Russian Tensions
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All news media must be taking with a pinch of salt
The first three paragraphs are ok:
“This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war between the USA and Russia, in which both sides are cynically using Ukraine as a battering ram.
The people of Ukraine will gain nothing and lose much from being treated in this way. They fight and die or lose their homes and flee. We pour in more weapons and shout encouragement from a safe distance. Russia wrecks the joint.
What Ukraine actually needs is action to cure its festering, universal corruption. It would also benefit from the pushing to the margins of the ultra-nationalist fanatics who have far too much influence in its government and armed forces. The war will make these problems worse, not better.”As to the rest, it won’t be official US policy to want to reduce Russia to the Stone Age. That may well be the opinion of some government adviser, but no more official policy than the mad plan for “denazifying” Ukraine that YMS has drawn our attention to will be official Russian policy.
What both the US and Russia want is to expand their sphere of influence to include Ukraine, an issue that is being settled on the battlefield at the expense of the people living there.
I don’t think the USA wants to reduce Russia to the Stone Age, they want Russia to continue producing like any other capitalist country but being part of their sphere of influences
Putin’s popularity is apparently on the rise in Russia but, one wonders, for how much longer?
According to the terms of the Geneva Convention and its interpretation, it is a “war crime” to deliberately kill non-combatant civilians but it is ok to kill armed people in civilian clothes fighting against you; and it is just too bad if civilians get killed in shelling from either side, their killing does not count as a war crime. Captured armed civilians are supposed to be treated as POWs and so to shoot them is a breach of the Convention.
There are calls to charge and convict Putin as a “war criminal” but to blame the head of the government for war crimes committed by their troops would create a precedent which Western politicians might not like. It would mean that they could be held responsible for any war crimes committed by their armed forces — and to Bush, Clinton, Obama, Blair, Cameron, and various successive Australian prime ministers being hauled before the international court at The Hague for the war crimes committed by their troops in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Putin is clearly a warmonger but so are they.
From a socialist point of view, the killings permitted by the Geneva Convention — workers killing other workers for the benefit of their respective rulers — are also to be condemned as is civilians being killed in the crossfire. War itself is the crime, of which workers are the victims.
A precedent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribunal_for_the_former_Yugoslavia
“…While the war in the former Yugoslavia was still raging, the ICTY prosecutors showed that an international court was viable. However, no accused was arrested…”
A precedent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribunal_for_the_former_Yugoslavia
“…While the war in the former Yugoslavia was still raging, the ICTY prosecutors showed that an international court was viable. However, no accused was arrested…”
Filing a criminal case against a president in the International Court is not an easy task as they want to present it, especially against president Putin, they also know the legal procedures, and they can file a countersuit against the USA and several presidents of the USA can be sued also, and most of them have been war criminals too. They are not boys scouts either
It was easy to be done against Germany because they were completely defeated and completely invaded by several powerful powers and they did not have atomic bombs like Russia. They might also claim that imposing sanctions and economic blockades against a country is also an act of war, and the USA has been imposing sanctions on Russia for several years. They are just playing games.
The ICC has always been represented by tricky lawyers who are dominated and controlled by the interests of the superpowers. The USA has removed its attorneys from the international court on several occasions to avoid being sued for criminal acts.
Assange is in jail because he published all the criminal acts committed by the USA and UK in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that case has never been taken by the International courts, as well, Haiti against the case was not honoured by the International court, the IC emitted a mandamus favouring Nicaragua against the USA and that country was never compensated by the USA.
The legal system ( jurisprudence ) was created by the ruling class to defend their own interests, only romantic lawyers believe that we can be liberated thru the so-called justice system
There are some reports in the New York Times indicating that Ukrainian soldiers also executed Russian soldiers after they were captured
Here’s the Daily Mail quoting the New York Times on that:
It’s war itself that is the atrocity.
According to this report in an Indian news outlet, in one such incident the soldiers killing captured Russians call them “Bolsheviks”. Somebody seems to think they are still fighting the Russian Civil War of 1918-21.
This is going to be a test of the sincerity or hypocrisy of Western politicians. Are they going to equally condemn atrocities by those fighting on their side?
They are also propagating wrong conceptions, and dusting off old anti-communist conceptions,( it shows the right-wing character of the Ukrainian government ) they are saying that Putin and the Russian oligarch are Soviets, Marxists, Bolsheviks and Communists and that they want to rebuild the old Soviet Union.
Whatever their intentions are, it does show a lack of political, historical and economical knowledge, as we know the Soviet ruling class was willing to switch from state capitalism to corporate capitalism,( it is more profitable too ) and they were as capitalist as any other capitalist in the Western and Eastern world, and most of the ex Eastern European countries are members of NATO, and they are electing populists, anticommunists, and right wings leaders.
This war has shown the weakness of the Russian ruling class and that the propaganda about the high military capacity of Russia is also mythology, their high military capacity is in the possession of atomic bombs,( Ukraine also had atomic bombs ) and they are going thru the same process that they went thru in Afghanistan, and probably Putin fell in the same trap that Sadam Hussein fell during the invasion of Kuwait,
This is a war between one sector of the ruling class of the USA and the ruling class of Russia using the Ukrainian workers as a pawn, it is not a war between communism and capitalism similar to the old propaganda of the Cold War, or the world struggle between two capitalist superpowers
Open Access Ukrainian Studies ebooks
An academic publisher has made these available to help people interested in the broader background. (A lot seem like under used backlist they don’t mind making available, but there might be something of interest there for people).
Imposs1904 has just put up in his blog this appropriate article from April 1963:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-inhumanity-of-war-1963.html?m=1
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