Wars of the Chickenhawks

By Gwydion M. Williams

Chickenhawk Politics

A War For Peace?

The Myth of Leninist Failure

The Invention of Pure Ukrainianism

I offer good news – a nuclear war harming any part of Europe is very unlikely. The entire Ukraine war has been fought within limits. Whatever they say in public, US and European leaders act as if they understood that Russia simply wants to reclaim people who would have been better not included in a sovereign Ukraine. Crimea, indeed, was part of Russia until 1954.

Likewise the current horrible situation in West Asia will stay within at least some of its horrible limits. Israel cannot risk losing US support.

The bad news is that the West’s elites and the West’s main media are going to go on encouraging conflict in the wider world. And a limited nuclear war in West Asia is possible in the longer run. Iran might get nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has them, and might eventually join a wider alliance aimed at forcing on Israel a real two-states solution.

The West’s top decision-makers, though contemptible, are far from irrational. They will avoid risking the lives of their voters, apart from letting some of the poor die of neglect. And though they have shelters for a nuclear war, they have no wish to preside over a wrecked world.

And would definitely not risk it for any point of principle. They might allow Israel to be destroyed and go no further than ineffective protests, if it should come to that.

Chickenhawk Politics

During the long cycle of conflicts that led up to the final invasion of Iraq, there were many jokes about ‘chickenhawks’ among US decision-makers.^[1] People who had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War.

They remain eager to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood.

They certainly don’t want to risk a war with Russia, or even with China. ‘Not in my backyard’ remains a reliable rule for the centre-right, and for the pro-hegemony centre-left.

Of course bad politicians may still have good policies, and voters might grimace and back them. Support for Israel is fading fast, especially among Jews living in the wider world. But I know of good people who believe that Russia might start advancing into the rest of Europe, if not stopped in Ukraine.

Yet the truth is that Russia no longer wants to rule any non-Russians, apart from minorities within the Russian Federation.

In not allowing regional minorities like the Chechens to secede, Russians are no different from the majority populations of most other sovereign states. They anyway did finally establish peace there, whereas the various conflicts encouraged by the West have mostly remained chronic and unsolved.

A War For Peace?

Filled with New Right wisdom, most Anglo politicians decided to remake the world after the Soviet collapse of 1989-1991. Broad ideas were:

The Marshall Plan, once seen as having saved the West, was actually a horrible error that we were lucky to survive.
The same mistake must not be made in former Soviet countries. They must get the Pure Capitalism that is being hampered in Western countries.
Everyone else must be pushed to accept the twisted version of the Mixed Economy that Thatcher and Reagan had pioneered.
Foreigners must be required to have two or more parties of government, though preferably with very similar views.
They must turn a blind eye to Israel’s desire to gradually make Jewish settlers dominant on the West Bank, which they view as sacred Jewish territory, Judea and Samaria.

It’s worth noting that while Samaria was once Hebrew, it was never Jewish. A distinct religious group called Samaritans were one continuation of the original Hebrew community. They did not accept the version of Hebrew religion brought back by the Babylonian exiles;^[2] the people who were henceforth known as Jews.

In the time of Jesus, Samaritans were powerful rivals, with their heartland in what is now the northern half of the West Bank. The parable of the Good Samaritan rests on the general assumption among Jews that Samaritans were hostile. And many other sources confirm that this was the norm.

Jews cannot validly claim ancestors in the portion of Caanan sometimes known as Samaria. Only Samaritans lived there, persecuted by both Muslims and the Christian crusaders. Mostly converting to Islam. Less than a thousand survive as practitioners of their religion, but many now counted as Palestinian Muslims or Christians have the actual hereditary right to Samaria, for what it’s worth.

There is also no doubt that some of those Jews who did not go into exile were converted to Islam, and are now part of the wider Palestinian community. Scheduled to be evicted in favour of current practitioners of the Jewish religion.

