ALB
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YMS has already dealt effectively with the “just war” theory. So I will only deal with pgb’s cop-out of “leaving it to the Ukrainians to decide”.
Obviously the Ukrainian government and its nationalist supporters want the war to continue to recover their lost territories. But it is equally obvious that on their own they are no position to do this. They need outside support. Presumably, pgb, you think they are entitled to ask for this. Ok, but do you think that the governments of the NATO and other countries such as Australia are being “just” in supplying arms to the Ukrainian government and nationalists, arms which are allowing the killing and destruction to continue? Are you for or against this? This is a decision you can’t leave to “the Ukrainians”. It’s for you to take.
The other question is how do “the Ukrainians” decide? It is clear that many are opposed to the war. Hundreds of thousands have voted with their feet against it by fleeing the country. Others have had to be conscripted against their will (in fact if the war is so popular amongst Ukrainians why is conscription necessary?). And there could be as many as five million Ukrainian subjects who resent being “de-Russified” and would be like some arrangement with Russia to protect them. Ok, maybe a majority is for the war, but why take their side as opposed to that of the minority who are against it? Why disavow the draft dodgers?
There are serious doubts about the truth of that story about Zelensky buying a villa in Egypt. It smacks too much of fake information. For a start, I doubt if Zelensky would be that stupid.
Anyway, here’s the other side (from an Egyptian source):
Revealing faux pas and reminder of the nasty past of Ukrainian nationalism:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/24/nazi-linked-veteran-ovation-zelenkyy-canada-visit-00117857
Looks like the moral high ground, occupied by the Ukrainian nationalists immediately after the Russian invasion, and used as a pretext by NATO to keep the war going to achieve its ends, is beginning to crumble.
Looks like the ethnic cleansing has begun now that the Azeri government has conquered the enclave. A consequence of the deadly idea of a “nation state” and the problem they have with minorities who don’t fit the definition of being part of the “nation”.
Expect more of this in the Caucasus if ever the Russian Federation breaks up as some are wanting. The population there of various linguistic and religious groups is so mixed up that the establishment of “national states” for any of them is bound to involve mass migrations and ethnic cleansing as happened in Europe after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian after the first world slaughter.
The doctrine of “national self-determination” is anti-working class, anti-socialist and anti-human. Bring back Rosa Luxemburg who was the most well-known person to realise and say thus.
Read also Elie Kedourue’s classic demolition job on nationalism, Nationalism which Wikipedia summarises as:
“Kedourie argued that multi-national empires like the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Austrian Empire had allowed different peoples to live together in peace, and the break-up of empires had led to wars as nationalists fought each other for dominance. (…) Kedourie had no use for nationalism, which he saw as dividing people up, and believed that importing Western ideas of nationalism into the Middle East had been a disaster, as it turned people who once lived together in harmony into enemies as various peoples started to see themselves as part of this or that nation.”
Whatever may be the case in some other parts, Ukraine is waging a war of conquest in Crimea which is only accidentally part of Ukraine (due to administrative decision by Khrushchev in 1954) and has not been ruled by it since 2014. Over 70 percent of the population there speak Russian as their mother tongue and don’t want to be ruled from Kiev. Yet the US and its allies are providing Ukraine with missiles to attack Crimea and its population.
The US has officially declared that its war aim is to weaken Russia not provoke a war with it. So what they are doing is arming Ukraine to do this, using it as their proxy or puppet — in fact they are financing the whole Ukraine state — but not with enough to beat Russia. They are cynically keeping the war going at a level below total war in order to weaken a geo-political rival.
Yet people can still be found who think that the war is justified and come up with all sorts of spurious arguments to justify the continuation of the killing and destruction and providing the means to do this. Shame on them.
The Lambeth “World Car Free Day” event was a bit of a flop, at least on the two occasions we passed by. Just the stall holders and a few families. Maybe it got better later in the afternoon. And of course all the main roads leading to Vauxhall Bridge were just the opposite of car free. Still, a good try but against the flow in the week the government announced it was postponing by five more years the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans.
But we did find evidence of some radical activity in the ward in a nearby road. This IWW sticker on a road sign:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/16253171/710927396542553682
400 more leaflets were distributed, some outside the ward but that doesn’t matter. The aim is not to get votes but to spread the idea and in particular see how many responses we get to the QR code.
