The latest article by Alexander Gallus on the Russia-Ukraine escalation and later war is a bit bizarre. Even if I agree with the conclusion, that NATO is ultimately to blame for the war by poking Russia and cornering it until it took an aggressive move- we must not forget that it is taking this move and that it is an aggressive move. Right now, it has invaded Ukraine on several fronts and across several borders, on a flimsy pretext of “denazifying” Ukraine1, while the Russian Army does not hesitate to employ equally murderous Chechen and other right wing death squads which have also been employed against their domestic communists.
While the tragic war is ongoing, it is impossible to predict the outcome, but one cannot avoid the fact that it is happening. Most of us (including myself) thought that all of this was another war panic. And we weren’t the only ones caught by surprise- watching the German intelligence head running away in his car from Kyiv might give us some consolation. Of course, the solution is not to cede ground to the mainstream media or the intelligence agencies, which even if they got it right this time predicted twenty other invasions that never happened, the same way they “predict” an Iranian nuclear bomb every other year. So, then the question becomes: where do we go from here? And what do we do about our credibility?
I think the essential thing is to first apologize. To say out loud and clear that we got it wrong this time. To try to track the reasons why we got it wrong- my two hunches being that the Russian state is much more autonomous of its ruling class than the American one; and that we mismatched the scales of the game, with Putin clearly playing for a much higher, and aggressive gambit than we were expecting, i.e. not just a defensive recognition of the People’s Republics of the Donbas, or even a military incursion similar to the Georgian wars of 2008, but an aggressive attack, including the passing of soldiers through Belarussian territory, which looks at attempting to tear apart the wider NATO and EU commitments at whatever price is necessary.
Then, we must outline our program. Basics must include a call for immediate peace, for the acceptance of refugees (not just those Ukranian of course, and a legalisation of those already here) and an unconditional recognition that the main enemy is still at home despite the current war. The last point will be unpopular, and now is not our moment. But we must hold the line. I think comrade Gallus is correct to point out that any situation which hopes to achieve some sort of capitalist peace will come from wide dialog and a recognition of Russia’s interests, and one can always debate how permanent that will be- but the time is not right for ironies about “Mad Vlad” when it is clear that he has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, and innocent people (and even some with which we talk on Discord regularly) are facing life and death situations. Doing so risks alienating those on the left and of future potential allies who are rightly in shock about the loss of innocent human life.
Comradely,
RF
