“We are paying a monthly fee to Republican party lobbyists. In December, they were saying on CNN that they had already invaded Panama and could do it again. The Panamanian state is funding its own invasion.” Panamanian student organizer Ahmed X with student group Juventudes Revolucionarias, said in an interview after protests escalated on February 1st.
Ahmed, like many Panamanians, are increasingly concerned about Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino’s ability to defend the country’s sovereignty against U.S. interests.
Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency U.S. colonial ambitions in Panama have escalated dramatically, the republican party lobby in question is the BGR Group , a lobbying and communications firm that president Mulino hired to assist Panama with navigating current U.S. relations.
On April 2, Reuters headlined “US officials object to European push to buy weapons locally,” which means that Trump’s demand for Europe to increase greatly its ‘defense’ spending is, indeed, part of his plan to keep the boom in the U.S. stock markets going. This needs to be understood in the relevant context:
Right now, Trump is promising to stop America’s apparently ceaseless creation of, and participation (such as in Ukraine) in, foreign wars, but he isn’t reducing — and is instead actually increasing — America’s ‘defense’ (aggression) expenditures while cutting virtually everything else (the federal expenditures that don’t help billionaires); and, in order to do this beyond the 2027 end-date of his $400 billion weapons-sale to the Sauds, he is trying to get America’s colonies (‘allies’), such as Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc., to increase their armaments-purchases from American firms such as Lockheed Martin — the firms whose sales-volumes are especially important to America’s billionaires, the people who control the U.S. Government. This is why he doesn’t want Europeans to grow their own ‘defense’ industries.
If a European nation will allow foreign (especially American) billionaires to benefit from its sharp increase in armaments-purchases, this won’t hurt ONLY their own domestic billionaires, but it will ALSO be sending those manufacturing jobs to America and thereby boost America’s economy at the expense of the local economy. For Trump to be requesting them to do that is to insult not only that country’s billionaires but also its residents.
This is not the only reason why NATO might soon break apart. For example: Trump is determined to take Greenland for the U.S. Government — to expand the U.S. to include Greenland. However, polls show that around 85% of Greenlanders are opposed to that, and Trump is also saying that if they won’t willingly comply, then he will do it militarily. Greenland is a Danish colony, and Denmark is a part of NATO. If the U.S. invades Greenland, then how will other countries in NATO feel about that? It would present the U.S. blatantly as aggressor against a NATO member-nation — the very nation that had previously been supposedly their chief protector. What would this do to NATO?
The U.S. Congress is, according to the U.S. Constitution, supposed to be the ultimate determinant of whether or not U.S. military forces invade another country; but, so far, there has been prevailing silence from Congress about Trump’s threat against Greenlanders and even Danes — not the outrage that would prevail if America were still governed under its Constitution.
We are entering the twilight zone. Will it turn out to be the end of the U.S. empire — the end of the largest empire in all of world history? It could — especially if Congress remains silent about what has been happening. The longer this silence continues, the deeper into it we are getting.
This is certainly a weird moment in world history. Of course, ultimately, NATO will end, but the question is when and how. NATO had started on 25 July 1945 as a sentiment and resulting decision by Truman, and was then born in 1949, but is probably near its end now, and the public don’t know it because lots of ‘history’ that has been told in The West is false.
There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually nothing on the importance of such leaks of national security information and the importance they serve in informing the public about what those in power are really up to.
Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise a host of concerns (legitimate targeting and the laws of war come to mind), there was a chill of terror coursing through the commentariat and Congress that military secrets and strategy had been compromised. Goldberg himself initially disbelieved it. “I didn’t think it could be real.” He also professed that some messages would not be made public given the risks they posed, conceding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s communications to the group “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
This seemingly principled stance ignores the bread-and-butter importance of investigative reporting and activist publishing, which so often relies on classified material received via accident or design. Normally, the one receiving the message is condemned. In this case, Golberg objected to being the recipient, claiming moral high ground in reporting the security lapse. Certain messages of the “Houthi PC small group channel” were only published by The Atlantic to throw cold water on stubborn claims by the White House that classified details had not been shared.
The supposed diligence on Goldberg’s part to fuss about the cavalier attitude to national security shown by the Trump administration reveals the feeble compromise the Fourth Estate has reached with the national security state. Could it be that WikiLeaks was, like the ghost of Banquo, at this Signal’s feast? Last year’s conviction of the organisation’s founding publisher, Julian Assange, on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC), might have exerted some force over Goldberg’s considerations. Having been added to the communication chain in error, the defence material could well have imperilled him, with First Amendment considerations on that subject untested.
As for what the messages revealed, along with the importance of their disclosure, things become clear. Waltz reveals that the killing of a Houthi official necessitated the destruction of a civilian building. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies: “Excellent.”
As Turse reminds us in The Intercept, this conforms to the practices all too frequently used when bombing the Houthis in Yemen. The United States offered extensive support to the Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Shia group, one that precipitated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises. That particular aerial campaign rarely heeded specific targeting, laying waste to vital infrastructure and health facilities. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, also noted in remarks to The Intercept that fifty-three people have perished in the latest US airstrikes, among them five children. “These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of US killing in Yemen, and the research shows that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”
The appearance of Hillary Clinton in the debate on Signalgate confirmed the importance of such leaks, and why they are treated with pathological loathing. “We’re all shocked – shocked!” she screeched in The New York Times. “What’s worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.” As a person with a hatred of open publishing outlets such as WikiLeaks (her own careless side to security was exposed by the organisation’s publication of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State), the mania is almost understandable.
Other countries, notably members of the Five Eyes alliance system, are also voicing concern that their valuable secrets are at risk if shared with the Trump administration. Again, the focus there is less on the accountability of officials than the cast iron virtues of secrecy. “When mistakes happen, and sensitive intelligence leaks, lessons must be learned to prevent that from recurring,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated gravely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It’s a serious, serious issue, and all lessons must be taken.”
Former chief of Canada’s intelligence agency, Richard Fadden, was even more explicit: “Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?”
Signalgate jolted the national security state. Rather than being treated as a valuable revelation about the latest US bombing strategy in Yemen, the obsession has been on keeping a lid on such matters. For the sake of accountability and the public interest, let us hope that the lid on this administration’s activities remains insecure.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) has published its annual report for UK arms exports in 2023. It summaries key quantitative and qualitative trends in UK arms exports in 2023, and in the five–10 year periods up to 2023, using a variety of sources of information. It is the only place where all this information is collated and discussed as a whole.
UK arms exports: making a killing
The report reveals that the US was the largest recipient of single licenses, totalling £984m (19.8% of the total). While these exports took place during Biden’s presidency, given the current actions and trajectory of the Donald Trump-led administration, there are serious human rights concerns regarding continuing this level of exports. The US, meanwhile, is not only deeply complicit, but outright encouraging the escalation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Meanwhile, in 2023, there was a massive jump in arms exports to Europe. Overall, the value of UK companies’ arms export contracts to Europe more than quadrupled between 2013–17 and 2019–23, reaching £16.15 billion in the latter period. This reflects a trend towards European rearmament that has been going on for many years, but which greatly accelerated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Then, despite not being as high as in previous years, sales to human rights abusing regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar remain high. In 2023, the UK issued single licenses worth £515m (10.4% of the total) to Saudi Arabia, and £351m (7.1% of the total) to Qatar.
While the trend towards European militarisation is likely to continue, the lull in sales to the Middle East may be temporary with new deals for Eurofighters to Qatar and Turkey looking increasingly likely.
Open licences are deadly
Overall, the lack of transparency in the arms trade makes it difficult to calculate the true value of UK arms exports. This is due to the lack of reporting required on open licenses. Under an open license, a company can export unlimited amounts of specified military equipment without further reporting requirements. CAAT estimates that, on average, roughly half of UK arms exports are conducted using open licenses.
Report author Dr. Sam Perlo-Freeman said:
The increasing militarisation of Europe reflected in this report is deeply concerning, and likely to continue. There is an urgent need to reevaluate how we think about security, so that instead of pumping money into arms companies, we start tackling the biggest security threat to humanity – the climate crisis.
Meanwhile, the Labour government is increasing military spending while announcing yet more benefit cuts and taking money from sick and disabled people. Moreover, while increasing domestic arms spending, governments are also promoting arms exports more strongly than ever, with devastating impacts around the world. We should be promoting welfare, not warfare, instead of creating a spiralling arms race that entrenches hostility and increases the chances of war.
This report shows the UK’s arms system is unethical and unaccountable and in desperate need of radical reform. Arms sales to human rights abusing regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar must stop, and it’s more than time that we started putting civilian lives and peaceful solutions before arms trade profits.
As support for the campaign against the 27-dish US DARC radar array at Pembrokeshire continues to grow in momentum, PARC Against DARC says “all eyes are on Henry Tufnell MP” to declare a position on DARC once and for all. This comes as Liz Saville Roberts MP, Plaid Cymru’s defence spokesperson, tables an Early Day Motion (EDM) in UK Parliament calling for DARC radar plans to be scrapped entirely.
The EDM, titled 975 DARC in Wales, was tabled on 19/03/25, and reads:
That this House notes with deep concern the proposed US-UK-Australian military radar project, DARC (Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability), which would install 27 21m-high, 15m-wide parabolic radar dishes within sight of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park; believes this would severely harm the visual landscape, local tourism, and the internationally recognised natural ecology of the area; further notes the concerns regarding potential health risks posed by radiofrequency signals, as indicated by scientific studies, on residential populations located less than a kilometre from the site; highlights that DARC, as part of the AUKUS Treaty, is in violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty’s prohibition on the national appropriation of space and undermines international law; warns that the deployment of anti-satellite weaponry, for which DARC is a crucial targeting device, threatens to destabilise the civilian satellite network by generating hazardous space debris of a volatile and unpredictable nature which increases the probability of damage to essential infrastructure; urges the Government to recognise that DARC lacks strategic military necessity compared to other priorities; and calls on the government to permanently withdraw its planning application for the Pembrokeshire site and any alternative UK location.
Cross-party support against the DARC radar system
Within its first day the EDM had achieved cross-party support including signatures from the Lib Dems defence spokesperson Helen Maguire MP, Green Party MP Siân Berry, as well as the now Independent Alliance MP and former Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Liz Saville Roberts MP worked closely along with her Parliamentary team as well as PARC campaigners in Pembrokeshire to draft the EDM. She said:
At a time when the United States is becoming a less reliable defence partner, we must question whether we truly want to further entangle Wales in US foreign policy through DARC and the AUKUS Treaty. The Ministry of Defence must also address local residents’ concerns regarding high levels of radiofrequency signals. That is why I have tabled this motion in Parliament.
The EDM comes following a similar ‘Statement of Opinion’ which was tabled by Cefin Campbell MS in the Senedd, also opposing DARC. It has gained cross-party support, having been signed by close to a third of MSs including several Welsh Labour, Plaid Cymru and Welsh Lib Dem Senedd Members.
Silence amid security concerns
Campaigners assert that the proposed DARC radar would give Donald Trump and the US military the ability to dominate the space domain from Pembrokeshire as well as ruin the peninsula’s landscape and environment. PARC Against DARC said:
As DARC radar becomes an increasingly contentious issue within public mindset and yet currently has the backing of Starmer’s administration, surely our elected Labour and Conservative representatives locally cannot stay silent any longer.
With Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Greens fully in support of the campaign, Welsh Labour beginning to show some promising support and the Senedd election period looming, how can it be right that our local elected representatives in both Westminster and the Senedd remain utterly silent on this hugely important issue which is now of grave concern to thousands of people, locally, nationally and internationally?
Lack of accountability and an emerging ‘political vacuum’
The campaign, along with members of the public, have contacted Henry Tofnell MP on numerous occasions, and our experience echoes that of many others as we have received reports that he has completely ignored hundreds of emails requesting answers on DARC. The group said:
As the MP for Mid and South Pembrokeshire and therefore the MP responsible for the proposed site at Brawdy, he has a public duty to take a personal, thorough and detailed interest in this issue. Accordingly we invited Henry to table this EDM on our behalf, yet he did not even have the courtesy to respond to our email requesting this.
