If you happen to be in downtown Los Angeles and come across Skid Row, everywhere you look there is evidence of suffering from the humanitarian war crime of capitalism and homelessness. I’m reminded of the tens of thousands facing the same fate due to low wages, joblessness and rents driven up by perfectly legal exorbitant increases. If you’re not already homeless, you may be soon if this economic war against us continues to spread, like the unchecked virus enabled by capitalism.

The 7.9% inflation rate doesn’t help. The main culprits being food, rent and especially – thanks to the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine – gas. Not only that, the $16 billion COVID-relief fund was cut for this war.

But, no problem. Working-class folks, even those facing desperate circumstances, understand sacrifice for the sake of others, especially children’s lives.

The reality, however, is that our sacrifice for this war is not for children, but for the profits of those in the U.S. whose existence depends on the expansion of war and misery.

But, what about all the news reports of civilians being targeted by the Russians and that “crazy” Putin?

The first thing that occurs when plans for imperialist war are finally implemented (see Ukraine: It was all written in the Rand Corp plan 3 years ago) is the vilification of the latest targets of U.S. imperialism, and the individuals that represent those targets.

In 1915, when Britain wanted to escalate war with Germany during World War I, they launched the British cruise liner Lusitania, traveling from New York to Liverpool, England, through a declared maritime war zone. Germany had already made it very clear on numerous occasions that any British ship in that zone would be considered an enemy vessel and would be attacked. So, it was attacked and thousands died. The tragedy was used to justify the U.S. entrance into the war two years later. The New York Times prominently featured photos of those killed. The U.S. used this coverage as a primary tool for propaganda and military recruitment.

After World War I, it was exposed that the sunken Lusitania was also carrying 50 tons of ammunition. This kind of tactic is being used again to sell the current war, but first let’s get some context.

From 1990 to 1991 the Soviet Union was given assurances from the U.S. and Western European countries that an expansion of the U.S.-led anti-Soviet military alliance, NATO, would not happen — and especially not move eastward towards them (NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard). The Soviet Union in 1991 therefore unilaterally dissolved their military alliance – the Warsaw Pact. Eight years later, with no Warsaw Pact to protect them, the U.S. directed a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that destroyed tens of thousands of homes, roads, hospitals, crowded markets, passenger trains, and the Chinese Embassy, killing three Chinese journalists. This was followed by bombings of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and many more NATO operations on the continent of Africa in the years following.

For the last 20 years NATO has doubled its member armies, expanding eastward and surrounding Russia.

Yet, in spite of the Russian government’s repeated warnings against turning Ukraine, which borders them, into another NATO member state with possible nuclear weapons, the U.S. poured more gas on the fire. They not only orchestrated a coup in 2014 to put in an anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime, but also began sending billions of dollars in funds, weapons and training to openly Nazi battalions that are now official sections of the Ukrainian military. In February, the U.S. then pushed those Nazi forces to escalate bombings of the Donbass region against a Russian-speaking minority population.

This was the Lusitania-like provocation, by the U.S. Those in the Donbass region pleaded for help from the Russian government to save their children. Since 2014 they have endured eight years of torture and bombings, with 14,000 killed. Then in February came this increased genocidal assault by the main terrorist Nazi threat, the Azov Batallion. Russia then decided it had no choice but to answer the call of the people in the Donbass and stop an existential threat on its borders – the possibility of a U.S.-led NATO state with nuclear weapons controlled by a Nazi-led military.

This is what the U.S. government with bipartisan support has done – they’ve pushed the world into a conflict that could start World War III, gambling the futures of our children and those abroad solely for the sake of profits.

These wars are, again, eased through with stories to push our buttons of evil men and evil deeds you’re just now finding out about. We’ve been here before and a look at the history of just one “newspaper of record” shows how the media has been an essential part of the Pentagon arsenal. Take this headline in the New York Times in August 1964: “REDS DRIVEN OFF; Two Torpedo Vessels Believed Sunk in Gulf of Tonkin.” The article begins:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4—The Defense Department announced tonight that North Vietnamese PT boats made a “deliberate attack” today on two United States destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam.

Although the story was a total lie, it served to begin the U.S.-escalated war on Vietnam. On the day it was published, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This  authorized a war on Vietnam (without a formal declaration of war), giving the President broad authority in the use of military force, which escalated by 1968 to a half-million U.S. troops occupying Vietnam. More than 2 million civilians in both North and South Vietnam were killed during the war. In addition, the use of millions of gallons of the chemical weapon Agent Orange, sprayed throughout by the U.S. military from 1961 to 1971, killed or maimed another 400,000. Some 500,000 children were born with chemical warfare-caused birth defects.

Six months before the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, in 1979 the Carter Administration began funding the new “freedom fighters” – the Mujahideen, which became the Taliban – in a war against a revolutionary government that, among other progressive reforms, had established for the first time laws mandating the equality of women. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, overwhelmed by U.S. military armed and funded Mujahideen, requested help from the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also worried about the threat of a possible U.S.-sponsored Mujahideen regime on their border. Sound familiar? This created the endless war in Afghanistan.

Nevermind that. Quick, look over there! An evil dictator in Iraq must be stopped now!

Here’s more headlines from the “newspaper of record”: Czechs Confirm Iraqi Agent Met With Terror Ringleader; December 20, 2001: Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms; April 21, 2003: Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert; and here’s a big one on April 24, 2003: U.S.-Led Forces Occupy Baghdad Complex Filled with Chemical Agents.

The problem with all these stories, and admitted by the New York Times in a published apology, is that none of them are true. They say it was the result of bad information with little verification. We’re just looking at the New York Times here but, you could look into the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, or any corporate newspaper and find the same misinformation passed off as truth and accepted as such by politicians, talk-show hosts, Hollywood scripts, celebrity campaigns and most of us during whatever latest war they point our heads toward.

The reporter on that last story and many of these stories was Judith Miller and this is what Miller had to say about the numerous unchecked lies in numerous unchecked articles selling a U.S. war that killed 500,000 children: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

In that “apology” from the editors of the Times they correctly stated that the fault was not just of the journalists reporting the story but the verification process – a process that accepted without question information lining up with the narrative of the State Department. Unfortunately, like racism, that process is very much a component of the military industrial complex.

In 1996 Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes interviewed then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the death of children in Iraq due to the U.S. war: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright replied calmly: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” This, based on evidence her administration knew was a lie. One of the definitions of evil in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “something that brings sorrow, distress, or calamity.” Even evil seems too soft of a word to describe U.S. imperialism and its enablers.

