The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 7th March 2014
UKRAINE and the Crimea have become a pivotal point in the power play between United States imperialism on one side and Russia on the other. Putin and the government he heads are definitely not socialist. But they do not seek world hegemony in the same way that the United States does. Putin is not the puppet of a megalomaniac military industrial complex in the same way that Obama is.
Russia is well aware that US imperialism has designs to bring it down as a rival capitalist power. When the Cold War ended the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and naïve progressives imagined that Nato would also become redundant and disappear. Instead it has grown and settled itself all over eastern Europe, the Middle East and is now trying to encircle China as well and make inroads into Africa.
The US neo-con strategists want to control the whole world and its reserves and in doing so are threatening the future of human existence on this planet. But they have a big weakness; they are running out of resources to fund their invasions and aggressions. Big banks are no longer secure and various countries around the world are seeking to ditch the dollar and trade in other currencies.
US imperialism grew in power in the first few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, tearing Yugoslavia into digestible pieces and then invading Afghanistan and Iraq. But it came unstuck. It was easy enough to walk into these places but the people there are not the dumb pushover the Americans expected. The longer they stayed the more the resistance grew. It was like a fly boasting it had conquered the fly paper.
Libya was easier for them and they left a prosperous and cultured country a smoking ruin being fought over by gangs of fascist rats.
Syria was another matter because the people of the imperialist countries had grown weary and wise to the imperialists’ use of phoney pretexts to invade other countries and Russia used its UN veto against invasion, so operation take-over-the-world stalled.
The US tries to persuade its vassal states like Pakistan, Britain and the European Union to do its fighting for it. And this was behind the huge propaganda assault on Ukraine to try to drag it out of Russia’s economic sphere of influence, into the EU and then into Nato. And this could include the plum prize of gaining control of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea base at Sebastopol in Crimea.
The propaganda offensive was only partially effective. Polls showed that by a small majority most Ukrainians against joining the EU — hardly surprising after what happened to Greece. Many people in west Ukraine thought the EU would be better for them than Russia. They were easily persuaded by CIA and EU agitators that they were being oppressed by their democratically elected government.
And in among these crowds that filled Maidan Square were a minority of out-and-out Nazis. The crowd encompassed a wide range of political views aims but the Nazis were very clear on what they wanted, well organised and armed. So they soon took on the leadership of the protests; what were reported by the western media as “peaceful protests” involved snipers shooting at police and throwing Molotov cocktails.
The elected president Yanukovych ceded new elections and then fled to Moscow as the insurgents took over the reins in Kiev — along with their American advisors.
Putin moved immediately to protect the Russian presence in Crimea and was welcomed by the Crimean people. He moved decisively and with enough numbers that no shots needed to be fired. In other parts of eastern Ukraine like Donetsk and Zhaparotzhe people are rising to take control of their regional government bases from the violent usurpers in Kiev.
There is little the West can do. Threats of economic sanctions are laughable; they would see gas supplies cut off to all Europe, including Britain. Obama is not is a position to send in any troops. And it is this loss of face, this helplessness that is so troubling to the western media.
As for the people of Ukraine outside of Crimea, they could be facing a civil war and our role in this is to give solidarity to our communist comrades there and to fight, along with Stop the War against any further Nato intervention.