John Wight on the grim context of the latest escalatory development in the blood-soaked proxy conflict between Russia and the West.
U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken boarding Ukraine-bound train in Poland on Tuesday. (Ben Dance / FCDO, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
By John Wight
Special to Consortium News
The legendary Athenian historian and general, Thucydides, was a man who believed in the supposed verities of war and conflict as a means by which to settle the affairs of state.
It is therefore no accident or surprise that his classic account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC remains a staple of military academies throughout the West.
Therein lies the problem, because unlike in the days of antiquity, when wars between the great powers were fought with spears and swords, in our time hypersonic missile technology and nuclear payloads have raised wars between the great powers — or perhaps reduced it — to the status of a zero sum game.
This is the grim context in which must be viewed the latest escalatory development when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine between Russia and the West. Yes, you read that correctly. This is in truth a conflict between Russia and the West, not per se Russia and Ukraine.
Ukraine in this regard is merely a convenient and bloodsoaked proxy — a cat’s paw whose manhood has and is being sacrificed on the altar of U.S.-led Western hegemony.
When British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Kiev by train from Poland on Wednesday, they did so bearing gifts. More money is to be poured into the failing attempt to bring President Vladimir Putin’s Russia to its knees, along with renewed consideration of providing Zelensky with the green light that will allow the Ukrainians to use the long-range missiles supplied by both to strike targets deep within Russian territory.
If this permission is ultimately granted, a dangerous proxy war will escalate closer to a direct U.S.-U.K. war on Russia, with all of the existential peril that implies.
U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin last Friday told Volodymyr Zelenksy he can’t use the U.S. ATACMS to hit deep inside Russia. But Blinken and the neocons in the State Department and in the U.S. Congress are pushing back against Austin.
British Prime Minister Kir Starmer will meet Joe Biden at the White House on Friday, with missile strikes no doubt on the table. It will be the mentally-addled Biden’s most consequential decision of the war.
The New York Times reported Thursday that Biden was close to allowing Ukraine to use British long-range Storm Shadow missiles to hit deep into Russia but not American ATACMS.
Lame Lammy
The newly installed Lammy as British foreign secretary is clearly out of his depth. Evidence for this was his hortatory declaration while in Kiev that the West guarantees Ukraine “100 years of support.”
The response to this boast came swift and sharp in the form of an X post from Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and current deputy chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. To wit:
“Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy has promised Ukraine 100 years of support. 1) He is lying. 2) So-called Ukraine will not last a quarter of that time. 3) The island called Britain is likely to sink in the next few years. Our hypersonic missiles will help if necessary.”
Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy has promised Ukraine 100 years of support. 1) He is lying. 2) So-called Ukraine will not last a quarter of that time. 3) The island called Britain is likely to sink in the next few years. Our hypersonic missiles will help if necessary?
— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) September 11, 2024
Lammy’s announcement that London is to donate an additional £600 million ($800 million) to Ukraine’s coffers, when placed against his same government’s recent decision to cut a winter fuel allowance that will affect 10 million of the country’s old age pensioners, tells us all we need to know.
It tells us that when it comes to wars abroad there is always money to be found, but when it comes to keeping vulnerable pensioners warm at home there is none available.
Ukraine is engaged in a conflict it cannot win, while Russia is fighting a war it cannot afford to lose.
The former has neither the manpower nor industrial capacity while the latter possesses both. The result is Kiev being turned into a NATO/U.S. dependency and the latter uncoupling from the West geopolitically and economically to the point of accelerating the formation of an Eastern post-hegemonic which points, increasingly, the way to the future.
Blinken and Lammy, on left side of table, meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday. (Ben Dance / FCDO, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
For Moscow this is an existential struggle with its security in mind, while for the West the geostrategic stakes have never been higher.
Western ideologues have never forgiven Russia from recovering from the demise of the the Soviet Union and emerging with its sovereignty intact under Putin’s leadership.
The Russian president’s real crime in their eyes — his demonization aside — is that he has had the temerity to assert that decisions pertaining to Russia’s security should be taken in Moscow instead of in Washington, London or Brussels.
