Theocratic Fascisms

Aid to the Bottomless Pit of a Nearly Bankrupt Country

There is no let-off in the whistling steam and stream of preparations for World War Three. Republican leader of the House of Representatives now looks more inclined, after the Congressional Easter recess, to respond to the Senate’s $95 billion aid package for Ukraine ($65n), Israel and Taiwan with a version that might convert the aid to a favorable loan. It looks as though many in the Senate would go along with this on the understanding that the loan would not be taken seriously, that a nearly bankrupt Ukraine (the World Bank predicts it will soon be bankrupt unless the collective West writes off all its debts) will never be able to pay back the loan in any case. Former British ambassador Ian Proud writing for antiwar.com details the wretchedness of Ukraine’s economic woes.

Ukraine’s economy is now more than ten times smaller than Russia’s. The problem runs much deeper. Since 2006 the country has consistently imported more than it exports. Ukraine’s yearly trading shortfall was $11bn in the ten years before war broke out, and that figure almost tripled to $31.6bn in 2022 and 2023.  Exports of goods have fallen further since 2022: 17% and 30% in 2022 and 2023 respectively compared to the average. Exports are even resisted by neighboring countries such as Poland and other European countires whose farmers resent competition from cheap Ukrainian produce. Imports of services have also doubled since 2021. Ukraine’s trading surplus in services, which amounted to $3bn annually between 2012 and 2021; since slumped to a deficit of $9.8bn. This is in part due to Ukrainian people who have fled to other countries spending Ukrainian money in other countries counts. This burns up foreign currency which reduces Ukrainian abilituy to pay for imports or external debt. There is little prospect that this deficit can be repaired through foreign investment which has averaged only $2.2bn annually, a result not just of the war but by control of the economy by its oligarchic caste. So far Ukraine has withstood the crisis by dependence on handouts from the collective West - $5bn a year between 2010 and 2021, $28bn i 2022, and $24bn in 2023. Ukraine, which spends half of its budget on defence, also borrows money: $40bn in 2022-2023, almost a quarter of its current GDP. Some of the borrowing is in lieu of aid: Europe has a program of support of 50bn Euro to 2027, nbut $33bn of this is in loans, representing another 20% of Ukraine’s current GDP. Ukraine’s gross external debt is already around 90% of GDP and could hit 140% of GDP by 2026. It is quite likely that Ukraine will not be able to service this level of debt.

By contrast, Russia registered a current account surplus of £238bn in 2022, "more than Ukraine’s pre-war yearly economic output, and over two times the value of western financial and military assistance to Ukraine in 2022. Russia’s current account surplus stabilised to $50bn in 2023. Russia has very low external debt, at less than 20% of GDP.  Russia’s military spending could rise to 10% of GDP this year, three times greater than Ukraine’s.  It does not depend on borrowing, and has sufficient resource to fund ambitious social programmes. Consumer spending is strong.

The Reagan-Thatcher Route to Prosperity and Perdition

It should be more than abundantly clear by now that the US and Europe have chosen a very misguided policy route over Ukraine that is the result of post-Thatcher and post-Reagan European neoliberalism, the consolidation of caste power over an increasingly unequal and stratified society, the culmination of 500 years of imperial aggression, self-entitlement and hubris, and the stifling fascist takeover of its fundamental religious belief system, Christianity, which proves unfailingly incapable of resisting political and economic overlordship, and so often collaborates enthusiastically with pale-faced-power. as throughout Latin America.

We don’t have to look far to find other forms of what I here shall call examples of theocratic fascism. Look first of all to the Banderite clique that took power in Kiev in 2014, and its embrace of a Christian orthodoxy (requiring the shutting down of what it considered to be the Moscow-inflected Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2023). The case of the apartheid Zionist state of Israel speaks for itself, a force capable of inflicting on the people of its long-occupied territories - Israeli’s Dalit caste - the same terrible genocidal fate as the German Nazis inflicted on European Jews. Now Germany is wedded to the genocidal State on a platform of collective guilt that serves to mask the role of the sponsors of Hitler, and of Hitler’s ability, in service to US and European oligarchs, to combat the threat of Russian-inspired communism and socialism through equating these movements with Judaism and seeking their physical annihilation.

Theocratic fascism plays out further in the marriage of Zionist Israel with the extremist Salafist movements now encased, with Turkish protection, in Idlib, Syria, and with US forces headquartered in Al-Tanf, in staging strikes against the interests of the legitimate government of Syria in Damascus, and against Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Quds forces legimtately present in Syria as advisers to the Syrian army. The overall objectives are consolidation of Israel’s illegal control over the entirety of Syria’s Golan Heights (ceded to Israel by Donald Trump), further weakening of Syria in support of the Zionist plan for a Greater Israel, ignition of conflict with Iran, and suppression of Hezbollah authority in southern Lebanon. Israel’s goal is to suck the US and European powers into their direct involvement with the attempted destabilization of the entire Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon region. This may very well - and should - invite the protective engagement of Russia and, possibly, of China. Such a descent into regional and then, quickly, global war, will have some interesting and strange trajectories not least involving Turkey (will it now choose unipolar West or multipolar East?); Saudi Arabia and the UAE (the same, only in the compass of BRICS); Egypt and Jordan (whose elites may find that their ultimate refuge is the multipolar East under the BRICS umbrella.

