Although NATO’s marginal alliances may change, the real rules of NATO’s shot callers do not, Declan Hayes writes.

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Though Edwin Starr’s version of WAR! was a Vietnam War era blockbuster hit, it was much stronger on the musical than on either the economic or factual fronts. According to its lyrics, war is good for “absolutely nothing” because “it means destruction of innocent lives”, “tears to thousands of mothers’ eyes when their sons go off to fight and lose their lives”. War, according to Starr, is an “enemy to all mankind”.

If all that was the case, then war would have ended with The Great War, “the war to end all words”, as its pimps marketed it, or at some other important historical juncture.

Because wars just as terrible as Vietnam and that cynically marketed war to end all wars are still with us and will remain with us for many years to come, there are clearly many important policy makers, like Dick Cheney, and enforcers, like Smedley Butler or U.S. Defense Secretary (ex Raytheon and future POTUS) Lloyd Austin who benefit from NATO’s endless wars.

Although there is a ton of empirical evidence to back that up about each and every one of NATO’s wars, economists look at this from the guns and butter trade off perspective which tells us that, given a certain amount of resources, one can produce only a certain amount of guns or butter or, as the Bible puts it, swords or ploughshares. If one wishes to produce more butter, one must produce less guns or, alternatively, as Black Rock helpfully explains with regards to NATO’s Ukrainian war, steal more resources with the use of such guns.

Thus, when the Yanks sent their Black Ships into Japan during the nineteenth century, they gave the Japanese the Hobson’s choice of freely buying more American “butter” or doing so at the point of American guns. As with Japan’s subsequent unconditional surrender in 1945, that led to changes both positive and negative in Japanese society. That said, this Hobson’s Choice of guns or butter has worked well for America’s shot callers time and again in such places as Cuba, the Philippines, Ukraine, Japan, Korea and Vietnam itself.

Capturing more resources enriches the victor, usually the Americans but also with the Japanese following the First Sino-Japanese War, which enables the victor to produce more butter and, of course, more guns, which will allow the predatory cycle to repeat itself. Victori sunt spolia, to the victor goes the spoils, said the Romans, who knew a thing or two about grand scale looting, when they were cock of the walk.

Because looting can be so profitable, it often makes sense to borrow to fund wars, the idea being to repay the loans once one’s ship with attendant booty comes in. Although the Crusades and Spain’s conquest of the Americas could be cited to make this point, America’s terrorist attacks on Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War make it much clearer.

Egged on by Citizen Kane, the jingoistic Randolph Hearst, America ripped those two countries apart, committing the most unspeakable of war crimes in the process. To glimpse what the rewards were, just think that the phrase más se perdió en Cuba (more was lost in Cuba, the jewel in the Spanish Empire) is still used in Castilian Spanish to signify a great disaster.

Although the annexation of the Philippines was a major step in America colonising the Pacific, it also helps to make the important point that war allows the victor assume control, to essentially rewrite the rule book as they see fit. Thus, though Hearst’s circulation figures benefited greatly from his yellow journalism, the advertisers and business tycoons he was in hock to benefited much more by stripping Cuba and the Philippines bare. For them, war was very good for their bottom lines as they got to call the shots during the Pax Americana which was, in essence, no different from either the Pax Britannica or the Pax Romana. Victori sunt spolia!

Much the same applies today to the vast media empire of Rupert Murdoch, who not only has illegal investments in Syria’s Golan Heights but whose evil empire is crucial in selling the war to NATO’s gullible masses, as well as NATO’s more important clusters of shot callers and stakeholders. Although Murdoch is directly profiting from the carnage he is promoting by looting Golan, as well as all of Syria and neighbouring Palestine, so too are his chums in corporate America, whose advertising and other cash flows are crucial to his own cushy number. They need Murdoch and the universities’ Peace Studies Faculties the arms industry funds to feed them the excuses they use to fend off Russia and other dissidents in the United Nations and similar talking shops.

