Ukraine

[french frank]

Reports had come through in time for today's BBC lunchtime Radio 4 news to announce Ukrainian claims of some sort of Russian first line defense breakthrough in terms of mine clearance operations having been completed. I remain disgusted and sickened at my would-be leftist friends' opposition to supporting Ukraine using all manner of feeble excuses from alleging Welensky to have fascist connections to saying America's and European support is all just in aid of their respective armaments industries. I am reminded of the old parable about the man who refuses to have an arrow removed from his heart until he has been satisfied as to all there is to know about his assailant's gender, background and motivation.

I don't understand Eldridge Colby's political stance, but I did like Freedman's rebuttal of the notion that the suffering of the Ukrainian people was so great that the war must be brought to an end somehow (necessarily in a way that would satisfy Russia).

1. "Russia’s war on Ukraine is immoral and unjustified. Prolonging or expanding the war will only bring more devastation and suffering for the Ukrainian people, leaving them worse off and Americans no safer or more prosperous.’" [Colby]

2. "As Ukrainians regularly point out a Russian occupation is hardly going to ease their suffering." [Freedman] But unsupported rebels could be picked off rather more easily.

[Bryn]

Reports had come through in time for today's BBC lunchtime Radio 4 news to announce Ukrainian claims of some sort of Russian first line defense breakthrough in terms of mine clearance operations having been completed. I remain disgusted and sickened at my would-be leftist friends' opposition to supporting Ukraine using all manner of feeble excuses from alleging Welensky to have fascist connections to saying America's and European support is all just in aid of their respective armaments industries. I am reminded of the old parable about the man who refuses to have an arrow removed from his heart until he has been satisfied as to all there is to know about his assailant's gender, background and motivation.

I concur, entirely. Their stance seems to support the old saw that left and right meet at their extremes.

In other news today, the Israeli far right PM refers to Israel as "Jewish and democratic". That's just as much a contradiction in terms as "Islamic and democratic" (as in the "Islamic Republic of Pakistan").

[Joseph K]

Reports had come through in time for today's BBC lunchtime Radio 4 news to announce Ukrainian claims of some sort of Russian first line defense breakthrough in terms of mine clearance operations having been completed. I remain disgusted and sickened at my would-be leftist friends' opposition to supporting Ukraine using all manner of feeble excuses from alleging Welensky to have fascist connections to saying America's and European support is all just in aid of their respective armaments industries. I am reminded of the old parable about the man who refuses to have an arrow removed from his heart until he has been satisfied as to all there is to know about his assailant's gender, background and motivation.

I wouldn't want to throw Ukraine under a bus either. I've read various things alleging America has provoked Russia into doing this - and yes Putin has said this also, but on the other hand, so the argument goes, one could hardly expect the US not to act with similar bellicosity (CF: Cuban Missile Crisis). Also, the line isn't just that it's all just in aid of armaments industries, but usually also that the proxy war could effect regime change in Russia... So, the line goes that the US/NATO shares at least some responsibility for this war and ought to do something to stop it rather than what has been happening... so the argument goes...

[french frank]

So, the line goes that the US/NATO shares at least some responsibility for this war and ought to do something to stop it rather than what has been happening... so the argument goes...

Yes, that is how the argument goes. The BBC article today is fascinating in outlining how Russian diplomacy has changed under Putin. I don't buy the 'NATO is responsible argument', when we are reminded that Putin was saying in 2000: "Russia is ready to co-operate with Nato... right up to joining the alliance....I cannot imagine my country isolated from Europe...". If that were true then, how could he imagine that the expansion of NATO was a threat to Russia? It suits the Putin narrative to say that, now that Russian foreign policy has changed dramatically, underscored by the change in diplomacy. And it suits some political theoreticians to agree that, while Russian aggression is in no way justifiable, the US/NATO is chiefly to blame for it. What caused diplomatic rapprochement to be abandoned?

