Star Wars Redux?

Tags

China, death-star, paul william roberts, putin, Russia, satellites, Space Force, space law, Trump ignorance, United Nations, weaponization of space

Last week, amid the outcry against grotesque in humanity at the Mexican border, President Trump – how those two words still sit so uneasily together, so incongruously! – ordered the Department of Defence and the Pentagon to create a sixth branch of the US Military he called Space Force. Its purpose? To make America great again beyond the ionosphere, out there in the universe. Another branch of the military? It does sound like the weaponization of space, doesn’t it? Well, a very clever East Indian fellow, whose name old age currently prevents from recalling, drafted the International Law governing outer space, and among the many clauses in this law, approved by the UN, is the prohibition of weapons there. It also declares all off-world bodies, moons, asteroids, planets, international territory, whose resources, if any, belong to the world as a whole. This may sound chauvinistic to any Venusians or Martians looking on, but from our point of view it certifies the solar system, the galaxy, and indeed everything else, as the communal property of our planet, the one presumed to be discovering everything. It’s not unreasonable, and won’t be until someone else comes along. Possibly no one has told Trump, and you can be certain he’s never read about it himself, that the Reagan-era Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, was in fact a sham designed to spook the erstwhile Soviet Union into throwing in the towel. That and an undermining of the economy by means of luring them into Afghanistan actually worked. The Soviet Union was bankrupted by trying to keep up with American financial exceptionalism, and the glorious age of Putin was born. Star Wars was a theoretical system of “death-star” satellites capable of shooting any incoming hostile missiles out of the middle air long before they reached America. Digital videos of the whole kit and caboodle looked very sci-fi and effective, as satellites zapped away at incoming threats left, right and centre, the lasers terminating old-fashioned missiles the way they do in video games. The trouble was that this in itself was a video game. The Pentagon of course never bothered to announce that the SDI was indeed a marvellous idea, but also one so expensive that the entire world together couldn’t afford it. Better dead than bankrupt was the message. But Russia and China believed SDI was in the works, and, unsurprisingly, thirty years later both of America’s eternal foes have rather pitiful versions of “death-star” satellites that can, or sometimes can in publicized tests, zap the satellites that pry into secretive doings on their stretches of earth or threaten their own wastelands of space junk. You can’t have this coercion going on, can you? Ergo: Space Force.

 

Let us theoretically posit that the UN’s Security Council is a monstrous aberration that negates the purpose of the entire rather useless organization. It’s just an hypothesis. So why is it that members of this Security Council always include Russia, China and America, with lesser, very grateful nations given a brief peek at what the big boys do? And what those big boys do – let’s call them RAC – is whatever the fuck they like. If criticized at all, it is by fellow big boys. All three of them have now broken space law, and who is calling for punitive measures? Perhaps no one? At least the international outrage is so muted that this latest American response – always belligerent – is… Space Force, war in outer space, more shame for this planet, if that is anyone else is watching. No outcry so far, no gnashing of UN teeth, probably because 95 percent of the planet views space exploration in much the same way as it views immortality. Yet for the rest of us the weaponization of space is very real, and a very real threat on the same level as the race for atomic weapons. The testing of “death-star” satellites way up there in the endless night will have unpredictable effects down here, from the disruption of telecommunications and data storage systems to the ever-more-likely event of space junk, a few tons of scrap metal, hurtling down to land in your kiddie park or wherever. The consequences of an actual shooting war up there are unthinkable.

 

Yet there he is, Space-Admiral Trump, the uniform tight, muscle-defining, as he salutes another platoon of space warriors on their way to do battle with Darth Putin’s scaly scum or the Beijingons. And no one objects? And no one points out that this is in fact illegal? Let the facts be facts, and life the thing it can, by all means, but don’t see yourselves as innocent bystanders when you can’t be bothered to rebel against monstrosity when it rears up on your watch. If we aren’t prepared to die for certain principles we have no principles at all.

