< Back UKRAINE IS LOSING THE WAR, SPARKING PANIC IN THE IMPERIALIST PACK Lalkar writers Sep 18, 2024 If the purpose of the Kursk ‘offensive’ was to distract attention from the hammering the fascists are getting in the Donbass, the result has been just the opposite. While Keir Starmer and his lickspittle foreign minister David Lammy have been assuring Volodymyr Zelensky that Britain will stand by Ukraine to the last drop of (Ukrainian) blood, signing off on ever more arms exports and pushing for ever more dangerous and delusional escalations against Russia, the ongoing real-world collapse of Ukraine’s military in the Donbass has been sending shock waves across Capitol Hill, adding another layer of political hysteria to the fevered presidential election circus. On Tuesday 6 August, Ukraine launched a surprise offensive into the Russian province of Kursk in what the Russian president Vladimir Putin characterised as a “large-scale provocation”. Moscow declared a federal-level state of emergency across the regions of Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod and moved quickly to mobilise supplementary forces to deal with the threat. In the space of 24 hours, Ukraine lost up to 230 soldiers and 38 armoured vehicles, of which seven were tanks. Other losses at the time of writing included four field artillery systems, a Buk-M1 anti-aircraft missile system, three rocket launchers and an AN/MPQ-65 radar station of the Patriot air defence system. The element of surprise enabled the Kiev regime’s offensive to make some headway early on, but Russian forces moved swiftly to stabilise the situation, backed up by Belarus. Fascist dreams of taking and holding Russian territory or seizing the Kursk nuclear power station came to nought. If the purpose of Kiev’s would-be offensive was to distract attention from the hammering the fascists are getting right across the frontline and in particular in Donbass, then it will achieve exactly the direct opposite. History is repeating itself. The fascists are back on Kursk soil, where they will again face crushing defeat, and this time the devastating consequences for imperialism will be global in scale. Grandmother’s footsteps Oblivious to the scale of the disaster toward which the whole of the collective west is blindly steering, Britain’s new ‘socialist’ prime minister Sir Keir Starmer , egged on by Ukraine’s stooge actor-president Volodymyr Zelensky , still thinks he is playing grandmother’s footsteps, testing out how many ‘red lines’ imperialism can get away with crossing, or how many white lies it can tell about the intended targets with a straight face (ie, Russia). Keir Starmer lost no time in ingratiating himself with the Ukrainian ‘president’ (a title to which Mr Zelensky has even less legal claim now that the agreed presidential election timetable has been quietly dropped), making haste to welcome the imposter into the Cabinet office and stagemanaging a standing ovation from all the assembled throng of newly minted ministers therein, all eager to thank him for his services to Nato imperialism. On the ludicrous debate over what restrictions the collective west could or should set regarding the choice of targets the Kiev junta ought to be ‘allowed’ to hit once western weapons had been supplied, Zelensky put pressure on Starmer to drop all limits and persuade his colleagues in the collective west to follow suit. “Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Sir Keir Starmer to ‘show your leadership’ by helping to remove restrictions on how Ukraine can use weapons supplied by its western allies. “Addressing a meeting of the cabinet in Downing Street, Mr Zelensky said being able to hit Russian territory would help prevent attacks on residential areas in Ukraine. “Pressed on the subject earlier, defence secretary John Healey said the UK’s provision of weapons to Ukraine ‘does not preclude them hitting targets in Russia’. “However, he added that it ‘must be done by the Ukrainians and must be done within the parameters and the bounds of international humanitarian law’.” ( Zelensky urges PM to help lift Ukraine weapon limits by Kate Whannel, BBC, 19 July 2024) This would make a cat laugh. Are these ‘parameters and bounds of international humanitarian law’ the same ones that inspired Starmer to instruct his party to reject the demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, even as Israel was murdering Palestinians with British supplied weaponry? The reality is that all these ‘red lines’ have been trampled over long since, and the collective west is indulging in an exercise of dangerous self-delusion and whistling in the dark. While Starmer was busily assuring Zelensky that Britain will stand by Ukraine to the last drop of (Ukrainian) blood, and signing the latest defence export support treaty aimed at helping Ukrainian and British arms companies to invest in further military capabilities, out in the real world it was the collapse of Ukraine’s military in the Donbass that was sending shock waves across Capitol Hill, adding another layer of political hysteria to the run-up to the USA presidential elections in November. Biden implodes Once upon a time, US president Joe Biden was seen by many as a safe pair of hands, a promise of a more settled period after the excitements of the Donald Trump tenure and as the best hope of blocking a second Trump administration. The reality has turned out to be quite different: the trouncing of the Ukrainian military and the disquieting tendency of western sanctions to boomerang back upon their originators. From being a safe pair of hands, President Biden revealed himself to be a massive liability whose own decay fully mirrored that of the class he served. So Washington was stuck with a president who is clearly suffering from dementia, routinely making grotesque blunders (confusing Putin with Zelensky, for example), appearing to fall asleep mid-speech and rambling inconsequentially. The publicly-visible and audible degeneration of this man, nailed to the election bandwagon and sold as the only realistic hope of avoiding a Trump victory in November, was the most cruel and callous case of elder abuse imaginable. But the Democrats kept on flogging this dying horse, praying that he could be cranked up just long enough to hold Trump at bay. Then, at the eleventh hour, the Democrat machine decided it was finally time to spit Biden out and replace him with his vice president Kamala Harris . It is rather late in the day for the Democrat grandees to suddenly ‘discover’ that Kamala Harris, who had not till then made much of a splash in her VP role, was in fact top-class presidential material. Fans point to her work on women’s reproductive rights as an asset, and her showy endorsement by both halves of the Obama clan will impress some. But all this sudden enthusiasm cannot hide the fundamental reality that Harris was chosen as a stop-gap measure to keep the Oval office seat warm for a more substantial incumbent further down the track. It is probable that some Democrats have already begun to regard another period of Trump tenure as hard to avoid. Another straw in the wind is Trump’s choice of running mate, JD Vance, who does not hide his contempt for the whole Ukraine project. As long ago as 2022 Vance told an interviewer that “it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine … I gotta be honest with you: I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” More recently at the Munich security conference in February, Vance played down the threat posed by President Putin’s Russia and said that the USA could not manufacture the weapons needed to supply Ukraine to continue the war. At the back of all this sound and fury from Republicans and Democrats alike is the torturing awareness that Nato is losing the proxy war against Russia and it is the multipolar world that is setting the agenda, not the unipolar. Recent developments in Hungary underline this truth. Orban’s diplomacy Viktor Orban , though prime minister of Hungary, a member of the European Union , has nevertheless not been shy to criticise that body’s policy on weapons sales to Ukraine, acting where possible to block or delay their supply. Today, in the bracing new multipolar world society now in formation, a world in which everyone visits everyone else without having to check it out first with the US hegemon, Prime Minister Orban is not bashful when it comes to throwing his hat into the diplomatic ring. Orban recently travelled to Ukraine, Russia and China, bringing with him his own idea of peace talks, centred on the principle that the EU’s Ukraine policy should shift “from pro-war to pro-people” and should recognise that the solution can be found at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. These sentiments, hardly controversial, are nonetheless like a red rag to the neutered bull of the collective west, still locked into the blind refusal to recognise that their proxy war has hit a brick wall – the only question remaining to be decided being how many more lives are to be squandered before this inevitable outcome is finally grasped. Meanwhile, Kiev is still trying to compensate for its failures on the battlefield by playing games with the oil supply , and is currently blocking the transit across Ukraine of Russian oil destined for Hungary and Slovakia. Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, has been blocked from passing through the stretch of the Druzhba pipeline network that crosses Ukraine. Druzhba, or Friendship, opened in 1964, in the days of the Soviet Union. It still carries Russian oil to Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. It is painful to record now how in happier days such engineering feats as the Druzhba pipeline stood as a symbol of what can be achieved by socialist planning, economic integration and fraternal relations. The Kiev junta, on the other hand, is more in the business of bombing pipelines than building them. Happily, the Turkstream pipeline, which does not go anywhere near Ukraine soil, is taking up some of the slack, and long term the most likely outcome for Kiev’s spiteful interference will be to sour still further the junta’s relations with Budapest – and encourage Viktor Orban to strengthen his country’s relations with Moscow. The more that imperialism strives to block the path to progress, the faster it alienates its former friends and satellites. From apathy to anger The increasingly desperate measures the Kiev junta has been taking to find enough new Ukrainian recruits to prop up Nato’s failing proxy war against Russia are causing some citizens to move from apathy and disaffection to acts of direct resistance against the draft. Special outrage is reserved for recruiting sergeants who, like the bounty-hunters of yore, prowl the streets in search of suitable victims. Everyone has a tale to tell about neighbours or workmates seized in broad daylight, bundled into the back of a truck and driven off to fast-track recruitment hubs. Sputnik records: “On the night of 16 July alone, a wave of arson attacks targeting the service and personal vehicles of Odessa’s territorial recruitment centre employees left five cars burned to a crisp. Similar incidents were reported in Vinnitsa, Rovno, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov the same night. “Two more cars were burned in Odessa the next night, with the weekly total approaching a dozen. The situation has gotten so bad in some cities that servicemen have reportedly resorted to putting ‘NOT Territorial Recruitment Centre’ signs on their vehicles to avoid being targeted.” ( Putin: US to force Kiev’s draft age down to 18 then remove Zelensky , Sputnik, 5 June 2024) Needless to say, the knee-jerk response from the junta to the wave of arson attacks and the rocketing number of draft dodgers was to blame the Russians, claiming that soldiers were being bribed to quit by Russian agents. But this fairy tale cannot account for the fact that the vast majority of the draft dodgers hail from western regions. It turns out that a disproportionate number of Ukrainian draft dodgers are actually found to come from areas with traditionally pro-western sympathies. Whereas draft dodging is less pronounced in places like Kiev (14,300 cases), Kharkov (4,500 cases) and Kherson (just 200 cases), in western regions the cases total as many as 334,200 at the last count. Whilst the war in the east (that is to say, the fascist repression of Donbass which began in 2014 ) could be ignored by many in the western regions, shrugged off as a little local border dispute with some troublesome Russians, the threatened crushing of the liberated Donbass in 2022 and the swift Russian response to that threat changed the character of the war, and spread it far and wide. It was one thing to hear about bloodshed going on in the ‘far east’, but quite another to lay down one’s own life fighting Nato’s proxy war against an enemy that is well able to defend itself. And so far from blaming the young men for their lack of ‘patriotism’, surveys show that very many people are broadly sympathetic to the dodgers. “Shock polling this week by the Razumkov Centre, generally regarded as one of Ukraine’s most respected public policy think tanks, revealed that a whopping 46 percent of Ukrainians do not consider it ‘shameful’ to dodge mobilisation, with 29.1 percent saying it is shameful, and 24.8 percent finding it difficult to answer. Among respondents aged 18-29, 50 percent said it is not shameful. “The same polling also found that 44 percent of respondents think the time has come for peace talks with Russia, with 35 percent against the idea, and 21 percent undecided.” ( Sputnik , op cit) It is the courage and steadfast resistance of the Russian army and people in the liberation war, a just war waged in response to the Nato/EU’s failing threat to force regime change on the Russians and break up their country into a number of weak statelets under the domination of imperialism, that is rattling the Capitol Hill cage. Let these imperialist windbags tie themselves into ever tighter knots trying in vain to find a new president to somehow magically mend US imperialist fortunes. Glory to the Russian armed forces in their victorious antifascist war! Previous Next 2022-2024 The Revolution Report

< Back MIDDLE EAST IN DEPTH WITH LAITH MAROUF EPISODE 26 - YEMEN GOES HYPERSONIC Garland Nixon and Laith Marouf Sep 18, 2024 Description from Joti Brar's Telegram : Truly excellent conversation as ever between Garland Nixon and Leith Marouf this week. Particularly interesting details on the Mach 10 hypersonic missile sent by the Yemeni resistance into Tel Aviv. Increasingly it becomes clear that the resistance and the imperialists speak different languages. The resistance forces live where they fight. They are defending their peoples. And so they practice strategic patience. They don't want Armageddon. They want to preserve as much life as possible. But they also know that to be left in peace they need to defeat the enemy. And they have built forces that are capable of so doing. They know that they need to stand together. And increasingly that is what they have been doing. These developments have become qualitative and a decisive shift can be seen in the balance of forces globally, which coincides with the deepening of the global capitalist economic overproduction crisis. In this context, the resistance forces send regular messages to imperialism and its proxies that would be clearly comprehensible to any sane and rational actor: Look at what we can do. Your technological dominance has been broken. If we wanted we could wipe you out. We don't want to do that. We want you to let us live. Please get the message and leave before you get destroyed. The imperialists cannot win against these forces. Not in Russia. Not in the middle east. Not in China. But they will keep trying because not to try means death. Not the death of their people, who will finally get the chance to get free. It is the death of their rule and their economic system that the billionaire elites truly fear. But their system can only survive by means of the mass destruction of wealth, infrastructure, materials, means of production and people. To avoid the inevitable ending of their domination, the imperialists are willing to drown the world in blood. As in fact they have been doing since the inception of the capitalist economic system 400 years ago. They must be defeated if humanity is to begin to breathe. Previous Next

