so much to degrade. Now, if China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.”
A day later the unnamed State Department official elaborated with this:
“We’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that … severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe. We’ve demonstrated our willingness to do so regarding firms from a number of countries, not just China. We will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”
As tough diplomatic talk goes, it does not get much tougher. And as dumb diplomacy goes, it does not get much dumber.
For one thing, the Biden regime is demanding that China act against what we can count Beijing’s closest partner—this as leading non–Western nations are coalescing behind a joint project to create a new, let’s call it post–Western world order.
I am reminded of a brilliant tweet someone wrote just after Russia began its Ukraine operation two years ago and the Biden regime sought to recruit Beijing against “Putin’s Russia,” as people such as Blinken insist on referring to the Russian Federation. “Please help us defeat Russia,” the tweet read, “so we can turn our aggression on you when we’re done.” But precisely.
Non-interference Key to Future
For another, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made its response to Blinken’s preposterous intentions clear even before the secretary boarded his plane (and just prior to the passage in the House last week of $60.1 billion in new aid for the Kiev regime).
“It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine,” a ministry spokesperson said last week, “while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.”
I cannot think of a handier way of shutting down Antony Blinken.
One other thing while we are on this topic. Among the principles on which a post-Western global order will rest are respect for the sovereignty of all nations and non-interference into the internal affairs of others.
These are two elements of civilized statecraft, as it is destined to be in the 21st century and of which the secretary of state has absolutely no clue.
Why did Secretary Blinken bother to raise this question of Sino–Russian trade when he must have known the response as well as you and I know it. I see two immediate explanations.
One, the crooks in Kiev have already lost Washington’s proxy war with Russia—and goodness knows how much of the just-approved aid they will steal—and Blinken’s presentation in Beijing reflects mounting desperation among the policy cliques who got the U.S. into this hopeless-from-the-start conflict.
Two, and closely related to the above, when Antony Blinken goes to Beijing he does not talk to the Chinese: He talks at them and is not especially concerned about their responses. He is talking only to the American public and the China hawks on Capitol Hill, who have the White House stretching to out-hawk them at every turn.
If you need support for this latter thought, there is Blinken’s assertion last Monday, when introducing the State Department’s annual human rights report, that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang Province. This charge has been highly suspect since Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s fanatically Sinophobic predecessor at State, conjured it before leaving office in 2021.
Given no charge of genocide has ever been supported with evidence, what in hell was Blinken doing raising this question (1) on the eve of a diplomatic visit to Beijing during which he purported to want other things out of the Chinese, and (2) given his government’s open sponsorship of what we must now call the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza?
Blinken Has Learned Nothing
Antony Blinken and China’s Central Foreign Affairs Office Director Wang Yi meet in Beijing in June last year. (U.S. State Department, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
My mind goes back to March 2021 when I read these things. It was then, in an Anchorage hotel (named the Captain Cook) that Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s new national security adviser, made an utter disaster out of their first encounter with senior Chinese officials, Wang Yi among them.
It was then and there that Blinken and Sullivan, all by themselves, tipped over Sino–U.S. relations with just the sort of shockingly ignorant display of late-imperial presumption Blinken is trying on yet again in Beijing this week.
Sino–American ties have never recovered from the encounter in Anchorage. And Blinken has learned nothing from the mess he made.
Lessons of which there are several. One and as suggested above, a creeping desperation now pervades the Biden regime’s foreign policy cliques. They do not know what to do about Russia and they do not know what to do about China.
Two and related to one, the level of incompetence evident among those directing this administration’s foreign policies is very likely unprecedented in the history of postwar American diplomacy. This now reaches the point it is a danger—most evidently in the cases of China and Russia.
Three, there is no self-awareness among these people. They are not present in their diplomatic encounters—reading, instead, from ideologically driven scripts. Again, three years into the Biden regime this is a clear danger.
Four, last, and by no means least, the Biden regime does not have a China policy.
Think carefully about this. In the single most important relationship the U.S. will have to navigate in the 21st century, those running policy are paralyzed—no map, no diplomatic design, no clear objective other than to oppose, literally, the 21st century in the name of prolonging the 20th.
This is why the warmongers, the economic saboteurs, and the paranoids left over from the “Who lost China?” years remain ascendant in Washington.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does a foreign policy made of nothing but ignorance and empty bluster. It is the gravest of charges, but Antony Blinken in China makes me feel unsafe.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/04/29/p ... y-blinken/
Well, I dunno if these clowns are more incompetent than the Trump regimes' ego-manically driven tenure, the only saving grace of which was that it retarded the imperialist program through sheer incompetence. Just compare the body counts...
And that's why I don't think that Trump will be allowed to be prez again, by hook or crook.
******
US Skyrocketing Military Spending Upsets World
The General Frank S Besson carries equipment to build a floating harbour in Gaza, 2024. | Photo: X/ @swilkinsonbc
Published 29 April 2024
With its appetite for global hegemony, Washington continues to fuel chaos around the world.
A recently released report showed that defense spending by the United States -- the world's largest military spender -- accounted for nearly 40 percent of world's total military expenditures in 2023.
In the latest move of aggressive U.S. military spending, President Joe Biden signed a US$95-billion foreign aid bill, which includes more military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
With its skyrocketing military spending and unabated appetite for global hegemony, the United States continues to fuel chaos around the world.
ROCKETING SPENDING
Military spending by the United States rose 2.3 percent to reach US$916 billion in 2023, representing 68 percent of total North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military spending, according to a Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report.
Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to addressing the U.S. long-term fiscal challenges, noted that the U.S. defense spending increased by US$55 billion from 2022 to 2023 in part due to additional military aid for Ukraine.
In the bill newly signed by Biden, more than US$60 billion goes to Ukraine while US$26 billion goes to Israel despite international criticism over the civilian casualties the Israeli army caused in Gaza.
The United States has provided Ukraine with massive military aid especially since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, as part of its strategy to counter its strategic rival, Russia.
As Israel's largest military supplier, the United States is complacent in the humanitarian crisis and regional insecurity of the Middle East.
In 2023, most European NATO members increased their military expenditure partly due to the two conflicts, the SIPRI report showed. The total European military spending in 2023 has seen a 16 percent year-on-year increase to US$588 billion.
Estimated military expenditure in the Middle East increased by 9.0 percent to US$200 billion in 2023, the highest annual growth rate in the region seen in the past decade. Israel's military spending grew by 24 percent to reach US$27.5 billion in 2023.
PURSUIT OF HEGEMONY
The SIPRI report showed that the United States spend more on defense than the next nine countries combined. Meanwhile, total military spending by NATO members reached US$1.3 trillion last year, accounting for 55 percent of global military spending.
The United States has decided to "shift its focus away from counterinsurgency operations and asymmetric warfare to developing new weapon systems that could be used in a potential conflict with adversaries with advanced military capabilities," according to the report.
Analysts believe that this shows that the United States is trying to eliminate all potential enemies, which embodies the Cold War mentality and hegemonic thinking.
"Really what American foreign policy is about is promoting American power: ensuring that America remains the hegemonic dominant power of the international system and minimizing any source of threat to America's geopolitical dominance," U.S. political scholar Christopher Layne said in a discussion last year.
Igor Korotchenko, a Russian military expert and the editor-in-chief of National Defense magazine, pointed out that the large number of U.S. military bases and aircraft carrier formations around the world serve its ambition to expand global military influence.
Huge U.S. military spending is not only an important indication of Washington's pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy but a cause of instability and chaos across the world, Korotchenko said.
Washington's attempt to maintain global hegemony by trying to divide the world is "a strategy that is very dangerous and misguided," said Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University.
WIN OR LOSE
The United States' enormous military expenditure and ongoing provision of foreign military aid clearly show its priorities. In the newly released first quarter financial results, U.S. military giant Raytheon saw sales of US$19.3 billion, up 12 percent from a year earlier, and net income of US$1.7 billion, up 20 percent from a year earlier, which both beat expectations.
Raytheon's order backlog is a record US$202 billion, with massive orders in the defense and commercial aerospace sectors, reflecting strong revenue potential in the future.
Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, reported first-quarter sales of US$17.2 billion , up 14 percent from a year earlier. The recent passage of the foreign aid bill may increase orders for F-35 fighter jets, which could mean additional revenue for Lockheed Martin, reported Bloomberg.
"It's past time to break the grip that the U.S. military-industrial complex has on our politics, policy, and collective thinking. For the military-industrial complex, no amount is too much to spend on Pentagon contractors," Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization headquartered in Washington. D.C., said in a statement earlier this week.
"For those of us in the real world, a dollar spent on killing machines is a dollar that we can't spend on daycare, expanding Medicare, or other human priorities," said Weissman.
A growing number of Americans are discontented with the continued consumption of national resources by the military-industrial complex, while crucial areas of people's livelihood receive insufficient attention.
Earlier in April, people held a rally protesting America's defense policies in Renton, a city in the northwestern U.S. State of Washington, according to a report by Renton Reporter.
"I would like to see the money being spent on the military being spent on healthcare, education, saving the planet, transportation, light rail, bicycle infrastructure, and things like that. Good things for human beings," Mona Lee, 85, who led the protest.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0002.html
*******
April 29, 2024
With the U.S. unable to compete in the EV market and desperate in Ukraine, the Secretary of State traveled to China to talk at Beijing for his domestic audience.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken waves as he arrives at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai on April 24. (US State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
By Patrick Lawrence
Scheer Post
Antony Blinken was in China for his second such journey as secretary of state and his third encounter with senior Chinese official. This is our news as April marches toward May.
I have to say, it is a stranger state of affairs than I can figure when the State Department and the media that clerk for it told us in advance that America’s top diplomat is going to fail to get anything done as he sets out for the People’s Republic.
“I want to make clear that we are realistic and clear-eyed about the prospects of breakthroughs on any of these issues,” an unnamed State Department official said when briefing reporters last week on Blinken’s agenda. This is how State warns in advance that the secretary will be wasting his time and our money during his encounters in Shanghai and Beijing.
What was this if not an admission of our secretary of state’s diplomatic impotence? Or do I mean incompetence? Or both? This is the man, after all, who arrived in Israel five days after the events of last Oct. 7 to announce, “I come before you as a Jew.” Does this guy understand diplomacy or what?
The media followed the State Department’ lead, naturally, in advising us of the pointlessness of Blinken’s sojourn in China—this at both ends of the Pacific. “Washington is realistic about its expectations on Blinken’s visit in resolving key issues,” said CNBC. “While crucial for keeping lines of communication open, the visit is unlikely to yield major breakthroughs,” the Japan Times commented.
Matt Lee, the very able diplomatic correspondent at The Associated Press (AP), got it righter than anyone in his April 22 report: The point of Blinken’s three days of talks with top Chinese officials, he reported, was to have three days of talks with top Chinese officials. “The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip might be seen by some as encouraging,” Lee wrote, “but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider.”
This is our Tony. As the record makes pitifully clear, there’s no mileage in predicting success when Blinken boards a plane for the great “out there.” This is unequivocally so in his dealings with the western end of the Pacific.
There is a long list of the topics Blinken was set to raise with Chinese officials, notable among these Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Taiwan and the South China Sea, military-to-military contacts, artificial intelligence applications, illicit drug traffic, human rights, trade: These are standards on the American menu when a U.S. official addresses Chinese counterparts.
The last is especially contentious just now, given the Biden regime’s disgraceful determination to subvert those Chinese industries with which the U.S. cannot compete. With plans to block imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles already afoot, last week President Biden announced new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel.
And it is now “investigating” China’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, which sounds to me like prelude to yet more measures to undermine China’s admirable economic advances.
Nonsensical Times 10
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is met by Kong Fuan, director general of the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office (left), ambassador Nicholas Burns and consul general Scott Walker as he arrives at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport. (US State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
But the premier question Blinken addressed has to do with Sino–Russian relations. As he made clear before departing, the secretary of state would more or less insist that the Chinese stop selling various industrial goods to Russia because the U.S. considers them “dual use,” meaning the Russians could use such things as semiconductors in their defense industries—so implicating China in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.
Before going any further, let’s try one of those “imagine if” exercises. Imagine if Beijing sent Foreign Minister Wang to Washington to tell the Biden regime to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine as this implicates the U.S. in Ukraine’s war with Russia and this is not on because China and Russia are friends.
It is not even fun, this “imagine if,” so nonsensical is it. Any such exercise would turn Wang, an acutely skilled diplomat, into another Blinken—the thought of which is nonsensical times 10.
But never mind sense and nonsense. Blinken and those who speak for him at State boldly previewed the secretary’s presentation in the days before his departure. Here is Blinken speaking to reporters last Friday:
“We see China sharing machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defense industrial base that sanctions and export controls had done so much to degrade. Now, if China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.”
A day later the unnamed State Department official elaborated with this:
“We’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that … severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe. We’ve demonstrated our willingness to do so regarding firms from a number of countries, not just China. We will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”
As tough diplomatic talk goes, it does not get much tougher. And as dumb diplomacy goes, it does not get much dumber.
For one thing, the Biden regime is demanding that China act against what we can count Beijing’s closest partner—this as leading non–Western nations are coalescing behind a joint project to create a new, let’s call it post–Western world order.
I am reminded of a brilliant tweet someone wrote just after Russia began its Ukraine operation two years ago and the Biden regime sought to recruit Beijing against “Putin’s Russia,” as people such as Blinken insist on referring to the Russian Federation. “Please help us defeat Russia,” the tweet read, “so we can turn our aggression on you when we’re done.” But precisely.
Non-interference Key to Future
For another, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made its response to Blinken’s preposterous intentions clear even before the secretary boarded his plane (and just prior to the passage in the House last week of $60.1 billion in new aid for the Kiev regime).
“It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine,” a ministry spokesperson said last week, “while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.”
I cannot think of a handier way of shutting down Antony Blinken.
One other thing while we are on this topic. Among the principles on which a post-Western global order will rest are respect for the sovereignty of all nations and non-interference into the internal affairs of others.
These are two elements of civilized statecraft, as it is destined to be in the 21st century and of which the secretary of state has absolutely no clue.
Why did Secretary Blinken bother to raise this question of Sino–Russian trade when he must have known the response as well as you and I know it. I see two immediate explanations.
One, the crooks in Kiev have already lost Washington’s proxy war with Russia—and goodness knows how much of the just-approved aid they will steal—and Blinken’s presentation in Beijing reflects mounting desperation among the policy cliques who got the U.S. into this hopeless-from-the-start conflict.
Two, and closely related to the above, when Antony Blinken goes to Beijing he does not talk to the Chinese: He talks at them and is not especially concerned about their responses. He is talking only to the American public and the China hawks on Capitol Hill, who have the White House stretching to out-hawk them at every turn.
If you need support for this latter thought, there is Blinken’s assertion last Monday, when introducing the State Department’s annual human rights report, that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang Province. This charge has been highly suspect since Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s fanatically Sinophobic predecessor at State, conjured it before leaving office in 2021.
Given no charge of genocide has ever been supported with evidence, what in hell was Blinken doing raising this question (1) on the eve of a diplomatic visit to Beijing during which he purported to want other things out of the Chinese, and (2) given his government’s open sponsorship of what we must now call the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza?
Blinken Has Learned Nothing
Antony Blinken and China’s Central Foreign Affairs Office Director Wang Yi meet in Beijing in June last year. (U.S. State Department, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
My mind goes back to March 2021 when I read these things. It was then, in an Anchorage hotel (named the Captain Cook) that Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s new national security adviser, made an utter disaster out of their first encounter with senior Chinese officials, Wang Yi among them.
It was then and there that Blinken and Sullivan, all by themselves, tipped over Sino–U.S. relations with just the sort of shockingly ignorant display of late-imperial presumption Blinken is trying on yet again in Beijing this week.
Sino–American ties have never recovered from the encounter in Anchorage. And Blinken has learned nothing from the mess he made.
Lessons of which there are several. One and as suggested above, a creeping desperation now pervades the Biden regime’s foreign policy cliques. They do not know what to do about Russia and they do not know what to do about China.
Two and related to one, the level of incompetence evident among those directing this administration’s foreign policies is very likely unprecedented in the history of postwar American diplomacy. This now reaches the point it is a danger—most evidently in the cases of China and Russia.
Three, there is no self-awareness among these people. They are not present in their diplomatic encounters—reading, instead, from ideologically driven scripts. Again, three years into the Biden regime this is a clear danger.
Four, last, and by no means least, the Biden regime does not have a China policy.
Think carefully about this. In the single most important relationship the U.S. will have to navigate in the 21st century, those running policy are paralyzed—no map, no diplomatic design, no clear objective other than to oppose, literally, the 21st century in the name of prolonging the 20th.
