War and industrial policy

War means industry.

Wars are not fought with global supply chains that crisscross a world where production happens across borders and oceans. War means preparing an industrial base for armaments — from ammunition to tanks and rockets.

So the U.S. and NATO have set up a new industrial production command center in Europe. At the direction of the U.S. Pentagon, a special meeting was held recently in Brussels. According to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, the meeting was to discuss plans to “expand their [NATO] nations’ industrial base” for building bombs, tanks, rockets and artillery for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Since February, the U.S. and NATO have sent tens of billions in arms to Ukraine. Washington’s military contribution has led by a significant margin, giving almost $70 billion to Ukraine in just over seven months.

The special meeting was reported in the New York Times on Sept. 28. The headline said: “Meeting in Brussels Signifies a Turning Point for Allies Arming Ukraine.”

According to the Times, “The top priority for the discussions was increasing ammunition for howitzers and rocket artillery, a senior U.S. defense official said.”

The rockets are produced by Lockheed Martin; howitzers are from Britain’s BAE, the largest defense contractor in Europe. Production is to be ramped up.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin are the two top arms manufacturers in the world – yes, the world, not just in the U.S. They are the top two of the five corporations that get 90% of Pentagon contracts. The other three are Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. 

The five together are the infamous U.S. military-industrial complex. (U.S. Secretary of Defense Gen. Lloyd Austin was on the Raytheon board of directors when Biden picked him.)

Number six in Pentagon contracts is Britain’s BAE.

Buildup began in 2014

The New York Times noted that the U.S./NATO military buildup in Ukraine began in 2014:

“The effort to send weapons made by the United States and other Western nations to [Ukraine] began … in 2014. The United States, Britain and Germany formed a group called the Joint Military Commission that began sending weapons and military trainers to Ukraine.”

In Ukraine, the so-called Maidan coup in 2014 was openly supported and financed by NATO. The coup installed a government that made NATO membership a policy mandate. (Watch the Oliver Stone-produced documentary “Ukraine on Fire” to see the U.S. State Department’s active role in the Maidan coup.)

Many Ukrainians resisted the Maidan coup, particularly in the working class. In the Maidan civil war, fascist gangs such as the Azov Battalion emerged as a force for the coup. Resistance to the coup was strongest in the eastern section of the country. 

In Odessa, a neo-Nazi, pro-Maidan gang targeted the House of Trade Unions near the center of the resistance. The building was firebombed and at least 46 anti-fascists and labor activists were burned alive or shot to death.

The resistance to the Maidan coup has continued from 2014 to today. The independent Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic were created when the people there voted overwhelmingly (89% and 96%) to secede from the Maidan regime. They have been subjected to continuous attacks since then.

The U.S. has turned the neo-fascist Ukraine army, including the Azov Battalion, into a military force owned, armed and trained by NATO and the Pentagon.

Along with expanding the arms industry, the New York Times reported Sept. 29 that the Pentagon plans to set up a new command center for its Ukraine armaments and its proxy forces in the war effort. 

The Times says, “The system would be placed under a single new command based in Germany that would be led by a high-ranking U.S. general, according to several military and administration officials.”

The newspaper adds, “The new command, which would report to General Cavoli, would carry out the decisions made by the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of 40 countries that the Defense Department created after the Russian invasion to address Ukraine’s needs and requests.

“About 300 people would be dedicated to the mission, which would be in Wiesbaden, Germany, the U.S. Army’s headquarters in Europe. Much of the training of Ukrainian soldiers on U.S. weapons systems is already taking place there or nearby,” the Times concludes.

You didn’t see it in the U.S. monopoly-controlled media, but throughout the month of September, there were mass demonstrations in Germany, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, Moldova and Belgium. A hundred thousand in Berlin; 70,000 in Prague. 

Primarily they were protests against skyrocketing energy prices and soaring inflation. They were also against war and the sanctions on Russia that are seen to be directly responsible for the cost of living crisis across Europe. Some protests demanded the opening of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

And then the pipeline was blown up.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cheered the explosions at the Nord Stream pipelines, saying it’s a “tremendous opportunity” to stop European “dependence” on Russian natural gas.

Was this deliberate sabotage, a criminal act of war?

There is a precedent for this kind of pipeline sabotage by the United States. Some 40 years ago, the CIA blew up a Soviet natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe in an operation dubbed Farewell Dossier, as documented by Thomas Reed, a former U.S. Air Force officer.

Today no one thinks it is accidental that there were four almost-simultaneous explosions damaging both pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2. Neither pipeline was in current use: Nord Stream 2 was never opened, and Nord Stream 1 had been shut down for weeks because U.S. and NATO sanctions had blocked normal maintenance. 

Few dispute the charge that U.S. and NATO forces sabotaged Russia’s gas link with the rest of Europe.

The intention to do this was announced by President Joe Biden back in February. Biden declared, “If Russia invades … then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” A reporter asked, “How will you do that exactly since the project is in Germany’s control?” Biden responded, “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

After the Sept. 27 reports of the pipeline bombing, Poland’s former minister of defense and former foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorsky, publicly congratulated the United States for sabotaging the Russian pipeline. However, Sikorsky, currently a member of the European Parliament and well-connected in Washington and in NATO circles, has since removed his tweet (“Thank you, USA”), which was seen as a confirmation of U.S. and NATO guilt.

