Sting – brought to you by Boeing and Raytheon
Russia cannot be beaten, and Ukraine is the new Vietnam – an unwinnable conflict that requires celebrity shills to rally public support
Last week I saw Sting live at Rod Laver arena in Melbourne and almost walked out during his finale because he did something that really annoyed me.
The legendary rocker had already gotten my hackles up earlier in the show by making me sit through what amounted to a four-minute advertisement for Netflix when he performed his song “What Could Have Been” from their original series Arcane. Fine, musicians do soundtracks for movies and TV, I get it, but there were loads of Police and solo classics he left off his set list – did he really play this new one because he thought the crowd would prefer to hear it? Or because somewhere in his contract with Netflix there’s a clause that says he must perform the song at a certain number of shows in certain key locations? My money is on the latter.
Anyway, I let that one slide despite my scorn for Netflix as one of the machine’s principal vehicles for wokeness (not to mention their unforgivable foray into softcore child porn with Cuties in 2020) and I got myself another cider and relaxed as he went on to play such classics as “Walking On the Moon”, “Every Breath You Take”, and “Roxanne”.
He could have finished with “Roxanne”, and it would have been all good (it was, after all, already his encore) – but then he announced he was going to do one more song and promptly sat down and played “Fragile”, but not before dedicating it to the people of Ukraine.
At this I got up to leave, muttering about war propaganda and other such things. I got as far as the mezzanine and decided I actually wanted to hear the song and be there for the final round of applause (and besides, one should not leave one’s girlfriend sitting alone at a concert, even if it is packed mostly with well-to-do Boomers).
It is not that I have no sympathy for the people of Ukraine, on the contrary, any innocent victims of the global war machine receive nothing but my most heartfelt prayers. But Sting’s little dedication (not to mention the closing act of the whole show) was more than a simple nod of solidarity to a war-torn people, it is part of a coordinated and sustained propaganda effort by the establishment to bolster and maintain support for the appropriation of our tax dollars to prolong this unwinnable conflict. Celebrities have been oozing this slime for twelve months now, and Sting is hardly the worst offender – Rod Stewart’s recent remarks show by comparison just how classy old Gordon Sumner has managed to remain, despite his obvious golden handcuffs.
I can’t be too mad at Sting. He came out against the US-led invasion of Iraq twenty years ago, which suggests his heart is fundamentally in the right place: war is bad, no matter who the aggressor is. And he has always been a bleeding heart activist – the less said about his part in “Do They Know It’s Christmas” the better. But the world has changed a lot since Iraq, and criticism of the war machine was more permissible in 2003, and it must of course be noted for those who are unfamiliar with my position on this matter, that to cheer for Ukraine is in fact to cheer for the war machine.
Those unable to see, one year on, that this conflict is unwinnable for Ukraine, regardless of how many billions of our tax dollars we pump into their war effort, and that it will drag on for the next 10 or 20 years, are either blind or stupid. Ukraine is simply the new Iraq; the new Afghanistan; the new Vietnam. It is a geopolitical boondoggle underpinned by the perennial issue of energy hegemony, which guarantees perpetual boom times for the armaments industry and the big US hedge funds who will get the reconstruction contracts when it all finally does come to an end.
Supporting Ukraine in this conflict only benefits the war machine and in this respect, Sting’s little propaganda stunt at the end of last Thursday’s gig was actually as much an advertisement for Boeing and Raytheon as his performance of “What Could Have Been” was an ad for Netflix.
Sad and unthinkable though it may be, the best thing for the people of Ukraine right now, in a practical life and death sense, would be an immediate cessation of all NATO and Western aid.
The idea that Ukraine, pre-February 2022, was a thriving liberal democracy is laughable. Ukraine was and remains one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, a hodgepodge of varying ideologies and sects as foreign to our idea of ‘freedom’ as is Communist China, nurturing not only good old-fashioned Soviet-style personalities, but one of Europe’s most fervent neo-Nazi enclaves also.
This war is not Hitler rolling through sleepy Holland and Belgium, pillaging their chocolate and cheese, it is one corrupt ex-Soviet state engaging in a border dispute with another corrupt ex-Soviet state, where the contested region of the Donbas, whose population are more sympathetic to Moscow, was the main catalyst. And a border dispute it would have remained for the entirety of the week or two it would have taken for the whole thing to be over, had NATO and the West not intervened.
