By April 19, 2022
As the live battle between the U.S.-led NATO forces and Russia in Ukraine is entering its eighth week, it has revealed itself as a proxy war, one opening a potential path to a world conflict.
To confront and stop this catastrophe, anti-war, popular and working-class forces in the imperialist countries must mobilize to stop the U.S.-NATO forces from extending and expanding the war. This may lead to sharp confrontations with the imperialist ruling class, but it is the only course possible.
This danger of a wider war has grown since Washington pressured Beijing in early March to honor sanctions against Russia or face greater U.S. hostility.
U.S. imperialism has dragged its West European allies − despite their own contradictory interests − into a confrontation with Russia. This confrontation uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder and a Ukrainian actor/comedian as the pretend leader in Kiev. In reality, Washington gives the orders.
The Pentagon and the U.S. military-industrial complex have already used the Ukraine conflict to twist arms throughout Western Europe and in the U.S. itself and increase military spending. Germany nearly doubled its outlay for the military. U.S. sanctions on Russia have disrupted economic plans in Western Europe, raising energy prices and increasing inflation.
NATO is sending stockpiled weapons to the Kiev puppet regime’s army. Even though these weapons will likely fail to bring victory to the pro-west regime in Ukraine, they have caused and will cause greater casualties among the Russian troops. They will extend the war’s duration, preventing a truce. Arms manufacturers, merchants of death, have received new orders and are raking in profits.
U.S. imperialism, other NATO regimes and their corporate media have waged a relentless propaganda war against Russia and its president Vladimir Putin.
In the U.S. this media blitz has surpassed in volume similar campaigns waged to provide pretexts for wars against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It has demonized Putin as thoroughly as earlier ones did Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The imperialists use the same playbook each war.
The enemy is at home
Anyone familiar with the recent history of U.S.-incited wars must be furious upon learning that Washington’s leaders want to charge Putin with war crimes. Even if the stories of civilian deaths in Ukraine are true − and nothing has been proven yet about what happened and who was responsible − they are incomparable to the millions killed during U.S. invasions and bombings of infrastructure in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yugoslavia, etc.
Western governments, while boasting of “free speech,” have censored major media presenting the Russian side − RT, Sputnik − while the corporate media omit the recent history of NATO’s threats to Russia:
Since 1991 NATO has nearly doubled its members, annexing countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, some bordering on Russia and all whose regimes are hostile to Russia. NATO holds regular war exercises near the Russian border. Most important, the U.S. is installing nuclear-capable rockets in the region that can reach Russian cities in five minutes and make a first nuclear strike on Russia possible.
Thus the advance of NATO eastward must be considered a serious existential threat to Russia, a danger at the very least of “regime change” to a Russian ruling-class grouping willing to submit to imperialist domination. Such a result would be a setback for oppressed nations worldwide and would extend, at least temporarily, imperialist domination.
The U.S. policy of prolonging the war in Ukraine by sending weapons and mercenaries is a danger to the world’s people. It is also a direct attack on the standard of living of the working class and people worldwide, including in the United States. Any mobilization of the workers to defend their standard of living must include a strategy to stop this war, a strategy aimed at the defeat of the imperialist ruling class, the main enemy of the world’s people.
Thus it is vital for anti-war and working-class organizations to organize education and action to demand:
Cut the military budget!
No arms to Ukraine!
Disband NATO!