There appears to have developed some kind of ‘political vacuum’ in west Wales, where much needed answers should be forthcoming, yet both local politicians in Labour and UK cabinet politicians will for ‘whatever reason’ not break cover or speak out on extremely important issues such as this and other issues.
PARC campaigners say they intend to hand-deliver 650 20-page information booklets and personalised letters to all 650 MPs in a trip to Westminster in London, before continuing to call on politicians in both the Senedd and UK Parliament to sign the respective statements of opposition to DARC.
Public opposition to DARC will turn the tide on politicians
PARC Against DARC said:
As a campaign we have said all along that just as in the ‘90s when we in the PARC campaign fought off the very similar over-the-horizon radar project in the St Davids peninsula, our campaign is growing rapidly, and can and will continue to grow in strength until there is such strong opposition to the development that it will be impossible to build.
We firmly believe that it’s only a matter of time until that situation is reached once again, and therefore as we have said before, it would be in the best interests of our local representatives to get on the right side of public opinion before their hand is forced. There is a stark historical reminder at play here that in the 1990s the local Conservative MP actually lost his seat over the issue, and the then Conservative government in Westminster was forced to very publicly cancel the project in the face of overwhelming public opposition
It noted that:
Our campaign simply grows from strength to strength. We’ve held packed public meetings, we have had over 100 positive media articles, our petition has been signed by over 17,000 people and the statement of opinion in the Senedd is signed by nearly a third of MSs.
Now, also, with the Early Day Motion in Westminster, cross-party opposition to the proposal and volunteers around the county having hand-delivered leaflets reaching 40,000 people, the pressure’s clearly intensifying on politicians who feel it is okay to ignore the thousands of emails they are collectively receiving, and ignore residents’ requests for answers and accountability.
They need to start thinking about the fact this is a defining issue both for their parties, their future and their legacy, but most importantly of all for the landscape, economy and safety of Pembrokeshire, Wales and the UK that it’s in all our interests to protect.
In conclusion, PARC Against DARC said:
We strongly urge anyone who has concerns about DARC to visit our lobbying page on our campaign website, where they can email their MSs and MPs, and ask them to support the statements of opposition in both our UK and Wales Parliaments.
If Nye Bevan was turning in his grave during the Blair years, it won’t be very long before he goes full Lazarus and rises up from it to chase Keir Starmer through the streets of Whitehall. “No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for that red Tory, refugee-hating, DWP-cutting bastard, Starmer. So far as I am concerned, he is lower than a snail’s gonads”
Or something like that.
Starmer: another indefensible week
This past week has been another brutal, self-inflicted car crash for Keir Starmer’s pretend Labour Party government.
A £2.2 billion increase in defence spending — partially funded by cuts to international aid — is an abhorrent move by an abhorrent chancellor.
Pretending to be an economist is one thing, but pretending an entire nation will benefit from an arms proliferation is just plain dishonest.
“As defence spending rises, I want the whole country to feel its benefits”, said Rachel Reeves.
What does she *really* mean by “benefit”? Perhaps we will see armed quadcopters and drones chasing disabled people around the streets to see if they’re fit for work? (More on the DWP later).
They could live-stream it on the government’s social media feeds, and GBeebies News.
‘Can’t Work, Won’t Work, Get Shot’, presented by Jeremy Clarkson and Priti Patel, sponsored by Elbit Systems.
Let’s spell this out in simple terms, free of media hyperbole, client journalism, and long fluffy words that mean less than fuck all to most of us.
International aid is, in part, used to provide humanitarian relief for the victims of war and genocide. The vile monstrosity, Reeves, is slashing this money to create further victims of war and genocide.
Will somebody please make this make some sort of fucking sense? Reeves is supposed to be a Labour chancellor, not Gideon Osborne in a fucking expensive frock.
I cannot contain my disgust with this corrupted, bought-and-paid-for, arms lobbyists wet dream of a government
How can any sensible individual take a glance at the scenes of utter devastation in Gaza and not be angered and horrified? Not Reeves. She wants in on the action
Why do they call it the “defence” budget anyway? The only dangerous, malignant force attacking Britain is the Labour Party. We need defending from these murderous maniacs, first and foremost.
Reeves: out of her depth, and out of her mind
Chancellor Reeves would be out of her depth in a birdbath containing a drop of pigeon phlegm, and if you need solid proof of that you need look no further than her claim that Labour’s proposed cuts would slash £5 billion from the welfare budget.
All it needed was someone that was able to use a calculator and this £5 billion suddenly became £3.4 billion, cementing Rachel Reeves’ place in history as the first Labour chancellor that couldn’t even kill off disabled people without screwing it up.
This was the perfect opportunity for Reeves to step forward and say…
“Comrades, I apologise, I have got this so very wrong. Disabled people do not deserve to bear the brunt of my growth-halving plans. Instead, we will be the Labour government that introduces the Musk and Zuckerberg Tax, ensuring those with the broadest shoulders carry the heaviest burden. Yes, I am the red Liz Truss, I am a nuclear-grade numpty, and I resign”.
Back in the real world, the most evil government of my lifetime soon found another way of stamping on the faces of chronically ill and disabled people.
One anonymous Labour MP said, “this assault on disabled people and those in need of support is nothing short of sadistically cruel”.
Another, Kim Johnson, described the benefits barbarity as “Austerity 2.0”.
This is their own fucking government they’re talking about.
The stench still isn’t enough for the Labour Party brownnosers
Kim Johnson might score a few brownie points with her constituents in Liverpool, but if she wants to be taken seriously she should resign from the Labour Party in horror and disgust.
Is the lure of the money and the access to power really worth anything more than a permanently stained conscience and the blood of the disabled people of Britain, dripping from your grasping hands, Ms Johnson?
Perhaps she can provoke the ridiculously named “Socialist Campaign Group” into listing a few names on a sheet of crisp A4 sheet of paper? That’s bound to bring Starmer’s pathetic excuse of a Labour government to its crooked knees, right?
There are no socialists in the Labour Party. No true socialist could possibly sit in a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting, nodding along to discussions of state-administered death and denying pensioners of warmth.
No true socialist can be a part of a government that attempts to profit from the currency of fear and hate so freely as this hideous bunch of ghouls.
Whatever happened to political integrity? Did compassion and decency pack its own bags, back in 2019?
Reeves claimed she is “proud” of what Labour has achieved in nine months. She should be ashamed, embarrassed and forced out of office. There is no pride to be found in wilfully killing off sick and disabled people, unless you really are an emotionless psychopath.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation had a look at Reeves’ master class in democide and concluded that the average family will now be £750 a year worse off by 2029.
Starmer: business as usual
Proud, you say?
Labour doesn’t have to follow this reckless and cruel policy, austerity isn’t a necessity. A simple 2% levy on assets over £10 million — which would be paid by some 20,000 multi-millionaires — would raise up to £24 billion, every single year.
If this 2% tax was in place now, UK billionaires would still have seen their personal wealth soar by an average of £141 million each — a total of nearly £7.5 billion combined — since this time last year.
Tell me, Labour voters, how many of you actually voted to plunge 250,000 extremely impoverished and vulnerable people — including 50,000 children — into relative poverty? Or rather, official figures suggest the number is closer to 400,000.
As Ecuador heads into a very important run-off election on April 13, the issues of security, state violence and the economy remain at the forefront for many Ecuadorians. Dollarization, submission to U.S. dictates, the proliferation of arms shipments through privately owned ports, and the expansion of international drug cartels to justify military presence have all combined to make the living conditions of the poorest unbearable, especially for African and indigenous communities with a constant war directed at them from the militarized structures of the state, like the case of the Guayaquil Four.
In her Spring Statement, chancellor Rachel Reeves offered billions to help arms industry profiteers with one hand, while taking billions away from chronically ill and disabled people with the other. And she promised to put the business of death and destruction “at the heart of our modern industrial strategy”.
Rachel Reeves: we will feel the ‘benefits of defence spending’, apparently
Labour Party chancellor Reeves argued that, “as defence spending rises, I want the whole country to feel its benefits”. But there are strong reasons to believe that’s just smoke and mirrors.
Arms companies are already raking it in thanks largely to the proxy war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, profiting from people’s pain as politicians play games with their lives. And Reeves has now confirmed prime minister Keir Starmer’s previous dystopian promise to “increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP” by “reducing overseas aid to 0.3% of gross national income” and thus oversee the:
biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War
This is perhaps an attempt to please the US as the superpower seeks to push other members of its NATO alliance to significantly increase their defence pledges. Or it could be Labour’s payment for receiving“£4m from [a] tax haven-based hedge fund with shares in oil and arms” that “stood to profit” from the Gaza genocide.
War gives arms companies the opportunity to increase profits, with the help of a crony government
Reeves kept talking about instability in the world, probably referring to the US-backed bloodshed of Ukraine and Gaza, and claimed:
A changing world presents challenges, but it also presents new opportunities, for new jobs and new contracts in our world-class defence industrial centres.
She added that this would mean “putting an extra £6.4bn into defence spending by 2027” and giving “an additional £2.2bn for the Ministry of Defence in the next financial year”. Then she outlined steps she would take to:
boost Britain’s defence industry and to make the UK a defence industrial superpower
You may want to contrast Reeves centring an arms trade industrial strategy with Labour’s previous promise under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to make a Green Industrial Revolution a “top priority“.
Part of becoming “a defence industrial superpower”, Reeves said, will entail spending on “drones and AI-enabled technology” (like the ones that haveterrorised Palestinians in Gaza).
And she topped her grim promises off by revealing that the government:
will provide £2bn of increased capacity for UK export finance, to provide loans for overseas buyers of UK defence goods and services.
Profiteers of death smile
UK governments have long engaged in corporate welfare, with billions of pounds of taxpayer money transforming into profits for arms shareholders. Britain’s biggest arms dealer BAE Systems, for example, gave shareholders £7.4bn in around nine years under the Tories while getting 21% of its international revenue from contracts with the Ministry of Defence.
BAE stocks, as with other big arms firms, have been soaring ever since the proxy war in Ukraine began in 2022 and Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in 2023. But Starmer’s government helped to push these stocks to a new high at the end of February 2025 with his promises to boost ‘defence’ spending. That was the case for BAE and fellow UK operatorsLeonardo and Raytheon.
Arms lobbyists have long been discussing the potential of Britain’s arms industry, but US president Donald Trump’s recent approach to Europe has helped to create a rush to enhance military spending.
Rachel Reeves: neither the only way, nor the best
A few places in Britain do indeed depend on the arms industry. But as Common Wealth researcher Khem Rogaly has insisted:
Policy choices have left communities dependent on military contracts because of divestment from public services and civilian industry.
Nonetheless:
the connection between military spending and job creation has weakened over time. Despite falling as a share of GDP, Britain’s military budget has grown in real terms since the early 1980s – the height of the cold war – yet at the same time more than half of jobs in the military industry have been lost. The military sector is increasingly a hi-tech employer that relies less on manufacturing and more on IT and engineering jobs in the south of England.
There is another way, though, because:
Modelling in the US and continental Europe suggests that investment in public services, environmental protections or renewable energy creates more jobs and more economic output than military contracts.
Instead of going down the path of increasing military spending, then, mass investment in public services and the planet would be a much better focus to have. But the corporate cronies in this government seem much more interested in pleasing their wealthy donors than actually investing in a positive, hopeful future.
The Left and Right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe.
Sometimes it helps to pare things back to their essentials, especially when complexity is being exploited not to illuminate but to confuse. So here is my short, complete idiot’s guide to world affairs:
There are two reality-based understandings of what we call “world affairs”, or sometimes “foreign news”.
