No Money For The Poor, Plenty For War

Yesterday Europe agreed to waive its strict budget limits to spend eight hundred and eighty eight billion euros on new weapons systems, missiles, tanks, drones and fighter jets.

This embrace of financial imprudence came less than a decade after many of these same leaders plunged their own member state, Greece, into penury for not doing austerity hard enough.

Neoliberalism is a sickness.

An ideology obsessed with taking away benefits from poor and disabled people and cutting social spending, but which finds unlimited money to buy killing machines and weapons of war.

And yesterday we saw how deeply this sickness is embedded in the bones of the neoliberal managers of our societies.

In 2015 the Greek government held a referendum on whether to move forward with spending cuts demanded by the EU in exchange for bailout loans. Sixty percent of people voted no to more cuts. The EU immediately said it would withdraw all funding for Greece, effectively threatening to drop a financial nuclear bomb on the country. The government backed down, imposed cuts of thirteen billion euros to health, wages and pensions while privatising huge sections of the economy.

The subsequent years saw suicides in Greece skyrocket by a massive forty percent as huge numbers of people lost their jobs, many of them in the public sector. Millions were pushed into desperate poverty.

Now these same leaders who ignored Greek democracy because it defied their ideology, who through austerity kill their own citizens, tell us that money is no object in the supposed defence of democracy and the citizenry.

The same leaders who for years have told European countries they can’t break strict fiscal rules to spend money on public goods have decided that the one industry for which these rules can be broken is the arms industry.

Leaders like Kier Starmer, who last week cut the UK’s aid budget, slashing money for the world’s poorest people by the largest amount in history to pay for murder weapons. A leader planning more domestic austerity to pay for arms.

They tell us there is no other choice.

As if peace with Russia isn’t a choice that can be made.

These same centrist liberals who tell us that peace isn’t a choice, that it would ‘reward Putin’s aggression’ rewarded George W Bush's aggression with full rehabilitation, Blair's aggression by making him the Middle East envoy, Obama's aggression with Netflix contracts and Biden's aggression with fealty.

Do they see their rotten, rank hypocrisy in any of this?

Do we not see how perverted, how twisted the western value system is?

Do we not see how it appears we in the west love war? How we love it not as an abstraction, but how we truly love to kill people?

In just the last 20 years Americans and Europeans have killed millions of people. Beheaded them, disembowelled them, tortured them, men, women and children alike. So many children. And babies. With absolutely zero consequence. Zero fucking consequence.

You can listen to Obama, a guy who bombed wedding parties in Afghanistan and Yemen, who murdered entire families and slaughtered a bride and groom on their wedding day, now tell you about the extraordinary lives of blue whales.

And they dare to moralise about ‘rewarding aggression.’

America has a global empire and one hundred and twenty eight overseas military bases without firing a shot I guess.

The impunity of it all. It’s a fucking sickness.

From the illegal war on Iraq which some estimates say killed one million people, to the overthrow of the Libyan government which transformed the most prosperous country in north Africa to the poorest, to the utter depravity and ultra violence of the genocide in Gaza.

It honestly looks like white westerners love killing the demonised other.

Now we are being enjoined to see massive anti-Russia militarisation as good and moral and upstanding and purely defensive because good old white Europeans would never wage war. Oh no!

Never!

If we have to wage war, it is purely and absolutely only in defence of the poor old put upon nations of Europe and America.

We promise!

Do we not see how deranged our promises and protestations might look to someone on the other side of the equation?

Do we not see the bone deep racism and the selective morality?

Do we not see the undisguised xenophobia?

We have to talk about this xenophobia, this warmongering xenophobia.

Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland and former head of the EU’s European Council tweeted this the other day:

Can you believe it? Lunatic levels of Russophobia and the stirring of hate in service of militarisation.

You could pick any moment of twentieth century history to whip up warmongering sentiment against almost any western country. You could talk about Britain’s concentration camps in South Africa and India which murdered millions, you could flame anti-German sentiment by talking about the six million dead in the Holocaust. You could tweet that on August 6th 1945 Washington DC made the decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and murder eighty thousand Japanese civilians within minutes. You could say that this was a warning to the world never to be friends with America.

What are Tusk’s words supposed to achieve?

Aggression, anti-Russian fever. The manufacturing of consent for militarisation. For war.

Then yesterday he tweeted this:

Unhinged, bloodthirsty.

Arms race? Like the Soviet Union?

