Saturday, October 7, 2023
Why Veterans Are Calling For Peace In Ukraine
https://popularresistance.org/why-veterans-are-calling-for-peace-in-ukraine/
By Gerry Condon, Popular Resistance.
October 5, 2023
Resist!
Who Lies? Who Dies? Who Pays? Who Profits?
Gerry Condon’s Speech at San Francisco Rally, October 4, 2023.
While reading the latest news of the war in Ukraine today, I was reminded of a song by Emma’s Revolution. The name of the song is Who Lies? It asks four fundamental questions that can be applied to just about any war:
“Who Lies? Who Dies? Who Pays? Who Profits?"
Veterans For Peace certainly knows who lies. Our members have been lied into multiple wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Who lied? The President lied. Our political leaders lied. The newspapers and television lied. Even religious, academic and municipal leaders encouraged us to fight and die in a war based on lies.
And we most definitely know who died. 58,000 US soldiers – mostly poor and working class — died for lies in Vietnam, while we killed over 3 million Vietnamese men, women and children – mostly poor peasants. Thousands of US soldiers were killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis died.
Our soldiers continue to die. PTSD and Moral Injury have led to more soldiers taking their own lives than those who died on the battlefield.
Who Pays? We all pay –our precious tax dollars, which are intended to provide essential public services like healthcare and housing – are stolen from us to pay for war.
Just one-third of what we are wasting on death in Ukraine could end homelessness in the US,or even end world hunger. But that is not where our money is going.
And now the final question, Who Profits? The weapons manufacturers like Boeing and Raytheon reap obscene profits. As do banks and huge financial institutions like Blackrock and Vanguard, which are heavily invested in the military, in high tech, and in media.
BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest shareholders in the six major media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media. So while they reap huge profits for the 1% off of war-related industries, they are simultaneously shaping the media narrative that supports war.
In Ukraine right now, we have a stalemated war of attrition, where as Caitlin Johnstone writes, “soldiers are being killed and maimed in a battle for inches. At least tens of thousands have died in this war with hundreds of thousands wounded, all for those teeny, tiny little blips on the map. Ukraine is now freckled with more landmines than anywhere else on earth, which experts say will take decades to clear. This giant deathtrap is exacerbated by the cluster munitions that are covering the land with greater and greater frequency, which will go on to detonate and kill civilians (mostly children) for years to come. The mines and artillery fire on the frontline of this war are reportedly creating tens of thousands of amputees, numbers comparable to what was seen in World War I.”
And now Depleted Uranium weapons,known to cause cancers, birth defects, and genetic damage, are being added to the lethal mix.
It is no surprise then that military-aged Ukrainian men have been fleeing and attempting to flee the nation in droves to avoid conscription.
Veterans For Peace supports those draft resisters. We support the right to Conscientiously Object to participation in killing and war. We support war resisters and the right of peace activists to speak out against war without persecution, in both Ukraine and Russia.
We call on our own U.S. soldiers to thoughtfully consider whether they will obey orders to fight in illegal, immoral wars, or participate in training and arming this US proxy war against Russia.
Veterans For Peace joins with peace-loving people throughout the US and around the globe who are calling for URGENT Negotiations to End the War in Ukraine, Not More Weapons to Prolong and Escalate It. See official Veterans For Peace statement, here.
Even a civilization-ending nuclear war is all too possible if the war in Ukraine is not ended soon, along with insane Neocon push for war against China.
So please keep in mind the four questions posed by Emma’s Revolution – Who Lies? Who Dies? Who Pays? Who Profits?
War is NOT the Answer! Keep on Waging Peace!
Gerry Condon serves on the Veterans For Peace (VFP) board of directors and represents VFP on the steering committee of the Peace In Ukraine Coalition.
Humor In The Headlines Over China In Latin America
https://popularresistance.org/humor-in-the-headlines-over-china-in-latin-america/
By Roger D. Harris, Popular Resistance.
October 5, 2023
Educate!
“As China arrives with a splash in Honduras, the US wrings its hands”
Washington Post, October 2, 2023
In a break from its hysterical coverage of the existential threat posed by Donald Trump, the Washington Post – house organ of the Democratic National Committee – cautions us of the other menace, China. “When the leader of this impoverished Central American country visited Beijing in June,” we are warned, “China laid out the warmest of welcomes.”
Apparently in a grave threat to US national security, the president of Honduras attended a state banquet and actually ate Chinese food. What next for the country the Post affectionately describes as “long among the most docile of US regional partners”?
Honduras changes its China policy
In a classic example of do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do diplomacy, the US was miffed when Honduras recognized the People’s Republic of China as the sole representative of China in March. Curiously, the US implemented its one-China policy 44 years ago.