So now military escalation rather than diplomacy is the name of the game — at least for those who send the sons of the working class to fight and die in wars rather than their own. In his classic antiwar novel, Dalton Trumbo lays it out much more powerfully than this writer ever could:
“So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You’re goddamn right they didn’t. They died crying in their minds like little babies … They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child.”
It bears repeating again and again that this ugly and bitter conflict was eminently avoidable. It is a conflict not of Russia’s but of the West’s choosing.
Returning to our Athenian friend Thucydides, it is a conflict that from the West’s standpoint conforms to his view that “You need to be willing to endure the most trying of circumstances if it means preserving your standing in the world.”
We today are living through a seminal inflection point in human affairs. The old world is dying, per Antonio Gramsci, and our rulers are determined that the new world will never be born.
Understand that and you understand everything.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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What’s always annoyed me about people quoting Thucydides is that they’ve evidently only read the first page which is about the rise of Sparta.
The real takeaway from The Peloponnesian War is the section known as The Melian Dialogue.
In this section democratic Athens decides to butcher its ‘ally’, a term which by this time had come to mean ‘vassal’, the island of Melos because they have had the temerity to leave The Athenian Empire. This empire started out as an alliance to confront Persia and had morphed into a military-political-industrial complex of domination. Just like now a confrontational alliance had changed into an aggressive empire of hegemony.
The Melians want out of the ‘alliance’ but Athens decides it can’t allow an ‘ally’ to set an example to the others, they send troops to butcher the men and enslave the women and children of its ‘ally’ as a grim warning to the others. Of course in the 21st century you’d probably only get a coup organised by the US embassy.
If you think that a democratic nation won’t do this or an updated and modern version to its ‘friends’ then you have no knowledge of history.
The western NATO military industrial complex rules the combined western centuries long war of empires for full spectrum dominance of world religious, cultural, and economic control of the barbarians with self anointed god given superiority rites.
Russia and Asia have been targets for unorthodox individualism or else a higher sense of cooperative vision based on unitive thinking.
Western culture is a merging of Viking raiders and Roman invasive religious orders.
Somebody mentioned it… Medvef: FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT
To understand this article one needs to go through what the writer beautifully put in his words:
“Ukraine is engaged in a conflict it cannot win, while Russia is fighting a war it cannot afford to lose.”
If a “Russian missile” took out the Golden Gate Bridge, how do you think ‘America’ would react? Would America be mad?
If that Russian missile was not fired by Russia, would that make a difference? If Russia gave that missile to somebody else, and that someone else then pushed the button, would that make America less mad at that Russian missile blowing up the Golden Gate? If Russia trained the people they gave the missile to, and provided them with support and advice, would that make America more or less mad at Russia after that Russian missile took out the Golden Gate?
I used the Golden Gate Bridge as a hypothetical target because Ukraine would very much like to take out the Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait with any missiles gifted to them. In fact, that target is not even under discussion now, as it has already been targeted, repeatedly by NATO weapons such as Storm Shadow missiles. This current discussion on this latest escalation is about targets ‘deep in Russia’, and in NATO-newspeak the Crimean Bridge is in Ukraine. America has already approved of NATO missiles taking out a very well known bridge built by the Russians.
If a Russian missile destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge, do you think America would just shrug and accept it, or want to blow up stuff in retaliation? That’s how close we are to an even bigger war here in the September of 2024 years since the birth of The Dude who told us that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
The military protection racket has taken over western civilization and the US rules itself and the western world through NATO military commands for full spectrum dominance afraid that the Asia and reborn Russia must be stopped mow before too late.
The premise of preemptive war pronounced on Iraq now gives credence to the possibility of a preemptive strike against all enemy nuclear powers via stealth and cruise weapons. A military protection begun with knights in armor is a medieval evil hoping to run the world for the profits of doom.