1. The first sees the United States as the beating heart of a highly militarised, global empire – the strongest ever known, with more than 800 military bases around the world. The US has divided the world into, on the one hand, “democracies” and “moderate states” that do its bidding and, on the other, “dictatorships” and “terror regimes” that won’t or can’t submit to its dictates.
The former are allies that reap some of the benefits of belonging to the empire, while the latter are presented as a threat to world peace. They must be constantly intimidated, contained, sanctioned and occasionally attacked.
The goal of organising the world this way is the control of global resources, chiefly oil. Western publics thereby enjoy limited privileges that come at the cost of deprivation for those outside the empire. These privileges are intended to keep the US empire’s publics docile and loyal. At the same time, the empire allows members of its elite to amass vast wealth from the exploitation of the world’s resources – wealth so vast that most people are incapable of grasping the extent of it.
This worldview is generally consistent with what is termed a left-wing disposition. It sees the existing system as a bad thing that needs to be ended.
2. The second worldview agrees with all of the above, except it thinks this is a the best system possible in the circumstances and must be preserved at all costs. This outlook is generally consistent with what is termed a right-wing, or conservative, disposition.
In other words, these two groups see things in largely the same way but respond to the same reality differently.
The second group, the conservatives, want to keep the world divided, justifying this to themselves on various grounds they usually refer to as “pragmatism”. In essence, they believe it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and it’s important that we remain the top dog. At some level this outlook rests on a barely concealed racist conceit, often that white or Christian peoples are civilisationally better than other peoples and that, were the world to be organised differently, chaos and barbarism would ensue.
The first group, the Left, want to end the division of the world into two camps, “them” and “us”, arguing that this is dangerous. This empire’s logic justifies pumping money that could be spent improving the quality of ordinary people’s lives, and securing the future of the planet, into the arms industries. It reinforces the logic of the West’s war machine that relies on fomenting a permanent climate of fear. In such a febrile political climate, people are easily manipulated into backing wars or the oppression of other, usually brown peoples. The empire’s division of the world rationalises racism, selfishness and violence, and prevents cooperation. It is inherently unsustainable. And in an age of nuclear weapons, it risks driving us into a confrontation that will quickly end life on the planet.
Of course, not everyone’s outlook fits into these two categories that see the world as it is. There are also liberals who don’t understand much of this. They live in a world of make-believe, an unreality manufactured for them, both by western politicians dependent on a billionaire donor class and a western media owned by billionaires deeply invested in maintaining a divided world that keeps them fabulously rich.
What we call “politics” is chiefly a pantomime in which the West’s wealth elite work hard to maintain the illusion for liberals that the empire is a force for good, that the suffering of brown people is a necessary short-term sacrifice if history is to continue on its progression towards a perfect capitalist liberal democracy that will benefit everyone, and that in this regard the West’s wars producing even more suffering for brown people are actually “humanitarian”.
In simple terms, conservatives support the permanent oppression of brown people because they fear them, rightly understanding they will never agree to their oppression. Liberals, on the other hand, support what they assume is the temporary oppression of brown people because they think that oppression is beneficial: it eventually purges brown people of their defective ideological and cultural habits, leading them to see things our way.
If it feels like too many of your friends and neighbours are indifferent to a genocide that has been live-streamed for a year a half, that is probably because, at heart, they are – whether they identify as conservatives or liberals.
US Elites want South Korea to be a “dictatorship for democracy”
Morse Tan, a high ranking former US State Dept. official, recently let the cat out of the bag on the US ruling elite position on South Korea’s Martial Law. He declared that “Yoon declared Martial Law to preserve South Korea’s Democracy.” Having previously labeled South Korea a model democracy, this is a No-Scotsman-move taken to absurdity.
Now, Tan is not a current US government official, buthe is an indicator of what the US national security state is thinking, in particular, what its neocon wing is thinking. Tan also recently claimed that “the impeachment against Yoon is an insurrection” led by opposition party leader Lee Jae Myung “who wants to turn the country over to the Chinese communists”.
As absurd and conspiratorial as these allegations sound, these are actually finely-tuned and well-honed Washington-CPAC talking points about Chinese threats and interference in Korea, and they are echoed endlessly, if histrionically by US flag-waving foot soldiers at South Korean protests and on Youtube. These anti-China messages were also repeated in German State TV ARD’s documentary“Staatskrise im Schatten von China und Nordkorea” (State Crisis in the Shadow of China and North Korea), released to its German public television website on Feb 25th. The documentary claimed that China had hacked South Korea’s legislative election to put the opposition DP party into power, who are now taking their orders from North Korea and China to impeach YoonThere is clearly a highly convergent and disciplined campaign of anti-China propaganda around the impeachment. ARD has removed its documentary, but the damage has clearly been done.
It’s impossible not to highlight the absurdity of Tan’s statement–“Yoon declared martial law (i.e. military dictatorship) to preserve democracy”. And as a foreign national, Tan is breaking South Korean law by directly participating in domestic Korean politics. But the free reign he is given, and the lack of disavowal or reprimand from the State Department–if only for his own safety–is very revealing.
Tan’s position in the state department was Ambassador at Large. These are powerful, Viceroy-type postings: they represent US policy and US interests on a (grand) strategic level. Consider other Ambassadors-at-Large: Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Paul Nitze, Paul Bremer III, StrobeTalbott, Robert Gallucci. These are not individuals given to improvising and airing idiosyncratic personal opinions. As a former state Viceroy, with the enduring prestige and power of state connections, the platforms that Tan has been given to expound his views signal that he is expressing the direction of official doctrine, reflected both in Tan’s public statements, state media talking points, and the coordinated erasure of counterviewpoints.
Strategic Unambiguity: What the US wants
US policy on South Korea’s dictatorship/martial law is analogous to its policy on Taiwan: Strategic “ambiguity” in language, concrete support and escalation in actions. The “ambiguity” serves to pretextually mask war preparations against China. Of course, there is nothing ambiguous about the strategy, other than the desire for a fig leaf of plausible deniability.
What the US wants from Korea is that which is strategically most advantageous for the US: a right wing Korean client regime to do the bidding of the US: escalate and prepare for war with China. This is a war that it has been envisioning since the early 2000’s and which was institutionalized by Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”. In fact, the reason Yoon was selected, elected, and lionized as South Korea’s president is because he was a walking neocon fulfillment list for this war.
As these war preparations accelerate and intensify, a South Korean military dictatorship with the US in control of the South Korean military is the easiest and most advantageous configuration to enact these plans. The US will settle for a client-plutocratic democratic state, but dictatorship has actually been the historical norm since South Korea was created by the US. Given the tight timelines involved, it is also possible for this configuration to be instituted again: this project of war is urgent and time-bound–US natsec heavyweights have calendared 2025 and 2027 (“the Minihan” & “Davidson windows”) as the propitious date range to trigger war with China.
Easy-peasy political proxy
South Korea offers two key strategic advantages. First, geographically and historically, Korea has always been the on ramp and bridgehead for invasion into China. War with China has always started from the Korean peninsula or Taiwan island, usually as interlinked pairs. Second, South Korea has the world’s 3rd largest standing army–including reservists, 3.6 Million troops–,larger than the militaries of China and Russia combined. The US gets operational control over these troops immediately if there is war. War with China is thus most compatible and convenient with a South Korean dictatorship.
There is very strong circumstantial evidence that the US knew beforehand about Yoon’s Martial Law declaration, due to the length and intricacy of the preparation and the aggressive military nature of the operation-which would have required coordination and communication with US forces in Korea. At the very least, they would have been aware. And regardless, they would have benefitted, geostrategically.
Sworn testimony shows that Yoon’s gambit was to trigger war with North Korea (through drone attacks, missile attacks, shelling, false flag assassinations of opposition) to justify declaring Martial Law. Only poor execution, North Korean forbearance, and rapid citizen mobilization prevented the seamless rollout of this military coup. Evidence has come out that Yoon was preparing repeated coups. Historically, all military coups on the southern peninsula have been greenlighted by the US.
On that point, Morse Tan is the Nancy Pelosi of Korea: he functions like a Track II US envoy–cheerleading for a right-wing South Korean military coup, with just the slightest hint of plausible deniability.
Note the dead radio silence out of Washington throughout this whole process: silence during the Martial Law declaration, silence after the rejection of Martial Law, silence after the impeachment, and silence throughout. Not a word of critique or condemnation. Note also the deafening hush of the mainstream corporate media.
Meanwhile, the fissures in SK society are approaching civil war.
Institutional Civil War, Governmental chaos
There is already intergovernmental war: on March 22 the CIO (Corruption Investigation Office, similar to the US Inspector General) raided the Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the Attorney General) for corruption, just days after the Prosecutor’s Office raided the CIO for evidence of warrant shopping on Yoon’s impeachment. This would be like the Inspector General raiding the Attorney General after the Attorney General raided the Inspector General.
Yoon has been released from custody on a technicality (“counting hours, not days”) despite being indicted for insurrection. His co-conspirators are still incarcerated, but the ringleader is free, highlighting the absurdity of the ruling. The prosecutor’s office, ostensibly committed to prosecuting Yoon, did not even bother to file an appeal. The prosecutor’s office is considered to be Yoon’s private army–Yoon was the former prosecutor general of Korea, and he promised to create a “Republic of Prosecutors”. That much he has been successful on.
The Return of the Zombie
Han Duck Soo, the impeached South Korean Prime minister (and former acting president) has just had his impeachment reversed yesterday, and is now acting president again.
The constitutional court found that Han had violated the constitution (by refusing to appoint already approved justices to the Constitutional Court to rule on the impeachment issue) but they reinstated him anyway. Never mind the irony that the court could have lacked standing to try his case if he had been successful in disabling the court. Han had also been tasked with appointing an independent counsel to investigate Yoon (to avoid the conflicts of interest that have appeared with the prosecutor’s office), but he had declined, leading to the current debacle of suspect loyalties and suspicious/delayed/tampered/sabotaged legal processes. One Constitutional Court justice claimed that the current political chaos was directly related to Han’s malfeasance and non-cooperation in these matters and found for impeachment–but she was a tiny minority of one in the ruling.
The Constitutional Court’s ruling on Han Duck Soo was already problematic in that it was out of sequence. The fact that they ruled first before Yoon’s case, and ruled against impeachment is an ominous signal. Two other high officials, Kim Seong-hun, and Lee Kwang-woo (of the presidential security service), indicted for impeding Yoon’s arrest, have recently also had their arrest warrants rejected. These are powerful figures who are now at large, with huge axes to grind. The trends are not in favor of impartial justice or peaceful resolution.
Washington’s Dirty Hand
The delayed impeachment ruling of Yoon itself is widely thought to be due to Washington’s pressure: it has been one month since the testimony was completed, but still there has been no ruling. This is abnormally long for what is an open-and-shut case: there is no doubt that Yoon declared Martial Law (he is on television declaring it!), and there is no doubt that he used extra-constitutional means–military force–to implement it and to try to prevent its rescission. But it’s widely considered that the ruling is delayed so that Lee Jae Myung’s appeal ruling (due on 3/26) will be decided before the Constitutional court’s ruling on Yoon is made public.
This is because Lee Jae Myung, the opposition DP party chair, would be the leading candidate for president if the impeachment of Yoon triggers a snap election (in 60 days). He is currently 20+ points ahead of any other potential candidate by polling. The presidency would be his to take under normal circumstances.
However, if Lee’s guilt is sustained by the appellate court, he would be stripped of all political rights for a decade, and the opposition DP would lose its strongest candidate. Washington does not want Lee Jae Myung as president, because it’s understood that he would balance with China against the US, and de-escalate the coming war on China. Hence the delay. Opposition party representative Park Sun-won has verified that the US is exerting pressure through diplomatic channels to align the impeachment date as close to Lee Jae Myung’s sentencing as possible.
On the Brink of Explosion
South Korea is now a tinderbox on the brink.