Today, a mere baker’s dozen of the world’s countries still recognize Taiwan as sovereign. Among them, Guatemala will switch Chinas if president-elect Bernardo Arévalo is allowed to assume office in January. Another holdout, Haiti, literally does not have an elected government of its own but may soon be receiving a US-sponsored occupying army.
China has emerged as South America’s leading and the wider Latin American region’s second largest trading partner, with over twenty states joining Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. This provides a substitute to monopolar dependence on commerce with Uncle Sam. Russia, too, has been pushing under the greenback curtain. The BRICS+ alliance with China and Russia also includes Brazil and Argentina among others.
“US aid and investments throughout the region are historically seen as slow in coming,” the Post explains as the cause for the trade and diplomatic shifts seen in the region and reflected in Honduras.
The Post hastens to add with a straight face that US investments come with “significant stipulations on human rights and democracy.” Supporting this ridiculous claim, the Post notes: “Honduras, long known for violence and corruption, has been subject to particular US scrutiny.”
The Post, it should be noted, proudly runs the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” So they should know what form the “particular” US scrutiny took.
Tellingly omitted from the Post’s story is mention of the 2009 US-backed coup that deposed the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manual Zelaya. In her memoires, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took credit for preventing Zelaya’s return to his elected post. That was in the original hardcover version of the vanity book. The subsequent paperback expunged the boast.
Xiomara Castro, who first rose to prominence after the coup that overthrew her husband Manual Zelaya, became the first female president of Honduras in January 2022.
Her predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), was immediately extradited to the US for drug trafficking proving beyond doubt that hers was a victory over a nacro-dictatorship. JOH was the last of a line of corrupt golpistas (coup mongers) that the US had propped up for the last dozen years. So much for the Post’s vaunting of US support for human rights and democracy.
And then, almost as an afterthought, the Post acknowledges that indeed US aid and investments have other strings attached to them; namely, “a preference for the private sector and nongovernmental organizations.” Concluding: “In contrast, China’s offers of trade and investment, with few strings attached, have increasingly outweighed traditional ties or ideology in the region.”
Peru – Chinese on the 20-yard line in our homeland
There’s cause for concern down in Peru too. Pedro Castillo, the elected president from a leftwing party, was imprisoned last December in a parliamentary coup backed by the military and the US. The de facto government imposed a state of emergency when demonstrations were mounted. Castillo was seen by the poor and indigenous as one of their own in a society with deep fissures of class and race
Disproportionate use of force against the protests, including firing live ammunition, has resulted in some 80 people killed. The US immediately voiced support for the coup regime and later deployed troops to Peru to bolster the unpopular government. (In neighboring Ecuador, the US recently struck a deal to send troops there in support of another faltering rightwing regime.) Peru’s economy is in recession and local communities are resisting major foreign mining projects.
So what’s the problem? According to an article in the Financial Times, based on the word of an “anonymous” US official and bolstered by the testimony of a nameless “source” close to the Peruvian government, there is a weighty peril. But it is not any of the above.
Apparently the Peruvian government is “not sufficiently focused” on the threats to their country posed by Chinese investment in infrastructure.
A possible reason for the insufficient focus by Peru’s president is she is being charged with committing crimes of genocide, aggravated homicide, and abuse of authority by Peru’s attorney general’s office.
Had she been paying attention, she would have noted that in April the Italian energy firm Enel announced it would sell its Peruvian electricity business to a Chinese company. Previously, another Chinese firm invested in the Lima’s electricity supply and some hydroelectric dams.
The danger doesn’t stop there. Cosco, a Chinese state-owned company, has a 60% stake in proposed deepwater port in Peru with construction slated for late next year. As the Financial Times warns, while the port is designed for cargo ships, it is “large enough to be used by Beijing’s navy to resupply warships.”
If a few hundred more deals like this were transacted and subsequently somehow weaponized, the Chinese could remotely in the distant future be on their way to create the equivalent of what BCC calls the complete arc of US military bases that presently surround China.
With such infrastructure projects and their 5G mobile networks, according to the head of the US Southern Command, the Chinese are already “on the 20-yard line to our homeland.”
What’s next for America’s backyard – upgraded to “front yard” by Mr. Biden – in this the 200th year of the Monroe Doctrine? China may soon export fortune cookies with subversive messages or, more threatening yet, launch another weather balloon over the Pacific. It is reassuring that the US seventh fleet, including its “ghost” drone warships, still patrols the coast of China with its message of peace.
Roger D. Harris is with the human rights organization Task Force on the Americas, founded in 1985.
Depleted Ukrainium
By Patrick Lawrence, Scheer Post.
October 5, 2023
Educate!
What Comes After Failure?
You cannot name the last time you read anything about a parliamentary election in Slovakia, so I won’t bother asking. But you are reading about one this week, assuming you still follow mainstream media—if only to understand what you are supposed to think about one or another event, as against what has actually occurred.