< Back MIDDLE EAST IN DEPTH WITH LAITH MAROUF EPISODE 26 - YEMEN GOES HYPERSONIC Garland Nixon and Laith Marouf Sep 18, 2024 Description from Joti Brar's Telegram : Truly excellent conversation as ever between Garland Nixon and Leith Marouf this week. Particularly interesting details on the Mach 10 hypersonic missile sent by the Yemeni resistance into Tel Aviv. Increasingly it becomes clear that the resistance and the imperialists speak different languages. The resistance forces live where they fight. They are defending their peoples. And so they practice strategic patience. They don't want Armageddon. They want to preserve as much life as possible. But they also know that to be left in peace they need to defeat the enemy. And they have built forces that are capable of so doing. They know that they need to stand together. And increasingly that is what they have been doing. These developments have become qualitative and a decisive shift can be seen in the balance of forces globally, which coincides with the deepening of the global capitalist economic overproduction crisis. In this context, the resistance forces send regular messages to imperialism and its proxies that would be clearly comprehensible to any sane and rational actor: Look at what we can do. Your technological dominance has been broken. If we wanted we could wipe you out. We don't want to do that. We want you to let us live. Please get the message and leave before you get destroyed. The imperialists cannot win against these forces. Not in Russia. Not in the middle east. Not in China. But they will keep trying because not to try means death. Not the death of their people, who will finally get the chance to get free. It is the death of their rule and their economic system that the billionaire elites truly fear. But their system can only survive by means of the mass destruction of wealth, infrastructure, materials, means of production and people. To avoid the inevitable ending of their domination, the imperialists are willing to drown the world in blood. As in fact they have been doing since the inception of the capitalist economic system 400 years ago. They must be defeated if humanity is to begin to breathe. Previous Next 2022-2024 The Revolution Report

< Back YVAN GIL: VENEZUELA WILL NOT TOLERATE AN ESCALATION IN THE AGGRESSIONS AND INTERFERENCES FROM SPAIN TeleSUR Sep 17, 2024 Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Yvan Gil, Sept 2024 Photo: EFE On Tuesday, the Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Yvan Gil, reported on his telephone conversation with the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, in which they discussed issues related to the sovereignty of Venezuela and the interference by Spanish officials in the internal affairs of the country. “Venezuela will not tolerate an escalation in the aggressions and interferences from Spain, which in recent years has become a haven for terrorists and criminals linked to fascism in our country,” he assured his Spanish counterpart. “Ignorance of our constitutional institutions is a red line, a Guaidó 2.0 will fail again. Our country is ready to take actions that safeguard its sovereignty”. Gil, for his part, informed Albares about the dismantling of terrorist plans against Venezuela, recently announced by Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. “Preliminary investigations involve these Spanish citizens in terrorist acts, who also have links with the Spanish National Intelligence Center,” said the Foreign Minister. “We wish the Spanish government to immediately rectify, unequivocally condemn terrorism and assume the obligations that are due to it in the framework of international law,” quotes Yvan Gil. Finally, the Minister reaffirmed the justice and peace nature of the actions by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against acts of interference and fascism that seek to undermine the sovereignty of the nation. “The Bolivarian Revolution, as it has historically demonstrated, will operate under the principles of justice, respect for international law, human rights and peace diplomacy, and will defend with great courage and courage the independence and sovereignty won more than 200 years ago”. Previous Next

< Back YVAN GIL: VENEZUELA WILL NOT TOLERATE AN ESCALATION IN THE AGGRESSIONS AND INTERFERENCES FROM SPAIN TeleSUR Sep 17, 2024 Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Yvan Gil, Sept 2024 Photo: EFE On Tuesday, the Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Yvan Gil, reported on his telephone conversation with the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, in which they discussed issues related to the sovereignty of Venezuela and the interference by Spanish officials in the internal affairs of the country. “Venezuela will not tolerate an escalation in the aggressions and interferences from Spain, which in recent years has become a haven for terrorists and criminals linked to fascism in our country,” he assured his Spanish counterpart. “Ignorance of our constitutional institutions is a red line, a Guaidó 2.0 will fail again. Our country is ready to take actions that safeguard its sovereignty”. Gil, for his part, informed Albares about the dismantling of terrorist plans against Venezuela, recently announced by Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. “Preliminary investigations involve these Spanish citizens in terrorist acts, who also have links with the Spanish National Intelligence Center,” said the Foreign Minister. “We wish the Spanish government to immediately rectify, unequivocally condemn terrorism and assume the obligations that are due to it in the framework of international law,” quotes Yvan Gil. Finally, the Minister reaffirmed the justice and peace nature of the actions by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against acts of interference and fascism that seek to undermine the sovereignty of the nation. “The Bolivarian Revolution, as it has historically demonstrated, will operate under the principles of justice, respect for international law, human rights and peace diplomacy, and will defend with great courage and courage the independence and sovereignty won more than 200 years ago”. Previous Next 2022-2024 The Revolution Report

< Back WHAT 'HOLDING KURSK' REALLY MEANS Alistair P-M Sep 14, 2024 Since the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk started on August 6 2024, the news has been full of stories of a “ secretive ” Ukrainian attack that has “ seized Russian territory ”, and “taken Russia by surprise ”. An article that ponders “what the incursion tells us about Putin’s Russia” even makes the observation that this was the first time that Russia has been invaded since WW2 - and who invaded them that time? But what was the point of the incursion anyway? The Ukrainians can’t have believed they were going to annex the territory, but Zelensky said the purpose was to use Kursk as a “ bargaining chip ” in negotiations with Russia - an absurd statement, considering that in 2022 he signed a decree explicitly prohibiting negotiations with Russia, at least while Putin is in charge. I’m not a military person and I’m no military analyst, but I listen to people with experience and contacts in the military like former US Marine Brian Berletic of The New Atlas and former Soviet naval officer Andrei Martyanov of SmoothieX12 YouTube channel and blog . Martyanov often makes the point that it is unhelpful to seize upon minutiae like individual towns being taken by one side or another, when trying to assess the overall military position. A site like Live UA Map (which is somewhat pro-Ukrainian) gives a better overview of the unfolding military picture. Something that is useful for getting a feel for what is going on, however, are testimonies from civilians and soldiers who have experienced what the Ukrainians have been doing while they have occupied Kursk. In my previous post on the topic I shared some very incriminating videos that Ukrainian troops had recorded themselves, as well as video of captured Ukrainian troops and some testimony from traumatised civilians. At the end of August, Ambassador for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Rodion Miroshnik said on RIA Novosti that civilians fleeing from Kursk had reported hearing English spoken, and that the Ukrainian troops they encountered “with some humanity left” had warned them to leave because “the Poles are coming behind us; they won’t spare you”: On September 13, a video appeared online made by a Russian soldier who had encountered another wounded soldier who had come back from Kursk. The wounded soldier told him that around Kursk the bulk of the attackers were Georgian, Polish and French, and that in the process of clearing these soldiers out, they had come across 8 children hanged in a barn: The Ukrainians weren’t exaggerating when they said “they won’t spare you”. It’s reminiscent of the Russian serviceman who testified that he had come across a child organ harvesting operation in Izyum. The horrors are unimaginable, on a par with those committed by the Nazis during WW2. If this kind of testimony existed from the other side, it would be front and centre in our news. It’s not. This is the reality of ‘the Kursk incursion’, of Nazism, and of imperialism writ large. It’s good that it’s going to lose. Republished from The Reluctant Dissident . Previous Next

