Stop the War Coalition’s Latest Statement on the War in Ukraine

I’ve just got this email from Stop the War Coalition, protesting against the escalation of the conflict. It condemns not only Russia, but also NATO for seeking to expand eastward and the thirty years of failed policies that have resulted in the present situation. It states that only diplomacy and a return to the Minsk-2 agreement at the end of the Cold War can end this crisis. It has my complete support, and I am therefore posting it here. I am not a member of the Coalition, but I’m leaving the invitation to join them for anyone who might be interested.

‘Our latest statement on Ukraine
22/02/22

Stop the War condemns the movement of Russian forces into eastern Ukraine and urges that they immediately withdraw, alongside the resumption of diplomatic negotiations to resolve the crisis.

This dispute could and should be resolved peacefully, and that remains the only basis for a lasting settlement, rather than the imposition of military solutions.  That it has not been resolved is not, however, the responsibility of the Russian or Ukrainian governments alone.  

The conflict is the product of thirty years of failed policies, including the expansion of NATO and US hegemony at the expense of other countries as well as major wars of aggression by the USA, Britain and other NATO powers which have undermined international law and the United Nations.  

The British government has played a provocative role in the present crisis, talking up war, decrying diplomacy as appeasement and escalating arms supplies and military deployments to Eastern Europe.  

If there is to be a return to diplomacy, as there should be, the British government should pledge to oppose any further eastward expansion of NATO and should encourage a return to the Minsk-2 agreement, already signed by both sides, by all parties as a basis for ending the crisis in relations between Ukraine and Russia.  

Beyond that, there now needs to be a unified effort to develop pan-European security arrangements which meet the needs of all states, something that should have been done when the Warsaw Pact was wound up at the end of the Cold War.  The alternative is endless great power conflict with all the attendant waste of resources and danger of bloodshed and destruction.  

We send our solidarity to all those campaigning for an end to the war, often under very difficult conditions, in Russia and Ukraine.  Stop the War can best support them by demanding a change in Britain’s own policy, which can be seen to have failed. 

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If you agree with our statement and want to help us stop escalation in Ukraine you can do so by becoming a member of Stop the War today (if you’re not one already) or affiliating your local group or trade union branch.

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Maoist Rebel News on Nazi Coup Plot in Germany

I’ve absolutely no respect for Chairman Mao. Far from being a liberator, the former Chinese dictator was a ruthless butcher, who killed and brutalized millions during the ‘Cultural Revolution’. Over 60 million people died in the artificial famine his regime created. He and his comrades were also vandals and barbarians, who tried to destroy China’s millennia old culture by smashing monuments and priceless art treasures, as well as the ruthless persecution of religion, including Buddhism and Taoism, as well as Christianity.

But Jason Unruhe of Maoist Rebel News says some very interesting things and makes some very acute observations of contemporary capitalism. In this piece, he discusses reports, found only in the Mail and RT, that the German authorities discovered a Nazi plot by serving members of the armed forces to overthrow the government. The plot including 14,000 soldiers, who were members of Nazi organisations. It’s a trivial number compared to the vast numbers in the German armed forces, but it’s serious because they were genuine Nazis. In the event of widespread unrest, the plotters in the military planned to leave the civilian government to its fate, and start re-opening concentration camps, in which they would incarcerate leftists and members of ethnic minorities.

Unruhe notes that this story seems to have been comprehensively buried by all of the media, with the exception of the two above, because of its explosive nature. He also states that we don’t know how many people have been arrested. This is a serious threat to democracy and justice in Germany. It means anti-Fascists have to become better organized and equipped, with German antifas now in a dangerous position. This plot means that they are Europe’s first and best line of defence against a real Nazi resurgence.

