The Hunt for Red October is a film about how a submarine captain decides to act when he realises that one side, his side, may have just gained a massive tactical advantage in the standoff between the superpowers by developing a stealth weapon. To restore the balance, and therefore the relative ongoing peace that has existed since WW2, he evens the odds again by stealing the sub and delivering it to his enemy, who will take it apart, copy it, and develop countermeasures. This is game theory, the most important aspect of which, in terms of avoiding war, is that there remains a balance, a stalemate maintained through mutual escalation that never gives either side a meaningful advantage. It is the nuclear option that ensures mutually assured destruction will prevent the superpowers from directly engaging with each other in conflict, so they fight by proxy, using smaller, non-nuclear, countries as pawns in their relentless game.
Recently, one side has gained such an advantage, and made a huge effort to use its military and political might to control the economic output and resources in counties right on the doorstep of the other, so much so that the hand seems almost inevitably forced. I think as an observer, and obviously not knowing the full story, that this is why Putin has done what he has done in 2022 in Ukraine. Of course our media will act like our perceived enemy’s missiles fall from a clear blue sky onto our perceived ally, and for no reason, as if there weren’t a long history of political, economic, military, and social manipulations that have led to this current conflict, led to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, destabilised Ukraine in 2014 with western weapons, all but destroyed Syria, replaced Gaddafi with tribal warlords, turns a blind eye to the ongoing Saudi bombing of Yemen, lets Israel wage an apartheid war of occupation on Palestine, and is not one bit interested in North Korea.
We all feel for Ukraine and its people, a country caught between the forces and ambitions of two empires, one that is desperately trying to survive the last death throes of a failed ideology in communism, in an unrelenting indirect conflict with another that is suffering the demise of the capital Ponzi scheme that knows it must keep expanding and exploiting in order to survive a little longer. There are no winners, apart from the already powerful, they as ever will lose nothing as this will bring political and financial capital to them regardless of who wins or what happens. They may gather more power, capture more state wealth syphoned off from increasing military budgets as the populations of each nation are urged to lurch rightward by their corporate media. We see the announcement of greater military spending all across Europe to combat the threat of Russia and China, but if this war is anything to go by Russia are a busted flush militarily, and China have no need to show their cards as they make everything we buy, and an economic war, unlike a military one, does reap more than it sows for the stronger economy. In the early 00s the US beat Iraq in a matter of hours, the Shock and Awe of that immense military machine shut down the airspace first, then the communications, then the infrastructure and that was it. The Pax that followed proved harder to control, but wasn’t it always so for the occupying force? When the US stay in other nations land its peacekeeping, when Russia do it its annexation, when the US send an envoy to negotiate the best outcome for the US it is peace talks, when Russia do it it’s interference, when the US arm a rebel group it’s liberation, when Russia do it it’s sponsoring terrorism. We must also remember that America has an agency that has no jurisdiction on American soil (CIA) but operates clandestinely all over the world funding insurgencies, rebel groups and freedom fighters, they are so blatant about it they make movies where these guys are the heroes.
Two things are incredible…. It is incredible that Russia is barely winning this, their elite troops kept back, their war fought by conscripts and part timers that have defective or the wrong equipment, their logistics not in place, not to mention the fact that they clearly knew nothing of the resolve of the Ukrainian people. This Russian lot are a shitshow of an army and it’s obvious for the world to see as their trucks break down and block the roads, they run out of fuel and their soldiers surrender then claim they had no idea they were off to invade a foreign land…. And… it is incredible that some countries have used this crisis as an opportunity to shut down certain press outlets, to censor media, to use the conflict as a smokescreen to shoehorn legislation in while the public have their eyes elsewhere, for us it’s to forget entirely about our corrupt government and to gloss over their links to Russian capital. We have a PM playing his version of his hero Churchill, you know the man he wrote the error strewn book on. That’s no surprise though as nearly everything that Johnson says is error strewn, especially his claims in concern of what tory steered vehicle is coming over the horizon momentarily, or whatever the latest lie on their record he’s currently peddling. I wonder, after the world has had Trump & Johnson, what then led Putin to think that he could tell fibs and stick to them? It’s always been the case that the truth is a casualty of war, but now the truth is a casualty of everyday life, and we are far too desensitised to contradiction. Often we see on the news what we know is not true but is comforting, we must remember how the press covered when Cameron ordering the killing of a British citizen on foreign soil without trial, or Blair defying the UN to invade Iraq, May trying to bypass judicial process to imprison indefinitely without trial, or how the mainstream corporate sponsored press have shunned Paul Mason, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Julian Assange.