This is why the warmongers, the economic saboteurs, and the paranoids left over from the “Who lost China?” years remain ascendant in Washington.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does a foreign policy made of nothing but ignorance and empty bluster. It is the gravest of charges, but Antony Blinken in China makes me feel unsafe.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/04/29/p ... y-blinken/
Well, I dunno if these clowns are more incompetent than the Trump regimes' ego-manically driven tenure, the only saving grace of which was that it retarded the imperialist program through sheer incompetence. Just compare the body counts...
And that's why I don't think that Trump will be allowed to be prez again, by hook or crook.
******
US Skyrocketing Military Spending Upsets World
The General Frank S Besson carries equipment to build a floating harbour in Gaza, 2024. | Photo: X/ @swilkinsonbc
Published 29 April 2024
With its appetite for global hegemony, Washington continues to fuel chaos around the world.
A recently released report showed that defense spending by the United States -- the world's largest military spender -- accounted for nearly 40 percent of world's total military expenditures in 2023.
In the latest move of aggressive U.S. military spending, President Joe Biden signed a US$95-billion foreign aid bill, which includes more military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
With its skyrocketing military spending and unabated appetite for global hegemony, the United States continues to fuel chaos around the world.
ROCKETING SPENDING
Military spending by the United States rose 2.3 percent to reach US$916 billion in 2023, representing 68 percent of total North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military spending, according to a Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report.
Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to addressing the U.S. long-term fiscal challenges, noted that the U.S. defense spending increased by US$55 billion from 2022 to 2023 in part due to additional military aid for Ukraine.
In the bill newly signed by Biden, more than US$60 billion goes to Ukraine while US$26 billion goes to Israel despite international criticism over the civilian casualties the Israeli army caused in Gaza.
The United States has provided Ukraine with massive military aid especially since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, as part of its strategy to counter its strategic rival, Russia.
As Israel's largest military supplier, the United States is complacent in the humanitarian crisis and regional insecurity of the Middle East.
In 2023, most European NATO members increased their military expenditure partly due to the two conflicts, the SIPRI report showed. The total European military spending in 2023 has seen a 16 percent year-on-year increase to US$588 billion.
Estimated military expenditure in the Middle East increased by 9.0 percent to US$200 billion in 2023, the highest annual growth rate in the region seen in the past decade. Israel's military spending grew by 24 percent to reach US$27.5 billion in 2023.
PURSUIT OF HEGEMONY
The SIPRI report showed that the United States spend more on defense than the next nine countries combined. Meanwhile, total military spending by NATO members reached US$1.3 trillion last year, accounting for 55 percent of global military spending.
The United States has decided to "shift its focus away from counterinsurgency operations and asymmetric warfare to developing new weapon systems that could be used in a potential conflict with adversaries with advanced military capabilities," according to the report.
Analysts believe that this shows that the United States is trying to eliminate all potential enemies, which embodies the Cold War mentality and hegemonic thinking.
"Really what American foreign policy is about is promoting American power: ensuring that America remains the hegemonic dominant power of the international system and minimizing any source of threat to America's geopolitical dominance," U.S. political scholar Christopher Layne said in a discussion last year.
Igor Korotchenko, a Russian military expert and the editor-in-chief of National Defense magazine, pointed out that the large number of U.S. military bases and aircraft carrier formations around the world serve its ambition to expand global military influence.
Huge U.S. military spending is not only an important indication of Washington's pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy but a cause of instability and chaos across the world, Korotchenko said.
Washington's attempt to maintain global hegemony by trying to divide the world is "a strategy that is very dangerous and misguided," said Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University.
WIN OR LOSE
The United States' enormous military expenditure and ongoing provision of foreign military aid clearly show its priorities. In the newly released first quarter financial results, U.S. military giant Raytheon saw sales of US$19.3 billion, up 12 percent from a year earlier, and net income of US$1.7 billion, up 20 percent from a year earlier, which both beat expectations.
Raytheon's order backlog is a record US$202 billion, with massive orders in the defense and commercial aerospace sectors, reflecting strong revenue potential in the future.
Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, reported first-quarter sales of US$17.2 billion , up 14 percent from a year earlier. The recent passage of the foreign aid bill may increase orders for F-35 fighter jets, which could mean additional revenue for Lockheed Martin, reported Bloomberg.
"It's past time to break the grip that the U.S. military-industrial complex has on our politics, policy, and collective thinking. For the military-industrial complex, no amount is too much to spend on Pentagon contractors," Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization headquartered in Washington. D.C., said in a statement earlier this week.
"For those of us in the real world, a dollar spent on killing machines is a dollar that we can't spend on daycare, expanding Medicare, or other human priorities," said Weissman.
A growing number of Americans are discontented with the continued consumption of national resources by the military-industrial complex, while crucial areas of people's livelihood receive insufficient attention.
Earlier in April, people held a rally protesting America's defense policies in Renton, a city in the northwestern U.S. State of Washington, according to a report by Renton Reporter.
"I would like to see the money being spent on the military being spent on healthcare, education, saving the planet, transportation, light rail, bicycle infrastructure, and things like that. Good things for human beings," Mona Lee, 85, who led the protest.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0002.html
*******
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
A mad world: Capitalism and the rise of mental illness
Originally published: Red Pepper on August 2017 by Rod Tweedy (more by Red Pepper) | (Posted May 18, 2024)
Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment. One in four adults in the UK today has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and four million people take antidepressants.
‘What greater indictment of a system could there be,’ George Monbiot has asked,
than an epidemic of mental illness?
The shocking extent of this ‘epidemic’ is made all the more disturbing by the knowledge that so much of it is preventable. This is due to the significant correlation between social and environmental conditions and the prevalence of mental disorders.
Richard Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, and Peter Kinderman, president of the British Psychological Society, have written compellingly about this connection in recent years, drawing powerful attention to ‘the social determinants of our psychological wellbeing’.
The evidence is overwhelming,’ notes Kinderman,
it’s not just that there exist social determinants; they are overwhelmingly important.
A sick society
Experiences of social isolation, inequality, feelings of alienation and dissociation, and even the basic assumptions and ideology of materialism and neoliberalism itself are seen today to be significant drivers—reflected in the titles of a number of recent articles and talks on this subject, such as those of consultant psychotherapist David Morgan’s groundbreaking Frontier Psychoanalyst podcasts, which have included discussions on whether ‘Neoliberalism is dangerous for your mental health’, and ‘Is neoliberalism making us sick?’
Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Jay Watts observes in the Guardian that ‘psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering.
Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkers as opposed to the environmental causes of distress.
Similarly, there is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities, though the association is robust and many professionals think this would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic.
There are clearly very powerful and entrenched interests and agendas here, which consciously or unconsciously act to conceal or try to deny this relationship, and which also makes the recent willingness amongst so many psychoanalysts and therapists to embrace this wider context so exciting and moving.
Commentators often talk about society, social context, group thinking, and environmental determinants in connection with mental distress and disorders, but we can I think actually be a bit more precise about what aspect of society is mainly driving it, is mainly responsible for it. And in this context it’s probably time we talk about the c word—capitalism.
Many of the contemporary forms of illness and individual distress that we treat and engage with certainly seem to be correlated with and amplified by the processes and byproducts of capitalism. In fact, you might say that capitalism is in many respects a mental illness generating system—and if we are serious about tackling not only the effects of mental distress and illness, but also their causes and origins, we need to look more closely, more precisely, and more analytically at the nature of the political and economic womb out of which they emerge, and how psychology is fundamentally interwoven with every aspect of it.
Ubiquitous neurosis
Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this intimate connection between capitalism and mental distress is the prevalence of neurosis. As Joel Kovel, a former psychiatrist and professor of political science, notes:
‘A most striking feature of neurosis within capitalism is its ubiquity.’ In his classic essay ‘Therapy in late capitalism’ (reprinted in The Political Self), Kovel refers to the ‘colossal burden of neurotic misery in the population, a weight that continually and palpably betrays the capitalist ideology, which maintains that commodity civilization promotes human happiness’:
If, given all this rationalization, comfort, fun and choice, people are still wretched, unable to love, believe or feel some integrity to their lives, they might also begin to draw the conclusion that something was seriously wrong with their social order.
There’s also been some fascinating work done on this more recently by Eli Zaretsky (Political Freud), and Bruce Cohen (author of Psychiatric Hegemony), who have both written on the relations between the family, sexuality, and capitalism in the generation of neuroses.
It is significant, for example, that one of the most prominent features of the psychological landscape that Freud encountered in late nineteenth-century Vienna were the neuroses—which, as Kovel notes, Freud saw as being entirely continuous with ‘normal’ development in modern societies—with much of these, he adds, being rooted in our modern experience of alienation. ‘Neurosis,’ Kovel says,
is the self-alienation of a subject who has been readied for freedom but runs afoul of personal history.
It was of course Marx who was the great analyst of alienation, showing how capitalist economics generates alienation as part of its very fabric or structure—showing how, for instance, alienation gets ‘lost’ or ‘trapped’, embodied, in products, commodities—from the obvious examples (such as Nikes made in sweatshops, and sweatshops embodied in Nikes)—to a wider and much more pervasive sense that the whole system of production and creation is somehow alienating.
As Pavon Cuellar remarks, ‘Marx was the first to realise that this alienation actually gets contained and incarnated in things—in “commodities”‘ (Marxism and Psychoanalysis). These ‘fetishised’ commodities, he adds, seem to retain and promise to return, when consumed, the subjective-social part lost by those alienated while producing them:
the alienated have lost what they imagine [or hope] to find in what is fetishised.
This understanding of alienation is really the core issue for Marx. People probably know him today for his theories of capital—how issues of exploitation, profit, and control continually characterise and resurface in capitalism—but for me the key concern of Marx, and one that is constantly neglected, or misunderstood, is his view on the centrality and importance of human creativity and productivity—man’s ‘colossal productive power’ as he calls it—exactly as it was in fact for William Blake, slightly earlier in the century.
Marx refers to this extraordinary world-transformative energy and agency as our ‘active species-life’, our ‘species-being’—our ‘physical and spiritual energies’. But these immense creative energies and transformative capacities are, he notes, under the present system, immediately taken from us and converted into something alien, objective, enslaving, fetishised.
Restructuring desire
The image he evokes is of mothers giving birth—another form of labour perhaps—with the baby immediately being taken away and converted into something alien, something doll-like–a commodity. He considers what effect that must have on the mother’s spirit. This, for Marx, is the source of the alienation and unease, the sort of profound dislocation of the human spirit that characterises industrial capitalism. And as Pavon Cuellar shows, we can’t buy our way out of this alienation—by producing more toys, more dolls—because that’s where the alienation occurs, and is embodied and generated.
Indeed, consumerism and materialism are themselves widely recognised today as key drivers of a whole raft of mental health problems, from addiction to depression. As George Monbiot notes,
Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt has written very compellingly on this association, suggesting that in modern societies we often ‘confuse material well-being with psychological well-being’. In her book The Selfish Society she shows how successfully and relentlessly consumer capitalism reshapes our brains and reworks our nervous systems in its own image. For ‘we would miss much of what capitalism is about,’ she notes,
if we overlook its role in restructuring and marketing desire and impulse themselves.
Another key aspect of capitalism and its impact on mental illness we could talk about of course is inequality. Capitalism is as much an inequality-generating system as it is a mental illness producing system. As a Royal College of Psychiatrists report noted:
Inequality is a major determinant of mental illness: the greater the level of inequality, the worse the health outcomes. Children from the poorest households have a three-fold greater risk of mental ill health than children from the richest households. Mental illness is consistently associated with deprivation, low income, unemployment, poor education, poorer physical health and increased health-risk behaviour.
Some commentators have even suggested that capitalism itself, as a way of being or way of thinking about the world, might be seen as a rather ‘psychopathic’ or pathological system. There are certainly some striking correspondences between modern financial and corporate systems and individuals diagnosed with clinical psychopathy, as a number of analysts have noticed.
Robert Hare for instance, one of the world’s leading authorities into psychopathy and the originator of the widely accepted ‘Hare Checklist’ used to test for psychopathy, remarked to Jon Ronson: ‘I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.’ ‘But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths?’ the interviewer asks. ‘”Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Bob.
Corporate and political … psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.
Pathological institutions in Capitalism
These traits, as Joel Bakan brilliantly suggested in his book The Corporation, are encrypted into the very fabric of modern corporations—part of its basic DNA and modus operandi.
The corporation’s legally defined mandate,’ he notes, ‘is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.
By its own legal definition, therefore, the corporation is ‘a pathological institution’, and Bakan helpfully lists the diagnostic features of its default pathology (lack of empathy, pursuit of self-interest, grandiosity, shallow affect, aggression, social indifference) to show what a reliably disturbed patient the corporation is.
Why should all of these contemporary social and economic practices and processes generate so much illness, so many disorders? To answer this I think we need to look back at the wider Enlightenment project, and the psychological models of human nature out of which they emerged.
Modern capitalism grew out of seventeenth century concepts of man as some sort of disconnected, discontinuous, disengaged self—one driven by competition and a narrow, ‘rational’ self-interest—the concept of homo economicus that drove and underwrote much of the whole Enlightenment project, including its economic models.
As Iain McGilchrist notes,
Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity.
We now know how mistaken, and destructive, this model of the self is. Recent neuroscientific research into the ‘social brain’, together with exciting developments in modern attachment theory, developmental psychology, and interpersonal neurobiology, are significantly revising, and upgrading, this rather quaint, old-fashioned view of the isolated, ‘rational’ individual—and also revealing a far richer and more sophisticated understanding of human development and identity, through increased knowledge of ‘right hemisphere’ intersubjectivity, unconscious processes, group behaviour, the role of empathy and mentalisation in brain development, and the significance of context and socialisation in emotional and cognitive development.
As neuroscientist David Eagleman observes, the human brain itself relies on other brains for its very existence and growth—the concept of ‘me’, he notes, is dependent on the reality of ‘we’:
We are a single vast superorganism, a neural network embedded in a far larger web of neural networks. Our brains are so fundamentally wired to interact that it’s not even clear where each of us begins and ends. Who you are has everything to do with who we are. There’s no avoiding the truth that’s etched into our neural circuitry: we need each other.
Dependency is therefore built into the fabric of who we are as social and biological beings, hardwired into our mainframe: it is ‘how love becomes flesh’, in Louis Cozolino’s striking phrase. ‘There are no single brains,’ Cozolino observes, echoing Winnicott, ‘brains only exist within networks of other brains.’ Some people have termed this new neurological and scientific understanding of the deep patterns of interdependency, mutual cooperation, and the social brain ‘neuro-Marxism’ because of the implications involved.
Capitalism is, it seems, rooted in a fundamentally flawed, naive, and old-fashioned seventeenth-century model of who we are—it tries to make us think that we’re isolated, autonomous, disengaged, competitive, decontextualised—an ultimately rather ruthless and dissociated entity. The harm that this view of the self has done to us, and our children, is incalculable.
Many people believe, and are encouraged to believe, that these problems and disorders—psychosis, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, self-harm—these symptoms of a ‘sick world’ (to use James Hillman’s terrific description) are theirs, rather than the world’s. ‘But what if your emotional problems weren’t merely your own?’, asks Tom Syverson. ‘What if they were our problems? What if the real problem is that we’re living in wrong society? Perhaps Adorno was correct when he said,
wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
The root of this ‘living wrongly’ seems to be because we live in a social and economic system at odds with both our psychology and our neurology, with who we are as social beings. As I suggest in my book, we need to realise that our inner and outer worlds constantly and profoundly interact and shape each other, and that therefore rather than separating our understanding of economic and social practices from our understanding of psychology and human development, we need to bring them together, to align them. And for this to happen, we need a new dialogue between the political and personal worlds, a new integrated model for mental health, and a new politics.
https://mronline.org/2024/05/18/a-mad-world/
"Scab of a nation, driven insane."
Frank Zappa
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Up in Arms: Why Educators Must Resist the Arms Industry in Our Schools and Colleges
21-05-2024
Austin Bilal
As a secondary school student, I remember visiting the Airbus Aerospace, Engineering, and Technology site on a school trip. Proudly nestled in our town’s small business and technology park, Airbus painted an impressive picture. They told us the story of the Mars Rover that they built and we were told that, if we worked hard enough, we could aim for the stars too. Little did I know that Airbus was also a leading manufacturer of military equipment used in wars which have resulted in countless deaths and casualties all over the world.
My town isn’t just home to Airbus, it is also home to MBDA. A joint venture between Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo, it is known as a world-renowned manufacturer of missiles. My dad even played for their football team. Surrounded by arms dealers and manufacturers my whole life, it’s no wonder that, on becoming a teacher, I would again be subject to the marketing campaigns of the infamous and bloody industry of arms exports. Or rather, I would be on a school trip from another perspective; working within an institution that normalises relations with such businesses of death.
Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Thales and Raytheon, to name but a few, are reported to spend millions every year sponsoring school events, funding competitions, and even providing classroom materials: from a missile simulator for children to play with, to workshops on the benefits of using camouflage on the battlefield. At a time of increasing disruption of arms contractors and so-called defence manufacturers by activists up and down the country,1 firms like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin are working hard on their public image. And what better audience than unsuspecting children? Presenting themselves as world leaders in advanced engineering and technology and as key contributors to the UK economy by fostering young peoples’ interest in STEM subjects and computer science, arms companies have been actively targeting school children for several years.
However, beneath the veneer of innovation and economic contribution lies the reality that arms companies are dependent on imperialism; the arms industry is geared to reap great profits from the inherent tendency towards war and military conflict within a world system of uneven exchange, and so their role in the education system is to reproduce the ideological basis for its perpetuation. As an extension of US imperial power in the region, Israel is the recipient of billions of dollars worth of arms. One wonders without such military aid and investment from Western states, whether their settler-colonial project would last a minute longer against the Palestinian resistance. The Israeli state is dependent on such arms, and the arms industry is currently dependent on the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. Between 2010-2019, the UK was the second biggest arms exporter in the world with £86 billion in sales. In 2022 alone, UK arms exports were valued at £12 billion, the most immediately relevant example of this being the UK’s £489 million arms exports to Israel since 2015. This has included the production of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets currently being used in Israel’s onslaught of Palestinian men, women and children in their homes, hospitals, and refugee camps.2 After October 7th, Israel even ordered more F-35 jets from Lockheed Martin, further entrenching the deeply imperialistic relationship between Israel, the United States and the UK. Highlighting this dynamic, US Air Force officer Mike Schmidt reportedly said ‘we are going to learn a lot’ from Israel’s use of F-35s in Gaza. The new F-35s are equipped with the latest computing capabilities, which the United States military deems as having ‘software kinks’ that need to be ironed out before the U.S can claim readiness of their fleet. Like many arms dealers, Airbus boasts that their technology is ‘field-proven’, conveniently sidestepping the grim realities of its application. Gaza is yet again a testing ground for the global imperialist powers to test their weaponry.
Amnesty International has called for several arms companies to be investigated by the ICC for complicity in war crimes. According to UK law, arms sales cannot be licensed by the British government if there is a risk of those weapons being used to unlawfully harm civilians.
In light of this, it is clear that the defence industry should not be in our schools. Far from teaching students about innovative ways to engineer technology for the future, representatives of these firms are normalising the role in which their employers play in the global political economy, reproducing war in the service of the neo-colonial system. As such, there is a clear moral argument to be made in resisting arms companies and defence contractors being invited into British schools.
Arms industry in schools
Since 2012, the Department for Education has promoted ‘military ethos’ programmes such as cadet units in state schools as well as increasing the role of the armed forces and arms industry in the provision of STEM and computing activities for students, even sponsoring youth organisations like Girlguiding and Scouts.
The image of the military is key to its survival. Recruitment targets for the Army and Navy have fallen short every year since 2010, and facing the perceived threat by Russia, ex-MI6 chief Alex Younger has added to the growing discourse around introducing conscription to suture the lack of recruits. This recruitment drive is intimately connected with the ideological maintenance of the status quo, of constructing the image of the proud and dutiful British military and associated defence industry. Such an industry plays on the innocence of children and their natural curiosity and intrigue in technology.
In 2017 ForcesWatch reported that arms companies, alongside and often in partnership with the military, have created an industry for STEM activities and sponsorship. BAE Systems, for example, ran an education roadshow with the Royal Navy and RAF, hosted by a CBeebies presenter.3 Named ‘The Big Bang Fair’, this roadshow was sponsored by 100 arms companies, attracting primary and secondary school children. BAE also invested more than £100 million in education, skills and early careers in 2018 alone. In October 2022, they delivered a workshop to one million students through their education roadshow. On average, they visit 435 schools a year, even using Lego Mindstorm kits to develop the skills to build high-tech weaponry, which the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) has appropriately called ‘grooming’.
In 2020, Declassified UK reported that the British intelligence agency GCHQ had been secretly promoting arms companies to school children. Paid for by public funds, the ‘cyber school hub’ pilot scheme in Gloucestershire run by Lockheed Martin whilst promoting BAE Systems, delivers workshops to children ages 9-10, and ‘careers advice’ for those aged 11-12 – all without the consent of parents. In the same report, it was revealed that, in some workshops, students were building drones and ‘sniffing’4 on classmates’ internet connections.
Lockheed Martin boasts a child-friendly STEM activity pack for British Science week, containing cartoonish clouds and smiling robots. The answers to their ‘crack the code’ activity include allusive and cryptic sentences such as ‘your mission is ours / we never forget who we’re working for / ensuring those we serve always stay ahead of ready’, clear efforts at instilling the military’s ethos. On the back of their activity pack is a ‘colouring activity’ of the Stealth Combat Aircraft F-35 Lightning II and the military transport aircraft the C-130J Super Hercules. Whilst in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, they host a Code Quest competition, giving students the ‘opportunity to explore new horizons in the ever-evolving ecosystem of computer programming and cybersecurity’.
Beyond workshops in STEM and computer science, the arms industry has a far wider and deeper connection to the British education system. ForcesWatch reports that, in conjunction with the Armed Forces, ‘arms companies and defence suppliers … are now influences within schools and colleges, particularly within career-led and technical education’. Of the University Technical Colleges’ sponsors, 39% are by or partnered with one or more major arms companies like BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.
As CAAT spokesperson Andrew Smith, has pointed out, ‘Arms companies aren’t spending money in schools because they care about education or young people. They are doing it because they want to improve their reputations and normalise what they do’. ForcesWatch further expands this point, stating that ‘[not only does it steer interested students towards a career in the defence industry or military and provide a mechanism for directly recruiting them, it helps to create an acceptance of military interests among young people and society at large’.
Companies involved in war crimes are, in collaboration with British intelligence services, delivering workshops in schools and creating classroom resources, which both canalise and socialise students into a normalised view of an industry built upon death. On one side of the world, children are bombed and murdered in their homes. On the other side, children are offered a career path to manufacturing and engineering weapons, offered marketing and human resources roles for war criminals, accounting and finance for the armoury of the global capitalist system. As an educator in an institution that is increasingly focussed on careers, one is found frequently questioning my role in the system and what are the intended purposes of schooling. In an effort to answer that, we must first understand the role of education in British society.
The role of education
Any educator will tell you that schools and colleges are complicated institutions. As a teacher of Sociology, I have the delight of teaching students the role of education as a part of the curriculum. Social theorists generally agree that the role of education in society is that of an agent of secondary socialisation. Socialisation, in this sense, is a process whereby young people are taught and learn the dominant norms and values of society.
Where sociologists disagree on the role of education is what norms and values are transmitted and whether this is an inherently positive process. The Marxist duo Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis conceptualised the hidden or informal curriculum as having a ‘correspondence principle’. They drew distinctions between how schools and education generally prepare young people for the exploitation in the workplace, concluding that schools ‘correspond’ to the workplace. In essence, schools mirror workplaces. Systems of punishment and reward, hierarchical relationships, strict uniform policies policing the body, and punctuality, are all norms and values that are taught informally in capitalist schooling. The key connection that they make is that schools act as an agency of the socialisation of the dominant norms and values of society, which ultimately prepare students to be docile, obedient workers that do not question their exploitation.
Similarly, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser argues that the education system is one of many social institutions that encompass the apparatus of the capitalist state. Althusser conceptualises the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production through the apparatus of the state, playing a double function of violence and ideology. The means by which the bourgeoisie maintain their power is through the repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatus. Althusser’s primary argument, as it is taught in the Sociology curriculum, is that the education system is a part of the ideological state apparatus, and the military is part of the repressive state apparatus. The institutions of education, our schools and colleges, belonging to the ideological state apparatus and an agency of socialisation, are vehicles of the norms, values, beliefs and worldviews of the UK ruling classes.
Althusser even argues that the educational ideological apparatus has embodied the ‘dominant position in mature capitalist social formations’. The school has replaced the church as the social institution of ideological influence. The overarching argument made by Althusser is that the ideological state apparatuses reproduce capitalist relations of exploitation. Therefore, the school becomes a site of ideological struggle.
The two apparatuses have met in the classroom. Applying Althusser’s conceptualisation of the state apparatus to the global capitalist system, the relationship between the two apparatuses crystallises in the arm industry’s normalisation campaign in UK schools. On the one hand, we have the increasing presence of the military and arms companies in schools. On the other, we have the exports of UK-made arms to entities like Israel equipping them with the technology for their genocide of the Palestinians. The ideological drive of normalisation in UK schools facilitates the next generation of British citizens to accept the social relations of British imperialism. This begs the question, how can educators resist the transmission of imperialist ideology within the school system?
How can educators resist?
As teachers, we are taught in our safeguarding training that our job is ‘loco parentis’, that we act in the place of parents, a sentiment which begs the question: would a responsible parent let a bomb maker into their home? If we truly embody this role, then we ought to act more like it; as educators, we are duty-bound to protect our children. All teachers will know that we are also duty bound to teach ‘British values’, by promoting ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. This was in order to, as explained by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools Lord Nash, ‘tighten up the standards on pupil welfare to improve safeguarding, and the standards on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils to strengthen the barriers to extremism’. It is clear that there is a double standard in the application of these values, as the extremism of the Israeli state has been unchecked by our government, despite the widely felt horror of the genocide has had on the ‘spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils’. One must not forget that ‘British values’ are a cynical attempt at curtailing ‘extremism’, which in reality is nothing more than racialised counter terror policing in schools as outlined by Dr. Layla Aitlhadj at PreventWatch on numerous occasions. Educators could use ‘British values’ as a strategic device in efforts to resist the arms industry in schools, but it is unlikely to have any cutting edge. That being said, there are two possible frameworks for resisting the arms industry in UK schools.
As a member of the National Education Union (NEU), I believe the initiation of a campaign to ban military companies, arms dealers and defence contractors from our schools is a viable route to take. There are pockets of inspiration and hope to be drawn from trade unions across the world. In the UK, the NEU successfully passed a motion at the Trades Union Congress in 2023 opposing the UK Government’s Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill, which would make it harder to boycott Israel. In the latest national conference of the NEU, the urgent motion on Palestine overwhelmingly passed, which cemented the union’s position on the most crucial topic of our times. An amendment was carried which called the Israeli government ‘racist’ and that it has a ‘case to answer for genocide.’ Members of the NEU are now empowered to confidently speak about Palestine in our schools, building solidarity with their struggle in one of the most important sites of secondary socialisation. Members now have the protection of their union to speak up in condemning the violence of the Israeli state.
Another way to resist was outlined by Dr. Nimer Sultany, in his speech at an Educators for Palestine conference organised by Camden NEU, he wished to highlight the significance of South Africa’s success in bringing Israel to court, outlining how the consensus view, that the International Criminal Court (ICJ) has failed to properly hold Israel to account, has been misplaced. Whilst the focus of public critique on the ICJ’s lack of a call for a ceasefire, he outlined the gravity and meaning behind the demand of Israel and its allies to ensure that genocide against the Palestinians did not happen.
Dr. Sultany noted that we should look at ‘how law can influence politics’, and that as educators we should use the ICJ ruling, or international law more widely, as a basis of security to speak about Palestine in schools. His argument is that, within the context of the ICJ preliminary ruling, a legal precedent has been established. Israel has been taken to court for genocide, with enough evidence for proceedings to continue, and that they have been mandated to ensure that genocide does not occur. Whilst one does not hold much hope in international law, battling on the basis of the legality of arms exports is a potential tool for the groups resisting the Zionist entity and the UK government’s complicity. If educators are not members of the NEU, they can opt to use this legal precedent as a defence against any possible incursions or consequences that may come their way from school leadership. Furthermore, if educators wish to join me in resisting arms companies in schools and colleges, quoting the ICJ preliminary rulings as a justification may prove difficult for leadership to deny.
Meanwhile, educators can also attempt the diplomatic route by making a case to their Senior Leadership Team, arguing that having defence contractors on school premises that speak and engage with our children is immoral and goes against ‘British values’. If diplomacy is ineffective, I wonder if it is our moral and pastoral duty as educators to consider disrupting the career events and talks. A more radical intervention could prove effective in stopping them happening altogether, whether that be by pulling the fire alarm or by hijacking the presentation through visible and loud protest.
Lunch with Lockheed
Having established the framework to analyse the education system, and the fact that the school has become a primary site of ideological struggle, I believe that it is our duty as teachers to block the transmission of harmful established norms that seek to perpetuate the logic of imperialism and colonialism in whatever way we are able to. While I do not wish for any educator to lose their job, I do not wish for children to be exploited and manipulated by defence contractors either. An example from my own workplace can serve as a case study for how to foster such action against the arms trade within the school. As a part of a week-long series of careers talks, the Army and Lockheed Martin entered my school during lunchtimes late in the week. I had been forewarned of Lockheed Martin’s attendance, however the Army turned up on the day too, and a handful of students were pulled out of class to spread the message that they were to be delivering their talk in the coming lunch break.
The news of the national workplace day of action for Gaza on February 7th 2024 had inspired me to create a workplace group chat with pro-Palestinian teachers: on the top of the agenda was what to do with Lockheed Martin. After some brainstorming, we concluded that it would be more fruitful for students that we knew were pro-Palestinian to attend the talk.
Our conversation led to several students who had shown an interest in the Palestinian cause being invited to my classroom. We had a brief conversation about Lockheed Martin and the historical complicity of these types of companies in the oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocides against colonised populations in several nations. Research drew them to the sobering fact that Lockheed Martin manufactures the F-35 jets that Israel uses to bomb Gaza, and that they sold the Mark 85 bomb that was used by Saudi Arabia in the killing of 40 children on a school bus in Yemen. The increasingly horrified students took note of questions I had prepared and then developed their own to ask the representatives of Lockheed Martin.
In a conversation the next day, the students debriefed me on the deflections that the Lockheed Martin representatives made. They pressed them on their production and sale of weapons and machinery used against civilians, but the Lockheed representatives doubled down and denied making anything of the sort, only ‘tanks and turrets’ – an attempt to deny complicity in the crimes of the company at large, professing innocently that the local factory is absolved of responsibility. The students were eventually shut down by the careers officer present in the meeting, and the representatives of Lockheed Martin refused to take questions from the pro-Palestinian students.
Though the event went ahead, informed and empowered students disrupting it in this way is one of the many seeds sown for future critical thinking and activism. I am proud of these students for showing the bravery and courage to stand up and question injustice. It is time for educators to follow their lead; be empowered to speak critically about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine, hold schools and colleges accountable as institutions of socialisation, and to make the case for the leadership of schools and colleges to cease relationships with arms companies and defence contractors.
References
1 This work is crystalised in Palestine Action’s work in shutting down Elbit factories and their subsidiaries, as well as a protracted targeting of businesses and institutions that deal with Elbit, such as the landlord to their sites.
2 Lockheed Martin manufactured the Mark 82 bomb which Saudi Arabia used in August 2018 to blow up more than 40 children on a school bus in Yemen.
3 CBeebies is a famous British children’s television channel.
4 Sniffing is a computing term that describes monitoring and intercepting network traffic. It is one of the main ways to spy on internet activity.
Austin Bilal
https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/up-in-arms
21-05-2024
Austin Bilal
As a secondary school student, I remember visiting the Airbus Aerospace, Engineering, and Technology site on a school trip. Proudly nestled in our town’s small business and technology park, Airbus painted an impressive picture. They told us the story of the Mars Rover that they built and we were told that, if we worked hard enough, we could aim for the stars too. Little did I know that Airbus was also a leading manufacturer of military equipment used in wars which have resulted in countless deaths and casualties all over the world.
My town isn’t just home to Airbus, it is also home to MBDA. A joint venture between Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo, it is known as a world-renowned manufacturer of missiles. My dad even played for their football team. Surrounded by arms dealers and manufacturers my whole life, it’s no wonder that, on becoming a teacher, I would again be subject to the marketing campaigns of the infamous and bloody industry of arms exports. Or rather, I would be on a school trip from another perspective; working within an institution that normalises relations with such businesses of death.
Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Thales and Raytheon, to name but a few, are reported to spend millions every year sponsoring school events, funding competitions, and even providing classroom materials: from a missile simulator for children to play with, to workshops on the benefits of using camouflage on the battlefield. At a time of increasing disruption of arms contractors and so-called defence manufacturers by activists up and down the country,1 firms like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin are working hard on their public image. And what better audience than unsuspecting children? Presenting themselves as world leaders in advanced engineering and technology and as key contributors to the UK economy by fostering young peoples’ interest in STEM subjects and computer science, arms companies have been actively targeting school children for several years.