500 to go, much of which will be distributed before and/or after the London. Branch meeting tomorrow.
We won’t be staying there all the time as we have to go to the opening of this exhibition off Clapham High Street by a local arts group in which we feature.
https://studiovoltaire.org/whats-on/unearthed-collective-where-can-we-be-heard/
Scroll down to the interviews.
This Saturday is “World Car Free Day”. Lambeth Council’s contribution this year is to close Goding Street, which in in ward just behind Vauxhall station, to cars and organise various events there:
This seems worth leafletting so we will be there. I bet the Green candidate will be there on her bike.
Out again today. Over 700 leaflets distributed until rain stopped play (as at the nearby Oval which we could see from the ward though it is outside it where the floodlights indicated that there was a match going on). We managed to get into a number of the blocks of flats this side of the tracks, through luck (following a postman, door open, somebody happened to be coming in or out).
We made sure the New Economics Foundation, the left/green leaning thinktank, whose offices we discovered are in the ward, got a leaflet. The person we gave it to did say that they didn’t like capitalism. Unfortunately they are reformists who are advocating within capitalism a chimeric Green New Deal:
Picked up the LibDem and Green leaflets. They are an object lesson in how to mislead with statistics. Both had bar charts claiming to show that they were best placed to defeat Labour, the LibDems on the basis of the number of seats they got in the council in last year’s elections, the Greens on the basis of the number of votes obtained in those elections. Both irrelevant in the ward since, there last year, it was the Tories who came second in terms of votes, perhaps reflecting the 2000 (out of 6000) electors living in the luxury flats the other side of the railway tracks.
Still some 800 leaflets to be distributed before polling day on 5 October.
Or they could be offered to go on a speed awareness course as an alternative. . .
In fact I don’t see why the whole system of penalty points, etc couple not be retained. No need to re-invent the wheel. Not in other matters too.
After all, we are not designing an ideal new social system from scratch but are proposing a practical solution to the problems generated by society, where it is now at its present stage of technological development, being organised on a capitalist basis (minority ownership and production for sake and profit).
I wouldn’t have thought socialist society would need “men (or women) with clubs” to deal with traffic offences. A simpler solution would be to take away or suspend the offending driver’s licence. As cars would not be owned by individuals but either lent to them or made available to them by a community garage when needed, in both cases on proof of a valid driving licence, a person without a licence would not be able to get a car to drive.
So they have actually gone and done it. It is now illegal to drive at more than 20 mph in a built-up area in Wales. Of course people are not going to respect it but will continue to drive in such areas at a speed between 20 and 30 if there is not too much traffic about and you don’t need a law to tell people not to drive fast pass a school or a hospital.
This hare-brained regulation seems to have been concocted by some desk-bound bureaucrat who has obviously never tried to drive a modern car at 20 mph all the time. Of course it could just be a revenue-raising scheme.
One of the measures that will hopefully be rescinded when we get socialism, if not before.
Full of women like Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi? What a nightmare. As if that would make any difference.
More on this here:
The rise of the ‘Super Distruster’ is a major challenge for communicators
“A diverse population of 16 million people, ‘Super Distrusters’ defy all traditional political and democratic categorisation: Some worry about the enemies of growth, Marxist institutional capture, thought police, cultural erasure and ‘the new elite’. Others worry about a rapacious capitalist class, a reactionary plot against social progress, racist and misogynist police, conservative gatekeepers and ‘the old elite’.”
We will all know people who hold such views but 16 million (29% of adults)? That would be nearly every third person we pass in the streets.
And of course some of the views are true. There is a ruling “elite”. There is a “capitalist class” which is more or less “rapacious” (by economic necessity). We might even be included, in fact probably are.
But this can’t be bad:
“Super Distrusters’ hostility towards the system presents a big challenge for big business and government, which are regarded as the most elite and untrustworthy institutions.”
Could their difficulty be our opportunity?
Most of it but not the western part which at the time (1939) was part of Poland — Lvov for instance was then in Poland. It became part of Russia when under the Ribbentrop Molotov pact of 1939 Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. This part had never been part of Russia and the people there no particular affinity with Russia. Before WW1 it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