The avowal by Thucydides that “you must be willing to endure the most trying of circumstances if it means preserving your standing in the world” is understood to exclude the ruling elite. The corporate and political elite view us lessers as resources whose only role is to serve as economic and actual cannon fodder. An appropriate slogan from the Vietnam war era: “I’d rather save my a$$ than your face.”
The Dalton Trumbo quotation, likely from his 1938 anti-war novel //Johnny Got His Gun// title taken from a line in the WWI song “Over There”–Johnny get your gun, get your gun… Opposing that war to preserve empire, whether isolationist, labor leftist like Debs, or religious pacifist got you prison time. By means of an unConstitutional law still applied today.
The judge is exactly right “our rulers are determined that the new world will never be born.” Because it would mean ending the econopathy treating natural and human resources as things to be used up. Also an end to the arrogant attitude portrayed in Halberstam’s book //The Best and the Brightest// and true of the current neolib Dem elite. Made all the more dangerous by their alliance with Cheney’s neocons. Obviously willing to fight to the death of everyone else and most other life on Earth to preserve their fatally ill global empire. With the MICIMATT as cheering section.
“… along with renewed consideration of providing Zelensky with the green light that will allow the Ukrainians to use the long-range missiles supplied by both to strike targets deep within Russian territory.”
Utter madness.
I don’t think neither the American public nor the American intelligentsia across the board from mass media to corporate, finance and the bureaucracy really understand what they’re dealing with. The only reason Kiev hasn’t been totally laid to waste is bc Putin’s a genuine humanitarian. The Ukes using long-range missiles to strike deep within Russia is a complete paradigm shifter, it potentially means Russia could target the CONTIGUOUS United States!
The whole notion that the Ukie proxies could ever defeat Russia was delusional beyond belief. Now we’ve reached a point in which our leadership class can’t seem to bear the humility of cutting and running; but that’s exactly what needs to happen immediately: NATO must cut and run. (I hate using the term “NATO” when any real observer knows full well it’s the Washington-Zio-militarist empire, period. NATO’s a misleading term.)
US is supporting Ukraine even though it has eliminated political dissent, has passed laws barring ethnic Russians from speaking Russian, and has banned Russian Orthodox churches.
The US government and press here gives no credence to Russia protecting Russian ethnics that the Ukrainian government despises.
At the same time, the US prefers war to diplomacy as President Biden doesn’t even speak to Putin.
Russia considers a potential nuclear armed Ukraine as an existential threat.
With Ukraine on the cusp of losing the war, the US is by authorizing missiles being fired into Russia, are provoking an escalation into a possible nuclear confrontation.
Some officials obviously think the US could prevail. That’s madness.
Where are the peace protests for ending this proxy war in Ukraine between U.S. and Russia? None of the media, or even so-called progressive wing of Democratic Party are speaking out against this “hidden” cost of this war on human lives….Sad, sad, sad. I will forward this article to friends. Hope others do too.
There are no orotests as most of people in the west are in fact supporters of this war.
So far, almost no US lives were lost and there is still a prospect of destroying and plundering Russia.
The collective West is still enthusiast about this war.
John Wight’s words are chillingly appropriate. The Western World (US) has run out of conventional weapons. Yet, they posture as if they had them. The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are absent from world memory. Memory itself will absent itself if sane heads don’t materialize.
Dr. Strangelove should be required viewing. Although 60 years old, the film is just as relevant today.
The ABM treaty is gone – the US withdrew; so-called friend of Russia, the DT, withdrew from the INF treaty. We now have Nuclear Fist Strike Doctrine. Ol’ Blinkered said that Ukraine will be part of NATO, nuclear missiles are in Europe. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds to midnight. But the US MassMediaCartel says this is not important, not an issue, Russia bad, China bad. Sadly, neither Joyful Genocide, or Orange Genocide will change anything. Sadly, millions of insouciant and gullible US denizens will “vote” for their own destruction. I’m no psychologist but this looks like a form of Collective Stockholm Syndrome or what Chris Hedges called ” a suicide-death cult”.