Today, along with the corporate media, Congress is again playing its part in the war drive – Congress just approved $800 million more for the Ukrainian government and their Nazi battallions, which, again since it’s never mentioned, has been bombing the eastern region and committing war crimes against civilians in Lugansk and Donetsk FOR MORE THAN 8 YEARS, killing at least 14,000 civilians.

This faith in the U.S. State Department’s information comes in spite of the knowledge of contradictory news being suppressed in Ukraine. Three television stations were closed for not reporting coverage favorable to the Ukrainian government. Much information came out in Ukraine exposing the Azov Battalion when they took over hospitals, schools and apartment buildings in Mariupol that were then shown in the U.S. media as civilian buildings and not Azov Battalion outposts. Doctored and mislabeled videos and photos were prevalent during the beginning of the Russian intervention, even showing Israeli bombings and Palestinian resistance as “evidence” of Russian brutality and Ukrainian resistance.

The bombing by Nazi-led forces of the center of the city of Donetsk, killing over 20 civilians waiting at an ATM machine, was verified by various organizations in Donetsk, media outlets and independent journalists in the Donbass region. But, you never saw that report because the TV reporters and news publications in Ukraine that report those types of stories have been closed down. The journalists or activists who have reported this missile attack on civilian Donetsk, like Alexander Matyushenko from the Levitsa Association in Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro), or the 37 other journalists detained in early March, have been jailed. In Kiev, arrests began even earlier. On Feb. 27, brothers Mikhail Kononovich and Aleksandr Kononovich, leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Youth, members of the World Federation of Democratic Youth as well as ethnic Belarusians, were seized and are being imprisoned along with members of other organizations we in the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha have been working with in Donbass. Last week I was communicating with someone from one of those organizations.

All of those detained are held on dubious charges with little explanation from authorities and are being denied legal representation.

The children who died in Iraq are just the tip of the iceberg of victims of U.S. and NATO wars, including the millions killed in Vietnam, Korea, Yugoslavia, Libya and Yemen. Now in Libya, because of the war by the Obama administration and destruction of civil society, slavery exists – a reality that undoubtedly is destroying the lives of children. In Yemen, the U.S. proxy war led by Saudi Arabia is now causing the starvation of millions of children, according to UN estimates.

If only those corporate editors of the media were as dedicated to exposing the war on children as they are in pushing for illegal and inhumane wars and proxy wars by the U.S., like the war in Ukraine now.

John Parker, of the Socialist Unity Party, is on the ballot as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from California in the June primary of Election 2022. He is part of the Left Unity Slate of the Peace and Freedom Party and has been endorsed by the Green Party.

The Emergency Campaign to Stop the War Lies is a grassroots effort to stop the lies and tell the truth about the U.S./NATO war on Russia and Donbass. It will kick off on March 20, the anniversary of the Iraq War, and culminate on the weekend of April 2 to 4, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

March 20 to 27 – Local outreach to communities, students and workers, including protests and picket lines, distributions of flyers and posters, street corner speak-outs, tabling in busy areas and banner drops. 

We have a general fact sheet to get the truth out. You can add your local information.

March 27 – “Expose the Lies” National Webinar featuring Alexey Albu from Borotba in Lugansk, Katya A. from Aurora Women’s group in Donetsk, and Kristina Melnikova, a journalist who has covered Ukraine’s war on Donbass for several years. Hear directly from the independent Donbass republics under fire from Ukraine and NATO.

Weekend of Sat. April 2 to Mon. April 4 – National protests on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, who stood against war and racism. Join us in demanding: 

• No U.S./NATO war on Russia and Donbass! 
• Jobs, education, housing, and healthcare, not war! 
• Disband NATO, AFRICOM & AUKUS! 
• Close Guantanamo and all U.S. military bases – bring the troops home! 
• Feed the people, not the Pentagon! No to U.S. sanctions! 

Initiated by Solidarity with Donbass & Antifascists in Ukraine and Socialist Unity Party / Partido de Socialismo Unido

Partial list of endorsers: John Parker, Socialist Unity Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California; Youth Against War & Racism; Mujeres En Lucha / Women In Struggle; Struggle-La Lucha newspaper; Communist Workers League; Workers Voice Socialist Movement; LA Black and Brown Unity – Los Angeles; Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice – Los Angeles; Peoples Power Assembly – Baltimore; Odessa Solidarity Campaign; Unemployed Workers Union; Anti-War West Sydney; Rhode Island Against White Nationalism – Providence.

ENDORSE HERE

Since the Russian intervention in Ukraine, representatives of the far-right and liberal milieu have been spreading calls for violence and even for the killing of those who had previously publicly advocated the implementation of the Minsk agreements, against “decommunisation” and for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Donbass. Activists of left-wing groups were the first to be threatened.

Lists of unreliables have emerged. Some “left-wing activists” also started compiling lists of “wrong leftists.”

On March 3, officers of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), with the participation of neo-Nazis from the Azov group, detained leftist activist Alexander Matyushenko from the Levitsa association in Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro).

He was charged under Article 437 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code – “waging aggressive war.” And, as the courts in Ukraine do not work now, he was arrested for 30 days without trial – on the prosecutor’s order.

The details of the criminal case are not known because the SBU refuses to introduce it to anyone but his lawyer. But most lawyers refuse to defend him or demand U.S. $3,000 for their services, a rather large sum for Ukrainians.

On the same day, 12 people were detained in Dnipro on similar charges. On March 4, 14 people were detained. On March 5, 11 people were detained.

In Kiev, arrests had begun even earlier. On Feb. 27, brothers Mikhail and Aleksandr Kononovich, leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Youth, ethnic Belarusians, were detained.

It is not known where they are and what they are accused of, as there is no contact with them.

On March 4, Vladimir Ivanov, a left-wing activist from Zaporozhye, disappeared. His whereabouts are unknown. Posts that are uncharacteristic for him are appearing in his Telegram account.

On March 7, journalist Dmitriy Dzhangirov, a member of the New Socialism party, Vasyl Volha, a former leader of the Union of Left Forces, journalist Yury Dudkin and publicist Aleksandr Karevin were detained in Kiev. Karevin managed to write on his Facebook page: “The SBU has come.”

Where all of them are now and what they are accused of is also unknown. Dzhangirov’s Facebook page posted a video of him, possibly under physical duress, saying things that are not typical of him.

On March 11, left-wing activist Spartak Golovachev disappeared in Kharkov. “The door is being broken down by armed men in Ukrainian uniforms. Goodbye,” he managed to write on social media.

