Ukraine: Proxy War, Proxy Annexation

The Real Reason Behind This Man-Made Bloodbath

Remember the initial invasion of Ukraine? Back in February of 2022? The one word repeated incessantly by hundreds of Western media sources was:

“Unprovoked”

I went back through dozens of articles from that time and it was always there, as if it were some requirement from the AP style guide. I wanted to check for confirmation bias, so I looked into it and found I wasn’t the only one who had noticed. A piece by Ted Snider in Antiwar.com claims that “The word ‘unprovoked’ is repeated by government officials and media in the West every time the word “war” is used in reference to Ukraine.” Others, including Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, a leading authority on geopolitics and a righteous ally in the fight to end world hunger, have analyzed this deceitful and very powerful PR tactic.

Sachs’s piece reminds us that Americans are ignorant about the one thing any cogent political analysis demands: history, specifically political history. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that “history is over,” and that we could all proceed to walk hand-in-hand toward a world full of nothing but kittens and gingerbread cookies for the rest of eternity. Capitalism had prevailed. There was no more need for bloody revolutions.

Just get your asses back to work.

The observations in Sachs’s piece demolish that claim. Not only are issues of class, race, gender, and economic inequality as complex and bothersome as ever, but proclamations like Fukuyama’s are too dangerous to ignore; they demand debunking because they encourage in people an uncritical mindset: they lead one to believe that knowledge and awareness are not really paramount because we’ve arrived at where we need to be, and now all we have to do is tighten up a few screws and take care of some loose ends. Identity politics exists to do just that: it’s a means of denying that capitalism — or whatever you want to call this system of upward wealth transfer — is the problem. We just need to be nice to each other and stamp out racism and intolerance toward those with heterodox sexual identities and everything will function like a well-oiled machine.

No systemic change necessary — Gee, that’s swell.

That would be sooper-dooper.

Of course, I support and have always fought for freedom and full legal rights for all oppressed and marginalized peoples. That includes the legal recognition of and protection for the most radical expressions of queerness. Those are the people who need our help. I even support a universal, one-payer, government health plan that would pay the costs of a trans person’s reassignment surgery.

But somehow, all of the moral posturing involved in identity politics tends to make people feel satisfied and smug — woke, when they need to be literate.

“How can you prove this?”

Well, how about the fact that nearly all the liberal Dems I know —friends and family — were ready to vote for the first president to be publicly and actively complicit in Genocide since we slaughtered our Indigenous population in the 19th century? That would be my first answer.

Maybe this is a “woke” genocide? Or maybe there is some perverse explanation for this logic:

”Let’s vote for Genocide, or else Trump might do something evil!”

Just how loyal a Blue Dog do you have to be to get that warped? Even people I know who are distrustful of the Dems and hate their corrupt machine still think Donald Trump is a combination of Caligula, Rasputin, and Hitler. They’ve done their job. You know we’re in trouble when The Atlantic can come out and proclaim that Russiagate is still a real thing and not get heckled out of the business for supporting a theory that has as much basis in truth as does QAnon or Flat Earth Theory.

After reading Sachs’s article, I immediately thought about how unaware our citizenry is when it comes to understanding ideology and how the media functions to help reproduce our nightmarish status quo. The average consumer of online content is no more politically educated than those sorry schlubs 150 years ago, the ones who engaged in genociding our Indigenous population — or at least ignored appeals to stop the killing.

Sachs points out that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the massive realignment of global power, the US has simply had its way, pushing east at will and expanding NATO. Someone I was eating dinner with after the start of the war said that I was nuts — NATO wasn’t the reason, Russia wasn’t provoked, there were no Nazis in Ukraine.

Well, since then, dozens of stories have surfaced documenting the reality of the neo-Nazi troubles in Ukraine. Furthermore, the New York Times had to apologize for soft-peddling the issue. A piece in Fair.org exposes the paper’s duplicity and its involvement in selling the war, just like it sold the Iraq War and fired Chris Hedges for telling the truth about it. The New York Times is an Empire rag.