[Serial_Apologist]

I wouldn't want to throw Ukraine under a bus either. I've read various things alleging America has provoked Russia into doing this - and yes Putin has said this also, but on the other hand, so the argument goes, one could hardly expect the US not to act with similar bellicosity (CF: Cuban Missile Crisis). Also, the line isn't just that it's all just in aid of armaments industries, but usually also that the proxy war could effect regime change in Russia... So, the line goes that the US/NATO shares at least some responsibility for this war and ought to do something to stop it rather than what has been happening... so the argument goes...

The Cuban missiles case was different in kind - Kruschev posturing on a defensive basis that if it was OK for America to surround the "socialist world" with nukes, what could they have against one part of that "socialist world" responding in kind? The Kremlin-dominated Soviet Bloc had long declared its non-intention to either attack or invade beyond its own terrain, as was later admitted by Perle (I think it was) admitting the Pentagon/White House knew this all along, while spouting on about "the Communist threat" to its own populace, as accepted by the West in general. Very few instances of the USSR coming to the aid of its intended allies come to mind - Cuba acted against Kremlin wishes in acting in Bolivia and later supporting the MPLA in Angola. The only case I can think of is their final existential act in coming to the aid of the beleaguered Afghanistan government at the end of the 1980s at the latter's request.

The Pentagon admission came straight from the Horse's mouth in a frank interview with Pilger, which I may still have on video. Support for Putin comes from far right parties and governments intent on going back to a world comprised of states inter-competing and tactically switching sides on a sixpence over dwindling resources worldwide - this amounts to a recognition of the insolubility of global capitalism's endemic problems, the "final solution" where global co-operation ultimately failed once the "Communist threat" no longer existed as an incentive to provide for a fairer less inegalitarian world. I think this goes some way to answering french frank's closing question. Today civilisation finds itself genuinely threatened by a mutual stand-off between Putin and a potentially returned Trump or Trumpalike, with what remains of liberal/centre governed electorates in Europe sandwiched between, and the possibility of either a post-election Tory or Starmer/Labour government abandoning support for Ukraine should a stalemate appear on the cards. No wonder the few remaining bourgeois politicians of more rational disposition with longer historical memories don't want to get into a bust-up with China!

[french frank]

... governments intent on going back to a world comprised of states inter-competing and tactically switching sides on a sixpence over dwindling resources worldwide - this amounts to a recognition of the insolubility of global capitalism's endemic problems, the "final solution" where global co-operation ultimately failed once the "Communist threat" no longer existed as an incentive to provide for a fairer less inegalitarian world. I think this goes some way to answering french frank's closing question.

A plausible analysis. Though viewing it on a more personal, individual level, was it that once Putin had arrived in power and was unwilling to leave, his increasingly authoritarian regime where all dissent must be suppressed (the assassinations began in 2003) made any kind of rapprochement between the Russian state and the west impossible?

[Retune]

I remain disgusted and sickened at my would-be leftist friends' opposition to supporting Ukraine using all manner of feeble excuses from alleging Welensky to have fascist connections to saying America's and European support is all just in aid of their respective armaments industries.

Occasionally I sample the peculiar mirror universe of Tankie Twitter, where people like George Galloway, who had concluded (with some considerable justification) that the invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression fought on a pretext, are now telling us that the war in Ukraine is a purely defensive operation forced on Putin by NATO. In this echo chamber, Ukrainian 'biolabs', unlike Iraq's elusive WMDs, are a terrible threat. The mental gymnastics required to sustain this level of doublethink are really pretty impressive - as George might put it, I have to salute their indefatigability. The only common factor seems to be to support, in any given conflict, whoever is the brutal dictator opposed to the West.

[Serial_Apologist]

A plausible analysis. Though viewing it on a more personal, individual level, was it that once Putin had arrived in power and was unwilling to leave, his increasingly authoritarian regime where all dissent must be suppressed (the assassinations began in 2003) made any kind of rapprochement between the Russian state and the west impossible?