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Half-Light of the Antichrists

Tags

arms business, Bush, Crimea, dick cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Electric, government corruption, Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Military-industrial complex, Moscow, nuclear holocaust, oligarchy, paul william roberts, privatization of military, putin, Russia, russian collusion, russian spies, Syria conflict, the Ukraine, the United States, threat of war, trump, war-business, war-profiteering

 

 

 

Perhaps Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are not exactly friends in the normal sense of the word – which in any case is not something either man would understand less still seek – but let us theorise that they’re comrades-in-arms, at least inasmuch as they both represent an autocratic oligarchy which sees itself, and always has seen itself as rightful rulers of the earth. Accepting for the sake of hypothesis that this is so, what, you rightly ask, does either of them stand to gain from threatening a nuclear holocaust that would effectively render this planet uninhabitable for millions of years — unless of course you’re a hardy, adaptable and fairly basic organism? What indeed? As we stand at the threshold of what could well be the most serious east-west debacle since the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early sixties, it is worth looking at the benefits to both sides of, not actually going to war but of appearing to be contemplating it. I doubt if any government on the planet believes a nuclear war is winnable or even feasible – and this would probably be because it isn’t. Why then hold the constant threat of one over our heads, and spend trillions of dollars annually on preparing for one? What possible reason could there be for such insanity?

 

Here’s what. Firstly, it is a universally agreed truism that the most frightened populations always elect the strongest, most militaristic governments to protect them from usually unwarrantable fears. While this won’t affect Putin’s transparently phony democracy, the success or failure of Trump’s considerably less malleable but still far from truly democratic one will affect them both, for good or for ill. Secondly, the most profitable businesses in both Russia and America are involved in what we can loosely term the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC), or in other words the privatized military-supply game, whose products now range from meals-ready-to-eat to missiles ready to fire (at $150,000 a pop). No product is so good a money-earner than a bullet or a missile, and everything in between that can only be used once before you need to order more. Now, both Trump and Putin are heavily invested in MIC companies, from, in America, Halliburton – once run by George Bush Junior’s VP Dick Cheney – to major hardware-builders like Lockheed-Martin and General Electric, for which Bush Junior’s Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld once worked in a senior capacity. In Russia the names are less familiar to us, but their owners or majority-shareholders are the same crew of oligarchs – some in Putin’s case operating partly as frontmen for him. Knowing this perhaps helps us to understand the continued and ubiquitous prevalence over the past seventy-odd years of wars around the globe, as well as the ceaseless threat of a superpower conflagration. That dwindled almost to nothing over the last twenty years, after the Soviet Union collapsed into bankruptcy, and the lull in business was clearly so disastrous that George Bush Senior even had to privatize the more mundane and utilitarian aspects of the lucrative army-supply business just to keep the dollars flowing into the hands of his friends and cronies. Even food was handed over to corporations like Halliburton, whereas things like peeling spuds were once an internal affair, and a useful punishment too. You’d think that security was one matter the army could definitely take care of itself; but no, now it is in the hands of private companies, whose operatives are paid ten times what the grunts get, and are also answerable to no government office at home. In Iraq, for example, these operatives robbed, raped and murdered with apparent impunity (at least none of them has yet be tried in a court of law). Putin et al were similarly busy in the resurrected and profligately capitalist Russia. One great advantage in this kind of business transaction is that the buyer never questions a seller’s price. It’s just taxpayers’ money so who cares?

 

It thus seems to me obvious that the astronomical profits to be made from war and, better still, the threat of war will be irresistibly attractive to those with the contacts and the funds to get involved in such enterprises – and usually to get involved fairly surreptitiously, so conflicts of interest and galloping corruption can be easily and vituperatively denied. Under Putin’s cunning aegis, the Russians got deep into cyberwarfare long before anyone else saw the virtues in it – and the results of this can now be seen almost daily in the west.