The reason Ukraine didn’t get accepted into NATO in 2007 is because Putin sent tanks into Georgia. To argue NATO expansion wasn’t a cause for the war is among the most ahistorical statements a person could make. NATO expansion had been a serious concern of Putin’s for decades. Remember, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg came out and said without equivocation that of course NATO expansion into Ukraine is what provoked the war. Victoria Nuland, for chrissakes, a neocon super-fiend and wife of Robert Kagan, runs our foreign policy. She helped stage the Maidan Coup, overthrowing a democratically elected President and setting the stage for this conflict.

The Ukraine War is a result of years of planning and the Democrat’s continued support for neocon-style military hegemony, neoliberalism, and finance capitalism. Still, the media presents it as unprovoked, despite everything I’ve highlighted. They even helped hide the Hunter Biden laptop story, and later tried to claim it contained nothing but videos of Hunter smoking crack and cavorting with prostitutes. Embarrassing, but not felonious.

The trouble is that it showed much more than that. The president used his power to suborn perjury, getting 50 intelligence officers to lie and call the laptop “Russian disinformation.” Biden’s graft is real, documented by the House Oversight Committee and others. It just doesn’t get reported by cable news or papers like The Washington Post. Why would a Ukrainian politician ask an American vice-president to get a judge fired? Why was Hunter earning over 500,000 a year sitting on the board of a company when he knew nothing about the industry?

Answer: Because Biden was essentially running Ukraine.

As I said, Sachs drew attention to the use of the word “unprovoked” and I immediately realized it was a great illustration of Gramscian “common sense.” It’s a perfect example, really, of a notion that serves to perpetuate a dominant class narrative: “This is a war to protect innocent Ukrainians, to protect democracy.”

When people are presented with evidence about the world that challenges their belief system, they comfortably fall back on common sense notions about what is right and wrong.

Common sense makes possible the kind of cognitive dissonance necessary for a ruling class to maintain hegemony. Every class and segment of society has its own common sense, the chaotic and often contradictory set of assumptions about life that help perpetuate a status quo. A counter-narrative and a counter-hegemony are created when we reach out to people and listen to their lived experiences in such a way that these contradictions are illuminated and a new common sense is forged from critical literacy.

Legacy media, cable news, and state department releases are the enemy, the Darth Vaders in this turf war for class consciousness, political literacy, and a free and uncensored digital commons.

The truth is that the Russo-Ukraine conflict is a war of profit, fought by us for a class of oligarchs and weapons manufacturers. It’s an opportunity for creepy equity firms and private fund managers — the Goldman Sachs and the BlackRocks of the world— to extract more wealth from working people and turn the planet into one big lordly manner, where everyone pays tribute — now called “rent” — to a bunch of tech platforms and private capital conglomerates that are creating a system of Techno-Feudalism, according to Yanis Varoufikas. This means a rentier economy bolstered by global neoliberal finance capitalism and forever war. Economist and professor Michael Hudson specializes in analyzing Marx’s work on rentier economies, especially in volumes II and III of Capital. He has written extensively on the inevitable and ongoing evolution toward a global rentier economy run by platform lords like Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos. Continuing down this path means that our future will be one of serfdom to a class of wealth hoarders, with big tech providing the sophisticated weaponry needed to control our vassal states and supplying both the hardware and software to run the platforms

Hayek’s prediction about the road to serfdom was correct in one sense: we are headed there, but it’s capitalism, not socialism, that created the new serfdom.

The death of the First Amendment back in June, along with Biden’s new, massive censorship apparatus, ensures hegemony. Don’t let them tell you that the executive having the authority to ask any website to remove information is not the beginning of the end of our Bill of Rights. Almost all modern discourse, especially political discourse, happens online. Once they control the digital commons, organized rebellion will be all the more difficult.

