sshenfield
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
The Russian anarchist website https://aitrus.info/node/5934 has posted an interview with an anarchist in Gorlovka, which is a town in the Donetsk People’s Republic. As it’s unusual to get news from such a vantage point, here is a translation of some of what he said:
‘Before Putin recognized the “independence” of the DPR the situation in my town was quiet enough. After recognition many residents hoped that Russia would send “peacekeeping forces” to the DPR and the war would stop. Instead, a considerable part of the town’s male population was mobilized into the “People’s Militia of the DPR.” At municipal service facilities at least 50% of men were mobilized, at some 100%. As a result there was no one left to repair many objects of the infrastructure. A city sewerage worker I know said on March 13: “We still have water for a few days. After that we’ll be in the shit.” There is a much stronger feeling of fear in the town than in 2014. But there are still enough food and other products on the shelves of stores.
As for the military situation in the area, the front line has not shifted and I don’t expect it to in the foreseeable future. But artillery fire has become more intensive.
My father and I stay home almost all the time, so that we don’t get handed mobilization notices on the street. We live in the central district, which throughout the war has been relatively little affected by artillery fire. Things have always been much worse for people living on the outskirts. So we are lucky.
There have been instances of whole groups of people being forced into motor vehicles and driven off to the military recruitment office. Even people with a “white ticket” have been mobilized. Although it is possible to avoid service legally. If you end up in the recruitment office, demand a full medical examination. That will take several days. If serious problems with your health are found they will let you go. My neighbor was excused because he used to have cancer. Even if there are no serious problems with your health, you can use the delay to find a reliable hiding place.
As for those who are mobilized, some are sent to the front, others serve in the rear. I know of instances when men were sent to serve in Kharkov or Kherson Province or at a “sorting station.” Trucks are loaded with the corpses of Russian soldiers and they are taken to Crimea. One told me: “I’d sooner go to prison for five years than see all this horror.” Many of the mobilized men have already been killed or wounded. Others have been taken prisoner. Those who refuse to go to the front are threatened with criminal charges.
At the very start of mobilization people were promised that they would just spend a few days in barracks and then be sent home. That is why many turned up at the recruitment office. Also because they feared possible problems at work if they failed to show up. Fighting spirit was nowhere to be found. The DPR “patriots” whom I know have not the slightest wish to join the “People’s Militia” and take part in the war.
The people of the Donbas have always been passive and attracted to a “firm hand.” The miners’ strikes in the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s were the peak of class struggle, but once the Ukrainian economy stabilized and the miners began to get decent wages their activism faded.
There was a group of non-political volunteers in my town in the first years of the war, who helped residents who could not care for themselves. But for a long time now I have heard nothing of these volunteers. There is no sign of grassroots self-organization here.
Here is 25 minutes interview with Prof. Georgi Derluguian on Russia-Ukraine war on Turkish TV, gives a southern angle missing from most commentary.
https://youtu.be/LZ6BNDgAnlA (Only the introduction is in Turkish, the rest is in English).
Biden was brought up a Catholic and my impression is that he is sincere about religion. According to Wikipedia, following the death of his first wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972: “The accident had filled him with anger and religious doubt. He wrote that he ‘felt God had played a horrible trick on him’.”
As for Putin, he did not have a religious upbringing. And religious nutters did not make careers in the KGB. So he would have had to ‘get religion’ at some point. There is no sign of him undergoing a personal transformation of that kind. He continued to pursue the same goals but in a new institutional context that made it expedient for him to give lip service to religion.
I do not believe that the majority of Russians are genuine religious believers. I certainly do not believe that Putin is. He is a cynic. He uses religion for the purpose of great-power politics. Russian ‘greatness’ is his religion. The Russian Orthodox Church itself, or at least the patriarch and the hierarchy, is concerned above all with great-power politics. Ukrainian Christians have criticized the ROC Patriarch for talking about politics and hardly mentioning religion.
This source says that ‘journalist Dmitry Skvortsov, writer Yan Taksyur and historian Alexander Karevin were kidnapped (not arrested) by the Security Service of Ukraine. No one knows where they are or whether they are still alive.
I hear from a Russian colleague that Yan Taksyur, a popular Ukrainian satirical poet, has disappeared, presumably arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine. His daughter has launched an appeal for his release. Meanwhile in Russia (Kostroma) a priest has been arrested for delivering an anti-war sermon.
A very interesting article about ‘Makhnovism’ on the ‘Open Democracy’ website: ‘Anarchism in the homeland of Makhno’: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ru/–48/. Unfortunately it seems to be available only in Russian; at least I can’t find an English version. The argument is that the image most Ukrainians have of Makhno comes from Soviet-era films and other propaganda, which portrayed him as a bandit, Ukrainian nationalist and antisemite. Ukrainian nationalists have added him to their pantheon of nationalist heroes on the basis of this false image. ‘Makhno’ has great prestige in Ukraine, but only a few well-informed anarchists know what he really stood for.
I haven’t studied Ukrainian but I can partly understand Ukrainian texts and videos. Russian and Ukrainian are about as close as Italian and Spanish. Both belong to the eastern branch of the Slavic subgroup of Indo-European languages. I think this helps explain why many Russians perceive Ukrainian as an odd sort of Russian rather than as a separate language.
According to WHO:
there are biological labs in Ukraine that at least until recently did contain dangerous pathogens. WHO recommended that these pathogens be destroyed but it is doubtful whether this has been done. Work with dangerous pathogens may or may not serve military purposes. It is reasonable to suspect that it does. Such work continues in Russia as it does in China and the US.
