SCF Editorial
January 02, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "SCF"
-- As this year ends, U.S. President Joe
Biden signed into law military spending of $770
billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The
scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is
eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is
willing to invest for overhauling its badly
neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating
the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more
people in the U.S. than in any other nation.
If there is one thing that portends a historic
collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological
addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital
resources.
What is also amazing is how this gargantuan
deformity in economic planning is presented as
somehow rational and normal by the Western media.
Three decades after the Cold War officially
ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for
annual expenditure on its armed forces.
Biden’s
budget – his first as president – exceeds the
record set by the previous Trump administration for
military largesse of $740 billion.
So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity
– as is the international tradition at this time of
year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque
amount of resources to the means of war and
annihilation.
This obscene expenditure is not in any way
conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in
Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable
war budget.
The United States spends more on its military
than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with
China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times
bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than
Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.
Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which
nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically,
the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion
portray China and Russia as the aggressors against
whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of
the world.
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Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),
as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to
devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China
and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric,
there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence
Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense
Initiative”.
The Biden administration has committed a further
$300 million in military support for Ukraine over
the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in
arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since
the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which
brought to power a Russophobic regime.
Next week, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold
negotiations in Geneva to deescalate tensions over
Ukraine and Europe generally. It is blindingly
obvious that the crisis over security has been
created by the United States pushing a policy of
militarizing Europe against Russia in the form of
expanding the NATO alliance all the way to Russia’s
borders.
With twisted logic, Moscow is accused of
“threatening” Ukraine and European security even
though its troops are on Russian soil and it is
American weapons that are encroaching on Russia’s
territory.
The inordinate military spending by the United
States year after year is proof of the source of
international tensions.
When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991
following the demise of the Soviet Union, there was
a reasonable expectation around the world for a
“peace dividend” to ensue. That is, whereby Cold War
militarism would at last give way to peaceful
economic development and cooperation. How lamentable
the disappointment!
The inescapable fact is that the U.S. economy is
a war-driven system. The military-industrial complex
at the heart of American capitalism is dependent on
massive taxpayer-funded financial subvention. If an
economy is driven for war, then it follows that
conflicts and wars are inevitable. This is why, 30
years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the
United States is closer to starting a war with
Russia and China than ever before.
In an insightful
interview this week, former United Nations
diplomat Alfred Maurice de Zayas condemned what he
called the “universal provocation” of the US “war
budget”. De Zayas points out that the United States
is preeminently guilty of undermining global peace
and security. Its relentless militarism compels
other nations to spend excessively on defense in
order to counter the threat posed by the United
States. Both China and Russia have long-proposed
multilateralism and “win-win” cooperation. Neither
of these nations has threatened the United States.
It is always the U.S. with its mixture of paranoia
and hubris that constantly portrays others as
enemies and existential dangers. Again, that is due
to the need for justifying the abomination of
American military orgy year after year.
The truth is the United States has been at war
against the rest of the world since at least the end
of the Second World War. For most of that period,
the Cold War, Washington cited the threat of Soviet
and Chinese communism. It waged wars in dozens of
countries on every continent killing tens of
millions of people purportedly in the “defense of
democracy and the free world”. How godawful
ridiculous is that?
The Cold War was supposed to have ended, yet the
U.S. continues its remorseless warmongering. It
retreated from Afghanistan this year after two
decades of futile war, only to now wind up tensions
with Russia and China. The pretexts and excuses
change over the decades, but the fundamental story
remains the same: the United States is at war with
the rest of the world in the vain ambition of
exerting hegemonic domination. Arguably, that’s an
essential definition of fascism.
But it’s not just against the rest of the world
that the U.S. rulers are waging war. They are waging
war against their own American citizens. The
Washington elite of both parties (comprising the de
facto War Party) whistle through a military budget
funded by taxpayers that dwarves anything the
federal government is prepared to spend on societal
infrastructure and decent human development.
Far above any other nation, the U.S. has a
pandemic killing nearly 850,000 people so far and
there is no end in sight. U.S. rulers refuse to
allocate more financial help to the population to
defeat the pandemic yet they are planning to spend
billions on offensive weapons systems to threaten
Russia and China.
The hideously perverse priorities of the United
States as demonstrated by its wanton militarism are
a portent and ultimate cause of its historic
failure. It is a vile disgrace that the apparent
solution to its inherent contradictions is to start
a catastrophic war. Fortunately, Russia and China
are strong enough militarily to not let that happen.
And so the outcome we will witness more of over the
coming year will be the United States cratering from
its own internal corruption.
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