Not to Worry, It’s Just Business
It might clarify your thinking on the Ukraine war, just to consider it an American entrepreneurial operation, albeit cloaked in sensationalism and falsification. There is no denying, however, that it was brilliantly executed, beginning as far back as the 2014 right-wing coup d’etat in the country. That American-engineered, regime-change operation, directed by Victoria Nuland, President Barak Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, underlies the current tragic situation in Ukraine. It permitted the Ukranian right to oust a democratically elected neutralist government under President Victor Yanukovych, and install an anti-Russian regime more to American liking.
The Ukraine disaster is a dream come true for the U.S. war-mongers. Now they can affirm, “We were right all along and the current Russian invasion of Ukraine is proof positive.” At least that is what is trumpeted over the orchestrated U.S. media, which stretches around the world. But the truth is not quite so simple. It seldom is. Tragically, though, it’s always innocent civilians–and soldiers–who pay the bill.
It doesn’t take much creativity to discern that American arms manufacturers have three lucrative income streams based on the Russia-Ukraine conflict:
- U.S. arms aid to Ukraine. Whoever pays for them, there is always a plump profit for the manufacturers.
- The ballooning U.S. defense budget, currently headed over the moon.
- And the growing defense budgets in NATO and other European countries.
And, should the U.S. war profiteers decide to try pulling off the same operation on Taiwan, with a little bit of luck they could have another historic armament-sales windfall in the Far East.
U.S. Arms Manufacturers’ Numbers Thus Far
The following graphs from The Motley Fool investment website trace the progress of four principal U.S. arms manufacturers. Click on their respective links to see the rise of their share prices since 2017. All of these arms manufacturers outpace the market. Yes, Virginia, war is good for business.
| Company | Defense Focus |
|---|---|
| Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) | Aviation, space, and missiles |
| Boeing (NYSE:BA) | Aircraft, space, and helicopters |
| General Dynamics (NYSE:GD) | Shipbuilding, defense IT, tanks |
| Raytheon Technologies (NYSE:RTX) | Electronics and missiles |
Between Distraction and Indifference
What’s the response of the American on the street? It ranges from distraction to indifference. Americans in general are more interested in movie-star news (The Oscars slap was an earth-shaking event.), pop culture and the wacky right’s latest power play. Also at work there are generations of anti-communist brainwashing. That campaign originated in the early 1930s–some would say 1918, at the end of World War I. The U.S. was floundering in the middle of the greatest economic depression in its history. But Russian industry was booming to the point where they were offering jobs to desperate U.S. workers. (There are still black people living in Russia today who are descendants of those families.) But it looked to American businessmen as if they were about to be overtaken by the industrious Slavic hordes, and that scare fixed American fear and loathing of Russia for all time. Even today any Russian setback triggers a knee-jerk, salivating, Pavlovian response among American plutocrats.
Ironically, it was precisely the engineers trained, and the industrial base laid down–out in the middle of their vast country, out of range of German bombers–during the thirties that permitted the Russians to determine the outcome the Second World War while Russia’s supposed allies dilly-dallied in North Africa. American and British operations in the desert were incidental to the winning of the war, but vital for the preservation of British colonies. That was Churchill’s first priority, along with continued control of the Middle East oil fields. Churchill’s judgment carried almost as much weight as Roosevelt’s in 1943. The British prime minister’s success was short lived, however. The decolonization of the British Empire began in 1947 with India and culminated with Hong Kong in 1997.
While Churchill watched the Empire disolve like a sugar cube in hot coffee, the Americans grabbed a major piece of the Mideast oil pie. Churchill displayed curious loyalty to Russia, an ally that lost as many as 27 million citizens killed in the process of winning the war on the Eastern Front. When the war was over he suggested to Truman that, before they disbanded their armies, they should turn them against the Soviets and rid themselves of the communist menace once and for all.
The U.S. Encircles the World
Flash forward three quarters of a century, during which Americans dedicated their efforts to taking over the world country by country, and encircling the Russians and other perceived adversaries with a lethal ring of somewhere between 800 and 1,000 military bases, many of them sites for launching missiles with multiple nuclear warheads. Did this make the Russians uneasy? Yes, funnily enough, it did.
All of that warmaking paraphernalia carries the NATO brand, but most of it is Made in U.S.A., along with the authority to deploy it. Make no mistake, the Americans are in charge in NATO. Its commanding officer, since its foundation in 1949, has always been an American general, and the triggers for action are essentially always the same:
- Oil
- Anti communism
- A business opportunity
- All of the above
Where Does the American Public Stand?
