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The pictures from Bucha are horrific enough. The trouble is the Ukrainian propaganda machine doesn’t know when to stop:
“Mylovanov said early eyewitness accounts and anecdotal evidence suggest children may have been burned alive, young women raped en-masse and then executed afterwards, and people forced to eat their pets after being deliberately starved by Russian troops.”
I don’t think that the Russian state really wants to exterminate Ukrainians by “denazifying” them. That seems to have been written by some extremist.
But the old Soviet Union had a chance to try this in Western Ukraine after WW2. This part of what is now Ukraine, with Lvov as the main city, had never been part of the Russian Empire. It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire up to WW1 and then of Poland up to 1939.
After WW2 the Russian state had trouble digesting it. The attempt to do so it did lead to six years of guerrilla warfare and, you are right, would again. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA):
“After the end of World War II, the Polish communist army—the People’s Army of Poland—fought extensively against the UPA. The UPA remained active and fought against the People’s Republic of Poland until 1947, and against the Soviet Union until 1949. It was particularly strong in the Carpathian Mountains, the entirety of Galicia and in Volhynia—in modern Western Ukraine. By the late 1940s, the mortality rate for Soviet troops fighting Ukrainian insurgents in Western Ukraine was higher than the mortality rate for Soviet troops during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.”
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army)
When the USSR collapsed in 1991 these nationalists came out into the open again and could even be said to be at the origin of present-day anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism.
The irony is that this would not have been a problem for the Russian state (in its various forms) had it not seized the parts of previously non-Russian Ukrainian area and incorporated into its province of Ukraine.
But I can’t imagine that those in charge of the Russian state want to repeat the exercise with the whole of the Ukraine. Their aim now appears to be to move their frontier westwards, leaving the rest of Ukraine as an independent neutral state (as the USSR did with Finland after WW2).
The nomination papers for our candidate in the Patiles & St. Mark’s ward were handed into today and accepted.
We won’t know who are our opponents are here and in Lambeth till Wednesday.
Here is the election address of our candidate in Tunbidge Wells:
Fit for Purpose? Or fit for Change?
Democracy can seem abstract when your ability to make changes to your community feels limited to choosing between a small number of political parties every few years. And how can any winning party really represent the needs of all 119,000 residents in Tunbridge Wells borough?
Party politics will always get in the way of local residents being able to make changes that help build a better community for all. The main parties are limited by decisions and views made centrally, and conflict between them distracts from the need to work for improvements that benefit the greatest number of people. Two councillors this year alone have resigned from their parties for failures in both local administration and at the very top of government. Whether Liberal Democrat or Tory, it is not the party but the political system they wish to maintain which causes these issues. We must strive to create a political system that ensures all members of society are listened to and can contribute. And this must start at the very grass roots of politics, not the top.
In Tunbridge Wells, there has been a disturbing number of cases of women’s drinks being spiked in bars and clubs. This problem won’t be resolved until every woman is safe and secure while out at night. We should ask what leads some people to violent and antisocial behaviour, and aim for a culture which treats everyone with respect.
Community projects which work to safeguard and support our community never have enough funding, part of a wider problem of neglected public services which has led to problems such as the lack of NHS dental care. Capitalist society is shaped by money, with most wealth ending up with the elite and the majority left to cope with dwindling resources and high prices.
The Green Party would have you believe capitalism can be managed to mitigate the effects of industry on the environment. Locally, efforts to maintain and protect our green spaces, stop developments outside of brownfield sites, reduce traffic, and efficiently renovate properties are constrained by the economic system. The main parties merely attempt treatment of the symptoms; we propose treating the cause by advocating for a socialist society built to satisfy everyone’s needs, and those of the planet.
Shannon Kennedy, the Socialist Party candidate, Pantiles & St. Mark’s Ward.
Why is that these days the liberal centre, who are supposed to be “the lesser evil”, are the warmongers and the authoritarian right is less bellicose? Hungary is an example where Orban has just been re-elected against the opposition which wanted to prolong the war in Ukraine:
“Their candidate Peter Marki-Zay argued that Hungary should join Poland, the UK and others in supplying arms to Ukraine. And if called upon, and only within a Nato framework, should even consider sending troops.”
I don’t know if this was a big issue in this election but it seems a majority there have not been carried away by Ukrainomania.
It’s the same in Serbia where the outgoing president was re-elected too, but that’s more easily understandable as 23 years ago Serbia was the victim of a NATO bombing campaign.
The well-known Ukrainian Trotskyy would have approved, writing in 1934:
“the lack of a stable gold ruble is one of the main causes of our many economic troubles and catastrophes.”
https://www.leftvoice.org/leon-trotsky-if-america-should-go-communist/
For the moment, the Bank of Russia is buying gold at the fixed price only from Russian banks, maybe as a first step towards what the RT interview suggests of eventually linking the value of the ruble directly to gold.
