Starmer steals from disabled for Nazi Ukraine and Israel!
Trump’s sickening proposal last month for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza to make way for a ‘Riviera’ owned by the United States, set the scene. Then for over a fortnight Netanyahu with Trump’s backing jointly deprived Gaza of food, water and fuel and making no bones about openly embarking on mass starvation, freezing and dehydration of Palestinians. This was obviously setting the scene for the resumption of the mass extermination bombings that wiped out up to a half-a-million Gazans earlier. On 17th March the mass terror bombings resumed with the bloodiest day of the genocide so far, with over 400 butchered in one night, many burned alive in their tents.
The ceasefire agreed by Israel and touted by Trump was openly blown away by Israel with Trump’s full support. The lesson for Russia over Ukraine is clear – Trump’s word is worthless. This ceasefire never got beyond the first phase of exchanges of batches of 3-6 Israeli hostages for hundreds of Palestinians from Israel’s torture and rape camps. Predictably, it was massively broken by Israel, as 60,000 mobile homes were supposed to be supplied to the demolished, wrecked Gaza strip along with 200,000 tents. The actual implementation of this was negligible except with tents – now being burned.
The total blockade of all aid, food and water with the open support of Trump made a sick joke of any second phase. The crime underway now is identical to that announced by former Israeli ‘defence’ minister Yoav Gallant on 8th October 2023: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Trump gave Israel the green light for this latest genocide and has hinted that he intends to do the same with the West Bank. Israeli repression has mushroomed in the West Bank. The stooge Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has taken it in turns with the Israelis to attack particularly Jenin, a prime target for the Gaza-fication of the West Bank. Hospitals and infrastructure are now under similar attacks in the West Bank as in Gaza.
This was always the objective of the Zionists, of course. And now Trump, an open genocidaire on the Palestinian question, is in the White House, the whole game of seeking to pressure the US to pressure Israel, which persisted when “Genocide Joe” Biden was in White House, has come to an end. Trump has made clear that he considers Palestinians subhuman – he even uses the word “Palestinian” as a racial epithet akin to “n****r” or “n****r-lover” as he did against the Jewish-Zionist Democratic Party politician Chuck Schumer recently for not being prepared to openly support his genocidal agenda. With Trump in office, both Israel and the US will have to be defeated militarily in some way, by the masses and/or a superior military force to have a hope of stopping the genocide.
Trump says that that US would ‘buy’ Gaza – from who?! – and forcibly deport the Palestinian population that lives there somewhere else! So that they can have a ‘Riviera’ for the wealthy. This plan was mooted by Trump’s Jewish-Zionist son-in-law, Kushner, last year. Trump’s real aim in saying this is transparently to steal, either for the US, or Israel – or both – the oil and gas reserves that have been found off the Gaza coast in the past decade or so.
There’s nothing novel about “hell” in Gaza – all that has happened now is that both Trump and Netanyahu are openly saying that “Genocide is good”, not even bothering to deny it. The total exposure of US imperialism and Israel will detonate some kind of explosion in the surrounding countries, but it is difficult to be sure what that will be. There is even talk of war against Israel by all surrounding states including Egypt and Jordan, but don’t hold your breath about that – they could be pushed into it by mass rage but there are all kind of variants possible.
So far, the only force confronting Israel and the US once again on the Palestinians’ behalf is Ansarallah in Yemen. In the background is Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi radicals such as Kataib Hezbollah, and Iran itself. They are at least steadfast in their defiance of Zionism and imperialism, but they suffered a severe blow, at least in the short-term, with the overthrow of Assad in Syria at the end of 2024. The route of communication between Iran and its allies in Lebanon, as well as the erstwhile if shaky support of the Assad regime itself, have now been replaced by a genocidal regime of Sunni-sectarian killers directing their rage against non-Sunnis and non-sectarian, secular or leftist/working class Arab and Muslim forces, while also groveling to the genocidal Zionists themselves. The US is already hitting Yemen in response to their solidarity with the Palestinians – Iran is also a target for the imperialists as previously. It will take deep-going political and social struggles, mobilizing the masses against the reactionary social forces that are shaken but are digging in very hard, to transform this situation. What is needed is both the emergence of a new communist leadership among the Arab and Muslim masses, and the creation of an anti-imperialist united front of all those in conflict with the Zionists, the US and their agents.
