Besmirched with appeasement, surrender, caving in to Russian demands - a venial sin!

Dear Tim,

Thanks for your comments. It is clear that you are on a different trajectory regarding Ukraine, and, judging from our recent discussion in the branch you are not alone. In that regard, when I send my piece to the NC later today to aid the discussion, I will make it clear that it is supported by just three members, not the whole branch.

In my view, the majority of comments at the national level lie somewhere between the views of myself, Michael and Bob WF, and yourself. However, we should recall that what unites everyone within Left Unity is that we are internationalists, not nationalists. The struggle against capitalist oppression is an international struggle, uniting the oppressed across borders.

Having said we are not nationalists does not mean we are neutral in national disputes however. For democratic reasons, we support the right of oppressed nations’ self-determination against a more powerful oppressor nation. In common parlance we ‘support the little guy’. That is true for Ireland against British imperialism, the Catalans against the Spanish state, and is true for Ukraine against Great Russian chauvinism, without supporting Ukrainian nationalist ideology I stress again.

The tussle within Ukraine between those opting for European or Russian capitalism was a bit of a Hobson’s choice; the forces leading the Euromaidan uprising were right wing, but the pro-Russian forces around the oligarch Yanukovych were no less so. The option of a socialist independent Ukraine was unfortunately not on the table; the true left was very weak and marginalised.

In my view, the desire to orient towards European capitalism was a distorted and refracted rejection of Russian dominance, but one that offered no solution to the problems of Ukrainian working people. However, to side with Yanukovych and his alliance with Russian gangster capitalism and subservience was not an option; that would play right into the hands of the Ukrainian nationalists.

The response of Putin’s Russia was not to open a comradely democratic dialogue with the new Ukraine about why they felt a divorce was necessary, but to pile on the Russian nationalist pressure, leading up to today’s intensified situation. We cannot side with that. Despite the reactionary nature of the new Ukrainian leadership, we look beyond it to the unequal status between the two countries and support the underdog.

Now, was there Western meddling in the Euromaidan protests? I don’t know, but possibly. The point however is that you cannot magic up a mass movement capable of overthrowing a vicious repressive leader out of thin air. The sentiment must already be there amongst huge sections of society.

And as for mass uprisings versus pro-capitalist parliamentary democracy, that is another big debate which I can only touch on here. For us there is no doubt that an eco-socialist society cannot be achieved by Parliamentary means (which does not mean that you ignore the Parliamentary process or take part in it when appropriate). The Russian, Yugoslav, Chinese and Cuban revolutions are pretty good evidence of that premise; the oppressed majority have to impose their will upon the exploiting minority and Parliamentary democracy will be dispensed with by our rulers if it comes to that situation. But you can’t equate the Euromaidan uprising with, say, Trump’s storming of the White House. One, despite its right-wing leadership was objectively against a neighbouring great power and the other was for strengthening domestic reaction and imperialism.

I was going to go into this further, but I think it’s time to stop rabbiting here.

Thanks Bob, for this thoughtful and knowledgeable response that I cannot disagree with and is perfectly reasonable in every way.

My point is simply that the impatient protestors who could not wait to win an election to overthrow Yanukovych got their way but, at an enormous cost.  It was just not worth it, was it?

Better to win change by working behind the scenes and only publicly protesting when you know you are not going to get arrested or shot at, as happened in 2014 in Kyiv.

Does LU think that NATO should agree with Russia that Ukraine should not be offered NATO membership in the forseeable future?

Or, is that the dreaded appeasement that our opponents would besmirch us with?

That it would encourage the Evil Empire to take another step westwards in their expansion aims of Communist/Russian world domination, as some would see it?

Huawei is pron: how-way

A new cold war, this time with evil empire, Communist China.

They are out to get our secrets, to spy on us and to do sabotage in the UK.  Never trust them, never have them as a friend and make them enemy no 1 to justify more defence and armament spending.  It's all so good for exponential economic growth and rocketing greenhouse gases as the nation speeds to shortages of vital resources and yet more waste as we rip out Huawei kit and put in the West is best technology.

Be suspicious, be very suspicious but don't think we might just be paranoid. Who would want our secrets that would cost millions to keep secret?  What are those secrets that must not be shared with anyone?

