This is the news you will not hear on the BBC. It is critical we know both sides of the story. If we allow our prejudices to run one way we will never find the solution to a peace formula that suits both sides.
American politicians, now balls high that they have ‘taken on’ Russia in a proxy war where only Ukrainians and Russians die, are talking openly about taking on China next, surrounding China with ABM warheads. This is lunacy.
Scotland, via our first minister and two vain SNP MPs who have been chasing ghost Reds under the bed for years, Alyn Smith and Stewart MacDonald, have ensured Scotland is part of that proxy war. The electorate was never asked for their view. This is unacceptable.
And while it is a tragedy that Putin lost patience with the West and recklessly, heedlessly decided to retake Ukraine, giving the West the cue to spend billions on more WMD, we now have a situation in which the West has no choice but to agree that Ukraine will be neutral which it refused to do, deliberately goading Russia into an invasion. In the short-to-medium term, issues such as Donbass region and Crimea will have to be pushed to the side, if we are to attain peace. The West must come to an accommodation with Russia. It has no choice.
For the sake of world peace and human existence on this planet, the US too has to stop invading other people’s countries – see Nicaragua and Iraq – like Russia invading Ukraine, unprovoked criminal acts, and calling US invasion ‘spreading Christianity and democracy’. It is neither. It is invasion of a sovereign state. It sets the precedent. It corrupts power. It is a tragic folly.
From renowned journalist John Pilger: The Guns of April
The United States and the NATO powers of Europe have set into motion a chain of events that is leading to World War III. In her famed work on the outbreak of World War I, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman detailed how miscalculations, the ubiquitous belief in a brief and winnable conflict, and irreversible tactical maneuvers—the “ifs, errors, and commitments”—accumulated as the imperialist powers dragged the workers of Europe into the snarl of the trenches and the slaughter of the Great War.
From No to Yes
A similar dynamic is unfolding in the US-NATO conflict with Russia. The US-supplied howitzers and massive deployment of weapons into Ukraine are sounding the Guns of April. In mid-March, US President Joe Biden repeatedly stated that he would not allow direct conflict between the United States and Russia, because “that would mean World War III.” A month later, this is precisely what the Biden administration is doing.
On Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin presided over a meeting of the representatives of forty nations in a council of war assembled by Washington on its Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe and the NATO Air Command. Austin, fresh from a visit to war-torn Kiev, confirmed that the war in Ukraine is a war between US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. He announced that Washington would be assembling every month going forward a comparable international gathering of high-ranking military figures—which he termed the Ukrainian Contact Group—to “focus on winning” the conflict with Russia.
The aims of the war are now clear. The bloodshed in Ukraine was not provoked to defend its technical right to join NATO, but rather was prepared, instigated and massively escalated in order to destroy Russia as a significant military force and to overthrow its government. Ukraine is a pawn in this conflict, and its population is cannon fodder. The Ramstein war council was organized to plot the next stage in this scheme. Prior to and in the aftermath of the meeting, the US and other NATO powers announced the deployment of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles, tanks and tactical drones.
Sending weapons extends war, not end it
The Contact Group, Austin declared, must “move at the speed of war.” In accordance with this direction, Germany announced Tuesday that it would deliver an unspecified number of Flakpanzer Gepard “anti-aircraft cannon tanks,” while Canada reported that it would be sending M777 howitzers, anti-tank munitions and armored vehicles. “The distinction limiting escalatory weapons,” which existed in the first weeks of the war, Air Force Magazine noted, “appears to have melted away.”
The pretense that the US and NATO are not at war with Russia has also “melted away.” Former US Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges stated on Sunday that the US aim in the conflict was “breaking the back” of Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded, accusing the United States of pressuring the Ukrainian government to sabotage peace talks and of conducting a proxy war in Ukraine. He warned that there was a “serious, real” danger of nuclear war. Austin dismissed Lavrov’s warning as “dangerous and unhelpful.”
What nonsense! Washington assembles a war camp and states that it aims to “break the back” of Russia. When Russia responds that such language and goals raise the danger of nuclear war, Washington declares this to be … unhelpful. The United States has made clear that it aims to crush Russia and topple its government. Faced with such an existential threat, the use of nuclear weapons becomes a tactic the Russian ruling class will weigh. Washington is determined to win the war, the Putin government is determined to prevent that from happening. There is no way out for either side but escalation. Lavrov is in fact correct: nuclear war is a real and serious danger.
