Letters from Vienna #25
Rumours of War
“Arms makers engineer “war scares.”” H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen wrote in their 1934 book: “Merchants of Death”. “They excite governments and peoples to fear their neighbours and rivals, so that they may sell more armaments. This is an old practice worked often in Europe before the World War and still in use. Bribery is frequently closely associated with war scares. Both are well illustrated in the Seletzki scandal in Rumania. Bruno Seletzki (or Zelevski) was the Skoda agent in Rumania.”
“In March, 1933, the Rumanian authorities discovered that this Czech firm had evaded taxes to the extent of 65 million lei. In searching Seletzki’s files, secret military documents were found which pointed to espionage. The files were sealed and Seletzki’s affairs were to undergo a thorough “airing.””
“A few days later the seals were found broken and many documents were missing. Seletzki was now held for trial and his files were carefully examined. The findings at that time pointed to widespread corruption of important government and army officials. Sums amounting to more than a billion lei had been distributed among the “right” officials, hundreds of thousands had been given to “charity” or spent on “entertainment,” because the persons receiving these sums “will be used by us some day.””
“The war-scare of 1930 was revealed as a device to secure Rumanian armament orders, for Russia at that time was represented as ready to invade Bessarabia, and Rumania was pictured as helpless against this threat; all the hysteria vanished over night when Skoda was given large armament orders by the Rumanian government. General Popescu who was involved shot himself in his study and other officials were exceedingly nervous about the revelations which might yet come. It was never revealed who Seletzki’s friends in the Rumanian government had been.”[1]
“War” General Smedley Butler wrote a year later “is a racket. It always has been.”
“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
“In the World War I a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.”[2]
Jim MacGregor and Gerry Docherty’s excellent book: “Prolonging the Agony” deals in great depth, in every sense of the word, with how the First World War was deliberately prolonged for the sake of profit. Thus, American cotton and British and coal were exported to Scandinavian countries, which were simply re-exported to Germany,[3] while the French relinquished control of and made no serious attempt to recapture the iron mines of Brion-Thionville, which were indispensable to the German war effort[4].
Anthony Samson’s “The Arms Bazaar” and Andrew Feinstein’s “The Shadow World” make abundantly clear that nothing has fundamentally changed in the intervening century. “Global military expenditure is estimated to have totalled $1.6tn. in 2010, $235 for every person on the planet. This is an increase of 53 percent since 2000 and accounts for 2.6 percent of global domestic profit. Today, the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on national security with a defence budget of over $703bn. the trade in conventional arms, both big and small, is worth about $60bn. a year.”[5]
With this wealth of experience and knowledge from the past it oughtn’t be too difficult to deduce why exactly there should be a war-scare concerning the Ukraine and why Bloomberg worries about a Russian invasion.
“As of this writing, Europe wasn’t at war over Ukraine, but the situation is fluid” Mark Gongloff an editor at Bloomberg noted. “Russia keeps denying its plans to invade its neighbour, but U.S. officials warn it could do just that any minute now, possibly before the Olympic closing ceremonies.”
“One cliched journalistic response to such events is to ask who wins and who loses. The short answer here is that everybody loses. This may cost me some subscribers, but war is bad, in my opinion. There are different levels of losing, however. Ukraine will be the biggest, most obvious loser.”[6]
The BBC also posed the question of whether Russia would invade the Ukraine and lamented that the human cost would be immense:
“Are Russian forces getting ready for war in Ukraine? At least 130,000 Russian troops are positioned within reach of Ukraine’s borders as Russia demands security guarantees from the West.”
“While the US says Russian forces are ready to launch military action any day, Moscow has repeatedly said it has no such plans and points to the withdrawal of some units. What happens next could jeopardize Europe’s entire security structure.”[7]
“It feels like a scene from the Cold War.” The New York Times reported “An unpredictable Russian leader amassing troops and tanks on a neighbour’s border. The threat of a bloody East-West conflagration.”
“But what seems like a perilous episode from a bygone era is now front and centre in global affairs. After a meeting with European leaders on Feb. 11, the White House warned that Russia could start a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in less than a week.”[8]
The Ukraine is not that far away from where I sit and gaze out of my window on this beautiful, sunny winter’s day. Merely 824 miles or 1326 km separate Kiev from Vienna. Indeed, the provinces of Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia once constituted parts of the Habsburg Empire and a Uniate or Greek Catholic Church can still be found in the heart of Vienna. One can hear Russian or Ukrainian (if much actually separates the two) on the street outside.
