This is the translation of International Revolutionary Tendency’s statement posted the day the NATO meeting in Vilnius began.
We know how it will end, however it ends: they will divide the loot – at least on paper – by negotiating the shares of participation in the war and eventual “peace” business, on the skin of the proletarians, and above all, of the proletarians of Ukraine.
In the capital of Lithuania, a NATO “two-day” opens today – and this is already the first lie because it will be a summit of heads of states at war against the Russian Federation, and not just military leaders. This may seem marginal, but it is enough to remind us that war is the continuation of politics by other means and, precisely, by means of military combat – given that, for us Marxists, politics is, in turn, with all the appropriate mediations, “concentrated economy” (whoever talks about this war avoiding its economic content is a cheater, or at least, if he has no power, a buffoon). Certainly Stoltenberg will not be missing, Crosetto [the Italian minister of “Defence”] will not be missing so as their counterparts in Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, given that each of these states has some claim to advance with respect to China (of which they dream to inflict another century of humiliation) and, generally, in the Pacific area.
Biden has already said that Ukraine is not ready, “mature”, to join NATO “before the war ends”. The reason, at least the official one, concerns the constraint of the Atlantic Pact which provides for the intervention of all allies in defense of even just one of its components. So if Ukraine joins NATO, all Pact countries that support Kiev’s war effort will officially become belligerents – and here’s a second colossal lie, because all NATO countries are already in this war to all intents and purposes with weapons and men! But none of the strongest shareholders of the Pact had anything to say: the current situation of war (formally) as a proxy war is more comfortable, the maximum costs of which are borne by Ukraine, that is – the specification is essential – by the Ukrainian workers, while the costs for United States, Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, etc., even though they too are at war, are limited to a few human losses, with the risk of reprisals reduced to the economic aspect, and supplies of military aid already guaranteed by furious negotiations and “covert” blackmail on the pledged pieces of the Ukrainian economy, human flesh and land.
Obviously, Zelensky and his Banderist gang have something to say: “It is absurd that there is no timetable for joining NATO”! Is it possible that only Ukraine should pay the terrible bill? – with the growing risk of having to pay him personally with his own life, if the exploited classes, now drugged by nationalism, realize what a terrible deception they have fallen prisoner of, believing that NATO really does guarantee “freedom” and “self-determination” of Ukraine. However, Biden, Macron and associates immediately had some good arguments to calm Zelensky and his cohorts: don’t worry, we will give you cluster bombs, to strengthen your terrorist potential; we give you the long-range missiles to strike deeper into Russia; we “are and will always be by your side” (the Italian premier Meloni).
After all, NATO’s guiding political principle is “war on Russia to the last Ukrainian”, and it is the club leaders who dictate the timing and methods of Ukrainian suicide, certainly not the “rulers” of Kiev.
But since cynicism is unlimited in disputes between imperialists, especially in warfare, here comes the moral lady, frowning. Biden’s allies are against the supply of cluster bombs, or rather they are a little bit troubled. The most lurid warmongers, from England to Italy, discover themselves adepts of the “chivalrous” war: the one registered in Wellington in 2008 when they agreed to make their massacres more “decent”, given that cluster bombs sow a unexploded part of their cargo difficult to “clear” at the end of the war, leaving a further horrible “memory” of the conflict – since usually there are colored unexploded residues, children often fall victim to them. Also in this case we see the typical Italian duplicity, since Italy officially sulks at Biden, but Crosetto, with a sibylline comment on twitter, is keen to remind us that “… the Russians have always used them”.
After all, it was not the moral that prompted the majority of European countries to ratify the convention against cluster bombs, leaving them to be used by Washington, their main ally, as well as the maximum architect of the massacres by any means and “decider of last resort” of wars and their load of horrors. Isn’t it perhaps that same morality that peddles non-existent ethical scruples, but, for example, didn’t bat an eye when in Iraq the “coalition of the willing” martyred Fallujah with phosphorus bombs? Or when Israel, as it has always done, reserves the same treatment for the Palestinian masses?
Why, then, are the European allies of the US discovering themselves – in this case – so exquisitely humanitarian and respectful of the “war agreements”? There are two reasons for this false leap in ethics: the first and essential one is that – under pressure from the United States, which has also made this war a war against the European Union – their involvement in the conflict is becoming more and more massive. And the signs of intolerance of the populations are growing under the weight of war expenses, even if this intolerance, so far, has not led to mass opposition to the war itself. If this scenario were to broaden, however, massive anti-war demonstrations with possible contagion from one country to another would become more likely. Another aspect concerns the exposure to reprisals, not only on the economic level, of sanctions and counter-sanctions, bottlenecks of supplies and exports, and all these developments would take place primarily on European soil for geographical and geopolitical reasons that are easy to understand. The fact that the summit is being held on the border with the Russian Federation is also another sign of the military continuous escalation, which worries the European governments of NATO – except for Poland and the Baltic states which are scrambling to gain the position of most loyal allies of the US superpower.
We have more than one reason to believe that the bomb argument will trigger a negotiation with which to compensate business partners: the quarrels between these great bandits, oligarchs of global capital, are always for the division of the loot. Even Erdogan’s resistance to Sweden’s entry into NATO – for “sacred reasons of principle”, there is no doubt – seems to have been overcome not only, and perhaps not so much, with the acceleration of Ankara’s entry into the EU, but thanks to the supply of F16s to the plenipotentiary of the Bosphorus, actor-pawn of the Ukrainian wheat agreement and many other border-line operations on the southern front of the Atlantic alliance. Furthermore, it is said that the program to equip Ukraine with cluster bombs is not as massive as it appears and the limits of use, even over time, have been illustrated by the Undersecretary of Defense, Colin Kahled, who claims that they “… will be used responsibly” (sic!).
The most important aspect remains, therefore, the preparation of the attack on Russian soil while from the political and propaganda point of view the purpose of threatening Russia with a type of intervention which is not to ventilate the use of atomic bomb, the mere declaration of which would have the effect of making the policy of Biden and the United States even more unpopular than it already is. At least for the moment, this task is left to Medvedev and other Kremlin advisers, except – of course – for moving NATO atomic warheads also in Italy…
In short, Ukraine has not yet been reduced to a desert so that a “comfortable” partition between the contenders can be started, but after Vilnius it is on the right track to become so. Also because on the Russian front, of course, the response is an attempt to make a new pact between the group around Putin and the former Wagner mutineers, who have returned to being patriots after being pro-tempore traitors and backstabbers. Really, even for the imperialists of the East, no less than for those of the West, the flaunting of “sacred” but … economically tractable moral values and ideals is always and only a deception for the proletarians, driven to massacre each other for the interests of their exploiters. China, in its turn, as an imperialist power on the rise, is torn between the drive towards cankering and the extension of the war in Europe, which would contribute to totally or partially wear out the old imperialist powers (paving the way for that “new multipolar order” to which it aspires), and the fear that the game will get out of control for everyone, plunging it, and with it the whole world, into a general conflict that is today premature for Beijing, although sooner or later inevitable.
More than ever, therefore, as established in the Milan assembly of 11 June, the imperative is: “let us join forces to stop their war“. Let’s abandon the national closures, the frustrating formulas like “Italy out of the war”, and the infantile illusions (in the best of cases) of stopping the rush to war through referendums. Let us fight with all our strength to weave the threads of an international uprising of the exploited against the war in Ukraine and the ever more heated trend towards a new world slaughterhouse!