As Humankind Blindly Staggers towards Nuclear War ...
15.05.2022
As Britain steps in to offer a “bilateral defense treaty” with neutral Finland that borders Russia, as well as one with pretend-neutral Sweden*, it is, in effect, offering a military “bridging loan” to the USA until NATO moves in to the two respective territories. This is one of the things – escalating bilateral treaties – that makes the war in Ukraine read more and more like the run-up to the First World War, also called the 1914-1918 war or, at the time, The Great War. Not that it was great at all. It was a bloodbath, aimed at, and succeeding in, fracturing and then sharing control of the “parts” of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire that sat on oil – just then, for the first time, much in demand, and believed to be found only in that region.
Today, the USA and Russia seem hell-bent on an all-out war in much the same mindless way as states in 1914 were – all looking no further than the end of their noses, and the noses of their respective bourgeoisies. The coming war is, like WW I, a classic capitalist war for control of raw materials, pipe routes, markets and political influence. It is also a way to rev up capitalist production by tenders and contracts for friends in armaments, that state-fuelled industry, that can actually kickstart flagging capitalist production during crises.
Russia has invaded Ukraine. The USA had already put sanctions on Russia and encircled Russia with missiles, while arming the Ukraine military to the teeth. Now the USA further encircles Russia and further arms and trains Ukraine’s military. It is not just the “state apparatus” of America and of Russia that are hell-bent on war but well-nigh the entire intelligentsia of each State is drawing the broad masses in tow behind their respective Governments in self-righteous nationalist fervour. Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the USA! and Glory to Russia! And the USA has also zipped Europe into its NATO, its military alliance for western capitalism.** Forunately, this coming “world war”, is not, so far, drawing in the whole “world”. So far, most ex-colonies stay out of this fight – despite inordinate lobbying and unholy pressure from the USA and UK, we note that India, China, most of Africa, Asia and Latin America have not been drawn in. This is over half the world’s people, who are, so far, not in this new “world war” in-the-making. People in the so-called third world are, in general, too used to suffering the USA’s wars of aggression, ourselves, to be able to stomach this same USA’s double-standards and hypocricy when it attacks Russia and defends Ukraine. As we watch US ally, Israel, assassinate the wonderful Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh live on TV, and then attack her coffin live on TV, in a 55-year Israeli invasion and occupation of Palestine, bank-rolled and propaganda-rolled by the USA, the Biden-style propaganda against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine sounds like stand-up comedy in very bad taste.
It is not only us in LALIT that see the comparison with WW I as we watch a new war impending.
Listen to the great analyst Noam Chomsky’s reply in an interview in Truthout a few days ago (11 May) to a seemingly unrelated question. He is asked why world leaders are going ahead with more fossil fuel even as the climate crisis looms. He focuses our attention on something else to explain how such short-term thinking is not new, saying: “Why did political leaders go to war in 1914, supremely confident of their own righteousness? And why did the most prominent intellectuals in every warring country line up with passionate enthusiasm in support of their own state — apart from a handful of dissidents, the most prominent of whom were jailed (Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht)?” In fact, all four of them were jailed, and the last two on the list were assassinated to boot.***
The question today, using Chomsky’s words, is “Why do political leaders go to war in 2022, supremely confident of their own righteousness? And why do the most prominent intellectuals in every warring country line up with passionate enthusiasm in support of their own state?” And why do they, this way, draw in the broad masses, too?
The Russian masses are in favour of their government’s “special operation” in Ukraine. To be more precise, 71% are in favour according to a recent poll. They believe that Russia is fighting a defensive war against an aggressive USA-led NATO that has built up missiles around Russia’s borders for 20 years without heeding the Russian state’s objections or “red lines” and, in particular, the people believe Russia to be fighting a war against a US-proxy in the form Ukraine, and inside Ukraine, in particular in the form of Nazi brigades, trained by the USA and who were responsible for a bloody Civil War against the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine who refused to accept the legitimacy of the USA-brokered bloody military coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014 against the then elected President, and who preferred to become “separatist regions”. (For the record, these Nazi elements have now been incorporated into Zelensky’s general military command.) Russian media, controlled by President Putin, holds this world-view in focus for Russian “media-consumers”, thus molding public opinion in Russia.