On social media, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former Pentagon adviser is quoted as saying that the U.S. likely attacked the Nord Stream pipelines to stop any reopening of Russian gas to Germany. Pointing to reports that thousands of pounds of TNT were used, the colonel says that only the U.S. Navy Special Operations and the British Royal Navy have that capability.

The Baltic Sea, where the bombing was carried out, is controlled by NATO. In June, the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet was reported to be engaged in underwater vehicle “practice” mining and demining operations in the area. In addition, a large U.S. Navy fleet formation passed nearby just five days before the explosions were detected.

The bombing won’t end the protests in Europe against skyrocketing energy prices and the war-induced inflation, though NATO probably hopes it will. The bombing could move the U.S./NATO proxy war into an open war, which may be intentional.

The war economy

The U.S. is in a war economy. War means industry, be it a hot war or an economic war, such as sanctions.

The U.S. military-industrial complex is in heavy production mode. Since 2014, the U.S. has spent billions on arming and training the coup regime in Ukraine. In the last six months, the Biden administration has pumped $70 billion into Ukraine.

The U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is seemingly a bottomless pit for military spending.

A recent Financial Times report noted that military stockpiles in Ukraine are not about high-tech weapons that need chips, but rather basic artillery, calling it “the return of industrial warfare.” 

“Fetishes for high-tech weapons and lean manufacturing have obscured the importance of maintaining stockpiles of basic kits [like artillery shells]. Total annual U.S. production of 155 million artillery shells, for example, would last only about two weeks in Ukraine. … Inexpensive ammunition that you can use on a large scale is essential.”

U.S. military spending has never been higher. The U.S. now has a trillion-dollar military budget.

The U.S. spends more on its military than any other country in the world by a massive margin.

The U.S. also has the deepest national debt in the world. The Oct. 4 New York Times reported that the U.S. “gross national debt exceeded $31 trillion for the first time on Tuesday.” But, of course, they don’t mention that military spending is the biggest chunk of debt.

Some have suggested that the big increases in the military budget under Biden were meant to rescue the economy from the COVID recession, including the $25 billion bailout of Boeing and the airline industry, a major part of the military-industrial complex. But using military production as a stimulant, like any other stimulant, eventually turns into its opposite and becomes a devastating depressant.

War is inflationary

The sharp oil price increases internationally are fueled by the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia and the U.S. sanctions that have blocked Russian gas to Europe. The U.S.-British-controlled oil monopolies are a key part of the military-industrial complex.

Military production is a different kind of capitalist commodity production. The products of the military-industrial complex are commodities. However, as Karl Marx points out in “Capital,” capitalism requires that commodities have a use value. Marx says that a commodity is “a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.”

The process of capitalist production and exchange means that the capitalist, to realize a profit, must produce a useful product.

Production from the military-industrial complex has no usefulness to society and no use value in capitalist production. The military-industrial complex stops production of useful commodities and instead produces commodities to be destroyed.

The U.S. military budget has devalued the dollar, increasing the debt. With no use value, there is no return value to compensate for the vast expenditures required to produce the jets, guns, cannons, tanks and other weapons of mass destruction in the Pentagon’s budget.

War is inflationary. Inflation did not start with the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine, but the war put a fire under the smoldering inflation that was already there.

Anthony J. Cotton says if confirmed he will prepare U.S. Army officers to deploy nuclear weapons — which is no longer unthinkable

Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr. Strangelove featured an unhinged Air Force General named Jack D. Ripper, who orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after he becomes convinced that the Soviets were polluting the U.S. water supply.

The scenario presented in the film, unfortunately, is not inconceivable today given the Dr. Strangelove-type characters who are prevalent in the upper ranks of the U.S. military and political establishment.

On September 16, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, Anthony J. Cotton was asked at his Senate confirmation hearing by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) whether he thought nuclear war was unthinkable.

He responded that if confirmed as STRATCOM commander, his role would be to “ensure that the 150,000 men and women supporting strategic command are prepared to do what some folks think may be unthinkable”—that is to deploy weapons from the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Later in the hearing, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IO) asked Cotton whether in light of the 2018 National Defense Strategy’s conclusion that the U.S. would struggle to win a war with China over Taiwan, “the president should have flexible nuclear options to prevent conventional defeat at the hands of our adversaries in this particular scenario.”

Cotton replied: “Yes I do.”

Criminally insane?

Cotton’s predecessor, Carl J. Richard, would have likely responded in the same way. Last year, he wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly magazine that the U.S. military had to “shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility,’” in the face of threats from Russia and China.

Former Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg stated that Richard sounded like he was “criminally insane.”

Pitch for an even bigger nuclear weapons budget

The son of an Air Force Master Sergeant who served in the Korean War, Anthony Cotton grew up in Dudley, North Carolina, and was commissioned in the Air Force through ROTC at North Carolina State University in 1986.

He went on to rise through the Air Force, becoming deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, a senior military assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, commander of the 45th space wing, and commander of the Air Force global strike command.

