What is the war mongering all about?

“The future battlefield” said Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonsson in an interview in Svenska Dagbladet on 2 August last year – as if it were already on the calendar. The Government-sponsored People and Defence meeting in January was full of even more alarmist statements. Of course, Russia was in the firing line.

But no-one can believe that Russia, which has such problems with Ukraine – a quarter of its size – would voluntarily go to war with the whole of Western Europe plus the US, together eight times its size? There must be something else behind all the war mongering.

Six suggestions:

Peace and Just Climate Transition Now!

Come join and build a movement for peace on Earth and peace with the Earth. Now we must come together locally, nationally and internationally for a ceasefire and peace negotiations in all wars, for concrete solutions to climate problems and for a fair distribution of resources.

Militarization all over the world is consuming enormous resources needed to solve the climate crisis and other major problems of our time. To continue to devastate and exploit the natural resources as if they were infinite makes the planet uninhabitable. Life itself is threatened.

We cannot continue to live as if there are numerous globes. Energy use must be greatly reduced both through energy-efficient technology and an energy-efficient lifestyle. We must have a resource-saving society. That requires fundamental change of the economic system and the society–a change for the better for those living in rural and urban areas and those working in agriculture, forestry, industry and service sectors.

War means that people are killed, injured and traumatized. People are forced to flee. Homes, communal buildings and infrastructure are destroyed. The environment is damaged by pollution, mines and bombs. War leads to military rearmament, it creates enemy images and builds fences between people. Instead we need to build peace.

We invite individuals and organizations to come along and create a people’s campaign for peace and justice. We need to build bridges to live together and be able to work together to solve the climate problems. We must create a dignified life all on our planet. We must work together to secure the food supply and save on our resources. We want the billions for military rearmament directed instead climate, schools, healthcare and social care.

Peace and just climate transition now!
Disarmament – for the environment and welfare!
For a just world!

Stockholm Peace Association/Working group for peace and just climate change
Friends of the Earth Sweden/Peace Committee
Artists for Peace
Fridays for Future Lund

What’s the war rhetorics about?

“It is very important that the NATO allies have the technological advantage on the future battlefield”, said Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonsson in Svenska Dagbladet last autumn. The future battlefield, in definite form, as if it were a matter of course. And the Folk och Försvar (People and Defence) conference in January was just as inflammatory.

”There could be a war in Sweden,” said Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin. ”Russia’s war is a step, not an end goal,” said Commander-in-Chief Micael Bydén. ”War in Europe, with the possibility of further escalation in a short time, is today a reality”, said Thomas Nilsson from MUST (Military Intelligence Bureau).

Most alarmed is Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of NATO’s military committee, who urges the people of NATO to be ready for a major war at any time; ”we must be prepared for anything to happen at any time”.

Now they hardly believe that Russia will attack us. Russia has had great difficulty dealing with Ukraine, a country with a third of Russia’s population and a quarter of its economic capacity. So far the war has cost Russia 60-120,000 deaths. Does anyone seriously believe that it will immediately attack the NATO countries, which have eight times the population of Russia and 25 times its economic capacity? When the current war also shows that defence is now much stronger than attack?

Conversely, do the NATO admiral, the Swedish commander-in-chief and the Swedish ministers think that NATO is just waiting to pounce on Russia? That sounds equally far-fetched. Admittedly, I have no great respect for the wisdom of the ruling class, but they probably understand as well as you and I that this would easily trigger a nuclear war that would wreak such havoc in the NATO countries that their own existence would be jeopardised.

So what is it all about?

Has Hamas thought beyond moralism?

Few things demonstrate the double standards and hypocrisy of the liberal establishment as much as the Palestinian conflict. For decades, Israel has killed about 20 times more Palestinians than Palestinians have killed Israelis. But this has never met with any condemnation, only regret, sometimes. When a Palestinian organisation attacks and kills Israelis, however, there is no end to the condemnation – and hatred.

That said, there is a big question mark over the Hamas attack.

Europe gets Black Peter?

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admits what insightful people knew more than six months ago: NATO has no ability to provide Ukraine with the ammunition it needs to wage war; that capability has been outsourced. Thus, NATO’s promise to do so was a sham that has tricked Ukraine into sacrificing a few hundred thousand lives for nothing.

Why do the media help?

