No War with Russia

It’s This System, Not Humanity That Needs to Become Extinct

Dear Readers: Today’s essay is adapted and expanded from an antiwar speech I gave at an antiwar rally held by the Revolution Club of Chicago yesterday.  The title is taken from one of the main slogans advanced at this rally and march, which faced off in Chicago’s Millennium Park with a large rally of pro-war marchers carrying both the national Ukrainian blue and yellow flag and the far right neofascist black and red Ukrainian banner.   

Doomsday Nears, Courtesy of Two Gangster States

As the American news cycle shifts between mass shootings, tornados, trans-bashing, the war on abortion, and the indictment of Donald Trump on the least of his crimes, the US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine rages on, killing many hundreds of soldiers every day. It has killed more than 8400 Ukrainian civilians to date. This war, into which the United States has poured more than $75 billion dollars so far, has brought the world closer to a nuclear conflagration than any moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It’s because of this war that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently put its Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it has ever been since its inception in 1947.

This isn’t Bolivia and Paraguay having a tussle over some contested water and land rights. This is two powerful and imperial gangster states – the US and Russia – with enough nuclear weapons between them to blow the world up many times over.  One of those states, Russia, is fighting what it considers an existential war on its own southwestern border, a border murderously invaded by the West twice in modern history.

“Let Us be Honest”

Does anybody doubt that the United States would be threatening to use nuclear weapons if Russia and/or China were arming and funding a war with the US in Mexico or Canada?  What if Russia and/or China floated some missile-carrying ships down the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Great Lakes (there were US warships in the Black Sea, which has a direct eastern border with Russia, as recently as December of 2021)? How about China putting its latest state-of-the-art aircraft carrier in the Caribbean?

“Let us be honest,” writes the longtime peace and justice minister Bob Bossie:

“The US surrounds both Russia and China with numerous ships, planes, and bases including nuclear weapons.  Why? To prevent those nations from challenging US world dominance.  What do you think would be the US response if Russian and Chinese ships patrolled US shores, positioned troops in bases in Canada and Mexico, and all of these were armed with nuclear weapons? The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis gives us some indications when the world came the closest to nuclear war between the US and the USSR. Just think of all the madness resulting from the overblown Chinese ‘spy’ balloon incident” (Bob Bossey, “No to US/NATO War in Ukraine and Increasing Threats to China,” statement read at an antiwar rally led by the Chicago Revolution Club in downtown Chicago on April 2, 2023).  

To Weaken an Imperial Rival, Not Defend Democracy

Now, the minute we as real socialists and communists and therefore as anti-imperialists start criticizing the provocative and dangerous US role in Ukraine you can expect some liberal or centrist or even an occasional leftist to call you an apologist and even an agent of the authoritarian despot and criminal  Vladimir Putin and his regime.  They will also often tell you that you don’t support the people of Ukraine.

Nonsense. Contrary to what we hear in the US corporate war and entertainment media, all the money and advance military hardware and intelligence “our” government is pouring into Ukraine – fanning the flames of a war that could easily go nuclear and end life as we know it – isn’t about advancing or protecting democracy in Eastern Europe or anywhere else.  The US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said it early on alongside US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a press conference in Kyiv: it’s about weakening Russia (the same goal behind the United States’ sponsorship of the terrorist Mujahideen in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion of that nation in 1979). It’s about draining the strength of an imperial rival on its own immediate border.  So what if this fuels and prolongs a conflict that has made life precarious and miserable for millions of ordinary Ukrainians while tipping the world closer to thermonuclear catastrophe?    

US democracy defense and promotion? Know any other good jokes? What, like in absolutist Saudi Arabia, where the most reactionary government on Earth takes in billions of US dollars’ worth of US weaponry? Like in the judeo-fascist apartheid state of Israel and numerous other authoritarian regimes – see this report (titled “Nearly three Fourths of the World’s Dictators received US Weapons and Military Assistance”) for an excellent account – that are backed by Uncle Sam? Seriously?

Beneath US propaganda about peace, justice, and the struggle against autocracy and imperial aggression, the truth is that super-imperial Washington saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to smack down a rival imperial state. America’s “Masters of War” (Bob Dylan) don’t mind seeing many more Ukrainians die and get maimed or seeing the world brought to the edge of nuclear and (oh by the way) environmental[1]annihilation to gain global imperial advantage – and to send a message to China that it better not try to control its own region (like the US does in the Western hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine) or challenge the US beyond Asia.   