NATO is a defence system now used as an offensive force
The real driving forces behind the war have emerged in the course of the conflict. The US and NATO powers goaded Russia into invading Ukraine, refusing to negotiate over Russia’s demand that Ukraine not be made a member of NATO. Russia termed its invasion a special operation, signaling that it intended a contained, tactical maneuver to stabilize its position in the region. The US, however, would not allow such a rearrangement and sought either to sink Russia in the quagmire of a “grinding occupation,” or to organize its defeat. To this end, Washington worked to undermine all efforts at a negotiated settlement. The rhetoric of Washington justifying this policy has deepened the conflict. Biden accused Putin of war crimes, then of genocide, and called for regime change in Moscow. Each new formulation had an irreversible, escalatory character, a click in the ratchet of war.
Despite the massive and mounting infusion of military equipment into Ukraine—Washington has shipped more than $3.7 billion worth of weaponry since the beginning of the war—the regime in Kiev has not been able to orchestrate the decisive defeat of Russia. The danger, seen from the standpoint of the US and NATO, is that Russia will be able to consolidate its control over Eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea coast. If the Ukrainian forces do not drive forward, then the advantage, at least from a military standpoint, shifts to Russia.
Military men making the decisions
The development of the conflict, set in motion in the Oval Office and deliberated in the Kremlin, is increasingly in the hands of military men and it is reaching a point of no return. A decisive defeat of Russia in the conflict requires the ever more direct involvement of the NATO powers themselves, up to and including the deployment of troops.
With its arms shipments, sweeping declarations and councils of war, the United States has staked its entire credibility on the defeat of Russia in this conflict. “The stakes reach beyond Ukraine and even beyond Europe,” Austin declared on Tuesday. The fate of American hegemony, including the credibility of its threats against China, hangs in the balance. The reckless decisions made by Washington have thus become the major premise in the logic of further escalation.
Washington drags behind it the major powers of Europe, as it assembles, with the hubris of empire, a war camp on the continent. Britain has been deeply complicit in every escalatory step, and Germany and France are taking up their assigned roles. Washington gathers the military conspirators on a US airbase in Germany, the country which once launched Operation Barbarossa, holds the Germans as virtual bystanders, and plots its war with Russia.
The leaders of the imperialist powers, above all the US, are proceeding with a recklessness bordering on criminal insanity. But it is a recklessness that arises out of class interests and the logic of the capitalist crisis. Driving the escalation of the conflict are not only geopolitical interests but, even more significantly, the intractable economic, social and political crisis in every major capitalist country, above all the United States.
As was the case with World War I, the same contradictions that give rise to imperialist war also provide the impulse for world socialist revolution. Even as the war develops, mass protests and working class struggles are erupting throughout the world, fueled by the surge in inflation and historically unprecedented levels of social inequality. The plans for world war are being implemented entirely behind the backs of the population. Workers must be alerted to the danger, and the growing struggles throughout the world fused with the fight against imperialist war and the capitalist nation-state system.
*****************************************************
Grouse Beater 
The Yanks war in Vietnam, was my wake up moment to Geopolitics and to understand, read and read.
My reading and understanding then led me back
To British involvement with regime change and other countries natural wealth.
India, Palestine, Indonesia etc.
The dark shadow of the yanks in South America and around the world.
I watched our lot follow the yanks into Iraq and Libya, and Afghanistan.
The French into Mali, the Saudi’s in Yemen.
The Belgians in the Congo.
I worked in Algeria and saw what the French did first hand.
As a working guy , I searched out the expert investigative journalists and photo journalists
The real ones! Getting the truth out there.
I watched in 2014, quiet protests in Ukraine turn into something else.
After McCain and Nuland were in Ukraine.
Then later the failure of the French and Germans to force the Minsk agreements, it’s as if they had been told to stand back.
The realisation that all those in the western countries are puppets to the yanks.
As are our media complex.
The blood lust lynch mobs!
We have millions of people in the west, yet there is no protest.
Why?
We in the west have our war criminals, the yanks and the British, yet they have altered the ICC in the Hague to prevent prosecution.