The American masses are even more convinced by their own leaders. 83%, according to a recent University of Maryland poll, support the supply of arms to Ukraine to the sum of $4 billion, already pouring oil on to the fires of war. Literally today, the US Senate is busy ratifying a new arms donation to Ukraine’s government, already approved by the House of Representatives, for the sum of $20 billion! To get an idea of the enormity of this sum of money, it is more than the US subsidizes its favourite ally, Israel, for its military invasion and agression of Palestine ($3.3 billion), and much more than the USA spends to prop up its second-most-favourite, the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has amended the Constitution so as to stay in power till 2030 (he gets $1.3 billion). That is the ongoing US policy. Anyway, the American people support it. Note that they only support with arms, not with their own lives. Americans arming Ukranians are Roman imperialists arming their gladiators to fight. But anyway, Americans believe the propaganda. They believe that Russia, without provocation, invaded its smaller neighbour, the sovereign state of Ukraine, out of some kind of madness or paranoia that took hold of its President Vladimir Putin. They believe the Russian people are brainwashed by Russian state-controlled media. But, then again, the US media has the same sort of function as the state-controlled Russian media. It molds public opinion in favour of the nation-state’s interests. The USA’s media is more efficient at this task than Russia’s.
The entire CNN team, for example, has moved house from Atlanta, Georgia to Kyiv, Ukraine. CNN provides total in-house Ukrainian propaganda 24-hours a day, even broadcasting notorious Nazi battalions’ videos and interviewing some of the notorious extreme-right fighters. CNN people, who stay at the luxury InterContinental Hotel for the war, are in-bedded in the Ukranian military. They then spout Ukraine’s version of events word-for-word. Those present in Ukraine during the war include whole teams around well-known journalists like Sam Kiley, Nick Paton Walsh, Hala Gorani, Ben Wedeman, Christiane Amanpour, Erin Burnett, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Jim Sciutto, Brianna Keilar, John Berman, Anderson Cooper, Kate Bolduan, Ana Cabrera, Clarissa Ward, Fred Pleitgen, Nick Robertson and Matthew Chance. They all stand 100% behind US President Joe Biden. Joe Biden, when he was President Obama’s Vice-President, was in charge of the Ukraine desk. That, it is important to note, was at the time of the US-sponsored coup d’etat in Ukraine. This coup was, in turn, the cause of the bloody civil war from 2014, in which 14,000 people were killed. And this civil war is what preceded the all-out war now raging.
Intellectuals in Russia and the USA “line up with passionate enthusiasm in support of their own state”. Just as in 1914, intellectuals did – with the exceptions like those mentioned by Professor Chomsky.
But there is a difference. And it brings us back to the existential nature of the climate crisis that was mentioned at the beginning of the Chomsky interview. This time, both Russia and the USA have atomic weapons. Each of those two powers have enough to explode the world and all its civilizations in one fell swoop a hundred times over. And it is only pretence that the USA is not a combatant. It is locked into mortal combat.
And then these leaders like Biden and Putin, Boris Johnson and Jens Stoltenberg play these war games, make war-alliances and pour armaments that they call “lethal” into mass slaughter? And we are not able to stop them? How many Ukrainians are going to lose their lives before this madness stops? Or is it really the USA fighting “until the last Ukranian”?
Let us all stand up like Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debbs, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnicht and oppose this terrible war. Let us all say: Russia, withdraw your troops now. NATO, announce your disbandment now! Close down all foreign military bases! We are fighting to close the USA base on Diego Garcia. Convert them to climate change observatories and clean energy research stations! End all arms production and sales! Convert these to research institutes for renewables and for food production for all, for housing, health care and public health, education, sports, arts and culture for all!
NOTES
* The Swedish State stands accused of collusion with the Nazis in WW II. Like in Western Ukraine, local Nazis in Sweden operated openly in cahoots with the German Nazi State, and a strong continuity of Nazi organization has persisted ever since in both countries.
** States in the European union like Germany and France follow the USA, taking the role of the USA’s battered wives – bruised and bleeding, humiliated, the USA flicking dandruff off their dress lapels, but unable to think of deserting the conjugal “protection” – while Boris Johnson’s Britain rushes around like the USA’s shameless whore, providing “intelligence”, much like it provided the “proof” in Iraq’s supposed possession of “weapons of mass destruction” that paved the way to Bush’s hellish sanctions and invasion that killed a million people. A broad alliance is being cobbled together now: the “settler colonies” – USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and no doubt Israel will end up in there – together with the weakened former Colonial Powers – Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy and their European allies. Plus Japan, another battered wife of the USA, eternally humiliated and unable to move out.
*** And, incidentally, we might also recall, while we are about it, that it was only three whole years and 20 million deaths later that the end of this madness began. The end began with the up-rising of the working class and peasantry during the Russian Revolution; less than three months after the successful October 1917 revolution, Lenin and Trotsky, who led this great revolution together, negotiated the Armistice as from December 1917.
