“It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
On 17 March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, for the illegal deportation and transferal of children from occupied regions in the Ukraine into the Russian Federation, which it judged to be a war crime. 123 states are party to the judgement of the International Criminal Court, including Brazil and South Africa but not including India, China or Russia itself. The USA also doesn’t recognise the authority of the ICC. Indeed, in 2018, the US threatened to arrest ICC judges if they pursued an investigation of US military personnel for war crimes committed in Afghanistan; and in 2020 the US imposed sanctions against two judges for investigating human rights violations by the US military. So why has the ICC — apparently at the bidding of the US, and certainly to its benefit — issued a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin? The answer lies in how this warrant will be deployed by the US and its military allies in the geopolitical struggle against Russia.
First, the West, through what is in effect its kangaroo court, has put pressure on parties bound to enact the ICC warrant to arrest Putin if he visits their countries, effectively prohibiting him from diplomatic relations with the rest of the world.
Second, the USA is forcing NATO states to choose between alliance with the West — which means, first and foremost, allegiance to the US dollar as the dominant reserve currency of the world — and the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), three of which are not parties to the International Criminal Court. As an example of which, last week South Africa invited Putin to attend the BRICS summit in August, effectively aligning itself with this growing economic alliance of nations and its threat to Western hegemony.
And third, by including the Russian President on a list of wanted criminals, the ICC has laid the legal ground for a declaration of war against Vladimir Putin himself. The same legal trick was used in 1815 when, in response to his escape from exile on the Island of Elba, the Congress of Vienna declared war not on France but on Napoleon Bonaparte himself, whom they declared a ‘criminal’ for violating the terms of his banishment. More recently, in 2003, the USA and its European allies declared war not on the Iraqi people but on the government of President Saddam Hussein, thereby justifying their illegal and genocidal invasion of Iraq and the theft of its oil reserves as a desire for ‘regime change’.
As it did with the equally manufactured war on Iraq, HM Governments like to declare war in March, as it gives military campaigns in the Northern Hemisphere the maximum time before winter returns. If I were a betting man, I’d have a flutter on the most servile Parliament in UK history declaring war on Russia this or next month. The UK brazenly sells arms to Saudi Arabia, Israel and other criminal states, so if all we were going to do was sell him some armour-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium there was no need for the pomp and circumstance that attended President Zelenskyy’s visit in February. When the UK state dusts off the stained-glass windows and gets its monarch out of mothballs, you know it means murder. And just like we were in 2003, the UK will be at the rear of a long coalition led by the US, endorsed by the UN, financed by the arms dealers and energy companies and paid for by us, the tax-payers.
But whenever we do go to war, I believe it will be declared against Putin himself, as a criminal wanted by the ICC, in pursuance of whose arrest the West will justify its illegal war on Russia and theft of its oil and mineral resources. In this respect, the ICC warrant is the ratification and legal form of the unilateral judgement of the USA — which was imperiously announced by US Vice-President Kamala Harris at the Munich Security Conference in February — that Russia has committed ‘crimes against humanity’, and that Putin will be held personally accountable.
As a measure of the influence the West has over the so-called International Criminal Court it funds and why so many non-Western nations refuse to recognise it as independent and impartial, the ICC, which was founded in 1998, has issued no equivalent warrant for the arrest of the Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman and before him the King of Saudi Arabia, for crimes against their own people and war crimes against the people of Yemen; of the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, for the genocidal treatment of the Palestinian people; of the Presidents of the Ukraine, Volodmyr Zelenskyy and before him Petro Poroshenko, for the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass; or of the Presidents of the USA, starting with Barack Obama and George W. Bush, for war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and in every other country they have invaded since the end of the Second World War.