Syria is now under the rule of Western-backed Al Qaeda/ISIS genocidaires, thinly disguised as so called HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham – Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant) who have characteristically, since the Assad regime collapsed before it and its Turkish and Zionist backers in December, launched a massive slaughter of thousands from Syria’s Alawite Shi’a and Christian minorities, also killing Sunnis who refuse to cooperate with the slaughter. Resistance is building up in the West of Syria against the pro-Zionist stooge Jolani/Al Shara’a regime. Israel is protecting the HTS from this insurgency, which appears to be initially based on former Assad forces and others seeking to stop a sectarian genocide. So, there is a potential giant Lebanon-type quagmire building up there for Israel, a much bigger one.
In the mind of Trump, who regarding Middle Eastern questions is basically a political agent of Likud, Israel’s main ruling party, Israel expelling the Gaza population, and the US doing so, are pretty much the same thing. It is piracy, and a motive for genocide. Trump is open about his intentions to steal natural resources of territories he covets and makes no bones about it. During his first term he openly boasted that US troops in Syria, who were sent in by Obama in 2014 supposedly to fight ISIS – were there to steal Syria’s oil for the United States.
His policies in Ukraine appear superficially different, but the underlying motive is similar. His demand that Ukraine sign over ownership of their natural resource of $500 billion worth of rare earth metals as ‘reparation’ for the aid that Biden gave to Ukraine is just naked theft. Except the problem is that most of this resource is apparently in the Donbass, which is part of Russia now. In part, he is upset at Biden’s policy in Ukraine because Biden gave away aid to Ukraine gratis. He says that US aid should have been a loan, as most of the EU’s aid was and is.
NATO in Chaos
The explosion of the Ukraine issue, particularly with Zelensky’s confrontation with Trump and his Vice-President Vance on 28th February in the Oval Office, has come close to tearing NATO apart. Trump’s changed strategic priorities have caused chaotic and unexpected developments within NATO. It has teetered on the brink of collapse over the past few weeks, as Trump’s changed priorities, his refusal to unconditionally support Zelensky, and his dialogue with Putin and Russia, have sent the West European bourgeoisie, particularly the British and the French, into paroxysms of rage and warmongering. Trump’s proposed 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine was in part a product of the maneuvering around his coercion of Zelensky to sign away mineral rights.
What Trump and Zelensky came up with was a variant of the previous Minsk agreement deceptions Russia had previously been burned by. It was hardly hidden – the truce being commenced; the US would restore military and economic aid to Ukraine that Trump had suspended in the aftermath of the confrontation in the Oval Office. This in the context where Russia has virtually driven Ukraine out from its diversionary incursion into Kursk, in undisputed Russian territory, and has been rapidly advancing in the Donbass.
Putin made a perfunctory show of welcoming the idea of a ceasefire but made it clear that Russia would expect such a pause to mean a route to a permanent solution, not a revamped Minsk, a pretext for the West to rearm the far-right Maidan regime for more atrocities. Such a solution would mean the recognition of Crimea as Russian, and likewise recognition of the four oblasts that have already voted in referenda to join Russia – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. And likely similar proper referenda of the populations of Kharkov and Odessa, where atrocities against the Russian and Russophone populations have also been committed by the Maidan regime and its far- right militias. The eviction from power of the Nazified elements, the acceptance of Ukrainian neutrality and non-NATO status, and a dramatic curtailment of the Ukrainian armed forces, that have been built up by NATO to pose a potent threat to the population of the Russians-speaking oblasts – this appears to be the Russian objective in negotiations. These have a clear democratic content and should be at least critically supported by genuine socialists. Because of that, they are anathema to the West European bourgeoisies, and they are the main reason why there is such a hysterical, barely hidden hostility to Trump’s position on Ukraine from the ruling classes of those countries.
The position that the Trump administration has de-facto adopted over Ukraine is only half-a-break from the policy of the Biden administration. Instead of simply arming Ukraine to wage the proxy war, they now threaten to continue Biden’s policy if Putin does not agree to their proposal for a settlement. But this is not convincing, as they do not have the resources to continue such a proxy war against Russia indefinitely. Trump regards China, not Russia, as the US’s most strategic adversary, as it is on course to surpass the US in economic power in the immediate future. Much of its economic power derives from capitalism overlaid by economic planning, whose origin was in the Chinese revolution – i.e. beyond capitalism. Unlike in Russia, planning in China has continuity and has never been even temporarily broken – China’s powerful billionaire bourgeois class notwithstanding. That is a crucial difference between China and Russia.