It should be noted that there is fighting for Kharkov, but in general it is under the control of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

On March 11, in Odessa, the SBU detained Elena Vyacheslavova, the daughter of Mikhail Vyacheslavov, who died on May 2, 2014, in the fire at the Odessa House of Trade Unions.

On March 12, the SBU detained Olena Lysenko, the wife of Andriy Lysenko, a volunteer from Donetsk. On March 13, she was released, having previously recorded a video in which she slanders her husband.

On March 13, in a village near Odessa, neighbors with nationalist sentiments burned down the house of left-wing activist Dmitry Lazarev.

The whereabouts of several members of the left-wing New Socialism and Derzhava parties are also unknown. They have stopped making contact or writing anything on social media. They may be in hiding, but they may also have been detained.

All indications are that as the fighting continues, the repression of dissenters and leftists will continue. Our capacity to defend the rights of the politically repressed in Ukraine is now very limited. And solidarity with Ukrainian political prisoners by the left and human rights defenders in all countries is very important to us.

Telegram channel with updates in Russian and English: https://t.me/repressionoftheleft

Since the post-World War II period national liberation movements and independent countries in Africa have developed solid diplomatic and economic relations with the former Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation.

It is this history which underlines the refusal of numerous African governments and mass organizations to side with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in its efforts to encircle Russia in order to leave it as a diminished state dependent upon the dominant imperialist nations globally.

In the immediate aftermath of the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the racist treatment of approximately 16,000 African students as well as thousands of others from Asia gained international news coverage. Africans were denied admission onto trains, refused food provided to Ukrainians, while attempting to seek refuge in neighboring countries such as Poland.

These incidents should not have been surprising considering the expansion and institutionalization of fascist and nazi ideology among those governing the Ukrainian state since the U.S.-backed Euromaidan coup of February 2014. Washington, under the administration of former President Barack Obama, sought to subvert any efforts by ousted President Viktor Yanukovych  to walk a middle-line between the U.S., European Union on the one side and Russia on the other.

The first-person accounts of the African students who were more than willing to speak about what had been done to them in Ukraine, had to be swiftly suppressed in the western media. Although any keen observer of the unfolding crisis in Ukraine would know of the role of groupings such as the Right Sector and the Azov Brigades in creating an atmosphere of reaction against Russian-speaking Ukrainians because their worldview encompasses many of the assumptions which fostered the philosophical underpinnings of the rationale for the initiation of World War II (1939-1945).

United Nations, African States and the Ukraine War

A debate on March 2 over a resolution to essentially condemn and apportion exclusive blame on Moscow for the current military situation, was voted on by 141 UN representatives out of 191. 35 countries abstained from the vote including 17 member-states of the African Union (AU).  Cameroon, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, Togo, Eswatini and Morocco were absent. Algeria, Uganda, Burundi, Central African Republic, Mali, Senegal, Equatorial Guinea, Congo Brazzaville, Sudan, South Sudan, Madagascar, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa abstained on the resolution.

Although the resolution passed, it has not brought about an end to the fighting in Ukraine which has prompted over two million people to leave the Eastern European country. The only African state to vote against the resolution was Eritrea. In recent months, the government of Eritrea has been in discussions with Russia about the utilization of Red Sea ports inside the country. A similar situation is developing in neighboring Republic of Sudan where Port Sudan, also on the Red Sea, has been the subject of talks between Moscow and the military regime now controlling Khartoum.

Another leading African state, the Republic of South Africa, abstained from the March 2 UN General Assembly vote noting that the resolution did not emphasize the need for a negotiated diplomatic settlement to the crisis. The ruling party in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) has maintained close ties to Moscow since the period of national liberation from the 1960s to the 1990s. The former Soviet Union provided diplomatic, educational and military support to the ANC and many other liberation movements turned independent governments such as the South-West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) of Namibia, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), just to mention a few.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who has been under tremendous pressure by the U.S. State Department over its position on Ukraine was quoted as saying:

“South Africa expected that the UN resolution would foremost welcome the commencement of dialogue between the parties and seek to create the conditions for these talks to succeed. Instead, the call for peaceful resolution through political dialogue is relegated to a single sentence close to the conclusion of the final text. This does not provide the encouragement and international backing that the parties need to continue with their efforts.”

A clear indication of the uneasiness and disapproval of the U.S. role in Ukraine was voiced by several African journalists during a briefing webinar on March 3 with Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Molly Phee. Several journalists asked critical questions related to the U.S. position in Ukraine probing Phee in regard to the demands by the White House and State Department that every country around the world denounce Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

Journalists raised the issue of racism against Africans attempting to flee Ukraine into Poland along with unreasonable demands being placed on AU member-states. The transcript of the webinar read in part:

“This is Simon Ateba with Today News Africa in Washington, D.C.  You just mentioned reporting about Africans facing racism in Ukraine and Poland, being denied entry into trains in Kyiv, and being turned back at the border with Poland.  Is there any reason why the State Department has not publicly condemned racism against Africans in Ukraine and Poland?’…. ‘Yes, this is Katlego Isaacs from Mmegi News.  I wanted to ask, why should African countries support the position of the U.S. to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when the U.S. supports the aggression in Israel against Palestinians?’…. My name is Swift from Gabz FM in Botswana.  I wanted to ask, what is the position of the U.S. on censoring of social media and the complete wipeout of the other party, in this case obviously Russia, since free speech and free press is the cornerstone not only of democracy but a tool that can create a counterculture or counternarrative?’”

Within the streets of countries such as Mali, Central African Republic (CAR) and Ethiopia there have been pro-Russian demonstrations. Mali recently called for the departure of the French ambassador and military forces after Paris objected to the involvement of the Wagner Group, a Russian-based defense services company working to curtail rebel attacks in the northern and central regions of the West African state.

Ethiopia in early March commemorated “Victory Day” which celebrates the defeat of Italian colonialism in 1896 at the Battle of Adwa. Photographs were released of Ethiopians carrying their own national flag while some others waved the flag of Russia in solidarity with the military operation in Ukraine.

The German newspaper DW reported on the military ties between AU member-states and Moscow noting:

“In recent years, Russia has increasingly used this historic Soviet connection to expand its political, economic and, above all, military relations with African nations. In 2019, Vladimir Putin hosted a Russia-Africa Summit attended by 43 African leaders. Just one year later, Russia became Africa’s biggest arms supplier. According to a 2020 analysis by the peace research institute SIPRI, between 2016 and 2020 around 30% of all arms exported to sub-Saharan Africa countries came from Russia. This vastly overshadows weapon supplies from other nations such as China (20%), France (9.5%) and the USA (5.4%). This increased the volume of Russian arms shipments by 23% over the previous five-year period.”