However, beneath the veneer of innovation and economic contribution lies the reality that arms companies are dependent on imperialism; the arms industry is geared to reap great profits from the inherent tendency towards war and military conflict within a world system of uneven exchange, and so their role in the education system is to reproduce the ideological basis for its perpetuation. As an extension of US imperial power in the region, Israel is the recipient of billions of dollars worth of arms. One wonders without such military aid and investment from Western states, whether their settler-colonial project would last a minute longer against the Palestinian resistance. The Israeli state is dependent on such arms, and the arms industry is currently dependent on the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. Between 2010-2019, the UK was the second biggest arms exporter in the world with £86 billion in sales. In 2022 alone, UK arms exports were valued at £12 billion, the most immediately relevant example of this being the UK’s £489 million arms exports to Israel since 2015. This has included the production of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets currently being used in Israel’s onslaught of Palestinian men, women and children in their homes, hospitals, and refugee camps.2 After October 7th, Israel even ordered more F-35 jets from Lockheed Martin, further entrenching the deeply imperialistic relationship between Israel, the United States and the UK. Highlighting this dynamic, US Air Force officer Mike Schmidt reportedly said ‘we are going to learn a lot’ from Israel’s use of F-35s in Gaza. The new F-35s are equipped with the latest computing capabilities, which the United States military deems as having ‘software kinks’ that need to be ironed out before the U.S can claim readiness of their fleet. Like many arms dealers, Airbus boasts that their technology is ‘field-proven’, conveniently sidestepping the grim realities of its application. Gaza is yet again a testing ground for the global imperialist powers to test their weaponry.
Amnesty International has called for several arms companies to be investigated by the ICC for complicity in war crimes. According to UK law, arms sales cannot be licensed by the British government if there is a risk of those weapons being used to unlawfully harm civilians.
In light of this, it is clear that the defence industry should not be in our schools. Far from teaching students about innovative ways to engineer technology for the future, representatives of these firms are normalising the role in which their employers play in the global political economy, reproducing war in the service of the neo-colonial system. As such, there is a clear moral argument to be made in resisting arms companies and defence contractors being invited into British schools.
Arms industry in schools
Since 2012, the Department for Education has promoted ‘military ethos’ programmes such as cadet units in state schools as well as increasing the role of the armed forces and arms industry in the provision of STEM and computing activities for students, even sponsoring youth organisations like Girlguiding and Scouts.
The image of the military is key to its survival. Recruitment targets for the Army and Navy have fallen short every year since 2010, and facing the perceived threat by Russia, ex-MI6 chief Alex Younger has added to the growing discourse around introducing conscription to suture the lack of recruits. This recruitment drive is intimately connected with the ideological maintenance of the status quo, of constructing the image of the proud and dutiful British military and associated defence industry. Such an industry plays on the innocence of children and their natural curiosity and intrigue in technology.
In 2017 ForcesWatch reported that arms companies, alongside and often in partnership with the military, have created an industry for STEM activities and sponsorship. BAE Systems, for example, ran an education roadshow with the Royal Navy and RAF, hosted by a CBeebies presenter.3 Named ‘The Big Bang Fair’, this roadshow was sponsored by 100 arms companies, attracting primary and secondary school children. BAE also invested more than £100 million in education, skills and early careers in 2018 alone. In October 2022, they delivered a workshop to one million students through their education roadshow. On average, they visit 435 schools a year, even using Lego Mindstorm kits to develop the skills to build high-tech weaponry, which the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) has appropriately called ‘grooming’.
In 2020, Declassified UK reported that the British intelligence agency GCHQ had been secretly promoting arms companies to school children. Paid for by public funds, the ‘cyber school hub’ pilot scheme in Gloucestershire run by Lockheed Martin whilst promoting BAE Systems, delivers workshops to children ages 9-10, and ‘careers advice’ for those aged 11-12 – all without the consent of parents. In the same report, it was revealed that, in some workshops, students were building drones and ‘sniffing’4 on classmates’ internet connections.
Lockheed Martin boasts a child-friendly STEM activity pack for British Science week, containing cartoonish clouds and smiling robots. The answers to their ‘crack the code’ activity include allusive and cryptic sentences such as ‘your mission is ours / we never forget who we’re working for / ensuring those we serve always stay ahead of ready’, clear efforts at instilling the military’s ethos. On the back of their activity pack is a ‘colouring activity’ of the Stealth Combat Aircraft F-35 Lightning II and the military transport aircraft the C-130J Super Hercules. Whilst in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, they host a Code Quest competition, giving students the ‘opportunity to explore new horizons in the ever-evolving ecosystem of computer programming and cybersecurity’.
Beyond workshops in STEM and computer science, the arms industry has a far wider and deeper connection to the British education system. ForcesWatch reports that, in conjunction with the Armed Forces, ‘arms companies and defence suppliers … are now influences within schools and colleges, particularly within career-led and technical education’. Of the University Technical Colleges’ sponsors, 39% are by or partnered with one or more major arms companies like BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.
As CAAT spokesperson Andrew Smith, has pointed out, ‘Arms companies aren’t spending money in schools because they care about education or young people. They are doing it because they want to improve their reputations and normalise what they do’. ForcesWatch further expands this point, stating that ‘[not only does it steer interested students towards a career in the defence industry or military and provide a mechanism for directly recruiting them, it helps to create an acceptance of military interests among young people and society at large’.
Companies involved in war crimes are, in collaboration with British intelligence services, delivering workshops in schools and creating classroom resources, which both canalise and socialise students into a normalised view of an industry built upon death. On one side of the world, children are bombed and murdered in their homes. On the other side, children are offered a career path to manufacturing and engineering weapons, offered marketing and human resources roles for war criminals, accounting and finance for the armoury of the global capitalist system. As an educator in an institution that is increasingly focussed on careers, one is found frequently questioning my role in the system and what are the intended purposes of schooling. In an effort to answer that, we must first understand the role of education in British society.
The role of education
Any educator will tell you that schools and colleges are complicated institutions. As a teacher of Sociology, I have the delight of teaching students the role of education as a part of the curriculum. Social theorists generally agree that the role of education in society is that of an agent of secondary socialisation. Socialisation, in this sense, is a process whereby young people are taught and learn the dominant norms and values of society.
Where sociologists disagree on the role of education is what norms and values are transmitted and whether this is an inherently positive process. The Marxist duo Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis conceptualised the hidden or informal curriculum as having a ‘correspondence principle’. They drew distinctions between how schools and education generally prepare young people for the exploitation in the workplace, concluding that schools ‘correspond’ to the workplace. In essence, schools mirror workplaces. Systems of punishment and reward, hierarchical relationships, strict uniform policies policing the body, and punctuality, are all norms and values that are taught informally in capitalist schooling. The key connection that they make is that schools act as an agency of the socialisation of the dominant norms and values of society, which ultimately prepare students to be docile, obedient workers that do not question their exploitation.
Similarly, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser argues that the education system is one of many social institutions that encompass the apparatus of the capitalist state. Althusser conceptualises the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production through the apparatus of the state, playing a double function of violence and ideology. The means by which the bourgeoisie maintain their power is through the repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatus. Althusser’s primary argument, as it is taught in the Sociology curriculum, is that the education system is a part of the ideological state apparatus, and the military is part of the repressive state apparatus. The institutions of education, our schools and colleges, belonging to the ideological state apparatus and an agency of socialisation, are vehicles of the norms, values, beliefs and worldviews of the UK ruling classes.
Althusser even argues that the educational ideological apparatus has embodied the ‘dominant position in mature capitalist social formations’. The school has replaced the church as the social institution of ideological influence. The overarching argument made by Althusser is that the ideological state apparatuses reproduce capitalist relations of exploitation. Therefore, the school becomes a site of ideological struggle.
The two apparatuses have met in the classroom. Applying Althusser’s conceptualisation of the state apparatus to the global capitalist system, the relationship between the two apparatuses crystallises in the arm industry’s normalisation campaign in UK schools. On the one hand, we have the increasing presence of the military and arms companies in schools. On the other, we have the exports of UK-made arms to entities like Israel equipping them with the technology for their genocide of the Palestinians. The ideological drive of normalisation in UK schools facilitates the next generation of British citizens to accept the social relations of British imperialism. This begs the question, how can educators resist the transmission of imperialist ideology within the school system?
How can educators resist?
As teachers, we are taught in our safeguarding training that our job is ‘loco parentis’, that we act in the place of parents, a sentiment which begs the question: would a responsible parent let a bomb maker into their home? If we truly embody this role, then we ought to act more like it; as educators, we are duty-bound to protect our children. All teachers will know that we are also duty bound to teach ‘British values’, by promoting ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. This was in order to, as explained by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools Lord Nash, ‘tighten up the standards on pupil welfare to improve safeguarding, and the standards on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils to strengthen the barriers to extremism’. It is clear that there is a double standard in the application of these values, as the extremism of the Israeli state has been unchecked by our government, despite the widely felt horror of the genocide has had on the ‘spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils’. One must not forget that ‘British values’ are a cynical attempt at curtailing ‘extremism’, which in reality is nothing more than racialised counter terror policing in schools as outlined by Dr. Layla Aitlhadj at PreventWatch on numerous occasions. Educators could use ‘British values’ as a strategic device in efforts to resist the arms industry in schools, but it is unlikely to have any cutting edge. That being said, there are two possible frameworks for resisting the arms industry in UK schools.
As a member of the National Education Union (NEU), I believe the initiation of a campaign to ban military companies, arms dealers and defence contractors from our schools is a viable route to take. There are pockets of inspiration and hope to be drawn from trade unions across the world. In the UK, the NEU successfully passed a motion at the Trades Union Congress in 2023 opposing the UK Government’s Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill, which would make it harder to boycott Israel. In the latest national conference of the NEU, the urgent motion on Palestine overwhelmingly passed, which cemented the union’s position on the most crucial topic of our times. An amendment was carried which called the Israeli government ‘racist’ and that it has a ‘case to answer for genocide.’ Members of the NEU are now empowered to confidently speak about Palestine in our schools, building solidarity with their struggle in one of the most important sites of secondary socialisation. Members now have the protection of their union to speak up in condemning the violence of the Israeli state.
Another way to resist was outlined by Dr. Nimer Sultany, in his speech at an Educators for Palestine conference organised by Camden NEU, he wished to highlight the significance of South Africa’s success in bringing Israel to court, outlining how the consensus view, that the International Criminal Court (ICJ) has failed to properly hold Israel to account, has been misplaced. Whilst the focus of public critique on the ICJ’s lack of a call for a ceasefire, he outlined the gravity and meaning behind the demand of Israel and its allies to ensure that genocide against the Palestinians did not happen.
Dr. Sultany noted that we should look at ‘how law can influence politics’, and that as educators we should use the ICJ ruling, or international law more widely, as a basis of security to speak about Palestine in schools. His argument is that, within the context of the ICJ preliminary ruling, a legal precedent has been established. Israel has been taken to court for genocide, with enough evidence for proceedings to continue, and that they have been mandated to ensure that genocide does not occur. Whilst one does not hold much hope in international law, battling on the basis of the legality of arms exports is a potential tool for the groups resisting the Zionist entity and the UK government’s complicity. If educators are not members of the NEU, they can opt to use this legal precedent as a defence against any possible incursions or consequences that may come their way from school leadership. Furthermore, if educators wish to join me in resisting arms companies in schools and colleges, quoting the ICJ preliminary rulings as a justification may prove difficult for leadership to deny.
Meanwhile, educators can also attempt the diplomatic route by making a case to their Senior Leadership Team, arguing that having defence contractors on school premises that speak and engage with our children is immoral and goes against ‘British values’. If diplomacy is ineffective, I wonder if it is our moral and pastoral duty as educators to consider disrupting the career events and talks. A more radical intervention could prove effective in stopping them happening altogether, whether that be by pulling the fire alarm or by hijacking the presentation through visible and loud protest.
Lunch with Lockheed
Having established the framework to analyse the education system, and the fact that the school has become a primary site of ideological struggle, I believe that it is our duty as teachers to block the transmission of harmful established norms that seek to perpetuate the logic of imperialism and colonialism in whatever way we are able to. While I do not wish for any educator to lose their job, I do not wish for children to be exploited and manipulated by defence contractors either. An example from my own workplace can serve as a case study for how to foster such action against the arms trade within the school. As a part of a week-long series of careers talks, the Army and Lockheed Martin entered my school during lunchtimes late in the week. I had been forewarned of Lockheed Martin’s attendance, however the Army turned up on the day too, and a handful of students were pulled out of class to spread the message that they were to be delivering their talk in the coming lunch break.
The news of the national workplace day of action for Gaza on February 7th 2024 had inspired me to create a workplace group chat with pro-Palestinian teachers: on the top of the agenda was what to do with Lockheed Martin. After some brainstorming, we concluded that it would be more fruitful for students that we knew were pro-Palestinian to attend the talk.
Our conversation led to several students who had shown an interest in the Palestinian cause being invited to my classroom. We had a brief conversation about Lockheed Martin and the historical complicity of these types of companies in the oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocides against colonised populations in several nations. Research drew them to the sobering fact that Lockheed Martin manufactures the F-35 jets that Israel uses to bomb Gaza, and that they sold the Mark 85 bomb that was used by Saudi Arabia in the killing of 40 children on a school bus in Yemen. The increasingly horrified students took note of questions I had prepared and then developed their own to ask the representatives of Lockheed Martin.
In a conversation the next day, the students debriefed me on the deflections that the Lockheed Martin representatives made. They pressed them on their production and sale of weapons and machinery used against civilians, but the Lockheed representatives doubled down and denied making anything of the sort, only ‘tanks and turrets’ – an attempt to deny complicity in the crimes of the company at large, professing innocently that the local factory is absolved of responsibility. The students were eventually shut down by the careers officer present in the meeting, and the representatives of Lockheed Martin refused to take questions from the pro-Palestinian students.
Though the event went ahead, informed and empowered students disrupting it in this way is one of the many seeds sown for future critical thinking and activism. I am proud of these students for showing the bravery and courage to stand up and question injustice. It is time for educators to follow their lead; be empowered to speak critically about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine, hold schools and colleges accountable as institutions of socialisation, and to make the case for the leadership of schools and colleges to cease relationships with arms companies and defence contractors.
References
1 This work is crystalised in Palestine Action’s work in shutting down Elbit factories and their subsidiaries, as well as a protracted targeting of businesses and institutions that deal with Elbit, such as the landlord to their sites.
2 Lockheed Martin manufactured the Mark 82 bomb which Saudi Arabia used in August 2018 to blow up more than 40 children on a school bus in Yemen.
3 CBeebies is a famous British children’s television channel.
4 Sniffing is a computing term that describes monitoring and intercepting network traffic. It is one of the main ways to spy on internet activity.
Austin Bilal
https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/up-in-arms
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World: The Twenty-First Newsletter (2024)
As the US celebrates $95.3 billion in military funding for Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the US, we unpack the US Indo-Pacific strategy and what’s at stake.
23 MAY 2024
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XV Nagasaki, 1982, from The Hiroshima Panels.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
For Prabir, who is now out of jail.
On the evening of 14 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken climbed onstage at Barman Dictat in Kyiv, Ukraine, to pick up an electric guitar and join the Ukrainian punk band 19.99. Ukrainians, he said, are ‘fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for a free world’. Blinken and 19.99 then played the chorus of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, entirely ignoring the implications of its lyrics – much like Donald Trump, who, to Young’s irritation, used the chorus in his 2015–2016 presidential campaign.
In February 1989, the day after Young received the news that his band’s tour in the USSR fell through, he penned the song’s lyrics, resting on his criticisms of the Reagan years and the first month of George H. W. Bush’s presidency. While it sounds patriotic on the surface, that song – like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) – is deeply critical of the hierarchies and humiliations of capitalist society.
The three verses of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ paint a picture of despair (‘people shufflin’ their feet/ people sleepin’ in their shoes’) defined by the drug epidemic plaguing the poor (a woman ‘puts the kid away/ and she’s gone to get a hit’), the collapse of educational opportunities (‘there’s one more kid/ that will never go to school’), and a growing population that lives on the street (‘we got a thousand points of light/ for the homeless man’). Springsteen’s song, written in the shadow of the US war on Vietnam (‘so they put a rifle in my hand/ sent me off to a foreign land/ to go and kill the yellow man’), also captured the strangulation of the working class in the US, many of whom were unable to get a job after returning from a war they did not want (‘down in the shadow of the penitentiary/ out by the gas fires of the refinery/ I’m ten years burning down the road/ nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go’).