So, while we see a tactical softening of US treatment of Russia from the Trump administration, this is not true of China. Instead, we see open hatred of “Communist China” – using the kind of Cold War rhetoric the Trump administration also uses against its domestic opponents, including the imperialist Democrats who it incredibly refers to as “far left Marxists” and the like. Much of Trump’s seeming sympathy for Russia, which causes apoplexy to the liberal imperialists, is driven by the aim of setting Russia against China. Though this is an unlikely scenario, as there is also a visceral imperialist hostility to Russia that, though Trump may have set it to one side for tactical reasons, still runs deep among the imperialist bourgeoisie. At the summits of the Russian state, which is bound up with a stunted variation of capitalism that is heavily deformed by many decades of post-capitalist economic development, which Russia’s weak bourgeoisie cannot conjure away, they have had their fingers badly burned by this issue already, via imperialist duplicity concerning NATO expansion. They are aware of the enmity of the West enough to understand Trump’s motives. His enmity to BRICS and threats of tariffs against it have a similar basis.
The strategic/tactical differences in NATO are severe. The European imperialist powers are spitting rage against Trump for ‘betraying’ Ukraine and whipping up hysteria. We have never witnessed such a falling out of Europe with the United States before. The ruling classes of West Europe have become used to being Washington’s clients, over all the decades since World War II. And suddenly Washington has woken up the fact that it is no longer hegemonic. That does not mean that it has lost all its power. But it has lost in Ukraine. Trump’s policy is a response to this – a temporary retreat to reconsolidate US rule in the Western hemisphere in the short term. With the aim of a later reconquest of that hegemony in the medium term. The European powers are not used to being treated with such contempt. When not publicly raging, they are dealing with it through gritted teeth.
European Imperialist rage and hysteria
This hysteria engulfs both Britain, outside the EU, and France and Germany, and smaller powers like Holland, within the EU. The hostility is resulting in anti-democratic actions that overlap with the Cold War with Russia, but which also encompass bourgeois forces located in former workers states such as Eastern Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania, which are either annexed components of the imperialist state of Germany, ex-workers state members of the EU, or clients outside it seeking to join it, such as Serbia. Attempts to organize Maidan-style ‘colour revolutions’ appear to be underway in Hungary and Serbia, and to be in preparation in Slovakia. We don’t have any regard for the pro-Zionist right-wing, anti-migrant government of Victor Orban in Hungary, and even less for the very right-wing popular presidential candidate in Romania, Călin Georgescu, who approves of the pro-Nazi wartime ruler of Romania, General Antonescu. We certainly don’t have any sympathy for the Alternative für Deutschland in (mainly) Eastern Germany, either – it is very right wing, implicitly Nazi, and yet hostile to the Ukraine proxy war. The AfD however also has a left-wing complement/ counterpart in the ASW of Sara Wagenknecht, who also opposes the proxy war from more of a leftist standpoint and appears to have been deprived of a presence in the Bundestag by electoral machinations from the ruling class parties.
What is significant though is that all these are hostile to the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. In Hungary a ‘colour revolution’ is being whipped up by the EU, as is also true in Serbia. An attempt was made, undoubtedly by the same forces, last May, to murder Robert Fico, the leftist Prime Minister of Slovakia, who is also critical of the Ukraine proxy war. The government of Serbia, politically alike to that of Slovakia in some ways, is also threatened with an EU-incited colour revolution. Irrespective of whether these political forces are to the right or left in formal terms, what is happening is that a degree of popular resistance to the NATO proxy war is being expressed through them. These forces are diffuse, some rightist, some leftist, but all express popular unease in former workers states at being drawn into an imperialist war, which could become a European or world-wide nuclear conflict, against Russia. So, we condemn all these attempted coups, assassinations and other atrocities in all these countries which are aimed at dragooning these populations into war with Russia. While some of these forces represent various forms of spontaneous left and right populism, and some have grotesque and unsavoury politics, they are at their very worst not to be equated with the Ukrainian Nazis who under NATO command, are simply continuing what their forebears did on the Eastern front, then under the command of imperialism itself.
Starmer’s British government is threatening to send troops to Ukraine as so-called ‘peacekeepers’, and the French government is bigging-up its status as a power with a nuclear arsenal, the “Force de Frappe” (“strike force”) independent of United States control, unlike the British Trident-based system. This because Trump has refused to back any West European armed intervention in Ukraine, or consequences of such in terms of blowback against any NATO member involving itself in such armed action, ruling out US assistance under NATO’s Article 5 mutual assistance clause. Without that NATO ceases to be an effective alliance at all. The contradiction is that, for Starmer at least, a British intervention is not feasible without US backing, a so-called ‘backstop’. Though the hysteria in the ruling class over this has led to various bourgeois figures – military officers and politicians of various stripes, to raise the idea of conscripting the population to wage a war against Russia.
