Building an anti-war movement on Ukraine
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
We are publishing a series of interesting pieces on the war in Ukraine from different left perspectives; we aim to inform and prompt discussion.
In that spirit and without endorsing the arguments of either side, we repost the exchange between Mike Phipps and the Stop the War Campaign on how best to build the anti-war movement.
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Fri 25 Mar 2022. Read the original here.
For the broadest possible anti-war movement!
Loading article text…
Mike Phipps is disingenuous. To oppose the war in Ukraine without mentioning the principal cause of that war, viz. NATO expansion and the threat to Russia is to treat the symptoms of an illness without seeking to cure those afflicted.
The reality is that Mike Phipps is a supporter of imperialism and therefore he has no criticism of the role of the US with its pivot to China and its breaking of the promises given to Gorbachev of not one inch eastwards in 1991.
Just as Phipps believes there was substance to the ‘antisemitism’ campaign in the Labour Party.
The reality is, whether we like it or not, Russia’s war is a defensive war. Phipps also ignores the 8 year long war that the Azov Battalion, which is part of the Ukrainian army, waged on the Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
What amazes me is that those who were so hot on ‘antisemitism’ prefer not to talk about the West’s arming of neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. Their presence in the Ukrainian state is quite frightening but Phipps and others prefer not to talk about it.
See my
The Ukraine War – Who is Responsible for the Carnage?
Putin has fallen into the trap that Biden laid for him
https://tonygreenstein.com/2022/03/the-ukraine-war-who-is-responsible-for-the-carnage/
I believe Mike Phipps that STW’s response to your letter says almost everything that needs to be said.
I’m only adding anything because since you wrote that letter there has been a “Stand with Ukraine” demo in London, well attended by Ukrainians and awash with yellow and blue flags that could very well have been patched together from the yellow and blue material of the 2018/19 “People’s Vote” demos.
Those demos share something else: not only a dearth of red flags and banners but the absence of trade unions, socialists and political organisations of the left – unless you count David Lammy and Chris Bryant as the sharp end of left activism in modern Britain that is.
You probably need to ask again just why socialists like myself and Yanis Varoufakis (certainly no friend of Vladimir Putin) feel this way. Yanis says:
“The sea of yellow and blue currently covering europe is a hypocritical sea. This “movement” (however well-intentioned many of its individual components may be) does not have the interests of Ukrainians at heart.”
This movement as exemplified by the EU, falling in line to US imperialism’s every diktat, is simply a tail wagged by the NATO dog.
And the Ukrainian people? Just like the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, they are being made cannon fodder in pursuit of US geo-political objectives.
Mike Phipps argues that “it is not NATO that is waging war on Ukraine”.
I am not a scholar of politics, but to me it seems that Nato IS waging war on Ukraine by pouring weapons into the country, stationing/sending NATO troups right to the border of Ukraine, turning a blind eye to the AZOV battaglion and similar organisations in Ukraine, talking up war rather than looking for alternatives.
Putin is no angel but this does not let NATO off the hook. On the contrary.
As an ex-soldier, I have never regarded war as an exemplary way to resolve issues between states. Triggering factors are not ever fully rationally in evidence; perhaps why books are written and requiems played for decades afterwards. Wars happen…because we are imperfect people pursuing conflicting goals.
Those of us old enough to remember the Kremlin’s invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 well recall the “arguments” trotted out by the “Tanky” supporters of the CPGB that the invasions on those occasions were also against people who desired the overthrow of “socialism” and thus posed a threat to the Soviet Union. Such people have surfaced once again in the Left, under the delusion that Putin’s Russia is in some bizarre way shape or form still a “workers state”, albeit a “deformed” one. Not withstanding, RT tries to give oxygen to the same myth, with its bizarre attempts to cultivate a “progressive” image, whilst its guru Putin, crossing himself at every opportunity, supports giving the black-cowelled priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church free reign to peddle their nationalistic, religious nonsense, whether imprisoning opponents on trumped up charges or sending out his murder squads to silence any opposition with Novichok poison.