While all this happening, however, there is the threat of a new front in the collective West’s counterrevolution against multipolarity, in the emerging contestation or reignition of border tensions between China and India, highlighted (if exaggerated) recently by a Financial Times report of how Russia might use nuclear weapons to roll back Chinese aggression and confirming Russia’s longstanding concern that China might try to annex Russian territories. Despite India’s status as a founding member of the BRICS, Modi’s prosperous new India also showcases another form of theocratic fascism: Hindu suppression of Islamic India, in conflict with both Muslim Pakistan and secular China.

And Back to Ukraine

Chatter and analysis continues over the Crocus City Hall terroristic attacks. Russia must of course investigate and will most likely find ways of establishing support for what has clearly been the presumption all along that there is a Ukrainian, US and British component to this narrative - to my mind all quite plausible, if still in need of a great deal more actual evidence beyond the Ukrainian border destination of the terrorists and their non-jihadist mercenary charater.

Russia is already pointing to Ukraine as a terrorist State and demanding the hand-over of the head of the SBU and any of his accomplices some of whom, like the recently sacked Ukrainian head of National Security,Danilov, and the head of the GUR, Budanov (he who likes to work in dim light), seem now to be protesting that if indeed they committed acts of terror in the past they had nothing to do with Crocus Hall.

Of course, to the rest of the world, however sympathetic they must feel for the victims and their families of the Crocus attacks, it must seem unearthly strange to hear Russia’s plaintiff charges of “Terrorist!” when, for two years, Russia has been attacking hundreds of targets across Ukraine which, however “military” Russia claims them to be, are not actually located in the disputed territories, and which must and clearly have involved the “collateral” deaths of many civilians. Today, as I write, Dima of the Military Summary Channel describes the exodus of civilians from Kharkiv, which has been without power for several days following Russian attacks on its main power plants. We must presume that any city subjected to energy blackouts, especially when occurring in the latter stages of winter, and coupled with the use by Russia of 1,000 and 1,500 kilo precision-guided FAB bombs, will suffer many civilian casualties.

To bring everyone up to date with where we are on the battlefields in Ukraine, on the basis of today’s midday report (Pacific Time) from Dima at the Military Summary Channel: (1) Ukraine - possibly fearing that Russia, having reoccupied the south of Robotyne in the so-called Bradley salient in Zapporizhzhia, would cut off the road between Robotyne and Ukrainian-occupied Novodanylivka to the north - launched major FPV drone attacks on a concentration of Russian forces to the west of Robotyne, between the settlements of Rivne, Chystopillia, Ilchenkove, and +Solodka Balka; (2) Following Russia’s success in taking most of Novomykhailivka and exerting pressure on Ukrainian forces in Kostiantynivka (they have just bombed a bridge that interrupts the main supply road between these settlements), Russian forces have returned to regular attacks on Vuhledar. Further north than Novomykhailivka, Russia now controls Pobieda; (3) West of Avdiivka, now firmly under Russian control, Russian forces are pushing west of Tonenke towards Umansk, Netailove, Vasnobrodivko and Pervomaiske (which Russia controls most of). Ukraine is attempting to establish a new line of fortification to the west that links Ocheretyne in the north to Novopokrovskiy, Novoselivka Persha, Mezhove, Skuchne, Karlivka, Halytsnivka and Krasnohorivka to the south, a distance of 34 kilometers, facing off against a Russian line to the east that runs only 14 kilometers and gives Russia greater flexibility in putting pressure on any point of the Ukrainian line; (4) In Berdychi, north of Avdiivka, Ukraine seems still to be in control of that settlement, but there are indications that Russian forces may be by-passing it from Orlivka to the south, and perhaps attempting a cauldron around it; (5) In the Bakhmut area, the main focus is now on the eastern side of Chasiv Yar, now all but reached by Russian forces even if it still may be a matter of months before Russia has pushed Ukrainian forces on the far side of the canal further back westwards. Russian progress is impeded by very recent Ukrainian efforts to mine the fields to the north and south; (6) further north, there are indications that Russia is attempting to establish a cauldron around Bilohorivka which they have so far not been able to seize from Ukraine.

Good Friends Terror

Writing for Global Research, Kit Klarenberg has provided some helpful details on the origins of ISIS links with western intelligence, another marriage, we might say, of theocratic fascisms.

He describes Daesh as primarily “guns for hire” separated from their actual donors by layer upon layer of cutouts. He notes that ISIS-K conveniently opposes the primary adversaries of the US: China, Iran, and Russia. Daesh and its short-lived caliphate across parts of Syria and Iraq emerged in response to what he says was a “dedicated, determined policy hatched in London and Washington, implemented by their spying agencies”.

Cited as evidence by Klarenberg are a July 2016 RAND paper forecasting a need to fill Eastern Europe with US soldiers in advance of a “hot” conflict with Beijing, as Russia would undoubtedly side with its neighbour. It was deemed necessary to tie down Moscow’s forces at its borders. The RAND’s 2019 report on Extending Russia outlined ways to bait Russia, including “provision of lethal aid to Ukraine; increasing US support for the Syrian rebels; promoting “regime change in Belarus”; exploiting “tensions” in the Caucasus; neutralising “Russian influence in Central Asia” and Moldova. RAND’s 2008 report on Unfolding the Long War anticipated the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq with a “divide and rule” strategy to maintain US hegemony in Iraq, exploiting tensions among Salafi-Jihadi groups and providing support for Sunni regimes against Iran. The result was that the CIA and MI6 began supporting such groups throughout West Asia, beginning with Syria after the Assad government refused to support a Western-friendly Qatari oil pipeline across Syria in favor of a Russian alternative. The effort incorporated the destruction of Libya.