As for the American public, their psychological preset obliges them to follow the flag, no matter how hare-brained an idea the government warhawks and their armament sponsors come up with. Say, for example, invading Iraq or taking over Afghanistan after the Russians had proven it was impossible. In every case, every American except Noam Chomsky leaps on the bandwagon, starting with the pre-cooked media. Instead of trying to defuse tense situations around the world, the Americans immediately leap into the fray–or, more likely, send in their proxies. It’s almost as if the military-industrial complex were in charge.
The Americans are seldom willing to give peace a chance. There is no place in their business plan for that. Like dedicated warmongers they stick to their profitable priorities and work their ticket to the bloody end of the line. No matter how seemingly insignificant the “enemy”–Panama in 1989-90, or the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983. Grenada’s left-wing government was not prepared for the American invasion–who is?–so the principal defenders were a Cuban construction crew working on the new airport there. It took 7.600 American troops a week to win the battle. The Cuban defenders died to the last man. President Reagan later claimed a great victory, calling it “the first rollback of communist influence since the beginning of the Cold War,” just another example of American heroism.
If the Gringos detect an opportunity, no matter how slim, to change an elected government for a regime managed by one of their running dogs–Shah Reza Pahlaví in Iran, for example, who scourged that oil-rich country for a generation with his SAVAK secret police. That brutal collective was created for him by the CIA and Mossad, after their 1953 ousting of the freely elected president Mohammed Mossadegh, whose “mistake” was to nationalize British oil interests in Iran.
Meanwhile, Back in Ukraine
Russia’s Ukraine incursion didn’t come along suddenly out of a blue sky. The rumblings of the Ukranian right in Maidan Square, (with a little help from their friends, the CIA) began in 2012. Their anti-democratic protests stiffened when they were joined by two hard-right groups, Svoboda (“Freedom”) and “Right Sector” which soon took control of the demonstrations in Kiev. Some members of Svoboda, identified as a fascist organization by Stern in 2012, were pluriemployed both in the Ukraine government and as members of the Svoboda leadership. So, yes, there were fascists involved in the 2014 expulsion of the elected government and takeover of the country.
What is still not clear is, how many? The worst of them is identified as the Asov Batallion, with its longtime close relations with fascism and use of neo-Nazi symbolism. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR, 2016) declared the Azov Battalion guilty of war crimes on multiple accounts. This condemnation was quickly voided, however, when the Azov Batallion became a regular military unit in the Ukrainian armed forces. Is the Asov’s ultimate goal the fascist conquest of Ukraine? The American media do not remember the Nazi takeover of Ukraine (1941-44), but the Russians do. (Source: Sokol, 2016)
All Hell Breaks Loose
The Ukranian killing fields are offering U.S.military-industrial complex not only a tsunami of sales, but a priceless real-war proving ground for their latest products. Now they can sell them as “combat tested.” To these serious American businessmen, Ukraine represents their proxy army and test bed. It’s a convenient solution for them. That way their own army doesn’t have to get its boots soiled.
Add to all of this the Russian claims of years of Ukranian armed harassment of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass. Vladimir Putin decides to invade Ukraine and put things back in their places, and all hell breaks loose both on the ground and in the world media, portraying Putin as the virtual anti Christ. This brings us full circle. The U.S. responds by upping the intensity of the media campaign and inundating Ukraine with American and British arms. And the profiteering is still far from over.
Murky Casualty Figures Fit the Script
So the Americans got their proxy war and the world continues to turn on its twisted axis. On 2 April 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 3,455 civilian Ukranian casualties in the country: 1,417 killed and 2,038 injured. NATO estimates that Russia has lost between 7,000 and 15,000 soldiers. Wounded who cannot rapidly return to duty generally number about twice the number of dead, according to the NATO estimation. Curiously, no Western source that I could find offers numbers for Ukranian military casualties. If you google “Ukranian military casualties,” you will be led directly to, “Ukranian civilian casualties,” which the Western press is selling exclusively. According to Global Times, Feb. 16, 2022, neither Russia nor Ukraine had any eagerness for going to war, but Washington, with its litany of warnings and dire predictions, and what one commentator has called “performance art,” has still been trying to make the world believe that World War III is imminent. It may or may not be but, if it is, it is primarily due to the relentless efforts of the United States.
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