Besides specifying his intent on preparing U.S. forces to wage nuclear war, Cotton used his confirmation hearing to make a pitch for an even bigger budget for the U.S. nuclear arsenal — when the U.S. government is already slated to spend $634 billion over the 2021-2030 period, for an average of $60 billion per year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

According to Cotton, “for the first time since 1945, the first time for us as a nation, we have two near-peer nuclear adversaries [China and Russia] [and will have to] roll up our sleeves to ensure that we are doing everything we can strategy-wise to [deal with] two.”

Cotton said that the U.S. nuclear arsenal was helping “constrain” Russia’s actions in Ukraine and could serve as a bulwark against a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. “I absolutely believe that our nuclear deterrent force held,” he said. “We did not see Russia do anything with our NATO partners. We may have heard the rhetoric, but I think at the end of the day, Russia and China both understand that we have a strong, resilient nuclear force that is offering deterrence to ourselves and extended deterrence to our allies.”

Such logic obscures the fact that it was the U.S. that provoked conflicts with Russia in China in the first place — and has provoked the new nuclear arms race which could end with the obliteration of much of planet earth with people like Cotton in positions of authority.

Source: CovertAction Magazine

Talk given at Burning Books in Buffalo, New York, on Sept. 17, during the Eyewitness Donbass and Russia national speaking tour.

We have to first address the most recent accusations against Russia regarding alleged mass graves since the ruling class is flooding the airwaves with this.

In the first place, I’d like to ask – who is the source of that information? Well, according to Reuters, which tries a little harder to show a semblance of objectivity, the source is solely the police. So the sources are the police and Ukrainian President Zelensky repeating this accusation.

Since 2014, however, the police and official sections of the military in Ukraine are led by open supporters of the World War II Nazi German occupation and celebrate the symbols of Nazi Germany. 

Second – the Euromaidan Press, one of the very few media outlets still allowed to operate in Ukraine, is widely circulating this story on social media. It also ran stories pushing allegations of rape by Russian soldiers, “confirmed” by former Ukrainian Ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova, who claimed that 25 teenage girls were kept in a basement in Bucha and gang-raped; nine of them were said to be pregnant. 

After evidence showed those claims were completely false, these accusations called into question the legitimacy of other Ukrainian government claims. The Ukrainian parliament promptly fired Denisova.

However, these stories had already gotten a very wide circulation. The same exact stories are still being circulated. Now, has Zelensky ever set the record straight on those lies as they continue today?

Third – has the U.S. corporate media been caught passing on outrageous lies that push U.S. imperialist war? Remember the crying and sad 15-year-old girl from Kuwait testifying before a very sympathetic and angered legislative body in Washington about babies being thrown from incubators by Iraqi soldiers, verified by corporate media? It was beamed around the world to build support for the first Iraq War.

Or how about the weapons of mass destruction and chemical weapons stories passed on as verified truth, but weren’t? At least 500,000 Iraqi children died of U.S. sanctions as a result of those tales, which all turned out to be unverified lies by the Pentagon and the Kuwaiti monarchy.

U.S. fueled Ukrainian civil war

Enough of that. I want to talk about playgrounds.

Playgrounds are wonderful. I saw the joy when my child was between ages 3 and 8 playing on the playground. Here we have the science of physics and engineering used for the sole purpose of creating see-saws and swings designed to hold a child’s weight, manufacturing squeals of joy from children, not bombs.

But children can’t live on playgrounds alone. They need nourishment. Speaking of that, isn’t it incredible that there was a shortage of infant formula in the richest country in the world? But there was plenty of money for weapons for Ukraine. 

In fact, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken last week brought another $2.8 billion to Kiev. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Some $70 billion has now been pledged for the war just this year. It’s the largest single transfer of arms in U.S. history.

See, the war didn’t start with the Russian intervention on Feb. 24. The U.S. began this war against Russia in 2002, and in a more concerted effort in 2004 with NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy fomenting civil war in neighboring Ukraine. 

Do you remember Blackwater, the corporation that provides mercenaries to the U.S. military? They are the folks who shot at Black people trying to escape the floods in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. 

Well, U.S. military advisers and Blackwater (now called Academi) trained fascist forces in Ukraine, with Washington sending them weapons for the coup in 2014 against a democratically elected Ukrainian government.

Up to this year, they spent $22 billion in that effort.

This war for oil profits and to increase threats against Russia and China includes the desire to further expand NATO, the most belligerent, violent, and aggressive military alliance in the history of the world. When Martin Luther King Jr. said “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government,” he would have surely included the U.S.-led NATO.

After the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, NATO was free to bomb Yugoslavia’s passenger trains, demolish homes and kill Chinese journalists, then go on to the wars of Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan. In fact, the number of NATO countries doubled in 20 years and encircled Russia like a noose. And when Ukraine, following orders from the U.S., called for its inclusion in NATO, with weapons that would be controlled by Nazi forces like the Azov Battalion, Aidar Battalion, Right Sector, and others – this presented an existential threat to Russia.

When 150,000 Ukrainian troops were lined up at the border of the Donbass region earlier this year, after increasing their bombings from 70 per day to 1,400 between Feb. 15 and Feb. 22, the people of the now independent republics of Lugansk and Donetsk formally requested protection from the Russian government to stop a humanitarian crisis caused by the Ukrainian military. The Russian military had a responsibility to stop a genocidal nightmare pushed by the U.S.