One million protestors hit the streets over the weekend, demanding the Constitutional court deliver its verdict immediately. Some of these protestors had been previously protesting in the snow for weeks, demanding justice. From the right, there has been open aggression by right wing counter-impeachment protesters, paid up or pumped up with “anti-communist” fervor by religious leaders and the ruling party, repeating ARD and CPAC tropes on “Chinese communist intervention”. These shock troops have destroyed and rampaged through Seoul’s Western District Courthouse, assaulted opposition party politicians, as well as attacked Chinese tourists as “spies”. The right have openly spoken of reconstituting the North West Youth league–the genocidal red-baiting death squads of the Korean war.
And so, it seems the American flag-waving beatings will continue until the anti-communist morale improves in the country. Regardless of the rulings to come, South Korea’s destiny is precarious: more potential turbulence, more violence, even potential civil war. Certainly more twists and turns. If the constitutional court acquits Yoon, there will be mass popular protests in the millions: Yoon will be incapable of ruling and is likely to declare Martial Law again, if only to save his bacon (he is facing insurrection charges). Recent news has revealed that Yoon had plans to declare Martial Law multiple times.
On the other hand, if the constitutional court successfully impeaches Yoon, the ruling party and its followers will pull out all the stops: street violence and a Maidan-type insurrection by the right wing cannot be ruled out. The quiet acquiescence of the right as was the case after the Park Geun Hye impeachment is unlikely, given the heated propaganda allegations and the polarized ideology.
So, South Korea is facing risky outcomes either way. The forces acting on this small country are immense. Whether Koreans get a clear diamond or spontaneous combustion from the immense pressure remains to be seen.
There is a tiny, narrow path that would relieve pressure and facilitate a more peaceful outcome. If the US removes its finger from the scale in South Korean affairs–and disavows the US-flag-waving right that it is stoking and supporting–a single word of reprimand would deflate the South Korean rightwing like a sharp pin to a blow up doll.
But that would take a geostrategic shift–a downshifting and downsizing dreams of US Hegemony, and a turn towards peace and win-win.
Is the US capable of this? Or will it continue its dangerous ways? The fate of the peninsula–and possibly the planet–lies in the balance.
There is not a single war or serious military confrontation since WWII involving the U.S. that needed to be fought. Every conflict where soldiers and civilians suffered death or injury was — and is in the case of the ongoing fighting — unnecessary. These battles for territory, control, resources, subjugation, spite, are the direct result of greed, hubris, racist arrogance, ideological fanaticism, sometimes just pure ego. Predictably, we hear high sounding rhetoric in every instance about spreading democracy, safeguarding freedom, responsibility to protect, defending our national interests, rules-based international order, yakkety yak blah blah blah. It’s all just spin to manufacture acquiescence and consent, to get us sheeple to stand down and let the warmongers and empire builders, the MIC and the war industry, have their way.
Those in the peace movement know the specific details rendered with this next graphic well. People who are preoccupied with living life and overcoming its many obstacles might dismiss it as fake news. But very tragically, it’s entirely factual. The U.S. just can’t stop attacking others.
There are three fundamental reasons why the U.S. is a belligerent, bullying aggressor, or as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously summed it up, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”
Thus there are three reasons we are perpetually at war. These are …
Ideological Drivers of Endless War
There has never been a shortage in recorded history of master race ideologies. We find them even enshrined in religious texts. The U.S. has its share of such doctrinal canons, each couched in marvelous language and noble-sounding rhetoric, promoted by a host of noted individuals and organizations, e.g. Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Council on Foreign Relations, Project for the New American Century, all anointing the U.S. as the indispensable nation, the world’s rightful heir as the master overlord. There is no ambiguity or nuance here. America has formally declared itself as the supreme authority over the entire planet. The latest buzz phrase is “rules-based order”, which effectively means the U.S. will make the rules to establish the order in the world, everyone else will obey or face the consequences. Those consequences take the form of economic or military terrorism, buttressed by the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency and the awesome might of the largest military in the history of the world.
Social and Political ControlDrivers of Endless War
Defending the homeland and war command our attention. They focus our energy, steel our resolve, unify us, add purpose and drama to otherwise mundane day-to-day life. They play on our most basic instincts for survival and protection of what’s dear to us. But on the flip side, they also shut down critical faculties, create a visceral bond with the worst aspects of human nature, and open the door for tyrannical control and elimination of basic freedoms and rights. War unites us alright — in fear, suffering, misery, deprivation, shame, anger, suspicion, hate, paranoia, dehumanization and death.
EconomicDrivers of Endless War
There are huge fortunes to be made with war. Conquered nations can be plundered. At home, those who invest in war industries will see magnificent returns. The more war, the greater the profits. It’s no secret that military conflict is encouraged, in fact driven, by profiteers on Wall Street and from within the defense contractors themselves. There’s a rotating door between those who head up defense companies and those who sit at the seats of power shaping policy and making the decisions which countries will be demonized, intimidated and attacked. Our current economic/political model incentivizes an unruly, aggressive, confrontational foreign policy and generously rewards the creation of war zones and arenas of conflict.
It is often said that the U.S. cannot be without an enemy. This is only partially accurate. More to the point, it is the military-industrial complex that can’t be without an enemy. NATO’s massive bureaucracy and whole reason for existing cannot be without an enemy. What’s the point of the enormously bloated U.S. military, with its 800+ overseas bases, its vast fleets of battle ships and submarines, its vast array of military satellites and surveillance centers, its psyops and special ops and secret ops, its carving up the entire world into combatant command zones if there isn’t an enemy? Here’s how the U.S. sees the world.
Let’s bear in mind what all of this means by looking at the big picture.
The entire Imperial Project — world rule by the U.S. as a self-declared hegemon — is at its core and at every layer anti-democratic. It replaces self-determination in the countries we dominate with our authoritarian control — a polite phrase for totalitarian subjugation — making it ironic and odiously cynical that the U.S. claims to spread democracy in the world, when it regularly overthrows democratically-elected governments, then replaces them with despots which do our bidding.
Just as tragically, the decision to be an empire, the entire program of global domination, mocks the idea of democracy in America itself. It was conceived of and initiated by a tiny minority of power-drunk, monomaniacal, avaricious psychopaths, supported by a ruling elite which sees conquest and plunder as just another day at the office. Put simply and directly: We as citizens never voted for any of this. And if we understood the true nature and agenda of the Imperial Project, we would without hesitation or equivocation entirely reject it and the misery and impoverishment it ultimately entails, both domestically and overseas.
Right here at home, the Imperial Project by forcing its agenda on U.S. citizens, obliging us to underwrite it every single day of our lives with in-kind and out-of-pocket cash payments of our hard-earned dollars, coupled with the loss of freedom and opportunity, a complete silencing of the voice and priorities of everyday citizens, is at its core and at every layer anti-democratic, despotic, and exploitative. We as citizens have become an ATM machine for the warmongering lunatics trouncing other countries across the globe. We are indentured slaves to a militarized economy which requires war to function, frightened subjects of a regime that creates enemies everywhere, pawns of a power game and calculated strategy to set us against one another, a social-political climate intentionally engineered to maintain “total spectrum domination”, meaning totalitarian control even within our own borders.
Maybe the idea of a benevolent, enlightened, inspired and visionary U.S. leading the world into a new age of affluence and harmony, guided by the best principles of democracy and driven by shared humanitarian values seems appealing. But it’s an illusion. It’s an illusion fostered by massive deceptions, propaganda, brainwashing, engineered for our compliance and complicity in the madness that has overtaken our governing institutions. Read the speeches of the mentors for this type of hyper-nationalistic insanity, the architects of the Third Reich, and see how closely they align with the promises of our current batch of make-America-great-again demagogues. Creepily, ‘Aryan super race’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ are bedfellows, the spawn of the same lunatic delusions. ‘Indispensable’ is nothing but code for ‘1000 year Reich’.
Yes, that avuncular icon at the top, embraced, lauded, and emulated by the patronizers of a naive, trusting and gullible citizenry, is pointing at us, you and I, entreating us to be a part of a sinister plan to take over the world.
We better make the right choice … while we still can make a choice.
On the eve of Labour Party chancellor Rachel Reeves’ controversial Spring Statement, protesters will rally outside the Treasury to demand the government raises taxes on the wealth of the super-rich instead of slashing public spending.
Protests on the eve before Reeves’ Spring Statement
The government sparked fury ahead of the budget, by announcing deep cuts in chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits, and international aid spending. What’s more, it is doing so all while boosting investment in the military.
So on Tuesday 25 March between 5pm and 7pm, hundreds of protesters will gather with banners and placards outside the Treasury. A light projection will beam “Tax the Super-Rich” onto the building behind them.
War on Want, Oxfam, Greenpeace, and others have organised the demonstration to take the Labour Party government to task over its warmongering austerity-fueled agenda.
Author and economist Gary Stevenson, Green Party Co-Leader Carla Denyer, Labour Peer Prem Sikka, and Ecotricity Founder Dale Vince will address the crowd. Alongside them the leaders of union, environmental groups, and anti-poverty organisations will deliver powerful speeches against the disgraceful slate of public spending cuts.
‘Cut after cut to the poorest and most marginalised’
Ahead of the protest, campaigners from various groups involved have underscored the devastating impacts of the budget Reeves is set to lay out to Parliament.
Tax Justice UK’s head of advocacy Caitlin Boswell said:
Across the country, inequality is soaring and people are being left behind, struggling to make ends meet and dealing with broken public services, all while the very richest get richer. Choosing to make cut after cut to the poorest and most marginalised, while leaving the vast resource of the extreme wealth of the super rich untouched, is immoral, harmful, and will not deliver for our communities or the economy. Instead, this government could choose to tax the wealth of the very richest people and corporations. This would raise tens of billions annually to address the cost of living crisis and deliver the long-term investment our country needs.
Linda Burnip of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) said of the government’s cruel and brutal cuts to disability and health-related benefits:
The Labour government has clearly chosen to target Disabled People for budget savings to finance their war effort instead of targeting the super rich and tax avoiders. Over a decade of Tory cuts have led to the death of thousands of Disabled People”… “Instead of facing the reality that more and more people struggle with their physical and mental health, Labour is feeding in the narrative that Disabled People receiving benefits are work-shy and should be punished. Resistance is mounting and dozens of protests are already taking place across the country.
Tax the rich: Reeves and Labour ‘siding with the super-wealthy’
There have been mounting calls for the government to raise taxes on the assets of the super-rich. The Trades Union Congress endorsed one last summer, and in October, a dozen Labour MPs broke ranks to support the call.
According to Oxfam, the richest 1% of Brits own more wealth than the poorest 70%, and the world could see multiple trillionaires within a decade. Meanwhile, Greenpeace has calculated that levying even a 2.5% tax on assets over £10m could raise £36bn annually.
Senior economic justice campaigner at War on Want Nuri Syed Corser said:
Inequality is soaring, the climate is collapsing, and public services are at breaking point. We need huge public investment to tackle these crises. But instead, the government is gearing up to deliver lethal cuts to welfare, international aid and green investment, claiming there is not enough money to fund these life-saving policies. Meanwhile, the obscene wealth of the super-rich is surging and going largely untaxed. It’s time to tax it.
Others highlighted how the Labour Party’s programme of cuts to public services and welfare makes it a budget fit for billionaires and big polluters only. Campaigns director at Stamp Out Poverty Louise Hutchins said:
The big oil and gas corporations have raked in billions in profits over years, while households are struggle with soaring bills and the climate crisis deepens. Why is Rachel Reeves punching down and getting ordinary people to pay? Isn’t it obvious that she should be getting the fossil fuel polluters to pay up?
Similarly, UK Campaigner at 350.org Matilda Borgström argued:
Rachel Reeves’ decision to slash welfare while refusing to tax the super-rich is both cruel and misguided. Instead of making billionaires like Jim Ratcliffe – who profits from fossil fuels that drive the climate crisis – pay what they owe, she is choosing to side with the ultra-wealthy at the expense of ordinary people. A wealth tax on billionaires could fund vital support for those struggling with the cost of living – accelerating the transition to renewable energy could slash energy bills, insulate homes and create future-proof jobs. Instead, Reeves is prioritising the interests of a handful of elites over the well-being of millions. This is not just an economic failure – it’s a moral one.
