09) NATO ACTIONS IN UKRAINE RISK NEW COLD WAR

 

Guest commentary by Dave McKee, President of the Canadian Peace Congress

 

            At the time of writing, the media in Canada is swirling with stories about the presidential election in Ukraine, which has apparently been won in the first round by "Chocolate King" Petro Poroshenko. Most of these corporate media reports offer little more than a rehash of this carefully crafted NATO‑EU narrative: following the ouster, by popular uprising, of former president Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian government moved quickly to meddle in Ukraine's delicate and unstable internal affairs; the referendum in Crimea occurred under the direct threat of Russian military intervention, thereby rendering the result as unsurprising but utterly invalid; Russia has proceeded to organize, equip and support bands of separatist militants who use terrorist tactics to destabilize Ukraine and enable Russian annexation.

 

            This narrative concludes that the people of Ukraine have the opportunity to bring stability to their country by providing a single‑round election victory to Poroshenko.

 

            Amidst this sometimes desperate‑sounding fable of "colour revolutions and confectionary rulers", the truth has conveniently been distorted or omitted entirely. This, of course, is also part of the NATO‑EU narrative.

 

            Why?

 

            Because the last thing that imperialist organizations and governments (including Canada's) want their people to remember is that Viktor Yanukovych was a democratically elected president of a sovereign country, whose decision about the political and economic direction for Ukraine sparked massive interference in Ukraine's internal affairs. They don't want us to consider that countries of the EU and NATO, who have dedicated decades to eastward expansion and encirclement of Russia, are responsible for backing and guiding the violent coup in February in which neo‑fascist forces played a key role. We are not to know that the referendum in Crimea was rooted in that region's historical status as an autonomous republic, both in the Soviet Union and in Ukraine. The corporate media definitely want to avoid any discussion of the May 2 massacre at Odessa, in which dozens of anti‑government protestors were trapped by reactionary, pro‑coup forces and burned alive.

 

            The people in imperialist countries are not to know these facts, because such knowledge is a key basis for building opposition. A Canadian public which recognizes the Harper government's foreign policy as aggressive, imperialist, militaristic and undemocratic is also a public that will question Canada's support and contribution to the current military buildup in eastern Europe. It is a public that will not support or accept massive increases in Canada's military budget, but will instead demand military spending cuts and the redirection of public money toward job creation, health and social programs, and the environment.

 

            Austerity and war are two sides of the same coin. In the context of an ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, imperialist states and organizations are becoming more aggressive in their drive to divide and redivide the world, to control markets and resources and outmaneuver their rivals. At the very same time that imperialist governments are inflicting brutal austerity measures against the people and attacking labour and democratic rights, they are seeking and using new and old pretexts for interference, provocation, and war.

 

            Such a huge contradiction, with such enormous and immediate stakes for so many people in Canada, could not be maintained if not for the massive campaign of misinformation. Imperialism's increased aggressiveness includes an intense effort to ideologically soften and confuse the population, to try to justify policies that place militarism as a most noble cause to which all social needs are secondary. We witnessed this during the Cold War, when imperialism generated anti‑Soviet and anti‑communist panic and used it to vindicate a costly and destructive arms race, countless military coups and deadly dictatorships.

 

            Which brings us back to the Ukrainian presidential election, an event as orchestrated by imperialist powers as any. Whatever the formal outcome, it is clear that stability, sovereignty and democracy will remain elusive to the people of Ukraine as long as their country is a pawn in the NATO‑EU game of European realignment.

 

            For people who truly care about the rights of the Ukrainian people - and all peoples - to peace, self‑determination and quality of life, the task is clear. We must work to expose the truth behind the crisis in Ukraine, to isolate the policies and actions of NATO and the EU as the main factor that provoked the current crisis, and to assert that it is the sole right of the peoples of each country to determine the path of their social, economic and political development, free from foreign interference.

 

            The risk of a new Cold War is real, and responding to that risk is a test of our internationalism. To avoid our responsibilities, and to instead pretend that international relations occurs in a geopolitical vacuum, means we will have failed the test.

(The above article is from the June 1-15, 2014, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)