These are songs of anguish, not anthems of war. To chant ‘born in the USA’ or ‘keep on rockin’ in the free world’ does not evoke a sense of pride in the Global North but a fierce criticism of its ruthless wars. ‘Keep on rockin’ in the free world’ is pickled in irony. Blinken did not get it, nor did Trump. They want the allure of rock and roll, but not the acidity of its lyrics. They do not understand that Neil Young’s 1989 song is the soundtrack of the resistance to the US wars that followed against Panama (1989–1999), Iraq (1990–1991), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq (2003–2011), and many more.
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIII Death of the American Prisoners of War, 1971, from The Hiroshima Panels.
Blinken went to Kiev to celebrate the passing of three bills in the US House of Representatives that appropriate $95.3 billion for the militaries of Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States. This is in addition to the more than $1.5 trillion that the US spends on its military every year. It is obscene that the US continues to supply Israel with deadly munitions for its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, including the $26.4 billion it promised to Israel in the new bills while feigning concern for the starvation and slaughter of Palestinians. It is ghastly that the US continues to prevent peace talks between Ukraine and Russia while funding the former’s demoralised military (including $60.8 billion for weapons in the new bills alone) as the US seeks to use the conflict to ‘see Russia weakened’.
At the other end of Eurasia, the US has, similarly, used the issue of Taiwan in its efforts to see China ‘weakened’. That is why this supplemental appropriation allots $8.1 billion for ‘Indo-Pacific security’, including $3.9 billion in armaments for Taiwan and $3.3 billion for submarine construction in the US. Taiwan is not alone as a potential frontline state in this pressure campaign against China: the newly formed Squad, made up of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the US, uses solvable conflicts between the Philippines and China as opportunities to weaponise dangerous manoeuvres with the hope of provoking a reaction from China that would give the US an excuse to attack it.
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIV Crows, 1972, from The Hiroshima Panels.
Our new dossier, The New Cold War is Sending Tremors Through Northeast Asia, published in collaboration with the International Strategy Centre (Seoul, South Korea) and No Cold War, argues that ‘the US-led New Cold War against China is destabilising Northeast Asia along the region’s historic fault lines as part of a broader militarisation campaign that extends from Japan and South Korea, through the Taiwan Strait and the Philippines, all the way to Australia and the Pacific Islands’. The bogeyman for this build-up in what the US calls the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (a term developed to draw India into the alliance to encircle China) is North Korea, whose nuclear and missile programmes are used to justify asymmetrical mobilisation along the Pacific edge of Asia. That South Korea’s military budget in 2023 ($47.9 billion) was more than twice North Korea’s GDP ($20.6 billion) in the same year is just one example that highlights this imbalance. This use of North Korea, the dossier argues, ‘has always been a fig leaf for US containment strategies – first against the Soviet Union and today against China’. (You can read the dossier in Korean here).
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XII Floating Lanterns, 1968, from The Hiroshima Panels.
In the early years of the US development of the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, Chinese scholars such as Hu Bo, Chen Jimin, and Feng Zhennan argued that the term was merely conceptual, limited by the contradictions between the countries involved in the development of the Chinese containment strategy. Over the past few years, however, a new view has developed that these shifts in the Pacific pose a serious threat to China and that the Chinese must respond with bluntness to prevent any provocation. It is this situation, characterised by the US’s creation of alliances that are designed to threaten China (the Quad, AUKUS, JAKUS, and the Squad) alongside China’s refusal to bend before the hyper-imperialism of the Global North, that creates a serious threat in Asia.
The last section of the dossier, ‘A Path to Peace in Northeast Asia’, offers a window into the hopes of the people’s movements in Okinawa (Japan), the Korean peninsula, and China to find a pathway to peace. Five simple principles anchor this path: end the dangerous alliances, US-led war games in the region, and US intervention into the region, and support unity across struggles in the region as well as frontline struggles to end militarisation in Asia. The latter point is being fought on several fronts by those living near Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base and Henoko Bay as well as South Korea’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defence installation and Jeju Naval Base, to name a few.
In 1980, the South Korean military dictatorship arrested Kim Nam-ju (1945–1994) and thirty-five other leftists on the grounds that they were involved in the National Liberation Front Preparation Committee. Kim was a poet and a translator who brought Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Ho Chi Minh’s writings into Korean. While in Gwangju Prison for eight years, Kim wrote a range of powerful poetry, which he was able to smuggle out for publication. One of those poems, ‘Things Have Really Changed’, is about the suffocation of the ambitions of the Korean people over their own peninsula.
Under Japanese imperialism, if Joseon people
shouted ‘Long Live Independence!’,
Japanese policemen came and took them away,
Japanese prosecutors interrogated them,
Japanese judges put them on trial.
Japan withdrew and the US stepped in.
Now if Koreans
say ‘Yankee Go Home’,
Korean police come and take them away,
Korean prosecutors interrogate them,
Korean judges put them on trial.
Things have really changed after liberation.
Because I shouted ‘Drive out the foreign invaders!’,
people from my own country
arrested me, interrogated me, and put me on trial.
Warmly,
Vijay
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -strategy/
As the US celebrates $95.3 billion in military funding for Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the US, we unpack the US Indo-Pacific strategy and what’s at stake.
23 MAY 2024
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XV Nagasaki, 1982, from The Hiroshima Panels.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
For Prabir, who is now out of jail.
On the evening of 14 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken climbed onstage at Barman Dictat in Kyiv, Ukraine, to pick up an electric guitar and join the Ukrainian punk band 19.99. Ukrainians, he said, are ‘fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for a free world’. Blinken and 19.99 then played the chorus of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, entirely ignoring the implications of its lyrics – much like Donald Trump, who, to Young’s irritation, used the chorus in his 2015–2016 presidential campaign.
In February 1989, the day after Young received the news that his band’s tour in the USSR fell through, he penned the song’s lyrics, resting on his criticisms of the Reagan years and the first month of George H. W. Bush’s presidency. While it sounds patriotic on the surface, that song – like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) – is deeply critical of the hierarchies and humiliations of capitalist society.
The three verses of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ paint a picture of despair (‘people shufflin’ their feet/ people sleepin’ in their shoes’) defined by the drug epidemic plaguing the poor (a woman ‘puts the kid away/ and she’s gone to get a hit’), the collapse of educational opportunities (‘there’s one more kid/ that will never go to school’), and a growing population that lives on the street (‘we got a thousand points of light/ for the homeless man’). Springsteen’s song, written in the shadow of the US war on Vietnam (‘so they put a rifle in my hand/ sent me off to a foreign land/ to go and kill the yellow man’), also captured the strangulation of the working class in the US, many of whom were unable to get a job after returning from a war they did not want (‘down in the shadow of the penitentiary/ out by the gas fires of the refinery/ I’m ten years burning down the road/ nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go’).
These are songs of anguish, not anthems of war. To chant ‘born in the USA’ or ‘keep on rockin’ in the free world’ does not evoke a sense of pride in the Global North but a fierce criticism of its ruthless wars. ‘Keep on rockin’ in the free world’ is pickled in irony. Blinken did not get it, nor did Trump. They want the allure of rock and roll, but not the acidity of its lyrics. They do not understand that Neil Young’s 1989 song is the soundtrack of the resistance to the US wars that followed against Panama (1989–1999), Iraq (1990–1991), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq (2003–2011), and many more.
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIII Death of the American Prisoners of War, 1971, from The Hiroshima Panels.
Blinken went to Kiev to celebrate the passing of three bills in the US House of Representatives that appropriate $95.3 billion for the militaries of Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States. This is in addition to the more than $1.5 trillion that the US spends on its military every year. It is obscene that the US continues to supply Israel with deadly munitions for its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, including the $26.4 billion it promised to Israel in the new bills while feigning concern for the starvation and slaughter of Palestinians. It is ghastly that the US continues to prevent peace talks between Ukraine and Russia while funding the former’s demoralised military (including $60.8 billion for weapons in the new bills alone) as the US seeks to use the conflict to ‘see Russia weakened’.
At the other end of Eurasia, the US has, similarly, used the issue of Taiwan in its efforts to see China ‘weakened’. That is why this supplemental appropriation allots $8.1 billion for ‘Indo-Pacific security’, including $3.9 billion in armaments for Taiwan and $3.3 billion for submarine construction in the US. Taiwan is not alone as a potential frontline state in this pressure campaign against China: the newly formed Squad, made up of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the US, uses solvable conflicts between the Philippines and China as opportunities to weaponise dangerous manoeuvres with the hope of provoking a reaction from China that would give the US an excuse to attack it.
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIV Crows, 1972, from The Hiroshima Panels.
Our new dossier, The New Cold War is Sending Tremors Through Northeast Asia, published in collaboration with the International Strategy Centre (Seoul, South Korea) and No Cold War, argues that ‘the US-led New Cold War against China is destabilising Northeast Asia along the region’s historic fault lines as part of a broader militarisation campaign that extends from Japan and South Korea, through the Taiwan Strait and the Philippines, all the way to Australia and the Pacific Islands’. The bogeyman for this build-up in what the US calls the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (a term developed to draw India into the alliance to encircle China) is North Korea, whose nuclear and missile programmes are used to justify asymmetrical mobilisation along the Pacific edge of Asia. That South Korea’s military budget in 2023 ($47.9 billion) was more than twice North Korea’s GDP ($20.6 billion) in the same year is just one example that highlights this imbalance. This use of North Korea, the dossier argues, ‘has always been a fig leaf for US containment strategies – first against the Soviet Union and today against China’. (You can read the dossier in Korean here).
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XII Floating Lanterns, 1968, from The Hiroshima Panels.
In the early years of the US development of the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, Chinese scholars such as Hu Bo, Chen Jimin, and Feng Zhennan argued that the term was merely conceptual, limited by the contradictions between the countries involved in the development of the Chinese containment strategy. Over the past few years, however, a new view has developed that these shifts in the Pacific pose a serious threat to China and that the Chinese must respond with bluntness to prevent any provocation. It is this situation, characterised by the US’s creation of alliances that are designed to threaten China (the Quad, AUKUS, JAKUS, and the Squad) alongside China’s refusal to bend before the hyper-imperialism of the Global North, that creates a serious threat in Asia.
The last section of the dossier, ‘A Path to Peace in Northeast Asia’, offers a window into the hopes of the people’s movements in Okinawa (Japan), the Korean peninsula, and China to find a pathway to peace. Five simple principles anchor this path: end the dangerous alliances, US-led war games in the region, and US intervention into the region, and support unity across struggles in the region as well as frontline struggles to end militarisation in Asia. The latter point is being fought on several fronts by those living near Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base and Henoko Bay as well as South Korea’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defence installation and Jeju Naval Base, to name a few.
In 1980, the South Korean military dictatorship arrested Kim Nam-ju (1945–1994) and thirty-five other leftists on the grounds that they were involved in the National Liberation Front Preparation Committee. Kim was a poet and a translator who brought Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Ho Chi Minh’s writings into Korean. While in Gwangju Prison for eight years, Kim wrote a range of powerful poetry, which he was able to smuggle out for publication. One of those poems, ‘Things Have Really Changed’, is about the suffocation of the ambitions of the Korean people over their own peninsula.
Under Japanese imperialism, if Joseon people
shouted ‘Long Live Independence!’,
Japanese policemen came and took them away,
Japanese prosecutors interrogated them,
Japanese judges put them on trial.
Japan withdrew and the US stepped in.
Now if Koreans
say ‘Yankee Go Home’,
Korean police come and take them away,
Korean prosecutors interrogate them,
Korean judges put them on trial.
Things have really changed after liberation.
Because I shouted ‘Drive out the foreign invaders!’,
people from my own country
arrested me, interrogated me, and put me on trial.
Warmly,
Vijay
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -strategy/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Craig Murray: The Drive for War
May 25, 2024
In the West, any deviation from any point in the architecture of neoliberal beliefs is a challenge to the entire system, and thus must be eradicated.
Prime Minister Róbert Fico at the E.U. Parliament in Strasbourg in July 2016.” (European Parliament, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND)
By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
The collective shrug with which the Western media and political class noted the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has been telling.
Can you imagine the outrage and emotion that would have been expressed by Western powers if not Fico but a pro-Ukraine, anti-Russian leader within the EU had been attacked? The new orders for weapons that would have been presented to the arms manufacturers, the troops that would have been deployed, the sabres that would have been rattled?
Instead we have the media telling us that Fico opposed sending arms to Ukraine and opposed threatening Russia. We are told he did not accept the mainstream narrative on Covid vaccinations. The media do not quite say he deserved to be shot, but they come very, very close.
Fellow EU leaders followed correct form in making statements of shock and disgust at the attack on Fico, but they were formal and perfunctory. The “not actually one of us” message was very clear.
There are now an ordered set of neoliberal beliefs to which anybody in a Western nation participating in public affairs must subscribe, or they are beyond the pale.
Not to subscribe to all of these beliefs makes you a “populist”, a “conspiracy theorist”, a “Putin puppet” or a “useful idiot”.
These are some of the “key beliefs”:
No. 1) Wealth is only created by a small number of ultra-wealthy capitalists on whom the employment of everybody else ultimately depends.
No. 2) The laws governing financial structures must therefore tend to concentrate wealth to these individuals, so that they may deploy it as they choose.
No. 3) State-created currency must only be concentrated in and distributed to private financial institutions.
No. 4) Public spending is always less efficient than private spending.
No. 5) Russia, China and Iran pose an existential threat to the West. That comprises both an economic threat and a physical, military threat.
No. 6) Colonialism was a boon to the world, bringing economic development, trade and education to people of inferior cultures.
No. 7) Islam is a threat to Western values and to world development.
No. 8) Israel is a necessary project for spreading Western values to the uncivilised Middle East.
No. 9) Security necessitates devoting very substantial resources to arms production and the waging of continual war.
No. 10) Nothing must threaten the military and arms industry interest. No battle against corruption or crime can override the need for the security military industrial complex to be completely unchallenged and internally supreme.
Dependent Orthodoxies
TikTok. (Solen Feyissa, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Within this architecture of belief, other orthodoxies hang dependent, such as the correct way to respond to a complex pandemic, or support for NATO and impunity for the security services. (Support for Israel is probably better portrayed as a dependent point, but with the subject of Gaza so prominent at the moment I have figuratively moved it into the main structure.)
Any deviation on any point of belief is a challenge to the entire system, and thus must be eradicated. You will note there is no room whatsoever, within this architecture of thought, for values like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. They simply do not fit. Nor is it possible within this architecture to incorporate actual democracy, which would give people a choice of what to believe.
If you accept this architecture of thought, then you must argue that the genocide in Gaza is a good thing, and it threatens the entire structure if you state that it is not a good thing. That is why we have witnessed the spectacle of politicians defying and then repressing their own people, willing to place all of their political capital at the service of genocidal Zionism.
Words struggle to convey the horrors we have all seen from Gaza, and in no way does it lessen the terrible suffering nor the extent of the crime to observe that it has caused a major rift in the neoliberal belief system which cannot be hidden from the people.
Gaza has ramifications leading to questioning throughout the system. Why is Tik Tok being banned, to stop people getting information on Gaza? Why is it a problem that the platform is owned by China?
What has China done that makes it an enemy? China has no military designs on the West. Of recent purchases most of us have made of physical goods, a high proportion have come from China. Why is an important trade partner an “enemy”?
Why is Russia our enemy? The notion that the Russian army is going to land on the Wash is utterly implausible. The Russian state, over centuries and wildly differing regimes, has never had the slightest desire to invade the British Isles. In the U.K., under various governments, for almost three centuries charlatans have been claiming a threat of Russian invasion to justify higher defence expenditure.
Why the need to have “enemies” at all?
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/25/c ... e-for-war/
Or, as 'the 'Old Man' put it, "the Ruling Ideas of the Epoch'. Ain't nothing new, just hyper-juiced by Edward Bernays and his cult.
May 25, 2024
In the West, any deviation from any point in the architecture of neoliberal beliefs is a challenge to the entire system, and thus must be eradicated.
Prime Minister Róbert Fico at the E.U. Parliament in Strasbourg in July 2016.” (European Parliament, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND)
By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
The collective shrug with which the Western media and political class noted the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has been telling.
Can you imagine the outrage and emotion that would have been expressed by Western powers if not Fico but a pro-Ukraine, anti-Russian leader within the EU had been attacked? The new orders for weapons that would have been presented to the arms manufacturers, the troops that would have been deployed, the sabres that would have been rattled?
Instead we have the media telling us that Fico opposed sending arms to Ukraine and opposed threatening Russia. We are told he did not accept the mainstream narrative on Covid vaccinations. The media do not quite say he deserved to be shot, but they come very, very close.
Fellow EU leaders followed correct form in making statements of shock and disgust at the attack on Fico, but they were formal and perfunctory. The “not actually one of us” message was very clear.