As CND prepares for its national demonstration at the BAE Shipyard, Barrow-in-Furness, on Saturday 22 March, the government is ramping up nuclear threats to prop up Britain’s failing nuclear weapons programme and justify military spending hikes in next week’s Spring Statement
BAE: laughing all the way to the bank, thanks to the Labour Party
The recent visit to the BAE Shipyard in Barrow and nuclear base at Faslane by Keir Starmer and John Healey, saw the Defence Secretary claim the weapons could do “untold damage” against countries like Russia in the event of a conflict.
It was also announced that the Port of Barrow, which has built submarines for Britain’s nuclear weapons programme since the 1950s, will be given royal status. This status applies to the dockland where the arms manufacturer’s shipyard is based and not the wider Barrow area.
CND’s protest comes ahead of the chancellor’s Spring Statement, where it’s expected that billions of pounds will be added to the military budget while brutal cuts are made to overseas aid, and services helping some of the country’s most vulnerable people.
The government argues that increasing the military budget will help revitalise “left behind” industrial towns and the wider economy. But military spending has one of the lowest employment multipliers of all sectors. Towns like Barrow need sustainable and varied forms of employment that put its people and the planet first.
Britain’s nuclear weapons accounts for at least 14% of the MoD’s military expenditure but the most recent annual report by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) found that key parts of its nuclear weapons programme are either failing or have major issues. CND is calling on the government to scrap Britain’s nuclear programme once and for all and develop an industrial strategy that generates sustainable economic growth that benefits everyone.
Protest details
The protest details for Saturday 22 March are as follows:
12 noon: activists will meet and take part in a leafletting action outside in Barrow-in-Furness town centre, outside The Forum, Duke Street, LA14 1HH
1-3pm: March and rally on High Level (Michaelson Road) Bridge over the Devonshire Dock.
Speakers at rally include: Sophie Bolt, CND General Secretary; Ben Soffa, Palestine Solidarity Campaign National Secretary; Dr Stuart Parkinson, Scientists for Global Responsibility Executive Director; Philip Gilligan, South Lakeland and Lancaster District CND Coordinator; Helen Tucker, NEU Cumbria and International Solidarity Officer for NEU Northern Region; Marianne Birkby, Radiation Free Lakeland; Linda Walker, Manchester Climate Justice; James Aigh, Paper Not Planes – Stop Croppers F35.
CND General Secretary Sophie Bolt said:
Starmer and Healey’s recent visit to Faslane and Barrow is part of the government’s reckless attempt to justify Britain’s immoral nuclear weapons programme. We need to see Healey’s nuclear threats for what they are: whipping up global tensions to justify siphoning off billions of pounds to the arms industry. Nuclear weapons do nothing to make people safer. They are a huge drain on public finances that will only make the population poorer and see essential services cut even further to the bone. Nuclear weapons encourage proliferation and make nuclear use more likely. Our protest isn’t about taking jobs away from people. Towns like Barrow could, and should, be at the forefront of a dynamic green economy.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign National Secretary Ben Soffa said:
Weapons and components manufactured in Britain – including by BAE Systems – are being used to murder Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza. Despite it being acknowledged that components made in North West England were part of the Israeli F-35 plane that killed 90 Palestinians in a single attack on the so-called ‘safe zone’ of Al-Mawasi, these exports continue. Now is the time for a thorough reassessment of whether exports from the UK’s weapons producers are in reality contributing to growing global instability and breaches of international law, including attacks on civilians.
No more war from Labour (or BAE)
Scientists for Global Responsibility Executive Director Dr Stuart Parkinson said:
The two greatest threats to the world are nuclear war and climate change. We could tackle both by disarming nuclear weapons and diverting the engineering jobs to green energy. This is where Britain and the world need to focus their efforts. Britain’s green economy now employs about 900,000 people – far more than the arms industry – and it is expanding. Barrow could and should be part of this just transition.
Coordinator of South Lakeland and Lancaster District CND Philip Gilligan said:
Like many residents of Westmorland and Furness I am delighted that CND will be in Barrow on Saturday calling for a future which is not dependent on investment in weapons which would kill millions of people and threaten all our futures. Barrow deserves better.
Spokesperson from the campaign Paper Not Planes: Stop Croppers F35 James Aigh said:
Paper Not Planes: stop Croppers F35 aims to stop the Burneside-based business, James Cropper PLC, supplying parts for F35 war planes, dozens of which are currently being used by Israel in their war on Gaza. No one wants a job supplying arms to a genocidal army, or building weapons of mass destruction. We can meet the needs of people in Barrow and Burneside through a redistribution of wealth.
Yoon Jim Murphy helped make Labour highly unpopular in Scotland. Then he became a lobbyist for arms companies and other unsavoury characters via Arden Strategies. And now, he would very much like it to be easier for funds to invest money in the arms industry.
Fortunately, when Sky invited Murphy on TV to share his point of view on the matter, journalist Taj Ali was there to point out the lobbyist’s interests.
.@Taj_Ali1 was invited to debate with Jim Murphy on the subject of loosening the guidance around what is considered ethical investments to make it easier for funds to invest in the arms industry, & the first thing he did was point out Murphy is a lobbyist for arms companies pic.twitter.com/KDXsqxxdQD
is a lobbyist for weapons manufacturers through his firm Arden Strategies. And I think it’s really important to note this. Because Ardern Strategies has actually funded one in ten Labour MPs. And they have this lobbying operation underway to change what we consider ‘ethical’ investment. I think there’s nothing ethical about arms manufacturers who profit from death, destruction and genocide overseas
Ardern Strategies and private profiteering from destruction
In 2024, Murphy said Keir Starmer’s Labour government would lead “the first truly private sector Labour government”. And as openDemocracypointed out:
In the same interview, Murphy revealed that he and his team at Arden speak regularly with Starmer and other Labour frontbenchers and that the firm is likely the party’s biggest commercial sponsor.
Ardern, it explained:
has solidified its access to the party at all levels, from the current leadership to the prospective MPs who may make up the frontbenches of the future.
Though “little is known about the clients it represents”, the outlet explained, it could reveal that some with connections to Arden were energy firms and “the CEO for the UK, Europe and Middle East operations of Northrop Grumman, a world-leading manufacturer of machines that kill people, and a major exporter of said machines to Israel”.
Labour government in bed with arms dealers and other deathmongers
Just as the extent of cronyism in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party came out last year, openDemocracy also revealed how the party had quietly received “£4m from tax haven-based hedge fund with shares in oil and arms”. And it reported that the Labour donation from Quadrature Capital “stood to profit” from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, having “held $121m worth of shares in a range of arms, tech and logistics firms which have all supported the ongoing military campaign”.
With the closeness of Murphy and Ardern to Starmer’s corrupt machine, meanwhile, it’s perhaps clearer than ever that there’s nothing ethical about what’s going on behind the scenes (or on the stage for that matter) with this Labour government.
Today, on the 22nd anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, key architects and commanders of this monstrous war crime, from Condoleezza Rice to David Petraeus, sit comfortably in cushy positions at top American universities. At the same time, the overseers of the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment and siege on Gaza, considered a genocide by human rights groups like Amnesty…
Israel has unilaterally ended the Gaza ceasefire, killing hundreds of people in the process – including at least 183 children. War criminal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the apartheid state has “resumed combat in full force” in the occupied Palestinian territory and that “this is just the beginning”. Meanwhile, two separate reports have shown how the UK has been protecting Israel’s genocidal interests.
Another report shows how Britain has been allowing Israeli arms company Elbit to spy on protesters. The firm has also met with the British government, which is holding a number of political prisoners in connection to Palestine Action‘s efforts to disrupt Elbit’s activities in Britain.
1) UK support for bombing Yemen amid anti-genocide resistance
In December 2023, as the world witnessed Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, Declassified UK journalist Iona Craig reported that the Houthis had become “the most audacious Arab ally for Palestinians”. A month earlier, they had started efforts to disrupt “all ships in the Red Sea bound for Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality”, in solidarity with Palestine. Then, in January 2024, Israel’s enablers in the US and British governments responded by launching attacks on Yemen. The two Anglo-colonial powers had previously supported ally Saudi Arabia’s devastating war against the Houthis, which began in 2015. However, the attacks in defence of Israel’s genocide marked “the first time” they’d officially entered the conflict in Yemen (unofficially is a different matter).
Now, as US president Donald Trump steps up attacks on Yemen on behalf of Israel, Craig has revealed how Britain is helping out too. She explained how the UK “provided aerial refuelling for US jets during Yemen airstrikes”, via the now notorious genocide-enabling base of RAF Akrotiri. She said “the RAF did not announce its involvement” in Trump’s “multiple waves of air raids across Yemen” starting on 15 March, but “publicly available flight tracking data” showed that:
A Royal Air Force (RAF) Voyager aerial refuelling tanker carried out two flights from Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus into the northern Red Sea to support the USS Harry S. Truman.
A defence source told Declassified that:
the UK provided routine allied air-to-air refuelling support to aid the self defence of a US aircraft carrier in the region from which the strikes were launched.
The US attacks killed at least 53 people, including five children. In all the months since the Houthis’ anti-genocide resistance began in 2023, they have “targeted dozens of merchant vessels… sunk two vessels, seized a third, and killed four crew members”.
2) UK government in service of Israel arms company
Regarding the British government’s support for Israeli arms company Elbit, Declassified‘s John McEvoy reported that, in December 2024:
Keir Starmer’s government held a private meeting with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons company
In the meeting were:
three representatives from Elbit Systems and three officials from Yvette Cooper’s Home Office.
Declassified got access to this information via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. The Home Office:
said that a recording of the meeting was made “but by mutual agreement [with Elbit] this was agreed… not to be released” through FOI.
This was not the first time the Home Office had worked closely with Elbit, however. Because one police report from 2023 showed how:
the Home Office was apparently instructing the police to prioritise the company and remand activists rather than facilitate freedom of assembly and expression, liberties enshrined in the Human Rights Act.
Just as worryingly, McEvoy explained:
Elbit Systems UK has “its own intelligence cell and share[s] information with the Police across the country on a two weekly basis”, a police file observes.
Meanwhile, Israel chooses war over peace (yet again)
This year’s ceasefire in occupied Gaza saw a brief pause in the horrors people there faced. It also saw both Israel and Hamas release numerous hostages, something that over a year of genocide had not achieved. Israeli occupation forces, however, violated the ceasefire on a number of occasions. And when its attempts to change the ceasefire deal in its favour failed, it resumed its genocidal assault on Gaza.
According to the BBC, Netanyahu has insisted that “all ceasefire talks will take place “under fire”” from now on. Families of hostages still in Gaza, however, have criticised the Israeli government’s decision to torpedo the ceasefire.
The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) misled a minister and subsequently parliament on the number of records it holds documenting blood and urine tests relating to nuclear test veterans, according to an MP.
The UK government says more than 20,000 military personnel were present for the UK’s nuclear weapons tests which took place from 1952 to 1967 in Australia and the South Pacific.
MP alleges AWE misled minister and subsequently parliament
Conservative backbench MP for South Holland and the Deepings Sir John Hayes, who is also a former minister, raised the allegation in a point of order in the House of Commons on Wednesday 12 March 2025.
Hayes said:
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. On 21 May 2024, the former Defence Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), published records of blood and urine tests relating to nuclear test veterans.
He said at that time that there were 150. It has now become clear from the correspondence of a court case brought by the British nuclear test veterans that there are 370 documents mentioning blood and urine. That includes 265 that were previously unseen and unreleased.
That raises the possibility, as you will appreciate, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the Atomic Weapons Establishment misled Ministers about the number of records, and that, inadvertently and entirely innocently, the Minister brought the wrong information to this House.