According to Paul Craig Roberts: “Washington’s refusal to accommodate Russia’s security concerns” is “totally irresponsible. By denying security guarantees to Russia, Washington essentially told the Kremlin that Washington intends to locate nuclear missiles on Russia’s borders and to use colour revolutions among former Russian provinces to destabilise the Russian Federation. In other words, Washington has shown that the US represents a life-threatening hostility to Russia.”
“Russia is not going to sit and wait for that to happen. Ukraine most certainly will not be permitted to be a member of NATO. Russia would reincorporate Ukraine into Russia rather than permit that to happen. No US or NATO missile bases will be permitted in Ukraine. If they are there or are put there, they will be destroyed.”[9]
The advantage of being old is that I remember perfectly well when the Americans once promised that NATO would never advance eastward. Yet it has done so, repeatedly. And anybody who thinks NATO benign need only study its brutal and murderous war of aggression against what is now former Yugoslavia.
Ukraine was never merely a distant province of the Russian Empire: it always represented the heart of what was once “Kiev Russ”. In addition to that: the elevation of the Ukraine from the status of a province to that of a state has always had more to do with geopolitical chess than anything else. Rarely were the differing and complex interests or desires of the people who actually live there consulted or considered.
In the 1990s Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”[10]
In the autumn of 2019 Eva Bartlett went to the region and focused on the alternative narrative, the one deliberately suppressed by the MSM (Main Stream Media). She spoke to Dmitry Astrakhan, a press officer in the DPR (Donetz People’s Republic) People’s Militia.
“I had a normal job and life,” Dmitry Astrakhan stated, “I wasn’t very political. In the beginning, people were mainly just struggling for our rights: the right to speak our language, Russian; the right to have education in our language, to keep the memory of WW2 — because Ukraine started re-writing history. They now consider those Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with German Nazis heroes, and the Red Army occupiers. We can’t accept this.”
“I never believed there would be a war, I didn’t believe the Western world would allow this. I thought it would just be some protests, some compromises, but not war. I thought people were being paranoid at first, thinking we would be killed. But they were right, and when the war started, I knew there were things worth fighting for.”
“The OSCE were attacked a week or so ago by a heavy anti-tank rocket launcher. Ukraine commits many war crimes but manages to mask it. They are Nazis, but they mask this from the West. Few people understand in the West how close Ukraine is to becoming a full-on Nazi state.”
“They say that they are from Bandera Front, they are Ukrainian far-right nationalists. When a person from some Western country hears about Bandera, this person could not understand what Ukrainian authorities mean. But I do, I understand what they mean, I understand who Bandera was and what they really mean.”
“There is a Nazi state in the middle of Europe in the 21st Century. They are dangerous both for us and for the Western world. If they finish with us, they will do the same in the Western world.”
“Ukraine has a big propaganda machine, and the censorship of Western media helps.
I was raised believing in the Western ideals of human rights and democracy. And what do I have? I have no human rights. Ukrainian Nazis can kill me and they can go to the European Parliament and they will be considered heroes. They can kill without court, without justice, without anything.”[11]
It is next to impossible for any outside observer to say with any degree of certainty anything about what is actually happening in the Ukraine or whether Russia will “invade” or not. That Moscow’s vital interests are affected by what goes on in the region is abundantly clear. What is also certain is that the Military Industrial Complex will undoubtedly profit from the current “crisis”. War hysteria or actual war invariably translates into cash. What few people care about are the ones who suffer as a consequence.
[1] p.4-5 The Merchants of Death, H.C. Engelbrecht & F.C. Hanighen
[2] p. 1-2, War is a Racket, Smedley D. Butler
[3] p.86-94 Prolonging the Agony, Jim MacGregor & Gerry Docherty
[4] p.57-67 Ibid
[5] p.xxii, The Shadow World, Andrew Feinstein
[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-11/russia-invading-ukraine-will-be-bad-news-for-the-u-s-humanity
[7] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56720589
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/article/russia-ukraine-nato-europe.html
[9] https://quebecnouvelles.com/by-refusing-security-to-russia-washington-has-opened-the-door-to-war-96958.html
[10] p.37, The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzeziński
[11]https://www.mintpressnews.com/under-fire-from-ukraine-everyday-life-in-the-donetsk-peoples-republic/262363/