The comments on Facebook about Medevdev certainly shows much ignorance and makes me reconsider the idea of rejoining FB. I more attracted to intellect which few of the comments reflect.
The readers of the New York Times are supposedly intelligent, but reading the comments section of just about any article dealing with Russia or Ukraine reveals the opposite. The commenters are overwhelmingly ignorant about the facts of the matter, and they are just as smug as most other ignoramuses.
Rob – you probably know this, but Chomsky/Hermann showed that those who consumed elite media like the Times and the Post etc. were likeliest to have the worst grasp of the real situation and facts about major items like Vietnam. It’s like the more propaganda you consume, the less facts you know and the more sure you are in your falsehoods!
I have an idea, let’s round up all of these moronic “western world leaders” and send their asses to the front lines in Ukraine. We don’t need to sacrifice any more innocent lives for those who wish to destroy the world…
“Britain is likely to sink in the next few years. Our hypersonic missiles will help if necessary.”
Medvedev’s comment should be taken not as bellicose aggression (which it will be) but as a sign the Russians are getting sick and tired of the West’s ignoring their warnings. Basically, this remark says: “Wake the Fuck Up!”
It is almost universally the case that documentaries shown on UK television about US politics stick very faithfully to official narratives even if they are blatantly false.
However, there was a minor departure from this in a recent episode of “Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World?” on the BBC channel. Narrator Meryl Streep stated a number of things about problems that could arise from NATO expansion. The programme also showed how Russian fears of, and hostility to, the west arose from the decision to bomb Serbia in 1999.
But if any Labour Member of Parliament were to repeat those things, then he or she would be expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party and would almost certainly not be re-admitted. That person would not be allowed to be a Labour Party candidate at the subsequent general election.
Seven Labour MPs are currently in that situation for voting to lift children out of poverty in a recent vote. That is how bad things have become in this country.
Starmer absolutely disgusts me and his latest warmongering comes as absolutely no surprise.
He’s very clear about using nuclear weapons:
Xxxx://news.sky.com/story/amp/sir-keir-starmer-says-hes-prepared-to-use-nuclear-weapons-to-defend-uk-13147192
And his support for the Ukraine:
Xxxx://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/10/uk-will-give-ukraine-3bn-a-year-for-as-long-as-it-takes-says-starmer
Einstein must have been an optimist, given that he is cited to have said “WW IV” will be fought with sticks and stones”.
At the rate international affairs are once again degenerating, we will all be overcooked carcasses before there is a Blinken of an eye!
Hydrogen Atom Bombs vapourise everything, including ‘sticks and stones’.
“BEING THE SUPERPATRIOTS THEY ARE, THE plutocrats equate military service with true patriotism. But while they heap praise upon those who “serve our country”, they themselves rarely join up.”
-Michael Parenti
SUPERPATRIOTISM p.123
“As prime examples, consider the chickenhawks…”
“Topping the chickenhawk list is George W. Bush.”
“Then there is Vice President Dick Cheney,…”
“Other high-ranking superpatriotic members of the Bush administration who avoided the draft included, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and Andrew Card..”
-Ibid p.124-126
Joe Biden
I’m no fan of Dubya Bush, but he didn’t dodge the draft. His daddy may have pulled strings to keep him stateside, but he joined the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 (two years before the draft began) and was honorably discharged in 1974. Obviously, the fact that he wasn’t called up raises suspicion, but he couldn’t have known for certain at the time he joined that he would escape overseas service. George HW Bush was a lowly 1st-term Representative in Congress at the time Dubya signed up. Daddy didn’t become a real Washington DC power player until he was appointed head of the CIA in 1976, two years after his son was discharged.
GHWB was a highly placed CIA operative since the early 60s. Certainly not ‘lowly’
Gees steve
Your don’t go from Lowly no standing no influence to Head of the CIA,
Get real.
You should do a little research before posting. I don’t know where your info comes from, but according to Wikipedia, people were being drafted for Vietnam as early as 1964. I myself graduated from college in June of 1969 and immediately became eligible for the draft. All through college I had a student deferment. In December 1969 the draft lottery began. That may be what you’re thinking of when you mention 1970.