U.S. media cover-up

Why hasn’t all of this been reported by the corporate media? 

When the U.S. targets a country for war, the media lose their pretense of objectivity and become an arm of the Pentagon. They report without verification any stories that fit the narrative vilifying the people and leadership of the targeted country.

Ukraine has purged itself of any public opposing views against this U.S. proxy war against Russia. Journalists not willing to play along have either been jailed or killed and media outlets are closed for simply reporting the truth. 

There are two major manufacturers of U.S. propaganda in Ukraine, established with money from NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy, the European Endowment for Democracy, and other U.S. intelligence and NATO funders. They are the Kiev Independent and the Euromaidan Press.

The Kiev Independent has a cozy relationship with the Azov Battalion, one of those fascist organizations that got money and weapons in 2014. Azov is now an official part of the Ukrainian military, and along with other fascist and white supremacist groups including Aidar, Right Sector, and Svoboda, they especially target the Donbass region.

Azov sends out videos and reports of “verified” atrocities by the Russian military and the Kiev Independent funnels these stories and videos to Western media, while also disseminating them through social media.

The Euromaidan Press had an interesting and heart-wrenching story about an older couple who were simply trying to get humanitarian aid to a shelter established by the Ukrainian military to protect people in Rubizhne, a city in the Lugansk region, from the Russian military which, they said, were targeting civilians.

What is so interesting about this story is that the alleged account they wrote about happened a few weeks before I visited Rubizhne.

Euromaidan Press’ story becomes more dramatic when it is revealed that this well-meaning couple met up with bullets from a Russian checkpoint. The woman, they wrote, was instantly killed, but the man lasted just long enough to call his son and speak to him for the last time before the last beat of his heart.

The reality of Rubizhne

Heart-wrenching, isn’t it? However, the fact is that the shelter in Rubizhne, which I visited and at one point held 350 people, was filled with people who were escaping the bombings of their homes, not by Russian tanks, but by Ukrainian tanks – according to them. And, the Russian military was not in control of the area when this story allegedly happened – the Ukrainians were.

Larissa, the manager of the shelter in Rubizhne, was brought to tears when she told me what had happened weeks before we arrived. She said the people in the shelter, including her daughter, were under threat of starvation, with no food or water or fuel to run the well, nor the ability to go out and get these things, due to the heavy fighting going on while this area was under Ukrainian control.

She said that even under those conditions, Russian military personnel made the choice to risk their lives to bring water, food, and vital supplies to the shelter. If not for that humanitarian aid, they may not have survived.

As we traveled further west in the Lugansk region, we ran across a tuberculosis hospital that had been retrofitted by the Ukrainian military to make war against civilians and used in violation of the 2015 Minsk II agreements.

That facility was full of artillery – 122mm shells that penetrate tanks and aircraft. The walls had been redecorated with symbols of Nazi Germany and the emblem of the Azov Battalion – the same one used by the 18-year-old white supremacist who massacred Black shoppers at the Tops grocery on Jefferson Avenue here in Buffalo.

We then traveled to Krymske, which in 2015 was occupied by the Ukrainian military. They violated the ceasefire treaty by using this location and bunkers just east of it for the sole purpose of bombing civilians and the Lugansk Peoples Militia in the neighboring town of Solkinyki.

Ukraine’s assault on these areas began in 2014 when the people of the Donbass region decided not to go along with the backsliding of history created by the U.S.-sponsored coup: a new anti-Russian government of puppets to U.S. interests and fascists who glorified World War II German Nazis and their collaborators in Ukraine.

So, with a vote of over 89%, the people of the Donbass region voted to have two independent republics – the Lugansk People’s Republic in the north of Donbass and the Donetsk People’s Republic in the south.

However, instead of honoring the democratic wishes of the people of Donbass, the new coup government in Kiev began massacring civilians in this region with tanks, resulting in the occupation of Krymske by the Ukrainian military, until late February 2022 when the combined forces of the Lugansk People’s Militia and the Russian military forced them out.

The first impression you get when entering the town of Krymske is how normal-looking the homes and buildings are, unlike in Solkyniki, where the homes look more akin to Swiss cheese and the administrative buildings are more rubble than structure. 

This is due to the constant bombing of Solkyniki by the Ukrainian forces from 2014 until February 2022. By 2017, in fact, the civilian population there had to flee for their lives.

In Krymske, however, although they did not have to fear being bombed by the forces of the Lugansk People’s Militia, the horror this population faced was the occupation of a military led by Nazis.

U.S., Ukraine and white supremacy

Before coming here today, we visited the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue. What was once abstract in our heads became very real when we saw the pictures of those who had died at the corner memorial there.

This community understands the ugly danger of white supremacy all too well. And it has also raised its head most blatantly and proudly in Ukraine today, thanks to the billions of dollars in U.S. support given to the Azov Battalion and other white supremacists since 2014.

Andriy Biletskyi, founder of the Azov Battalion, said in 2010 that the Ukrainian nation’s mission was to “lead the white race of the world in a final crusade…” Today followers of the Azov movement are encouraged to commit atrocities wherever they are living and post them on social media.