I seek your guidance on how the Government can correct the record and publish those extra records. The nuclear test veterans deserve nothing less.”
I am grateful to the right hon. Member for giving notice of his point of order.
The Chair is not responsible for the accuracy of ministerial statements in the House, but he has put his point on the record and no doubt those on the Treasury Bench are taking note and listening.
John Hayes and Andrew Murrison did not respond to a request for comment.
Labour MP said blood and urine test data collection was ‘routine’
In a debate in the House of Commons on 28 November 2023, Labour backbench MP for Salford and Eccles Rebecca Long Bailey said “limited documents, notes, forms, official instructions and guidance” were accessible in the National Archives which suggest:
blood and urine test data was collected from servicemen and that this information was stored and analysed.
She also said the documents at the National Archives indicate that “orders from the Air Ministry and War Office” told medical officers:
to arrange repeated “blood testing of personnel working regularly with radioactive sources”.
Long Bailey went on to say that it seemed “clear that blood and urine tests were routine”.
Those blood and urine test results are critical for nuclear test veterans to be able to access proper compensation from the government due to the ill health they experienced after being exposed to radiation and nuclear material.
In 2023, law firm McCue Jury & Partners said nuclear test veterans were having their medical records “illegally withheld” which was having:
a devastating impact on their physical and mental health.”
The firm said:
Blood and urine samples taken from them as young men at the Cold War weapons trials have been reclassified as ‘scientific data’ and placed out of reach at the Atomic Weapons Establishment.
Nuclear test veterans group says veterans need transparency
LABRATS says it “represents nuclear veterans, atomic veterans, scientists, civilians, and their families across the world who have been affected by the Atomic / Nuclear Testing program” and has been looking for the blood and urine tests.
LABRATS founder Alan Owen said:
This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are hundreds of thousands of pages if not millions of pages of information which has not been digitised and not indexed.
The Minister admitted to the gargantuan task of looking through these records. The Nuclear veterans do not have time on their side, the average age is 85 and we lose many each month, we need a fast track 1 year inquiry into the mismanagement of these records.
We require transparency and access to these records, not secrecy and exclusion.
Charity says veterans ‘never’ received ‘appropriate compensation’
Help for Heroes head of communications, public affairs & policy Sasha Misra said:
Help for Heroes is aware that the Ministry of Defence is currently reviewing the medical records of nuclear test veterans, and we are keen to understand more about its investigation into missing files.
Veterans and their families continue to face the long-term health impacts of radiation exposure, yet they have never received appropriate recognition or compensation.
Help for Heroes is calling on the Government to establish a fair compensation scheme to support those who served and their families.
MOD committed to ‘look seriously into’ medical records
We recognise the huge contribution that Nuclear Test Veterans have made to national security.
The government is committed to working with veterans and listening to their concerns. We have already amended the criteria for the commemorative Nuclear Test Medal to ensure those who took part in US atmospheric testing are also recognised.
The Minister for Veterans and People has commissioned officials to look seriously into unresolved questions regarding medical records as a priority, and this is now underway.
This work will be comprehensive, and it will enable us to better understand what information the Department holds in relation to the medical testing of Service personnel who took part in the UK nuclear weapons tests, ensuring that we can be assured that relevant information has been looked at thoroughly.
AWE declined to comment.
Anti-nuclear campaign calls for inquiry for nuclear test veterans
Successive British governments have covered up the scandalous legacy of Britain’s nuclear testing programme for too long.
Bolt said the testing programme had:
caused serious intergenerational health impacts for the local inhabitants where testing took place as well as test veterans who were unaware of the experiments they were taking part in while on mandatory national service.
As a result, it’s hard not to conceive that the Atomic Weapons Establishment is continuing to avoid scrutiny by failing to acknowledge the extent of the medical documentation it has on those who took part in the programme.
Releasing documents in drips and drabs in the hope that veterans will eventually die, and their families will give up is disgraceful. But they can’t stall forever.
We need an inquiry now, while veterans are still alive, to get to the bottom of this scandal with full cooperation from both AWE and the Ministry of Defence.
When the truth about the Nuked Blood scandal finally gets out, it will join the Post Office, Infected Blood, and Hillsborough scandals as one of the great state injustices against its citizens.
Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation…
The outrages are raining down one after another: Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine is responsible for the war with Russia, which thus blames Ukraine for the deaths of its own people and implicitly supports Putin’s use of unrestrained military force. Trump’s proposal to forcefully relocate Palestinians from Gaza, which functions as an extension of ethnic cleansing. Trump’s exaggerated use of…
With the Ukraine War and the retreat of the United States from what has routinely been called Europe’s security architecture, states are galloping to whatever point of presumed sanctuary is on offer. The general presumption is that the galloping is done in the same step and rhythm. But Europe, for all the heavy layers of union driven diplomacy, retains its salty differences.
Poland is particularly striking in this regard, having always positioned itself as a defender against the continent’s enemies, perceived or otherwise. This messianic purpose was well on show with the exploits of King John III Sobieski in his triumphant defence of Vienna against the Ottoman Empire in 1683. The seemingly endless wars against Russia, including the massacres and repressions, have also left their wounding marks on a fragile national psyche.
These marks continue to script the approach of Warsaw’s anxiety to its traditional enemy, one that has become fixated with a nuclear option, in addition to a massive buildup of its armed forces and a defence budget that has reached 4.7% of its national income. While there is some disagreement among government officials on whether Poland should pursue its own arsenal, a general mood towards stationing the nuclear weapons of allies has taken hold. (As a matter of interest, a February 21 poll for Onet found that 52.9 percent of Poles favoured having nuclear weapons, with 27.9 percent opposed.)
This would mirror, albeit from the opposite side, the Cold War history of Poland, when its army was equipped with Soviet nuclear-capable 8K11 and 3R10 missiles. With sweet irony, those weapons were intended to be used against NATO member states.
The flirtatious offer of French President Emmanual Macron to potentially extend his country’s nuclear arsenal as an umbrella of reassurance to other European states did make an impression on Poland’s leadership. Prudence might have dictated a more reticent approach, but Prime Minister Donald Tusk would have none of that before the Polish parliament. In his words, “We must be aware that Poland must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.” According to the PM, “this is a race for security, not for war.”
The Polish President, Andrzej Duda, is also warm to the US option (he has been, over his time in office, profoundly pro-American), despite Tusk’s concerns about a “profound change in American geopolitics”. He was already ruminating over the idea in 2022 when he made the proposal to the Biden administration to host US nuclear weapons, one that was also repeated in June 2023 by then-Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. To have such weapons in Poland was a necessary “defensive tactic […] to Russia’s behaviour, relocating nuclear weapons to the NATO area,” he explained to the BBC. “Poland is ready to host this nuclear weapon.”
Duda then goes on to restate a familiar theme. Were US nuclear weapons stored on Polish soil, Washington would have little choice but to defend such territory against any threat. “Every kind of strategic infrastructure, American and NATO infrastructure, which we have on our soil is strengthening the inclination of the US and the North Atlantic Alliance to defend this territory.” To the Financial Times, Duda further reasoned that, as NATO’s borders had moved east in 1999, “so twenty-six years later there should also be a shift of the NATO infrastructure east.”
Much of this seems like theatrical, puffy nonsense, given Poland’s membership of the NATO alliance, which has, as its central point, Article 5. Whether it involves its protection by a fellow NATO ally using conventional or nuclear weapons, hosting such nuclear weapons is negated as a value. Poland would receive collective military aid in any case should it be attacked. But, as Jon Wolfsthal of the Federation of American Scientists reasons, an innate concern of being abandoned in the face of aggression continues to cause jitters. Tusk’s remarks were possibly “a signal of concern – maybe to motivate the United States, but clearly designed to play on the French and perhaps the British.”
The crippling paranoia of the current government in the face of any perceived Russian threat becomes even less justifiable given the presence of US troops on its soil. According to the government’s own information, a total of 10,000 troops are present on a rotational basis, with US Land Forces V Corps Forward Command based in Poznań. In February, Duda confirmed to reporters after meeting the US envoy to Ukraine Gen. Keith Kellogg that there were “no concerns that the US would reduce the level of its presence in our country, that the US would in any way withdraw from its responsibility or co-responsibility for the security of this part of Europe.”
Duda goes further, offering a sycophantic flourish. “I will say in my personal opinion, America has entered the game very strongly when it comes to ending the war in Ukraine. I know President Donald Trump, I know that he is an extremely decisive man and when he acts, he acts in a very determined and usually effective way.” With those remarks, we can only assume that the desire to have massively lethal weapons on one’s own soil that would risk obliterating life, limb and everything else is but a sporting parlour game of misplaced assumptions.
Universities have long been pivotal hubs of the global solidarity movement with Palestine. During Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza and its annihilation campaign against Palestinian educational institutions, students across the world transformed universities into sites of protests and encampments. A central demand united this movement: that universities cut their ties with Israel’s machinery of war…
May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded these same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
The Ukraine Timeline
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during the ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turnout. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired, and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: The Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: The US activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead, Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO essentially reject them out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join the Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins a counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance of a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three years takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
*****
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
We live in dangerous times, and politicians are happy to be cheerleaders of that supposed fact. They do not care to reassure; they merely care to strike fear into hearts and feed the sort of pernicious despondency that encourages conflict. Hope is not a political currency worth trading. These days, fear is the bankable asset, easily cashed at a moment’s notice.
The March 6 meeting of the Special European Council was a chance for 27 leaders of the European Union to make that point. It was time to cash in on the Russia threat and promote a strategic vision that spoke of elevated dangers. It was, in other words, a good time to be throwing money at the militaries of the various member states.
The language was clear from the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a figure who has become increasingly hawkish in pushing the barrow of the military-industrial complex. Announced on March 4, her ReArm Europe plan entails various measures intended to free up to EUR 800 billion in defence funding. A notable one is enabling member states to use the escape clause of the Stability and Growth Pact to bypass the Excessive Deficit Procedure. Without giving too much by way of details, von der Leyen claims that EUR 650 billion of “fiscal space” could be created were EU countries to increase defence spending by 1.5% of GDP. So much, it would seem, for the bloc’s emphasis on fiscal frugality.
Another measure involves the provision of EUR 150 billion of loans to member states under Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) that will go into such defence initiatives as air and missile defence, artillery, missiles, armed drones and anti-drone systems, and cyber security. But this is not all: this initiative is not only intended for European defence but aiding Ukraine and, it follows, prolonging the war.
Vague suggestions are also on the table. Von der Leyen babbles about “cohesion policy programmes” that might be used to increase military expenditure, with money drawn from the EU budget. Private capital will also be raised through the Savings and Investment Union and the European Investment Bank.
The five-point agreement that emerged from the summit was approved by 26 of the 27 members. (Hungary did not disappoint in vetoing the leaders’ statement). It spoke to such compulsory conditions as Ukrainian participation in peace talks, and European involvement on matters touching upon its security. “Ukraine’s, Europe’s, transatlantic and global security,” the statement pompously reads, “are intertwined”. EU funding in the order of EUR 30.6 billion was also promised for 2025.
The move brings some unwanted attention to the workings of EU policy. Of interest here is the issue of using Article 122, an emergency provision that is non-legislative in nature and has been previously used in responding to the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In other words, it is an executive pathway that purposely bypasses the European Parliament.
Resorting to the article in this instance did not impress Manfred Weber, who leads the European People’s Party (EPP) group in the Parliament. “Bypassing Parliament with Article 122 is a mistake,” opined Weber to his colleagues in the Strasbourg plenary. “Europe’s democracy stands on two pillars: its citizens and its member states, (and) we need both for our security.”
European Parliament president Roberta Metsola also urged EU leaders at the March 6 summit that, “Working through the European Parliament, especially on decisions of this magnitude, is a way of fostering trust in our union.” While “swift action” was needed, “acting together is the only way of ensuring broad and deep public backing.”