But Boris Johnson is talking about Russia’s sphere of influence. It’s OK to say that the other side is trying to form a sphere of influence. But OUR goals are freedom and democracy.
Jean McCollister, an old colleague of mine from the nuclear disarmament movement of the early 1980s who now lives in Slovenia, has circulated the following statement on FaceBook:
We are all losers in this conflict.
It didn’t have to be this way. If political leaders and policymakers had shown some wisdom and understanding over the last few decades, it never would have come to this point. A few did, but they were overridden by the short-sighted, the greedy, the arrogant, the ignorant, the power-hungry and the downright evil.
Obviously we all lose in a nuclear conflagration, which is a distinct possibility in these chaotic, reckless times.
Ordinary Ukrainians and their animals all over the country lose no matter the eventual outcome, suffering daily from the violence and trauma of an unnecessary war on their territory, now no longer limited to just the Donbass, where the violence and suffering had been ongoing for eight years, but spreading across the whole of Ukraine.
Ordinary Russians and their animals lose by being cut off from the world, repressed, censored, and jailed at home, suffering the brunt of economic sanctions, and treated as personae non gratae abroad for something they had no control over.
Ordinary people and their animals the world over–Americans and Europeans too–lose from being further squeezed by rising prices, particularly in the energy sector, and increasing poverty. I’m seeing posts here and there declaring willingness to pay more for gas in order to “help” Ukraine by “putting the screws to Putin”. Cool. But it won’t just be the price of gas skyrocketing as payment systems and supply chains are completely disrupted by US-imposed sanctions. We will see how these people feel six months from now. And apparently no one realizes that this gleeful satisfaction over sticking it to Putin entails other costs, namely Ukrainian lives, given false hope and sacrificed in a conflict that they cannot win.
Putin loses by contributing, through his aggressive actions, to the very outcomes he least desires: a Europe previously divided over how best to engage with Russia now united in its opposition, a halt to Nordstream 2, NATO expansion made even more likely, massive sanctions affecting the Russian economy, the achievement of villain-in-chief status in the world today, hated and despised in much of Ukraine outside the Donbass, and possible unrest and loss of popularity at home that could conceivably even end up removing him from power (don’t hold your breath).
Zelensky loses as leader of a country that, already plagued by corruption, extremism, and lack of democracy, has now descended into chaos, civil war and violence. He is being hailed for his heroism but will be remembered by history (should we survive to write it) for his folly and haplessness. Voted into power as the peace candidate, he not only failed to deliver on his promises but has fanned, or at least failed to put out, the flames of war. Whether he truly desired an agreement with Russia is debatable, but even if he did, he has been hamstrung and unable to act independently, manipulated by neocon American officials wanting to use Ukraine as a tool against Russia on one side and, every time he seemed willing to talk with Donbass separatists, pressured and threatened by Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups on the other, preventing any such meetings and a lasting peaceful settlement that could have emerged from them.
America loses as the racism, hypocrisy, and double standards of its foreign policy and military interventions become glaringly blatant for all to see, entailing a further loss of its credibility as a global actor. Pot, kettle; sauce, gander, goose; choose your metaphor. The blowback from emboldening, arming, and training militant right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis, oops, I mean freedom fighters, in Ukraine will, sooner or later, reach America’s shores, just as support to “some stirred-up Muslims” in Afghanistan did. The swift and ruthless application of widespread economic sanctions against Russia may appear as a display of power and influence, but you can be sure the unintended lesson has not been lost on many observers: don’t make yourself vulnerable to US sanctions. The status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will thus likely become a thing of the past. And a decades-long policy of humiliation and deliberate exclusion of Russia from Europe has led to the realization of a US geopolitical and strategic nightmare: bringing Russia and China closer together.And China? Hm. Maybe I’m missing something but I’m not seeing a downside for China here (assuming we manage to avoid nuclear warfare).
When the dust settles and the bodies have been buried, we may be lucky enough to find ourselves in a best-case scenario: a peaceful, stable, multipolar world of nations that respect universal human rights and international law.
But we could have had all that long ago, without war—back in the 1990s, after the Cold War ostensibly ended—were it not for the relentless US drive for global hegemony. Why did so many countries have to be ruined and so many millions have to die first?
The Western media focus only on the people fleeing Ukraine westward via Lviv to Poland or to Hungary, Moldova or Romania, whose number has now passed the million mark. By ignoring all those going to Russia or Belarus they vastly underestimate the total number of refugees, who must already number several million. We know that two million have been evacuated from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and are now in camps or with relatives in southern Russia. Many more must have crossed nearby borders from other areas into Russia or Belarus. If you are in Sumy, for instance, which makes more sense — the short trip across the Russian border or the long journey west?
Reply to ZJW: I suspect that I learned of Tridni Valka from the forum, made a note of it, and then forgot where I had got it from. Another case of memory deterioration with old age.
This thread now has 903 posts. Anyone who is paying close attention to every post must have little time for anything else. I see nothing wrong in paying less attention to some posters than to others who have shown themselves better informed and more thoughtful.
I just discovered this video from April 2014. Soon after the start of the civil war in the southeast, Ukrainian troops defect to Donbas. The nationalists have to work hard on ordinary people to turn them against one another.
This text is from Tridni Valka (Class War in Czech):
Tridni Valka on war in Ukraine
Apparently based in the Czech Republic, though they produce their texts in nine languages.