People now counting as Jewish include a mix of many different origins – though genetic studies do show a majority of Middle Eastern heritage.^[3] Stronger in the male line than the female, suggesting many female converts. Women who probably converted to get a better-off husband. (Also better washed, for mediaeval Christians.) That probably continued happening even when Christian and Islamic authorities banned it: pre-modern societies had only weak controls over individuals who moved away from the places where they were known.

Regardless, remote ancestry has not been allowed to override current populations anywhere other than the land of Caanan. Indeed, the original Zionist idea was only to make a safe haven for European Jews somewhere. It was seen as part of a general settlement of people of European origin as self-sufficient communities wherever the agriculture was suitable and the native population not too numerous. Uganda was considered, and would have been a very unhappy choice. White settlers in Kenya and South Asians in the whole of East Africa were mostly driven out.

In the event, the rulers of the British Empire decided that they needed Jewish support when they were in danger of losing World War One. Many in the ruling class believed in notions of vast hidden subversive Jewish power – the London Times was initially ready to believe the absurd stories in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^[4] They dropped this only when it was shown to be a plagiarism from a French pamphlet written against Napoleon III, and not mentioning Jews.

At the time Balfour promised a Jewish homeland, the only Jew in the British cabinet was against the idea.^[5] He correctly saw that it might be used to deny Jews the right to live as minorities in places they had been for centuries.

The USA had taken vast numbers of European Jews, and would have benefited enormously had it taken all the survivors of the death camps. But it didn’t happen: many in the USA felt that recent arrivals hadn’t entirely fitted and they didn’t want too many more.

But those people had to go somewhere.

They were also joined by Jews who had lived for centuries in Islamic countries,

Up until the 1990s, I supported Israel against Palestinian claims. I favoured a Two State solution, and supposed that it had been achieved with the Oslo Accords. But it gradually became clear that the government of Israel was determined to undermine the authority of the secular nationalists who had made the deal.

Arafat had missed many opportunities to get a real two-state solution, before the Soviet collapse. But when he finally adjusted to the new realities, Israel undermined his authority. The excuse was a failure to stop continuing violence, but this was always bound to take time. He was not given time, or a reasonable settlement.

The refusal to allow even a small Palestinian state with genuine independence is likely to prove fatal to the original Zionist idea.^[6] Especially since hostility to Jews as such is now marginal in almost all Western countries. It is deliberately lumped in with hostility to Israel extremism, but Jews deciding where to live must be aware of the realities.

Among the Palestinians, it is generally agreed that Israel encouraged Hamas in its early days, when it seemed less dangerous than secular nationalism.^[7] And though they never encouraged Hezbollah in Lebanon, the organisation formed as a reaction among Shia Muslims to Israel invading their homelands.^[8] The invasion was intended to drive out the Palestinians living there, but ended up producing a much more dangerous enemy.

The Myth of Leninist Failure

I mentioned earlier that the West’s leaders rejected the idea of a Marshall Plan for the former Soviet Bloc. George Soros has whined about being laughed at, when he called for it. But he chooses not to connect this with Russia rejecting Western values. And the rest of the boosters of US Globalisation seem unaware that it was ever possible.

Those who were fools then, are still fools today.

The Marshall Plan was the USA giving vast funding to former enemies: Japan, Italy, and the western half of Germany. And this generous and moral policy paid off.

The New Right have a naïve belief in cheating and dishonesty as the best policies. As I see it, short-term benefits reliably have a much larger cost in the long run. US power advanced when it was widely seen as moral, and in many cases actually was moral. And sadly, Jimmy Carter’s brief attempt to make US politics more honest was swept aside by Reagan’s trickery.

The West in the late 1940s and in the 1950s faced a real risk of losing the Cold War. Not just militarily, but also economically. Even though we now know that Soviet claims were exaggerated, the revised figures show a vigorous system into the 1970s.

The USA was briefly being overtaken by the Soviet Union. The main Western successes were the recipients of Marshall aid, Japan in particular. Places that had a lot more state controls than were ever managed in the USA.