In 2019, Olena Semenyaka, the head of international outreach for the Azov movement, told Time Magazine that Azov’s mission was to form a coalition of far-right groups across the Western world, with the ultimate aim of taking power throughout Europe.

She also acknowledged contacts with the U.S. Rise Above Movement (RAM) and said that RAM members came to Ukraine from the U.S. to “learn how to create youth forces in the ways Azov has.” 

After this meeting, RAM members participated in and helped organize the August 2017 Unite the Right riot of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, North Carolina, where Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist who drove into the counter-protest she participated in. Three RAM members were arrested for inciting and organizing violence there and sentenced to a little over two years in prison.

How does this relate to right here, right now?

Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 Muslims in March 2019 as they worshiped in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, wrote in his manifesto that he visited Ukraine. He also wore the emblem used by Azov (the same one we saw on the wall in the tuberculosis hospital) when he did the killing. He featured the Azov emblem in his manifesto.

The recent killing here in Buffalo was done by an 18-year-old white supremacist who said he was influenced by Tarrant — and the beat goes on.

In spite of protest from a former FBI agent about the danger of white supremacist groups here in the U.S. that have international ties, the FBI refuses to put the Azov Battalion, RAM or other white supremacist groups on their terrorist list, which would give them more legal avenues to shut them down. Instead, the FBI recently went after the African People’s Socialist Party for simply having relations with a legal Russian organization. 

The FBI has a history of assisting or orchestrating assassinations against Black organizations and activists from Martin Luther King Jr. to Fred Hampton to Malcolm X. We, especially Black and Brown peoples, can’t rely on them. We have to rely on ourselves and the solidarity from our working class. 

We can’t rely on those who don’t give a damn about the threat to Black people from these fascist groups, like the Biden Administration and the Democrats, all of whom voted to continue to support feeding these monsters in Ukraine. They are no better than the racist Republican Party when it comes to white supremacy and the murder of our children by either the cops or fascist organizations.

The money they are literally sending up in smoke to bomb ethnic Ukrainians, ethnic Russians, and other peoples in Ukraine could have saved countless lives from COVID – which, by the way, hits us Black people three times harder – or solved the homeless crisis and stopped the march towards poverty for our entire class due to inflation. But they don’t give a damn about our security or our children’s lives.

We are at a critical juncture. What lies before us is the threat of World War III. What lies before us is the threat of unprecedented poverty due to the rise in costs of basic necessities. What lays before us is a return to Jim Crow laws and the lynchings we have already seen in the form of shootings of stores, shootings of churches – all resurrecting the past horrors of the bombing of the church in Birmingham by the KKK.

But if we unify our struggles, if we pledge our solidarity to every movement of working and poor people and people of color; to women and gender non-conforming people and our trans family; to Starbucks and Amazon workers fighting for a union; to Haitian immigrants fighting for their lives along with the entire immigrant community; and pledge to never let U.S. imperialist war be allowed to decimate our class and our struggle – instead of us fearing them, they will tremble at our strength and actions.

Let’s get organized and unified, now! You can do that by keeping in touch with the Socialist Unity Party and joining our efforts to unify and reinvigorate a truly anti-imperialist movement in this country.

Sept. 21 –  We gathered last night, coming from Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Denver, at the hotel in Austin, Texas – 12 minutes away from the Austin Convention Center where the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) was holding its “Future Forces” conference. 

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The NDIA gathered merchants of death like Lockheed, General Dynamic, Raytheon, and other weapons manufacturers salivating over the prospect of billions more additional dollars to add to the $70 billion already promised for war in Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials and military officers, including President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, were scheduled to attend this conference – some in person, some virtually – to push for more weapons to be manufactured to make up for those already being used to target the Russian, Lugansk, and Donetsk militaries and to target civilians, especially in the Donbass region.

However, as could be seen on the faces of Ukrainian military officers entering and exiting the conference, the last thing they expected to see were activists chanting: “Hey hey, ho ho, war profiteers have got to go!” and “Biden, Biden, can’t you see – we don’t want a World War III.”

Many of the activists from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Dallas Anti-War Committee, Socialist Unity Party, Austin Students for a Democratic Society, and other unaffiliated activists were also surprised at the overwhelmingly positive reception this protest received from residents and those working near the Austin Convention Center. 

Paul Tardie, who decided to come over after seeing the protest from across the street, said, “Thanks for doing this!” He said that he was frustrated by the one-sided reporting on what he knew was a U.S. proxy war against Russia.

Nicole Rogers and Jacob Rogers from Round Rock drove 20 miles in traffic to get to the demonstration. They had very unique signs reading “Draft beer, not people” and “War money, blood money,” with its own comic strip within the sign explaining how the military-industrial complex profits off of war. 

Nicole led chants highlighting the need for peace and not death from the bombs being sold during this convention. A veteran who was walking by and wanted to know more about our protest spoke to her and walked away saying he was with us.

Two members of the Dallas Anti-War Committee joined the protest with their banner, leading the picket line and chants. Members Dan and Cassandra drove three and a half hours to get to the protest. 