 

Those who imagine things are so much better in Canada ought to think again. Compared with the hundreds of millions spent on worthy projects, the hundreds of billions, or even the trillions spent on machines or weapons of death take up a goodly portion of the GDP – or to put it more bluntly our tax dollars. Do we really know who the actual recipients of this largesse are? In some cases we do a little. But mostly we don’t. I have always thought that a useful thesis topic would be the study of and interrelationships found in the boards of certain mega-corporations. When I briefly and cursorily looked into it back in the nineties I was struck by the multiple presence of the same names on different but equally significant boards. Then there were the monikers of certain individuals with profound contacts in the Canadian government registered on the boards of US companies with who Canada was doing very big business. I imagine that the same thing would be true today. Although now more than then it must be remembered that corporate loyalties are not national but transnational. They go wherever the money goes; yet that still does not mean a board member cannot make a vast profit by urging a deal between his or her native Canada and another entity based elsewhere. In fact the rise and rise of interglobal finance makes all kinds of skullduggery and fiscal flimflam easier rather than more difficult to enact. I wish some enterprising post-grad student would pick up this study of what is essentially who runs what and run with it themselves.

 

To conclude the hypothesis: Over the past few years we’ve seen Putin’s Russia almost gleefully willing to play the bad guy, the provocateur and belligerent, whether in Crimea, the Ukraine, England, Syria or in America herself. Why such shamelessly provocative and hostile acts? Well, it could be in wise recognition of the fact that America is far better at playing the alleged good guy in international squabbles and conflicts, since this is what plays well with the notoriously fickle US public. And it certainly adds to Putin’s domestic prestige as tough guy, standing up to the motherland’s incessant bullying by western powers. A friend of mine in Moscow tells me that Putin now genuinely believes his new and improved nukes can slide in the US undetected and impossible to intercept. I doubt it, but much of chess is bluff – and Russia always turns out grand master after grand master. All we can be sure of is that the endless threats, provocations and proxy wars will continue, and continue to make trillions for those in the war-facilitation business. The pity is that we, the people seem incapable of putting a stop to our end of this despicable trade and those involved in it.

 

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

Vimy Ridge and the Next Hot War

Tags

jacques parizeau, justin trudeau, montreal, NATO, pacifism, putin, vimy, world war III

 

Quebec wants to rename Vimy Park in Montreal after the late separatist premier, Jacques Parizeau. Canada is griping about the dishonour to those 10,000-odd Canadian soldiers who were killed or wounded during one of the most ferocious battles of World War I. It begs many questions, but perhaps the most important is the issue of commemorating a senseless slaughter of conscripted troops who were not asked if they wanted to support the British in a pointless struggle that ought never to have been started and went on murderously for many years too long. Prominent voices denounced it early, and a number were jailed for their honesty. My grandfather fought in Flanders, so I grew up on stories of that most horrendous of wars, with its tens of millions dead. It seems to be equated now with World War II, yet there was nothing like the justification existing for stopping Hitler, whose very existence can be ascribed to the inequity with which Germany was treated after the first war – in which the German army felt itself confident of victory until being told by the government to surrender ignominiously. Understandably, many Quebeckers had no desire to fight for Britain, and, among the many evils of war, conscription is one of the greatest, violating all our current notions of human rights. It has always struck me that the way to forget the actuality of something is to erect a memorial to it. A park named ‘Vimy’ acknowledges nothing about the realities of that wicked, unnecessary war, beyond the name of a battle, which is also ridiculously enshrined among the useless artifacts that aspiring Canadian citizens are expected to memorize as a signal part of their new country’s more inglorious past. I am not particularly a separatist, but I do recognize Quebec’s right to view history in a somewhat different light. The French-Canadians who died or were mutilated at Vimy were many, and the obliteration of this stupid park is the commemoration of a greater tragedy, the forced servitude of men to die in a cause for which they had no passion or even concern. I deplore our ongoing participation in celebrating the barbarism of all wars. As Aldous Huxley noted, a war to save democracy sounds good, but once you have centralized a command system necessary to fight any war, instituted conscription, interned foreign nationals, and done all the other vile things essential – you no longer have a democracy to save. As Tolstoy said, war is the greatest of all crimes, because it contains all other crimes – murder, rape, arson, robbery, even counterfeiting, and so on. All the more disturbing is it to see this once-pacific country urged towards another war, with the usual devices or fear and fake jingoism.