West is Best; Russia is really Rough and the Muslims very evil, Mad and Mistaken!

Do you agree that Russia feels uncomfortable with the EU and NATO, seeming to them, to be right up against their border?  Is this understandable to you?

The West attacks other countries and has done, off and on, for centuries, as part of our Western European nations' empire building exploits.  Right now, we are attacking Islamic State.  Are Russian planes and drones also joining in the fun of killing humans with no fear of casualties for them, too?

Ukraine, in the Cold War, was fully part of the USSR - like the three Baltic states.  Am I correct in understanding that more of a pro-Russian Ukrainian president, than a pro Western, was fairly elected?  That he was ousted from power in February 2014 after anti Russian, pro European protesters were shot dead by the security forces and by snipers?  This seems to have prompted Putin to take back Crimea that USSR had given to Ukraine in 1954.  Is that correct?  The takeover seems to have been a very popular move with the Crimeans.

What we do is turn eastern Europe, except Crimea and eastern Ukraine, into our domain by welcoming them into our European sphere of influence, then into the EU and, later, into NATO.  No wonder, Russia is apprehensive and, possibly, more patriotic and nationalist than it has ever been.  Nine (or ten)former eastern European satellite states of the USSR are now in the EU and three of them, the three Baltic states, are part of NATO.  The other seven are:
Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia.

1. The 28 EU countries are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK.12 Nov 2014

There were six USSR aligned countries in the Cold War: 
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania.  The six created a wide buffer zone along Russia's eastern border.  All are now part of the West by virtue of being in the EU.  The three Baltic states that were part of the USSR, are in the EU and NATO.  No wonder, Russia and Putin were/are anxious to keep Crimea and eastern Ukraine under their sphere of influence.

Even our media use the term, 'Russian backed separatist rebels', rather than the Russian Army fighting in eastern Ukraine.  If it had been us, we would have been in there with a fully fledged army, navy and air force attacking the country we had picked on - as we have done for every single year for the last 101 years, at least, according to the 'Guardian' four page spread on 12 February 2014.

The West is Best and must always dominate, control and expand its sphere of influence.  The West, with our talk of a EU Army to face up to aggressive Russia, is convinced we are superb with our democratic voting system that the mistaken Muslim countries must also do - down the barrel of a gun: our gun.  It is not that the West is arrogant; it is just that we are always so right and Russia and the Arabs are always so wrong.  We cannot help but be always so right, for it is in our nature so to be!

According to Google search:

Formerly Communist countries (by current name):

• Formerly part of the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
• Other Asian countries: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Yemen.

Six former Soviet republics that are part of the EU's Eastern Partnership Programme, according to Radio 4 News on 22 May 2015:
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine.
The programme is to help the six strengthen their links with the West.

Current Communist Countries: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.

Not even Russia is a current Communist country, for it has embraced Western capitalism.  Yet, we have turned Russia into our no 2 enemy, after Islamic State as no 1 enemy.  Both terrorist states are now used to justify our threatening much of humanity with annihilation with Trident.  It must now, definitely, be replaced with four subs, say our militaristic, malevolent, immoral friends.

Is it universal human nature to be warlike and to kill their own for the sake of domination?

The 1st World War, that the Western ‘Christian’ nations were responsible for, was the bloodiest war the world has ever seen.  It was slaughter on an industrial scale and started over Belgian neutrality. 1m British lives. alone, were wiped out.

Is it the white man’s nature to fight, to dominate and to kill any old human, especially black foreigners in other lands?  Or, would the black man be just as bad if given half the chance?  If the American Indians had discovered the vast resources that the white supplanters/settlers discovered would they have turned out exactly like the Americans - the world’s Emperor nation?  Or, is there something innate in the black man’s tribal ancestry, in his DNA, that makes him less keen to conquer nature, to dominate people, to kill and to be top dog?

