Will Ukraine Confrontation Put “Paid” To the Propaganda Line that Trade Prevents War?

Probably not. I've noticed that bourgeois propaganda tropes are immune to facts, evidence, and reason. (And not just bourgeois propaganda tropes either.) When an ideological myth serves a purpose, politically or indoctrinally, its validity in reality is irrelevant.

The propaganda myth I'm referring to is the notion that nations that trade together don't fight wars. I don't know how many examples from history it would take to put such an obviously false idea to bed: apparently an infinite number is required. And the academics and “commentators” who put out obviously false ideas and are listened to respectfully, given space in newspapers and magazines and book contracts, are never discredited.

Let's take Europe. The countries and regions of Europe have trades for centuries. They've fought numerous wars during the same centuries. Trade prevents war?

Trade goes back millennia. So does war. Wars are generally fought until recent times between nearby entities. (This for the obvious reason that modern means of rapid travel and the ability to communicate over long distances quickly didn't exist.) Nearby entities also traded extensively, again because closeness made trade easier.

Nazi Germany, on the eve of invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, was receiving massive shipments of raw material from the Soviets. Didn't stop Hitler from invading and trying to destroy the Soviet Union.

And now we have Ukraine. Europe's economy is dead in the water. Russia is going into recession. Yet Europe, following its U.S. master, has started a trade war with Russia, imposing economic sanctions, to which Russia has had to respond, and it has responded by cutting off selected European imports of food, hurting its own people. The European political bosses prefer trying to rip Ukraine out of the Russian orbit, and push its anti-Russian military alliance, NATO, right up to Russia's border, than the economic welfare of their own states- and obviously they don't care about their own peoples, as long as they don't rebel.

I don't see trade preventing conflict here. Trade and economic well-being is being sacrificed to political goals. Politics is trumping economics. That isn't always the case, but it is the case much of the time- enough of the time to make one wonder how seemingly intelligent people could put forward such an obviously fallacious idea as “countries that trade together don't go to war,” and how an establishment media can find such nonsense cogent.

One can speculate as to the motives of the parasitic polemicists and ideologues who promulgate obviously false ideas, and I call them parasitic because they contribute nothing of value to society, yet occupy comfortable sinecures and pampered positions of status (although as parasites go, they're insignificant compared to parasites like billionaire hedge fund managers and other such speculators in financial instruments). One obvious motive is to promote the very destructive so-called “free trade” policies that have eviscerated the livelihoods of millions of non-privileged people all around the globe and greatly increased the power of capital over people. Another is the ever-present Panglossian impulse of those this system privileges to make it seem that the current system of corporate oligarchy is the best of all possible worlds. In both cases the real point is implied most of the time, although it can be stated overtly. This would surely explain why the corporate media, the capitalist foundation-funded “think tanks,” and academia would find these falsehoods useful to promote. (For some reason you don't see refutations of the false concept, even though refutation, as I just illustrated, is elementary.)

I notice that there are fads in establishment propaganda. “Free trade” worked out so badly for most people who have to earn a living, that now the rulers have changed tactics. Under Clinton, the destructive “free trade” deals were loudly ballyhooed as sure to rain down prosperity on all. When, predictably (and it was predicted by people on the margins of “respectability,” and by some beyond the margins) the opposite turned out to be the case, naturally disgruntlement and resistance among the populace set in. So now Obama, pursuing even more repressive and destructive “trade” agreements, is doing so in ironclad secrecy. Not even the national legislators who will be expected to rubber-stamp these venal pacts are allowed to know the details. These schemes will make the oligarchic corporations even more powerful and will place national governments in positions of complete subservience to them, invalidating any national laws- labor rights, environmental, anything at all- that gets in the way of some corporation's scheme to make a buck.

So the capitalist world, led by the U.S., gets ever less democratic and ever more repressive, as the corporate oligarchy, shielded by the “national security” state, gets ever richer and more powerful. It will end some day, probably badly, and in the meanwhile tremendous and unnecessary human suffering will be inflicted. The irony is, capitalism doesn't have to be this way. If it were properly regulated, it would be a workable system. But that is impossible without well-organized, mass people's movements that can seize state power and impose regulation for the common good. And the propaganda system works daily to confuse and divide people, while the various secret police and police agencies make sure that the beginnings of such organized movements don't get off the ground, by infiltrating, disrupting, and repressing them, and persecuting key activists. And especially in a nation like America, where the white majority is either racist or at best indifferent to their fellow humans of a darker skin pigmentation, and where right-wing ideologies are promoted at every turn while progressive ones are suppressed, dividing and ruling seems like a winning strategy for the rulers. The decay and self-destruction of the system is a slow process. As long as the imperial homeland can exploit overseas areas, by for example using their dirt-cheap labor to provide inexpensive consumer goods to the homeland population, the lid can be kept on, with the application of police violence against “the losers” of society, those who have to sell dime bags of outlawed intoxicants, or loose cigarettes on the street