ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
It looks as if it is rather Zeletsky who is cracking up. Here he is claiming that Russia’s aim to kill all 44 million Ukrainians:
“they all have orders to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all.”
Completely irrational.
Putin was (re-)elected president in elections in 2018. He was first elected in 2000.
The elections would have been far from ideal by democratic standards (certain candidates were banned, no equal access to publicity) but there is no evidence that the end result would have been different.
In other words, he didn’t seize power illegally or unconstitutionally. And he wouldn’t have been able to exercise the full powers of president without the support of an elected Parliament (even if the elections there were fully democratic either). So he is more like Erdogan of Turkey than a straightforward dictator like Hitler or Stalin.
Just heard the Ukrainian President say that God is on his side. Of course he is. But he is also on the Russian side. He seems to love inciting wars so he can support both sides and enjoy seeing them slaughter each other.
Here’s another, ridiculous piece of war propaganda from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. How could anyone believe that a group of bearded Muslims speaking Russian with a foreign accent would be able to get anywhere near the Ukrainian President? Or perhaps they were supposed to be suicide bombers?
But there is a more sinister aspect. In the USSR people from the Caucasus were internal migrants doing the sort of shitty jobs that immigrants do in Britain, discriminated against and regarded as the lowest of the low, as this article from 2017 pointed out. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence evidently thought that it was a good idea to evoke the spectre of savage Muslim fanatics in order to consolidate Ukrainian nationalism amongst the population.
While we hear a lot about Russian oligarchs and their “ill-gotten gains” we hear rather less about Ukrainian oligarchs and theirs.
“In total, the top 100 wealthiest business people in Ukraine control around $44,5 billion, according to Forbes, which accounts for 27% of Ukrainian GDP in September, 2021.”
“BBC ‘in danger’ if Kremlin TV banned’ is a headline in the paper today. I thought it might be saying that, if RT was banned for being impartial, then Downing Street TV might be in danger of being banned on the same grounds. But it was about something else.
Yes, that article by Michael Roberts is informative. He has identified what might be another reason why the Western capitalist bloc is going to such lengths to bring Ukraine into its sphere of influences:
“Ukraine is rich in natural resources, particularly in mineral deposits. It possesses the world’s largest reserves of commercial-grade iron ore—30 billion tonnes of ore or around one-fifth of the global total. Ukraine ranks second in terms of known natural gas reserves in Europe, which today remain largely untapped. Ukraine’s mostly flat geography and high-quality soil composition make the country a big regional agricultural player. The country is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of wheat and the world’s largest exporter of seed oils like sunflower and rapeseed. Coal mining, chemicals, mechanical products (aircraft, turbines, locomotives and tractors) and shipbuilding are also important sectors of the Ukrainian economy. All of this remains to be fully exploited. The EU and the US have also been drooling over the prospect of getting hold of these resources.”
So of course is China and why it has friendly relations with both Russia and Ukraine. I am not sure this will be what motivates Russia, though its oligarchs might be interested in having a go at exploiting this. But, whoever it is that is going to do this, it requires stable, peaceful conditions and it is not clear that Russia would be able to maintain this as an occupying power.
But does Russia want to conquer and permanently occupy Ukraine?
I would still say that Russia’s concern is the security as a state. Roberts hints at this when he says:
“All in all, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a huge gamble which if it does not succeed in ‘neutralising’ Ukraine and forcing NATO into an international agreement, will seriously weaken the Russian economy.”
In other words, making Ukraine neutral would be the main aim. Russia might still be able to achieve this but that depends on it winning militarily and decisively. Which is what the Western bloc is doing all it can to prevent short of sending its own troops in. A dangerous situation, I admit.
The Western capitalist bloc and the Russian capitalist state are already virtually at war, with the West using the Ukrainian armed forces as their proxies who it is arming and treating as “our boys”.
At stake is which side should be the dominating influence over the territory that is called Ukraine but also has come to involve trade routes (pipelines but also at some point the Arctic route from the Atlantic to the pacific will come into it) and supplies of raw materials (oil and gas).
The economic sanctions against Russia — seizure of assets, blocking access to finance, airports, ports, trade, even sporting events — are those normally applied against a state that another state is at war with.
These sanctions and counter-sanctions will have the economic effect in the Western bloc of diverting resources from profit-making and slowing down capital accumulation, as happens when a state is concentrating on winning a war. But their leaders have evidently decided that this is a price worth paying to bring the Ukraine into their sphere of influence.
Of the people that they wheel out to explain the government’s position on this matter, this bloke, James Heappey, a junior minister at the ministry of war, seems to know what he is talking about, much more than his boss, Ben Wally, the minister of war himself. No gaffes about Munich or about going to war with Russia.
But of course, as you say, they are all careerist lickspittles, including those on the “Opposition” benches (the Outs for the time being before the roles are reversed and they become the Ins).
This is sort of funny. I always thought that Truss was out of her depth as Foreign Secretary, not understanding anything about capitalist diplomacy (or any diplomacy, actually). Where do the capitalists find these second-raters to look after their political affairs?
That long document in French seems to be looking forward to a coming world war. In the meantime workers in Ukraine should use the free guns that are being handed out to use in a civil war against the bourgeoisie. Left Communist revolutionary romanticism.
It appears that Snake Island near Odessa may have to be renamed as Fake Island. The Ukrainian soldiers still deserve to be congratulated, for choosing not to die for nothing.
Similarly, the mayor and people of this Ukrainian town took the sensible decision not to follow the Ukrainian government’s stupid advice to throw Molotov cocktails at the tanks that rolled into their town. That way a pointless loss of life was avoided.
No war is worth the shedding of a single drop of working class blood.
More disinformation from US intelligence agencies, this time aimed at sabotaging the Ukraine/Russia talks?
“Amid reports of a referendum in Belarus approving a proposal to renounce its non-nuclear status, a US official believes Belarus is preparing to send soldiers into Ukraine in support of the Russian invasion.
The Washington Post spoke to an unnamed US administration official on Sunday evening who said the deployment could begin as soon as Monday.”If you are going to make up something like that, it might be an idea to give it some degree of plausibility.
By the way, it is Monday.
So the EU wants to ban RT and in Britain so does the Labour Party (of course, nothing less would be expected of “the party of NATO”) but in the days when bourgeois democrats really believed in the principles of bourgeois democracy this would have been denounced as an infringement of freedom of speech.
When in the middle of fighting an actual war the British government banned the Daily Worker in 1941 this had to be done under a carefully drafted regulation and apologised for. Today, apparently, governments can decide to do this just like that without a state being at war.
In 1941 we protested against the suppression of the Daily Worker even thought we had waged war on the so-called Communist Party since it was founded. Our grounds were:
“The S.P.G.B. has its own, quite different, point of view. True to our basic principle we do not support suppression of opinion, however false we believe that opinion to be.”
Why should RT be banned? Many of us watch it to be able to informed of what Russian state propaganda is saying. Others will do so too. People should be able to watch it and make their own minds up just as should be able to watch the BBC and other TV station churning out propaganda and make their minds about that too.