One need only look at the risk of collapse in Elon Musk’s Twitter’s advertising revenue the BBC is gloating about to see how fickle such advertising financing can be. Play NATO’s tune or there will be consequences. One can also see it with such cheapskate politicians as Britain’s Sir Kier Starmer, who is aghast at so-called war crimes in Ukraine but fine with levelling Gaza to the ground. Starmer’s job is to repeat nonsense like that via the Citizen Kanes of our day, whilst wearing a poppy to commemorate the hoodwinked Tommies of yesteryear.

On the subject of bought, bribed and bullied British politicians, just consider former PM Liz Truss, who was not the cleverest of God’s creatures but who still managed to land a lucrative number pimping for Taiwan after the Tories ditched her. Vacuous jingoism and war mongering pays. War, what is it good for, besides boosting the bank balances of Starmer, Truss, Blair and their ilk?

On the subject of poppies, pushing up daisies is not the sole preserve of the British. Though I have previously written about the hoodwinked Poles of Monte Cassino, former American Vice President Dick Cheney, who made a fortune from the criminal rape of Iraq, said it much better than I could when he said he dodged the Vietnam draft because he had better things to do than had the 60,000 less fortunate Americans, who ended up face down in Vietnamese rice paddies. Or the 5,000 Americans and sundry NATO sycophants who died in Haliburton’s Iraqi war.

Cheney, you see, is one of NATO’s elite, God’s anointed, as is George Bush, who was personally instructed by no less a figure than God to loot Iraq and, presumably, to pocket its reserves, along with those of Libya, which likewise vanished into NATO’s banking ether.

Although Saddam acted as a buffer between Iran and Turkey, his demise simply opened up new opportunities, not only for the marauding Yanks, but for the Muslim Brotherhood from their strongholds in Qatar and Turkey.

Although NATO’s marginal alliances may change, the real rules of NATO’s shot callers do not. Casualties, such as those inflicted by the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, the North Koreans or the Viet Cong, are merely irrelevant expendables, the cost of doing business, of NATO’s elite securing the resources they crave and the rents and profits that flow from them.

The current Ukrainian war, which some say Russia is “winning” as it might be winning a football match, is no different in that respect. NATO embarked on that genocidal enterprise and got a good return for its buck because, in the words of American leader Lindsey Graham “killing Russians is the best money we ever spent”. And although very many armed and very dangerous Russians might take severe umbrage at that, they are very unlikely to get their hands on Graham or any other of God’s American elite, for whom killing Russians or anyone else is a risk free investment.

Although the cash flows from NATO’s war in Ukraine might not have been as anticipated, they have not been bad. Sure, though Monsanto and Black Rock did not get all the valuable real estate they had hoped for, they and NATO’s other real shot callers did well out of it. Germany, which is happy for its NATO partners to wantonly blow up its infrastructure, is now a joke and should be taken less seriously as a sovereign power than should either Andorra or San Marino, with due respect to the good people of those two countries for comparing them to the humourless laughing stock of Europe. Sweden and Finland, meanwhile, have rushed to join NATO, thereby ensuring that their defence budgets, as well as their arms, security and related industries will quickly fall under American control and all, as with Ukraine, with an economy of American lives or future American effort.

And though Israel has taken relatively severe casualties in Gaza, that project, as far as I can see, is fully on track. I expect Israel and their American partners in crime to level it with bunker bombs and to send its survivors off into the wilds. And then it will be the turn of Lebanon, Syria and Yemen before zooming in on Iran, the next beefy carcass these vultures hope to leech off.

And sure, there will be tonnes of casualties along the way but Israeli or American expendables do not matter, except to make homely youtube homecoming videos to cynically pull at the heart strings, as Citizen Kane might today do had he a youtube channel. The main thing, the thing war is really good for, is enriching and further empowering those in Black Rock, Haliburton, Monsanto, Big Pharma and Defence, who are the real and only voices Dick Cheney, Liz Truss, Tony Blair, Benjamin Netanyahu, George Bush and that von der Leyen idiot hear when they lie that God is telling them to cause the carnage Starr’s song laments.