When I hear of this nation’s indigenous peoples’ plight, or that of our urban poor and dispossessed, and then hear of the plans to spend many billions on new warplanes and ships, I despair. And now the the drumbeat to join NATO in defending Eastern Europe against Russian aggression – WTF? For a start, aggression doesn’t stop aggression, it incites it. And a few hundred troops in Latvia, or wherever, will stop the Russian armies for a day at the most, should they invade. The last time NATO badgered us into joining a brief peace-keeping mission was in Afghanistan, and it ended up as five years of armed conflict, with much loss of life. Are we deluded enough to be bullied into this again? Fighting the Taliban and sundry medieval warlords will be nothing like fighting the Russians in conventional warfare. The escalation of such a war would be unthinkable – Russia still has enough intercontinental ballistic nuclear warheads to destroy the planet several times over. Yet in contemplating this extreme folly Justin Trudeau, and his defense minister, are surely forced to think of the unthinkable. If the unstable Premier Putin ignores a NATO threat, what then? Who is that next decision up to? Not Canada, to be sure. With Europe in various forms of turmoil, and the US in its usual blindly belligerent mayhem, do we really want to support a NATO, and how does it benefit us if we do? No one will survive a nuclear war, and NATO does not possess the troops necessary to fight Russia in a conventional war. What then? Did we elect the wrong Trudeau brother? – for Sasha has seen war in Iraq, and, I think, understands the realities of armed conflict better than hail-fellow-well-met Justin.

If we wish to disassociate ourselves from the colonial past – and we do – why be coerced into Euro-American neo-imperialism? For such it is. In supporting various petty nationalist aspirations approved by Washington, we seem to be unable to see or approve of the same thing done by Russia. Syria is just a Russian client, and Moscow’s confounding policies there demonstrate that. The Baltic countries have, on and off, been part of a Russian or Soviet imperium, as the Ukraine has been. American interest in these regions is purely self-serving and cares not a jot for realities or national aspirations. The Baltic states did not seem to object especially to Nazi domination, and indeed happily participated in very early stages of the Holocaust. Russian domination may seem like Hades to someone in Idaho, but it will be business as usual in Latvia. Why interfere when the interference is only in the interests of US strategic hegemony?

I would suggest that we do not need an aggressive army in Canada, with warplanes and a nuclear navy, but, since we are supposedly a democracy, why do we not demand a plebiscite on the issue? An army to make peace and assist with disasters, or one to make war and create more disasters in the process? Many billions spent with Lockheed-Martin, Boeimg, or other Masters of Death, or else those billions spent at home where they are sorely needed? A peace-loving nation, or a belligerent punk, a wannabe superpower? We the people ought to choose who and what we are. If I was not blind, I would start a petition right now – but someone ought to. The choice seems obvious to me, and it is, after all, our tax money – but put it to a vote and let’s see.

If Putin moves to regain the old Soviet Empire, and to boost his own flagging reputation, how will he be stopped? Exactly. The best-case scenario in that event is more memorials to the dead, ignoring the scandalous futility of their deaths. With the West in an incessant economic chaos, the incentives to war are great: the Masters of Death make vast profits and employ many.  But those, like me, familiar with the truths of nuclear war, although we may now number few, can assure everyone that no climate change will be as climactically changed as a Nuclear Winter. It is extinction, the survival of a few we now think least fit – organisms able to thrive on atomic radiation.

We have no enemies in this wonderful country – except ourselves, perhaps — so let’s keep it that way, and then hope for the best, knowing we have behaved as best we could under the circumstances. At least those Russian missiles won’t be directed at the Great Lakes, as once they were.

 

Paul William Roberts