The generally accepted source for the world economy across time is the work of Angus Maddison, published by the West’s own Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.^[9] And conveniently, some of the raw data is posted on the Wikipedia.^[10] I was able to do a quick cut-and-paste, and then an estimate using Excel. And it showed that real economic history is very different from the New Right vision.

The ratios of GDP per head comparing 1950 to 1973 were as follows; Eastern Europe, 2.4: USSR, 2.1: United States, 1.7: Japan, 6.0: China, 1.9: India, 1.4: France, 2.5: Germany, 3.1: Italy, 3.0. The Wiki data for Germany unfortunately lumps east and west, when West Germany was certainly growing fast. But at that time, the Soviet Block was a vigorous competitor.

Mao’s China was also doing fine in 1973. GDP per head in China in 1913 was 552, in today’s dollars. By 1950 it was 448, justifying Mao’s claim that China’s rural economy had actually declined when it was open to global capitalism. And despite errors, it had risen by 1973 to 838. Small compared to what came later: 1,834 in 1989 and 6,725 in 2008. But getting a traditionalist economy moving tends to be the hard part.

A comparison to India is interesting. Their figures are 1913, 673. 1950, 619. 1973, 853. 1989, 1,270. 2008, 2,975. By this measure India had regressed under British rule, but was ahead of China in 1950.

Mao caught up. Self-reliance worked, and advanced technology was mastered. The first H-bomb in 1966, and the first satellite in 1970.

Mao also got education for the children of the peasantry. Got everyone used to working in large factory-like units. That laid the basis for what came next: a massive expansions of factory production once the USA was no longer hampering China’s trade with the wider world. It gets forgotten that the US government had treated China’s actual government as illicit until the early 1970s, and let the Taiwan exiles keep China’s UN seat until 1971.^[11]

In the case of anti-China pundits, they can hardly be ignorant of such a basic fact of history. A clear case of them omitting truths that would not suit their case. There is indeed a much wider pattern of Western sources coping with these off-message facts by simply not mentioning them. They are hardly the only people to do this, but they claim Unlimited Truthfulness for themselves. They definitely don’t live up to their claims.

In the case of economic growth in Leninist systems, I’ve looked for alternative figures. For China, the only data I found showed much the same picture.^[12]

You do get confident statements about China stagnating and starving under Mao, but only from those who don’t have to look in detail at what was actually happening. No one mentions details, because that could not be done without bare-faced lying.

Note also that this is wealth per head. China’s death rate fell sharply under Mao, and was no worse than a poor-country average during the so-called famine after the over-ambitious Great Leap Forward.^[13] China’s total GDP was 136,071 million in 1973. India’s a mere 85,546. There were at that time 882 million Chinese, as against 580 million Indians. And China has since got its population growth under control.

The Soviet Bloc was also not exactly failing in 1989: it had simply lost confidence in itself. This is shown by using the Wiki’s figures to find the ratio between GDP per head between 1973 and 1989, 16 years rather than 23. Eastern Europe, 1.2: USSR, 1.2: United States, 1.4: Japan, 1.6: China, 2.2: India, 1.5: France, 1.3: Germany, 1.4: Italy, 1.5.

There was also failure in the space program. Not only did they lose the race to the moon: the string of early successes faded out. Late Soviet influence cast a blight on everything it touched.

By the 1980s, the Soviet Union no longer believed that it was the future of humanity. And many of its officials must have noticed that their overseas equivalents had much nicer life-styles. Including those countries where the actual wealth per head was below Soviet levels.

If some of those who brought down the Soviet system were idealists, and rather more were confused, many must have seen that they personally might gain quite a lot. As indeed many of them did.

That’s my analysis. I’m sure a professional economist could make a better job of showing how the Soviet Union flourished until the 1970s, and then faded. I do the best I can, as a man of 74, working from home.