< Back WHAT 'HOLDING KURSK' REALLY MEANS Alistair P-M Sep 14, 2024 Since the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk started on August 6 2024, the news has been full of stories of a “ secretive ” Ukrainian attack that has “ seized Russian territory ”, and “taken Russia by surprise ”. An article that ponders “what the incursion tells us about Putin’s Russia” even makes the observation that this was the first time that Russia has been invaded since WW2 - and who invaded them that time? But what was the point of the incursion anyway? The Ukrainians can’t have believed they were going to annex the territory, but Zelensky said the purpose was to use Kursk as a “ bargaining chip ” in negotiations with Russia - an absurd statement, considering that in 2022 he signed a decree explicitly prohibiting negotiations with Russia, at least while Putin is in charge. I’m not a military person and I’m no military analyst, but I listen to people with experience and contacts in the military like former US Marine Brian Berletic of The New Atlas and former Soviet naval officer Andrei Martyanov of SmoothieX12 YouTube channel and blog . Martyanov often makes the point that it is unhelpful to seize upon minutiae like individual towns being taken by one side or another, when trying to assess the overall military position. A site like Live UA Map (which is somewhat pro-Ukrainian) gives a better overview of the unfolding military picture. Something that is useful for getting a feel for what is going on, however, are testimonies from civilians and soldiers who have experienced what the Ukrainians have been doing while they have occupied Kursk. In my previous post on the topic I shared some very incriminating videos that Ukrainian troops had recorded themselves, as well as video of captured Ukrainian troops and some testimony from traumatised civilians. At the end of August, Ambassador for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Rodion Miroshnik said on RIA Novosti that civilians fleeing from Kursk had reported hearing English spoken, and that the Ukrainian troops they encountered “with some humanity left” had warned them to leave because “the Poles are coming behind us; they won’t spare you”: On September 13, a video appeared online made by a Russian soldier who had encountered another wounded soldier who had come back from Kursk. The wounded soldier told him that around Kursk the bulk of the attackers were Georgian, Polish and French, and that in the process of clearing these soldiers out, they had come across 8 children hanged in a barn: The Ukrainians weren’t exaggerating when they said “they won’t spare you”. It’s reminiscent of the Russian serviceman who testified that he had come across a child organ harvesting operation in Izyum. The horrors are unimaginable, on a par with those committed by the Nazis during WW2. If this kind of testimony existed from the other side, it would be front and centre in our news. It’s not. This is the reality of ‘the Kursk incursion’, of Nazism, and of imperialism writ large. It’s good that it’s going to lose. Republished from The Reluctant Dissident . Previous Next 2022-2024 The Revolution Report

< Back THE CYNICAL LIE THAT 'HELPING UKRAINE' HELPS UKRAINE Alistair P-M Jun 25, 2023 Written in June 2023, but the points all still apply - the situation is just even worse now. Since the SMO got underway, the collective West - i.e. the US, Europe and their allies, who also like to refer to themselves as The International Community - has sent Ukraine billions of dollars in cash and aid, some of which has been ‘lethal aid’, which sounds like food parcels laced with cyanide but in fact just means weapons. Western leaders love to trot out soundbites about standing with Ukraine “ for as long as it takes ”, but what do they actually mean by that? As long as what takes? Defeating Russia? Seriously? And why, exactly? Ukraine isn’t a NATO member state, so the rest of NATO has no formal reason to help them, certainly not to the extent of sending them weapons to continue fighting Russia, but that’s what we’ve been doing for well over a year now. We’re treating them like a de facto member of NATO, but one that we’re conveniently not obliged to help; we’re just doing it because we care so much about their freedom, democracy, etc . We launched the sanctions war against Russia because we were so outraged about their totally unprovoked attack on their neighbour that we felt it necessary to try and destroy their economy and ignite a coup against Putin. But because we’ve decided that we’re not a party to the conflict, we’ve decided that Russia aren’t allowed to retaliate against us either militarily or economically, so if they do then we’ve decided that that will be unprovoked too. Hmm. And what happened? The sanctions backfired spectacularly, isolating us economically and politically, and the weapons have mostly been destroyed, including on 13 May 2023 an ammunition dump near Khmelnytskyi that included the depleted uranium that the UK sent , creating a potentially radioactive cloud that may have passed over western Europe. I’m still waiting to see any mention of it in western media, but I’m not holding my breath. Asking why we’re ‘helping’ Ukraine so much, is a question that is guaranteed to be met with angry and hurt-sounding liberal types talking about protecting Europe, not giving in to Putin’s authoritarianism, and other euphemisms for “because we are”. Obviously these people also dismiss all the extensive evidence of Ukrainian war crimes against civilians and terrorism in Russia as Russian propaganda (even when Ukraine boasts about it). The most you might get is an admission that it’s real but justified by Russia’s invasion, and Russia is doing the same anyway (because the news says they are ). The fact that the Ukrainian war crimes have been going on since 2014 might be met with the rejoinder that it was all in response to Russian aggression in some form or another. In the MSNBCNN liberal worldview, Ukraine has always been the underdog and Russia has always been the giant looming on the border, arming militants. In reality, Donbass has been the underdog since the DLPR declared independence, and Ukraine has been the giant angrily punishing its upstart rebels with extremist militants armed and trained by the West. Both Russians and people from elsewhere went to Donbass to fight these militants, but Putin came under intense criticism in Russia for not coming to the aid of the Donbass people sooner, since they were explicitly being targeted for their Russian ethnicity, and the Russian audience could understand very well what the Ukrainian nationalists were saying about them . The continuing terrorism against the Donbass was a long-burning provocation that has been whitewashed in the west, one enacted with the intention of dragging Russia in militarily, which would provide justification for western sanctions, weapons supplies and maybe even military intervention. Putin and others would have been well aware of this, and they didn’t act until their hand was forced by Ukraine building up troops on the DLPR border in readiness to violently take back Donbass. When Russia eventually did act, they acted decisively, recognising the DPR and