These and other factors have frustrated the U.S. in its diplomatic efforts to win unconditional support for its war against Russia in Ukraine. The existence of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) since 2008 under the guise of enhancing the security capacity of AU member-states in their struggles against what is described as “Islamic Jihadism”, has proved to be an utter failure. Despite the existence of a military base housing thousands of Pentagon troops in the Horn of Africa state of Djibouti and the building of other makeshift installations, along with joint military operations and training opportunities for African military officers, the overall stability and security of many states has worsened.

Ending Imperialist War Requires a Rejection of U.S. Foreign Policy

Several countries within Latin America have maintained their trade and diplomatic relations with Russia. These states include Cuba and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Caracas has been under siege by successive administrations in Washington, both Democratic and Republican. In recent years, the White House has attempted to install a puppet regime in Venezuela while denying recognition of the government of President Nicolas Maduro. Billions of Venezuelan assets have been frozen in U.S. banks along with the expulsion of high-level employees of embassies and other outlets for Caracas.

Yet during the first weekend of March, the U.S. deployed a delegation to Venezuela to discuss the possibility of replacing banned Russian oil shipments with supplies from the Maduro administration which has been under a blockade by Washington at least since 2017. The move illustrates the illogical foreign policy positions under which President Joe Biden finds himself. Moreover, the opposition to the talks has forced Biden to publicly move away from this latest energy strategy.

Energy, transportation and food prices are skyrocketing in the U.S. compounding the already 40-year high inflation rate. Although the corporate and government-controlled media agencies are proclaiming the dire straits that Russia is undergoing since the withdrawal of several banking services, McDonalds, Coca-Cola and other corporations, it is the Biden administration and the Democratic Party politicians who must face the U.S. electorate in 2022 and 2024.

Attitudes towards U.S. military policy among Africans and people in Latin America reveals the unsustainability of this approach to international affairs. These peoples know that the reckless approach by Washington and Wall Street will have a negative social impact on billions around the globe.

The inability of the Biden White House to pass legislation in Congress which would address the social crisis unfolding in the U.S. portends much for the political landscape in Washington. A U.S.-inspired war in Eastern Europe will not solve the economic stagnation and hyperinflation faced by the majority of working people and nationally oppressed.

These forces must unite to overturn the war program of the White House and Pentagon which only robs the people of their rights to decent housing, education, food, water, environmental justice and all other necessities of modern life. A new foreign policy must be developed which defunds the defense department and dismantles the U.S. bases which are waging war around the globe.

Source: Fighting Words

On the 19th anniversary of the Iraq War:
The U.S. government lied about Iraq – it’s lying about Russia & Ukraine
EXPOSE THE LIES

March 20 marks 19 years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, based on a lie about “weapons of mass destruction.” The U.S. always lies about its wars. Here’s how Washington and NATO provoked the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. 

Lie #1: Russia is the aggressor against Ukraine

Russia didn’t start the war. Ukraine has been at war for eight years against the Donbass republics, Donetsk and Lugansk. Ukraine’s war has cost over 14,000 lives in Donbass. Like Yemen, U.S. media ignored the human toll and U.S. role in the conflict. For months, Washington pushed Ukraine to invade Donbass again. Russia only intervened to stop a bloodbath and end the war, as well as to ensure the neutrality of its neighbor. Ukraine continues to commit daily war crimes in Donbass, including a March 14 missile attack that killed more than 20 people in Donetsk.

Lie #2: Ukraine is a democracy that must be defended

In 2014 a violent coup overthrew the legally elected government of Ukraine, which tried to maintain friendly relations with both the West and Russia. The coup was supported by U.S. officials and both Republican and Democratic politicians. The new government banned political parties, kept national minorities from using their languages, and engaged in repression against journalists and oppositionists. Neo-Nazi groups played a major role in the coup. Today they infest the Ukrainian state from top to bottom. These groups work with white supremacists in the U.S. and Europe and pose a danger to people everywhere.

Lie #3: The U.S. is an innocent bystander

The U.S. poured the gasoline, lit the match and fans the flames of war. Biden sent hundreds of tons of weapons to Ukraine and pushed Russia into a corner. Why? To justify further expansion of NATO, undermine Russia’s sovereignty and increase profits by sanctioning Russian exports. Washington ignored Russia’s serious concerns about Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO expansion for decades. The U.S. sabotaged the Minsk agreements meant to make peace in the region. It pressured its EU “partners” to sink a pipeline agreement with Russia for the benefit of U.S. Big Oil and Wall Street banks. 

Lie #4: Poor and working people should sacrifice

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi justified torpedoing money to fight COVID from the budget because “We’ve got a war going on in Ukraine.” Congress agrees: There’s plenty of money for war. Meanwhile prices of gas, food and rents are skyrocketing. Public schools are in crisis. Millions face eviction with the end of pandemic protections, while money continues to fund state-sponsored white supremacy. Police brutality and repression against immigrants continues unabated, while President Biden pushes racist violence with calls to “Fund the police,” in the same breath as he funds Nazi-led armed forces in Ukraine. We reject the bipartisan policy of war against people at home and abroad.

Help expose the lies. Build a movement for people’s needs, not war!

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I am a Ukrainian-American. I grew up and spent over half of my life in Ukraine, although now I live in the United States. I wanted to explain my thoughts on the ongoing crisis with Russia, because mainstream corporate media outlets don’t ever share perspectives like mine.

It is definitely a stressful time, for obvious reasons. Fortunately, my family and friends in the country are alive and are doing well enough under the circumstances. Unfortunately, in the past decade this isn’t the first time I have had to check in on my loved ones there, and for basically the same reasons. This is what I wanted to talk about.

You see, the U.S. government has meddled in Ukraine for decades. And the Ukrainian people have suffered because of this.

The overwhelming support that Western governments and media outlets have poured out for Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24 is not actually motivated by concern for the Ukrainian people. They are using us to advance their political and economic interests.

We know this because Washington overthrew our government twice in the past two decades, and has fueled an eight-year civil war that has taken the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and wounded and displaced many more.

The following facts don’t get mentioned by the media, as they contradict the foreign-policy goals of the U.S. government. So unless you are actively engaged in the anti-war movement, the info below is probably new to you. That is why I wanted to write this article.

U.S. government backed two coups in Ukraine in one decade, and fueled a civil war that killed thousands

The first U.S.-backed soft coup in Ukraine occurred in 2004, when Ukraine’s Western-backed presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko lost the election.