I can’t say I’m surprised at the high number of real Nazis in Germany’s military. The Baader-Meinhof Gang in the 1970s were spurred on to carry out their terror attacks from the realization that the denazification campaign after the War had only affected a comparatively small number of those serving Hitler’s vile regime. Many others had escaped, and despite their horrific crimes were living peaceful, comfortable lives. The British and Americans recruited Nazi agents and collaborators, including men responsible for vicious pogroms and massacres against Jews, for the intelligence agencies during the Cold War. It thus really wouldn’t surprise me if they let many Nazi members of the armed forces keep their jobs in the Cold War as part of Europe’s defence against Stalin. Just as they set up Gladio, a left-behind resistance network that would fight Communism if the Warsaw Pact successfully invaded and conquered the West. The feared invasion mercifully never happened, but various elements of the Gladio network were involved in far right-wing terrorism. It’s possible something similar could have been behind the persistence of real Nazism in the armed forces. Also, the neo-Nazi papers on sale in the eastern parts of the Federal Republic after the War styled themselves as the newspapers for soldiers and peasants.

Fascism is now a very real threat in Europe, with the election of Far-right wing parties to power in Poland, Hungary and other countries in eastern Europe, Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, and the Fascist Alternative fuer Deutschland on the rise in Germany. The leaders and senior members of the latter do have Nazi, or neo-Nazi connections. They’ve made speeches denouncing Germany’s Holocaust memorial as a ‘national shame’, and declared that if they got into power they’d open an underground railway to Auschwitz.

But I’m not as pessimistic as Unruhe is here. I got the distinct impression that young Germans are very anti-totalitarian, and that German anarchists, who are very ready to fight Fascism on the streets, are very well organized.

This is, of course, if there’s anything to this story at all. I think it probably is true, but it may be fake news concocted for some strange reason, and released only by those two sources. I also wonder about the figures involved. 14,000 sounds very high. I’m not sure that the National Democrats or the German Republican Party, two of the main neo-Nazi parties before the AfD a few years ago, had anywhere near that number of members. They certainly didn’t have much popular support, as they always came very low down the list in German elections, although the NDP did manage to get something like four members elected to the Reichstag or somewhere in Germany before they were banned.

But if this is true, then it’s a frightening demonstration of how serious a threat Fascism now is. It has to be fought wherever it’s found, right across Europe, before it seizes power again and begins another Holocaust.

From the JFK Files: CIA Planned False Flag Attack from USSR

This is another interesting little piece from Jason Unruhe at Maoist Rebel News. Unruhe, sporting a black and orange Mohican, reports that amongst the other recently declassified documents relating to JFK, there were details of a false flag operation planned by the CIA to start a war with Russia. The agency wanted to convert a couple of American planes so that they resembled, at least from a distance, Soviet MIG fighters. Or alternatively, they would use real MIGs purchased from countries outside the Warsaw Pact. The planes would be used to stage an attack on America, which would then be blamed on the Russians.

Fortunately, the plan was never put into action. The costs of converting the American planes was much too high, at over a million dollars for each plane. Technical experts stated that it would be impossible, and the results would not be convincing except from a distance.

Unruhe points out that this shows how far the American military was prepared to go – to start a war that would easily have ended up in a nuclear inferno – in order to attack a nation that had defied American imperialism.

In fairness, American imperialism wasn’t the only issue involved here. The Communist states established by the Soviet Union were dictatorships, and alternative, competing political parties and organisations had been suppressed by force. But it’s also fair to say that what also terrified the Americans, and other, western leaders, was that an aggressive alternative to capitalism had emerged. In the 1950s under Khrushchev standards of living in the USSR rose to such an extent, and the economy prospered, that the Americans were seriously afraid that the USSR would overtake America as the richer, more affluent society. Hence the determination to find any means of discrediting Communism and destroying the USSR.

And this appears to be just one of a number of false flag attacks that the CIA dreamed up to blame on America’s enemies elsewhere in the world. A little while ago I remember posting up a piece about how the CIA also planned a series of bomb attacks in Miami and other cities in Florida, which they hoped to blame on Castro’s Cuba. All in order to start a war there, and restore the brutal Bautista regime, which Castro had overthrown.

There is now a section of the American population which really, really doesn’t trust their government. At it’s most extreme, this milieu is represented by people like Alex Jones, who rants about how the globalist elites are somehow in a weird alliance with evil aliens, or demons, and planning to destroy the world and turn the survivors into genderless transhuman cyborgs. All through socialism and feminism and with the use of FEMA camps. Many others simply don’t believe that Islamist terrorists were responsible for 9/11, and instead think that it was a false flag attack conducted by their own government with the intention of starting a war.

