Following the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has become common to hear rhetoric comparing Putin to Hitler, that this moment is akin to 1941 and talk of the West being engaged in a war against fascism.
Cover image: Steve Eason
Welsh politicians including Mick Antoniw, a Welsh Labour minister in the Senedd, and Adam Price, leader of Plaid Cymru, are among those to recently use this kind of language.
But it is important that Welsh Labour, Plaid Cymru, trade unions and the wider left do not fall behind this interpretation.
The hard truth is that Russia is only doing what the United States and its ally Britain have done for decades: Bombing and militarily intervening, in what it regards as its backyard, to secure economic and business interests for the nation’s elite. This is utterly vile; it should be opposed, and we should demand all Russian troops out of Ukraine immediately.
But is it correct or helpful to make out that Russia is uniquely evil?
Putting aside what the West did to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, consider what the United States does in its own backyard – in the Caribbean, Central and South America.
The US has blockaded the island of Cuba for more than six decades, it has sponsored countless military coups and attempted military coups against democracies, most infamously in Chile in 1973, where thousands were killed, tortured & dissapeared by the US-installed fascist leader Augusto Pinochet.
The US has poured in military aid to brutal dictatorships. It has economically destabilised left-wing governments such as Michael Manley in Jamaica. Throughout the 1980s, it mined Nicaragua’s ports, armed, and trained right wing terrorists and paramilitaries, to topple a left-wing government. During the same period, it invaded Grenada to impose neoliberalism at gunpoint and Panama to remove its leader. It operates a torture camp in Guantanamo Bay and trains torturers from across South and Central America at the notorious School of the Americas. The list is endless.
What is different today, is with the decline of US power, more countries want to get into the imperialist game, and act like the United States.
In painting Russia as uniquely evil, the danger is that it encourages us to rally behind our own ‘virtuous’ ruling class, our own political establishment, and our own state’s imperialism as the lesser evil. At the same time, it does nothing to actually secure Russian troop withdrawal from Ukraine.
Instead, it encourages jingoism and militarism at home that only risks escalating the conflict and bloodshed further. It encourages the kind of political atmosphere where politicians call for the return of Treason Laws, where RMT union and striking tube workers are linked to Putin by the Daily Telegraph as part of ‘the enemy underground’ and where Zarah Sultana MP gets called ‘Putin’s whore’ for daring to criticise NATO.
It also leads to absurdities such as Adam Price tweeting at the beginning of the current crisis, that the “issue is whether we will live in a world governed by international law and established norms of behaviour – or a lawless world of geopolitical Darwinism, where guns not laws determine the shape of the future, a precedent that will reverberate from Bosnia to Taiwan”.
Most of the Global South will be surprised to hear we were all living in a world governed by international law until Russian troops moved into Ukraine and suddenly turned us into a lawless world based on military might.
Throughout this war there has been an effort to pretend that the history of military aggression only began a few days ago. We must ask ourselves, whose interests are served by this erasure?
A century ago, during World War I, anti-war socialists noticed in each of their respective countries, their politicians, media, and establishment figures were masters in denouncing the crimes of rival imperialist nations, but only to bolster their own imperialism.
What do we make of the spectacle of Welsh Government Ministers falling over each other to rightly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but who have stayed silent on the military aggression of the British Government where they live? For twenty years, as we watched bombs falling on Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere they told us that foreign policy was a non-devolved issue that they could not possibly take a position on.
Now that Welsh Government ministers are all anti-war and upset at the plight of people being bombed, will Mark Drakeford soon announce an end to his administration’s support for arms fairs and arms industries whose product is used on Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Kurds, and Yemenis? Of course not.
But there is no reason why we should not talk about Yemen and Ukraine in the same breath.
The war in Ukraine is a threat to Ukrainians, a threat to the region and a threat to world peace.
In an ever more dangerous world, we must link getting Russian troops out of Ukraine with opposition not just to Russia, but all imperialist states, especially our own. We must put pressure on world leaders to de-escalate rather than escalate global tensions.
Let us then be careful, in building our anti-war movement against Russian troops in Ukraine, to use the language of international solidarity of working-class people across borders against all warmongers, East and West.
On Sunday 6 March at 2 pm at the Aneurin Bevan Statue, Queen Street, Cardiff there will be a protest calling for a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine as part of an international day of action called by peace groups in Western and Eastern Europe, North America and elsewhere. A protest has also been called 12 noon Sunday, 6 March, on Museum Green – the green in front of the Waterfront Museum, Swansea.
