Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from JournalistenWatch:
Arms industry in full swing: global military spending is rising to a new high
After the political actors and henchmen of global economic powers have fed the pharmaceutical industry with taxpayers’ money in recent years, it is now the arms industry’s turn. And things are going really well for the “corpse makers”:
Global military spending rose to a new high last year. This emerges from a new report by the Stockholm Institute for International Peace Research (Sipri), which was published on Monday.
According to this, global military spending increased for the ninth year in a row — it climbed to a record level of 2.44 trillion US$. For the first time since 2009, military spending also increased in all five geographical regions defined by Sipri, with particularly high increases in Europe, Asia and Oceania, and the Middle East.
Russia’s military spending rose 24% to an estimated $109 billion in 2023, a 57% increase since 2014, according to the report. NATO members accounted for $1.34 trillion last year, equivalent to 55% of global military spending. U.S. military spending rose 2.3% to $916 billion in 2023, accounting for 68% of NATO’s total military spending.
China spent an estimated $296 billion on the military in 2023, up 6.0% from 2022. This was the 29th consecutive year-over-year increase in Chinese military spending. China accounted for half of total military spending in the Asia and Oceania region. Several of China’s neighbors also linked their own spending increases to China’s rising military spending.
It doesn’t really matter who goes to war against whom, the profiteers are the same everywhere.
Afterword from the translator:
What the pharma industry hasn’t managed over the decades, the Military Industrial Complex is working hard to accomplish: the complete annihilation of life on the planet for financial gain. I know, WAR has always been a part of humanity, but the weapons that had been in use before the atomic bomb made it literally impossible for them to wipe out all life on Earth. Now, with AI and all the bio, chemical and nuclear weaponry at the fingertips of these megalomaniacs, it looks like life on this planet has reached the wall against which it has been stood for execution. How are we going to defend ourselves and our families against so much greed and hatred by the few and their minions in our “governments”?
https://samnytt.se/cameron-kriget-i-ukraina-extremt-bra-valuta-for-pengarna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A-BwyNc7Ls
Cameron: War in Ukraine ‘extremely good value for money’
David Cameron and his American counterpart Antony Blinken are holding a joint press conference in Washington on Monday. Like most other press meetings of this level in the Western world over the past two years, the war in Ukraine is a central topic.
Both Cameron and Blinken talk about the importance of military rearmament. This must be done to “promote and demonstrate democratic values and a freer, more peaceful and successful world,” the document says.
Not least in the United States, there is growing political opposition to the continued shipment of weapons worth hundreds of billions to the war-torn European country. The British Foreign Secretary is trying to counter this by emphasizing how good the war is for the United States.
– The best thing we can do this year is to keep Ukraine in this war. They fight so bravely. They will not lose because of lack of morale, the British Foreign Secretary said during a press conference, before continuing:
– This is extremely good value for money for the US and other countries. About five to ten percent of your defense budget, almost half of the military equipment Russia had before the war was destroyed without the loss of a single American soldier. This is an investment in American security!
The conference is sparking reactions on social media, with many questioning whether the leaders of the Western world even care about the Ukrainian people.
The duplicity of the Brits is expected.
I have yet to hear anyone tell us WHY we should promote war on Russia or WHY they consider Russia a threat to the United States. There’s another problem: someday, the Russians may get tired of the U.S. supplying weapons, money, materials and “advisers” to Ukraine and say that such actions are an act of war. What happens then?
That was a rhetorical question.
@KHarn
Re: “I have yet to hear anyone tell us WHY we should promote war on Russia or WHY they consider Russia a threat to the United States.”
It is an open secret more-or-less that the common peoples of the U.S. and Europe do not want – do not relish – a war with Russia. Perhaps because like you, they see where it could lead if things go badly wrong.
The various propaganda organs of the West say that we must help Ukraine in its war against Moscow, but this polite fiction – which is designed to supply the appearance that it is Ukraine which is at war and not the U.S. & NATO – fools fewer and fewer people every day, least of all the Russians.
The Russians know that without the support of the U.S. & NATO, the Ukrainian war effort would collapse. They also know that various western nations have sent advisors, arms and financial aid to the Zelensky regime. French President Macron, that little popinjay, even boasted a few weeks back that France would fight Russia alone if need be! Maybe he needs someone to read to him the dismal story of Napoleon’s long retreat from Moscow, with the important parts underlined…
And various mercenaries from the West have joined the war as well, and some have become casualties in it.
The truth of the matter is that it is the western ruling class which is at war with Russia, and not the ordinary people of the West. The financial and political elites in the West feel mortally-endangered by the emerging BRICS bloc – which threatens the global hegemony of the Bretton Woods regime and the U.S. dollar as the currency of international trade.
Worse yet, from the standpoint of the western elites, the Russians, Chinese, et al, are now creating a sound currency backed by real commodities, one which – if it takes hold – would cause a stampede away from the fiat money and unpayable debts of the West and into the BRICS alliance instead.
If you want to know why the world is being set afire by the western power elites, this is the correct explanation: Their century-long position as the dominant power in finance and geopolitics is being threatened by a rival who seems poised to unseat them.