alanjjohnstone
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
The re-militarisation of Germany
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said that, while the country was grateful to soldiers for drilling wells, stemming floods and helping with Covid vaccinations, “that is not their core mission”.
He added: “The army’s core mission is to defend freedom in Europe,” saying that it was his objective to turn the German military into “the central pillar” of European conventional defences and make it “the best equipped force” on the continent.
Days after the Russian invasion began in February, Mr Scholz announced a “new era” in German defence spending, pledging a special €100 billion fund to modernise the underfunded forces, plus increasing defence spending to two per cent of GDP.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/german-army-too-focused-drilling-194548910.html
Perhaps, Lizzie45, with your insight, you can suggest a strategy for our organisation to remedy its admitted shortcomings and avoid the pitfalls of ALB’s point on the nebulous demands for fairness.
To add to his post, the decades-old campaign for fair trade has failed to deliver its promised benefits to the developing and undeveloped world and a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work has also been an unsuccessful aim for employees.
I, for one, would be very interested in hearing how our activities should proceed to defend the interest of our fellow citizens but too also advance the cause of socialism.
I’m curious to why the USA so far has not supplied Ukraine with a version of the Iron Dome anti-missile defence system.
Israel appears to think it is effective.
Climate nationalism
Tanzania’s Energy Minister Januari Makamba has joined Uganda’s parliament in criticising a European Union parliament resolution calling on the two countries to stop developing their oil and gas projects in the East African region.
He stated that Tanzania like many other countries in the world is entitled to use its resources the same way industrialised countries do for their people.
Wishful thinking?
According to Newsweek’s William M. Arkin, Putin may be running out of options as he fights to maintain his grasp on the country.
“We’re seeing more and more blaming of Western weapons,” says the second official, “as if it is an excuse for why Russia is losing. It’s ironic, given that Putin-and-company normally argues that it can defeat NATO. Now it’s, ‘we couldn’t have won because of Western intervention’ that is seeking to deflect responsibility from Moscow.”
“Putin’s options for the future are bleak, particularly as he increasingly feels the heat of domestic opposition,” the first intelligence official said. The official also noted “the impact of 60,000-plus Russian casualties and as well as the bite of sanctions and the controls on travel as challenges to Putin.”
“I’m not so sure I agree with the ‘long war’ predictions,” an Army officer said as he suggested that Putin is running out of options for a viable conversion. “Everyone’s talking about Putin’s hold over Europe with his control of gas, that this is his ace in the hole. But if the heat intensifies back home, Putin may have to shift his attention to a winter disaster of his own making.”
“Continuing the war is the only way for Putin to stay in power,” Former World Champion chess player Garry Kasparov said. “He wants to create extra chaos in the free world hoping that a new window will open for him. It’s really just a protracted agony. It is cynical and stupid, but Putin is willing to put thousands of civilians into graves in the months to come before the whole of Ukraine is liberated, if that will allow him to maintain power.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/analysis-beginning-end-vladimir-putin/
Germany appropriates 3 Russian-owned refineries.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-takes-control-of-russias-rosneft-subsidiary/a-63145437
The notion of the royal family as symbols of duty or sacrifice to the nation is “a lie” and is at the centre of a deeply unequal UK, Clive Lewis, the Norwich South MP and former shadow cabinet minister has argued, breaching Keir Starmer’s order to his party to stay silent before the Queen’s funeral on Monday.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group of mercenaries, defended the idea of sending prisoners to fight in the Ukraine war after a video showed him recruiting at a prison.
“It’s either private military companies and prisoners, or your children – decide for yourself.”
Prigozhin said that if he were in prison he would “dream of” joining the Wagner group to “pay my debt to the Motherland”.
“If you serve six months, you are free,” he said. But he warned potential recruits against desertion, adding: “if you arrive in Ukraine and decide it’s not for you, we will execute you”.
Another apt quote from Red Rosa
“…For us, for Social Democracy, the Russian soldier is not an enemy, only an armed and dangerous beast whom we wish to tame. For us, the Russian soldier is primarily a blind instrument of absolutism, a proletarian, a worker, a part of the Russian working class, and as such our brother, a member of the one and the same working class to which, according to our view, both Polish and Russian proletarians belong. Therefore, the matter of our worker struggle is also their concern. By enlightening the Russian worker who occupies our land, we call on him not to sympathize with a foreign cause but to understand his own class interests and to fight together with us for common liberation, first from the yoke of absolutism, and then from the chains of the capitalist system…”
I read this recently from Rosa Luxemburg which I thought relevant. It is a long quote but explains why we should oppose all sides in this conflict.
“…The strongest pillar holding up the despotic government, as well as the reign of capitalists over the working people, is the military, the standing armed forces. The people are usually convinced that a country needs an army to defend itself against enemy attack. In reality, these enormous armies standing always at arms are needed not for defense of the country but for two purposes: to plunder foreign lands and peoples, and to keep the people of their own land in bondage to their sovereign exploiters.