In results announced in Bratislava Sunday, a leftist party whose primary platform plank is opposition to the war in Ukraine won 23 percent of the vote. On Monday the Slovakian president, Zuzana Čaputová, formally asked Robert Fico, who leads the SMER party, to form a government. It looks like he will do so in a coalition with either Voice, a social-democratic party that took 15 percent of the vote, or with Progressive Slovakia, a liberal-centrist party that finished with 18 percent of the vote.
Fico is an interesting figure. He has served as prime minister twice over the course of a decade, during which time he proved sufficiently European to bring Slovakia into the euro. To one or another extent, his likely coalition partners favor keeping Slovakia as a card-carrying member of the Western coalition supporting Ukraine. But they did not win the election: Fico did. And Fico is all business in his opposition to Slovakia’s support for the U.S. proxy war tearing Ukraine and its people to pieces.
SMER’s platform assigns the West and Ukraine equal responsibility for the war—a purposeful rip into the “unprovoked” charade—and promises an immediate end to all Slovakian arms shipments to the war effort. Speaking after the election results were announced, Fico pointedly pledged to press Kiev and its backers to begin peace talks with Moscow. “More killing is not going to help anyone,” he declared.
There are two things to say about Robert Fico’s return to the top of Slovakian politics. One, we find once again that the U.S. is a victim of its old, Manichean habit of dividing the whole of humanity into good guys and bad guys. The headline on CNN’s report on the elections reads, “Pro–Russian politician wins Slovakia’s parliamentary election.” The New York Times head is, “Unease in the West as Slovakia Appears Set to Join the Putin Sympathizers.”
Tell me, which of these is more pathetic? “Pro–Russian?” “Putin sympathizers?” This is infantile—apart from being false, I mean. Fico simply articulates an independent, perfectly sound position on the war. CNN and The Times are infantilizing their viewers and readers as they reduce this position to the simplistic binary of a Saturday-morning cartoon. The insidious thing here, and let us be ever vigilant on this point, is that these media are inserting into our brains the thought that any deviation from the Russophobic orthodoxy amounts to support for the Kremlin’s demonized occupant.
Two, “unease” is too mild a word for the reigning sentiment among the war-mongering elites in Washington and the European capitals. An incipient panic is closer to the reality as public support for the war—and here and here official support—ever more visibly wobbles and wanes. The first front in any war is the home front, where it is imperative the battle is won. And those running the war in Ukraine are slowly but surely losing on this side of the conflict.
They are losing it on the ground in Ukraine, too, it is now more or less obvious. Our question becomes: Where will the powers that instigated this war and invested heavily in it turn next? As I argued soon after the Russian intervention began in February 2022, this conflict was probably conceived as the Washington neoconservatives’ shoot-the-moon moment, its all-out play to take down the Russian Federation. What happens now, as the neocons lose this round of Hearts and the game as they have played it is over?
To my great relief, the blue-and-yellow flags that disfigured the American landscape in the early months of the war are now mostly gone. More than half of Americans polled agree with Robert Fico: No more military aid and weapons to Ukraine. This percentage is headed in only one direction from here on out.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s swing through North America beginning with his attendance at this year’s General Assembly last month, went pretty badly. At the GA, he did not make any headway persuading the global majority opposed to the war to come over to his side. His reception in Washington was… what is the best word?… muted? House Republicans, many of whom oppose more military aid, refused to meet him. When, over the weekend, Speaker Kevin McCarthy finally pushed through a bill to keep the government funded, he had to strip out a provision authorizing another tranche of weapons funding.
The mood elsewhere appears to be no brighter. That astonishing debacle in the Canadian Parliament—presenting an old SS man as a hero because he fought the Soviets?—cannot have done Zelensky’s constituency in Canada any good. Across the pond there are signs of impatience as roughly eight million Ukrainian refugees settle in Europe, displaying little interest—and who can blame them?—in going home when the war is over. War or no, solidarity or no, the Poles have blocked imports of cheap Ukrainian wheat. There are signs of buyer’s remorse among the Finns a matter of months after their impulsive decision to join NATO. And now the Slovakians and their new leader’s alarming display of political and intellectual independence.
However these matters may stand as you read this commentary, the trends here outlined are destined to accelerate in coming months. The Ukrainians’ long-touted counteroffensive, a major prop in the campaign to maintain public support for the war, is touted no more. It is well on the way to taking its place next to the 2007 “surge” in Iraq. Remember that? Of course you don’t. And you won’t remember the counteroffensive any more distinctly in, I would say, a year’s time.