So Junior Bush was definitely a draft dodger, and he definitely avoided going to Vietnam because of his family’s pull. I was a draft dodger too, but I didn’t later become president and cause the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people – including servicemen and women who served their country where Bush Jr. got a pass.
He definitely joined the Texas Air National Guard to avoid the draft. It doesn’t sound like his service was exactly rigorous considering he mostly drank and worked on his Dad’s campaigns. Fortunate son indeed.
Mr. Parenti continues…
“In his youth, he won entry into Yale University more on pedigree than performance. Later on, seeking to evade the draft, he got himself admitted to the Texas Air National Guard despite his low score on the pilot aptitude test. As he explained it without a hint of apology, ‘I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself learning how to fly airplanes.
Bush was accepted into the Guard ahead of hundreds of other applicants who were waiting to join in order to escape duty in Vietnam. His unit, the 147th Fighter Group, was nicknamed the ‘Champagne Unit’ because it had so many sons of Texas privilege. How he jumped to the head of the line is itself a story. A rich Houston businessman and longtime friend of the Bush family approached Ben Barnes, then Speaker of the Texas House, and asked him to help George W. gain entry into the Guard. Only when questioned under oath did Barnes admit that he had spoken to the Texas Air National Guard on Bush’s behalf.”
-Michael Parenti
SUPERPATRIOTISM p.124
How the Bush family in part, came to that privilege,
“According to declassified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of the two Bush presidents, made lush profits off Auschwitz slave labor.”
-Ibid p.119
I just ordered everything Professor Parenti ever wrote.
Very accessible to anyone, written seemingly with the same intent Thomas Paine wrote “Common Sense” first published Jan. 10th 1776 during the American Revolution which when I read it I thought:
“Wake up, these are who these scumbags are, these are what these scumbags are doing, and it would be a good idea if we stop them before they flush the country down the toilet, which they only care about insofar as how it can be used to make money.”
Michael G: Parenti was correct and I’m glad you mentioned several quotes from his books considering GWB and the strings pulled to get him into the Texas Air National Guard to avoid getting drafted.
Dr. Michael Parenti has been correct all along and I cherish his books that I have and will also continue purchasing more my personal library.
Michael G. How many Zionists are in the line up of people just named. I count at least five. Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld appointed a dozen or more Zionists to high positions within the Bush administration, and of those named to high positions at least two were caught leaking classified information to Israel in the late 1970s; that would be Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
Paula, the Zionists have more or less taken over the State Department with those you mentioned plus many more and the New Yorker magazine published an article many years ago (I wish I saved it) about the Israeli spy in the Pentagon, Johnathan Pollack, and another one, whose name I can’t recall, but the author of that article said that all freshman Congress men and women are told to always vote “Yes” on any bills or appropriations for Israel and if you don’t you won’t be re-elected as the Zionist Lobby will smear your name in the big corporate media conglomerates.
And since when does an American Secretary of the Treasury go abroad (Janet Yellen) and tell her brethren, Zelenky and Netanyahu not to worry, as I’ll make sure we keep funding your oppressive and war-making regimes. Words to that effect.
For those who might find the name John Ashcroft “not like the others” in the above list, he was Clarence Thomas’ confirmation sherpa, along with Biden in Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall.
And, I think, Joe Lieberman. Not a member of the administration but very supportive of it.
Records were published about George W Bush which showed he often absented himself from the National Guard where his father had got him a position so he didn’t have to serve in Vietnam. So he didn’t just dodge the draft, he dodged the dodge. He should have been ashamed years later to call himself “The War President”, but he did avoid one war and started another so I suppose that qualifies him.
Instead of producing military records to prove George wasn’t absent the Bush admin produced a dentist’s records to show he was in the area at that time. That doesn’t prove he was on duty when he should have been. The only thing positive I could say about Bush is he seems to show some guilt and unease in his rare interviews that may be contrition, and I think that may be why he absorbs himself in his paintings (which I think are rather good).