The winner of the November 2004 vote, Viktor Yanukovych, was portrayed as being pro-Russian, so Western governments refused to recognize his victory and declared electoral fraud.

Western-backed forces in Ukraine then mobilized and carried out a textbook color revolution, called the “Orange Revolution.” They forced another run-off vote that December, in which their candidate Yushchenko was declared president.

In a shockingly honest 2004 report titled “U.S. campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” Britain’s establishment newspaper The Guardian admitted that the “Orange Revolution” was “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing,” bankrolled with at least $14 million by the U.S. government.

“Funded and organised by the U.S. government, deploying U.S. consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and U.S. non-government organisations, the campaign” attempted to topple governments “in four countries in four years,” The Guardian boasted, targeting Serbia, Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Much like in the United States, Ukrainian presidents are appointed and govern in the interest of wealthy oligarchs, so no Ukrainian president ends his tenure with a particularly high rating. The U.S.-backed Yushchenko, however, set a new record for the lowest popular support in history.

In the next presidential election, in 2010, Yushchenko got just 5% of the vote, which should give you an insight into how popular he actually was.

During his first term Yushchenko implemented a program of austerity, reduced social spending, bailed out large banks, deregulated agriculture, advocated for NATO membership, and repressed the rights of language minorities like Russian speakers.

The second U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine was launched in late 2013, just a decade after the first one, and consolidated power in 2014.

Viktor Yanukovych, who was frequently called pro-Russian by Western media but in reality was just neutral, won the 2010 presidential election fair and square.

But in 2013, Yanukovych refused to sign a European Union Association Agreement that would have been a step toward integrating Ukraine with the EU. In order to be part of this program, Brussels had demanded that Kiev impose neoliberal structural adjustment, selling off government assets and giving the Washington-led International Monetary Fund (IMF) even more control over Ukrainian state spending.

Yanukovych rejected this for a more favorable offer from Russia. So, once again, Western-backed organizations brought out their supporters into the Maidan Square in Kiev to overthrow the government.

As was the case during the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, the United States sent politicians to meet with the leaders of the demonstrations, and later coup leaders, in late 2013 and early 2014. U.S. Senators John McCain, Chris Murphy, and others spoke in front of large crowds in Maidan.

At some point the control of the stage and leadership of the protests was overtaken by far-right forces. Leaders of such organizations as Svoboda (a neo-Nazi party) and Right Sector (a coalition of fascist organizations) spoke to the protesters, sometimes standing side-by-side with their American backers like McCain.

Later their organizations acted as the spear of attack against the Ukrainian police in the violent February 2014 coup d’etat, and they were the first to storm government buildings.

With the success of the U.S.-backed forces and fascists, President Yanukovich fled the country to Russia.

U.S. government officials met with coup leaders and appointed a right-wing neoliberal, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to lead the new regime, because they recognized they couldn’t appoint the fascists and maintain legitimacy.

A leaked recording of a phone call between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, showed that Washington chose who the leaders of the new coup regime would be.

Nuland referred to Yatsenyuk affectionately as “Yats,” saying, “Yats is the guy.”

The first actions of the post-2014 coup government were to ban left-wing parties in the country and reduce language-minority rights even further. Then Ukrainian fascists attacked anti-coup demonstrations in the streets all over the country.

As the anti-coup protests were being violently broken up by the far-right, two areas in the east of the country, Donetsk and Luhansk, rose up and declared independence from Ukraine.

The people of Crimea also voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Crimea has a Russian military base, and under their protection they were able to vote safely.

The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections.

At first many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their own countrymen, in this civil war that their U.S.-backed government started.

Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups (and the oligarchs that were backing them) formed so-called “territorial defense battalions,” with names like Azov, Aidar, Dnipro, Tornado, etc.

Much like in Latin America, where U.S.-backed death-squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

In May 2014, neo-Nazis and other far-right forces assaulted an anti-coup demonstration in the major city of Odessa. 48 people were burned alive in a union hall.

This massacre added more fuel to the civil war. The Ukrainian government promised to investigate what happened, but never really did.

After the 2014 coup, Ukraine held an election without any serious opposition candidates, and Western-backed billionaire Petro Poroshenko won.

Poroshenko was seen as the most “moderate” of the right-wing coup coalition. But that didn’t mean much, considering many opposition parties were banned or assaulted by the far-right when they tried to organize.

Additionally, the areas that would have heavier support for the voices who wanted peace with Russia, such as Crimea and the Donbas, had seceded from Ukraine.

The new president had the impossible task of trying to appear sufficiently patriotic for the far-right while at the same time sufficiently “respectable” for the West to continue backing him publicly.

To appease the far-right, Poroshenko gave out awards to World War Two veterans “on both sides,” including the ones that fought in Nazi Germany-aligned militias like the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The Ukrainian government officially honored the leaders of these organizations, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukevych, who organized massacres of many thousands of Poles, Jews, Russians, and other minorities during World War Two, and who willingly participated in the Holocaust.

The holiday Defenders of Ukraine Day, or Day of Ukrainian Armed Forces, was changed to October 14, to match the date of founding of the Nazi-backed Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

This is why you sometimes see red-and-black badges on Ukrainian soldiers. This symbol shows support for the fascist Ukrainian forces during World War Two.

(Also I have to make a separate but important point here: Ukraine was previously part of the Soviet Union, and the majority of the Ukrainian population during World War Two supported the Red Army and actively resisted Nazi occupation of their country. The Ukrainian fascist collaborationists and parties did not have as broad support as the anti-fascist resistance did, and were mostly active during the period of Nazi occupation.)

A large portion of the civil war that broke out in Ukraine after the 2014 coup was waged under Poroshenko.

From 2014 to 2019, in five years of civil war in Donbas, the geographic region that encompasses the Luhansk and Donetsk republics, more than 13,000 people were killed, and at least 28,000 were wounded, according to official Ukrainian government statistics. This was years before Russia invaded.

The Ukrainian army and its far-right paramilitary allies were responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties, with the United Nations reporting in January 2022 that, between 2018 and 2021, 81.4% of all civilian casualties caused by active hostilities were in Donetsk and Luhansk.

These are Russian-speaking Ukrainians being killed their own government. They are not secret Russian forces.

Researchers at the U.S. government-sponsored RAND Corporation acknowledged in a January 2022 report in Foreign Policy magazine that, “even by Kyiv’s own estimates, the vast majority of rebel forces consist of locals—not soldiers of the regular Russian military.”

Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainians fled the country due to the conflict, especially from the eastern regions that saw most of the fighting.