Not even The New York Times pretends any longer that the front line in eastern Ukraine has budged more than a matter of meters the whole of this year. And this is before the harsh winter weather begins. At that point, stasis will be the best the Ukrainians can hope for. All this autumn and all winter, the Russians are likely to continue their rolling volleys of rockets, missiles, and artillery shells to the point most of Ukraine east of Kiev resembles Ypres or the Somme in 1918.
Let us look ahead to next spring, then. The Ukrainian front will have sustained another winter’s deterioration, and popular discontent among Europeans is likely to have sharpened. It will be considerably harder to pretend that the Kiev regime can win the war or, indeed, that it makes any sense to continue it. And Joe Biden will be looking at an election in seven or so months.
At that point, what?
A moment, please, while I Windex the crystal ball. Yes, yes, it all comes clear.
We already see signs of one major development out front, Slovakia’s election but one example among several. It is difficult to see how Europe can sustain the commitment to the war it has displayed to date. There are too many weak spots appearing. If I am correct about this, at a certain point, it will no longer make sense to speak seriously of a unified alliance ganged up behind Ukraine and against Russia. And then the war hawks’ worst fear will look less a nightmare than a reality: A weak Europe means a weak NATO.
In my read, Ukraine is likely to resemble Iraq quite beyond the 2023 counteroffensive as a reprise of the 2007 surge. Remember “the coalition of the willing” the Bush II people assembled? It was better named “the coalition of the coerced,” I always thought, and in a very short time it had the consistency on the ground of papier mâché. How long did it take for the pretense to fall away, and no one any longer pretended Iraq was other than an American war?
The same will occur in Ukraine, I predict. As early as next year it will be an American war waged by an American proxy, the Europeans doing their bit by transshipping U.S.–made weapons and assuming other odds-and-ends chores but reducing their own participation and supplies of matériel to token levels.
As Ukraine emerges as an American project, no more nonsense about “Western unity” and “allies and partners” about it, American attitudes are likely to shift further in the direction of objection. If the majority of Americans has already had enough of this conflict as they drive to work along potholed roads and across crumbling bridges, Ukraine will be a much harder sell once the Biden regime can no longer pretend the rest of the West is with us. At that point—best outcome here—Americans may realize once again that the street is a very fine place to conduct politics.
Let’s look at this more closely. As it emerges that Washington and Kiev are the only powers committed to prolonging hostilities, it will also become evident that neither has a choice under its current leadership. Volodymyr Zelensky cannot at this point enter seriously into peace talks: He has sacrificed too many Ukrainian lives. Joe Biden, apparently skilled at grifting, seems a dumbhead when it comes to thinking things through tactically or strategically. He has staked far too much on Ukraine and is now stuck—in an election year no less—with his whatever-it-takes, as-long-as-it-takes grandstanding.
There are a few wild cards to consider. What if the Biden regime, which is known to consider Zelensky increasingly obnoxious, forces the Ukrainian president to organize elections next year and then makes sure he, Zelensky, loses them? There is some speculation to this effect. What if Biden is impeached? What if his incapacities at some point overpower him? What if Donald Trump, who is vociferously opposed to the war, assumes a lead in the polls such that the results on November 5, 2024, are nearly a foregone conclusion?
Possibles, improbables: There are always some of these to bear in mind.
Anyone who wonders just how worried Washington’s political cliques are about weakening enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine can consider a piece The New York Times published in its Monday editions. The headline above Julian Barnes’s piece is in that line I have come to love since the old Russiagate days. It reads, “Putin’s Next Target: U.S. Support for Ukraine, Official Say.”
Use this piece as a mirror, readers. In it you will see reflected the anxieties of the policy cliques as they address the matter of declining popular support for the war they intend to prolong.
“Russia’s strategy to win the war in Ukraine is to outlast the West,” Barnes begins. “But how does Vladimir Putin plan to do that?”
Our Julian is generous with his dum-da-da-dum, you have to say. And then he delivers, with that superb punch and paranoia you used to find in American Opinion, the John Birch Society publication:
American officials said they are convinced that Mr. Putin intends to try to end U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking conspiracy theories with new technologies.
The Russia disinformation aims to increase support for candidates opposing Ukraine aid with the ultimate goal of stopping international military assistance to Kyiv….
Moscow is also likely to try to boost pro–Russian candidates in Europe, seeing potential fertile ground with recent results. A pro–Russian candidate won Slovakia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. In addition to national elections, Russia could seek to influence the European parliamentary vote next year, officials said.
I see, I see, amazing grace and all that. If I oppose Western support for the unwinnable war in Ukraine, it is because the Russians have gone to work on me. How could I have missed this? How could I have been so foolish as to assume a figure such as Robert Fico actually thinks for himself and means what he says when he asserts that the atrocious death toll in Ukraine is senseless? All those Slovakian voters: Kremlin dupes, every one.
