Why War?

 Understanding the war from a different perspective through the analysis of Professor Georgi Derluguian

Banners for socialism

 

 

An article well worth circulating to a wider audience

The Root Problem is War Not Putin

BY TIMOTHY BRAATZ

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War is armed combat between political communities with the aim of inflicting serious injury or death on multiple, non-specified individuals.

War is slaughter.

War is a highly contagious disease, spreading germs the way a common cold causes its human host to sneeze. Among the many war germs are hatred, fear, dehumanization, tribalism, glorification of violence, and legitimization of murder. Without sufficient therapy, each war leads to the next.

For the recent slaughter outbreak in Ukraine, contact tracing is easy. A partial remission began in Europe in 1953, but the germs festered in a U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms standoff. An international disarmament movement addressed the infection. The greatest breakthrough was empowering General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1988, to withdraw the Soviet Union from the Cold War and call for a “nuclear-free and nonviolent world.” Rejecting Dr. Gorbachev’s prescription, the U.S. war syndicate’s European command, known as NATO, expanded its military presence eastward to the borders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Ukraine was slaughter-free from 1953-2014. The killing resumed in response to disagreement over whether the national government should be more aligned with Russia or NATO/European Union. In early 2022, Russian president Vladmir Putin intensified the conflict by sending more troops into Ukraine.

Conflict is inevitable, violence is not. The Russian-NATO-Ukrainian-Belarusian conflict is complex. The root problem, though, is that so many participants are infected with the essential war germ: the belief that killing is 1) a legitimate way to resolve conflict and 2) the only viable method of national defense. The little voice in your head saying, “Someone needs to bomb Putin’s tanks” or “If I were there, I’d be shooting Russians”—that’s the war germ.

I contend that if the goal was to minimize human suffering, the violent response to Putin’s violent invasion has proved counterproductive. Thousands of Ukrainian and Russian fighters have died. The frustrated Russian invaders have turned to indiscriminate urban bombing. Civilian deaths are mounting. Millions have fled their homes.

Meanwhile, individual Europeans and North Americans hurry to join the mutual slaughter. Prominent voices plead for NATO aircraft to enter the fray. They sympathize with Ukrainians, yet call for increased suffering. They don’t know what else to do.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler sent German forces into Denmark. Understanding that military resistance was futile, the Danes—without nonviolence training—opted for protest, noncooperation, and sabotage. Their cities weren’t destroyed. Casualties were relatively minimal. The Danes endured five years of humiliating German occupation. They survived.

Imagine the Ukrainians doing likewise. Indeed, protest rallies have begun in Russian-occupied cities. It might violate your sense of justice and honor—there’s the war germ again—but perhaps nonviolent resistance to foreign occupation is better than mutual slaughter and whatever follows.

Since we’re just imagining, we can do better. In 1994, the Ukrainian government renounced its nuclear weapons. What if the government had eliminated its military altogether and replaced it with nonviolent training for all? We’ve seen small groups of unarmed Ukrainians turn back Russian tanks; imagine millions—men, women, children—with the courage and knowledge for nonviolent resistance. Sympathetic foreigners could join them without worsening the situation.

Of course, since an anti-military Ukrainian government would have shunned NATO’s advances, Putin might have left Ukraine unmolested. Putin, you see, is just a vector; the real enemy is war itself.

While we’re at it, imagine nonviolent international peacekeepers—no guns, no blue helmets—who can intervene between parties in conflict, reducing fear and dehumanization, bearing witness. Nonviolent Peaceforce already does this on a small scale; more such non-governmental groups are needed. Then, when a warlord orders a foreign invasion, tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, from around the world, could converge to stand in the way.

“Nonviolent defenders could never stop an invading army.” That’s the war germ. But many bewildered and remorseful Russian soldiers quickly surrendered in Ukraine. Imagine how many more would have abandoned their posts if, rather than dodging Ukrainian bullets, they had found themselves face-to-face with a festive parade of civilians expressing concern and friendship, refusing to become infected with the dehumanizing desire to kill, but also refusing to give way.

Just to be clear: Nonviolence isn’t passivity and doesn’t involve flight. Nonviolence is confronting your opponent with courageous compassion. Nonviolence requires the willingness to suffer, even die—just like soldiering—but without the willingness to cause harm.

Nonviolence promises a cure for the war disease. Imagine if masses of trained nonviolent defenders had minimized casualties in Ukraine and demoralized—no, re-moralized—the Russian invaders. One such highly visible success would prove to many skeptics that killing is not the only viable method of national defense—an important step toward total delegitimization of murderous conflict resolution. The first country that institutionalizes unarmed civilian defense will change the world.

Alternatively, we can keep hoping the disease will cure itself, that more slaughter will end all wars.