There are now an ordered set of neoliberal beliefs to which anybody in a Western nation participating in public affairs must subscribe, or they are beyond the pale.
Not to subscribe to all of these beliefs makes you a “populist”, a “conspiracy theorist”, a “Putin puppet” or a “useful idiot”.
These are some of the “key beliefs”:
No. 1) Wealth is only created by a small number of ultra-wealthy capitalists on whom the employment of everybody else ultimately depends.
No. 2) The laws governing financial structures must therefore tend to concentrate wealth to these individuals, so that they may deploy it as they choose.
No. 3) State-created currency must only be concentrated in and distributed to private financial institutions.
No. 4) Public spending is always less efficient than private spending.
No. 5) Russia, China and Iran pose an existential threat to the West. That comprises both an economic threat and a physical, military threat.
No. 6) Colonialism was a boon to the world, bringing economic development, trade and education to people of inferior cultures.
No. 7) Islam is a threat to Western values and to world development.
No. 8) Israel is a necessary project for spreading Western values to the uncivilised Middle East.
No. 9) Security necessitates devoting very substantial resources to arms production and the waging of continual war.
No. 10) Nothing must threaten the military and arms industry interest. No battle against corruption or crime can override the need for the security military industrial complex to be completely unchallenged and internally supreme.
Dependent Orthodoxies
TikTok. (Solen Feyissa, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Within this architecture of belief, other orthodoxies hang dependent, such as the correct way to respond to a complex pandemic, or support for NATO and impunity for the security services. (Support for Israel is probably better portrayed as a dependent point, but with the subject of Gaza so prominent at the moment I have figuratively moved it into the main structure.)
Any deviation on any point of belief is a challenge to the entire system, and thus must be eradicated. You will note there is no room whatsoever, within this architecture of thought, for values like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. They simply do not fit. Nor is it possible within this architecture to incorporate actual democracy, which would give people a choice of what to believe.
If you accept this architecture of thought, then you must argue that the genocide in Gaza is a good thing, and it threatens the entire structure if you state that it is not a good thing. That is why we have witnessed the spectacle of politicians defying and then repressing their own people, willing to place all of their political capital at the service of genocidal Zionism.
Words struggle to convey the horrors we have all seen from Gaza, and in no way does it lessen the terrible suffering nor the extent of the crime to observe that it has caused a major rift in the neoliberal belief system which cannot be hidden from the people.
Gaza has ramifications leading to questioning throughout the system. Why is Tik Tok being banned, to stop people getting information on Gaza? Why is it a problem that the platform is owned by China?
What has China done that makes it an enemy? China has no military designs on the West. Of recent purchases most of us have made of physical goods, a high proportion have come from China. Why is an important trade partner an “enemy”?
Why is Russia our enemy? The notion that the Russian army is going to land on the Wash is utterly implausible. The Russian state, over centuries and wildly differing regimes, has never had the slightest desire to invade the British Isles. In the U.K., under various governments, for almost three centuries charlatans have been claiming a threat of Russian invasion to justify higher defence expenditure.
Why the need to have “enemies” at all?
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/25/c ... e-for-war/
Or, as 'the 'Old Man' put it, "the Ruling Ideas of the Epoch'. Ain't nothing new, just hyper-juiced by Edward Bernays and his cult.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
The US Is Discrediting All Arguments For Why It Should Lead The World
All the violence, tyranny and injustice it claims to be keeping at bay with its globe-dominating leadership is being inflicted by the empire itself, in more and more brazen and egregious ways each year.
Caitlin Johnstone
May 28, 2024
One by one, the US empire is discrediting all of its own arguments for why it should lead the world. All the violence, tyranny and injustice it claims to be keeping at bay with its globe-dominating leadership is being inflicted by the empire itself, in more and more brazen and egregious ways each year.
The entire premise behind the empire’s containment strategies, military encirclement and cold war brinkmanship with China is that obviously the PRC needs to be stopped from rising and displacing the US as the global leader, and arguments about the need to control Russia and Iran by any means necessary arise from the same premise. These arguments are accepted as a given by many on the basis that the US is a free and democratic country which promotes liberal values and opposes authoritarianism, so of course it’s better to have the US in charge of world affairs.
But every point which could be used to bolster that argument is being rapidly eroded by the US itself. The US is making the world a much more violent and dangerous place. The US is assaulting freedom by perpetrating and facilitating more and more injustice and authoritarianism. The US is undermining international law by constantly violating it. Every argument that could be made for the merits of US global leadership gets weaker by the day.
As the US backs Israel in routinely committing horrifying massacres in Gaza, it’s clear that the US cannot claim to be making the world a more peaceful and harmonious place.
As the US and its allies recklessly ramp up nuclear brinkmanship with Russia over the failing proxy war in Ukraine, it’s clear that the US cannot claim to be making the world safer.
As the US denounces the International Criminal Court for applying for arrest warrants of Israeli officials, and supports Israel in dismissing the orders of the International Court of Justice to cease its assault on Rafah, it’s clear that the US has discredited its claim as the upholder of the “rules-based international order”.
As online censorship and banned pro-Palestine slogans are increasingly normalized throughout the US-led western world, it’s clear that the US has discredited its claim to being a protector of the freedom of speech.
As the US inflicts violent police crackdowns on anti-genocide protesters on university campuses nationwide, it’s clear that the US has discredited its claim to being a protector of the freedom of assembly.
As the US backs Israel in murdering a historic number of journalists and shutting down Al Jazeera, while itself imprisoning Julian Assange for journalistic activity exposing US war crimes, it’s clear that the US has discredited its claim to being a protector of the freedom of the press.
As the US supports its proxies in Kyiv canceling elections in Ukraine while providing military assistance to most of the world’s dictatorships, it is clear that the US has discredited its claim to being a major promotor of democracy.
Whatever argument you could come up with for why the world benefits from US leadership, there are major stories in the news right now which soundly discredit such claims. The evidence is in, and that argument has been lost.
This is not some empty rhetorical point I’m just making to show that my worldview is better than those of the mainstream western empire apologist; it is extremely relevant to present and future developments of unparalleled importance to the survival of our species.
The US empire has been simultaneously ramping up aggressions against China and Russia as well as in the middle east with increasing recklessness that appears bound for a massive military confrontation with at least one major nuclear-armed state at some point in the coming years. It is doing so because the rise of China means US planetary hegemony will be on its way out the door unless something significant occurs, and the empire managers appear to have calculated that it’s worth risking the life of every terrestrial organism to force that something significant to occur.
The only possible argument that this is a sane or reasonable thing to do is that the world is better off with US leadership than without it. But as we just discussed, every possible premise of that claim has been soundly discredited by the actions of the United States. And it’s only getting worse.
This to me makes it abundantly clear that the world would be better off without US leadership.
Whenever I say this I get empire apologists in my comments furiously arguing that if the US doesn’t dominate our planet then China will, but there’s no evidence that China seeks to supplant the US as a unipolar planetary hegemon, and the assumption that there must always be one unipolar power dominating the globe is ahistorical nonsense. In all of human history there has been only one unipolar planetary hegemon, namely the US empire, and it didn’t exist until the fall of the Soviet Union in the nineties.
It is not rational to believe that something which has only happened one single time in all of history must be the norm for our world. Multipolarity has been the norm, not the exception, throughout all the rest of our time on this planet prior to the emergence of US global supremacy some three decades ago.
None of this is to suggest that a multipolar world will solve all our problems or give rise to peace and harmony. But it is clear that accepting the emergence of such a world is preferable to a world in which the US empire seeks to suppress and delay its arrival with rapidly increasing amounts of violence and aggression, up to and including ramping up for World War Three and playing insane games of chicken with armageddon weapons.
The US empire is too crazy and sick to be allowed to rule the world anymore. There is no argument to be made that the benefits outweigh the costs. There is no reason the world’s great powers cannot come together and collaborate toward a healthy world for the benefit of everyone, if humanity can just shrug off its primitive impulse to dominate and control.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/05 ... the-world/
******
The brink of dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the levee breaks
Alastair Crooke
May 27, 2024
The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe, but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble.
The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.
President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.
The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.
It reflects the myopia of not wanting to see or hear that which stands so plainly in clear sight before one: If it were simply “anti-West” – nothing more than negation of negation – then the criticism would have some justification. Yet, it is not mere antithesis.
Rather, the near 8,000-word joint China-Russia statement evokes the very elemental laws of nature itself in sketching the West’s usurpation of the fundamental principles of humanity, reality, and order – a critique which maddens the collective West.
David Brooks, the U.S. author who coined the term BoBos (Bohemian Bourgeoisie i.e. the metro-élites) to chart the rise of wokeism, now asserts that ‘liberalism’ (whatever that means today) “is ailing” and in retreat. The classic ‘liberal’ zeitgeist lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations that precede choice – our obligations to our families, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.
It tends to the tepid and uninspiring, Brooks says; “It avoids the big questions like: Why are we here? What is the meaning to it all? It nurtures rather, the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency – but not, as Lefebvre allows some of the loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love”.
To be clear, Brooks, in a separate piece, argues that by putting so much emphasis on individual choice, pure liberalism attenuates social bonds: In a purely liberal ethos, an invisible question lurks behind every relationship: Is this person good for me? Every social connection becomes temporary and contingent. When societies become liberal all the way down, they neglect (as quoted by Brooks) Victor Frankl’s core truth that “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life”.
The joint Xi-Putin statement therefore is not just a detailed work-plan for a BRICS future (though it is indeed a very comprehensive work plan for the BRICS summit in October). Russia and China rather have put forward a dynamic vision of concrete principles as pillars for a new society in the post-Western future.
By playing straight into the primordial sources of meaning that are deeper than individual preference – faith, family, soil and flag – Russia and China have picked up the pieces and born-up the mantle of the Bandung Non-Aligned Movement through promoting the right of national self-determination and an end to centuries old systems of exploitation.
Yet how and why can the West be said to be accelerating its own dissolution?
The NY Times gives the clue to the ‘why’: The old ‘Anglo’ obsession with a defiant Russia that the West has never been able to bend to their will. And now, Russia and China have signed a joint statement somewhat similar to the ‘no limits’ friendship declared in February 2022 but reaching further.
It portrays their relationship as “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation … ”.
Put starkly, this breaches the long-standing western rule of triangulation: the U.S. must stand with either the one, Russia or China, against the other; but never should China and Russia be permitted to band together versus the U.S.! – a doctrine sanctified in western ‘canon law’ since Mackinder’s time in the 19th Century.
Yet, that ‘two versus one’ is precisely what Team Biden inadvertently have ‘done’.
What then, constitutes the ‘how’?
The problem with the western solutions to any geo-political problem is that they invariably comprise more of the same.
The combination of this deep disdain for Russia – subsumed into the undercurrent fear of Russia as a putative geo-strategic competitor – invites a western recourse to repeating the same triangulation approach, without due reflection on whether circumstances have changed, or not. This is the case here and now – making for a ‘clear and present’ risk of unintended and damaging escalation: A prospect that might midwife the very thing that the West most fears – a loss of control, spiralling the system down into freefall.
The Mistake:
Ray McGovern, a former U.S. Presidential briefer, has chronicled how as “Biden took office in 2021, his advisers assured him that he could play on Russia’s fear (sic) of China – and drive a wedge between them. This represents the ‘mother of all errors’ of judgement, because it brings about the circumstances in which the western ‘Order’ may dissolve”.
“This [presumption of Russian weakness] became embarrassingly clear when Biden said to Putin during their Geneva summit … let me ask a rhetorical question: ‘You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world’.”
McGovern observes that this meeting gave Putin clear confirmation that Biden and his advisers were stuck in a woefully outdated appraisal of Russia-China relations.
Here is the bizarre way Biden described his approach to Putin on China: At the airport after the summit, Biden’s aides did their best to whisk him onto the plane but failed to stop him from sharing more ‘wisdom’ on China: “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China”.
‘Yes’: More of the same! Biden was trying, on the advice of his experts, to insert the ubiquitous western ‘wedge’ between Russia and an ‘BIG’ China.
After these remarks, Putin and Xi spent the rest of 2021 trying to disabuse Biden of the “China squeeze” meme: This mutual effort culminated in the Xi-Putin ‘no limits’ friendship summit of that year. If the advisers had been paying attention however, they would have threaded a long history of Russo-Chinese rapprochement. But no, they were ideologically frozen in the view that the two were destined to be eternal enemies.
Doubling Down on the Mistake. It gets worse:
Then, in a 30 December 2021 telephone conversation, Biden assured Putin that “Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine”. However, Foreign Minister Lavrov has revealed that when he met Blinken in Geneva in January 2022, the U.S. Secretary of State pretended he had not heard of Biden’s undertaking to Putin on 30 December 2021. Rather, Blinken insisted that U.S. medium-range missiles could be deployed in Ukraine, and that the U.S. might be willing to consider limiting their number.
Making An Egregious Mistake Worse
In August 2019, when the U.S. withdrew from the treaty banning intermediate-range missiles in Europe, the U.S. had already deployed missiles in Romania and Poland (saying their purpose was ostensibly ‘to defend against Iran’). However, the tubes installed are deliberately configured to accommodate nuclear warhead equipped, cruise and ballistic missiles; but here is the rub: it is not possible to determine which missile is loaded, as the tubes have lids to them. The time for these missiles to reach Moscow would be 9 minutes from Poland, and 10 from Romania.
But if, as Blinken threatened, missiles might be installed in Ukraine, it would drop to only 7 minutes (and were it to be a hypersonic missile, which the U.S. does not yet possess, it would be a mere 2-3 minutes)
Just for clarity, this (i.e. Ukraine) is Russia’s existential war which it will fight, no matter what it takes. Beijing is fully aware of the high stakes involved for Russia (and ultimately for China, too)
The Consequences to relying on the ‘Same Tactics Again, and Again’ Threats and Pressure).
On 18 May in Moscow, in the wake of the latest Xi-Putin summit – as MK Bhadrakumar notes – Lavrov predicted an escalation in western weapon supplies to Ukraine, reflecting not only the Biden’s election need to be seen ‘facing down Russia, but also the reality that “the acute phase of the military-political confrontation with the West” will continue, in “full swing”.
The western thought processes, Lavrov said, are veering round dangerously to “the contours of the formation of a European military alliance – with a nuclear component”. Lavrov lamented that “they have made a choice in favour of a showdown on the battlefield: We are ready for this”. “The agenda to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia militarily and otherwise – is pure fantasy and it will be resolutely countered”.
European military inadequacy explains, presumably, the mooted notion to add a nuclear component.
Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... ee-breaks/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Is US Really the Largest Foreign Aid Donor? Numerous Rubber Cheques Expose US Arrogance, Hypocrisy in Intl Aid
MAY 29, 2024
US Marines Delivering aid after an earthquake in Nepal, 2015. Photo: Department of Defense.
By Huang Lanlan and Leng Shumei – May 27, 2024
Note:
The US has always crowed over its “achievement” of being the world’s largest foreign aid donor. However, US foreign aid has, in fact, usually been found to be based on maximizing the country’s own interests, disregarding the practical interests and long-term development of the recipient developing countries and regions.
The US has been wantonly interfering in other countries’ internal affairs in the name of foreign aid,which was described as selfish, arrogant, and hypocritical, for its own gains. This has resulted in serious negative impacts on world peace and development. In the name of aid, the US acts arbitrarily in some recipient developing countries and regions, upholding the unipolar hegemony, disrupting the international development order, and undermining global prosperity and stability.
The Global Times is publishing a series of articles to expose the hypocritical nature and baneful influence of US foreign aid. This installment, the first in the series, focuses on the empty promises the US has made to its recipients around the world, and some arrogant political and economic conditions attached to the US aid. The article looks into how these rubber cheques have brought the recipients not better lives but long-term miseries.
Israeli and American activists block the entrance to the US Consulate building that houses the Palestinian Affairs Unit, in Jerusalem, May 24, 2024. They call on the US to stop providing arms to Israel for the war in the Gaza Strip. Photo: VCG.
The US Senate, in April 2024, approved a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for some of its allies including Ukraine and Israel. For Ukraine, the aid contained provisions, such as the Biden administration sending to Kiev more US-made missiles known as long-range ATACMS, and Biden seeking repayment of $10 billion in economic assistance from Ukraine, reported The New York Times on April 25.
The aid package has aroused widespread controversy in the international community, with many criticizing the US for conditioning its aid on mandatory terms that may actually lead to more debt for recipients like Ukraine.
There is no doubt that US aid has prolonged the crisis in Ukraine. Since the war began in early 2022, the US Congress has voted through five bills that have provided Ukraine with continuous aid, doing so most recently in April 2024. The total budget under these bills – the “headline” figure often cited by news media – is $175 billion, according to US think tank Council on Foreign Relations.
