Constant State of Emergency

Russia/NATO/USA War as a guarantor of peace? The Ukraine Conflict Brings Back Memories of the Book "1984" by British Author George Orwell

by Kai Ehlers |

[This article published in Feb 2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, Russland/NATO/USA - Steter Ausnahmezustand.]



Ukrainian military exercises near Lviv with Swedish-British short-range missiles that came into the country as arms aid

The noise around Ukraine is getting shriller. And yet, the war will not happen in the way it is currently being conjured up by many sides with ever new speculations. Russia is neither threatening war nor interested in an invasion of Ukraine. That would put a critical economic and political strain on the country. Russia only wants to prevent Ukraine from becoming a full NATO country.

Joe Biden, too, only sounds off and then immediately puts himself into perspective. Even Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who likes to appear militant, builds herself up threateningly against Russia, but shows no real will to attack. It is recognizably not about open war with Russia, but about its constriction, if possible about a dead arm. At the same time, the entire propaganda power of Western actors shows that not a single one of them is prepared to go into the fire for Ukraine and to follow up warlike words with military deeds.

Let us simply note: Russia as the heartland of Eurasia - linked, moreover, with China, and all the more closely the longer the marathon threat from the USA, NATO and the EU continues - could not be defeated in a war with conventional weapons. Already in the past, it could not be conquered, let alone subjugated, by wars of conquest. Remember the failed attempts of Napoleon in the early 19th century, of the German Imperial Army in World War I, and of Hitler's Wehrmacht in World War II. Apart from that, the use of nuclear weapons would also have deadly consequences for whoever used them first.

Frozen Conflict

We are not simply seeing a repeat of the "Cold War" between two blocs. Rather, what we are witnessing are the West's hysterical attempts to maintain its global dominance below the threshold of open warfare or even nuclear war in the face of an unmistakable reshuffling of the global constellation of forces. A closer look reveals that the louder the rhetoric against Russia, the less able the Western actors are to actually implement what is threatened. Let's just take "Nord Stream 2" as an example. Does Annalena Baerbock really want to expect the German population to pay the "price" for its dependence on gas imports from Russia if nothing more is delivered? She is unlikely to survive that politically. Or let's take the demand to exclude Russia from the international payment transactions of the SWIFT system. How will Germany then pay for its gas imports from Russia? How will it pay for other goods traffic? Not to mention that the use of weapons against Russia, whether conventional or nuclear, would lead to the devastation of Europe, especially Germany, in the heart of the continent. U.S. President Biden cannot want such a weapons deployment. In an exchange of blows carried out with long-range nuclear-tipped missiles, the United States would not be unaffected. All actors know this.

It will be seen that the greatest hotheads will ultimately come together for "dialogue" because the great war, which could destroy the enemy, no longer exists as an easy way out of today's transformation crisis. It would only be conducive to initiating one's own destruction. What does exist is an increase in regional flashpoints and the thawing of frozen conflicts in various border areas and overlapping zones of influence of the blocs. This can be used to keep each other in check. Here, the West has an advantage over Russia, which is surrounded by conflict zones from the Soviet Union's legacy, such as Transnistria, South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Ukraine is also one of them because of its history in the Soviet Union, the post-independence period in 1991, and the fact that it is a binational country with a Russian population of one-fifth. The conflict, which has been smoldering since the Maidan upheaval of 2014, is constantly being fueled - even as a proxy war. At best, it can be frozen by new Normandy negotiations. Irrespective of this, Western actors are probably also interested in forcing Russia into an arms race, as the USSR once did in the 1980s, in order to weaken it economically.

All of this brings up memories that one thought had long been overcome. In 1949, British author George Orwell described the three great power blocs in his book 1984: Eurasia, Oceania and East Asia. At their borders, where the zones of influence overlap, wars are constantly being waged, but they do not substantially change the basic constellation between these three powers. The wars are waged by special forces, while the population is kept quiet in a permanent state of emergency under the slogan "war is peace" by full technical control, including mental and health surveillance. Anyone who questions this kind of peace is threatened with annihilation.

A few sentences from the chapter "War is Peace" may clarify this kind of peace. "In one combination or another," Orwell writes, "these three superstates are constantly at war, and have been for 25 years. War, however, is no longer the desperate war of annihilation it was in the early decades of the 20th century. It is warfare with limited objectives between opponents who are incapable of destroying each other, who have no material cause for war, and who are not divided by any real ideological difference. (...) The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. (...) For if all people lived equally in leisure and security, the great mass of people, normally stultified by their poverty, would educate themselves and thus learn to think for themselves; and once this happened, sooner or later they would realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods had to be produced, but they could not be distributed. And in practice, the only way to accomplish this was through continuous warfare. War today is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the goal of war is not to achieve or prevent territorial conquests, but to keep the social structure intact. A truly permanent peace would be the same as a permanent war. This is (...) the inner meaning of the party slogan: WAR IS PEACE."

The answer is simple

Of course, this cannot be applied one-to-one to today. There are still significant differences between Euramerica, Russia and China, but they tend to shrink to folkloric specificities with the advance of digital capitalism. The resources needed for industrial development are not yet evenly distributed. Gas supplies are still being fought over, but the development of new energy sources, including nuclear power, is on the horizon. Technical control of the population is not yet perfect or globally unified. Nor has the placement in a regime of public health become a daily ritual before the "eye" of "Big Brother" as in Orwell. But basic elements of the development he describes are emerging from the fog of current war propaganda, at least as practiced by the West. There is an attempt to drive the population into the acceptance of a constant exceptional situation in which war appears as the guarantor of peace.

What do we have to counter this? The answer is basically quite simple: to do exactly what the warmongering forces do not want. Think for ourselves, look for ways of cooperation ourselves, build bridges ourselves, on a small as well as on a large scale. Is there any other way? Probably not.