The wise words from Chief Seattle indicate that certainly, originally, their view of their place on the earth was totally different from that of the 'Christian' white man. They saw their existence as part of the web of life; the Christian nations saw their place on the earth as, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." (Westminster Confessional). The biblical perspective is certainly not part of Nature but a cut above Nature. The American Indians, the Maoris and the Aborigines all saw themselves belonging to the earth. The white man, with his arrival on every continent, brought the Bible and the belief that the earth belonged to them and they could do exactly what they liked, as often as they liked with never any repercussions from the earth's life support systems. After all, we are a cut above the rest of Creation; we are made a little lower than the angels; and, certainly we are not the human animal.

In addition, the Muslims or the Arabs have had decades of vast oil wealth but have not turned out like the rampaging, destructive, warlike white man of the Christian West.  Our lot killed millions of humans between 1914 and 2014 and very nearly brought about nuclear holocaust eg the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The other lot did not.  The closest were the evil Communists whose killings we like to exaggerate to make us feel better and to justify our killing of them in SE Asia.  And all this war on the godless Communists from 1945 to 1975 after they had, perhaps, ensured the defeat of Hitler with Stalin’s rearguard action, to begin with as the Communists fought to protect their homeland from the Nazis! No public and frequent acknowledgement that they, the Communists had been decisive in winning the war, in defeating Hitler. Only condemnation for not being democratic and for being so jealous to keep the eastern European nations under their sway as a buffer from the western European nations frequent wars and expansionism.

Are our intelligence services as intelligent and as essential and as useful as they want us to think?

Dear Prof Richard

I was the guy who asked the question on Sunday morning, "Were we unnecessarily paranoid about Soviet Russia in the decades of MAD.  Why all the fuss and nonsense from our spies when it was MAD that just about prevented a nuclear holocaust?"

Please could you check, clarify and comment on my report, below of what you said on Sunday.  Ignore my rather jaundiced, unpatriotic, despairing and dissident interpretation over the usefulness of our secret services!

Very many thanks, if you are able to oblige.

Tim

Richard Aldrich replied and confirmed the facts as being correct.

​The offering, below is after his sub editing and that he called "a fiesty piece !!!!" The facts and annual costs of £2/3 billions are his; the conclusions I have drawn are mine:-​

​At the Wigtown Book Festival on Sunday, I heard Richard Aldrich, Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick, speak about his book about GCHQ.  From what I heard, our top ranking intelligent intelligence officers (probably mostly from Oxbridge) got things wrong over Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons at the time of the Gulf War in 1990/91.  They told the politicians that he did not have any WMD but, it seems that he did have them all the time, and lots of them!  So in 2002/3 there was not only political pressure on them "to bend the intelligence" towards invasion but, also a fear of getting it wrong a second time. Ironically, this led them to over-correct and, again to get things wrong, by telling Blair and Bush that this time they were fairly sure he had them.  Therefore, twice they have been mistaken in the case of only one country.  Aldrich said that "Saddam Hussein was deliberately ambiguous over his WMD" in order to keep his enemies, like Iran, guessing.

Therefore, are the 

​two or three ​

billions of pounds spent every year on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 worth all the money?  They all work so closely  with America's National Security Agency, too that there must be much duplication of wasted effort of finite resources and much hot air - of dangerous greenhouse gases.

It seems that all kinds of weird and wonderful shenanigans went  on over bugs in embassies during the Cold War that was all a complete waste of everyone's time and money.  Time and again, our intelligence officers were taken by surprise at what was known by the Russians despite exhaustive efforts to keep it all secret!  I can only conclude that it was mutually assured destruction (MAD) - and mutual destruction very many times over, too - that prevented nuclear annihilation.

Aldrich asserted in one slide that 'The Cold War was HOT!'  He explained that some of the submarines and aircraft used to collect intelligence near Soviet bases became involved in actual fighting.  Some of our submarines were depth-charged by the Russians while working on behalf of GCHQ. I noted down that he said, "GCHQ failed in its main mission to crack top level Soviet cyphers."

​

Aldrich gave so many examples of wasted effort by intelligent officers that I came away feeling that it was some sort of no expense spared, elaborate game that was played out between the secret services of both - the ever so virtuous Christian West and the very wicked Communist East.

I also came away thinking that the evil Communists did exactly what they liked and when they liked (just as our side did), without the West's secret service being able to stop them - even if they did know in time which, on so many occasions, they did not!​