Major escalation against Russia in Crimea/ Kiev, the EU and NATO take world to the edge
By Fadi Kassem, Georges Gastaud and Aymeric Monville
This statement, by three leaders in the PRCF (Pole for Communist Renaissance, France), was published Oct. 9. Translation: Workers World
Attack on the bridge from mainland Russia to Crimea: An explosive charge placed in a vehicle or under the apron explodes at the passage of a fuel train, destroying three spans 64-meters-long on the lanes with traffic flowing north. The railway bridge, which also houses pipelines, was not seriously affected, despite the fire burning several tank cars.
Whatever its modus operandi, the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge is a major provocation against Russia. Given the actual power of the Ukrainian army, this irresponsible operation indicates that NATO and the U.S.’s worst hawks are at the command post in Kiev with only one single objective: to provoke a major East-West confrontation, whatever the price for the population of Ukraine, for that of Russia, or even for the whole of Europe.
The goal now proclaimed by Washington’s neoconservatives is to smash Russia, then dismember Russia in order to dismantle Russian-Chinese cooperation, and then attack the People’s Republic of China, a country which Washington designated a long time ago as its strategic enemy (already under Obama).
Moscow is knowingly forced by the West and their Kiev subcontractors to confront a tragic dilemma: either to escalate, including perhaps the use of tactical nuclear weapons — which would entail a major risk to world peace, including the extermination of humanity — or to accept humiliation without reacting, which would encourage further aggression from the Euro-Atlantic alliance and the pro-Nazi regime of Kiev against Russia. The latter option is no less dangerous for world peace.
More than ever, true peace activists are those who explain, facts on hand, that the European Union-NATO has done everything it could since 2014 to torpedo the Minsk Agreements, allegedly guaranteed by Kiev, Paris and Berlin, and to pursue NATO’s relentless rush to the East. They contrast with those pseudo peace activists running in the pack of the holy alliance between the media and the politicians, promoted by the pseudo-left and backed without the slightest restraint by the so-called “public service” media sector.
This rush began in 1991, during the unilateral dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, a dissolution initiated by the deceitful Mikhail Gorbachev, this false friend of peace, this true proponent of a new Munich capitulation.
However, beyond the differences that may exist on the responsibilities present in this “high-intensity conflict, which Biden, Macron and the Chief of Staff of the French Army announced, a conflict they were already preparing well before Feb. 24, 2022, personalities, who hold positions quite distant politically from the geopolitical analyses we uphold like the Gaullist Henri Guaino or the European Social Democrat Ségolène Royal, [which] demand that France, pathetically aligned today with Washington at the expense of our vital national interests, urgently find its independent voice to call for peace and negotiations.
Those who, on the “left,” like the leadership of the supposedly “radical” left and the electoral coalition NUPES (a coalition on its way to disintegration), preferred to wave the Ukrainian flag over “communist,” “green” or “socialist” town halls.
Those on the “left” who preferred rather to postpone any effective anti-NATO action, while aggressively calling for more and more weapons to be delivered to Kiev (i.e., to its neo-Nazis accomplices like those of the “Svoboda” party, an old Nazi Ukrainian party) — all those on the left who desisted from their responsibilities will have to carry the indelible stain of history, like the one carried by French, Russian, Belgian and German “socialists,” who in 1914 betrayed proletarian internationalism and the real interests of their own people, calling, under the guise of false patriotism, for the mass killings that became World War I.
More than ever, all those who understand that a continental or transcontinental war would necessarily be nuclear and lead to humankind’s extermination in our time, all those people must do everything they can to demand negotiations, de-escalation and an end of arms deliveries and sanctions that are presently ruining the economies of European countries, while bringing economic and social chaos this fall throughout Europe for the sole benefit of U.S. imperialism and U.S. hegemonism.
But above all, it is time for the uninhibited intervention of truly communist activists and class trade unionists with workers, and as much as possible with struggles involving workers in enterprises (like in refineries, “Camaïeu,” Electric power providers, etc.). In this struggle, we do not forget the mass of wage earners who are prevented from living normally by the speculative price of gasoline and the de facto blocking of wages by Macron and their bosses.
There is a strong, even a vital connection of the defense of world peace, France’s return to an independent foreign and military policy, the defense of wages, of workers’ living conditions and social gains — in particular, guaranteed stable pensions.
The EU wants to cut these benefits, even as the self-proclaimed Empress Ursula von der Leyen relentlessly calls for an escalation of sanctions against Russia, for more weapons delivered to Ukraine and for senseless expenditures for more and more weapons as demanded by Washington, with, as a bonus, the powerful rise of German militarization with its historical interventionism on the Steppes of Russia.
From here on now, let’s bring sincere republican, anti-imperialist and antiwar slogans to the popular movement: money for wages and pensions, not for warmakers or stockholders! Stop ruinous “Sanctions,” and stop sending murderous and suicidal weapons! Stop the EU-NATO dictates that are leading France, Europe and the world towards chaos and a pan-European conflagration that could become global!
At a time when British transport workers (rail, road, docks) are moving towards a general strike and are valiantly facing the Thatcher-2 that is Cruella Truss, at a time when the peace movement is gaining strength in Berlin and Prague directly indicting the EU and NATO, the development of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle is the main hope for the defense, not only of purchasing power and living conditions of working classes, but also for world peace and for the future of humankind and all living beings on earth.
This is all the more pertinent as the crisis of capitalist domination is worsening in Europe, where the Russian-Ukrainian conflict stirred up by Washington is undermining the European “Union” and ends up destabilizing the euro. While the French state apparatus is fracturing (see the massive protest at this very moment of judicial police officers against the Macron regime, or see how judges just sent Minister [Éric] Dupont-Moretti to face the Courts of the Republic for conflict of interests), Macron is even threatening to dissolve Parliament unless his reactionary project on delaying retirement is speedily approved . . .
In 1914, Lenin already stated in essence that, in the face of the great global imperialist massacre that was to come, we must be prepared to replace the imperialist world war with the revolutionary offensive of Labor against Capital. Under very different conditions and forms, this salutary slogan, centrally associating class struggle with the defense of peace and humanity, is, in principle, more current than ever.
