Solidarity 628, 16 March 2022

“Stop the War”? Yes, but with victory for Ukraine!

The carnage and human suffering caused by Russia’s predatory war against Ukraine is immense. Towns in Eastern Ukraine – Kharkiv, Sumy, Mariupol – have been partially destroyed. Hospitals, public buildings, housing estates have been hit by missiles and Russian artillery fire. The battle for Kyiv will take place soon. 549 Ukrainian civilians, including 26 children, have been killed according to the United Nations estimates (as of 10 March), although the actual numbers will certainly be considerably higher. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says his armed forces have had 1,300 troops killed...

Why we look to workers' "sanctions"

We distrust NATO because we know the big capitalist powers will always give their own interests priority over the rights of less powerful nations. The NATO powers want to push back Putin, but only to restore stable investment and trade conditions, and stall new disruptions. They pushed Ukraine into signing a pro-Putin deal in 2015 ( the now-defunct Minsk 2 ) and they would do the same again. The US wanted to bring some (compliant) form of democracy to Iraq by their sanctions and then war there, but the outcome was chaos and deaths. We have no cause to denounce the trade and financial measures...

Open the doors to refugees!

Clare Moseley, founder of the Care4Calais charity, explained the thrust of the Tory government’s approach to Ukrainian refugees: “Ukrainians who spoke to the media, even when they weren’t eligible for a visa, immediately received one. Otherwise the Home Office was doing all it could to stop Ukrainians talking to the press.” So determined is the UK government to say one thing (to appear pro-Ukrainian) and do another (keeping out refugees) that Priti Patel and Home Office officials have repeatedly told straightforward lies, for instance about the establishment of (non-existent) application...

Putin is not a victim of NATO

NATO is a military alliance of big capitalist powers. We oppose it. But to present Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as triggered by NATO, rather than by Putin’s own imperialism, is a whitewash, as in an article by Nick Clark in Socialist Worker of 26 February. NATO was formed in 1949. The first shot it fired in anger was 1994 (over Bosnia). Russia has not been under threat of attack from NATO. Clark claims “thanks to NATO, the US practically funded the whole colonial war” of France in Indochina (1946-54). In fact US funding to France started in 1950 (along with the non-NATO Korean war) and was less...

Corrections

The article in Solidarity 627 on the House of Lords amendments to the Nationality and Borders Bill was based on a report from the website Electronic Immigration Network . We have since amended the online version in line with what it says on Parliament’s website – which is slightly different. Where the original said that Clause 15, on restricting asylum claims if the asylum-seeker had travelled through a safe third country, had been amended, the Parliament website says it has been removed. The Parliament website reported an amendment to allow asylum-seekers to work if they are still waiting on...

Lithuania cancels Covid vaccines for Bangladesh

It has been widely reported that Lithuania has cancelled a donation of 440,000 Covid vaccines to Bangladesh because of the Bangladeshi government’s abstention in the UN General Assembly vote on Russia’s war in Ukraine. I haven’t been able to find any statement or quotation from the Lithuanian government confirming this, but it seems to be true. It’s a disgraceful and stupid decision. Those who decided on Bangladesh’s stance at the UN will not be hurt by it. Those who will be hurt are people with mostly little influence over such government policy - the working class and in particular the poor...

Why has the Morning Star ignored Unite on Ukraine?

Last Thursday the executive council of the big union Unite met and passed a resolution on the war in Ukraine. The resolution “unreservedly condemns Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and stands in full solidarity with the millions of victims of the attack. Unite calls for an immediate cease-fire and a withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukraine.” It congratulates union members “such as those at the Stanlow refinery – who refuse to unload Russian oil from any ship regardless of the nationality of the vessel that delivers it, and Unite repeats the call on the UK government to close the loophole that...

DSA needs to learn the lessons of SDS

Sixty years ago, the United States was still in the grip of the McCarthy era. The Attorney General would regularly update his list of “subversive” organisations. Communists and other leftists were denied platforms in many places, including universities. Racial segregation remained in place in the Southern states. And young people were largely depoliticised, attending university in record numbers but showing little interest in changing the world. And then at a conference held in Port Huron, Michigan, the moribund League for Industrial Democracy decided to relaunch its student arm under a new...

Croatia 1992, Bosnia 1992, Kosova 1999, Ukraine 2022

British soldier in Bosnia in the 1990s, there to provide security for UN aid convoys In Croatia's war of independence (1991-5), about 14,000 civilians died; in the Bosnian war (1992-5), about 40,000; in the Kosovan war (1998-9), about 12,000. We distrust and dislike NATO; but it was far from the main problem in these cases. It intervened only very late (a short bombing campaign against Serb nationalists in Bosnia in September 1995, another against Serbia over Kosova in March-June 1999), and it accounted for some hundreds among the tens of thousands of civilian casualties. The great majority...

Tax the rich to shift from fossil fuels

In The Housing Question Engels mocks the French millionaires of his day for pouring their money into Germany, thus financing a hostile military power. The actions of the French capitalists were rational as an investment decision. But their unrestrained profit-seeking undermined France’s imperialist interests. A similar dynamic has played out between Europe and the Putin war machine. Europe gets 40% of its gas, 27% of its oil and 46% of its coal from Russia. Over many decades, trillions of dollars of European money has flowed into Russia’s state-owned fossil giants. The European capitalist...

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