The wars that today’s states wage against each other are not needed by the working class, only by the capitalists. The working class gains nothing if the state wins new territory by subjugating other lands and peoples to tyrannize them and wring them dry. Only capitalists benefit from winning new markets, since there they can transport and transform into gold the bloody labor they squeeze out of workers at home. The nobility benefit from armies and wars too, because they can occupy the top military positions and live idly in them while receiving fat salaries from the state coffers. Finally, bureaucrats high and low find in war and in newly conquered lands the opportunity to line their pockets with embezzled funds, starving soldiers and tyrannizing conquered peoples as they do so.
Yet those who profit the most from weapons, armies, and wars are the manufacturers of iron, steel, rifles, and ships, as well as the various suppliers of military clothing and food products. In these ways, hundreds of millions spent every year for upkeep of the military flow from government coffers to the pockets of a handful of capitalists. These few make enormous fortunes, especially in wartime, when the government loses battleships, weapons, and cannons in battle and places orders for yet more instruments of murder.
Armies and wars bring the working people only loss. The youth of the people waste some of their most beautiful years in the regular army, spending their time not on work that would benefit them and theirs but on mindless drills, enduring cruel harassment and humiliation from brutal drillmasters and petty officers. In war the sons of the people fall by the thousands, laying down their lives or becoming crippled for life, all to make their worst enemies, the capitalists, richer. In this way, nearly the entire cost of maintaining enormous armies and waging wars falls on the backs of the people. The countless millions the government throws away on barracks, artillery, warships, officers, and so forth flow from no other source than the pockets of common folk. Taxes paid by the impoverished masses on every last morsel placed in their mouths and on every thread of clothing worn on their bodies are the source from which all current governments grow their militarism. But the greatest injury inflicted by today’s militarism on the working class is that soldiers are the instruments the government uses to oppress the people of their own land! It is true that the ranks are filled by workers themselves. A soldier is a worker or peasant in uniform. And yet, the years spent in military service in a barracks, at a distance from family and friends, and the brutal discipline of the army are intentionally set up to make of the worker or farmer in uniform a cowed animal, blind and deaf to everything but the orders of his commanders. After several years of drills, the soldier forgets that he is a child of the people, stops thinking at all about his actions, and stands ready at his officers’ orders to murder his own father and mother. And so the classes and governments in power have in the army a deadly weapon against conscious workers and rebellious peasants. The tsarist government responds to every uprising of desperate peasants in Russia, to every large demonstration of workers in Russia and Poland, by spilling blood. On one side, proletarians in plain clothes fight for a better existence and for freedom, and on the other, at the order of officers, proletarians in uniform turn murderous weapons against them as they would against foreign invaders. Today’s armed force serves mainly to hold the working class under the yoke of capitalism, not only in Russia but in every capitalist country…”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-5 in favor of the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, which according to its text “promotes the security of Taiwan, ensures regional stability, and deters People’s Republic of China (PRC) aggression against Taiwan. It also threatens severe sanctions against the PRC for hostile action against Taiwan.”
In addition to authorizing $4.5 billion in military assistance, $2 billion in loan guarantees, and boosting “war reserve stockpile” funding for Taiwan by hundreds of millions of dollars, the bill also grants Taiwan many of the benefits of being a “major non-NATO ally” without officially designating it as such.
Furthermore, it establishes a “robust sanctions regime to deter PRC aggression”.
Dave DeCamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, tweeted that if passed, the bill “will be the most radical change in U.S. policy toward Taiwan since the 1970s and will make war much more likely.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said during a Wednesday press conference in Beijing that “if the bill continues to be deliberated, pushed forward, or even signed into law, it will greatly shake the political foundation of China-U.S. relations and cause extremely serious consequences to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
Professor Lyle Goldstein authored a report—titled “Threat Inflation, Russian Military Weakness, and the Resulting Nuclear Paradox: Implications of the War in Ukraine for U.S. Military Spending”—for the Costs of War Project at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
Goldstein’s paper explains that “Western strategists have a long tradition of overinflating Russia as a threat.”
The report says, “Russia is a weaker conventional military power than many in the U.S. had imagined; thus, there is no additional cause for intensified fear of a Russian military threat to the U.S. nor for the resultant expansion of the Pentagon budget.”
“Russia doesn’t seem to have a military that is capable of protracted, large-scale offensive action, let alone expeditionary operations, that could threaten U.S. national security,” the paper says, detailing poor performances by Russian aerial, cyber, ground, missile, naval, and space forces against Ukraine this year.
“Russian armies are completely unable to march on Paris or Berlin, let alone Warsaw or Bucharest now or in the foreseeable future. It is plain enough that they could not even conquer Kyiv,”
To end Russia’s war in Ukraine, the paper suggests pursuing “de-escalatory approaches,” including “direct talks, reviving the arms control agenda, and pursuing military confidence-building measures between NATO countries and Russia.”
“The White House and Congress are fueling this war with a steady stream of weapons instead of pushing for talks to end the conflict,” said CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin. “That’s why we, the people, have to rise up with a demand of negotiations, not escalation.”
Argentina produces food for 400 million people – yet amid soaring inflation and the daily struggles of people there is scarcity.
7 million pensioners, of which 86 percent are getting the minimum amount every month demand a better income.
The conservatism of the Swede