Border disputes and other unsavory geopolitical acts occur all over the world on a weekly basis. But we don’t pour billions of our tax dollars into these do we? The Chinese government is currently engaged in genocide, but we don’t lift a finger to stop this do we? No, we only get involved in the conflicts that benefit our ruling elite.
But this obvious hypocrisy is irrelevant in the final analysis. This war is simply unwinnable for one reason that should be obvious to everyone – Russia is a nuclear power. Furthermore, Russia has more nukes than any other nuclear power. It’s not Israel, or Pakistan – it’s RUSSIA. They cannot be militarily conquered. They will launch their missiles before they ever let that happen, whether it’s Putin in charge or someone else.
I used to hang around a big crew of Russians in my younger days and I know firsthand, those guys are crazy. Their sensibilities are not tuned to the same frequency as ours in the West. They have a fatalistic world view. They like guns, vodka, and big explosions. Their idea of a hilarious joke is spiking your drink with military grade hallucinogens and watching you wander around the club with your junk hanging out. The 17-year-old Russians I knew back then were tougher and more resourceful than most Western 40-year-olds I know today. Russians are nuts – and they’ll blow the whole planet to kingdom come before they concede defeat.
This war is unwinnable. That is a fact. So, what is the objective here?
The objective is to embroil the West in another twenty-year proxy war, primarily to make money for the Democratic Party’s defence contractor donors, and of course to control the narrative and the news cycle – because “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war.”
Snarky Orwell references aside though, there are of course geopolitical imperatives that drive the war effort also – as Nicholas John Spykman, professor of international relations at Yale University said: "Who controls the Rimland [the strip of coastal land that encircles Eurasia] rules Eurasia, who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world."
The NATO war hawks are once again gunning to turn the Cold War hot and exert full and final dominance over Eurasia. They will fail in this enterprise as surely as every other end-run against Russia throughout history has failed.
I will state it again: I have tremendous sympathy for the people of Ukraine. I’m not mad at Sting for dedicating his closing song to them – I’m mad at him for peddling war propaganda. And truth be known, I’m not even sure if I can be mad at him for that, he is only a singer after all. I wonder if he knows that Ukraine and Russia were about to conclude a peace treaty in April last year before Boris Johnson flew in and scuttled the talks? More on this here. Why would Johnson do that?
The companies and politicians who control the US, UK, Western Europe and their allies do not want the war to end. They wish it to continue in perpetuity, presumably until Putin is bled dry, or the Russians get sick of it and overthrow him (neither of which will happen – they are nuts, remember; and moreover, this is not their first rodeo), or at the very least until the people back home wise up like they eventually did with Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and demand an end to the madness.
I wrote last week about the horrible imperfection of history, how evil people are always going to do evil things, and how we need to avoid using utopian-leaning words like ‘should’ when fostering public foreign policy sentiment which, in this case at least, could lead to nuclear war and the end of civilisation as we know it. Wars should never happen – we can all agree on that. But whether or not any given war should be fought is a separate question every time.
Putin is not out to slaughter the Ukrainian people and destroy their way of life – it’s debatable whether his goal was even to occupy the entire country, before NATO goaded Zelensky into full scale armed resistance. Primarily he wants his land bridge to the Crimea to maintain Russian hegemony in the region. It is an unfortunate fact of life that military superpowers are able to impose their wills on smaller states, and to be perfectly frank – the USA, UK and Germany are in absolutely no moral position to lecture Russia on this topic.
Rod Stewart said, “If the Ukrainians lose, it’s the end of civilisation as we know it.” Rod, like Sting, gets points for musicianship, but fails pitifully at political science. It is in fact the opposite: If the Russians lose, it’s the end of civilisation as we know it.
I’ve never been a fan of Rod, ludicrous prat that he is. I probably inherited my distaste for him from my mother; I remember her telling me as child how she always used to see him around London in the seventies and found his persistent presence undesirable – “Yuck, go away Rod. Stop following me around,” was how she described her reaction. So to hell with Rod.
But I’m sad about Sting – not quite driven to tears, but pretty bummed. Apart from the Ukraine thing and the Netflix plug, it was a great show. But this is what the machine does – it hijacks all your favourite performers and turns them into grimy little shills. Once a massive Green Day fan, I have yet to forgive Billie Joe Armstrong for coming out very publicly and passive aggressively in 2020 and endorsing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
At least Sting wasn’t wearing a blue and yellow suit and calling for F-16 fighters like Rod. But he was shilling for the machine. It makes sense I guess – the machine has made him a very rich man. I would, however, point him back to his classic 1985 song; one he neglected to play last Thursday night: “Russians”.