Baltimore community activists drove 24 hours to get to the protest. That East Coast city is another area victimized by infrastructure neglect, which recently manifested in the presence of E. coli in its drinking water. 

Said Sharon Black of the Baltimore Peoples Power Assembly: “We need money for food, housing and infrastructure to rebuild our cities. We need to be fighting for abortion rights and trans rights, not for U.S./NATO proxy wars. Biden needs to stop the Starbucks and Amazon union busters, not spend billions on war.”

What we found out today is that there are a lot of people who now remain quiet, due to the perceived backlash for challenging the lies from the Pentagon and the corporate media about the U.S. war on Russia. They remain quiet because they have a different view. 

From the conversations we had with some of them today, we learned that many more than we realized do understand what is really going on – from the Nazi infiltration of the military and government of Ukraine to the war’s billions of dollars in profits for the military-industrial complex. 

More importantly, we discovered that when we mobilize and make our rejection of these lies and this war visible through protest – people will find their voices and join us.

Video

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On Sept. 21, U.S. President Joe Biden stood before the 77th United Nations General Assembly and said with a straight face: “If nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for … You cannot seize a nation’s territory by force.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines projection as “the unconscious transfer of one’s own desires or emotions to another.” Or, in this case, one’s own actions.

Biden’s remarks were subject to widespread ridicule on social media. But many people who recognize the hypocrisy of a U.S. president condemning others’ alleged “imperial ambitions” may not fully understand how this slander was directed at the embattled people of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) of the Donbass region, who have been subject to eight and half years of unrelenting war since the 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup in Ukraine.

While Biden was in New York gracing world leaders with his comedy stylings and attempting to whip up a new wave of war frenzy against Russia and China, activists from around the U.S. gathered in Austin, Texas, to protest a conference of the biggest U.S. military-industrial corporations, including Raytheon Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Ukrainian president, U.S. tool, and war criminal Volodymyr Zelensky was the invited guest of honor of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA). He only appeared virtually, but Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Volodymyr Havrylov was in Austin. Havrylov joined the chorus of U.S. officials and billionaire war profiteers, encouraging an unprecedented speedup of weapons production (and profits).

The Biden administration and Congress have committed $70 billion in war aid to Ukraine so far this year.

Thanks to these esteemed folks, on Monday, Sept. 19, another awful massacre occurred in Donetsk, the capital city of the Donetsk People’s Republic. At least nine people were killed and five more wounded when a Ukrainian shell hit a bus stop and destroyed a nearby market. As usual, the target was an entirely civilian area.

At first, rescue workers thought more people had been killed, Donetsk News Agency reported, “due to the large number of body fragments.”

On Tuesday, Sept. 20, a school and several residential buildings in Donetsk were damaged by Ukrainian fire. A civilian was wounded. The next day, a hospital was hit, wounding three.

Now it’s Thursday, Sept. 22. Another mass slaughter of civilians in Donetsk. “Kiev gunmen delivered artillery fire from the occupied town of Orlovka using 155mm projectiles which impacted near the Central Indoor Market building and flower shops and hit the Route 38 mini-bus. Six people, including a 14-year-old girl, were killed, and another six were wounded in the shelling, according to the latest reports.” 

In the Lugansk People’s Republic, cities like Alchevsk that had been largely spared from attacks in recent months are now being routinely attacked by Kiev, using long-range weapons provided by the U.S. and other NATO powers. Svatovo, Novoaidar, and Troitskoye were all hit by U.S. high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) this week.

Referendum to join Russian Federation

This is the backdrop for the decision to hold a referendum for the DPR and LPR to join the Russian Federation. The referendum is being organized quickly, on an emergency basis, and will be held over five days from Sept. 23-27. Residents of the liberated Kherson and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine will also have the opportunity to vote.

All of these regions, along with Kharkov and Odessa, rose against the fascist-led, U.S.-sponsored coup regime in the spring of 2014. Mass movements in each region declared their intentions to proclaim people’s republics. Only Donetsk and Lugansk were able to successfully resist being crushed by the Ukrainian military and neo-Nazi gangs. Anti-fascists in those areas were forced into exile, imprisoned, killed, or driven underground. 

The United States pressed Ukraine to launch a new offensive against the Donbass starting in late 2021 – a deliberate provocation to draw Russia into a military conflict with the NATO military alliance. In February, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Militias and the Russian Armed Forces united in a special military operation to protect the Donbass republics and de-Nazify Ukraine. Today many Ukrainian anti-fascists fight in the ranks of the Donbass militias.

A movement for a referendum on joining the Russian Federation has been growing in the Donbass republics for several years. It’s not something the Russian government wanted; Russian President Vladimir Putin resisted these calls in the interests of a negotiated agreement with Ukraine and its Western sponsors. But the U.S. rulers weren’t interested in a negotiated settlement — they wanted war.

If, as expected, the referendum is successful, the Russian government has signaled that it will accept the vote and incorporate the DPR and LPR as soon as October 1.

The decision to join the Russian Federation may not be ideal from a political standpoint and certainly was not the goal of many of the communists and socialists who inspired the independence struggle of 2014. But it is driven by necessity. 

