Even though their last names are pronounced the same, Jeffrey Sachs and David Sacks are not related. What does unite them is their revulsion over the senseless slaughter in Ukraine.
There is a good chance that you have not read or heard about the horrific casualty numbers emanating from the war in Ukraine, because many media sites — and almost all the elites pushing to “fight to the last Ukrainian” — tend to ignore them or sweep them under the rug. After all, what’s a million or more human beings killed or wounded when you are seeking to use the people of Ukraine as cheap, disposable pawns in a proxy war against Putin and Russia?
And just who believes the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to be a “proxy war?” None other than Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In an interview on Wednesday, Rubio directly stated what so many have assumed for the last three years: “It’s been very clear from the beginning that [President Trump] views this as a protracted, stalemated conflict. And frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers — the United States, helping Ukraine, and Russia — and it needs to come to an end.”
Many believe the war could have “come to an end” soon after it started. One who does is Jeffrey Sachs.
At the end of last month, the Columbia professor and former advisor to three U.N. Secretaries-General — delivered to the European Parliament an address on the horrors and the futility of war in general, and especially in Ukraine, titled “The Geopolitics of Peace.”
Sachs makes many critically important points about Ukraine — the folly of NATO expansion; the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s president; the continual mistakes and provocations made by the Obama and Biden administrations; and his hour-long plea with Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to avoid war by publicly declaring that “NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine.”
According to Sachs, although Sullivan answered they “could not say that publicly,” he assured Sachs there “will be no war.”
To that, Sachs stressed during his remarks to the EU Parliament: “These are not very bright people. I’m telling you, if I can give you my honest view, they’re not very bright people. They talk to themselves. They don’t talk to anybody else. They play game theory.”
One person who agrees with Sachs on much of this is David Sacks, a billionaire entrepreneur who is now the White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks has been one of the most powerful and consistent voices screaming out for both an end to the war in Ukraine and for full accountability.
During an interview with Jesse Watters on Fox News, Sacks said, “I think that Zelensky has powerful motivations not to make peace … He basically says the war needs to go on forever. And I think there’s good reasons for that in his mind. Number one, if the war is over, he loses power, right? … And he’ll be vulnerable to political retaliation from his political opponents. He needs this war to justify his rules. So I think that’s number one is, if he gives up power, his own safety is at risk. Number two is the gravy train here. I mean, we’ve been sending hundreds of billions of dollars over to Ukraine. And these Ukrainian elites there, these oligarchs have been feasting on that money. And Zelensky is at the top of that pyramid. And that whole grift ends if the war ends.”
Many might find Sacks’s words shocking, but many others believe they should have been spoken months or even years ago. Perhaps the reason they have not is that most of the media and the elites immediately signed up with “Team Ukraine.”
Once they did, seemingly most negative stories about Ukraine — reports of more than 1 million killed or wounded; the offer of a very early ceasefire; off-shore bank accounts; connections to organized crime; and full accountability of the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars being spent on the country; or the exponentially increasing chances of triggering World War III — were off the table and not to be investigated. Why?
Going back to the remarks from Jeffrey Sachs, we might have an answer. Said Sachs, “I used to be a member of the Democratic Party. I now am a member of no party because both are the same anyway. The Democrats became complete warmongers over time.”
Is the Democratic Party now the “warmonger” party? One that believes in and instigates “forever wars” for their own interests? Be those interests a proxy war; an unhinged hatred of Trump which then welds Trump to Putin; helping various defense contractors or international organizations enrich themselves via the slaughter of young Ukrainians and Russians; or simply a giant board game played by wealthy elites thousands of miles from the battlefields.
No matter the answers, 1 million men, women and children have been killed or wounded for absolutely nothing. Jeffrey Sachs and David Sacks have just called out that obscenity in very public ways. They should be applauded.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.