Is this the dying empire’s of the west and a new world order.
I hope so!
The yanks have to be sent home for good.
Scotland must end this perfidious union for our own sakes.
I’m sorry for the ordinary Ukrainians and Russians getting killed .
I hope they manage to overcome.
It is so serious, yet there seems to be no ground swell of protest.
🐼🐼🏴🏴
It has always been America’s aim to dismember the Russian Federation into its constituent parts and republics, and, even if the war in Ukraine does not escalate and draw in NATO forces, the dismemberment of the Russian Federation, as of the former Yugoslavia, will cause the loss of countless lives. The big powers rule the chessboard of geopolitics like entitled grand masters, and the pawns are always the wee countries – and, sometimes, big countries – around them.
The American economy’s reliance on sales of armaments – the military-industrial complex – is now huge and this bloated sector, along with the Big Pharma/Big Tech, etc. industrial complex seeks to bend everyone else in the world to their predatory and unfettered capitalist project, consuming more and more of the world’s resources. That many Americans recognize this is to their great credit. Here, in the UK, we are the attack dogs, snarling and biting at the behest of our masters in the US, so, if war is instigated, we will be in the front line – and Scotland even more so, because we host the UK’s nuclear arsenal.
The answer could lie in bringing both Ukraine and Russia into Europe (as both Gorbachev and Yeltsin advocated after the fall of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of the Warsaw Pact) but that would create a much more powerful power bloc in Europe, with two such massive countries coming on board, and, apart from internal disapproval from the likes of Germany, France and the UK, still, to all intents and purposes, part of Europe in NATO terms, the US would see that as inimical to their own geopolitical interests, while, simultaneously and hypocritically, decrying European reliance on America.
Biden is a corrupt warmonger who has a personal stake in Ukraine, too, even as he destroys America from within with his social policies designed to overturn Western societal liberalism of centuries, and he makes Trump look like Mother Theresa/Teresa? That Zelenskyy is basically a puppet of the US goes without saying; either that or he is mad. No one, having the opportunity to claim his country’s neutrality would have not taken that path, squashed as Ukraine is between East and West, unless under huge pressure from the US to not do so.
Even then, his lack of backbone has led to the destruction of his country because it must have been obvious that a refusal to either declare neutrality or to remove all claims to NATO/EU membership could – not would, but could – lead to invasion by Putin’s Russia. Putin, albeit it was a drastic error to have invaded at all, despite the provocation, has outmanoeuvred the West and that is why the escalation by the West is now taking place. Every population involved should simply say: f..k off, do your own killing and dying, politicians and generals, we are not biting.
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
Thanks for this post. Given the widespread anti-Russia/pro-Velensky propaganda, hearing an alternative viewpont is essential for informing the public.
It’s worth noting that countries with most of the world population (China, India, Latin America, Africa) are refusing to get involved.
Indeed the Kenyan Government refused to allow Zelensky to address their parliament as they “feared being dragged into a conflict with the potential to hurt its bilateral ties with both Kyiv and Moscow”
https://nation.africa/africa/news/nairobi-declines-ukraine-request-to-address-kenyan-parliament–3779598
Yes ,it is a tragedy that there is no anti-war movement growing. The left and the so-called left in this country are either fissured and fractured or have turned into attack dogs of war. Having observed the numerous wars instigated by the US to impose its hegemony on the world I am frankly in despair that even people on the Scottish independence side seem to have become supporters of US aggression and even deny that it is so. One wonders where they have been over the past decades. (By the way, I am discounting the present SNP as being on the independence side. Under its present leadership it has become just another fawning Atlanticist careerist party. No, I am referring to those who have recognised the present SNP leadership for the phoneys that they are and understand the dishonest media war which has been unleashed on the very idea of Scottish independence, yet now seem to trust all the reporting by that same media on the Ukraine crisis.)
Yet again, throughout all the various conflicts of the past decades, I find that John Pilger is the constant voice of reason that I would trust throughout all the fog of propaganda produced by the western media in service to US hegemony and its assumed role as the world’s policeman, From Brzezinski’s luring of the Soviet Union into a war in Afghanistan (which involved the training and arming of tribal mujahidin who later provided the kickstart for Al Qaeda) the western support for Indonesia’s brutal war on E. Timor and all the subsequent western-backed conflicts in the Middle East to topple regimes, John Pilger has documented the arrogance and corruption of the horror show which is the west’s infliction of war and ruin on non-western countries. There are many countries in the world now who have suffered from the west’s military interference who must hate the west but meanwhile our media creates a picture of populations happy to have had their country subjected to the ‘benign’ attentions of western governments.