In fact, the line that attempted to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attack was a lie. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hated Hussein’s secular Iraq as much as they hated America. The ultimate responsibility for 9/11 lies with the Saudis. 17 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, and the operation was planned and funded by people very high up in the Saudi political hierarchy. But this was far too inconvenient for Bush and later Obama to reveal to the American public, and so they suppressed those pages of the report into the attack.

Given the numerous false flag attacks that the American military has planned and carried out against its own people, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident which provided the pretext for the Vietnam War, it isn’t even remotely surprising that so many Americans are highly sceptical of the official stories about 9/11.

Vox Political On Simon Jenkins Lies About Corbyn and NATO

Mike also put up an article a few days ago correcting another mendacious article about Jeremy Corbyn, penned by Simon Jenkins in the Observer. According to Jenkins, at the leadership debate in Solihull last week Corbyn had answered ‘No’ to the question of whether he would go to the defence of another NATO country if they were invaded by Russia. Other Blairites had also got the same impression, it seems. One of my friends told me that he had received an email from a Blairite friend telling him in very coarse terms that Corbyn had stated that he would submit to Putin and let the Russians rule us.

But Corbyn didn’t say that at all. He said he would go to war to defend a NATO ally, but explained at length that he would do everything he could to make sure it didn’t come to that. Mike has put up a full transcript of that part of the debate, pointing out that Jenkins’ article, and his conclusion that Corbyn wants us to leave NATO, is a lie.

As for Jenkins’ own personal politics, Mike has a photograph of him speaking at a meeting of Policy Exchange, the ‘intellectual boot camp of the Tory modernizers’. Which shows you how left-wing he is.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/22/no-simon-jenkins-its-your-lie-about-jeremy-corbyn-that-is-a-step-too-far/

In actual fact, it’s not unreasonable to ask what NATO’s real purpose is. William Blum in issue 22 of his Anti-Empire Report, has an article entitled ‘Why Does NATO Exist?’ It’s a fair question. NATO was formed to protect Europe from the threat of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the military pact formed by the countries of the eastern European Soviet bloc, with the exception of Yugoslavia. Blum points out that neither the Soviet Union nor the Warsaw pact exist any more, both having collapsed about 1991. He asks

If NATO hadn’t begun to intervene outside of Europe it would have highlighted its uselessness and lack of mission. “Out of area or out of business” it was said.

If NATO had never existed, what argument could be given today in favor of creating such an institution? Other than being a very useful handmaiden of US foreign policy and providing American arms manufacturers with billions of dollars of guaranteed sales.

See: https://williamblum.org/aer/read/22

But there are voices demanding that NATO be disbanded because of the threat it poses to peace. The New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and member of the council of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Alice Slater, two years ago published an in article in Counterpunch stating that with 16,000 of the world’s 17,000 nuclear weapons in the West and Russia, the US should not be working its way towards starting a new Cold War with Russia over events in Ukraine. Instead, she argued that it should honour the agreement it made with Gorby not to expand into the former Soviet bloc in return for his agreement not to block the reunification of Germany, and the entry of the former East Germany into NATO. She goes on to state that we should be working to disband NATO, and remove the US’ weapons from Poland, Romania and Turkey. She also states that the US should agree to the proposal to ban space weapons, made by China and Russia, reinstate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was scrapped by Dubya in 2001, and take up Russia’s offer to negotiate a treaty against cyberwarfare.

She briefly discussed the article in the Washington Post by Jack Matlock, who was the US’ ambassador to Russia under Reagan and Bush, and who described how it is NATO that is provoking Russia with its conduct in eastern Europe. She states that it is ironic that Obama is holding a third ‘Nuclear Security Summit’, without planning to cut back on America’s own huge nuclear arsenal and the $640 billion it plans to spend in the next ten years on two new nuclear bomb factories and new delivery systems – submarines, missiles and planes.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/25/time-to-disband-nato/

This is far more radical than anything Corbyn said. And Corbyn’s statement that he would work to stop a war before it got started is plain commonsense, given that such a conflict could, if not almost certainly would, lead to nuclear Armageddon.