THE STRANGE CONNECTION BETWEEN DEINDUSTRIALISATION AND MILITARISM

and "Until yesterday"

What follows is my English translation of two articles, originally in Italian, published in a single one on ComeDonChisciotte.org yesterday, Saturday 14th September 2024, as they both focus on the same topic.

The first one that follows was first published on Comidad.org on Thursday 12th September 2024. (All formatting original).

THE STRANGE CONNECTION BETWEEN DEINDUSTRIALISATION AND MILITARISM

There are people with whom it is impossible to converse, as one almost fears intruding into their inner monologue or disturbing their streams of consciousness. But the pinnacle of the ability to sing and play it for oneself certainly has to be credited to US/NATO propaganda, which reached the heights of symbolist poetry with the story of Russia's crossing of alleged “red lines” and the Kremlin's equally alleged inability to react. These were in fact “red lines” drawn by President Biden himself two and a half years ago, such as the sending of F-16 fighter jets to Kiev, which was still ruled out a year ago.

One also has to doubt the claim that the control of escalation is an exclusive monopoly of the US and NATO. Last week's Russian missile attack on the military training centre in Poltava objectively represents an escalation, as a military target was selected within a densely populated civilian area, knowing moreover that at least some of the instructors hit would not be Ukrainian but from NATO countries. There was the “coincidence” that immediately after the attack came the resignation of Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström, whose work had been instrumental in drawing Sweden fully into NATO, whereas until three years ago Stockholm had never asked to formalise membership, despite having participated in all the alliance's military exercises since 1995. Billström resigned from the government and even from the parliament; he obviously did so for entirely personal reasons, either because he was in love or because of a sudden vocation to become a flower child. Nobody in the Swedish government, however, pointed out to him that the timing of that resignation would give rise to the assumption that there were Swedes among the victims of the Poltava attack.

Resigning at such an inopportune time would only make sense if Billström's head was claimed by powers within Sweden who were so enraged with him that they were unwilling to accept any delay. There were indications that Saab engineers were also involved in the Poltava massacre, as in the Swedish Leonardo [an Italian multinational company specialising in aerospace, defence and security].

Such an eventuality would mean for Saab a prospect of a drop in design and production capabilities. Engineers are not like popes: once one dies, it is not easy to make a new one. The hypothesis of the involvement of Saab personnel in the Poltava massacre was formulated by Giuseppe Gagliano, who is president of the “Carlo De Cristoforis” Institute for Strategic Studies, whose leadership includes generals Fernando Termentini and Carlo Jean.

This is just a circumstantial reconstruction and nothing has yet been proven. If those mythical investigative journalists of fiction existed, it would be enough to take Saab's organisational chart and check whether any sudden deaths due to illness or accident of the Swedish company's high-ranking technicians were reported in the next few weeks; since this is the trick with which war propaganda disguises losses that one does not want to admit. [See for instance this Fox News article reporting on the sudden death of a US Army Lieutenant Colonel in Poland soon after the Poltava attack - what a coincidence!].

However, we can forget the possibility of such a check-up; it is not for nothing that the headlines in our newspapers and news programmes labelled the facility hit by the Russian missiles as a “school”, added a hospital to it, and nearly said that there was also a kindergarten [in Italy, at least! - I have not see such lame propaganda in US and British news media, not even in The Guardian, which admitted that Russia hit a military academy].

The history of Saab does, however, contain interesting indications. In the past, the company's name was linked not only to aircraft production, but above all to the production of cars that were legendary for their robustness. On this fame of Saab, the writer Kurt Vonnegut elaborated his hilarious, surreal and hyperbolic theory as to why the Swedish Academy did not award him the Nobel Prize. It would have been revenge for Vonnegut's disrespectful expressions about the quality of Saab cars. The fact is that, after a gruelling succession of crises and apparent recoveries, the company's car business was taken over by General Motors and then finally closed down in 2011.

Faced with the general decline of the automotive sector, Saab's reaction was to concentrate on military production.

In today's de-industrialised and impoverished West, wages are too low and employment prospects are increasingly precarious, so there is no longer a domestic market capable of absorbing automotive goods in large quantities.