Real Anti-Imperialists vs. the Putin Left

There are some folks who call themselves radicals, socialists, and anti-imperialists who are pro-Russian and who do parrot the language of Putin and provide justification for his unlawful and murderous invasion of Ukraine. This is the Putin/RT Left, with numerous dodgy “the Bucha Massacre maybe didn’t happen” outlets like Mint Press News, The Grayzone, Consortium News, and Black Agenda Report.  It’s right that Washington and its tool NATO provoked (quite recklessly) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but wrong to deny the criminality of the invasion and its atrocity-filled execution.  It correctly denounces the long and terrible record of US imperialism but perversely uses that ongoing history to provide pretend justification for Russian imperialism and war crimes.

Serious and actual socialists and anti-imperialists don’t make those mistakes. Real socialist anti-imperialists in the USA are of course quite aware that we live in the belly of the beast of the biggest, baddest, and most dangerous and aggressive military superpower not just in the world today but in all human history. We know damn well what the American Empire did to the Philippines and Korea and Central and South America and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and all the rest.  We know  that, as a PBS documentary showed last week, US president Richard Nixon would have unleashed nuclear weapons on the people of Vietnam but for the radical-led antiwar mobilization in the US in 1969. We know about all the dictators and despots and death squads the American Empire has long backed and installed around the planet.   

Yes, as Aljazeera reported a year and a half ago, the US “controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.” It’s the top dog imperialist superpower by far and away – yup.

We revolutionary socialists and communists don’t need any lectures on all that (see my essay, “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,” posted by Consortium News five years ago.)

At the same time, we don’t support other capitalist and imperialist gangster states in the world system just because they aren’t the USA or just because Washington is fighting with them for wealth and power.  We don’t reflexively line up with a mass-murderous dictators like Assad simply because he’s on the wrong side of the American Empire. We don’t line up with the women-hating fascist theocrats atop Iran because Washington opposes the Teheran government. We don’t align ourselves with fake-communist and authoritarian state capitalist-imperialist China because Washington has designated it as its leading rival and enemy.  We aren’t foolishly smitten with the emergence of a more multipolar world capitalist system, as if that’s any less horrific, oppressive and exterminist than a more unipolar one.   

Where We Don’t and Do Live

We do not back Putin’s criminal and bloody invasion of Ukraine.  Anyone who thinks that the anti-feminist gay- and trans-bashing neofascist  Christian white nationalist Putin regime is some kind of virtuous anti-imperialist force is living in a dream world.

But Russia is not our main responsibility here in the USA. We don’t live in Russia.  The Russians need to overthrow their own gangsters and fascists and capitalists and imperialists.  They need to make another Russian Revolution.  Our responsibility here in the US is to take down our gangsters, our fascists, our capitalists and our imperialists. And really, it’s bigger than that.  Our task and that of the people of the world is to take down capitalism the system.  Yes, capitalism the system.  This expand-or-die system is imperialist by its very nature and that’s true whether you are talking about the top dog United States or China or Russia or for that matter England or France (hence the validity of the longtime “Maoist” term “capitalism-imperialism”).  Our task here in the US is to make a real North American socialist revolution.

“Let us not talk falsely now,” as Bob Dylan says, “the hour is getting late.” Imperialism, lethal inter-state conflict, imperial competition, and war are  built into the very nature, the essence, the DNA of the capitalist world system. Asking or expecting capitalism not to engage in deadly war and not to poison the natural environment is a fool’s game. It’s like asking a fish not to swim in water. The same goes for asking or expecting capitalism to permit the end of the police state or of racial oppression or of sexist patriarchy or of nationalism or (of course) of class rule.

It’s like the recvoms say: “it’s this system, not humanity, that needs to become extinct.”

Endnote

+1. The Ukraine War has exacerbated the ongoing climate catastrophe – the arguably the biggest issue in all human history – in different was.  It has pushed the world’s leading nations further away from the global cooperation required to address the crisis.  It has sparked new Western oil and grass drilling to make up for reduced and sanctioned oil and gas flows to the West from Russia. At the same time, the climate catastrophe, an outcome of capitalism, increases the likelihood of war and of course of nuclear war.  As Bob Bossie  explains (in the documented cited in the fourth paragraph of this essay), “nuclear war becomes ever more likely because of the impact of climate change – floods, droughts, extreme weather patterns, fires, sea level rise, mass migration, etc. These changes in earth’s climate push nations into greater competition for diminishing human necessities such as food, fuel, fresh water, land, etc.”  The Ukraine War’s terrible ecological impact is part of why The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock was moved forward to 90 seconds to Midnight.