Militarism (MIMAC)

Give yourself 38 min, and you’ll understand how extremely self-destructive the NATO/EU world’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been and why all the assumption it made was wrong. Professor Emeritus of Economics (University of Massachusetts) and founder of Democracy at Work, Richard Wolff, talks with brilliant clarity about the economic impact of the Ukraine war. He assesses the impact of Western sanctions on Russia as well as how the war has affected the West economically. And very importantly, he analyses just how destructive arms spending is for the rest of society and the working people. Here are the main themes: 0:00 Introduction 0:32 “Economic War” with Russia? 12:01 Moral significance of Western sanctions 14:20 Economic impact on the United States 21:07 Economic impact of military spending 32:21 Economic impact on Ukraine I cannot recommend this – and the acTVism Munich and The Source Channel – enough. Please share...

Baher Kamal, Human Wrongs Watch January 23, 2023 Or the perversities of the nuclear age priorities. We could help hundreds of millions of children with a fraction of the money that goes into warfare and nukes As if the 100 billion dollars that the United States has so far provided to Ukraine in both weapons and aid were not enough, the US has now started to install in Europe its brand new, more destructive nuclear warheads. The US 100 billion dollars are to be added to all the weapons and aid that 40 Washington’s ‘allies’ –Europe in particular– have been sending to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022. The US spending on the Ukrainian war in less than a year amounts to the desperately needed funding that the United Nations require to partially alleviate some of the horrifying suffering of over one billion human beings over...

Josep Borrell High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy,Vice President of the European Commission December 11, 2022 Normally, The Transnational does not reproduce policy papers or analyses from government sites which, one must suppose, are readily available to the public through mainstream media. But in this case, we assume that rather few have even mentioned this urgently important message of vastly increased militarism in the EU space. Mr Borell – who was recently accused of racism because of his ‘jungle’ comment – writes that “defence spending within the EU grew in 2021 to €214 billion. This is a 6% increase compared to 2020 – and the strongest yearly growth rate since 2015. But we are still far away from the 2% NATO benchmark.” But he conveniently omits every mention of the fact that the military expenditures of Russia are about € 70 – that is,...

John F. Copper December 15th, 2022 US intelligence agencies do not say China is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan. Why? Taiwan’s role as the ‘reverse great wall’ in US containment policy and Xi’s 2049 reunification deadline are missing from Western narratives. They explain why the US is provoking war with China in Taiwan and why China refuses to be provoked. Originally posted by Pearls and Irritations on October 26th, 2022 The US-Taiwan relationship is a long-discussed subject. Now it is even more a topic in the news with experts and government officials speaking of it being an immediate cause of a war between the United States and China. There are two issues, however, considering their importance, are not a central part of the narrative about US Taiwan policy but should be. One is Taiwan’s strategic importance to the United States. The other is China’s President Xi Jinping’s declaring a...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin welcoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to a meeting at the Pentagon, Aug. 31, 2021. (DoD, Jack Sanders) In addition to advancing longstanding U.S. geo-strategic aims, it seems the proxy war in Ukraine is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. Caitlin Johnstone December 5, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article. A surprisingly frank article in The New York Times, “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the U.S. proxy war to test its weapons for future use. “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come,” writes Lara Jakes. Jakes says “new advances in technology and...

Jan Oberg November 18, 2022 This article was written in October for the distinguished China Investment – a magazine sponsored by China’s National Development and Reform Commission. It was published in November here in both Chinese and English. Due to the reactions to my articles there, it looks like I shall become a regular contributor to China Investment like I am to the China Daily. The European Commission has just decided on new sanctions against Russia – in fact, the eighth round of such sanctions. This time the reason is that Russia has held referenda in the Donbas region of Ukraine. I sense we’re witnessing a new disease – Sanctionitis. It seems related to a larger, fatal disease with few treatment options, namely the SHMSI Syndrome:Sanctionitis + Hubris + Masochism + Self-Destructive Impulses. The patient has foggy ideas about reality and his own strength and exaggerates ad absurdum the positive...

Tufts University November 11, 2022 The United States (US) ‘‘spends roughly as much on defense as the rest of the world put together…and remains the only country able to project military power globally.’’[1] With its extensive defense budget and capabilities, the US remains a military leader in contemporary international politics – but can this military advantage ever become a long-run disadvantage for our foreign policy? According to our data, the US has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60% undertaken between 1950 and 2017. What’s more, over one-third of these missions occurred after 1999.[2]  With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the US to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite – the US has increased its military involvements abroad. Originally posted on Tufts University’s homepage here Perhaps as we exclusively...

Caitlin Johnstone November 9, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination. Originally published in Caitlin Johnstone’s newsletter on October 28, 2022 The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that...

Jan Oberg November 3, 2022 Everything Ukraine has been predicted. Warnings about trying to get Ukraine into NATO tumbled down, not the least by leading US experts on Russia. They also said that Russia was not – could not be – a threat unless made into one. In all modesty, I said it too 6 years back. No one listened. The believers in the religion of militarism and the NATO Church did not have the ability to reason. Those who did not agree with NATO’s expansion were perceived as dangerous nonbelievers or heretics. As outsiders and dissidents who dangerously undermined “our” security and were the apologetics of Putin… Today the attempts to get Ukraine into NATO – while NATO has been 30 years in Ukraine and nobody respected the polls that told what the Ukrainian people wanted – has turned out to be the most enormous and most stubborn blunder...

Natylie Baldwin October 18th, 2022 I first came across Benjamin Abelow’s analysis of the Ukraine war as a lengthy article published on Medium in May.  I found the depth and thoroughness of his article impressive and complimented him on it.  When he told me that he’d expanded it into a short book, I was intrigued and offered to review it.  I was not disappointed. Originally posted on Natylies Baldwin’s homepage on October 2nd, 2022 Abelow’s overall argument as expressed in the overview of the book is that in the world in which we live, countries that are able, will use the means they have available to defend what they perceive to be their national security interests, including force.  This includes deterring or repelling hostile countries from encroaching on their border and near abroad.  The prime defender of this concept for itself is the U.S. as reflected in the Monroe Doctrine and its defense...

Johan Galtung TFF Associate October 2nd, 2022 Originally written in 2003 and expanded upon in 2015 and posted on Transcend Media Service’s, TMS, on September 26, 2022. 1.  Definitions and Hypotheses: An Overview Definition: An empire is a transborder Center-Periphery system, in macro-space and in macro-time, with a culture legitimizing a structure of unequal exchange between center and periphery: economically, between exploiters and exploited, as inequity; militarily,   between killers and victims, as enforcement; politically,  between dominators and dominated, as repression; culturally,   between alienators and alienated, as conditioning. Empires have different profiles.  The US Empire has a complete configuration, articulated in a statement by a Pentagon planner: “The de facto role of the United States Armed Forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.  To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing”.[1] In other words, direct violence to protect...

Jeffrey Sachs By Amy Goodman (*) – Democracy Now! September 19, 2022 Jeffrey Sachs: “Dangerous” U.S. Policy & “West’s False Narrative” Stoking Tensions with Russia, China GUESTS: Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, sustainable development solutions advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres, and former adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. We discuss Western hegemony and U.S. policy in Russia, Ukraine and China with Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose new article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.” Sachs says the bipartisan U.S. approach to foreign policy is “unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded,” and warns the U.S. is creating “a recipe for yet another war” in East Asia. Originally published at Other News on September 5, 2022 Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: Politico is reporting...