Another Week – Another $800 Million
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Darrell Castle talks about the U.S. decision to give another $800 million in weapons to Ukraine and whether this continued escalation is necessary. He also asks the question “Whose hands end up using them and, how do we know where the weapons go.”
Transcription / Notes
ANOTHER WEEK ANOTHER $800 MILLION
Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 29th day of April in the year of our Lord 2022 and I will be talking about the U.S. decision to give another $800 million in weapons to Ukraine which now seems to be a weekly thing. Is this continued escalation necessary and where do these weapons go? Whose hands end up using them and, how do we know?
Last week Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin were in Ukraine for talks with President Zelensky. This was an unusual visit for the U.S. since no official delegation has visited that country since the Russian invasion began. It was not unusual, however, for the U.S. to promise $800 million more in weapons since that seems to be an almost weekly thing now. This new package was termed foreign military assistance and was part of a new $713 million which came after two successive weeks of $800 million each. This week President Biden asked congress for $33 billion of taxpayer debt to pour into the Ukrainian black hole of war and despair.
The new weapons also reflect a continuing trend of escalation in lethality including heavy artillery, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters, and tanks. The heavy artillery included 18 towed 175mm howitzers and 40,000 rounds for them. In an interesting twist of fate, the U.S. and other NATO members are also delivering ammunition and weapons from the Soviet Union remaining in European stockpiles. Poland will send several T-72 Soviet era tanks and Germany will provide self-propelled anti-air armored tanks. Those are essentially a flak gun mounted on a tank chassis. These old Soviet weapons systems will then be replaced by U.S. state of the art systems so sweet deal.
I give you this partial list of weapons to demonstrate the escalation of the war in terms of lethality and danger. Poland and Germany both previously expressed reservations about continuing to escalate the struggle but have sense reversed course. That reversal came after a meeting between several NATO members and Secretaries Blinken and Austin after their Ukraine visit. The meeting was held at Ramstein, the U.S. air base in Germany. The German Chancellor Herr Scholz, in an interview just two days before with a German magazine said:
“We need to do everything to avoid a direct military confrontation between NATO and a heavily armed superpower such as Russia, a nuclear power. I will do everything to avoid an escalation that could lead to World War lll—there can be no nuclear war.”
Apparently, everything does not include U.S. pressure, threats, and/or promises to pay for it all. Just two days after that statement was published Germany promised to offer artillery systems and training to Ukrainian troops on German soil. The German defense minister hailed the decision as “progress.” Scholtz once again emphasized that “avoiding escalation towards NATO is a top priority for me and that’s why I don’t focus on polls or let myself be irritated by shrill calls. The consequences of an error would be dramatic.”
Well, chancellor, those are fine words, but once again talk is cheap, and in the end you did exactly what you said you would not do. The risks you previously said you wanted to avoid are just as real now as they were then. In fact, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the next day, “the risk of nuclear war remains a serious real danger and we must not underestimate it.” Russia currently has a stockpile of battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons estimated at 2000 while the U.S. maintains about 250. Those weapons are not designed to be city annihilators, but to be used on the battlefield against enemy troop concentrations.
In addition to the weapons, President Biden announced that the U.S. will now pay the salaries of Ukrainian government officials because, well that’s who we are with common democracies and all. The question remains, how do we know where the weapons end up. Harry Truman once said that we would sell the Soviets anything they couldn’t shoot back at us, but I’m afraid that in this deal we don’t know if the weapons we freely give will come back at us or not.
Tucker Carlson interviewed Colonel Douglas MacGregor who was military advisor to a succession of U.S. Presidents from Clinton to Trump and who is obviously very knowledgeable in the area. Colonel MacGregor said that the weapons could very easily end up on the black market which is the same thing that happened with ISIS in Syria and Libya. Western Intelligence went in and trained all these anti-government forces who turned out to be terrorists, so the U.S. gave military grade weapons to some of the most violent people on earth. We do not know where these weapons are going and after the dust settles, they may very well end up in the wrong hands such as those of some terrorist group.
