NATO’s Nazi-Lovers Would Starve Workers in Britain and Russia!
The media-driven war frenzy against Russia over Ukraine is linked to starving and freezing ordinary people and privatising and destroying our basic public services, smashing what is left of the system of social security, and wrecking the National Health Service in favour of privatised medicine. The pandemic has been used as a wedge for that, and now all public health protection against Covid has been junked and healthcare put under massive strain yet again. This was all going on before the war frenzy got underway, but the media-driven hysteria has given the capitalists the cover to put their foot down hard on the accelerator.
The huge rise in fuel costs, which is pure profiteering, likewise was going on before the media war frenzy began but the threat now is that the sanctions (a war measure) against Russian oil and gas will mean prices that have effectively doubled for many, may double again. On top of the cut in Universal Credit, and the NI-rate rise due in April, Inflation is already coursing through the system and increased fuel costs are driving up many other commodity prices, including those of food. The government’s ‘emergency’ response to this this, from Council Tax Rebates to raising NI allowances, is pitiful and will as usual, benefit the wealthy. And we see capitalist ideologues like Adair Turner, former CBI chief and now ‘green’ capitalist ideologue, calling for ordinary people to ‘sacrifice’ for the war drive:
“Putin thinks the west is rotted by liberalism and won’t make the smallest sacrifice to stand up to him. We need to reduce energy consumption to make an impact,” he said, citing a reduction in speed on major roads to around 55mph and turning down thermostats by several degrees as examples of how that could be achieved.”
These parasites won’t need to freeze or starve of course. That is for the oiks. We’ve seen similar garbage from Biden and other leading American politicians, from EU bigwigs like Ursula van den Leyden, from Tory MPs. Meanwhile Keir Starmer, aka Dür Stürmer, has gone from smearing Labour opponents of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as Jew-haters, to covering up for NATO’s support for Nazis and threatening anyone who questions NATO’s supposed ‘moral’ nature with expulsion from Labour. Starmer won’t fight the government over this cost-of-living attack any more that he did over the pandemic, where he did nothing to oppose the repeated sabotage of public health measures the public forced on Johnson. For Starmer and Johnson, profits came before health. In 2020 he supported Johnson in forcing kids into unsafe schools against union opposition, which undoubtedly created the conditions for the deadly, super-infectious Alpha variant which massively increased the death toll in Britain and spread around the world.
Labour grovels to the Tories on virtually everything because it supports neoliberalism and capitalism as a system: within that system there is no room for reforms anymore, only attacks. Blair’s government pioneered many of the current government’s attacks, launched predatory imperialist wars like Iraq, and even began the privatisation of the NHS through PFI hospitals. We advocate that no-one should vote for Starmer’s Labour in local elections or at all: socialists and trade unionists should form a new party to stand for a programme and strategy for abolishing capitalism, not trying to save it at our expense.
The capitalist media is covering up for the large-scale influence of outright Nazis in Ukraine. Like the Azov Regiment, part of the Ukrainian army, which uses the Wolfsangel, Death’s Head and sometimes the Swastika as its symbol. The birthday of Stepan Bandera, a WWII Nazi collaborator whose militia slaughtered numerous Russian and Ukrainian anti-fascists, and 200,000 Jews, is celebrated in Ukraine as a public holiday. The cover-up of these things is especially true in the liberal media, who some might expect to have some conscience about such things. But no, the BBC and the Guardian, who have in the past run exposés of the power wielded by Nazis in Ukraine, today systematically hide this, and suppress discussion. Even their agitation in support of refugees is racist, as the EU gives asylum to Ukrainians because they are white, and their cause is pro-imperialist. Non-whites and victims of imperialism generally are treated like dirt.
The banning of Russia Today is to suppress understanding of this, part of regimenting the population to make ‘sacrifices’ for the capitalist-imperialist war drive against Russia. The middle-class media luvvies have woken up to the fact that their lords and masters, big capital, now regard outright Hitlerites as useful to them. So, these foul hypocrites about-turn and become the most demented in shouting down everyone who questions NATO expansion, its support for Nazis and the obvious fact that NATO deliberately provoked this war.
Why do they hate Russia? Because under Putin, Russia has retreated from neoliberalism and renationalized a large part of the Russian economy that was privatised under Yeltsin. With the massive privatisation ‘shock treatment’ in Russia in the early 1990s, the life expectancy of ordinary Russians fell by six years between 1987 and 1994. That has been reversed because much of neoliberalism has been reversed. Putin’s Russia is not socialist, its still capitalist but the form of capitalism in Russia is out of step with the neoliberal world project of subjecting every country to plunder and profiteering.
US capital and its British and EU servants want to defeat, colonise, partition and plunder Russia, and then move on to China. They are quite prepared to risk nuclear war in doing so, as well as rowing back on even the totally inadequate concessions they have made to combatting climate change to try to screw Russia with sanctions. Russia and China are too big for that, this will likely just fragment the world economy and backfire against the Yankee dollar. But they are desperate enough to risk that also. Profits and plunder come before human survival for imperialist capital. The fall in profit rates that the capitalist system produces creates a desperate hunger for profit from anywhere at all, even if they must risk everything to get it.
Neoliberal capitalism has plundered and destroyed so many of the social gains previously won by organised labour in Western countries and around the world, waging brutal and genocidal wars against anyone who resists, from Iraq to Venezuela to Syria to Libya. It is in the interest of workers in the West to defend Russia and defeat the imperialist war drive, for Russia to defeat NATO and its Ukrainian liberal-Nazi proxy coalition, and to solidarise with the working class of the Donbass, who have been resisting these attacks since 2014, defending themselves against a Nazi war that has killed over 14,000 people.