The trouble is, by any definition today, in what does "the West" now consist in joint interest political terms? When Putin effectively assumed permanent power, that question had not yet arisen.

[french frank]

The trouble is, by any definition today, in what does "the West" now consist in joint interest political terms? When Putin effectively assumed permanent power, that question had not yet arisen.

Is the West not embodied in NATO (Trump notwithstanding)? Following the Gorbachev regime, and Putin's own apparent willingness to consider rapprochement, what changed Putin's mind?

[Serial_Apologist]

Is the West not embodied in NATO (Trump notwithstanding)? Following the Gorbachev regime, and Putin's own apparent willingness to consider rapprochement, what changed Putin's mind?

It's all extremely complex, and I can't confess to having grasped the complete measure of it all, but from what I understand about the way in which Communism was dismantled in Russia, along with the rest of the E Bloc, while there were to be distinguishing differences of approach, the aim was to sell off the under-invested state industries to carefully selected bidders - Joe Bloggs wasn't permitted to submit his £1 for buying up the entire Polish steel industry for instance - and run them in accordance with western viability criteria. The West (if you will) was keenly interested in the previously occupied lands, where a spirit of national and personal freedom and independence had never been extinguished and people had had greater access to western media and advertising, than in Russia, hosting a population exhausted and demotivated by decades longer of domination and demoralisation. There, in the absence of western concerns (which strategically were more worried about combatting Islamic extremism) the alternative was seen to lie in the re-creation of a domestic capitalist class; however the only people with the financial clout and any organisational experience were the party elite who were to become Putin's oligarchs, and their privileged compliant state bureaucrats. The mindset required to set national renaissance in motion, let alone address the deep eco damage inflicted by decades of hurried unconsidered industrial expansion would be absent in both the masses and leadership, hence Putin's and his henchpersons' need to cobble together a defining national mythology based on an idea of inherent destiny, like all fascist ideologies before, helped by the Orthodox church.

[french frank]

It's all extremely complex ...[1] the previously occupied lands, where a spirit of national and personal freedom and independence had never been extinguished and people had had greater access to western media and advertising ...[2] The mindset required to set national renaissance in motion ... would be absent in both the masses and leadership, hence [3] Putin's and his henchpersons' need to cobble together a defining national mythology based on an idea of inherent destiny, like all fascist ideologies before, helped by the Orthodox church.

Your [1], [2] and [3] (my numbering) seem to me to place western responsibility for the current war firmly in a secondary position. Since 2000 when Putin first became president he has manipulated the system to put Medvedev briefly in as his puppet, only to resume the presidency and organise a referendum to allow him to continue beyond the then constitutional limit of two terms. From a Russia edging its way cautiously towards democracy, it was he who slammed the door, eliminating (by incarderation or assassination) political rivals and critics, gagging the free press and replacing it with a state propaganda machine and replacing the diplomats with state propaganda parrots. And yes, 'a defining national mythology based on an idea of inherent destiny' is exactly what he has inculcated in the population.

When such a regime stays within its own borders its existence might be tolerated. But this one hasn't done that.

[Serial_Apologist]

Your [1], [2] and [3] (my numbering) seem to me to place western responsibility for the current war firmly in a secondary position. Since 2000 when Putin first became president he has manipulated the system to put Medvedev briefly in as his puppet, only to resume the presidency and organise a referendum to allow him to continue beyond the then constitutional limit of two terms. From a Russia edging its way cautiously towards democracy, it was he who slammed the door, eliminating (by incarderation or assassination) political rivals and critics, gagging the free press and replacing it with a state propaganda machine and replacing the diplomats with state propaganda parrots. And yes, 'a defining national mythology based on an idea of inherent destiny' is exactly what he has inculcated in the population.

When such a regime stays within its own borders its existence might be tolerated. But this one hasn't done that.