LPR as independent states, destroying most of the Ukrainian air force almost immediately and providing air and artillery support for the DLPR troops fighting the Ukraine troops that had been built up on their borders. Suddenly, the narrative of Ukraine being the underdog appeared to ring true. Formal support for Ukraine has taken the form of financial and military support, both for the country and for refugees abroad, and informal support has taken the form of aggressive media and and social media campaigns. Embarrassing memes like this one popped up, and people fell over themselves to Like and Love and Share them: The informal support has been just as important as the formal support, in that it has legitimised in the public consciousness the massive formal support for a country that, as stated earlier, we don’t have any treaty obligations to help. But the burning question is: what is our ‘help’ actually doing for Ukraine? Russia has an overwhelming military advantage (‘escalatory dominance’ as Obama put it), so the longer the conflict continues, the more the Ukraine army will be destroyed. At the end of March 2022, after most of the first iteration of the Ukraine army had been destroyed, negotiations in Istanbul resulted in a ceasefire agreement that would have put an end to the conflict, with Ukraine agreeing to cede Crimea, the DPR and the LPR. Then Boris Johnson visited his old buddy Zelensky in Kiev, and promised them more money and weapons if they kept fighting ‘for as long as it takes’. So the ceasefire went in the bin . This was probably the point at which Russia/Putin realised that Ukraine is a state with no autonomy - sometimes referred to as a zombie state or simply 404 (‘State not found’) - and by no means a sovereign country. They have said repeatedly since then, that there is no point negotiating with Ukraine, or even the EU, only the United States. But they’ve also called the US ‘ agreement-incapable ’, meaning that Russia can make an agreement with one arm of government, only to have another arm of government, or the military, break that agreement. Naturally, our media tells a very different story, one of a brave Ukraine standing up to brutish Russian aggression. What the news never says, is that ever since the start of the SMO, Ukraine hasn’t had a chance against Russia. They just keep pushing the lines that actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps reading, which is that Ukraine just needs a few more tanks, a few more weapons, a few more billion dollars to keep them going long enough to take back Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhye and Crimea. This is fantasy. They couldn’t take Donbass and Crimea back at the start of 2022, when they had all of their original army (almost the largest in Europe), and there is no reason to think they can do it now. So why do we keep supporting them, and why is Zelensky being told to keep saying this? All of the Soviet-era materiel that Eastern European countries have sent (which Ukrainians may already have been trained to use) has to be replaced at some point. NATO countries are obliged to only buy military equipment from other NATO countries, so that means big contracts for arms manufacturers in the US, UK, France and elsewhere. So what if the obsolete old Soviet tanks get blown up, along with their crew? Giving Ukraine lots of older Western weapons like the Javelins and NLAWs lets us feel good about having done something, even if they turn out to be useless because their batteries expired years ago and the people using them received bare minimum training on how to use them. So it makes the guy holding it a target, so what? As CBS reported and then withdrew , as little as 30% of military aid may have reached its intended recipient. A lot of what goes missing ends up on the black market - buyers there also complain about defunct batteries - and two French Caesar self-propelled guns even ended up in Russia . The mix of ammunition of different standards that we’ve given them might not be compatible with the weapons they have, but at least they can sell it on the dark web to someone who might have a use for it. The relatively new German Leopard tanks showed themselves to be ineffective in the disastrous Summer 2023 'counteroffensive', getting trapped in minefields and becoming sitting ducks for Russian artillery. Even the wonder-weapon US Patriot air defence systems have proven ineffective: they have been destroyed by the hypersonic Kinzhal missiles they were supposed to be able to shoot out of the sky, and their hyper-expensive missiles have fallen onto the cities they were supposed to defend (see below). The crews of these tanks and weapons systems are dead meat, but does anyone care? Ukraine is synonymous with corruption. Apart from the unaudited black hole of ‘aid to Ukraine’ that the US supposedly sends, there was the time the Ukraine parliament voted to give themselves a pay rise , and the quickly-forgotten scandal of crypto platform FTX having possibly been a conduit for funds from ‘Aid to Ukraine’ to find their way back to Democrat donors. And of course there are the Bidens , Burisma, and the other children of prominent US senators having high-paid no-show jobs in Ukraine for years. So the grift continues, but only while the fighting continues. Ukrainian lives - and almost certainly the lives of soldiers from NATO countries, whom many military commentators agree must be manning the advanced weapons systems that Ukraine has been sent, because the Ukrainians simply haven’t had time to learn how to use these systems - continue to get traded for dollars , and the media continues to tell us that this is all ‘for Ukraine’ somehow. On top of that, the men fighting are practically abducted off the street, then sent into battle with virtually no training, inadequate weapons, and the threat of being shot by their own side if they try to retreat. They are literally cannon fodder to keep the war going as long as possible. There’s always the possibility that the reason Zelensky keeps reading his lines is that he knows that his life , and maybe the lives of his family, are at risk if he drops the pantomime at any moment. He’s a Jewish , native Russian speaker, in a country where the security services are allowed to detain and disappear anyone they think might be a threat to the state, and the whole western media is on their side. If he says something off-script and suddenly winds up dead, undoubtedly his death will be blamed on Russia. It would probably even be used as an excuse for further escalation, but with a more hardline leader. How can this all end? The US was originally looking for regime change in Russia, and with the Wagner mutiny the media all got very excited thinking it might be happening , but it didn’t. Western leaders have also talked about aiming for a ‘frozen’ conflict, essentially a new Cold War era, with a DMZ splitting Ukraine into East and West. I don’t know what’s going to happen any more than anyone else, but Russia say that the SMO is going to plan, and we’ll have to wait and see what that means. If the New Cold War proposition wins out, with the current US-led regime continuing to dominate Europe west of Ukraine, the media in this bloc is bound to keep up their story about the Ukraine conflict and its causes. They don’t have a choice any more; to admit that one part was untrue would open the floodgates to the rest of the truth spilling out. The Russia-controlled east will probably get to know the truth about this conflict, and I have to think that no one in eastern Ukraine will ever trust the West again. If the US-led bloc doesn’t get the frozen conflict it wants, then it seems likely there’s no other option but for eventual regime change in Europe and a severing of ties with the US. Or maybe even more than that, since Russia has shown that they can handily defeat Western weapons, and the West barely has enough weapons to defend itself as best it can. The near future looks bleak, but I have hope that we can come through this for the better. The sooner we realise that America is not our friend, and Russia doesn’t have to be our enemy, the better. Republished from The Reluctant Dissident . Previous Next 2022-2024 The Revolution Report