Putin is wrong, war and aggression is always wrong regardless of if it’s Russia or Israel or Saudi Arabia or the US (Israel bombing Syria, SA bombing Yemen since 2014, US & Allies using an average of 46 bombs per day over the last 20 years in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and more according to the Airpower Report) simply because its fought by workers, for owners, and mostly effects citizens. We know that whatever the outcome profits flow to those that produce the armaments and logistics of conflict, while the cost is always borne by the citizens of both the aggressor and the defender. This Ukrainian conflict has already seen countries all over Europe committing to greater military spending (as if Europe is under resourced in that area??), so the Lords of war will now be rubbing their hands, as will their stooges in Parliaments across the west who no doubt await their benefit. It’s almost as if the oft attempted expansion of NATO toward Russian borders, which had seemed less necessary until Biden, and had been mooted unnecessary as early as 1991 because it had no purpose once the soviet bloc disintegrated, was a deliberate attempt to aggravate Putin, who had already warned of what Russia would do if it was on the cards long ago and often, into creating a greater arms demand in Europe. The hope on the part of NATO was maybe that Putin would back down and the US could exert more influence in those border countries by moving their corporations in, he hasn’t. The hope of the people is that the citizens of a country stop their leaders from pursuing their own political and economic agenda of increasing conflict in the world for profit, the necessity of arms, but motivated by fear we Europeans always seem to welcome that extra money they can borrow on our behalf to go to foreign lands and make a profit for what seems to me to be their corporate sponsors, the same corporate sponsors who own the means of making all seem righteous, the media. Our governments can’t keep waiting lists down, can’t keep day-care centres open, can’t fund social care, can’t keep the rivers clean, can’t afford enough police or firefighters or nurses, can’t tar the roads, can’t prosecute criminality, can’t subsidise energy, can’t afford their own promised green agenda….but no conflict, directly engaged in, or by proxy, has ever had to cease or pause because they can’t afford to continue, strange that..
The Ukrainian people and the Russian people now suffer because they are a pawn in a bigger game, a disgusting expression of the economic will of a small group of powerful individuals, whereas the average citizens are uninterested and uninvolved until they see the well planned media perspective advertised on news tv, and worse still citizens seem to have a collective amnesia over how war is always always always always played out – the US used thermobaric weapons in Vietnam and Afghanistan, nobody said anything, the Russians use them in Ukraine and there is an outcry, accusations of war criminality! I would contend that all war is a form of criminality, there is a famous picture of Baghdad from 2003, the IBC estimated 7000+ dead and 17000+ injured non-combatants (civilians) as a result of the coalition forces in 2003 alone, by 2020 the estimate is 200,000+, that’s not counting refugees. Of course we should do everything we can to help the Ukrainian people, including calling for an end to conflict for profit, and especially the sort of politics played out on our behalf in secret where we only find out the upshot as the conflict begins when the television sells it to us as necessary and moral (Assange may be going to jail forever simply for revealing truths that we the people should have already known). It’s never moral to bomb some worker’s hometown, maybe killing some of his relatives and friends, maybe sending his wife and kids off to beg a neighbouring country for charity while he takes up arms against your forces, then when you win asking him to thank you for what you then name his liberation, all while corporations move in to rebuild infrastructure, dig resources out of the ground, and pay for their “help” with that country’s captured value… and it looks the same from both sides, Putin will think he’s right to do this, the very same thing Europe and the US did nearly 20 years ago in attacking a foreign nation to protect our own nation based on a perceived threat that, I feel personally and so do a lot of others, turned out to be a known mistruth, but that has not stopped Bush and Blair from being much sought after for after dinner speeches or advisory positions.
A very small number of people want war, and their power makes conflicts keep occurring, but they’re never the ones who fight in them. The truth maybe is that we will keep doing/seeing this until one of two things happens, either the world elects more moral public servants who are capable of coming to accord, or large western corporations finally get complete control of every country’s economic output. And let’s say we go to war to defend ourselves and our country and Europe, what is it then that we the soldiers would fight for, an idea of our land? – Our common land has been robbed from us long ago by the aristocracy, you likely don’t even own your garden till you pay the bank back and then the bank will own it again… Our national identity? – That’s ever evolving and rightly so, we are a diverse people of many colours and traditions, we have everything from communists to fascists to liberals and all in between… Our politics? – no better led than any totalitarian state, ours is just more a more sophisticated form of totalitarianism, our national broadcaster has a party picked governor and has to keep telling us it’s impartial over and again to stay the curiosity of our observations… Our corporations advantage of global influence upon governments and economies? – Now we might be onto something… The preservation of our way of life? – Mortgaged and waged slavery, laws that prevent justice and protect wealth against morality, mass inequality, government lies, a clown for PM, privatisation and subsidies for the wealthy… We should maybe be engaged in revolutions, and not wars..
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