The United States strongly supported Poroshenko and the Ukrainian government as it was waging this brutal war that killed thousands, injured tens of thousands, and displaced millions.

This is why I say the U.S. government doesn’t actually care about Ukraine.

In 2019, the Ukrainian people clearly showed that they opposed this war by overwhelmingly voting against Poroshenko at the ballot box. Current Ukrainian president Zelensky got 73% of the vote, compared to just 24% for Poroshenko.

Zelensky ran on a platform of peace. He even addressed the Russian-speaking eastern parts of the country in Russian.

Very quickly after entering office, however, Zelensky changed his tone. Much like the supposedly “moderate” Poroshenko, Zelensky was told that he was risking losing Western backing, and the loyalty of the far-right, which could threaten to kill him.

So Zelensky did a 180 on his peaceful rhetoric, and he continued to support the civil war.

Neo-Nazis have a significant influence in Ukraine’s state security services

Here it is important to address another important point: The Ukrainian government is not directly run by fascists, but in Ukraine fascist forces do have significant influence in the state.

After the 2014 U.S.-backed coup, neo-Nazis were absorbed by Ukraine’s military, police, and security apparatus.

So while the parliamentary representation of fascist parties is not large (they often get just a few percentage points of the vote in elections), these extremists continue to be supported by taxpayers’ money through unelected state institutions.

Additionally, these neo-Nazis have the street muscle to terrorize political opponents. They can quickly mobilize dozens or hundreds of people on a moment’s notice to attack opponents.

Moreover, these fascists are highly motivated combatants that ensure the loyalty of the Ukrainian military. They represent a powerful faction of the Ukrainian political spectrum, and one of the forces in Ukrainian society that pushes for escalating war with the separatists regions and Russia.

I sometimes see people try to reject this fact by saying, “How can Ukraine have all these Nazis if their president is Jewish?” Here is the answer: the Nazis are not appointed by Zelensky.

These fascists have a major influence in the unelected state security apparatus. The have systematically infiltrated the military and police. And they even enjoy support and training from Western governments and NATO.

The position of fascists grew substantially stronger in Ukraine in the eight years of the civil war, from 2014 to 2022.

For those reasons Ukrainian presidents (Jewish or not) have to take the position of the far-right into consideration. (Not to mention the possibility that far-right gangs could threaten to kill the president or other politicians if they defy them.)

Furthermore, all forces that normally oppose fascism or would oppose the civil war have not existed en masse for eight years in Ukraine: following the 2014 coup, many left-wing parties and socialists got banned by the Ukrainian government, and were assaulted in the streets by the fascists.

Any Ukrainian president, especially since the coup, is highly dependent on the support of the U.S. government as well. So Zelensky is very much a hostage of the situation.

When Washington tells Zelensky he must continue the civil war in Ukraine against his own electoral promises, support NATO membership, ignore the Minsk II agreement of 2015, or even ask for nuclear weapons, he does everything he is told.

Like any other U.S. puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every U.S. administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.

The fact that most Ukrainians wanted peace with Russia was reflected by the fact that they voted for the peace candidate Zelensky in such overwhelming numbers, 73%. And the fact that Zelensky did a total 180 on that promise shows how little political power he actually has.

Western sanctions will only hurt working-class Russians (and average people in the U.S. too)

Now to circle back to the present moment and what to do now. I don’t support the invasion Russia is carrying out. But the only government I can influence by the virtue of living in the United States is the U.S. government. Luckily, the that is extremely relevant, because Washington is one of the root causes of what is happening in Ukraine now.

For the past eight years, I spoke out against the coup and the civil war in Ukraine that the United States supported, promoted, and funded.

While I never thought a war with Russia was possible, I and many other Ukrainians are against Ukraine joining NATO and escalating tensions with the separatist republics and Moscow.

Any further escalation by the U.S. right now can only lead to a larger war.

I even hear some U.S. politicians playing around with the idea of a “no-fly zone,” which means they are calling for NATO to shoot down Russian planes. This is the quickest way to World War Three.

The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the U.S. wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have supported a brutal civil war for the past eight years.

The reason U.S. media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.

Washington is willing to fight until the last Ukrainian to weaken Russia.

For that reason, I am absolutely against U.S. sanctions in general, and this round of U.S. sanctions against Russia in particular.

The harsh Western sanctions imposed on Russia target the civilian population.

Sanctions don’t affect ruling elites, and all U.S. sanctions ever do is collectively punish working-class people of a country where Washington doesn’t like their government.

Devaluing the Russian currency, the ruble, is effectively a form of shrinking workers’ wages, cutting the pensions of retirees, and preventing regular people from being able to access food or medicine.

This isn’t to mention the cost that these sanctions are now also having on the people in the United States itself, with gas prices as high as $6 a gallon and even $7 in parts of California.

The skyrocketing oil prices caused by this crisis will lead to more inflation. And while the official U.S. inflation figure is 7.5%, the real number is probably in the double digits.

All of this makes life harder for average working people, in Ukraine, Russia, the U.S., and around the world.

Russiagate and anti-Russian xenophobia has made the crisis even worse

Another factor in the Ukraine crisis is the rampant surge of russophobia.

Since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Democrats have blamed Donald Trump’s victory on Russian hacking without any solid proof. All of the supposed evidence they presented fell apart when investigated.

Many U.S. politicians demonized Russia as much as they could, just to push the blame for their candidate losing on someone else.

Now Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine has made it okay to be openly xenophobic. I have even seen some people call for killing all Russians, boycotting all Russian businesses, revoking student visas for Russians, etc.

Even in the more “respectable” media, you see talking heads speaking about Russian people as if they’re not human.

Under Donald Trump, many of these same people demonized China, and then acted surprised when there was a wave of hate crimes in the U.S. against East Asians.

During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the press demonized Arabs and Muslims, leading to hate crimes against their communities.

My point is that demonizing nationalities is never acceptable, and people can see through the flimsy excuses of hiding one’s own xenophobia behind the declarations of “solidarity” with my country.

In conclusion, I wanted to say that, if you live in the United States, the only government you can actually influence through demonstrations and other forms of protest is our own.

I absolutely think it is a crime right now to support the U.S. government’s drive for war, sanctions, or further escalation of tensions in Ukraine.

The U.S. government has been fueling this conflict for decades. Washington has funded coups and fueled a civil war in Ukraine.

Now, U.S. corporations stand to greatly benefit from what is happening.

The government doesn’t care about the people here in the U.S., and the only reason it says it cares about people abroad is so it can justify further military spending and advance its foreign-policy goals – which aren’t good for anyone except for a handful of rich American oligarchs.