International Uproar Following Mass Raids And Arrest Of Indian Journalists
https://popularresistance.org/international-uproar-following-mass-raids-and-arrest-of-indian-journalists/
By People's Dispatch.
October 5, 2023
There has been an outpouring of solidarity following the raid and arrest of journalists in India.
They have been targeted as a result of baseless accusations published in the New York Times.
In the hours following the raids of over 100 journalists affiliated with Indian leftist outlet Newsclick, international outlet Peoples Dispatch, and Tricontinental Research Services, and the detention of around 50, leading academics and journalists from across the world have expressed solidarity and outrage.
The coordinated repressive action was carried out as part of an investigation under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a draconian law which has been widely criticized by human rights organizations in India and internationally as it undermines civil liberties and rights. Newsclick editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha and administrator Amit Chakraborty were arrested during the raid under the draconian anti-terror law and remain in police custody.
On October 3, after news broke about the raids, the Press Club of India held an emergency meeting in New Delhi, wherein journalists and media activists resolved to continue fighting for media freedom in India.
On October 4, journalists and writers, including novelist Arundhati Roy, staged a protest at the Press Club of India, while hundreds of young activists gathered at Jantar Mantar area in Delhi to reject the attacks on press freedom.
Roy spoke to the BBC, denouncing the charges against the journalists under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. “They have confiscated the phones, the computers, they have charged them under this anti-terrorism act, collapsing the difference between terrorists and journalists,” she said.
In New York City, activists and journalists picketed on October 3 outside of the New York Times building in Midtown Manhattan. Much of the blame for the latest unjust targeting of these Indian journalists lies at the hands of the New York Times. The Indian government has been viciously targeting Newsclick for many years, following their first raid of the outlet in 2021 following Newsclick’s faithful reporting of the farmers’ protests in the country. A recent article by the New York Times, claiming that Newsclick-affiliated journalists are part of a Chinese propaganda network, was used by Modi’s government to justify further repression.
“A Government that has not been able to substantiate any charges against Newsclick despite being in possession of all its information, documentation and communications, needed a motivated and bogus article published in the New York Times to invoke the draconian UAPA and attempt to shut down and stifle independent and fearless voices that portray the story of the real India,” said Newsclick in a recent statement. “Of peasants, of laborers, of farmers, and other oft-ignored sections of society.
The New York Times’ recent article is merely a part of the West’s Cold War against China, activists claimed. Ben Becker, editor-in-chief of BreakThrough News, said at the picket that the piece is a way to accuse “anyone who opposes US foreign policy of being an agent of China.”
“What this article did is to lay the groundwork for an attack on the anti-war movement or anyone who’s critical of US foreign policy against China,” he said.
It is Newsclick’s steadfast reporting of working class struggles in India that has landed them in hot water with the Modi government, said Zoe Alexandra, co-editor of Peoples Dispatch, outside of the 52-story New York Times building.
“[Newsclick] dared to cover the incredibly powerful and courageous uprising of farmers in India. They were talking to farmers when they were committing suicide in the dozens and in the hundreds,” said Alexandra. “It’s Newsclick that covered the largest strike in human history. A quarter million people on the streets.”
A coalition of 18 media organizations in India have penned a letter, published on October 4, to Chief Justice of India (CJI) Y V Chandrachud, expressing concern over the state’s repression. “The invocation of UAPA is especially chilling. Journalism cannot be prosecuted as ‘terrorism’. Enough instances in history abound to tell us where that eventually goes,” reads the letter. Signatories include Digipub News India Foundation, the Indian Women’s Press Corps, the Press Club of India, and the Foundation for Media Professionals.
In Taliparamba municipality in Kerala, India, dozens in the Democratic Youth Federation of India marched in solidarity with Newsclick.
The International People’s’ Assembly (IPA), a platform of over 200 trade unions, people’s movements, and left parties, declared in a statement on October 3 following the raids: “Today’s raids constitute a dangerous attack on press freedom in India and concerns all the democratic and progressive people around the world. The International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA) demands an end to persecution and press suppression in India.”
Biden moves towards deal with Republicans: Ukraine war funding in return for border crackdown
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/06/rnau-o06.html
Patrick Martin
a day ago
The outlines of a reactionary deal between President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans have begun to become clear in the aftermath of the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The essence of the budding agreement is for the House Republicans to approve billions in additional US military aid to Ukraine in return for the Democratic president agreeing to stepped-up repressive measures against migrants seeking to cross the US-Mexico border and gain asylum and employment in the United States.
The Biden administration carried out two such measures since McCarthy was removed as speaker on Tuesday in the first such action by the House of Representatives in US history.
On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that it was waiving the application of 26 federal environmental laws in order to go forward with a 20-mile extension of the border wall between the US and Mexico, mainly in Starr County, Texas, on the Rio Grande. This was a direct repudiation of Biden’s campaign pledge in 2020 not to build “another foot” of the wall begun under the Trump administration.