More here:
The fact that the “West” is prepared not only to risk a global economic downturn but also disruption to the international payments system shows how determined they seem to be to do down Russia. In any event, they don’t seem to be likely to achieve their original stated aim of incorporating Ukraine into NATO.
But at what point will Western oligarchs react against this and bring pressure to bear to stop this danger to their commercial interests?
He did say that. The exact quote from Sky News on 1 April is:
“People don’t want a revolution, they do want to know how to pay their energy bills.”
Unfortunately, what he says is true. We draw the conclusion that what Socialists should do is to work to get people to want a social revolution that will convert the means for production from a class monopoly into the common property of the whole people.
Leftwingers imagine that the desire for revolution can arise out of the struggle to reduce energy bills.
That’s the difference between them and us.
Here’s Peter Hitchens’ take on the war. I am drawing attention to it since, as we don’t read the Daily Mail here we might miss it, even though it appeared in the Mail on Sunday which frequently takes a different even opposite position to the Daily Wail itself.
Anyway, here it is:
The Ukrainian regime is not completely naive. They know what NATO hawks like Borys have in mind — Afghanisation – and are not too enthusiastic about it. Can’t say I blame them. Here is what one of them has said;
“Our partners must finally understand that the ‘Afghanization’ they want and the long-lasting exhausting conflict for Russia will not happen,” Podolyak said. “Russia will leave all Ukrainian territories except the south and east. And will try to dig in there, put in air defense and sharply reduce the loss of its equipment and personnel.”
“‘Afghanization’ is when there is a strong guerrilla resistance across the country that inflicts heavy losses on the aggressor for many months or even years and thus significantly weakens the power of the occupier’s army,” he said. “Such actions took place during the Soviet Union’s attempt to control Afghanistan: Afghan guerrillas destroyed and weakened the Soviet occupiers for years. As a result, weakened Russia as a whole.”Anyone who wants to inflict that on the population of some country just to weaken a rival state must rate as criminal by any standards.
That is indeed a mystery but it makes one thing clear — that the political regime in Ukraine and that in Russia are very similar.
The media speculate on whether or not Putin is angry with his generals but even he has not gone so far as to publicly denounce any of them. It is Zelensky who has done that, even going a step further in denouncing two of his as “traitors”. Together with the killing of one of his peace negotiators and the apparent poisoning of two others it appears that Ukrainian politics also has elements of gangsterism as in Russia. There is also the banning of opposition parties.
Whatever the war is about it is not Democracy v Dictatorship or Good versus Evil, as the warmongering politicians tell us. It’s war over territory between two capitalist states. We are told we must support one particular side but the answer can only be a plague on both their houses.
I don’t know whether or not this is an April Fool but here is the front page of today’s Times:
“Don’t back down, Ukraine urged. Britain fears western allies will push Zelensky to settle for early peace deal.
Britain is concerned that the United States, France and Germany will push Ukraine to “settle” and make significant concessions in peace talks with Russia, The Times has been told. A senior government source said there were concerns that allies were “over-eager” to secure an early peace deal”https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dont-back-down-britain-urges-ukraine-wmtfkv3pn
Borys is clearly becoming too big for his boots when the poodle starts to tell its master what to do. Not doubt he will be slapped down but this is further evidence of Britain’s malign influence in trying to prolong the war with its death, destruction and misery.
“Real freedom doesn’t have a flag” is not part of the photo but what we as socialists say, added precisely as a criticism of those on the demonstration for wrapping themselves in a flag. The sane applies to the slogan “Stop All War”. It was meant as a criticism of the demonstrators who were demanding to stop one particular war (actually, to support one side in it).
Interview here with the leader of one of the breakaway statelets in the Donbas in which he invokes the “right to self- determination”:
“You know that there are two contradictory articles in the United Nations Charter, written respectively: One: the right to self-determination. The other article: the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the states. Which one of these two articles is the essential one? I believe the right to self-determination should be the essential one, and the people should have the right to make their own decisions. This is my opinion and understanding on this subject. I believe if the needs and the plight of people were the principle – instead of the economic interests of the states – the global system would have been more just.”
According to the TUSC website, one of our opponents in Clapham East will be them, their candidate being a Bobbie Cranney. Our chance to confront and expose SPEW as a phoney socialist party.
While we are sorting out the sheep from the goats, here’s a different breed of goat, the pro-Russia ones. This is the position of the “New Communist Party” (a breakaway from the old Communist Party over the Russian action in Czechoslovakia in 1968, hence their name of “tankies”):
They justify still supporting Russia, despite it not claiming to be socialist and them admitting it is capitalist, on the grounds that Russia is an economically backward country and so a victim of “imperialism”.
I know that opinion polls only give quick off-the-cuff answers to set questions and so are not all that reliable but the results of this one suggest that young people in the US, Britain and France are less susceptible to pro-war propaganda than those aged 65 and over:
It also seems that people in the UK are generally more susceptible even than those in the US. In fact only about 2% in the UK would seem to support neither side (very broadly our position) compared to about 15% in France and 10% the US.