Worse still, some 40 percent of its military aid was reportedly used for the mandatory purchase of US equipment and training services, and part of the military aid was a financial loan that may become a long-term liability for Ukraine.
The US has always considered itself the largest foreign aid donor in the world. However, in reality, its foreign aid has always been based on maximizing its own interests, ignoring the actual interests and long-term development of the recipient countries, experts reached by the Global Times noted.
Selfish, arrogant, hypocritical, and ugly. These are the words experts used to describe the US foreign aid. The fact is that, under the guise of aid, the US interferes in the internal affairs of other countries and US politicians seek personal gains, bringing serious negative impacts on world peace and development, the experts stressed.
Considering the US’ active push to expand its presence in Asia and the Pacific in a string of moves aimed at containing China in recent years, experts warned relevant countries to remain vigilant of the hypocrisy of the US and to proceed with their own common and long-term interests in mind.
Deep-rooted egoism
In 1949, then US president Harry Truman put forward the Point Four Program of economic and technical assistance for underdeveloped areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which marked the beginning of US foreign aid to developing countries. Its first appropriations were made in 1950, according to documents on the website of Truman Presidential Museum and Library.
Throughout the last seven decades, US foreign aid has been the embodiment of its deep-rooted egoism, with the primary goal of serving the country’s own interests, said Chinese scholars specializing in US studies reached by the Global Times.
“In absolute terms, the amount of foreign aid provided by the US does indeed rank among the top in the world, due to the strong value of the US dollars,” said Yu Xiang, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy, Tsinghua University.
“Nonetheless, we need to examine how much of its aid was actually implemented,” Yu told the Global Times. “Too often, the US merely issues empty promises.”
US aid to Africa, for instance, has been proven to be no more than “pie in the sky” talk. In June 2013, then US president Barack Obama announced the ambitious “Power Africa” initiative during his visit to South Africa, promising to invest funds to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity in Africa by 2020.
However, as of the end of 2020, the actual power generation capacity under “Power Africa” was only “4,194 megawatts,” less than one-quarter of what the initiative had promised, according to the Power Africa 2020 Annual Report released by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Also, the US committed $55 billion to support the AU Agenda 2063, at the second US-Africa Leaders Summit held in December 2022. However, people were disappointed later to find that only $15 billion was allocated to newly signed projects, while the remaining $40 billion was a repackaging of various previous initiatives and agreements between the US and African countries in recent years.
In an interview with GZERO Media that month, Amaka Anku, head of Africa’s Practice at the Eurasia Group, criticized the US’ rhetoric as being pretty but hollow. “So, the problem isn’t really what they’re saying. It’s what they’re not doing,” Anku told GZERO. “The Biden administration is saying all the right things but they’re not really doing things differently.”
No wonder the Center for Global Development (CGD), a US think tank that publishes the Commitment to Development Index (CDI) report every year to assess the assistance of the world’s richest countries to the poorer countries, ranked the US in the bottom quarter of the list in almost all its previous years’ reports.
In the latest CDI report released in 2023, the CGD put the US in the last place among all the 21 countries included. “There was never any pretense of altruism,” the Economist commented on USAID in May that year.
Activists from the People’s Liberation Front in Sri Lanka protest against the visit of then Secretary of State of the US Mike Pompeo on October 27, 2020. Photo: VCG.
A boss or a partner?
The US also never treats the aid recipient countries equally.
It always delivers aid in a condescending and patronizing manner, acting as a teacher or savior. It gives assistance from a position of superiority and arrogance, completely drawing lines according to its own standards, and ignores the cultural traditions and realities in other countries and regions. Its aid often comes with harsh conditions that harm the sovereignty and dignity of the recipient country or region, while also meddling in its internal affairs.
As to this point, Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University, refers to the US’ Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia as a typical example.
The three Pacific Island countries, known collectively as the Freely Associated States, paid a heavy price for US military actions against Japan during the World War II. After the war, they were placed under long-term trusteeship and had their domestic and foreign affairs controlled by the US until the mid-1980s when they gained independence, but all signed the so-called Compact of Free Association agreements with the US.
Here, “association” refers to the special close relationship these countries have with the US, where defense powers are handed over to the US, and the US has unrestricted access to their territories, airspaces, and territorial waters to deploy military forces and equipment. In other words, the three Freely Associated States had to sacrifice their national security sovereignty for economic assistance from the US, Chen noted.
The so-called free association is essentially an extremely unequal relationship, where a superpower exploits and erodes the territories and sovereignty of weaker countries in order to seek its geopolitical advantage in the Pacific region and serve its hegemonic strategic objectives, Chen stressed.
Worse still, the US’ aid packages are also usually bonded with conditions that were related to exporting American values, such as US-style “democracy,” “humanism,” and “constitutionalism,” according to experts reached by the Global Times.
Created by the US Congress in January 2004, and with the objective of providing development assistance to low-income countries, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) had signed 83 programs in 51 countries and regions across five continents as of February 2022, according to the MCC website.
The MCC claims it is committed to addressing common human challenges and helping underdeveloped countries develop their economies, and improving people’s livelihoods.
But in reality, it serves the US global strategic and geopolitical goals, and is an important political and economic tool to win over regional countries, especially key small countries.
Many provisions of the agreement place US law above the laws of the recipient countries, requiring the recipient countries to meet the standards set by the US for political reform, market economy, democratization, and human rights, among others, seriously infringing on the sovereignty of the recipient countries and regions, and thus facing constant opposition and resistance from developing countries.
In 2020, the Sri Lankan government rejected an offer by the MCC to continue a compact on the grounds that the MCC is an instrument of neo-imperialism pursuing economic hegemony over poorer countries, the Asian Times reported.
The US and its allies do not have any moral right to talk about “democracy” and “human rights.” These two values have also been abused by the US in the last few decades to intervene in other countries and create chaos, chairman of the Sri Lanka China Friendship Association Ananda Goonatilleke said in a signed article in The Morning newspaper of Sri Lanka in December 2021 when the US held a so-called Summit for Democracy.
Not to mention the US’ 20 years of missteps in Afghanistan. In 2001, the US sent troops to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism and rebuilding Afghanistan for the Afghan people. Since then, in the following two decades, successive US administrations have spared no effort to implant the so-called democratic institutions and a free market economy in Afghanistan.
However, a review of what these “efforts” have brought to Afghanistan is needed. An estimated 241,000 people have died as a direct result of the war since the US invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, Al Jazeera reported in 2021 when the US withdrew its troops.
At the same time, 3.7 million children were out of school, with 60 percent of them being girls. And most Afghans continued to live in poverty. Attacks on civilians were also on the rise. Since 2017, 1,705 violent incidents against civilians were recorded. In 2020 alone, 424 attacks spanning 235 days were recorded across the country, according to the Al Jazeera report.
“In the past 20 years, the US has not brought any development to Afghanistan, and now they have imposed sanctions on us at the most difficult time in Afghanistan,” Najibullah Jami, a professor and political analyst at the Kabul University in Afghanistan, said in an interview with the Xinhua News Agency in 2022.
Afghan people climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan’s 20-year war. Photo: VCG.
New target, same old trick
A notable new characteristic of US aid is that it attaches conditions more directly aimed at countering the US’ perceived opponents like China, Yu noted.
“This is a clear trend that shows the US thinks [the main purpose of] its foreign aid is to serve its demand for geopolitical gain, which is far greater than the demand for ‘popularizing democracy and human rights’ as it has declared,” Yu told the Global Times. “That reflects the hypocrisy of US aid.”
The US House of Representatives, on March 6, approved a $7 billion spending package that included funding to support updated versions of the COFA with the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia after months of delay.
Citing some US officials, a report by the Associated Press said, on March 19, that the move is an important sign for the US to demonstrate its commitment to relations with the Pacific Island countries “amid warnings China is actively trying to pry them away from Washington’s sphere of influence.”
In recent years, the Pacific Island countries and China have been engaging in increasingly mutually beneficial cooperation. In order to contain and disrupt China’s peaceful development, the US has been implementing and vigorously promoting the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy in recent years, with the South Pacific region becoming an important part of this strategic game, Chen said.
In fact, in their relationship with the US, these island nations and their people are treated as pawns or even sacrifices to serve the US’ own interests. And the US has been employing the same old trick in many scenarios by using foreign aid as a tool to counter China’s growing influence in and strengthening cooperation with developing countries, forcing the latter to take sides.
Also in March, during a trade mission visit to Manila, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in the Philippines’ tech sector and help double the number of semiconductor factories in the country. Observers say the pledge and visit highlight the Southeast Asian country’s growing importance to Washington and will help reduce the Philippine economy’s reliance on China amid rising tensions between Manila and Beijing over sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, VOA reported.
With its current capabilities, the US is unable to keep up with the pace of its global hegemonic strategy. For some allies and partners, Washington often adopts the tactic of making empty promises, using inducement and coercion to tie some countries to its anti-China bandwagon, Chen noted.
But relevant countries seeking aid from the US should be more clear-headed: Instead of being used as tools of the US hegemonic strategy, it is better to uphold their sovereignty and dignity in a dignified manner, which is truly beneficial for the long-term interests of their countries, Chen said.
https://orinocotribune.com/is-us-really ... -intl-aid/
MAY 29, 2024
US Marines Delivering aid after an earthquake in Nepal, 2015. Photo: Department of Defense.
By Huang Lanlan and Leng Shumei – May 27, 2024
Note:
The US has always crowed over its “achievement” of being the world’s largest foreign aid donor. However, US foreign aid has, in fact, usually been found to be based on maximizing the country’s own interests, disregarding the practical interests and long-term development of the recipient developing countries and regions.
The US has been wantonly interfering in other countries’ internal affairs in the name of foreign aid,which was described as selfish, arrogant, and hypocritical, for its own gains. This has resulted in serious negative impacts on world peace and development. In the name of aid, the US acts arbitrarily in some recipient developing countries and regions, upholding the unipolar hegemony, disrupting the international development order, and undermining global prosperity and stability.
The Global Times is publishing a series of articles to expose the hypocritical nature and baneful influence of US foreign aid. This installment, the first in the series, focuses on the empty promises the US has made to its recipients around the world, and some arrogant political and economic conditions attached to the US aid. The article looks into how these rubber cheques have brought the recipients not better lives but long-term miseries.
Israeli and American activists block the entrance to the US Consulate building that houses the Palestinian Affairs Unit, in Jerusalem, May 24, 2024. They call on the US to stop providing arms to Israel for the war in the Gaza Strip. Photo: VCG.
The US Senate, in April 2024, approved a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for some of its allies including Ukraine and Israel. For Ukraine, the aid contained provisions, such as the Biden administration sending to Kiev more US-made missiles known as long-range ATACMS, and Biden seeking repayment of $10 billion in economic assistance from Ukraine, reported The New York Times on April 25.
The aid package has aroused widespread controversy in the international community, with many criticizing the US for conditioning its aid on mandatory terms that may actually lead to more debt for recipients like Ukraine.
There is no doubt that US aid has prolonged the crisis in Ukraine. Since the war began in early 2022, the US Congress has voted through five bills that have provided Ukraine with continuous aid, doing so most recently in April 2024. The total budget under these bills – the “headline” figure often cited by news media – is $175 billion, according to US think tank Council on Foreign Relations.
Worse still, some 40 percent of its military aid was reportedly used for the mandatory purchase of US equipment and training services, and part of the military aid was a financial loan that may become a long-term liability for Ukraine.
The US has always considered itself the largest foreign aid donor in the world. However, in reality, its foreign aid has always been based on maximizing its own interests, ignoring the actual interests and long-term development of the recipient countries, experts reached by the Global Times noted.
Selfish, arrogant, hypocritical, and ugly. These are the words experts used to describe the US foreign aid. The fact is that, under the guise of aid, the US interferes in the internal affairs of other countries and US politicians seek personal gains, bringing serious negative impacts on world peace and development, the experts stressed.
Considering the US’ active push to expand its presence in Asia and the Pacific in a string of moves aimed at containing China in recent years, experts warned relevant countries to remain vigilant of the hypocrisy of the US and to proceed with their own common and long-term interests in mind.
Deep-rooted egoism
In 1949, then US president Harry Truman put forward the Point Four Program of economic and technical assistance for underdeveloped areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which marked the beginning of US foreign aid to developing countries. Its first appropriations were made in 1950, according to documents on the website of Truman Presidential Museum and Library.
Throughout the last seven decades, US foreign aid has been the embodiment of its deep-rooted egoism, with the primary goal of serving the country’s own interests, said Chinese scholars specializing in US studies reached by the Global Times.
“In absolute terms, the amount of foreign aid provided by the US does indeed rank among the top in the world, due to the strong value of the US dollars,” said Yu Xiang, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy, Tsinghua University.
“Nonetheless, we need to examine how much of its aid was actually implemented,” Yu told the Global Times. “Too often, the US merely issues empty promises.”
US aid to Africa, for instance, has been proven to be no more than “pie in the sky” talk. In June 2013, then US president Barack Obama announced the ambitious “Power Africa” initiative during his visit to South Africa, promising to invest funds to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity in Africa by 2020.
However, as of the end of 2020, the actual power generation capacity under “Power Africa” was only “4,194 megawatts,” less than one-quarter of what the initiative had promised, according to the Power Africa 2020 Annual Report released by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Also, the US committed $55 billion to support the AU Agenda 2063, at the second US-Africa Leaders Summit held in December 2022. However, people were disappointed later to find that only $15 billion was allocated to newly signed projects, while the remaining $40 billion was a repackaging of various previous initiatives and agreements between the US and African countries in recent years.
In an interview with GZERO Media that month, Amaka Anku, head of Africa’s Practice at the Eurasia Group, criticized the US’ rhetoric as being pretty but hollow. “So, the problem isn’t really what they’re saying. It’s what they’re not doing,” Anku told GZERO. “The Biden administration is saying all the right things but they’re not really doing things differently.”
No wonder the Center for Global Development (CGD), a US think tank that publishes the Commitment to Development Index (CDI) report every year to assess the assistance of the world’s richest countries to the poorer countries, ranked the US in the bottom quarter of the list in almost all its previous years’ reports.
In the latest CDI report released in 2023, the CGD put the US in the last place among all the 21 countries included. “There was never any pretense of altruism,” the Economist commented on USAID in May that year.
Activists from the People’s Liberation Front in Sri Lanka protest against the visit of then Secretary of State of the US Mike Pompeo on October 27, 2020. Photo: VCG.
A boss or a partner?
The US also never treats the aid recipient countries equally.
It always delivers aid in a condescending and patronizing manner, acting as a teacher or savior. It gives assistance from a position of superiority and arrogance, completely drawing lines according to its own standards, and ignores the cultural traditions and realities in other countries and regions. Its aid often comes with harsh conditions that harm the sovereignty and dignity of the recipient country or region, while also meddling in its internal affairs.
As to this point, Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University, refers to the US’ Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia as a typical example.
The three Pacific Island countries, known collectively as the Freely Associated States, paid a heavy price for US military actions against Japan during the World War II. After the war, they were placed under long-term trusteeship and had their domestic and foreign affairs controlled by the US until the mid-1980s when they gained independence, but all signed the so-called Compact of Free Association agreements with the US.
Here, “association” refers to the special close relationship these countries have with the US, where defense powers are handed over to the US, and the US has unrestricted access to their territories, airspaces, and territorial waters to deploy military forces and equipment. In other words, the three Freely Associated States had to sacrifice their national security sovereignty for economic assistance from the US, Chen noted.
The so-called free association is essentially an extremely unequal relationship, where a superpower exploits and erodes the territories and sovereignty of weaker countries in order to seek its geopolitical advantage in the Pacific region and serve its hegemonic strategic objectives, Chen stressed.
Worse still, the US’ aid packages are also usually bonded with conditions that were related to exporting American values, such as US-style “democracy,” “humanism,” and “constitutionalism,” according to experts reached by the Global Times.
Created by the US Congress in January 2004, and with the objective of providing development assistance to low-income countries, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) had signed 83 programs in 51 countries and regions across five continents as of February 2022, according to the MCC website.
The MCC claims it is committed to addressing common human challenges and helping underdeveloped countries develop their economies, and improving people’s livelihoods.
But in reality, it serves the US global strategic and geopolitical goals, and is an important political and economic tool to win over regional countries, especially key small countries.
Many provisions of the agreement place US law above the laws of the recipient countries, requiring the recipient countries to meet the standards set by the US for political reform, market economy, democratization, and human rights, among others, seriously infringing on the sovereignty of the recipient countries and regions, and thus facing constant opposition and resistance from developing countries.
In 2020, the Sri Lankan government rejected an offer by the MCC to continue a compact on the grounds that the MCC is an instrument of neo-imperialism pursuing economic hegemony over poorer countries, the Asian Times reported.