The collapse of the Soviet Union after the Cold War arms race was one of the worst humanitarian disasters in human history. The average life span of a Russian shrunk to 57 years old and hundreds of millions were immiserated while a few oligarchs consolidated unprecedented wealth and power.

I am afraid that Europeans are too propagandised for peace.

I am afraid many truly believe Russia is going to invade Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and then move on to Poland and then Germany and then France and then England.

I am afraid they know nothing.

That they can’t see their projections for what they are.

I am afraid we are walking towards world war three.

In response to a tweet I wrote about asking people in favour of this militarisation to think about who dies in wars, someone said “Russians, hopefully lots of Russians.”

I am afraid that in the west we truly do love to kill people.

Because the extreme militarisation of Europe obviously raises not lessens the risk of war. Finland is now in NATO. It has a one thousand mile border with Russia. A border that will now be heavily armed. It will only take one misunderstanding, one miscommunication, one faulty radar reading on this border to risk war world three.

And for what?

For what?!

Because we refuse to understand that we aren’t the only big swinging dick in the playground. Because we refuse to understand security requires compromise and dialogue, not militarisation.

What would America do if there were Russian and Chinese troops on the borders of Mexico and Canada? What would Europe do if Ireland, Portugal and Finland were allied with Russia and China and the EU was encircled by ‘enemy’ troops? Or is only one side allowed to legitimately fear for its safety?

The entitlement and superiority complex of the average white American or European is stunning.

And liberal leaders like Tusk have the shamelessness to talk only now, as he also did the other day, about the end of the ‘rules-based international order’ after supplying the weapons and political cover for a genocide.

Disgusting.

But Nate, what would you do? Putin invaded Ukraine!

I’m sure in the propaganda addled brain of the average westerner what I’m going to say next makes me a Putin apologist or a Trump appeaser.

But here goes.

In 1990 the US and western European countries all promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward. This was a promise repeated on multiple occasions to secure Soviet agreement for a unified Germany. Then NATO expanded to Russia’s borders, with only two of these accessions ratified by referendums. Other referendums on NATO membership failed or, in the case of most like all those on Russia’s border, people were never asked. In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Treaty they’d signed with Russia. Then, having done this, they put missiles that could hit Moscow in five minutes on Russia’s border in the new NATO countries. In 2014 the US supported the overthrow of Yanukovych, the (extremely corrupt) president of Ukraine who had committed Ukraine to neutrality. His replacement committed Ukraine to NATO, a long standing Russian red line. The history of Ukraine’s Maidan ‘revolution’ of 2014 is contested, but there’s no question that the outcome favoured (and funded) by the west happened. And we can’t ignore the messy history of Ukraine in all of this. The country is divided along social and cultural lines, with support split pretty much down the middle between those who support Europe and those who support Russia.

If you only read mainstream news sources you might be unfamiliar with these facts. Maybe they are uncomfortable. But they are facts and they are historical context almost entirely ignored in the story of how we ended up in this moment.

(This ten minute video by Professor Jeffery Sachs of Columbia University outlining the buried history of Ukraine, Russia and the west is worth a watch).

None of this is to justify anything. War is the worst thing that can happen to people. It is shit, horrendous, grotesque. It is the singular worst evil that humans can do to each other. It is the mass, orchestrated, strategic murder of young working men who, as in the case of Ukraine and Russia, have no choice. Mass murder which in 2025 is achieved using the most despicable weaponry ever invented. ‘Switchblade’ drones. ‘Loitering’ munitions. ‘Hellfire’ missiles. Young working men conscripted to be meat shields for rich, cosseted, powerful men.

But once it has started the only thing we should think about is how to stop it, not how to prolong it.

All wars end with a peace agreement. All of them. That agreement comes after either a protracted, violent stalemate with neither side making gains and thousands dead. Or it comes after one side has been thoroughly eviscerated and destroyed with usually millions dead and one or multiple countries in ruins.

Once war has started, these are the only two choices there can ever be.

And the neoliberals in the US and Europe, as Tusk explicitly said, seem to be gleefully backing the latter: the total destruction and collapse of Russia using Ukrainian men, and maybe eventually men from across Europe as fodder for this goal.

Personally I know one thing for certain: when the headlines are full of pro-war agitation, when those who hold onto anti-war ideals are shamed as weak and pathetic, that is the moment to resist the drum beats. I know that when the voices of war become the loudest voices on our screens, that is the moment to double down on pro-social, pro-human, anti-war principles.

No to an arms race.

Yes to peace.

End the killing.

Stop the war.