Stronger defense for Donbass

Under the Russian Constitution, once the DPR and LPR are part of the federation, Russia will have a much stronger basis to defend those areas and respond to the Ukrainian-NATO attacks, including exercising its nuclear deterrent. The republics will maintain their names and enter the federation as autonomous republics, as Crimea did in 2014.

The recent military setback for the anti-fascist alliance in Ukraine’s Kharkov region and subsequent attempts by the Ukrainian military to break into the DPR and LPR have created enormous anxiety for the people of Donbass, who face genocide in the event of a Ukrainian takeover. This has been the stated policy of not only the hardened fascist battalions like Aidar and Azov but even of high officials in Kiev for the last eight-plus years.

On Sept. 21, President Putin made a national address to present a decree on a partial military mobilization (draft). Up to 300,000 people are to be called up to protect Russian territory from NATO aggression, which will soon include the DPR and LPR. It appears that the Russian government has now accepted the fact that there will be a prolonged state of war with the imperialist West.

We can expect these new defensive measures to be met with a new wave of anti-Russia war propaganda heading into the midterm U.S. elections, on a par with the witch-hunt against all things Russia earlier this year. This is likely to have an impact on the politically weak sections of the anti-war movement here. It is incumbent on principled anti-imperialists and socialist workers to meet this challenge with courage and political clarity.

Victory to the Donbass republics, Ukrainian anti-fascists, and their allies! 

Defeat U.S./NATO imperialism and its Ukrainian proxies! 

End the New Cold War against Donbass, Russia, and China!

On Sept. 18,  Struggle-La Lucha’s John Parker, socialist candidate for U.S. Senate, visited the Tops Market in Buffalo, N.Y., where 10 Black people were massacred by a white supremacist in May. Parker made a statement explaining the links between the violent ultra-right movement in the U.S. and Washington-funded neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

The people of Jackson, Mississippi, have toxic sludge coming out of their kitchen faucets. In some neighborhoods, there isn’t enough water pressure to flush toilets. They’ve gotten, at most, the distracted attention of President Joe Biden.

Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba says it will take $1 billion to fix the city’s water plant and another $1 billion to fix the sewer system. The Biden administration’s response? Last January, they promised to loan the state of Mississippi $459 million over 5 years for water “improvements.” (Reminder: these loans from the federal government must be paid back with interest.)

The loans go to the state, not to Jackson, a majority-Black city that has been underdeveloped for years.

With the new crisis in Jackson’s water system, nothing has come from the Biden administration.

One joker suggested that if the city of Jackson declared itself a part of Ukraine, the $2 billion check would be in the mail tomorrow.

The joke isn’t that far off.

$13.7 billion ‘slipped in’

Andrew Lautz in Responsible Statecraft reports that the Biden administration has “slipped” another $13.7 billion weapons package into a routine spending bill that Congress must pass to keep the government open past Sept. 30.

“If Congress accedes to the Biden administration’s request, then the U.S. government will have committed nearly $69 billion in taxpayer funds to Ukraine in just six short months,” the report says.

“The latest request from President Biden allocates about half of the total funding to the Department of Defense ($7.2 billion) and the other half to the Departments of State and Energy ($6.5 billion). This is in line with the first Ukraine aid package Congress passed ($13.6 billion total, which included $6.5 billion for DoD and $6.8 billion for State) and the second, much larger aid bill Congress passed ($41.6 billion total, including $20.1 billion for DoD and $19 billion for State).”

If the Biden request passes as is, then total U.S. war spending committed to Ukraine will be over $69 billion in six months. That’s more than triple what the U.S. spent in Afghanistan in the first year of the occupation. It’s more than the State Department’s budget. And it equals what Russia spent on defense in 2021, Lautz adds.

This is all new funding, not taken out of existing funds for the Pentagon, for example. That means that Biden and Congress must borrow the funds. Lautz explains: “In fact, rising interest rates mean that the interest costs alone on this $69 billion in debt could be an additional $14 billion to $15 billion over 10 years, raising the taxpayers’ total tab for Ukraine assistance to as much as $84 billion.”

The escalating billions for the U.S.-NATO proxy war on Russia have gotten not even a whisper of objection in Congress. With all the electioneering that is going on and the coming congressional elections, the only negative comment was from Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who said it wasn’t enough.

When it comes to Congress, the sky’s the limit for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

Wall Street antics

Wall Street bankers and the military-industrial complex are calling the tune. And that can be seen in the antics of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is putting in performances at the centers of power. 

On Sept. 6, Zelensky rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, which was filled with the blue and yellow Ukrainian war flag. This was the day after Labor Day, which seemed to emphasize that Zelensky had recently imposed a martial-law condition on workers in Ukraine, outlawing labor unions for 80% of the workforce, banning strikes or picket lines, and tearing up existing union contracts. Zelensky signed the law in the last week of August. 

Zelensky’s vicious anti-labor laws have been compared to the anti-labor repression of Chile’s fascist Pinochet regime.

Zelensky announced at the Stock Exchange a massive $400 billion state selloff, inviting Wall Street’s imperialist capitalists to exploit Ukraine’s resources and low-paid labor.

Zelensky is following the Wall Street appearance with a show prepared for a major U.S. military-industrial conference on Sept. 21 in Austin, Texas, hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA). Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s minister of defense, is also scheduled to speak.