The Root Problem is War Not Putin - CounterPunch.org

Messages from beyond the grave

 Messages from Marx and Lenin

Marx

https://twitter.com/i/status/1500787231950213121

Lenin

https://twitter.com/i/status/1502265756821696513

Pity the Nation (poem)

 

“Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.”

― Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of The Prophet

Sympathy (music video)

 

Nestor Makhno (video)

 Nestor Makhno Paysan d'Ukraine ~ Nestor Makhno Peasant from Ukraine (1996) (EN, NL subtitles) : Hélène Chatelain : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

French but click English subtitles

Stop the Wars

 

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grows increasingly brutal, we say to our fellow workers in all lands that we have no quarrel with you. On the contrary, we appeal to workers in all other lands to refuse to slaughter one another for and at the behest of, our capitalist masters. We appeal to you to unite with us in the struggle to overthrow the system of capitalism which not only causes war but all the other social problems which our class endures throughout the world.

 Putin is not acting from a belief in self-determination, but from naked Russian nationalism.  That is what is so amusing about those supporting him against the nationalists of Kyiv. Russian capitalism intends to use its power in order to implement its long-standing imperialist and expansionist aspirations. In Russia, Putin’s regime is trying to stoke Russian nationalism to divert attention from the growing workers' socio-economic problems: poverty wages and pensions, dismantling of available health care, education and other social services. In the noise of the nationalist and militant rhetoric, it is easier to complete the formation of a corporate, authoritarian state based on reactionary conservative values and repressive policies.

We will not succumb to the nationalist poison. To hell with their “nations” and their flags.

Capitalism’s war drums are never silent.

 

The Russians have invaded Ukraine and once more men, women and children are in the front lines of what could be a bloody conflict. 

When the ruling class talk of war it is more than ever necessary for the workers in this country to remember that the workers in other countries have as little direct responsibility for their callous ruling class and bloody-minded military as we have for ours. Almost no wars in history have ever been decided on by the people who were called on to fight them.

War cuts across the basic identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of them at enmity with each other in the interests of the capitalist class. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate and commit misery and killing upon each other. It elevates lying, and murdering opponents into virtues, it confers honours on those who practise these means most successfully. Men and women have the vile methods of warfare imposed on them and are filled with the idea that violence and not mutual understanding is the final solution to all problems. Many of those who have been subjected to the atmosphere and atrocities of war remain addicted to violence or traumatised by it when hostilities have come to an end. War cannot be humanised. Its brutalities will cease only when capitalism, which is the cause of wars, has been brought to an end.

We condemn the system of social organisation that creates conditions in which civil wars can all happen — a system where it must always be "You or I" and rarely "You and I". Socialists point out and explain the war existing in society - the class war -  must be won before we can end the cause of wars.  Wars are not about freedom and democracy. That's just a convenient slogan. Wars are part of the more violent ongoing competition for profit and power in the world. When negotiations finally break down, the ultimate form of competition is war. The only war — if you want to call it that — for freedom and democracy that British people have been involved in was against our own ruling class. Atrocities are going on all the time in different countries, and other nations do little or nothing about them — unless they want to use them as propaganda. Governments talk about human rights and freedom when it suits them, but if you look at their actions it's just hogwash. They are completely devoted to protecting and expanding possessions and profits and power — utterly regardless of human beings. Whoever wins a war, the people always loses — on both sides.

We can fully understand the desire to stop a war and socialists are opposed to wars in all its forms. But first and foremost we are opposed to the capitalist system which gives rise to war. There are plenty of sincerely motivated people who are deeply committed to “peace". Such aims are utopian unless they are related to the historical possibility of establishing a class-free state-free society.

 Understanding that capitalism causes wars, socialists urge the need for conscious political action to end capitalism and thus eradicate war. The Socialist Party has often stood alone in condemning war from a class angle. Frequently alone among all political parties in Britain, the Socialist Party has never supported one capitalist interest against another in a war. We have refused to be tricked into support for legalised killing and consistently we have argued that workers have a material interest in opposing all wars. For workers, there is but one way ahead and that will never be in the company of capitalists of any nation.

Peace Train (music video)

 

The World Socialist Movement

 

The socialist movement is not only the heart, but is a combination of heart plus head.

It is almost a truism to say that when the workers, as a class, couple their latent revolutionary fervour with socialist understanding, they become an indomitable force sweeping everything before it. 

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea come of age, it is more powerful than the strongest armies.” 

 

As to any fears that there is no room for differences of opinion in a socialist party, this simply isn’t so. Socialists have varying opinions on matters of a speculative nature, on interpretations of current events, on attitudes to cultural matters, specific aspects of science, even on projections of the actual workings of a socialist society.