In The Name of Peace: Rein In Our Government

 The war in Ukraine drags on, amidst conflicting reports of atrocities and who caused them. Western media repeat the NATO dispatches attributing civilian deaths to retreating Russian forces, said to have been humiliated by the Ukrainian defense fighters. Other reports estimate that the civilian deaths and bombs were caused by Ukrainian groups such as the Azov battalion, documented pro-Nazi militias integrated in the regional armed forces of Ukraine. Still, other reports indicate that having accomplished its goals at this stage of combat, the Russian army is turning its attention to its strategic goals in Eastern Ukraine. All parties agree that Ukraine is being devastated by the warfare. There is little doubt that US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) supply of arms to Ukraine is prolonging the war and further destroying Ukraine.

 One thing has remained the same: while the military operations in Ukraine drag on, a million Americans have died from COVID. Hundreds of thousands condemned to living the streets, without a roof over their heads. More Americans in prisons than in any other country. Children going hungry every day. Fires and floods ravaging our lands. And again our ruling class is engaged in war, this time in Eastern Europe! Also, as it ships more and more weaponry to Ukraine, our ruling class accentuates its war on the American people: Missiles for Ukraine means more people starve in the United States.

The US has committed over $2 billion in arms to Ukraine since 2014. But people are sleeping in the streets of America. The U.S. foments wars in the Middle East and supplies arms to the combatants, but can’t feed its own people. Millions who lost their jobs during the pandemic are still not back at work. Our political leaders are working overtime to restrict voting rights in the United States. They praise Ukrainian migrants and refugees as heroes, while they cage Central American migrants at the US-Mexico border. They are not fighting for democracy anywhere. We have no dog in the current war! We have our own autocrats in our own country to deal with.

War is how America operates. In all but 15 years of its existence, the US has been at war somewhere. The United States has barely withdrawn troops from a 20-year war in Afghanistan that is estimated to have cost over $2 trillion. Now it is committing forces – both troops and hundreds of millions of dollars – to a war in Eastern Europe. The capitalists are individualizing an historic motion of the disintegration of the post-WWII world. By focusing on individuals they are diverting our view from their rotting and increasingly desperate system. They have killed millions in the last few decades of war-making, in places we had no business entering, all in our name. War is simply part of capitalism.

We have political representatives who, with hardly any dissent, vote for more money for the military each year but who can’t seem to agree on a watered-down Build Back Better bill for the American people. This war is already catastrophic, but even more, now that there are explicit threats to use nuclear weapons. The working class around the world will suffer because of this. The American people’s response to this war must be to disarm the war-makers – our own war-makers.

Western media continue to perpetuate a myth that this war began on February 24, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the US has orchestrated this conflagration. Despite an agreement not to expand NATO eastward, the US has championed admitting Eastern European nations. NATO was formed in 1949 as a military alliance against the Soviet Union. It continues today as an aggressive alliance to strangle Russia.

With over 750 military bases around the world, the US has troops stationed in more than 80 countries. In Europe alone, the US maintains more than 60,000 troops. US bases lie in a crescent from Russia’s Western flank to its Southern border into Central Asia. While the US is still the foremost military power in the world, China is challenging its economic supremacy. Facing that challenge means the US finds it increasingly important to weaken Russia.

Further, Europe is becoming more and more dependent on energy from Russia, and the US is acting to interrupt that. The more they go to war, the more the war takes even more away from the workers – in higher prices, lack of services, and directly in death and destruction. If they are successful in winning the right to supply Europe with energy, it will mean more fracking and contamination of our groundwater, more pipelines that leak into our water supply, and more environmental destruction. The threat of a nuclear holocaust underlines the stakes for the survival of the planet and gives new meaning to the phrase: “Everything or nothing, all of us or none.”

We are not powerless. What we do here also acts to end suffering around the world. There is something revolutionaries can do every day. Every time we take to the streets to end police killings or demand health care and housing as a right to human life we are fighting to dismantle the war machine. Our best hope for “national security” – and the best hope for attaining peace in Ukraine – is for our working class to accelerate our demands for our own well-being and our own democracy. For jobs at a living wage, for the right to housing and health care, for a future for our young, for an ecologically sustainable planet. If the working class wins our wars at home, there will be no fighting anymore.

 

Rev 1b 4/26/22