The US and its allies do not have any moral right to talk about “democracy” and “human rights.” These two values have also been abused by the US in the last few decades to intervene in other countries and create chaos, chairman of the Sri Lanka China Friendship Association Ananda Goonatilleke said in a signed article in The Morning newspaper of Sri Lanka in December 2021 when the US held a so-called Summit for Democracy.
Not to mention the US’ 20 years of missteps in Afghanistan. In 2001, the US sent troops to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism and rebuilding Afghanistan for the Afghan people. Since then, in the following two decades, successive US administrations have spared no effort to implant the so-called democratic institutions and a free market economy in Afghanistan.
However, a review of what these “efforts” have brought to Afghanistan is needed. An estimated 241,000 people have died as a direct result of the war since the US invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, Al Jazeera reported in 2021 when the US withdrew its troops.
At the same time, 3.7 million children were out of school, with 60 percent of them being girls. And most Afghans continued to live in poverty. Attacks on civilians were also on the rise. Since 2017, 1,705 violent incidents against civilians were recorded. In 2020 alone, 424 attacks spanning 235 days were recorded across the country, according to the Al Jazeera report.
“In the past 20 years, the US has not brought any development to Afghanistan, and now they have imposed sanctions on us at the most difficult time in Afghanistan,” Najibullah Jami, a professor and political analyst at the Kabul University in Afghanistan, said in an interview with the Xinhua News Agency in 2022.
Afghan people climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan’s 20-year war. Photo: VCG.
New target, same old trick
A notable new characteristic of US aid is that it attaches conditions more directly aimed at countering the US’ perceived opponents like China, Yu noted.
“This is a clear trend that shows the US thinks [the main purpose of] its foreign aid is to serve its demand for geopolitical gain, which is far greater than the demand for ‘popularizing democracy and human rights’ as it has declared,” Yu told the Global Times. “That reflects the hypocrisy of US aid.”
The US House of Representatives, on March 6, approved a $7 billion spending package that included funding to support updated versions of the COFA with the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia after months of delay.
Citing some US officials, a report by the Associated Press said, on March 19, that the move is an important sign for the US to demonstrate its commitment to relations with the Pacific Island countries “amid warnings China is actively trying to pry them away from Washington’s sphere of influence.”
In recent years, the Pacific Island countries and China have been engaging in increasingly mutually beneficial cooperation. In order to contain and disrupt China’s peaceful development, the US has been implementing and vigorously promoting the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy in recent years, with the South Pacific region becoming an important part of this strategic game, Chen said.
In fact, in their relationship with the US, these island nations and their people are treated as pawns or even sacrifices to serve the US’ own interests. And the US has been employing the same old trick in many scenarios by using foreign aid as a tool to counter China’s growing influence in and strengthening cooperation with developing countries, forcing the latter to take sides.
Also in March, during a trade mission visit to Manila, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in the Philippines’ tech sector and help double the number of semiconductor factories in the country. Observers say the pledge and visit highlight the Southeast Asian country’s growing importance to Washington and will help reduce the Philippine economy’s reliance on China amid rising tensions between Manila and Beijing over sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, VOA reported.
With its current capabilities, the US is unable to keep up with the pace of its global hegemonic strategy. For some allies and partners, Washington often adopts the tactic of making empty promises, using inducement and coercion to tie some countries to its anti-China bandwagon, Chen noted.
But relevant countries seeking aid from the US should be more clear-headed: Instead of being used as tools of the US hegemonic strategy, it is better to uphold their sovereignty and dignity in a dignified manner, which is truly beneficial for the long-term interests of their countries, Chen said.
https://orinocotribune.com/is-us-really ... -intl-aid/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government
It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.
Caitlin Johnstone
June 1, 2024
It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.
The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof.
This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation.
Until you understand this, nothing the US government or the US war machine does will make sense. You won’t understand why military operations are being waged which don’t seem to benefit the American people in any way, and which if anything actually harm the national security interests of the United States. You won’t understand why US foreign policy remains the same no matter who’s in office, regardless of party or platform. You won’t understand why the US and its allies do crazy things that otherwise make no sense for governments to do, like backing an increasingly unpopular genocide in Gaza, starting a cold war with China, or tempting nuclear armageddon with Russia.
And the answer is that these aggressions are not happening because they benefit the US as a nation, or even because they serve the political agendas of any elected officials. The nonstop violence is a means to a completely different end, and is almost an end in and of itself — benefiting war profiteers, shoring up geostrategic control, and expanding the sphere of the US empire’s particular brand of global capitalism.
There’s the nonstop worldwide military operation, and then there’s the theatrical set pieces of an official government slapped together in the foreground which we’re all meant to pretend has something to do with all the wars and militarism we are seeing. In reality the war machine just does what it’s going to do while the official elected suits in Washington put on these performances where they argue about abortion and Donald Trump to make it look like the US has a real government that’s making real decisions.
It was decided long ago that war is too important to be left to the will of the electorate, so now there’s this fake dummy political system that the American people are given to play with so they won’t meddle with the gears of the imperial machine. The local inhabitants of the hub of the globe-spanning empire are kept too propagandized, entertained, distracted, busy, poor, and sick to have a truth-based relationship with what’s being done in their name around the world, and if they do make some space in their life to become politically engaged they are herded into a kayfabe two-party system where both factions support war, militarism, imperialism, plutocracy and ecocidal capitalism but put immense amounts of energy into empty culture warring over issues that nobody with any real power cares about.
Trying to talk about this to people who are still plugged into the mainstream imperial worldview is like if Amazon had a children’s cartoon show called Andy Amazon & Friends, and the public believed the cartoon show was Amazon — they didn’t know anything about the sprawling trillionaire megacorporation that’s devouring the global economy. You’d try to talk about the gargantuan e-commerce company and they’d think you were talking about the cartoon, and object that what you’re saying doesn’t line up with what they know about the show and its characters.
Once you see the corporation behind the cartoon, once you see the empire behind the performative puppet show of official politics, you see it everywhere. You see it in the movements of the imperial war machine. You see it in the news headlines. You see it in the phony justifications and narratives that are being spouted by the western political-media class. You see it in our education system. You see it throughout our vapid mainstream western culture of interminable diversion and capitalist indoctrination.
And you stop caring about the puppet show. You stop caring about presidential elections, about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump, about the culture war wedge issue of the day and the latest hot topic that everyone’s saying you need to take a position on. It becomes as interesting to you as some Youtube video your kid has on in the background when you’re busy dealing with a home emergency.
And the behavior of the empire absolutely is an emergency. The escalations against Russia and China that these freaks are pushing have the world on a trajectory that’s going to get us all killed, and the horrors they are inflicting in Gaza and elsewhere are creating a nightmare on earth right here and now. The empire is only getting crazier and more violent as its planetary domination becomes more challenged, and until people can see it for what it really is, it’s going to be very hard to build up the necessary public opposition against it to use the power of our numbers to force them to stop.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/06 ... overnment/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Photo: desarrollodefensaytecnologiabelica.blogspot.com
The military-industrial complex is killing us all
By David Vine (Posted Jun 04, 2024)
Originally published: TomDispatch on June 2, 2024 by Theresa (Isa) Arriola (more by TomDispatch)
We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.
Bombs also make people rich.
When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”
The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.
Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.
Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.
The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
The MIC’s hidden domination of our lives must end, which means we must dismantle it. That may sound totally unrealistic, even fantastical. It is not. And by the way, we’re talking about dismantling the MIC, not the military itself. (Most members of the military are, in fact, among that the MIC’s victims.)
While profit has long been part of war, the MIC is a relatively new, post-World War II phenomenon that formed thanks to a series of choices made over time. Like other processes, like other choices, they can be reversed and the MIC can be dismantled.
The question, of course, is how?
The Emergence of a Monster
To face what it would take to dismantle the MIC, it’s first necessary to understand how it was born and what it looks like today. Given its startling size and intricacy, we and a team of colleagues created a series of graphics to help visualize the MIC and the harm it inflicts, which we’re sharing publicly for the first time.
The MIC was born after World War II from, as Eisenhower explained, the “conjunction of an immense military establishment”–the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and others–“and a large arms industry.” Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy “Iron Triangle” or what some scholars believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial—congressional complex. To this day those three have remained the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized corruption (that also features all too many illegalities).
The basic system works like this: First, Congress takes exorbitant sums of money from us taxpayers every year and gives it to the Pentagon. Second, the Pentagon, at Congress’s direction, turns huge chunks of that money over to weapons makers and other corporations via all too lucrative contracts, gifting them tens of billions of dollars in profits. Third, those contractors then use a portion of the profits to lobby Congress for yet more Pentagon contracts, which Congress is generally thrilled to provide, perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle.
But the MIC is more complicated and insidious than that. In what’s effectively a system of legalized bribery, campaign donations regularly help boost Pentagon budgets and ensure the awarding of yet more lucrative contracts, often benefiting a small number of contractors in a congressional district or state. Such contractors make their case with the help of a virtual army of more than 900 Washington-based lobbyists. Many of them are former Pentagon officials, or former members of Congress or congressional staffers, hired through a “revolving door” that takes advantage of their ability to lobby former colleagues. Such contractors also donate to think tanks and university centers willing to support increased Pentagon spending, weapons programs, and a hyper-militarized foreign policy. Ads are another way to push weapons programs on elected officials.
Such weapons makers also spread their manufacturing among as many Congressional districts as possible, allowing senators and representatives to claim credit for jobs created. MIC jobs, in turn, often create cycles of dependency in low-income communities that have few other economic drivers, effectively buying the support of locals.
For their part, contractors regularly engage in legalized price gouging, overcharging taxpayers for all manner of weapons and equipment. In other cases, contractor fraud literally steals taxpayer money. The Pentagon is the only government agency that has never passed an audit–meaning it literally can’t keep track of its money and assets–yet it still receives more from Congress than every other government agency combined.
As a system, the MIC ensures that Pentagon spending and military policy are driven by contractors’ search for ever-higher profits and the reelection desires of members of Congress, not by any assessment of how to best defend the country. The resulting military is unsurprisingly shoddy, especially given the money spent. Americans should pray it never actually has to defend the United States.
No other industry–not even Big Pharma or Big Oil–can match the power of the MIC in shaping national policy and dominating spending. Military spending is, in fact, now larger (adjusting for inflation) than at the height of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or, in fact, at any time since World War II, despite the absence of a threat remotely justifying such spending. Many now realize that the primary beneficiary of more than 22 years of endless U.S. wars in this century has been the industrial part of the MIC, which has made hundreds of billions of dollars since 2001. “Who Won in Afghanistan? Private Contractors” was the Wall Street Journal‘s all too apt headline in 2021.
Endless Wars, Endless Death, Endless Destruction
“Afghanistan” in that headline could have been replaced by Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, among other seemingly endless U.S. wars since World War II. That the MIC has profited off them is no coincidence. It has helped drive the country into conflicts in countries ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Grenada, to Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and so many others.
Deaths and injuries from such wars have reached the tens of millions. The number of estimated deaths from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen is eerily similar to that from the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia: 4.5 million.
The numbers are so large that they can become numbing. The Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama helps us remember to focus on:
one life
one life
one life
one life
one life
because each time
is the first time
that that life
has been taken.
The Environmental Toll
The MIC’s damage extends to often irreparable environmental harm, involving the poisoning of ecosystems, devastating biodiversity loss, and the U.S. military’s carbon footprint, which is larger than that of any other organization on earth. At war or in daily training, the MIC has literally fueled global heating and climate change through the burning of fuels to run bases, operate vehicles, and produce weaponry.
The MIC’s human and environmental costs are particularly invisible outside the continental United States. In U.S. territories and other political “grey zones,” investments in military infrastructure and technologies rely in part on the second-class citizenship of Indigenous communities, often dependent on the military for their livelihoods.
Endless Wars at Home
As the MIC has fueled wars abroad, so it has fueled militarization domestically. Why, for example, have domestic police forces become so militarized? At least part of the answer: since 1990, Congress has allowed the Pentagon to transfer its “excess” weaponry and equipment (including tanks and drones) to local law enforcement agencies. These transfers conveniently allow the Pentagon and its contractors to ask Congress for replacement purchases, further fueling the MIC.
Seeking new profits from new markets, contractors have also increasingly hawked their military products directly to SWAT teams and other police forces, border patrol outfits, and prison systems. Politicians and corporations have poured billions of dollars into border militarization and mass incarceration, helping fuel the rise of the lucrative “border-industrial complex” and “prison-industrial complex,” respectively. Domestic militarization has disproportionately harmed Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities.
An Existential Threat
Some will defend the military-industrial complex by insisting that we need its jobs; some by claiming it’s keeping Ukrainians alive and protecting the rest of Europe from Vladimir Putin’s Russia; some by warning about China. Each of those arguments is an example of the degree to which the MIC’s power relies on systematically manufacturing fear, threats, and crises that help enrich arms merchants and others in the MIC by driving ever more military spending and war (despite a nearly unbroken record of catastrophic failure when it comes to nearly every U.S. conflict since World War II).
The argument that current levels of military spending must be maintained for “the jobs” should be laughable. No military should be a jobs program. While the country needs job programs, military spending has proven to be a poor job creator or an engine of economic growth. Research shows it creates far fewer jobs than comparable investments in health care, education, or infrastructure.
U.S. weaponry has aided Ukrainian self-defense, though the weapons manufacturers are anything but altruists. If they truly cared about Ukrainians, they would have forgone any profits, leaving more money for humanitarian aid to that country. Instead, they’ve used that war, as they have Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and growing tensions in the Pacific, to cynically inflate their profits and stock prices dramatically.
Discard the fearmongering and it should be clear that the Russian military has demonstrated its weakness, its inability to decisively conquer territory near its own borders, let alone march into Europe. In fact, both the Russian and Chinese militaries pose no conventional military threat to the United States. The Russian military’s annual budget is one-tenth or less than the size of the U.S. one. China’s military budget is one-third to one-half its size. The disparities are far larger if you combine the U.S. military budget with those of its NATO and Asian allies.
Despite this, members of the MIC are increasingly encouraging direct confrontations with Russia and China, aided by Putin’s war and China’s own provocations. In the “Indo-Pacific” (as the military calls it), the MIC is continuing to cash in as the Pentagon builds up bases and forces surrounding China in Australia, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia, Japan, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines.
Such steps and a similar buildup in Europe are only encouraging China and Russia to strengthen their own militaries. (Just imagine how American politicians would respond if China or Russia were to build a single military base anywhere close to this country’s borders.) While all of this is increasingly profitable for the MIC, it is heightening the risk of a military clash that could spiral into a potentially species-ending nuclear war between the United States and China, Russia, or both.
The Urgency of Dismantling
The urgency of dismantling the military-industrial complex should be clear. The future of the species and planet depends on it.
The most obvious way to weaken the MIC would be to starve it of its lifeblood, our tax dollars. Few noticed that, after leaving office, former Trump-era Pentagon chief Christopher Miller called for cutting the Pentagon’s budget in half. Yes, in half.
Even a 30% cut–as happened all too briefly after the Cold War ended in 1991–would free hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Imagine how such sums could build safer, healthier, more secure lives in this country, including a just economic transition for any military personnel and contractors losing jobs. And mind you, that military budget would still be significantly larger than China’s, or Russia’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s combined.
Of course, even thinking about cutting the Pentagon budget is difficult because the MIC has captured both political parties, virtually guaranteeing ever-rising military spending. Which brings us back to the puzzle of how to dismantle the MIC as a system.
In short, we’re working on the answers. With the diverse group of experts who helped produce this article’s graphics, we’re exploring, among other ideas, divestment campaigns and lawsuits; banning war profiteering; regulating or nationalizing weapons manufacturers; and converting parts of the military into an unarmed disaster relief, public health, and infrastructure force.
Though all too many of us will continue to believe that dismantling the MIC is unrealistic, given the threats facing us, it’s time to think as boldly as possible about how to roll back its power, resist the invented notion that war is inevitable, and build the world we want to see. Just as past movements reduced the power of Big Tobacco and the railroad barons, just as some are now taking on Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the prison-industrial complex, so we must take on the MIC to build a world focused on making human lives rich (in every sense) rather than one focused on bombs and other weaponry that brings wealth to a select few who benefit from death.
https://mronline.org/2024/06/04/the-mil ... ng-us-all/
The MIC is inseparable from the capitalist economy. How about we expropriate the bastards with no compensation? They'd be getting off lucky.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
COL. LARRY WILKERSON ON SCOTT RITTER AND RUSSIA’S DEVASTATING WARNING TO NATO
JUNE 6, 2024
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https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/06/col ... g-to-nato/
JUNE 6, 2024
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https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/06/col ... g-to-nato/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."