What astonishes me is that none of them have done an analysis based on overall economic performance. None I can find, at least, after quite a lot of seeking. The Big Lie of capitalism flourishing and Leninism failing gets accepted, even though the raw facts show otherwise. Many on the left prefer to think that the Soviet Union was always a failure, in the delusory belief that this will make their own variety of socialism more popular. Likewise for Mao’s China, and they seem keen to endorse the New Right story that China since Mao has wholly abandoned socialism.

The Invention of Pure Ukrainianism

The big trouble with lying is that it isn’t true.

The same people who had been certain that the Marshall Plan had been a disaster found it convenient to ignore the consequences of this false belief.

They could be satisfied with outcomes in Middle Europe – the bloc from East Germany down to Bulgaria. They could avoid recognising that it was the attraction of the interventionist European Union that counted.

They were satisfied until the population started voting for right-wing parties that also cared about welfare, and did not feel entirely grateful for what the USA had done to them.

The ‘geniuses’ of the New Right have never faced up to what they did to Russia. The figures in the Wiki say that in 1973 its GDP per head was 10,492. But after Western ‘help’ it had shrunk to 8,586 in 1995. And had risen again to 24,669 by 2018, thanks to Putin stopping the rot.^[14]

Maddison’s 2003 book shows a similar picture, allowing for it using equivalents in 1990 dollars.^[15] 6059 in 1973, rising modestly to 7098 in 1989. Falling as low as 3854 in 1996, when the Russian Communists came close to ousting Yeltsin.^[16]

Back in 1996, I commented on how the West had messed up.

“The Independent in its editorial of 19th June 96 conceded that in previous votes “extensive ballot-rigging probably took place”. But they defend the virtue of latest elections (And Richard Nixon never told a lie.) The Independent had previously endorsed the notion that Russians freely voting for enemies of the West is anti-democratic. They have to treat the present events as fully honest until at least 1997 or 1998”.^[17]

In an updated version that I posted to the web in 2015, I added details:

“The 1995 Legislative elections saw the Communists come top with 22% in the PR section of the vote. The right-wing nationalist ‘Liberal Democrats’ come second with just over 11%. The pro-Western pro-Yeltsin ‘Our Home – Russia‘ got just over 10%. The pro-Western but anti-Yeltsin Yabloko got under 7%. Lebed’s group under 5%, and also less than a rival Communist Party still looking to the vanished Soviet Union. There were a lot of small parties with smaller votes.

“In the 1996 Presidential vote, Yeltsin got 35.8 and the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov got 32.5. Lebed got 14.7, the Yabloko candidate 7.4 and the right-wing nationalist Zhirinovsky 5.8%. Yeltsin won the second round, 54.4 to 40.7, with 4.9 rejecting both of them.”^[18]

Gorbachev was actually a candidate in 1996, but got a derisory 386,069 votes, 0.52 of the total. Yeltsin after the Communist revival was wise enough to stand down and make Putin his successor. By 2002, the last year shown for Maddison’s 2003 book, GDP per head was back to 4844. Meantime pro-Western Yabloko has shrunk to insignificance: 1.34% in 2021.^[19] Failing below the threshold for even one seat in the national parliament.

The 753,280 voters for Yabloko are treated by the West as if they were the real and democratic Russia. 54.4 million voters for mostly anti-Western parties are ignored. But it’s an open system, with Putin currently the most popular. 28.0 million voted for Putin’s party, and 10.7 million for the Communists, the largest opposition.^[20]

(Figures are for party lists; these are half the MPs and the rest are for individual constituencies. Yabloko has had none of either sort since 2007.)

Russia has surprisingly healthy politics, considering what they suffered in the 1990s. But the West’s greedy elite wants obedience rather than a healthy society. And in Ukraine, they got their wish.