Migrants wait along the border wall near Yuma, Arizona. [AP Photo/Gregory Bull]
On Thursday, the DHS said it would begin deporting asylum seekers from Venezuela who had recently crossed into the United States illegally. This slammed the door shut on the ongoing flood of migrants from Venezuela, triggered by the massive economic crisis in that country precipitated by the US economic sanctions and de facto blockade, aimed at destabilizing and overthrowing the government of President Nicolas Maduro, which is at odds with US foreign policy in the region.
Last month, amid great fanfare, the Biden administration had announced it would issue temporary work permits for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants now in the US.
The two actions combined amounted to a declaration that the Biden administration is embracing the vicious anti-migrant policies advocated by Trump and the Republicans over the past eight years, since Trump descended the escalator in his Manhattan tower to slander immigrants from Mexico as murderers and rapists.
Biden’s actions are so clearly aimed at wooing Republican support for Ukraine funding—the principal issue underlying McCarthy’s demise as party leader in the House—that even the Washington press corps was compelled to raise it. At a photo-op with General Charles Q. Brown, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there was a shouted question to Biden, “Mr. President, are you going to tie Ukraine aid to the border?”
Biden ducked the question, but he responded to a follow-up: “You pledged not to build another foot of border wall. What changed?” The president claimed nothing had changed. But there were already headlines in major newspapers about the reversal, and a Trump statement gloating that his border policies had been vindicated.
This sequence of events confirms the analysis made yesterday on the WSWS, in the perspective statement “McCarthy’s downfall, the Democratic Party and the escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia.” We warned that the Democrats “are pledging to collaborate with the domestic agenda of the Republicans in exchange for guarantees that funding for Ukraine is untouchable.”
The trigger event for McCarthy’s ouster was his decision Saturday night, September 30, to support a continuing resolution (CR) that would enable federal agencies to keep spending money for 45 days into the new fiscal year, thus averting a federal shutdown. The legislation did not contain additional funding for the war in Ukraine, nor the draconian measures on the border proposed by the fascist right.
Within two days, fascist Republican Representative Matt Gaetz filed a motion to declare the office of speaker vacant, forcing a vote on keeping McCarthy in office. The next day, the House Democratic caucus decided to vote against McCarthy, without a single dissenter. The vote on Tuesday was 216-210 against McCarthy, with 208 Democrats joining the seven other Republicans who supported Gaetz, while 210 Republicans backed McCarthy.
With the office of speaker now vacant, the House cannot carry out any business, pending a new election. The interim speaker, Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, designated in advance by McCarthy, put the House in recess for a week while the Republicans discuss a replacement speaker.
Two candidates have so far announced: ultra-right Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who declared his opposition to Ukraine aid, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, the number two Republican, who has generally supported US military and financial support to Kiev.
Several members of the Republican caucus, including fascist Marjorie Taylor Greene, have said they would support the selection of ex-president Trump as the speaker. There is no constitutional requirement that the leader of the House actually be an elected representative. Trump’s four indictments, however, make him ineligible under rules adopted by the Republican caucus, which they would have to revoke.
Neither the House recess nor the continuing resolution means an immediate end to US military aid, Pentagon officials said. They noted that there was a total of $7 billion in authority, under two separate legal provisions, either to spend money or transfer military equipment to Ukraine. However, the CR is only for 45 days. Any Ukraine funding after November 14 requires the passage of the overall Defense Department spending bill, which remains highly uncertain.
According to press accounts, there was intensive discussion in the White House about how large the Ukraine aid package in the Pentagon spending bill should be. Under ordinary circumstances, the budget provides spending authority only for fiscal year 2024, which ends next September 30. But there were suggestions that Ukraine aid should be authorized through all of 2024, to take the issue off the table during the presidential election campaign.
Biden said on Wednesday that he would be giving a major speech on Ukraine, saying of the blockade in the House, “It does worry me … There are a majority of members of both parties that have said they are for Ukraine aid.”
On Thursday, there was a briefing on Ukraine from White House national security aides for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but no information has yet been released of what was discussed.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and General Brown are scheduled to travel to Europe next week for meetings in Brussels October 11-12 of the Ukraine defense contact group and NATO defense ministers. Such meetings are usually the occasion for announcing new arms shipments to Ukraine or escalatory actions by NATO directed against Russia.
Oppose sending British troops to Ukraine! Mobilise the working class against imperialist war!
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/06/dbiw-o06.html
Socialist Equality Party (UK)
5 October 2023
The admission by Defence Secretary Grant Shapps that Britain plans to deploy troops to Ukraine and confront Russian ships in the Black Sea confirms how close the world is to a direct war between nuclear powers. It must be answered by the development of a mass anti-war movement in the British and international working class.
