We are all Starving for Peace While Politicians Feed the Hunger of War

Ukraine: The Hunger for War Will Never be Satisfied When it is Fed by Blood and Money

Imagine walking into a bustling restaurant where every table sits empty, save for one – a lone soldier with “War” scrawled across his back, feasting opulently as harried waiters in the guise of powerful political figures incessantly pile his plate high with billions upon billions in cash offerings. All around him, other tables marked “Healthcare,” “Schools,” “Housing,” and “Arts” remain barren and unserved as the haute cuisine of death is repeatedly overfunded.

This vivid 1953 Soviet-era caricature by Yuliy Ganf captured with haunting prescience the perpetual dilemma plaguing modern nation-states: the gross imbalance between insatiable military budgets and the neglected compassion deficit starving all other vital public services of adequate resources.

Today, the West has become an even more grotesque instantiation of this morally inverted premise.

In the current geopolitical context, the West’s continued heavy spending on defence raises questions, especially when confronted with the effectiveness of Ukrainian forces against Russia with Western support. Former British Prime Minister and current Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron’s recent promises of substantial military aid to Ukraine further highlight this disparity.

Empty Plates and Broken Promises

We are now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, living in the sixth-wealthiest nation on earth. And yet, millions of British citizens find themselves in an unconscionable daily struggle to afford basic necessities – not due to any personal failings, but crushed under the unbearable weight of inflated food costs, avaricious energy profiteering, and crippling interest rates ballooning mortgage and rent obligations.

This should have been an era for the renaissance of Keynesian economics – using the power of strategic government spending to uplift the working classes and promote broadly shared prosperity. Instead, the merciless austerity dogma of neoliberalism reigns supreme, consigning whole communities to generational cycles of deprivation.

The Tories’ betrayal has been particularly egregious. Having campaigned on a “levelling up” agenda to address regional inequalities, they wasted no time cancelling this much-needed manifesto pledge just as a historic cost-of-living crisis pushed millions to the brink of abject poverty. While families struggled to keep roofs over their heads and put food on the table, the UK government made the perverse decision to divert a staggering £3 billion annually towards military aid for Ukraine, as part of an open-ended commitment lasting “as long as it takes”.

Camron also stated that London had ‘no objection’ to the weapons being used ‘inside Russia’.

He said: “We will give three billion pounds every year for as long as is necessary. We’ve just really emptied all we can in terms of giving equipment,” he went on to tell Reuters in an interview on a visit to Kyiv last week, that the aid package was the largest from the UK so far.

“Some of that (equipment) is actually arriving in Ukraine today, while I’m here,” he said. Cameron states Ukraine had a right to use the weapons provided by London to strike targets inside Russia, and that it was up to Kyiv whether to do so. “Ukraine has that right. Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself”.

The Russian response was as swift as it was bellicose – Moscow threatened retaliation against British military assets both in Ukraine and beyond should any UK armaments contribute to Ukrainian strikes within Russia’s borders saying:

“Russia could strike British military installations and equipment both “inside and beyond” Ukraine if British weapons are used by Kyiv to attack its territory.”Russia could strike British military installations and equipment both “inside and beyond” Ukraine if British weapons are used by Kyiv to attack its territory”.

“Any British military facilities and equipment on the territory of Ukraine and beyond could be a response to Ukrainian strikes with the use of British weapons on the territory of Russia,” the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

The Kremlin also summoned the British Ambassador to Moscow “to express a strong protest” in connection with recent comments by U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

This generosity towards fueling a proxy war laid bare the ruling class’s utterly skewed priorities. Rather than marshalling resources to alleviate the escalating economic immiseration crushing their own citizens under the boot of sociopathic austerity policies, they eagerly forwarded another bottomless cash transfusion to the permanent warfare state’s latest imperial conflagration.

The gross disconnect between the government’s galling prodigality towards militarism and its calculated stinginess towards citizenly welfare could not be more glaring. As the domestic plights of the British people are cavalierly disregarded, the only beneficiaries of such lavish government spending appear to be the powerful corporate war profiteers and securitized ammunition industry fattening their bottom lines.

So as always, British families are squeezed to the financial brink by draconian public service cuts, and their taxes are actively redirected to stoke the flames of an ever-intensifying global conflagration of another ‘Forever War’ benefiting only the military-industrial arms complex and the politicians that prostitute themselves to mammon.

Leaders Out of Touch with Public Sentiment

The U.S. has also pursued a similar policy schizophrenia, ramming through a $60 billion Ukrainian military funding package despite over 70% public opposition amidst domestic economic anxieties. The voices advocating for investment in crumbling American infrastructure, housing, education, and healthcare have been systematically silenced and starved by a political establishment prioritising profits for the military-industrial behemoth over the vital needs of its own population.

This grotesque reality was thrown into even starker contrast by recent reports that a consortium of heavyweight economic bondholders – including Wall Street titans like BlackRock and Pimco – are gearing up to demand Ukraine immediately resume debt repayments next year. So as the world’s poor face untenable increases in basic costs of living, unelected financial oligarchs are manoeuvring to ensure the diminishing public coffers get drained to satisfy their own usurious claims over the public interest.

This debt repayment shakedown will likely have devastating ripple effects far beyond Ukraine’s borders. To meet the draconian repayment terms, Kyiv will be compelled to maximize exports of its most valuable economic assets – its prodigious agricultural output and vast swaths of fertile farmland. The inevitable result will be a distortion of European and British food markets as Ukrainian crops and farmland get firesaled to ravenous corporate speculators able to undercut domestic producers.

The scenes are already writing themselves – embattled EU farmers facing total ruination as their livelihoods are upended by a tidal wave of below-market Ukrainian commodities sold off in a desperate bid to placate finance vulture funds. Generational family farms will shutter en masse as their operating margins are obliterated by the depressed prices resulting from Ukraine’s coerced economic fire sale. Protests will erupt across the European countryside as yet another secular way of life gets sacrificed on the altar of endless debt servitude to usurious banking cartels unbound by national allegiances.

All to maintain their flow of money into the gaping maws of Davos debt holding titans like BlackRock – firms with zero concerns about food security or stable livelihoods for Europe’s rural populations. Their only imperative is accruing greater and greater returns through the ruthless extraction of assets from any and all global territories, no matter how destabilising the local human tolls.

To these financial supremacists, the ruin of Britain and Europe’s farming communities is an acceptable sacrifice to feed their ravenous hunger for greater consolidation of economic power and resource control.

There Are Plenty of Hawks in This War but Where Are the Doves?

Where in this bleak milieu are the voices demanding a pivot to peace instead of perpetual war? Who is advocating a ceasefire and reallocation of resources back towards the gaping domestic crises fueling populist discontent worldwide? In a true democratic society, would not these ignored populist demands take precedent over the shrieks of wealthy warmongers always clamouring for more and more sacrifice of public funds at the altar of killing?

For the privileged feast of death gluttony to continue unabated, the people’s urgent pleas for economic and social reprieve must remain unheeded. Just as in Ganf’s darkly satirical vision, the only tables getting served are those of militarism’s most corpulent patrons as the populace starves for want of the barest public policy nutrition.

All the while, the real-world capitalists plunging the world into deeper immiseration via their piratical monopolization of resources laugh amongst themselves at the suckers abiding their rigged bureaucratic starvation diets. The people deserve better than perpetual austerity juxtaposed against this gluttonous military overindulgence. This twisted feast must end – before the people’s hunger for peace and justice sparks level of social unrest even warmongers cannot abide.