< Back THE CYNICAL LIE THAT 'HELPING UKRAINE' HELPS UKRAINE Alistair P-M Jun 25, 2023 Written in June 2023, but the points all still apply - the situation is just even worse now. Since the SMO got underway, the collective West - i.e. the US, Europe and their allies, who also like to refer to themselves as The International Community - has sent Ukraine billions of dollars in cash and aid, some of which has been ‘lethal aid’, which sounds like food parcels laced with cyanide but in fact just means weapons. Western leaders love to trot out soundbites about standing with Ukraine “ for as long as it takes ”, but what do they actually mean by that? As long as what takes? Defeating Russia? Seriously? And why, exactly? Ukraine isn’t a NATO member state, so the rest of NATO has no formal reason to help them, certainly not to the extent of sending them weapons to continue fighting Russia, but that’s what we’ve been doing for well over a year now. We’re treating them like a de facto member of NATO, but one that we’re conveniently not obliged to help; we’re just doing it because we care so much about their freedom, democracy, etc . We launched the sanctions war against Russia because we were so outraged about their totally unprovoked attack on their neighbour that we felt it necessary to try and destroy their economy and ignite a coup against Putin. But because we’ve decided that we’re not a party to the conflict, we’ve decided that Russia aren’t allowed to retaliate against us either militarily or economically, so if they do then we’ve decided that that will be unprovoked too. Hmm. And what happened? The sanctions backfired spectacularly, isolating us economically and politically, and the weapons have mostly been destroyed, including on 13 May 2023 an ammunition dump near Khmelnytskyi that included the depleted uranium that the UK sent , creating a potentially radioactive cloud that may have passed over western Europe. I’m still waiting to see any mention of it in western media, but I’m not holding my breath. Asking why we’re ‘helping’ Ukraine so much, is a question that is guaranteed to be met with angry and hurt-sounding liberal types talking about protecting Europe, not giving in to Putin’s authoritarianism, and other euphemisms for “because we are”. Obviously these people also dismiss all the extensive evidence of Ukrainian war crimes against civilians and terrorism in Russia as Russian propaganda (even when Ukraine boasts about it). The most you might get is an admission that it’s real but justified by Russia’s invasion, and Russia is doing the same anyway (because the news says they are ). The fact that the Ukrainian war crimes have been going on since 2014 might be met with the rejoinder that it was all in response to Russian aggression in some form or another. In the MSNBCNN liberal worldview, Ukraine has always been the underdog and Russia has always been the giant looming on the border, arming militants. In reality, Donbass has been the underdog since the DLPR declared independence, and Ukraine has been the giant angrily punishing its upstart rebels with extremist militants armed and trained by the West. Both Russians and people from elsewhere went to Donbass to fight these militants, but Putin came under intense criticism in Russia for not coming to the aid of the Donbass people sooner, since they were explicitly being targeted for their Russian ethnicity, and the Russian audience could understand very well what the Ukrainian nationalists were saying about them . The continuing terrorism against the Donbass was a long-burning provocation that has been whitewashed in the west, one enacted with the intention of dragging Russia in militarily, which would provide justification for western sanctions, weapons supplies and maybe even military intervention. Putin and others would have been well aware of this, and they didn’t act until their hand was forced by Ukraine building up troops on the DLPR border in readiness to violently take back Donbass. When Russia eventually did act, they acted decisively, recognising the DPR and LPR as independent states, destroying most of the Ukrainian air force almost immediately and providing air and artillery support for the DLPR troops fighting the Ukraine troops that had been built up on their borders. Suddenly, the narrative of Ukraine being the underdog appeared to ring true. Formal support for Ukraine has taken the form of financial and military support, both for the country and for refugees abroad, and informal support has taken the form of aggressive media and and social media campaigns. Embarrassing memes like this one popped up, and people fell over themselves to Like and Love and Share them: The informal support has been just as important as the formal support, in that it has legitimised in the public consciousness the massive formal support for a country that, as stated earlier, we don’t have any treaty obligations to help. But the burning question is: what is our ‘help’ actually doing for Ukraine? Russia has an overwhelming military advantage (‘escalatory dominance’ as Obama put it), so the longer the conflict continues, the more the Ukraine army will be destroyed. At the end of March 2022, after most of the first iteration of the Ukraine army had been destroyed, negotiations in Istanbul resulted in a ceasefire agreement that would have put an end to the conflict, with Ukraine agreeing to cede Crimea, the DPR and the LPR. Then Boris Johnson visited his old buddy Zelensky in Kiev, and promised them more money and weapons if they kept fighting ‘for as long as it takes’. So the ceasefire went in the bin . This was probably the point at which Russia/Putin realised that Ukraine is a state with no autonomy - sometimes referred to as a zombie state or simply 404 (‘State not found’) - and by no means a sovereign country. They have said repeatedly since then, that there is no point negotiating with Ukraine, or even the EU, only the United States. But they’ve also called the US ‘ agreement-incapable ’, meaning that Russia can make an agreement with one arm of government, only to have another arm of government, or the military, break that agreement. Naturally, our media tells a very different story, one of a brave Ukraine standing up to brutish Russian aggression. What the news never says, is that ever since the start of the SMO, Ukraine hasn’t had a chance against Russia. They just keep pushing the lines that actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps reading, which is that Ukraine just needs a few more tanks, a few more weapons, a few more billion dollars to keep them going long enough to take back Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhye and Crimea. This is fantasy. They couldn’t take Donbass and Crimea back at the start of 2022, when they had all of their original army (almost the largest in Europe), and there is no reason to think they can do it now. So why do we keep supporting them, and why is Zelensky being told to keep saying this? All of the Soviet-era materiel that Eastern European countries have sent (which Ukrainians may already have been trained to use) has to be replaced at some point. NATO countries are obliged to only buy military equipment from other NATO countries, so that means big contracts for arms manufacturers in the US, UK, France and elsewhere. So what if the obsolete old Soviet tanks get blown up, along with their crew? Giving Ukraine lots of older Western weapons like the Javelins and NLAWs lets us feel good about having done something, even if they turn out to be useless because their batteries expired years ago and the people using them received bare minimum training on how to use them. So it makes the guy holding it a target, so what? As CBS reported and then withdrew , as little as 30% of military aid may have reached its intended recipient. A lot of what goes missing ends up on the black market - buyers there also complain about defunct batteries - and two French Caesar self-propelled guns even ended up in Russia . The mix of ammunition of different standards that we’ve given them might not be compatible with the weapons they have, but at least they can sell it on the dark web to someone who might have a use for it. The relatively new German Leopard tanks showed themselves to be ineffective in the disastrous Summer 2023 