Source: M/P

War drives present avalanches of biased information, making difficult the discernment of reality vs what is simply war propaganda. Our corporate media, as in all war drives, switched gears from seemingly objective reporting to robotic allegiance to one narrative of the U.S. No person or organization wants to lose friends and support taking stands for truth in such an environment.

But if we don’t, who will highlight the alternative media sources in Ukraine reporting a totally different story? Corporate media reruns lies of the Gulf of Tonkin, babies thrown from incubators, etc., to allow, this time, the most dangerous threat to humanity: NATO’s continued expansion. This expansion has nearly doubled NATO in 20 years.

In that time, we’ve seen its aggressive nation-destroying power cause the death of millions, a worldwide refugee crisis and the creation and enabling of terrorist organizations from ISIS to the rise of neo-Nazis now officially in the Ukrainian government. Neo-Nazi military organizations, funded with billions of dollars and training from the U.S. government, led the war crimes against the people of Donbass for the last eight years, killing 14,000.

Last November’s appointment by President Zelensky of Nazi leader Dmitro Yarosh as adviser to Commander of Ukrainian Armies explains why Luhansk and Donetsk, now independent republics, had every right to ask for Russia’s help. And it was also Russia’s right to stop an existential threat on its borders – including the real possibility of a Nazi-led, white supremacist military possessing NATO weaponry.

This war will only stop and not escalate when the U.S. is forced to end the expansion. We must target the root cause of this war – U.S. imperialism – and expose the rise of fascism, not cower and promote excuses they so desperately need to justify their proxy war. We must remain on the correct side of history.

–written by John Parker

John Parker is a leading member of the Socialist Unity Party and a longtime member of PFP. He is the PFP candidate for U.S. Senate in Election 2022.

Source: https://www.peaceandfreedom.us/positions/pfp-chair-statements/pfp-statements-war-russia-ukraine-nato

The strategic plan of the United States against Russia was elaborated three years ago by the Rand Corporation (The Manifesto, Rand Corp: how to bring down Russia, May 21, 2019).

The Rand Corporation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is “a global research organization developing solutions to policy challenges”: it has an army of 1,800 researchers and other specialists recruited from 50 countries, speaking 75 languages, spread across offices and other locations in North America, Europe, Australia, and the Persian Gulf. Rand’s U.S. personnel live and work in more than 25 countries.

The Rand Corporation, which describes itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan organization,” is officially funded by the Pentagon, the U.S. Army and Air Force, national security agencies (CIA and others), agencies in other countries, and powerful non-governmental organizations.

The Rand Corp. prides itself on having helped devise the strategy that enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the Cold War, forcing the Soviet Union to consume its resources in a grueling military confrontation. This model has inspired the new plan elaborated in 2019: “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia”, i.e. forcing the adversary to overextend itself in order to unbalance and knock it down.

These are the main lines of attack outlined in the Rand plan, on which the United States has actually moved in recent years.

First of all – the plan establishes – Russia must be attacked on the most vulnerable side, that of its economy strongly dependent on gas and oil exports: for this purpose commercial and financial sanctions must be used and, at the same time, Europe must be made to decrease the importation of Russian natural gas, replacing it with US liquefied natural gas.

In the ideological and informational field, it is necessary to encourage internal protests and at the same time undermine the image of Russia outside.

In the military field, it is necessary to operate so that European NATO countries increase their forces in an anti-Russian function. The US can have high probability of success and high benefits with moderate risks by investing more in strategic bombers and long-range attack missiles directed against Russia. Deploying new intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe aimed at Russia assures them a high probability of success, but also carries high risks.

By calibrating each option to obtain the desired effect – Rand concludes – Russia will end up paying the highest price in the confrontation with the US, but the latter and their allies will have to invest large resources to divert them from other purposes.

As part of that strategy – the Rand Corporation’s 2019 plan predicted – “providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability, but any increase in U.S.-provided weapons and military advice to Ukraine would have to be carefully calibrated to increase costs to Russia without provoking a much larger conflict in which Russia, because of proximity, would have significant advantages.”

It is precisely here – at what the Rand Corporation called “Russia’s greatest external vulnerability point,” exploitable by arming Ukraine in a manner “calibrated to increase costs to Russia without provoking a much larger conflict” – that the rupture occurred. Caught in the political, economic and military stranglehold that the US and NATO increasingly tightened, ignoring Moscow’s repeated warnings and proposals for negotiation, Russia reacted with the military operation that destroyed more than 2,000 military facilities in Ukraine that were actually built and controlled not by Kiev’s rulers but by US-NATO commands.

The article that three years ago reported the Rand Corporation’s plan ended with these words: “The options in the plan are really only variants of the same war strategy, the price of which in terms of sacrifices and risks is paid by all of us”.

We European people are paying it now, and we will pay it more and more dearly, if we continue to be expendable pawns in the US-NATO strategy.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Source: Internationalist 360°

[pdf-embedder url=”https://struggle-la-lucha.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Overextending-and-Unbalancing-Russia-RAND_RB10014.pdf”]

 

White male supremacist Donald Trump described his foreign policy “dream” to a group of his admirers on March 5th, according to an article from the Guardian newspaper:

In a speech to Republican donors in New Orleans, Donald Trump said the US should put the Chinese flag on F-22 jets and “bomb the shit out of Russia” in retribution for its invasion of Ukraine.

The Washington Post reported the remarks, which were made on Saturday night.

To laughter, the paper said, the former president said: “And then we say, ‘China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it,’ and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.”

According to the Post, Trump also called NATO a “paper tiger”, said the US military had won “skirmishes” against Russian troops while he was president, and claimed to have been tougher on Vladimir Putin than any other US leader.

Trump’s speech, however crude, reveals that there are two different U.S. imperialist strategies against capitalist Russia and socialist China being considered on Wall Street and in the Pentagon, both designed to retain U.S. imperialist world-wide hegemony: 1) the current Biden strategy to line up the U.S.’s junior NATO “partners” to make economic war (sanctions) and, if necessary, actual military war to effect regime change in Russia, a strategy dating back to post-World War II, and then to “copy” that same strategy to Asia to have its subordinates there attack China,  and 2) the Trump strategy that guided his regime, to entice or coerce the Russian leadership to attack China, while waging economic war against China and its people.

Both gambits are catastrophic for the global working class and oppressed and are terrible threats to world peace.