When NATO — which is the military form of US hegemony in Europe — declares war on Russia, I believe it will do so not on the grounds of the military defence of the Ukraine but on a legal basis. In doing so, the ensuing conflict will be placed outside the political realm, and therefore not open to debate in our legislatures. Like the equally manufactured ‘war’ on COVID, this will be a war for biosecurity. And like all wars of biosecurity, it will be waged not against the Russian people but for them; not to defeat them but to save them; not for our benefit but for theirs. And like the police who, under coronavirus-justified regulations, beat the non-compliant with weighted truncheons, sprayed their eyes with tear-gas and shot them with rubber bullets in order to ‘protect public health’, we’ll make those Ruskis free — or they’ll die trying!
The more recent example of a war waged against a head of state is the so-called ‘decapitation strikes’ launched by the US military in 2011 against the President of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, who two years before had initiated the Gold Dinar as an alternative currency for Africa. The Dinar was intended to divert Africa’s oil revenues towards state-controlled funds rather than through US banks; and just as Gaddafi was assassinated by US-backed rebels for this threat to the dollar, so the criminal cartel we call the US Department of Defence will attempt to do the same against Vladimir Putin. Doubtless the gloating crime bosses in the US military who took pleasure in circulating photographs of the dead and mutilated bodies of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein one day hope to add the body of Vladimir Putin to their list of assassinated Presidents.
There is a problem with their plan, however, which is, of course, that Russia is not Libya or Iraq or the other small countries the US invades with impunity as the rest of the West sits on its hands in the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. Russia has the second strongest military in the world and the largest nuclear arsenal; and it has just reaffirmed — very publicly — its alliance with China, which has the third strongest military in the world. Moreover, the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dimitry Medvedev, has made it very clear that any attempt by a foreign power to enact the ICC warrant and arrest Putin — or to invade the Crimea — will be taken as a declaration of war, and that Russia would respond with all its military capabilities, including nuclear missiles.
However, beyond the military balance between NATO and the Moscow-Beijing alliance, there is the balance of foreign debt. The USA has a national debt of $31.6 trillion, giving it a public debt to GDP ratio of 94.75 per cent. This has risen from 63 per cent in 2007, the year the last Global Financial Crisis began; from 55 per cent in 2001, the year the US launched the so-called ‘War on Terror’; and from 31 per cent in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan was elected President and began to impose the monetary and fiscal policies of neoliberal capitalism not only on the USA but on the rest of the world too. The US external debt to GDP ratio — that is, the debt owed by the US Government to other countries, which increases the risk of defaulting on repayments and decreases economic growth — is 93.28 per cent. In comparison, Russia, with just $422 billion of debt — 1/75th that of the US — has an external debt to GDP ratio of 26.43 per cent, while China’s is just 17.71 per cent. In the UK, the ratio is 298.49 per cent, which is among the highest in the world. This is only one measure of the financial crisis Western capitalism is facing.
At their meeting in Moscow last week, Xi Jinping, the President of the People’s Republic of China since 2013, said to Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation since 2012: ‘Change is coming that hasn’t happened in a hundred years, and we are driving this change together.’ Both these men have long experience of leading their countries and, in Putin’s case, years in his country’s security services. They have consistently run rings around the senile automatons, bankrupt game-show hosts, recovering alcoholics, born-again fundamentalists, former bankers, ex-hacks and World Economic Forum puppets struggling to formulate the foreign policy of the West as they pump more and more magic money into their failing economies.
US hegemony — which has lasted less than 80 years — is nearing the end of its bloody and genocidal history, and a New World Order is on the point of forming. However, the more its economic monopoly over the globe wanes, the more the US flexes its oversized military muscle. The challenge facing the rest of the world is to survive its downfall. Like all school bullies who don’t realise the playground has turned against them until they’re surrounded and without a friend to turn to, it isn’t going to be pretty. Either China will become the new hegemon as the lead partner in a Beijing-Moscow axis, or the US will take us all down with it — and a king whose crown is threatened is a dangerous thing! As Richard III told his doomed army in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on! Join bravely. Let us to it pell-mell —
If not to Heaven, then hand in hand to hell!
