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Looks as if Russia will achieve its main war aim — Ukraine will not join NATO, says Zelensky. But why didn’t NATO let him say this before?
Revealing fact about Mariupol mentioned by the Times’s Diplomatic Editor Roger Boyes today which might explain why both sides there are being so ruthless and bugger the inhabitants.
Boyes, who is a bit of a warmonger himself, explains that Mariupol
“is also a fighting base of the so-called Azov battalion, a 900-strong unit that grew out of a far-right Ukrainian group in 2014. They are now integrated into the Ukrainian national guard; their extremist, white supremacist politics is often overlooked because of their ferocity in battle. Typically they smear their bullets with pig fat before shooting at the equally ruthless Chechen Muslims who are fighting with Russian forces. Originally the Azovs and other similar groups such as Dnipro I were funded by Ukrainian oligarchs.”
These are amongst those who the non-Marxist anti-Humanists and the Alliance for Workers Liquidation are supporting and urging on.
It can be easily imagined that the Russian Army and their proxies from the breakaway statelets would like to eliminate them while they are never going to surrender or allow the civil authority to surrender. Meanwhile it’s the ordinary people living there who suffer.
The demand to “Hang the Kaiser” is already being raised:
“Vladimir Putin will be “held responsible” for war crimes in Ukraine at the international criminal court in The Hague, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, has pledged, saying the UK would help gather the necessary evidence.
The justice secretary, Dominic Raab, was travelling to The Hague on Monday to help make sure that “when that prosecution comes, the court will have what it needs”, Javid told BBC One’s Breakfast programme.”But if they are going to apply victor’s justice they are going to have to win first.
Given the current war hysteria he doesn’t stand a chance, quite apart from Priti Patel being keen to kick one more foreigner.
More about conscientious objectors in Ukraine and Russia here:
https://eprimefeed.com/latest-news/russia-and-ukraine-prosecute-conscientious-objectors/30966/
“We are in favour of the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached – in this case to the Ukrainian state fighting the Russian invasion of its territory.”
Who is going to deliver these weapons? Why don’t they come out and openly say: We demand that NATO supply the Ukrainian state with guns and bombs and missiles? Or go around spray painting: No-Fly Zone Now.
In fact, why don’t they take the next step and themselves go and join the armed forces of the Ukrainian capitalist state? I believe that state has set up a foreign legion and is recruiting.
This war is certainly sorting out the sheep from the goats.
Another leftist group to go off the rails (at least our rails though not theirs as following Rays Dunasksyeva they have always supported “national self- determination”) is the “Marxist” Humanist Initiative, including Andrew Kliman despite his high understanding of how capitalism works and does not work.
Here is their statement on the war.
Scroll down to the end to see their slogans including “Victory to Ukraine!”. They even oppose Ukraine becoming neutral ie defend its right to join NATO if it wants.
Appalling and unforgivable from a working class point of view.
“Paper inflated is paper discounted. The vouchers were quickly swept into the hands of insiders, traders, and the in-place management of the newly “created” enterprises: in short, an emerging bourgeoisie.
That was the infamous “voucher” program 1992-1994. At its end, the voucher program accounted for seventy-seven percent of the large and medium sized industries and 82 percent of the small industries. These accounted for two-thirds of prior industrial output and sixty percent of the industrial working place. The great dismantling could begin.
The voucher program was followed and supplemented by auctions to privatize state industries, cash purchases of shares from the government and the industries themselves. So…….state and privatized banks made cash loans to the “management” of the industries in exchange for privatization shares in the industry. The management used privatization shares as collateral for the loans, with the cash circulating between the banks and management in order to repeat this daisy chain through the purchase of privatization shares in other industries, or to purchase “distressed” shares from enterprises unable to obtain bank loans, and thus vulnerable to underbidding in the auctions.
It was a mess. Everything was in order. It was the crime of the century. It was the apotheosis of daily pettiness. There was bribery, deceit, insider trading, insiders trading on insider information. It had all the characteristics of a day or a week or a year in the life of the New York Stock Exchange. “
Good description there of how the current Russian capitalist class originally accumulated their capital — as a result of the Russian government following the advice of American “free” market economists. In other words, the West created the oligarchs they now want to punish.
This is good. I hope we are circulating it widely on social media. I will put him and Marx on a couple of French-language ones. Some will understand English.
I notice that Lenin has a Canadian accent, so he too was a colonial.
I think he meant outside Ukraine. For the past two days they have been bombing airfields in the West of Ukraine through which NATO weapons have been or are likely to be delivered. It looks as if some NATO “military instructors” may have been killed at one of them. the so-called (Orwellianlly-called) “International Peacekeeping and Security Centre (IPSC)” near the Polish border.
(Indeed, the ‘Almost-War’ article in this month’s Standard now looks risible. But hey! Even socialists aren’t always right.)
This a bit unfair. It doesn’t take into consideration that the Socialist Standard is a monthly publication whose articles are prepared two weeks before the beginning of the month, which means it can’t deal with events that happen in between or during the cover month.
You are right that most of us here wrongly argued that Russia wouldn’t invade (except Cassandra, not sure that name is apt as she was cursed with being able to predict the future but that nobody would believe her — and he is now predicting WWIII). But that article didn’t express that view. It simply left the options open, beginning:
“They told us that 16 February would be the day that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. But diplomatic discussions continued. What had happened? Did Putin really intend to go to war? Or were what appeared to be war preparations merely a means to exert pressure and win concessions from the West?”
And of course the rest of the article puts the subject into historical context followed by a socialist political analysis.
Our dilemma for next month is whether WWIII will break out before it is published. But we could announce that on the cover and then claim that it was an April Fool.
Ukrainian stamp honouring Ukrainian ultranationalist and founder of the Banderites.