In a non-legislative resolution, 419 MEPs encouraged member states to, amongst other matters, increase defending expenditure by at least 3% of GDP, create a bank for defence, security and resilience and pursue a system by which European defence bonds might be used to pre-finance military investment. While these approving members thought Europe was “facing the most profound military threat to its territorial integrity since the end of the Cold War”, 204 chose to vote against it, with 46 deciding to abstain.
In the process of reaching the final resolution, it is worth noting that certain MEPs from The Left and The Greens/EFA attempted to include an amendment that was rejected by 444 votes. “The Parliament,” it read, “deplores the choice to use Art. 122 […] for the new EU instrument meant to support members states defence capabilities; expresses deep concern for being excluded from decisional process”.
While the March summit suggested a new turn towards bellicose militarism, the trend is unmistakable and troublingly inexorable: Europe is spending more on defence, and was doing so even before the return of Donald Trump to the White House. In 2024, military budgets increased by 11.7% in real terms, with a number of countries reaching the target of 2% of GDP expenditure agreed by NATO members in 2014. Throughout Europe, the merchants of death, an eloquent, accurate term coined in the 1930s, can only be crowing.
New arms export licensing data shows that the Labour Party approved £10.9m in arms exports to Israel in its first three months in office. Data from July to September 2024 show a large increase in arms exports compared to the first half of the year.
Labour: signing off on Israel’s genocide
While the £10.9m figure only includes individual licences, the data also shows that Labour approved an open license for “components for combat aircraft”. Open licenses are not shown in the financial figure as once granted, companies can export unlimited amounts of specified military equipment. While there is currently no information available on which licenses Labour suspended in September, this license appears completely incompatible with its supposed commitment not to supply military equipment that could be used in Gaza.
The biggest single issue license awarded, worth £7.2m, was for “technology for submarines”, with a footnote stating that it was for “marketing and promotional purposes, including demonstration to potential customers, temporary exhibitions”.
In total, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) estimates that the UK has approved and/or delivered at least £100m in military equipment to Israel since October 7th 2023. This figure includes single and open licenses and is conservatively estimated from a combination of publicly available sources due to the lack of data published on open licenses.
Globally, £2.9bn worth of arms exports were licensed between July and September 2024. Despite having committed horrific war crimes in Yemen and committing appalling human rights abuses at home, Saudi Arabia was the biggest recipient of UK arms exports with £1.65bn of licenses issued. This included £800m in air-to-surface missiles, £741m in components for bombs, and £100m in surface-to-air missiles.
Licenses were also issued to other human rights abusing states including £23m to Egypt, £15.7m to Turkey and £8.6m to Bahrain. The US was the third biggest recipient for UK arms with licenses worth £253m.
Starmer: making zero difference
CAAT’s media coordinator, Emily Apple, said:
It appears that a Labour government has made zero difference to arms dealers profiting from war crimes and human rights abuses. Despite the government’s admission that Israel is not committed to upholding international humanitarian law, it has authorised millions of pounds of military equipment to Israel, directly supporting its genocide against Palestinian people and supporting Israel’s domestic arms industry.
These figures show that this government is deeply complicit in genocide and human rights abuses. Labour promised change – but it is business as usual for arms dealers.
If our government refuses to act, it is down to all of us to take action against this vile trade and ensure that both politicians and the arms companies are held accountable and face the consequences of their actions.
European leaders meeting in an “Emergency War Summit” in Brussels have agreed on huge increases in arms spending. On entering the meeting, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, declared “Spend, spend, spend on defense and deterrence.” And in response to an interviewer’s question, French Prime Minster Francois Bayrou dismissed the idea that the French public should have any say in this decision, adding “We can’t let the country be disarmed.” (CNews and Europe 1). French President Macron asserts that peace will come only when Russia is “pacified” and Zelensky, Macron and Starmer will try to meet with Trump once again to hear him reiterate, “No, Non, Hi (Ukrainian) and Nyet.
European leaders have been junior partners, via NATO, with US imperialism (think Libya and Iraq) but now the section of the US ruling class that’s behind Trump is openly severing the partnership. These leaders are bobbing and scrambling to hang on to their old role or find a new one for themselves. Reputations and institutions are at stake and it’s not clear that they can finesse their way out because they’ve always counted on an official narrative about Russia that will be put to the test.
As Alexander Mercouris has noted, the real fear among European leaders is if the US and Russia achieve peaceful relations and a Great Power reset, the fictional “Russia threat” that’s been perpetrated on ordinary Europeans will gradually diminish and people will realize they’ve been lied to all along. For now, we can hope that ordinary Europeans will resist how Europe’s ruling elite try to create hysteria, double down on stupidity (“going batshit crazy” in Mark Sleboba’s words) and eviscerate social programs.
Europeans, as well as their US counterparts, who are unwilling to swallow the official propaganda are subjected to unrelenting Putin-baiting — including from liberals and even self-identified leftists — but we refuse to be silenced. We need to do a better job of using our access to social media to show people that the “Ukraine project” was a proxy war as a prelude to attacking Russia. Finally, we can hope that this will lead to an actual left rising in Europe and the United States.
Of course I want peace. Probably as much as anyone reading this.
Naturally, I get excited and hopeful, whenever there are any signs that we are moving in the direction of a more peaceful world.
At the same time, I’m fed up with being led down a primrose path only to find an Abrams tank waiting at the end.
Trump has made enormous strides, or the appearance of enormous strides, toward rapprochement with Russia and ending the Ukraine war. He rightfully points out that this was a needless conflict. Whether he could and would have prevented it is debatable.
Certainly, the fact that the horrifying slaughter which has claimed an estimated 1,000,000 Ukrainians and 100,000 Russians may finally be ending soon is welcome news.
But make no mistake about it.
Trump is not a Peace President.
Because at the same time we entertain the prospect of peace in Ukraine, there are many extremely disturbing things unfolding elsewhere. Here are just a few revealing items.
Trump has ramped up the bombing of Somalia. Of course, we know what a threat to our national security Somalia is. And we also know that innocent Somali citizens are the wrong color, so if we kill a few thousand more, who cares?
It has been reported by reliable non-mainstream sources that a formidable number of B-52 bombers continue to arrive at U.S. bases in the Middle East. These are high-altitude aircraft, so it is doubtful they will be used to drop food and other humanitarian supplies to the besieged people of Gaza. That anti-Iran rhetoric is also accelerating makes this very concerning. Trump may not be Putin’s puppet, but he most assuredly is Bibi’s buttboy. WW3 anyone?
Lethal weapons from the U.S. continue to pour into Israel. So far Trump has approved $12 billion, that enormous sum within only a month-and-a-half. The Trump administration in a ham-fisted unconstitutional end run around Congress days ago rushed more than $2 billion to Netanyahu’s killing machine, justifying the armaments by declaring that Israel is facing a state of emergency. What’s the emergency? The tour buses for Israelis to gleefully view the genocide need an oil change?
Then there’s the constant saber rattling about China. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced that the U.S. is ready to go to war with China. It’s inevitable, you know. War with China. No other option. Why? DON’T BE SO RUDE! What? Are you a Xi Jinping apologist? They’re COMMIES. Enough said.
Many analysts are saying that seeking peace in Ukraine actually serves the war agenda: 1) The U.S. is seeking to split Russia off from their close relationship with China, and 2) Ukraine is a distraction. America must marshal its military resources for the Big War. Kiddie cops cozy up to Kiev. Real men bomb Beijing.
Trump loves power. Trump loves thumping his chest as the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet. Any talk of peace ultimately only in some twisted fashion feeds into delusions of empire, underscores the right of might, fuels the quest for conquest.
So …
When you walk that primrose path, take care to avoid the landmines.
Trump’s Presidency thus far exhibits the most extreme example that I have ever found of a national leader who not only represents ONLY the extremely rich but who especially despises the poor — it’s a value-system that a person’s moral value is his/her net worth: a person’s value is his/her wealth, neither more nor less than that. The four main federal expenditures that Trump and Musk are investigating for “waste, fraud, and abuse” are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Assistance to the poor. Whereas Social Security and Medicare are relatively safe against being cut, since those are not annually appropriated by Congress, Medicare and assistance to the poor (both of which serve ONLY the poor) ARE appropriated annually by Congress, and signed into law by the President; and, so, those two will likely be cut the most. (They are in what our Government calls “discretionary spending.” You know: they’re things such as yachts.)
The federal Department that the Trump Administration is the least seeking for cuts is the by-far costliest federal Department (at roughly $900 billion per year), which is the only federal Department that has never been audited and that consequently is the most corrupt and wasteful, the Defense Department (Pentagon), which Department is the basic or even only market for the products of firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrup Grumman, etc., which firms (except for Boeing) don’t even have any significant consumer markets — their profits depend totally or almost totally on sales to the U.S. Government itself and to its allied Governments; and, so, they need to control the U.S. Government in order to control their markets, which they consequently do, by means of America’s furiously revolving-door between the public sector and the private sector, so that becoming a part of this “military-industrial complex” is the surest way to become and remain a billionaire in today’s America, regardless of whether or not the U.S. economy is doing well from the standpoint of consumers (the general public — which includes lots of ‘worthless’ people, individuals who owe more than they own).
On February 14, the AP had headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.
On March 5, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicare, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) over the next ten years.
On March 8, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud,” and reported that “The Department of Government Efficiency is sifting through $1.6 trillion worth of Social Security payments — records that include a person’s name, birth date and how much they earn — in an anti-fraud effort that has advocates worried the Trump administration could start denying payments to vulnerable older Americans.” It reported the lies by the Trump Administration to ‘justify’ what they are doing, but the matter will be settled in court, by politically-appointed judges; and, so, mere truth and falsity won’t necessarily deterrrmine the ruling, especially not if a billionaire is worth a thousand mere millionaires (and paupers are worth nothing).
What is supposed to happen when a Government represents ONLY an aristocracy? In 1776, the answer was Revolution. We are there again — or else we never will be again, and will instead continue to accept the continued systematic looting of the American people, this time by DOMESTIC (instead of English) billionaires. It’s not a conflict between Democrats versus Republicans; that’s merely the method to distract us. It is a conflict between the billionaires versus the public.
Liberal versus conservative makes little real difference nowadays, but is more of a difference in style, so as to distract the public from the REAL conflict. They do it all the time.
Campaigners from Pembrokeshire-based PARC Against DARCtravelled to the Senedd on Wednesday 5 March to give a presentation in opposition to Brawdy-proposed DARC space radar array, an AUKUS military proposal backed by President Trump the group argues could ratchet up tensions in space against China:
Campaigners said that they are now ‘ramping up efforts’ to stop DARC Radar.
Twelve Members of the Senedd from across the political spectrum have so far subscribed to a Statement of Opinion that recognises widespread local opposition to the proposal including a petition with nearly 17,000 signatures and concerns regarding DARC’s visual, health and regional security implications, and calls for a Welsh Government commission.
PARC Against DARC campaign steps up a gear
A PARC spokesperson said:
Today marks a big step change in the political impact of the campaign against DARC that has gone an incredibly long way very quickly, with now cross-party support from some Welsh Labour MSs, strong support from Plaid Cymru, and support also from the Welsh Liberal Democrats’ Senedd representative, Jane Dodds. For the many people opposing DARC in Pembrokeshire, this shows us the Senedd playing its best role: as a true reflection of the people that elect it. We strongly encourage MSs to heed our community’s call, and support the statement of opinion.
The spokesperson continued:
It’s right for politicians of all stripes to support this statement of opinion for all the reasons locals oppose DARC. Proposing a 27-dish DARC radar array on the skyline of a true jewel-in-the-crown natural wonder and headline Welsh tourism industry attraction like the St Davids peninsula has been a totally ill-conceived idea from the start, and the Senedd Members we spoke to today have certainly been some early adopters on the right side of history in reflecting that.