I find it frightening that so many people in this country seem to have abandoned their fate ( sometimes too enthusiastically) to the present day politicians whose motives are so transparent and reckless. The atmosphere is becoming thick with war fever and is reminiscent of that of World War 1 when intolerance and eagerness for the conflict had no truck with any arguments against the rush to war. Again, there will be a heavy price to pay for ordinary civilian populations, even the somnolent in their armchairs, seemingly oblivious of any danger to them. Somewhere along the way, throughout all those conflicts and proxy wars since World War 2, populations in the west have perhaps felt immune from the destruction of war being waged elsewhere and lulled by that, have allowed their governments their foreign adventures. Many of them need to wake up to the pressing danger looming in which war and destruction can come to these shores. It will be too late then for regrets.
Thank you for the article and the comments. I have been increasingly disgusted with the facile coverage and the halo polishing of the UK and US while happily ignoring their past sorties and the destruction of whole countries .
Great article from one of the vanishingly few genuinely honest , independent journalists – still – around . JP , like Noam Chomsky , is/are appearing more like prophetic voices in the wilderness , their unheeded warnings about the true nature of unchecked U.S Power more prescient with every new disastrous ( for others ) play in the Theatre of Armed Conflict . Ukraine just the latest , possibly terminal , example of US bad faith and obsessive self-interested manipulation .
Reassuringly clear-eyed comments from yourself and BTL
Excellent article, thank you Grouse Beater. I am reminded of what Aime Cesaire and other postcolonial writers warned us more than half a century ago in the aftermath of WW I and II, after disclosing the fact that the former empires crushing of national civilizations – including us Scots – merely paved the way for the Teutons to consume what was left of us, aided in all cases by the narrow tyranny of a dehumanized (native) bourgeoisie:
“And now I ask: what else has bourgeois Europe done? It has undermined civilizations, destroyed countries, ruined nationalities, extirpated “the root of diversity.” No more dikes, no more bulwarks. (Yet) The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder. The time of the old colonialism has passed. Which means that American high finance considers that the time has come to raid every colony in the world. American domination – the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred.”
And this:
“Unless Western Europe undertakes on its own initiative a policy of nationalities, a new policy founded on respect for peoples and cultures – nay, more – unless Europe galvanizes the dying cultures and raises up new ones, unless it becomes the awakener of countries and civilizations, Europe will have deprived itself of its last chance and, with its own hands, drawn up over itself the pall of mortal darkness.”
It’s reassuring to read this and the comments below. Sadly, we appear to be out of step with many others posting elsewhere with all sorts of tactics being adopted to silence those who don’t want to cheerlead this war from the sidelines. How can so many people be so blind?
@ Alf Baird. Have you listened to Ursula von der Leyen recently on behalf of EU countries? She’s as crazy as Biden.
She is one of the group DiEM25 want removed from power, and changes in the right-wing policies of the EU Central Bank.
GB, thanks for that. I hadn’t heard of DiEM25. Have just had a look to find out more about them.
Thankyou Gareth for bringing your audience to this article.
I have noticed that it often seems to be the ‘chronologically advantaged’ (cynical old grey haired buggers like me) who seem to see straight through the obvious Atlanticist machinations and spin and are prepared to point it out.
Alas there never is a balancing ‘Perspective’ on the pap machine in the living room.
Perhaps those on Twattter could share John Pilgers’ link:
to the World Socialist Website article:
Perspective
The Guns of April
WSWS Editorial Board
27 April 2022
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/27/pszn-a27.html
Depends on how long and how many losses Ukraine is willing to accept to try to push Russia out of east Ukraine. And the same for Russia, how far west does Russia want to go before they stop. Political opinion in the US gas its limits also as to how much they are willing to spend. An anti/war movement in the US is beginning to take place and will at some point take control and end the support for the war. The US is starting to have economic problems which will get worse and cause the anti-war movement to grow. I am not as pessimistic as expressed in the article or the above comments.