De-industrialisation has been hailed by our oligarchies as the great opportunity to settle accounts with the subaltern classes, dismantling large working-class concentrations and financialising social relations with the tendency to replace wages with loans as much as possible.

The consequence is that the high-tech, high value-added industrial process narrows its social base and inevitably coincides with the armaments sector, which has the government as its direct financier and client. The fact that Leonardo is currently Italy's most important industry fits this paradigm. The similarities between Saab and Leonardo also relate to the increasing integration of these two companies into the US “military-industrial complex”, i.e. the military kleptocracy. Leonardo's flagship is the production of the F-35 fighter aircraft on behalf of Lockheed Martin.

Deindustrialisation has not brought us the ecological idyll but the increase of militarism and war, and also a degree of industrial dependence on the US military kleptocracy to levels unthinkable even during the Cold War.

What makes Mario Draghi's discourse (but does anyone still take him seriously?) on the construction of a European military-industrial-financial complex utterly fanciful is that the trough of the arms business is at Atlantic level and coincides with NATO, on which the European Union depends for its survival.

Imperialism is a two-way street, which is why the domestic oligarchies invoke the US shield to be defended not by Russia, but by their own subaltern classes.

Joining NATO and its arms business coincides with the only industrial perspective of European countries.

It is not always really about high technology, but there is also petty production of junk passed off as who knows what. Saab, in partnership with the American Boeing, produces small-diameter super-bombs. On its website, the Swedish company celebrates the miraculous virtues of its innovative devices, claiming that they are capable of revolutionising air and missile bombing techniques.

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The second article that follows is actually a Telegram post by Pino Cabras published on his channel on 5th September 2024. (All emphasis mine).

Until yesterday

Former Swedish Foreign Minister, Tobias Billström.

Sweden's foreign minister, Tobias Billström, has suddenly resigned, leaving everyone stunned: until yesterday he was making the missionary statements of someone who was ready to lash out even harder against Russia, proud of having stowed two hundred years of Swedish neutrality in the dog's closet to make it the 32nd member of NATO. He was one of the most uncompromising initiators of the new arms race and the new Russophobic course of 21st century Atlanticism.

Until yesterday.

Today, following closely on the heels of his Ukrainian counterpart Kuleba, the head of Swedish diplomacy is not only leaving office, but is also leaving parliament and politics tout court: ‘I am fifty years old and want to do something else’, he tells us. What he wants to do, we do not know. Like Forrest Gump, he quits because he is ‘a bit tired’.

No one asks questions. Nobody questions him.

Until yesterday. I'll ask him today.

So, Mr Billström:

1. Is there, by any chance, a connection between this unexpected resignation of yours and the Russian bombing of the military school in Poltava, where dozens of foreign military trainers died?

2. Are you aware that many of these trainers were precisely Swedes who were engaged in training Ukrainian and NATO soldiers at war with Russia in the use of the most sophisticated weaponry also supplied by Sweden?

3. How many of the coffins that closed on the Poltava bodies are flying to Scandinavia right now?

That's what the big Atlanticists have been doing lately. First they set devastating war fires, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Europe. Then, after the catastrophes, they go whistling away, quietly, as if they had never been there. Maybe after ten years, like Britain's Cameron, they come back to make more disasters. It is not important for them to lose wars.

It is always the others who die. For them it is important that there is a war, always renewed, fleeing if there is to be responsibility in the events that will cost them defeat. The last resort is always the penultimate one. Until yesterday.

The section in bold and italics above reminded me of this famous meme, to which I just added suitable captions:

By the way, this is not just speculation or, worse, conspiracy theory. General Wesley Clark, retired 4-star U.S. Army General and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia, admitted that the George W. Bush Administration planned to take out 7 countries in 5 years (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran) back in an interview with Amy Goodman on 2nd March 2007:

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.”

[…]

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

[…]

AMY GOODMAN: So, go through the countries again.

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and back to Iran.

So, every time you talk to people about the warmongering Outlaw US Empire and they do not believe you and call you a “conspiracy theorist”, please show them the video above. The complete interview can be found here and the full transcript here.

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