'counteroffensive', getting trapped in minefields and becoming sitting ducks for Russian artillery. Even the wonder-weapon US Patriot air defence systems have proven ineffective: they have been destroyed by the hypersonic Kinzhal missiles they were supposed to be able to shoot out of the sky, and their hyper-expensive missiles have fallen onto the cities they were supposed to defend (see below). The crews of these tanks and weapons systems are dead meat, but does anyone care? Ukraine is synonymous with corruption. Apart from the unaudited black hole of ‘aid to Ukraine’ that the US supposedly sends, there was the time the Ukraine parliament voted to give themselves a pay rise , and the quickly-forgotten scandal of crypto platform FTX having possibly been a conduit for funds from ‘Aid to Ukraine’ to find their way back to Democrat donors. And of course there are the Bidens , Burisma, and the other children of prominent US senators having high-paid no-show jobs in Ukraine for years. So the grift continues, but only while the fighting continues. Ukrainian lives - and almost certainly the lives of soldiers from NATO countries, whom many military commentators agree must be manning the advanced weapons systems that Ukraine has been sent, because the Ukrainians simply haven’t had time to learn how to use these systems - continue to get traded for dollars , and the media continues to tell us that this is all ‘for Ukraine’ somehow. On top of that, the men fighting are practically abducted off the street, then sent into battle with virtually no training, inadequate weapons, and the threat of being shot by their own side if they try to retreat. They are literally cannon fodder to keep the war going as long as possible. There’s always the possibility that the reason Zelensky keeps reading his lines is that he knows that his life , and maybe the lives of his family, are at risk if he drops the pantomime at any moment. He’s a Jewish , native Russian speaker, in a country where the security services are allowed to detain and disappear anyone they think might be a threat to the state, and the whole western media is on their side. If he says something off-script and suddenly winds up dead, undoubtedly his death will be blamed on Russia. It would probably even be used as an excuse for further escalation, but with a more hardline leader. How can this all end? The US was originally looking for regime change in Russia, and with the Wagner mutiny the media all got very excited thinking it might be happening , but it didn’t. Western leaders have also talked about aiming for a ‘frozen’ conflict, essentially a new Cold War era, with a DMZ splitting Ukraine into East and West. I don’t know what’s going to happen any more than anyone else, but Russia say that the SMO is going to plan, and we’ll have to wait and see what that means. If the New Cold War proposition wins out, with the current US-led regime continuing to dominate Europe west of Ukraine, the media in this bloc is bound to keep up their story about the Ukraine conflict and its causes. They don’t have a choice any more; to admit that one part was untrue would open the floodgates to the rest of the truth spilling out. The Russia-controlled east will probably get to know the truth about this conflict, and I have to think that no one in eastern Ukraine will ever trust the West again. If the US-led bloc doesn’t get the frozen conflict it wants, then it seems likely there’s no other option but for eventual regime change in Europe and a severing of ties with the US. Or maybe even more than that, since Russia has shown that they can handily defeat Western weapons, and the West barely has enough weapons to defend itself as best it can. The near future looks bleak, but I have hope that we can come through this for the better. The sooner we realise that America is not our friend, and Russia doesn’t have to be our enemy, the better. Republished from The Reluctant Dissident . Previous Next

< Back RICHARD MEDHURST UN SPEECH IN GENEVA ON PALESTINE & THE UK'S CRACKDOWN ON FREE SPEECH Richard Medhurst Sep 15, 2024 Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/richardmedhurst Donate on PayPal: https://paypal.me/papichulomin Donate on GoFundMe: http://tiny.cc/GoFundMe-Richard Bitcoin address: bc1qnelpedy2q6qu67485w4wnmcya5am873zwxxvvp Subscribe to Richard Medhurst on other platforms here: Rumble: https://rumble.com/richardmedhurst Rokfin: https://rokfin.com/richardmedhurst Odysee: https://odysee.com/@richardmedhurst Substack: https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/ Richard Thomas Medhurst (1992) is an independent journalist, political commentator, and analyst from the United Kingdom with a focus on international affairs, US politics, and the Middle East. Medhurst is known for his coverage of the Julian Assange extradition case in London, as one of the only journalists to report on the trial of the WikiLeaks founder from inside the court. He has also covered the Iran nuclear deal talks on the ground in Vienna. Medhurst was born in Damascus, Syria. His father is English and mother is Syrian. Both his parents served in United Nations Peacekeeping and Observer missions and were among the UN Peacekeepers awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988. Owing to his parents’ professional mobility, he has lived in Syria, Pakistan, Switzerland, and Austria. He speaks four languages fluently: English, Arabic, French, and German. As an independent journalist, Medhurst regularly hosts live broadcasts and video reports on his YouTube channel. Previous guests include the Foreign Minister of Venezuela, the Dep Foreign Minister of Iran; the Palestinian, Russian and Cuban ambassadors to the United Nations in Vienna; the former British Ambassador to Syria; and various UN officials, journalists, and more. Medhurst’s reports and analysis on Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, Niger, Lebanon, Iran, the Israeli occupation in Palestine and its genocide in Gaza have gone viral countless times, racking up millions of views. Richard Medhurst has a combined following of roughly one million people online, and appears regularly on international news outlets including Al Jazeera, WikiLeaks, Black Agenda Report, Al Mayadeen, The Times, LBC, and others. Richard Medhurst on Twitter: / richimedhurst Richard Medhurst on Instagram: / richardtmedhurst Richard Medhurst on Substack: https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/ ________________________________________________________ #gaza #palestine #richardmedhurst #israel #Medhurst #RichardMedhurst #idf Previous Next 2022-2024 The Revolution Report

< Back RICHARD MEDHURST UN SPEECH IN GENEVA ON PALESTINE & THE UK'S CRACKDOWN ON FREE SPEECH Richard Medhurst Sep 15, 2024 Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/richardmedhurst Donate on PayPal: https://paypal.me/papichulomin Donate on GoFundMe: http://tiny.cc/GoFundMe-Richard Bitcoin address: bc1qnelpedy2q6qu67485w4wnmcya5am873zwxxvvp Subscribe to Richard Medhurst on other platforms here: Rumble: https://rumble.com/richardmedhurst Rokfin: https://rokfin.com/richardmedhurst Odysee: https://odysee.com/@richardmedhurst Substack: https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/ Richard Thomas Medhurst (1992) is an independent journalist, political commentator, and analyst from the United Kingdom with a focus on international affairs, US politics, and the Middle East. Medhurst is known for his coverage of the Julian Assange extradition case in London, as one of the only journalists to report on the trial of the WikiLeaks founder from inside the court. He has also covered the Iran nuclear deal talks on the ground in Vienna. Medhurst was born in Damascus, Syria. His father is English and mother is Syrian. Both his parents served in United Nations Peacekeeping and Observer missions and were among the UN Peacekeepers awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988. Owing to his parents’ professional mobility, he has lived in Syria, Pakistan, Switzerland, and Austria. He speaks four languages fluently: English, Arabic, French, and German. As an independent journalist, Medhurst regularly hosts live broadcasts and video reports on his YouTube channel. Previous guests include the Foreign Minister of Venezuela, the Dep Foreign Minister of Iran; the Palestinian, Russian and Cuban ambassadors to the United Nations in Vienna; the former British Ambassador to Syria; and various UN officials, journalists, and more. Medhurst’s reports and analysis on Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, Niger, Lebanon, Iran, the Israeli occupation in Palestine and its genocide in Gaza have gone viral countless times, racking up millions of views. Richard Medhurst has a combined following of roughly one million people online, and appears regularly on international news outlets including Al Jazeera, WikiLeaks, Black Agenda Report, Al Mayadeen, The Times, LBC, and others. Richard Medhurst on Twitter: / richimedhurst Richard Medhurst on Instagram: / richardtmedhurst Richard Medhurst on Substack: https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/ ________________________________________________________ #gaza #palestine #richardmedhurst #israel #Medhurst #RichardMedhurst #idf Previous Next