NDIA includes defense industry giants like Raytheon Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Eight defense contractors — including Raytheon, Lockheed and General Dynamics — attended an April Pentagon meeting to discuss how the U.S. could increase arms production for the Ukraine proxy war.

This should be sufficient to set the course for the anti-imperialist movement. The U.S.-NATO proxy war is being expanded. It can only be countered by organizing opposition to the imperialist war, the Wall Street bankers and the military-industrial monopolies behind it.

Talk given on behalf of the Socialist Unity Party at the international meeting “200 Days of War: Stop the War of U.S./NATO Imperialism Against Russia! Stop U.S. Preparations of War Against China!” on Sept. 10.

Today the capitalist media is rapturous with news of the advance of the long-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kharkov region. How significant this will be remains to be seen. Less is said about why and how this counter-offensive was made possible: the massive intervention of the Pentagon and NATO to shore up their faltering proxy war against Russia.

Last week, as the Ukrainian offensive was taking shape, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a “surprise” visit to Kiev to pledge another $2.8 billion in military aid from Washington. For those keeping track, that brings the total in public U.S. military aid to Ukraine this year to a whopping $16.5 billion. That’s more than the annual Gross Domestic Product of 98 countries, according to U.N. figures.

This has been described as the largest single arms transfer in U.S. history. It’s also an enormous transfer of wealth to the military-industrial bourgeoisie. But in reality, this is just the tip of a very large iceberg that includes separate Congressional funding, covert U.S. aid and the infusion of weapons, troops and mercenaries from the U.S.-controlled NATO alliance.

Blinken’s visit was not really a surprise. It was the latest in a long line of visits by high-ranking U.S. officials to give marching orders to their puppet regime in Kiev. These visits date back to the very beginning of the war against Donbass in 2014 and 2015, when it was then-Vice President Joe Biden, among others, who delivered the orders.

The continuing infusion of massive amounts of money and weapons to the war zone removes any illusions that the Ukrainian conflict is just a brief episode in the New Cold War against Russia and China. On the contrary, the way Washington has doubled down at a time of growing economic crisis for the masses in the U.S. and Europe shows that the ruling class intends this war to continue for a long time, to break up and dominate the Russian Federation.

But they also feel the urgency to make tangible headway quickly. The ability to seduce large sections of the U.S. population to “stand with Ukraine” has waned sharply with the accumulating crises facing the working class. Inflation is only the most obvious. The Biden administration is spending billions on war and police while funds for public health, pandemic eviction bans, climate crisis, and education are eviscerated. This contradiction cannot be papered over forever.

The situation will sharpen even more quickly among the Western European NATO powers, which face the prospect of winter without access to cheap Russian fuel.

Importance of Donbass struggle

The efforts of the organizations represented here for a genuine anti-imperialist position in the movement is making headway. Here in the U.S., the United National Antiwar Coalition has finally called for a week of action around U.S. threats to Russia and China in mid-October. There are many factors, but the impact of events like this one, and of John Parker’s visit to the Donbass front line in May, on the rank and file of the left are significant.

The importance of the Donbass people’s struggle continues to be under-appreciated, if not outright ignored, by most left forces in the West. If the people of Donetsk and Lugansk are considered at all, it is as mere tools of Russia. In fact, the relationship is quite different. 

Imagine trying to build an anti-imperialist movement during the Vietnam War while ignoring the struggle of the Vietnamese people! And yet, this is the standard position of the Western left on the conflict in Ukraine and the Donbass republics.

The explosion of resistance in eastern Ukraine after the Maidan coup in 2014, particularly in the Donbass, the most working-class region of Ukraine, was a tremendous breakthrough in reviving anti-fascist consciousness and internationalist solidarity rooted in the Soviet period. It reverberated through the people of all the former Soviet countries, particularly Russia. 

There is a reason why Soviet flags and the Banner of Victory are seen everywhere in the current anti-fascist military operation. It’s not that Putin is trying to restore the USSR, as the Western media claim, or put something over on the global left. He and the Russian ruling class would love nothing more than to be rid of those symbols. 

But they reflect the genuine consciousness of the most active elements of the Soviet people about the stakes of the war, even three decades after the destruction of the USSR. That includes many anti-fascist Ukrainians.

In 200 days since the launch of the Special Military Operation, the anti-fascist military alliance has succeeded in liberating much of Donetsk and Lugansk from Ukrainian occupation. But as they have advanced, a large group of Ukrainian troops, including some of the most hardened neo-Nazi battalions, has become concentrated in a well-defended area west of the capital of Donetsk. And all summer, this has meant unrelenting, daily, brutal Ukrainian attacks on the civilian population of the city, including raining thousands of small anti-personnel mines on the streets, where children, seniors and emergency workers have been the main victims. 

This heroic population, which has held strong for more than eight years of war, is under the worst siege of the war. The morale of this anti-fascist city is absolutely crucial to the struggle. We must elevate the plight of the people of Donetsk and expose the grotesque war crimes of the U.S. and Ukraine.

Victory to the Donbass republics and Russia! End the U.S./NATO proxy war and sanctions!