Leon Trotsky, before his assassination in 1940, at the hands of a member of one of Stalin’s death squads, postulated that what was once a politically corrupt, self-serving bureaucracy, now had elements in its ranks who were headed towards outright fascism. Today, with its number of billionaire oligarchs, courtesy of firstly Yeltsin and now Putin, feeding off the proceeds of their pillage of Soviet industries to assuage their ever growing avarice for mega-yachts and high-end overseas residences that would put the Saudis to shame, Russia’s leaders can no longer be defended as some kind of errant “socialists”, let alone “communists”, as some on the so-called “Left” seem to think.
Putin’s recent attack on Lenin, stating that the Ukraine was a creation of Lenin’s, says much of what we need to know about Putin’s regime. They have now long gone over from being a vile, bunch of political parasites to a fully fledged, imperialist regime with as strong a penchant towards fascism as one could need.
The similarity between Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 and Putin’s on the Ukraine in 2022 is stark, not withstanding that both the states that were attacked were capitalist is irrelevant, and the washed out, middle of the road, fence sitters on the so-called “Left” need to recognise this before their stance does any more harm to the struggle against the megalomaniac regime in the Kremlin.
When Putin stationed a hundred thousand plus troops near the border of Ukraine, what he was in effect saying is that either we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. And he gave Biden and NATO leaders several months to think it over. But given that ‘they’ created Russia’s security concerns in the first place, they were never gonna address them of course.
The invasion and the ensuing war could easily have been prevented had they done so. They left Putin with no choice, and deliberately so, so that they could then wage total economic warfare on Russia, and everything Russian.
The fact that Biden and Johnson and Stoltenberg et al have been repeating on pretty much a daily basis since Feb 24th that ‘the attack was *unprovoked*’ tells you ALL you need to know! As for Mike Phipps referring to STWs position regarding NATO expansion as STWs ‘analysis’, does he regard all the warnings during the past twenty-five years or so by experts that NATO expansion to the east will end badly as just their analysis?!
John Pilger put it like this in a piece he posted on Feb 17th:
Setting aside the manoeuvres and cynicism of geopolitics, whomever the players, this historical memory is the driving force behind Russia’s respect-seeking, self-protective security proposals, which were published in Moscow in the week the UN voted 130-2 to outlaw Nazism [the US and Ukraine are the two countries that voted against!]. They are:
– NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)
– NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.
– Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.
– the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.
– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)
These amount to a comprehensive draft of a peace plan for all of post-war Europe and ought to be welcomed in the West.
Mike Phipps appears to imply that these proposals by Russia – and Russia’s concern about NATO expansion during the past twenty-five years – was all a ruse. I wonder how he thinks the US would react at the prospect of Russian troops and armaments/missiles being based right on its border! Or relatively close!
As other commenters have stated, it is foolish and disingenuous to ignore the huge role that NATO, the UK and the US have played and are still playing in this conflict. It seems obvious to many people outside the Western corporate media bubble that this invasion could have been prevented if the US government, which is the dominant institution in Europe’s affairs, had been willing to treat Russia as an equal partner rather than as an enemy.
As for ending this war, honest and open diplomacy by the US government (Ukraine is plainly just a pawn) which treats Russia’s demands seriously might be a fine starting point. That will never happen, of course, and I can see we are at the start of many years of conflict in Eastern Europe, benefiting the ruling classes, Ukrainian fascists and the weapons corporations. If we on the Left do not want that, we need to organise here in the UK and internationally, demonstrating solidarity with the working class in Ukraine and Russia.
NATO (the USA) is using Ukraine to wage war against Russia. War in Ukraine did not start with the recent Russian escalation. Declaring solidarity with “the Ukrainian people” can easily be misinterpreted as support for the regime in Kiev, especially when Ukrainian colours are displayed with the slogan.
Peace campaigners should not take sides in a conflict, demands should be made of all participants especially our own government.
I notice with dismay that while everyone is trying, with a haste that is almost indecent, to be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians, nobody is saying much about those people bravely resisting the war in Russia.
More than 15,000 have been arrested and detained, facing 15 years in prison. Many more have been severely beaten for going out onto the streets of more than 52 Russian cities to oppose Putin’s imperialist war.
They, too, surely, need our solidarity.
A Russia Solidarity Fund has been established to assist these courageous protesters with medical and legal costs.
For information, contact the Fund at [email protected]