Shapps’ proposals threaten disaster. To openly place British military forces in Ukraine has only one possible aim: to provide a casus belli through the sacrifice of NATO military personnel.
The plans were revealed in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, “Grant Shapps to send UK troops to Ukraine.” This followed a visit to the Army’s Salisbury Plain training ground Friday and a return trip to Ukraine one day earlier, involving discussions with President Volodymyr Zelensky and with General Sir Patrick Sanders, the UK’s chief of the General Staff. Shapps said he was talking to military chiefs about increasing training and the production of military equipment by private companies in Ukraine itself:
“I think there’s a point at which, I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well… not just training, but also we’re seeing BAE [the defence firm] for example move into manufacturing ‘in country.’”
Political editor Edward Malnick added, “Mr. Shapps suggested that Britain was preparing to play a more active role helping the country to defend itself against attacks in the Black Sea, where Russia has been increasingly targeting cargo ships carrying grain.”
A threat of all-out war with Russia
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president, warned immediately that transferring British training courses to the territory of Ukraine would “turn your instructors into legal targets for our armed forces. Knowing full well that they will be mercilessly destroyed. And no longer as mercenaries, but precisely as British NATO specialists.”
He noted comments by “the head of the German defence committee with an unpronounceable surname—Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann—who said yesterday that she believes that Ukraine has the right to use long-range missiles to attack targets on the territory of the Russian Federation… These idiots are actively pushing us towards a third world war.”
The media was forced to acknowledge that Shapps was threatening to provoke war with Russia. The Guardian described the announcement as “highly escalatory… the Ministry of Defence has never acknowledged a permanent military presence in the country.”
It noted that at the start of the war, “Tavoriv military base in western Ukraine, one of the main encampments used by British troops to train Ukrainian troops, was hit by a devastating missile strike that killed at least 61 people, including many international volunteers, only a few weeks after the invasion.”
UK’s role as provocateur in chief
Fear of provoking mass opposition to such a disastrous escalation of a war without any popular support led to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak denying immediate plans to deploy UK troops, telling the press that this was “something for the long term, not the here and now.” Shapps also rowed back, claiming to Conservative Home, “The Sunday Telegraph erroneously wrote a headline which bore no connection to any of the transcript or anything that had been discussed.”
The government is now relying on a servile media to bury Shapps’ revelation of the UK’s criminal plans: “they [Telegraph] fixed it immediately and no one else wrote it up,” he told Conservative Home. But whatever denials are made, the defence secretary has confirmed that the UK, in intimate collaboration with the Biden administration, is preparing provocations that must lead to all-out war.
The US and NATO have staked their credibility on the outcome of the war in Ukraine… With Ukraine running out of human cannon fodder in the conflict with Russia, the only way to ‘change the game’ is for NATO forces, up to now providing the weapons, intelligence, logistics, and command structures for the Ukrainian army, to intervene directly in the conflict.”
Britain’s role throughout the Ukraine war has been that of provocateur-in-chief. Shapps boasted to the Telegraph, “Of every single partner in the world… We were helping first, we supplied kit first and encouraged others to do the same, we provide more training and intelligence.”
In January 2023, the UK announced the provision of 14 Challenger II main battle tanks to Ukraine, breaking the logjam on other European countries delivering Leopard tanks and on the US sending Abrams. The UK was the first to provide Ukraine with long range Storm Shadow missiles capable of striking targets deep into Russian territory. As part of British-led Operation Interflex, more than 20,000 recruits from the armed forces of Ukraine have received training in the UK, including jet fighter pilots—preparing the way for the handing over of F-16s long demanded by Ukraine.
Threatening engagement with Russian vessels in the Black Sea also continues the UK’s role as NATO’s provocateur. In June 2021, days before NATO’s Operation Sea Breeze naval and air exercise, British destroyer HMS Defender entered waters off Crimea claimed by Russia and was met with warning shots.
Preparing to fight a war with Russia is the declared policy of the UK. In 2018, General Sir Nicholas Carter, the former chief of the Defence Staff, proposed that the British Army needed “to project land capability over distances of up to some 2,000 km,” directly comparing today’s tasks to the Nazi war of annihilation waged against the Soviet Union.
In his keynote address to the Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) annual “Land Warfare Conference” last summer, General Sir Patrick Sanders, named as having briefed Shapps, demanded a strengthened armed forces capable of waging offensive wars. Sanders insisted, “The British Army must be prepared to engage in warfare at its most violent.”
The scale of the violence being considered is demonstrated most chillingly by September’s revelation that the UK is on the verge of stationing US nuclear weapons on its soil at Royal Air Force Lakenheath for the first time in 15 years.