Global geopolitical instability
Sionedd Williams MS attended the event saying:
Yesterday I showed my support for the campaign against the DARC project in Pembrokeshire. Plaid Cymru has a proud tradition of promoting peace, and this US militaristic project has no place in Wales.
The campaign argues that DARC radar would also serve the current purposes of Trump’s US imperialist space domination agenda and Elon Musk’s massively expanding SpaceX space network.
PARC said:
This just heaps on the condemnation from local residents of a local area with a long and rich history of challenging such proposals.”
We now have an ‘untrustable Trump’ in the Oval office with a subordinate Starmer as UK partner. The rate Trump is going, we can’t even rely on the US being a UK ally by the time DARC would be built, so it must be stopped or we risk inviting the enemy inside the gate!
Titled ‘Highlighting Militarism in Wales’, the day’s presentations included speeches by local PARC campaigners Roy Jones and Jim Scott, and afternoon talks by Academi Heddwch, Cymdeithas y Cymod and Crynwyr Cymru/Quakers Wales, Cardiff UN Association and Stop the War Cardiff.
Symbolic peace doves released at the Senedd
The events were followed by a televised Vigil for Peace on the steps of the Senedd where Ali Lochhead from CND Cymru spoke of the group’s vision for Wales as a nation of peace. Côr Cochion Choir sang and closed the event as two Peace Doves were released as a symbol of the promotion of peace:
Heledd Fychan MS who sponsored the Peace Day said:
On this UN International Day for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Awareness and today I proudly sponsor an event at the Senedd, highlighting militarism in Wales, hosted by PARC Against DARC.
Plaid Cymru has a long-standing history of opposing militarism and advocating for peace. We remain committed to supporting the campaign by Pembrokeshire residents against the DARC proposals. A lot of interesting discussions and a valuable opportunity for Senedd Members to learn more and understand the strength of opposition and the reasons why this should be of concern to everyone in Wales.
Reduce military spending and stop DARC
PARC Against DARC concluded:
While Trump’s shock realignment of the World order is clearly dangerous, erratic and unpredictable, we support any efforts for peace and his indication that there should be a reduction in military spending by all the global superpowers.
Scrapping excessive AUKUS infrastructure like DARC would be a tangible commitment to slowing down that exact irrational cycle of militarisation. We and all campaigns in the Senedd today, as well as we are sure so many people, could so readily support a world where we commit our resources and our wealth as nations to improving lives and competing primarily on creating the technologies of the future, rather than harking back to the archaic, unaffordable international military stalemate culture of the past.
Campaigners urge all to sign their petition against DARC and call on Welsh residents to email Senedd Members and request they subscribe to the statement of opinion against DARC, using the campaign’s template on the campaign’s lobbying page.
One thing that instantly struck me watching the White House press conference February 28, 2025 with US President Donald Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was that the grand welcome accorded to Zelenskyy by the previous US government of Joe Biden and some Western European governments had gone to Zelenskyy’s head. He expected that as he was like an idol to warmongers like Biden and to reporters itching to see Russia defeated, that he would be so to Trump, too.
(Watch Biden/Zelenskyy bonhomie at a press conference with reporters from the dominant/major/traditional/legacy media, the war media, to whom Russia is the “evil empire,” per President Ronald Reagan’s label.)
Zelenskyy was told to put on a suit when visiting the White House. He showed up wearing a commando like stylish black sweatshirt with the logo of Ukrainian tryzub or trident and black pants, both from Ukrainian fashion designer Elvira Gasanova’s menswear label Damirli.
One should have the freedom to wear whatever one wants, however, Zelenskyy has not always worn such casual clothes. He used to wear suits till Russia attacked1 Ukraine, since then his attire has been military/commando style clothes which he says he’ll wear till the war ends. Zelenskyy is not always on the war front, but his clothing creates an impression that he is just coming from the war front, this in turn deludes him into believing that he is kind of a commando. This commando mentality proved almost fatal for the United States-Ukraine relations when he acted as one during the meeting. On March 3, Trump ordered a pause to all military aid to Ukraine — the first wise step to stop the war. Intelligence sharing is also on pause. Zelenskyy needs to come out of this commando mentality.
If Zelenskyy was more powerful than Trump, he could do, wear, say, whatever he wanted to. But he is not. He met Trump for Ukraine, not for himself. If the meeting was a personal one, no one will give a damn even if he blew it up. No. This interaction was for Ukraine and he should have remembered that. As the saying goes: Beggars can’t be choosers. Or as Trump put it: “You don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards. Without us, you don’t have any cards.”
Zelenskyy badly needs a class in 101 diplomacy. You don’t cut off the branch you’re sitting on; Zelenskyy almost cut off the branch (of the US aid tree) on which Ukraine depends. During the meeting, he constantly argued rather than try and take the conversation towards a more agreeable path.
Despite the fact that US Senator Lindsey Graham, a strong Trump supporter, had warned Zelenskyy beforehand: “Don’t take the bait. Don’t let the media or anyone else get you into an argument with President Trump.”
Zelenskyy’s arguments wouldn’t have mattered if he was arguing with the Biden team, because it was the Biden regime’s war.
Another thing one can deduce from Zelenskyy’s behavior is that he’s not smart like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu or India’s Narendra Modi (both have big egos and cruel mentality, and wouldn’t hesitate to unleash violence to achieve the desired goals). But neither argue or show any displeasure when they meet Trump because they know they are weak partners vis-a-vis the US which is very strong — I would say too strong for our world, not a very good thing. Israeli leaders are famous for insulting, bypassing, or ordering US leaders but they can’t do that with Trump — of course, instead, they get things done with flattery.
Invited for lunch, but humiliated and shown the door without lunch from the White House, Zelenskyy flew into London in the warm and comforting embrace (albeit, a momentary one) of Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the UK. (Britain, once the greatest empire in the world, now has not much power except, every now and then, it makes some noise to draw attention.)
A conference of 18 leaders: Europeans and Canada’s Justin Trudeau, were called to support Ukraine which Starmer called “coalition of the willing.” The unwilling ones will be crushed or maligned. But the leaders were aware that without the US not much can be accomplished.
Tusk should have added: We are all together but still alone unless the Globo Cop US joins in.
It seems like Zelenskyy came his senses. On March 4, he said:
“None of us wants an endless war. Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians.” “My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”
Zelenskyy must be feeling very humiliated: first for being dressed down by Trump, and, then for accepting “Trump’s strong leadership.”
Advice for Zelenskyy, if he’s allowed to stay in power, or any other leader who takes over: Try to stay neutral, avoid joining NATO, be friendly, as much as possible, with your neighbors, including Russia, and prevent being a proxy in the hands of US/European warmongers. The devastating result in the form of death and destruction for both Ukraine and Russia is in front of you, due to your prolongation of the war.
Ukrainians must watch the following video of a speech given by Jeffrey Sachs to the European Parliament.
Business-being Trump
The effective rate for many anti-bacterial, disinfectant, and other products is advertised as 99.99% effective. In other words, it’s not absolutely effective and not totally potent.
The same analogy can also be applied to Trump. One could say Trump is 99.99% nasty, greedy, cruel, or whatever. That, however, leaves room for some uprightness in Trump.
Trump’s figure for US support of $350 billion dollars to Ukraine was, as usual, exaggerated, the actual amount is about $183 billion — huge sum of money for the war, for which major support comes only from the Democratic Party’s “affluent upper-middle class base.” However, the total amount Ukraine received from the US, European Union institutes, several countries, and groups amounts to $380 billion.
For Trump, Zelenskyy is not a hero. Trump is a different entity with a diverse agenda; he has been talking about ending the Russia/Ukraine war for a long time and so it was counterproductive to argue and throw tantrums rather than listening to Trump and then requesting a favor here and a favor there. Of course, Trump has his own interest in facilitating a ceasefire, he is eyeing Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.
After all, Trump is business-being and like most businesspersons, his motive is always a financial one.
Trump is right when he points out the danger of the Russian Ukraine war:
“You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War Three2.”
Trump attacked
The war news media and many European leaders instead of thanking Trump for his efforts in working for a ceasefire, which would not only prevent loss of life and destruction in Ukraine and Russia but would also save US and European taxpayers’ money, lambasted him for being a “bully” and termed discussion with Zelenskyy an “ambush.”
Financial Times’ Europe editor Ben Hall said Trump and Vance “were spoiling for a fight” with Zelenskyy. Marc Polymeropoulus, MSNBC’s National Security & Intelligence Analyst noted that Trump and Vance “have humiliated the United States” when they shouted at Zelenskyy.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Trump and Vance of “doing Putin’s dirty work.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) described Trump’s berating of Zelenskyy “utter embarrassment” for the US.
Trump is wrong on a huge number of issues but not on this one. All those criticizing him are foes of Ukrainian people; it’s they who are paying the price for this meaningless war.
1 The former USSR’s (now Russia) request for NATO membership in mid 1950s was rejected. Why? two logical reasons: one, if Russia is in NATO then you have no enemy to fight with. That is a no, no. Also, there wouldn’t be a war lobby and no arms-related corruption; not a good thing for lobbyists, Congresspersons, weapons producers who always get their cuts, profit, and so on. The other reason was a united Europe wouldn’t be as vulnerable to US dictates as it is now.
2 The World War I and the World War II started by Europeans and the world was dragged in because most countries were under European colonial rule. (The name World War is a misnomer — actually it should be called European World War.) How wise are these idiot European leaders whose insanity could drive Europe towards the European World War III.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will introduce 27 European Union members with her “ReArm Europe” costing $840 billion.
The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest. This is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.
How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being near to the White House (near to America’s central command) being analogized to Ukraine’s being near — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command)? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It’s being hidden.
The Ukrainian war actually started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.
The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, bothbefore and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.
In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)
Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:
Article 1
The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …
Article 4
The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.
Article 5
The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.
Article 6
All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.
The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.
Article 3
The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.
Article 4
The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.
Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.
According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …
The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …
The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”
NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did agree to, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, America’s recent Presidents are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (America’s recent Presidents), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.
Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. If Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962, then the U.S. would have invaded and taken over Cuba, because the only other alternative would have been to skip that step and go directly to invade the Soviet Union itself — directly to WW3. Under existing international law, either response — against Cuba, or against the U.S.S.R. — would have been undecidable, because Truman’s U.N. Charter refused to allow “aggression” to be defined (Truman, even at the time of the San Francisco Conference, 25 April to 26 June 1945, that drew up the U.N. Charter, was considering for the U.S. to maybe take over the entire world). Would the aggression in such an instance have been by Khrushchev (and by Eisenhower for having similarly placed U.S. missiles too close to Moscow in 1959), or instead by JFK for responding to that threat? International law needs to be revised so as to prohibit ANY nation that is “too near” to a superpower’s central command, from allying itself with a different superpower so as to enable that other superpower to place its strategic forces so close to that adjoining or nearby superpower as to present a mortal threat against its national security. But, in any case, 317 miles from The Kremlin would easily be far “too close”; and, so, Russia must do everything possible to prevent that from becoming possible. America and its colonies (‘allies’) are CLEARLY in the wrong on this one. (And I think that JFK was likewise correct in the 1962 case — though to a lesser extent because the distance was four times larger in that case — America was the defender and NOT the aggressor in that matter.)
If this finding appears to you to be too contradictory to what you have read and heard in the past for you to be able to believe it, then my article earlier today (March 4), “The Extent of Lying in the U.S. Press” presents also five other widespread-in-The-West lies, so that you will be able to see that there is nothing particularly unusual about this one, other than that this case could very possibly produce a world-ending nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. People in the mainstream news-business are beholden to the billionaires who control the people who control (hire and fire) themselves, and owe their jobs to that — NOT really to the audience. This is the basic reality. To ignore it is to remain deceived. But you can consider yourself fortunate to be reading this, because none of the mainstream news-sites is allowed to publish articles such as this. None of the mainstream will. They instead deceived you. It’s what they are hired (by their owners and advertisers) to do, so as to continue ruling the Government (by getting you to vote for their candidates).
The Left and Right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe.
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