Pre-war capitalist appeasement and post-war confrontation

Despite all the distortions currently promoted by the capitalist media, Russian President Putin is not Hitler. He is head of a capitalist regime whose ruling class seeks independence from the whims and wishes of Wall Street. That’s why he is a target of their machinations to remove him from power.

Before World War II, fascist military officers led by Franco sparked a deadly civil war in Spain against an elected republican government. The capitalist governments in Europe and the U.S. had no objections to that and declared their “neutrality”. The German bombers who destroyed the Spanish town of Guernica, famously depicted by Picasso, were illegally fueled with Texas Oil (now called Texaco) gasoline supplied to them on credit.

Hopes were high among the capitalist elite in the West that Hitler would turn his eyes and his tanks on the Soviet Union. But to prepare for that war, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, who in turn attacked Poland, then Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Only after that, realizing that “their backs were against the wall”, did they ally themselves with the Soviet Union, who in June 1941 was attacked by some 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 German-allied troops (Romanians, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, and others).

At least 27 million Soviet lives, both military and civilian, were lost in the struggle, which finally ended in victory in May 1945.

In 1974, Richard Nixon knew that he lost his campaign to hold onto his office in the midst of the Watergate scandal when right-wing Senator Barry Goldwater told him he must go. Goldwater opposed Nixon’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which Nixon and Kissinger believed could lead to a Soviet-China conflict. Taking sides with the PRC was just too much to the radical right at the time, just as it was in 1979 when Carter agreed to the “One China” policy. And so it is today to the Trumpist wing of the ruling class and the “mad dog” generals in the Pentagon.

From the first days in office in 2017, Trump placed billions in tariffs on imports from the PRC, even as his crony Steve Bannon predicted war with China would occur within five or six years. First economic war, then military conflict: that was and is the Trumpist dream.

Trump repeatedly denounced NATO. Whether or not Trump used that in his negotiations with Putin to entice Russia to join the U.S. in a war with China is unknown, since Trump went to extraordinary lengths to keep the subject of those talks secret.

Right-wing and ultra-militarist author Tom Clancy, who had extremely close Pentagon contacts, wrote a popular novel in 2000 called “The Bear and the Dragon”, precisely describing this war and how the U.S., after inviting Russia to join NATO,  would come to aid Russia against a Chinese invasion, from which Russia would somehow reap huge wealth.

Fortunately, the Russian leadership has never fallen for this imperialist pipedream.

The Biden administration presents a different gambit, more in line with “standard” imperialist post World War II strategy to isolate economically and militarily first the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation into accepting U.S. domination and control over its vast natural resource and labor pool.

And it plans to continue to apply that same strategy to China, and has continued and amplified the Trump tariffs and sanctions, as well as continued naval fleet “parades” through the South China Sea. However, the Chinese leadership has so far seen right through this imperialist plan:

A March 7th AP article reports:

BEIJING (AP) — China’s top diplomat on Monday accused Washington of trying to create an Asian version of the U.S.-European NATO military alliance and said it is up to the Biden administration to improve relations with North Korea.

It [China] also has said Washington is to blame for the [Ukraine] conflict for failing to take Russia’s security concerns into consideration.

The United States is playing geopolitical games under the pretext of promoting regional cooperation,” Wang said. He said this “runs counter” to regional desires for cooperation and “is doomed to have no future.”

Wang complained Washington is organizing U.S. allies to “suppress China.”

Beijing is irritated by growing military ties among the Quad nations of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India. China criticized a U.S. decision last year to supply technology for Australia to field its first nuclear-powered submarines.

“The real purpose of the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’ is to create an Indo-Pacific version of NATO,” he said. The Western alliance’s expansion was cited by Russian President Vladimir Putin as one reason behind his invasion of Ukraine.

Imperialist war drive: trillions for the billionaires, devastation for the workers and poor

The Russian intervention that the U.S. has forced the Russian Federation into has already caused immense suffering among both Ukrainians and Russians. And on March 8th, Biden announced that the U.S. would ban all oil purchases from Europe:

[Biden] warned Americans that the decision would inevitably mean painful, higher prices at the gas pump.

“I said I would level with the American people from the beginning,” Mr. Biden said. “And when I first spoke to this, I said defending freedom is going to cost. It’s going to cost us as well, in the United States.”

And he warned oil companies in the United States not to take advantage of the decision by arbitrarily raising prices.

“Russia’s aggression is costing us all,” he said. “And it’s no time for profiteering or price gouging.”

Yeah, right. Workers here and abroad are already facing a record spike in gasoline prices. In California, fuel prices have already hit $7.00 a gallon. This comes in the midst of an unprecedented jump in the inflation rate, even while the parasite collection of billionaires rakes in trillions more in profits, particularly Big Oil.

A March 10th article in the Guardian reported:

Oil and gas companies are facing a potential bonanza from the Ukraine war, though few in the industry want to admit it, and many are using soaring prices and the fear of fuel shortages to cement their position with governments in ways that could have disastrous impacts on the climate crisis.

So far, Biden has not persuaded his European “partners” to ban their Russian oil and natural gas purchases. Only Britain has announced a gradual reduction of its Russian oil purchases, taking full effect by the end of the year.

A March 8th article on the CNN Business website, titled “Your toilet paper roll is slimming down”, describes another technique corporations are using to squeeze out extra profits from the workers and oppressed besides simply raising prices:

Product downsizing, also known as “shrinkflation,” is happening with toilet paper, said Edgar Dworsky, a former assistant attorney general in Massachusetts who is a consumer advocate and editor of website ConsumerWorld.org.

For example, Procter &Gamble’s (PG) Charmin’s ultra soft toilet paper 18-count mega package now contains 244 two-ply sheets, down from a previous 264 double-ply sheets per roll. And super mega rolls of the brand now display 366 sheets versus a previous 396 sheets per roll.

“That amounts to losing the equivalent of about a roll and a half in the new 18-count package,” he said.

Proctor and Gamble executives have found a new way to put “lipstick on this pig” – calling it “innovation”.

In an email to CNNBusiness, Procter & Gamble pointed to various reasons for variations in sizes of its products and that store prices are determined solely by retailers.

“There is a cost element to innovation — adjusting the count per pack or the package size is one way of reinvesting in this innovation while maintaining a competitive price point,” the company said.

As U.S. imperialism fails to maintain a sufficient standard of living for us producers of all the wealth in our society; U.S. imperialist hegemony over Russia and China offers us nothing but inflation and more “belt tightening”, as well as the danger of war, perhaps even nuclear war. But our position in the “belly of the beast” does give our class the opportunity to unite with our sisters and brothers around the world and transform our society to end wars and to put people before profits.

Source: Fighting Words