Ukraine was pulled two ways, with Western Ukraine keen on obedience and failure. Plus massive corruption by elected leaders, and a growing heroization of Ukrainian fascists who had fought for Hitler at both the beginning and end of the war, even though they made a bid to be a Third Force in between. GDP per head was 7,849 in 1973, shrunk to 5,024 by 1995. And still dismal at 9,813 in 2018, as against 24,669 for Russia.^[21]

Russia flourishing while Ukraine remained mired was one reason why eastern and southern Ukraine liked the idea of being ruled by Moscow once again.

Not the main reason. Even though the portion of the ancient Ruthenian people who became Ukrainians failed to liberate themselves after the Mongols conquered them in the 13^th century, some of them deeply resented being eventually taken over by Moscow. Disliked Moscow achieving a much more successful version of Ruthenian identity.

And many others found it fine. They were similar in language and religion, and could become functionally Russian. In the October issue of Labour Affairs, I gave an example of how Ukraine invented itself after being awarded independence by Yeltsin.^[22] Awarded in combination with leaders in Belarus and Ukraine, at a time when Ukraine was still friendly to Russia. The main logic was undermining the residual power of Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union.

But once Ukraine had been gimmicked into sovereign existence, people who had been Russian-speaking and similar to the population still in the Russian Federation decided that there was a wonderful Ukrainian heritage to which they must return.

But it was a lie. In as far as it was a nation, it was a nation with a sad habit of making a mess of every opportunity to rule itself.

Ukraine means borderland, and it was just that. Invaded by Poles, and they and Russians suffered massive slave raids by the foothold the Ottoman Empire had in Crimea. Had till Catherine the Great conquered it.

Ukrainians also identified as Cossacks. Men keen on their own freedom, but also notorious for being brutal servants of powerful foreign autocrats. Foes of the freedoms of strangers. Mostly servants of the Tsar, but they used to be notorious for having worked all over Europe for the Nazis in World War Two. But the USA collected many and gave them refuge in Canada – much safer from Jews looking for war criminals than they would have been in the USA.

Ukraine was pulled two ways. The Orange Revolution of 2004 was such a flop that the loser in 2004 was returned in 2010.^[23] A vote that international observers called transparent and honest, after fears that the pro-Orange government might try to rig it.^[24]

In 2014, Western advisors did not risk taking up the President’s offer of a new election on a fair basis. Instead the parliament went hysterically anti-Russian and broke their own constitution by declaring him deposed.^[25] Fragmented a country whose identity had always been weak, with a large minority now thinking that rule from Moscow was a better option.^[26]

Western leaders had swallowed their own lies. Putin repeatedly won fair and open elections: no more corrupt than a typical vote in the USA. And his main opponent each time was the candidate of the revived Russian Communist Party. Pro-Western elements were no stronger overall than those West Europeans who still vote for Communist Parties. Rather weaker than the non-Communist left-wing Europeans who reject US hegemony.

Nietzsche said that which does not destroy us, makes us stronger. One of many half-smart remarks he made: damage will more often cause permanent weakening. But for Russia, all of the ingenious plots to create a war in Ukraine have indeed made Russia stronger.

Made them dependent on China; but China’s leaders have been much smarter. A world view evolved from Leninism has been vastly more realistic than the New Right garbage. Friendship with Russia counts for much more than those chunks of Siberia and Central Asia that China’s last dynasty once ruled. It is anyway true that most of Siberia was independently tribal until the Tsars conquered them.

China’s rulers are sensible and modest. They can simply sit back and let the chickenhawks discredit themselves.

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenhawk_(politics)

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans#Hellenistic_period

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews#Paternal_line

^[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/hitler-the-13th-chancellor/

^[5] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Edwin-Montagu-Jewish-Anti-Zionist-Warned-in-1917-Against-Plans-for-a-Modern-Israel

^[6] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Zionism-Decays-Into-Canaanite-Nationalism

^[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hamas#Early_Islamic_activism_in_Gaza

^[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hezbollah

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Economy:_Historical_Statistics

^[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

^[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations#People’s_Republic_of_China_in_the_United_Nations_(since_1971)