Trade unions and Labour Party cheerleaders for war
Pursuing and escalating the war against Russia depends above all on the services provided by the trade unions in suppressing the class struggle and the Labour Party in giving unswerving support to NATO aggression.
For the past three decades, a crisis-ridden British ruling class has seen support for US-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine as the primary political mechanism for projecting its global interests against its main European rivals, a policy reinforced by the disastrous impact of Brexit on Britain’s world position. But the turn to war and the imposition of austerity, coming in the aftermath of the horrific impact of the COVID pandemic, have produced a cost-of-living crisis that has led to the explosive eruption of a strike wave that started last summer.
The Tories have responded by passing minimum service legislation, effectively banning strikes in essential services. But they have relied so far on the betrayals imposed by the trade union bureaucracy on rail, post, telecoms, education, local authority and health strikes involving millions of workers.
Amid a governmental crisis that saw the downfall of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the abortive premiership of Liz Truss and her forced replacement by Sunak, and with rail strikers denounced in the media as “Putin’s stooges,” the trade union bureaucracy protected British imperialism and its war drive from a threatened general strike.
In September, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) overwhelmingly backed the war in Ukraine, calling for “financial and practical aid from the UK.” Last year’s TUC Congress voted to “support affiliates’ campaigns for immediate increases in defence spending in the UK,” since “Congress … recognises that defence manufacturing cuts have hindered the UK’s ability to aid the Ukrainian people under brutal assault from Putin’s regime.”
The trade union leaders now insist that workers have no choice but to rely on the election of a Labour government next year. This is despite Sir Keir Starmer’s declared hostility to strikes and his insistence that a Labour government will continue the austerity measures of the Tories and will do so more efficiently. They explicitly back Labour’s full support for war in Ukraine by what Starmer boasts is “the party of NATO.”
The elevation of Starmer and his cabal of right-wing warmongers to Labour’s leadership is the political responsibility of Jeremy Corbyn. His refusal to mobilise the massive popular support he had among workers and youth against imperialist militarism was the essential precondition for preparing a NATO war against Russia.
Within a week of Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in September 2015, the Sunday Times published a statement by a “senior serving general” warning of “a mutiny” if he became prime minister, using “whatever means possible, fair or foul” against him. Corbyn’s response was to roll over on every major issue, including war in Syria, NATO membership and the renewal of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme.
Corbyn’s replacement by Starmer in 2020 signalled the final collapse of the “Labour left” and any nominal anti-war tendency in its leadership. When Starmer last year threatened any MP backing the Stop the War Coalition or criticising NATO with disciplinary action, all 11 signatories to a statement criticising NATO and Russia and calling for a negotiated peace immediately withdrew their support. Most of what remains of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) led by Corbyn’s former shadow chancellor John McDonnell now openly backs the war.
For a mass, socialist anti-war movement!
The Socialist Equality Party demands an immediate end to the US-NATO war against Russia, waged as a conspiracy against the population of the UK and the entire world and imposed without any discussion of its causes and consequences.
Behind the backs of the working class, the NATO powers have instigated a conflict pushing towards direct military confrontation with Russia and China that threatens nuclear annihilation.
There is significant and growing opposition to war among British workers, especially the younger generation. But this opposition lacks a programme, perspective and leadership. A struggle must be taken up to mobilise the working class in a global anti-war movement against the NATO powers and the bankrupt nationalism of the Putin and Zelensky regimes that has brought the Russian and Ukrainian workers to the brink of disaster.
War abroad means class war at home. Shapps used his Telegraph interview to demand an increase on military spending to 3 percent of GDP. All the resources used to finance the military machine will be paid for through ever more brutal austerity and attacks on the working class and imposed by a turn towards dictatorial forms of rule. To oppose war therefore means to resolutely pursue the class struggle, animated by a socialist and anti-capitalist programme. As the Socialist Equality Party has explained:
Imperialist war arises out of the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system—between a global economy and the division of the world into rival nation-states, in which private ownership of the means of production is rooted. These same contradictions, however, produce the objective basis for world socialist revolution. Already, the consequences of the war are enormously intensifying social conflicts around the world. The impact of soaring inflation is driving class struggle, including the eruption of strikes and protests among autoworkers, airline workers, healthcare workers, educators, service workers and other sections of the working class.
The SEP calls for the building of a new mass anti-war movement of the British, trans-European and international working class. An end to war is not possible except through the political mobilization of the working class in opposition to the entire ruling class, its servants in the trade union bureaucracy and its two parties, Tory and Labour. It means building independent organs of class struggle, rank-and-file committees in every workplace.
The development of an anti-war movement in the UK must be connected to the fight to unite workers in every country, including in Russia and Ukraine, against war and imperialism and for socialism. It will be built in collaboration with our international co-thinkers in the International Committee of the Fourth International and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.
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