Also in this context, French President Macron rushed to promote France’s supposed capacity to take the place of the US in putting Western and Central Europe under its nuclear umbrella for supposed ‘defence’ against Russia. Germany under its new Christian Democratic Chancellor Merz, though, ruled out any German participation in any such Ukraine expedition without Russian consent, probably more out of fear of the AfD than for any other reason. But other virulent NATO imperialist lackey states such as Poland immediately piped up and said that they would like French nuclear weapons hosted on their soil, and Lithuania, whose body politic is even more polluted with Nazi sympathies than Ukraine, expressed the hope that NATO nuclear weapons would be hosted on its soil.
It is very clear that it is not Russia that is remotely threatening to send its troops to menace Britain, France or Germany. It is Britain and France who are, so far verbally, screaming against Russia and openly proposing to send troops to menace Russia in Ukraine, just off its South-Western border. Which opens the vista of an aggressive European war in Eastern Europe waged by Britain and France, overseen by the European Union under the tutelage of the President of the European Commission, the right-wing German politician Ursula von der Leyen, who has been a major driver of anti-Russian hysteria, warmongering and attacks on democratic rights in the EU for several years now.
There is a wave of pathetic military jingoism coming from the decrepit British ruling class, which under Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer, has been the most virulently militaristic over Ukraine. Which leads straight to a threat of conscription here, to send troops to Ukraine. The renewed austerity is in good measure being driven by the Starmer regime’s commitment to the crusade against Russia for the Nazis in Ukraine. Starmer recently signed a ‘partnership’ to aid Ukraine for 100 years! To finance this, and billions of pounds worth of other promises to Ukraine in terms of military and other expenditure, he has cut ‘foreign aid’ to numerous places. The fiscally driven attack on the disabled through cuts in the Personal Independence Payment that the Starmer government has proposed, is also transparently driven by its military aid to Ukraine against its own Russian-speaking population, as well as its continuing military aid to Israel for its genocide. It is, in terms of what has been projected in the media, more brutal than George Osbourne’s Tory attacks of more than a decade ago. It also looks like it has begun to catalyse the beginning of a revolt at the base of the Labour Party, which has put Starmer in political trouble.
Political fluidity and Opportunities for Left Advance
We are now in a remarkable situation where politics is extremely fluid, and the ruling classes are targeting repression against the potential that palpably exists for political resistance to cohere. The blatant attacks on Palestine protesters in the United States is one facet of that – the Mahmoud Khailil case, of a Green Card holder being detained and threatened with deportation for protesting against a genocide, is the ultimate outrage and obscenity. But it is also sign of weakness and fear from the Zionists, as are the acts of repression in Britain (see our article on page 16). There is huge political anger over the Zionist genocide, which has been true for the entire period of Israel’s slaughter, beginning in October 2023. Up to now, there has been a division of consciousness between a widespread understanding of the barbarity of Zionism, and a lack of understanding and/or a nervousness of many politicised people concerning the proxy war in Ukraine. But a division of the ruling class, as the Trump-induced crisis in NATO, appears to have broken the log-jam. This is reflected among some activists on the left. A whole layer of bureaucratic forces who were pro-Zelensky liberals in socialist garb, centering around the former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, have with the Trump crisis in NATO, become much more virulent. Some were already known to be hysterical Russophobes and backers of NATO’’s warmongering, but others were much cagier and preferred to stay in the closet.
They have suddenly become much more outspoken and jingoistic, as NATO itself came under threat of a split and disintegration. But they have also met much stronger and numerous opposition to them, many of whom had in previous political debates been reticent in speaking out in defence of Russia, given the demonization and hysteria against Putin, etc. But not so much now! Defence of Russia in this war is a key principled position of authentic communists. When coupled with militant support for the Palestinian struggle against genocide, against oppression, and for national liberation and full equality, these are key elements of the communist programme today. We need for a broader layer of the left to campaign for actions of the working class to combat these manifold wars and genocides, including political strikes and similar mass actions.
We, who have been outspoken defenders of Russia in this proxy war since the early days of Maidan, have noticed a gradual drift leftwards among the more serious left on this question, and there are grounds for optimism that this process is deepening. We seek the regroupment of subjectively revolutionary aspiring communists and revolutionary socialists in a new international communist movement, a new Communist International, and there are reasons to be optimistic that more opportunities are opening up for such a regroupment to make progress. We need both to create an expanded communist movement, and a force that can intervene both in electoral terms in front of the working class, and give leadership in anti-war actions, strikes and other class struggles, to give our class revolutionary leadership in the struggles to come.