All of this helped to create a public that supports the war, and while there has been some pushback, Americans are nevertheless ready to elect a president who will by all means, let the Israeli genocide machine keep churning away. Trump and Harris have both pledged their undying loyalty to Israel. If you have any doubts about Harris, I encourage you to read Hamid Dabashi’s piece from August 8 in the Middle East Eye. I agree with Dabashi’s assessment: Harris will walk in lockstep with Israel, and there will be no support for a move to curb Israeli aggression.

So why does it all keep snowballing? Well, capital has no patience with stagnation. You grow or you vanish. The weapons industry knows this, and keeping it afloat has always been a major priority. We are an Empire. Continuing to extract wealth from the planet means we need to control it. Especially now that the American dollar is losing its authority as a fiat currency. The government needs the war machine as much as the war machine needs them. It’s exactly what Marx talks about in the first volume of Capital: this is the kind of relationship that evolves out of a capitalist structuring of the economy.

Thus, the expansion of NATO was necessary to continue having a large number of client states to sell our weaponry to. This was much bigger than any humanitarian motivation or concern for democracy.

If that was ever a concern at all...

Aside from expanding NATO and enriching weapons manufacturers, Ukraine is also a prime target for American equity ghouls like BlackRock. Al Mayadeen reports that “US investment giant BlackRock has transferred Ukraine's state sovereignty under the pretext of investment plans.”

That is staggering. The piece argues that Ukraine’s sovereignty, at least economically, has been handed to BlackRock, a large investment fund. Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, private equity firms, and government NGOs are making sure that Ukraine will be the second California gold rush.

Let’s put all of this together and take a look at how it works. Media and state propaganda sell the public on a lie, an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. The public, ideologically indoctrinated and ready to eat up anything CNN and the State Department tell them, go along, patriotically, unquestioningly. They believe America is a beacon of democracy, this is their common sense. American presidents don’t commit genocide — common sense.

Congress has now approved $175 billion in aid to Ukraine, while homeless people live in camps under freeway overpasses. Americans are not just paying for an army that conscripts 50-year-old men and chases the rest into hiding. We are giving Ukraine money for social services and pensions as BlackRock gobbles up all the real estate in sight, essentially buying up most of the country.

There you have it: proxy war and proxy annexation via economic takeover.

In a short essay, Graham Wood of the Helsinki Times refers to Naomi Klein’s work, correctly identifying Ukraine as a textbook case of shock doctrine tactics. The strife between Russia and Ukraine is centuries old, and the realities of the post-Cold War world left Ukraine economically crippled, with serious divisions between Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. Ukraine was in crisis, defenseless — another vassal state ripe for the picking, desperate and unable to resist getting into bed with the West’s financial institutions and the US war machine. The real estate will be gobbled up, the farmland will be purchased by Monsanto or some other evil food conglomerate, and Kyiv will foot the bill for decades of weapons purchases.

Jimmy Dore recently showed up at the Democratic National Convention and confirmed everything I’ve just written about. Not only are Democrats clueless when it comes to Ukrainian history, but so are the Ukrainians. Dore walked up to a pro-war Ukrainian activist outside the convention hall. She was urging everyone to continue funding them. During his back-and-forth, the young Ukrainian he was speaking with proved to have no knowledge of the Minsk Accords, the Maidan Coup, or Stoltenberg’s claim that NATO expansion was indeed the cause of the war. She had zero understanding of Ukraine’s post-Cold War history and dismissed every fact she was confronted with as “Russian Propaganda.”

Eventually, she signaled to the others in her group and they picked up their gear and moved to a different corner.

The global media machine, owned by just a handful of corporate outlets, has tendrils that reach into every nook and cranny of the planet. That means it’s easy to motivate people to get engaged with movements that undermine their own interests.

It is very difficult to challenge someone’s worldview, to illustrate the contradictions present therein.

To date, there are almost 15,000 fatalities and half a million casualties from the Russo-Ukraine War. There have been 40,000 killed in Gaza, 15,000 of them children. This is the grist for our mill. Fodder fed to the Empire’s war machine as we cannibalize the planet in our quest for global domination and narrative control.

Whatever the cost.