Pals in death and destruction, 2024. Photo: Beata Zawrze
My family were interested in Russia’s progress after the revolution, and soon came to the conclusion the Bolsheviks were the real villians of the story, that they had betrayed people’s hopes. Those were the days when almost everybody was poor and struggles to get through the bad days. Russia seemed a million miles away from bland life in Tollcross, Edinburgh, but interesting to see how it had overthrown the wealthy elite and the benefits that accrued.
For years they had ordered and received a copy of ‘Soviet Weekly‘, a tabloid sized newspaper that contained news items on Russian politics, from relations with satellite countries to annual grain harvests yeilds, and often all about bad winters in the Urals. The West was fearful of Russia’s revolution. It had chosen a different way to exploit the masses. We offered a carrot before the work began, while Russia offered a carrot after the work if you survived.
Only one copy could be afforded, so it was passed around from family member to family member until it arrived at my young eyes. I cannot claim it informed me to become a communist sympathiser, but it did educate me to understand Russia was a vast continent that had every right to exist as Scotland did. I lived in the days where few discussed their politics with others, let alone who they voted for. Your politics, same as your sex life, was strictly private.
I did not understand how much of it was plain raw propaganda. In that it was no different from any UK newspaper. If a harvest was bad, it was descibed as ‘still better than last years’. The Gulag Archipelago was never mentioned. Today, UK newspapers furnish us with a faked ‘balance’ of opinions, some wildly different in detail if published in Scotland, and have columnists whose entire job it is to demean and deride Scotland’s achievements and hopes. Our press is not much different from the old Soviet Union’s state controlled press. The Ukraine proxy war is portrayed as a noble cause, and Russia is the evil nation – both are bog standard stock stories.
When Keir Starmer entered Downing Street, a few foreign events were arranged to glamorise his arrival. He visited a NATO summit and promised to spend more on defence. He pledged £3bn a year for Ukraine, (enough to mitigate the Two-Child Act) paid apparently from his back pocket. And he was reckless describing his talks with Joe Biden had happened “at pace” and were attentive to detail. By all accounts this is an exaggeration. Biden’s advisers did most of the talking.
But he said something else, and this is the motivation for this article. He wanted to see British missiles for Ukraine fired deep into Russian territory. It was spoken to sound tough, macho man, the new prime minister ready to kick ass, the caped statesman – a contradiction in terms – and our taxes used to embroider his reputation.
Alas, bombing Russia is not NATO policy. The Ministry of Defence and Downing Street also later clarified that it was not current UK policy to allow such strikes.
Leaders fail to learn from bitter history. When Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997, few could have imagined he would one day leave that gated community under a black cloud marked “Iraq”. Britain’s war in Iraq was dressed up – like Starmer’s missiles – as vital to national security. In reality it was a bombastic gesture intended to make Blair look good in American eyes. The thousands who voted Labour in Scotland have damnable short memories, as those unfortunate to live in the Middle-East know to their cost. Labour governments are no different from Tory administrations, they feel the need to declare they are the virtuous guys.
Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 British politicians have used it as a stage on which to parade their toughness, most ludicrously Boris Johnson. From the start, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has collaborated. The politicians go over the top in demanding “total victory” against Russia – one they know is implausible. Zelenskiy embraces them warmly and sends them the bill.
One condition that NATO has emphasised throughout is that Ukraine’s war be strictly defensive. NATO knows its limitations. Nothing should escalate it beyond the country’s borders. Vladimir Putin should not be provoked into a wider conflict. This has meant no NATO weapons should be used against targets deep inside Russia. This level of sanity has held, mercifully, despite Zelenskiy running around begging for armaments to bomb Russia. He was the man told not to make peace offerings to Putin, although he had originally proposed a settlement to avoid needless deaths. That makes him a pawn of the West.
Starmer, well on his way to fulfilling his nickname Sir Stumblebore, apparently disagrees with this line of rationality. Happy gladhanding US imperialism, in fact, any change in NATO’s weapons deployment requires a collective decision. But Zelenskiy has already welcomed the sign that a NATO member is ready to escalate the war, and we pay billions of our tax money to do so. How odd that he tells us there are no ready fixes for the UK nation’s maladays, but there is ready money for war and death.
Some NATO members, such as France and Germany, have allowed their non-NATO military aid contributions to be used in limited ways to strike far into Russia. The US has declined this course of illegal action. Trump, rightly condemned as a crook and a pathological liar, approved no wars during his presidency, and says, once elected, he is ready to bring the Ukrainian conflict to an end. I think he means it.
This is NATO’s war. It is gleeful in being resurrected and acquiring new scared member states. That means more money for generals and admirals. NATO, of which Ukraine is not a member, has offered to fund a Zelenskiy victory. Our criminal elite have hated Russia ever since Yakov Yurovsky a stray group shot the Russian Royal family. Their relative King George, refused to give them asylum, because Tzar Nicolas was a competitor to the English crown.
So long as we are ready to see tens of thousands of Zelenskiy’s conscripts die, the West is ready to pay. NATO special forces now in Ukraine could mutate into regular ones, as happened disastrously in Afghanistan. Putin, as long as he lasts, has the power to lay waste the great cities of Ukraine. There is a school of thought that says, Putin does not want to own a derelict Ukraine costly to rebuild. He wants to bleed the West to the peace talks table and agre the solution he asked for over twenty years – a neutral Ukraine that is not a NATO member. This view has merit as well as evidence to back it.
Non-military sanctions against Russia have failed. They have deterred no one. They have punished western economies, cohered autocracies and cut Russia off from networks of persuasion or contact. We have flung out Russian writers, musicians, and artistes. This was always the outcome so long as we do not push for peace and prefer to Cold War slogans, ‘reds under the bed’, and the ‘commies are coming’.
There is no evidence that Putin was ever seeking a hot war with the west. He made a terrible mistake in marching on Kyiv, one from which he needs somehow to be extricated. But when peace-making is so neglected a craft – when it is now derided as appeasement – it is depressing that a British prime minister should be a cheerleader for war. This is Starmer’s first fatal mistake, his Iraq. (We might have to add his Ukraine view his folly that Israel has not embarked on a campaign of genocide against Palestinians.) The next collapse of judgement is his wish to construct a UK conglomeration of federal ‘regions’. Scotland is ready to throw that stupidity out of the window
This article, composed in an hour, will be interpreted by imperialists lackeys as Putin peurile. I am a person of interest. Irony of ironies, the current director general of MI5 is a Scot, Ken McCallum. There is no evidence he will punish a slowly dying man, or come to our defence should the English parliament become the nasty insurgents. Nor will he suggest Trident is moved from Scotland to a south England port to keep Scots safe. So, we should not be afaid to demand peace.
NOTES
This is an article in progress.
The Fog of War essay explaining history of conflict here: https://wp.me/p4fd9j-s4c
Professor Mearsheimer lecture: Ukraine – A History Lesson: https://wp.me/p4fd9j-rkn
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