Russian Tensions
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Like in Mexico, the criminals have military weapons and military vehicles and drugs dealers have small submarines
PS: How many hospitals, and schools can be build with the money spent on those sophisticated weapons ? We need a free access society to satisfy the real needs of the human beings
Hardly a day passes by without an exchange of fire and shelling between the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters, and Turkish forces and Turkey-backed Syrian opposition gunmen.
Analysts say Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to push his own goals in neighboring Syria. Turkey’s leader says he’s planning a major military operation to push back Syrian Kurdish fighters and create a long sought-after buffer zone in the border area.
We weren’t the only ones to get it wrong. So, apparently, did the Great Zelensky.
Here is ex-Trotskyist Paul Mason putting the case for NATO arming Ukraine. No surprise there since he’s now a “Starmerite”. What is galling is that he invokes Marx and Karl Liebknecht in support of this.
Here’s a couple of passages from his article.
“The Marxist tradition never had a problem with supporting wars waged by states where they served the interest of the working class, or of anti-imperialism — from Marx’s support for the French Republic in 1870, to supporting the USSR against Nazism, to solidarity with Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.”
[This point is dealt with in chapter 13 of our pamphlet The Socialist Party and War here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/the-socialist-party-and-war-1950/#ch13 ]
“For Karl Liebknecht, it [anti-militarism] was about recognising that the standing army, separate from the people, brutalising its recruits and using them against strikes and colonial uprisings, was an essential part of the capitalist system. The way to combat militarism was through agitation, education, political rights for soldiers and through international disarmament, removing the excuse for the arms race.
But Marxist anti-militarism has never been pacifism. In the new situation of the Zeitenwende Germany, like all democracies, will need to modernise its armed forces and spend more on them. Die Linke should not oppose this.”[Liebknecht did advocate those army reforms but he saw the way-out as international working class action to replace capitalism with socialism, not agreements between capitalist states.]
https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/the-crisis-in-die-linke-5fbdc71ee8ec
In reply to ALB, I came across a paper that provides a very useful survey of the positions on war taken by European social democrats in the years preceding 1914: Marc Mulholland, ‘Marxists of Strict Observance’? The Second International, National Defense and the Question of War. I can send the paper by email on request.
First, there WERE a few prominent figures who like us equally opposed offensive and defensive wars. “At the 1891 Congress of the International, [Dutch socialist Domela] Nieuwenhuis argued that socialists ‘must reject all chauvinism and any distinction between offensive and defensive wars.’ Any skilled diplomat, he pointed out, could present his country’s military action as ultimately defensive…”
But this ‘revolutionary pacifism’ was the position of a quite small minority. “Wilhelm Liebknecht condemned the Dutch resolution as ‘unacceptable and absurd’.” Most social democrats insisted on ‘the right of national defense.’ The point about diplomats being able to present offensive action as defensive proved prescient in 1914, when Germany attacked Belgium and France in the name of a strategy of defense against Russia. And now Russia presents its attack on Ukraine as a defensive move against NATO expansion.
By coincidence Imposs1904 has been putting the articles on his blog from the June 1957 Socialist Standard including 50 Years Ago. This from 1907 contrasts the views of August Bebel, the most well-known leader of the German Social Democratic Party and Gustave Hervé, a French leftwinger who at that time was promoting “anti-patriotism”.
The article’s headline makes it quite clear what we thought of Bebel’s position. For the record, when the First World Slaughter broke out Hervé became a rabid French nationalist overnight. Bevel had died in 1913.
This well-made 39-minute video makes a persuasive case for the Russian adventure being primarily a land and resources grab, given the recent discovery of huge oil and gas reserves in Ukraine (in Crimea and Dnieper/Donbas), which threatened to wreck Russia’s near-monopoly in European sales.
It argues that Russia always makes its strategically most risky moves when the oil price is high or peaking, as in Afghanistan, Georgia, Crimea and in February this year. In this view, the geopolitical situation vis a vis Nato looks rather beside the point.
And then the leftists and the pro-Russians are saying that Russia is not expansionist or imperialist. There is not difference between the capitalist interests of Russia, Ukraine, USA, and the countries who are members of NATO. In Syria Russia is not a liberator either as most left-wingers are claiming. In inter capitalist disputes they always take side with one capitalist bloc
PS: In Latin America most leftists are supporting Putin and Russia including the government of Cuba and Venezuela, but they are making commercial alliance with the USA capitalist class, like in the case of Venezuela who have had secret meeting with a USA delegation, and the USA have lifted some commercial restrictions with Cuba
Yet another war for oil, then. Tempting but it also assumes that this would be why the West was so keen to incorporate Ukraine into its sphere of influence. Was it? Could a case be made out for this?
Article here from 2020 about Ukraine’s natural gas reserves. Ironically, the West might now be more interested in developing them than they were before Russia invaded.
An interesting but long article on the propaganda war to ensure a consensus of opinion is imposed upon the media.
Declared false facts:
1) that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014
2) that neo-Nazism is a significant force in Ukraine.Chomsky defends himself against his critics
Another article that comes to his defence
Noam Chomsky is a good linguistic, but he has never been a good historian, politician or economists
Looks as if Zelensky has been taken in by Borys’s bluff, bluster and bombast. But then Zelensky’s not too bad at that sort of thing himself (though he doesn’t seem
to be partying while the Donbass burns).As David Niven said in the Pink Panther movie: You can not bullshit a bulshitter
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