< Back IS ITS NATIONAL DEBT OF 25 TRILLION DOLLARS THE USA'S GREATEST WEAKNESS Proletarian Writers, CPGB-ML Sep 15, 2024 With debt rising exponentially year on year, and interest payments of $1tn this year alone, the US economy is poised ever closer to open bankruptcy. The USA is now spending more than $2bn per day in interest payments alone on a debt so large that it equates to $106,000 for every single US citizen. This servicing of a ballooning debt is the fastest growing part of the national budget, and a sign of the underlying bankruptcy of the US economy. No wonder the imperialists are desperate for a huge payday in Russia and/or China. Only by robbing the workers of the world even more intensively can these capitalist books ever hope to become ‘balanced’. The news that the US national debt has now topped 35 trillion dollars is not easy to digest. For starters, what is a trillion anyway? And what is the national debt? If it’s so big already, will another trillion or so make things any different? In a homely analogy, the US treasury department helpfully invites us to view the US national debt as “similar to a person using a credit card for purchases and not paying off the full balance each month. The cost of purchases exceeding the amount paid off represents a deficit, while accumulated deficits over time represents a person’s overall debt.” ( Is the Federal Reserve printing money in order to buy Treasury securities? , Federal Reserve FAQs, 25 August 2016) This folksy way of explaining the crazy reality of the USA’s national debt, firmly locating the phenomenon of indebtedness on the familiar domestic ground of shopping lists, maxed out credit cards and wobbly household budgets, has the advantage for capitalism of seeming to tame what are in fact the uncontrollable forces of the market, normalising what in any sane view would be recognised as dangerous nonsense. You just can’t keep borrowing money year after year without paying any of it back. Bankruptcy and meltdown loom large The individual consequences of accumulating too much personal debt on the domestic scale can be horrendous enough, but the consequences for a country of the national debt/GDP ratio getting so far out of hand, exposing the impossibility of generating sufficient growth to pay off the creditors, is something else again. This is the fate that the USA faced when its debt to GDP ratio surpassed 100 percent in 2013, at which time both its debt and its GDP were approximately $16.7tn. More recent figures suggest that the debt/GDP ratio has further outstripped the country’s ability to pay down its debt. The Congressional Budget Office recently reported : “The deficit for 2024 is $400bn (or 27 percent) larger than it was in the agency’s February 2024 projections, and the cumulative deficit over the 2025–34 period is larger by $2.1tn (10 percent).” How is it possible for otherwise sensible people to be persuaded that it is sustainable for the most wealthy country on earth to keep adding a new annual budgetary deficit onto the previously incurred national debt, with no realistic prospect of ever paying any of it off? To the capitalist mentality the notion of the US economy going into full meltdown is literally unthinkable, conditioned as it is by the ideological constraints of the bourgeois class perspective. Even the stunts pulled by congressmen, refusing to vote through further accumulations to the national debt unless the government makes political concessions, are mostly staged affairs, concluded by some shabby backdoor deal which always ends up incurring further unrepayable debts. But these shadow boxing clowns do not really have a clue about the true dimensions of the disaster they are courting as US imperialism sleepwalks its way through the minefield of unserviceable (let alone unrepayable) debt. Creditors looking increasingly nervous Sensitive to charges that it is stoking inflation by printing money, the federal reserve shifts its ground, claiming that “although Federal Reserve purchases of Treasury securities do not involve printing money, the increase in the Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities is matched by a corresponding increase in reserve balances held by the banking system. The banking system must hold the quantity of reserve balances that the Federal Reserve creates.” But whether the increase in the money supply and corresponding cheapening of the debt is effected simply by the fraudulent production of dollar bills or by some more subtle fiscal smoke-and-mirrors exercise, the end result can only be runaway inflation. Since involvement in WWI left the USA with a national debt of about $22bn, its expansion has been continuous, with no apparent reverse gear. Wars have been accelerants (notably in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria) as have economic crises (in 2008 and 2020, in the latter case partially masked by the Covid health emergency). From 2019 to 2021, spending increased by about 50 percent. None of this would necessarily be so bad if the USA could demonstrate a healthy enough growth rate (debt to GDP ratio) to persuade creditors to keep on buying government securities and the like. But increasingly, potential creditors are becoming wary of propping up the flagging economy of a country that starts wars it cannot end, and which threatens even ‘friendly’ countries with economic sanctions. One which tears up the United Nations charter and imposes in its place a ‘rules-based order’ answerable to the US alone, and which conducts a policy of coups, coercion, assassination and blackmail against whomsoever it chooses. The USA should not be surprised to see a flight from the dollar as countries opt to expand and deepen commercial and political relations elsewhere. As US geopolitical analyst Brandon J Weichert wrote recently in the National Interest magazine: “With a $1.5tn deficit this year (just this year!), $35tn in overall debt, and $1tn in interest payments this year (for one year alone!!), if the US dollar is no longer the primary global reserve currency and there is suddenly a true rival to the US currency, then the entire American financial system comes crashing down.” ( America’s greatest enemy isn’t China or Russia: it’s $35tn in debt , 4 June 2024) And with the US financial system would come the whole imperialist-centred world capitalist economy. No wonder Senator Lindsay Graham is keen to underline the importance of getting hold of the Donbass’s considerable resources (which he described as “a $12tn goldmine”!) via Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. US imperialist strategists are clearly banking on this prospective Ukrainian payday, and considering it as a mere down payment on the bonanza they hope to enjoy when their dream of Russian regime change finally turns into reality. All (!) they have to do is to instal a pliant comprador government in place of the anti-imperialist administration of President Vladimir Putin, break the resistance of the Russian people, break the country into pieces and let the orgy begin. What happens if (when!) these dreamers are finally forced to wake up to the harsh reality of Nato ’s defeat and Russia’s victory , no one in the imperialist camp seems prepared to consider. Previous Next 2022-2024 The Revolution Report