On 23 October 2002, Chechen separatists took the audience of the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow hostage. Russian security forces rushed there to punish the separatists. A total of 170 people were killed by gas, including 130 hostages. The world was stunned by the Russian brutality.

Now it is Western Europeans and North Americans who are brutal. There must be no talk of peace in Ukraine; no, Russia must be punished. Even if it requires hundreds of thousands of unintended casualties (mostly Ukrainans).

The US would benefit from losing the dollar as a world currency

Some suspect that NATO’s (i.e. the US) militancy on the Ukraine issue, plus military build-up in general, has to do with fears that control over world finance is slipping away. The renminbi is still a long way from replacing the dollar but is being used in more and more international financial transactions.

In many ways, the US has itself to blame. The fact that it arbitrarily steals countries’ dollar balances has made more and more people reluctant to hold dollar accounts. Not least China itself. But French President Macron has also expressed a desire to move away from dollar dependency. As have many other heads of state.

As uncomfortable as this may be for US self-confidence, it may still be a blessing in disguise. At least that’s the view of Per Lindvall, who (building on Zoltan Poszar at Credit Suisse) points out how access to easy credit has driven their industry out of the market. This is what is known as the ‘Dutch disease‘. Another historical example could be when Spain’s access to cheap South American silver meant that it did not invest in domestic production capacity and in a hundred years turned into a poor agricultural country.

Of course, such things hit unevenly. US rentiers probably benefit from not having to deal with complicated production processes, while the majority of the population suffers from unemployment and falling wages. As long as the rentiers are in power, the government will continue to defend the international status of the dollar. To the ruin of the country.

US loses also for energy reasons

A while ago I asked the question whether war in Ukraine was even worthwhile for the US and the answer was no. They may be upset that their position as the world’s Big Brother is being increasingly undermined, but gunplay doesn’t help at all. That position is always achieved, I said, referring to a book by George Modelski and William Thompson, by leading technological development and also having something to offer others.

However, Mr Thompson later completed the picture, together with Leila Zakhirova. The pretender to become the world’s Big Brother must also have access to a new, more efficient energy source in order to afford to do what it wants, plus use it in conjunction with technological innovations that make the pretender more efficient. Holland developed windmills and torrefaction and used this to mechanise shipyards, among other things. England developed coal in conjunction with steam engines. The USA developed oil in conjunction with internal combustion engines and assembly lines. Perhaps because of the failure to find such an energy-technology symbiosis, the brilliant developments in Song-era China eventually dried up.

So what will happen in the future?

Who will “win” in Ukraine?

To answer the headline question, we must first of all recognise that ‘winning’ means very different things to the states involved. For Russia and Ukraine, it means being left alone. Russia, too, is a poor, comparatively backward country with little ability to project much power beyond its borders and therefore cannot hope for much more than to be left alone, at least for the foreseeable future. For the state that has played a major role in the development of the crisis, namely the United States, it means preserving its global hegemony.

Does it have any chance of doing this? This question is not easy to answer, but it can be helped by studying the rise and fall of various hegemonic powers in the past.

This is what George Modelski and William R. Thompson did in their 1996 book Leading sectors and world powers. They start with the Song era in China a thousand years ago and continue until the end of the 20th century.

What they find is this.

World Social Forum comes closer to heaven

(Thanks a lot Tord for this article. Do please change one more sentence: “a working group has been set up to start a permanent assembly calling itself World Assembly of Struggles and Resistance of the WSF” should be: A permanent assembly has been set up, calling itself.. etc)

Two significant renewals of the World Social Forum process is now taking place. In February 2022 Asia Pacific Forum took place primarily on the net with a base in Bangkok. This was a meeting in its own right but also an attempt to build strength towards organizing a WSF in the Asian region. In September 2022 a seminar took place in Tunis on how to make the WSF process more effective for movements to converge and make decisions while maintaining the open space character of the WSF as a whole. This by creating a permament assembly of movements thus making it better prepared and able to follow up on desicions made. The two initiatives are now building a momentum together to revitalize the World Social Forum process.

One result is that the next World Social Forum (WSF) 2024 is planned to take place close to the top of the world in Nepal. Supported by movements all over Asia Nepalese organizations have presented a well a politically and practically plan for the International Council of WSF. It was supported by all present at the International Council of WSF meeting 16th of February.