Cheerleading for WW3

24 Nov

Have you noticed how folk with zero military experience have an uncanny knack for being front of the queue in promoting wars for others to fight? Last night I checked the profile of historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash. Like me, he’s never seen a day’s active service in all his puff – the difference being that I don’t write columns like the one he penned yesterday.

 

Mr Garton Ash opens his November 23 piece thisaway:

As we mark the end of the ninth month of the largest, most brutal war in Europe since 1945, the worst thing we can do for peace on our continent is to push for peace negotiations with Vladimir Putin. The best thing we can do for peace is to increase our military, economic and humanitarian support for Ukraine, until one day it can negotiate from a position of strength.

Sorry to use strong language and long ungainly sentences but … the bidding war of creative fiction to which all sections of ‘our’ corporate media are now barefacedly committed in respect of America’s mis-sold and insanely reckless war on Russia marks – to the few who trouble to acquaint themselves both with its causes and deliberate prolonging (not least by Britain’s last prime minister but one) – a new low for the systemically corrupt manufacturers of what it pleases them to call public opinion … 1

Pushing for peace: those dangerous appeasers at Nato

… a new low precisely because the bidding war I speak of creates a media feeding frenzy which fuels such terrible loss of life; mainly on the side of poorly equipped, trained and led Ukrainian conscripts. 2 Is Garton Ash incapable of seeing that a $53bn intervention from the USA alone, 3  whose elites have most to gain from keeping the war going, is the sole driver of what he rightly calls “the largest, most brutal war in Europe since 1945″?

Or that the war he now wants to see intensified carries the very real risk I set out four days ago in The lies that triggered WW3? Apropos a Ukrainian rocket strike on Poland – in all likelihood calculated to trigger an Article 5 response from Nato 4 – I wrote:

Wanting to avoid thermonuclear war does not preclude recklessly provoking a nuclear adversary in ways that up the likelihood of getting precisely that, Dr Strangelove style.

And now the Garton Ash sagely advises that “the best thing we can do for peace is to increase our military, economic and humanitarian support for Ukraine …”

Don’t you just love that royal “we”? Say what you like about the West’s fascist goons flocking to Ukraine to stand shoulder to shoulder with their spiritual brethren in the Azov Battalion …

… at least they put their money where their mouths are!

Will the Garton Ash do likewise? I rather doubt it.

* * *

  1. In a BTL exchange two days ago I wrote: “Our emotions are as much the playthings of those who manufacture our political views as they are of those who manufacture our consumer ‘choices’. For most folk, Ukraine sprang into existence in the run up to February 24 this year – despite a vicious civil war having raged there for eight years. The reason they don’t acknowledge this is not that they’re bigots. Just that they never knew. Well whose fault is that, and whose interests does it serve?”
  2. Many say the withdrawal from Kherson marks a turning point. But their position on the banks of the lower Dnieper exposed 30,000 Russian troops to the danger of deliberate flooding from the massive Kakhovka Reservoir upstream. And to what end? To control a largely evacuated city of zero strategic value when Russia is fighting a war of attrition, not territorial conquest. (That’s an alien concept not only to those who pour out Guardian drivel but also to Western generals, none of whom have ever engaged a peer adversary, and whose wars on the middle east have measured success in land grabbed by their own or, more commonly, proxy forces. Try this discussion between Brian Berletic and Andrei Martyanov, or this interview with US Colonel Douglas McGregor, retired.) Here too those who believe Ukraine is now winning – an opinion not shared by General Mark Milley, Chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff – are sorely misled by the know-nothing commentary of Graun, CNN, Economist etc. At root of their fecklessly upbeat assessments is a mix of military ignorance and attributions to “Putin” of goals Moscow never aspired to, before trumpeting Russian ‘failure’ to achieve them.
  3. The beneficiaries of those Congress approved billions – other than the black markets into which high grade weaponry will vanish, to resurface in the world’s hell holes and/or the hands of criminals – are as always the shareholders of Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon et al. (Does this belie my claim of Uncle Sam’s cannon fodder in Ukraine being ill equipped? Not when the high end ordnance which (a) the Pentagon is prepared to risk falling into Russian hands, and (b) does in fact get through, demands months of training before it can usefully be deployed.) As for Europe’s contribution, that can be measured in energy-starved homes and corporate closures as blowback from its imbecilic economic war on Russia. (That a weaker and more pliant Germany is, alongside regime change in Moscow, a prime goal of Washington’s war is beginning to dawn on a clueless or craven Berlin, now nervously eying the gathering protests from a shivering citizenry and firms going to the wall – which, Germany being Europe’s powerhouse, is now having knock-on effects in shut-downs and lay-offs from Leipzig to Lisbon.)
  4. Article 5 of the Nato treaty requires all member states to respond to an attack on any other member state as if to an attack on its own sovereignty.

2 Replies to “Cheerleading for WW3

  1. You are right. The TGAs of this world like the Monbiots and rest of them-they are legion- make a very prosperous living putting the ruling class’s thoughts into words. Unlike men who work in the sewers they don’t cleanse themselves after work. The taste for shovelling excrement is no engrained in them that they will do it for free.

    What did Ash say about invading Afghanistan, or Iraq, Libya or Syria? And what did he say about South Ossettia or Kosovo etc etc? We all know the answers.

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