Training is certainly no problem because Ukrainian troops are on the ground in Germany and Poland training right now. I suppose if NATO can’t come to you then you can come to NATO. There is a very strong rumor that UK special forces along with French and American special forces are also inside Ukraine training Ukrainian troops. I hope and pray that is not the case, but it does seem likely. There just seems to be no end to the madness and bloodshed. I wonder how many of the lunatics that make up U.S. strategy have ever picked up a rifle and walked patrol a few thousand miles from home. The strategy to use war as a tactic is just a geopolitical chess match to them.
Secretary of Defense Austin explained the whole thing with his announcement in Poland following his meeting in Ukraine. Quoting the Secretary in the New York Times, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things it has done in invading Ukraine. It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
That statement when analyzed, is very disturbing to me. What it means is that the U.S. and its vassals do not want the war to end because they want to use Ukrainian blood to drain the blood of Russia. Peace is never talked about or even mentioned as a possibility. Just keep the war going and make it worse each week. The American taxpayers can foot the bill and eventually the various defense contractors can profit. How does that profit work when the weapons are reportedly coming from stockpiles? Well, those stockpiles have to be replenished eventually so you might as well just transfer the money to General Dynamic, Raytheon, and others. Why not just be honest about it and transfer the money directly to the defense or more honestly, war industry.
The U.S., as a collateral benefit, gets to maintain its status as the world’s greatest arms dealer. Russia is weakened by being ground up militarily and economically in an unnecessarily long war that destroys Ukraine at the same time. The troops in Vietnam use to have a joke about our presence there that went something like; We are going to free these people if we have to kill every last one of them to do it. There will be no negotiations in Ukraine because as Secretary Austin’s said the longer the war drains Russia the better.
Why all this hatred of Putin, and Russia? I remember the cold war and this invasion obviously happened, but I contend that Putin tried virtually everything to avoid it. Would the U.S. accept Russian missiles in Mexico or Canada? Would the U.S. accept a hostile alliance between those countries with enemy troops there? Would the U.S. accept Russian military equipment pouring into Mexico and Canada? I certainly hope that we would not but that is the scenario that Russia is expected to accept, but the bear says no we will not accept it. The bear is also intelligent and a keen observer of modern culture.
Putin sits in the Kremlin and watches Western Civilization crumble and destroy itself and its once common values. He states publicly that he is not going to accept that for Russia and the West rightly concludes that he will not play the Great Reset game that has been designed for the world and therefore he must be destroyed.
In a recent speech, he compared the West’s loss of its values, its ideals, with Russia’s loss of the communist idea that had led Russia for so long, so a new way had to be found after Communism. He went on to say” now it seems the great European powers are tired and have abandoned their ideas in favor of a pan European one. Liberalism has failed the West and has led to the loss of values and identity.” To counter the liberal elite of the West, Putin suggests that Russia become a beacon of conservatism and traditionalism.
Putin asks, “Where are the humanitarian fundamentals of Western political thought? What are the general ethical limits in the world where the potential of science and machines are becoming almost boundless? Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all these are the mileposts on the path towards renewal.”
I could go on with Putin’s speech denouncing wokeism, but I think that is enough to help explain why they hate him so much. Its much easier to despise, demonize, and destroy someone’s character when you have financial status as the world’s reserve currency, and you have complete, total control of all information that is available, and you allow no counter thought to be expressed.
In conclusion I want to express some thoughts about where this attitude of grinding down Russia could lead. There are people of influence in America, people such as senators and generals who are starting to publicly advocate for U.S. ground troops in Ukraine. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware recently: “We in congress and the administration must come to a common position about when we are willing to go the next step and to send not just arms but troops to the aid and defense of Ukraine?” Many generals echo the same sentiment, calling our reluctance fear, but perhaps it is prudence rather than fear. It is also an admission that the U.S. does not want the war to end but prefers that it grind on.
These Doctor Strangelove types are willing to gamble with nuclear annihilation as the stakes. Would Putin allow his country to be humiliated and destroyed rather than initiate a nuclear exchange. I doubt that very much. Escalation to nuclear holocaust if it comes, will be one step at a time one escalation followed by an ever more aggressive retaliation until finally a tactical nuke is deployed and then an even more powerful one and so on and so forth.
Finally, folks, this is really Doctor Strangelove level insanity. When it comes to nuclear war there is only one rule and that is don’t go there and don’t even think about it.
At least that’s the way I see it,
Until next time folks,
This is Darrell Castle,
Thanks for listening.