Not 100% firmly - the West could have offered what one might call ancillary assistance which could not subsequently be labelled "outside interference". For a start, public ownership was not the main problem for Russia, but the way it was managed, namely in the top-down way in which large-scale industrialisation and its state planning had been imposed without grass roots involvement ever since Stalin's time. This was not helped by adopting a macho posture of keeping up with the West on armaments production further consolidating bureaucratic rule. Western technological help and advice, which would have kept large-scale Russian production publicly owned, would I suggest have been there for the taking in three ways: firstly sending in ecologists and sustainable tech engineers to clean up polluted lakes, rivers and contaminated soils by sustainable means, which actually do exist; secondly by providing advisers not wedded to privatisation as a precondition of success, viz support; and thirdly - on the strength of the aforementioned - offering the help of NGOs tasked with promoting all-in grass-roots involvement and decision-making in workplace and neighbourhood planning. There is (or used to be) the Institute for Worker's Control in this country. Bottom-up democracy, extended beyond the limited remit of periodic elections, had always been the main benchmark of socialism, going back through Trotsky and Lenin to Marx and further back to the Levellers - what better could the Western bourgeoisie do than send them off to cause trouble elsewhere! - as had happened in the 1960s when thousands of students took time out to live in Cuba and help build a worker's state there? The dismembered USSR no longer posed any threat by that stage, real or confected, after all!

[french frank]

Not 100% firmly -

Well, 'firmly in secondary position' was not intended as a quantifiable percentage

the West could have offered what one might call ancillary assistance which could not subsequently be labelled "outside interference". [...] Western technological help and advice, which would have kept large-scale Russian production publicly owned, would I suggest have been there for the taking in three ways: firstly sending in ecologists and sustainable tech engineers to clean up polluted lakes, rivers and contaminated soils by sustainable means, which actually do exist; secondly by providing advisers not wedded to privatisation as a precondition of success, viz support; and thirdly - on the strength of the aforementioned - offering the help of NGOs tasked with promoting all-in grass-roots involvement and decision-making in workplace and neighbourhood planning.

I think what you're describing is a sin of omission rather than of commission and might better be thought of, with hindsight, as a lost opportunity. Is allowing former Soviet bloc countries to join NATO ('expansion') or the EU "outside interference"? That would require acceptance of the Russian view that such countries are indisputably part of Russia's 'sphere of influence' and encroachment is therefore an aggressive act.

Meanwhile, Zelensky's choice of Defence Minister in Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar, reminds us of the way the Crimean Tatars were treated by the Soviet Union, especially in light of Russia's accusations of 'genocide' of Russians in the Donbas.

[Joseph K]

The west surely is responsible for creating an environment in Russia in which someone like Putin has managed to do what he's done - also people like Tony Blair up until quite recently were still advocating working with him as an ally - Putin's Useful Centrist IDIOTS - YouTube - I've posted this link before but it's again relevant, and I entreat people to check out the whole chapter/book - that is, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine - Russia's Shock Therapy: Neoliberalizing Russia | Shortform Books

[Serial_Apologist]

Well, 'firmly in secondary position' was not intended as a quantifiable percentage



I think what you're describing is a sin of omission rather than of commission and might better be thought of, with hindsight, as a lost opportunity. Is allowing former Soviet bloc countries to join NATO ('expansion') or the EU "outside interference"? That would require acceptance of the Russian view that such countries are indisputably part of Russia's 'sphere of influence' and encroachment is therefore an aggressive act.

Meanwhile, Zelensky's choice of Defence Minister in Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar, reminds us of the way the Crimean Tatars were treated by the Soviet Union, especially in light of Russia's accusations of 'genocide' of Russians in the Donbas.

It would seen that Putin's vision includes rehabilitating anyone who has played a major role in the history of his country. BTW I wasn't aware that Putin had been offered membership of NATO - only "collaboration" - but I could be wrong.