An Open Call to the NDP and Potential Leadership Candidates: Support a Transparent, Fair, and Democratic leadership contest.

Good morning this crisp, autumn October 20, 2025, friends and fellow comrades across Canada, and particularly those who have publicly leapt into the NDP leadership race, and the NDP HQ. I am writing to ask for your support in what I consider to be an incredibly simple call:

        Support a Transparent, Fair, and Democratic leadership contest.

Sounds simple, right? Easy? It should be, ought to be. Before the leadership race, Avi Lewis astutely observed that, over the course of the contest, 'party insiders' would be prominent. He noted, correctly, that “it was these insiders - and their expertise - that engineered the NDP’s decades of incremental, Liberal-lite politics” and that “their kind of politics brought us to the low point where we now must begin again." Lewis charged that these insiders “are going to fight like hell for what they insist belongs to them” because “they think of the NDP as *their* party. Their (broken) toy. Their club, to run by their rules.” Lewis demanded that "our process - our decision - is made in the sunlight of collective action, not the back rooms where insiders ply their trade.” He concluded “let the members decide.” Hear, hear!

All I am asking and calling for is public support, from Rob Ashton, Tanile Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson, and Yves Engler, and whoever else wants to, for this principle. It ought to be easy for Avi, they’re his words! Similarly it ought to be easy for Rob Ashton. If Ashton is as hard as nails, born in the labour union as he says, then he’ll be more than familiar with weasel words and procedural ratfuckery, and would want to publicly oppose this kind of conduct in the strongest terms possible. Even McPherson, if she really stands against ‘purity tests’ and wants to welcome a broad tent in the party, then there could be no finer demonstration of that than by publicly affirming support for an open, transparent, fair, and democratic leadership contest. I don’t know Ms Johnston well but I think she’d likely support it, too. And I know that my friend and comrade Yves Engler would support such an initiative.

This is important. It is actually incredibly important. I owe Avi Lewis $100, but I have a stop payment on this debt until such time as I am assured that my hard earned dollars are actually permitting of the democratic process – which now I am not so sure of. Can we have a democratic leadership contest? Is HQ going to procedurally disqualify the most vibrant and necessary voices a-priori? I’m not going to argue the details of the manufacturing of consent for this, because I think they’re silly. I’ll just note that if consent *is* manufactured for this kind of undemocratic conduct, it would be a wound from which Social Democracy in Canada may not actually ever recover.

I do not care if my preferred candidate wins. I genuinely don’t. If there is a transparent, fair, and democratic leadership contest, I’ll fight for the gills for the party of the person who wins. But if that doesn’t occur, if there is first principles rat-fuckery, I will not only not donate to or support that party – buddy, I will devote my waking hours to heaving it into the dustbin of history. I don’t want that, and for those blithe to the ramifications of the ‘New Democratic Party’ starting out its fledgling new life upon an act of supreme anti-democracy, I assure you, you don’t want that. That, feeling like the NDP isn’t actually the party of Democratic Socialism in Canada at all, that HQ is just pulling the strings to sell us another stupid spectacle, is exactly what got us here in the first place. We should not be fighting one another, we should be uniting to oppose Carney and his devastating cuts, and Poillievre and his idiocy. Beginning this leadership contest by being lax as it pertains to procedural exclusion by the NDP insider caste would, perhaps irrevocably, poison this.

So, again, I am publicly asking for each of the NDP leadership Candidates, and preferably NDP central itself, to on record affirm their support for a transparent, fair, and democratic leadership contest.

Thank you,

- dc

I Hope the Rump LSBC and TLABC Lose – October 14 2025

 

Today is the first day of the BCSC Law Society of British Columbia (LSBC) trial, and I hope, for both my sake, and the sake of British Columbia, that the rump remnants of the LSBC and Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia (TLABC) lose. Moreover, I do not care if the rump remnants of the LSBC, or TLABC, or any hectoring or censorious professional quarter, do not like hearing it, and am prepared to wear for all eternity having said so. First, though, an important preface: British Columbia, Canada, is actually the greatest polity in the world. Skookum, better, more enlightened, our Constitution is good, our Courts (especially our Supreme Court) are honourable and intelligent, we are generally, though not exclusively, good neighbours and gracious guests of the First Nations here, and we generally enjoy a stable existence which we should seek to cherish and preserve. That cannot be said of everywhere, and I am glad to be scrabbling on the bottom of the heap fighting with the Crown and legal regulator here, than to be on the top of the heap elsewhere. With that said, I am for the legislative transcendence of this institution, the LSBC. It is a bad institution, perhaps the worst institution I have ever encountered: cold, stupid, dysfunctional, unfeeling, unintelligent, tasked with enormous power and responsibility and yet woefully unfit and incapable for purpose, and all the worse because it conducts itself entirely at a remove from the overwhelming majority of communities in British Columbia, sequestered as it is to one high-rise office in Vancouver with a hostile phone-tree, like a bank.

Its proponents point to its longevity as proof of its worth. ‘Look at the mighty oak tree, the LSBC,’ they say, when in point of fact this institution actively practised completely arbitrary and capricious racial and ideological exclusion for well over 100 years. Its membership today are demographically, and sociologically, descended from the beneficiaries of that exclusion, their being kept in absolute fiat power over the provision of legal services as a gated-community unto themselves. When the body of 14,000 licensees makes a decision on who ought or ought not be included, a membership which has at least in part been selected for on that basis, that is intrinsically suspect. Claims that it has since been reformed and rationalized are greatly exaggerated. In truth it does not even represent the greater mass of actually practising British Columbia legal practitioners today. Rather, what actually occurs is that everybody knows this hulking wreck functions poorly - and only in the interests of a tiny, extremely affluent minority - is malformed, does not fulfill its public duty in a rational way, and yet one is obliged, blackmailed, into silence and obeisance, allegedly because the alternative might be worse. The present litigation over the new Legal Professions Act in British Columbia has thwarted and thawed that conspiracy of silence somewhat. In a piece this past week for the Vancouver Sun, King's Counsel Peter Gall conceded that "the Law Society has had decades to meet the access challenge, but has failed to do so," that the Law Society's own processes take "too long, [are] too expensive and [are] unnecessarily adversarial," and that, ultimately, "the status quo isn't defensible." Peter A Gall "BC's Legal System is Failing to Serve the Public Interest" Vancouver Sun, October 9, 2025. I disagree with some of Mr Gall’s other views and conclusions, but it is nonetheless astounding all on its own that Counsel of such standing would openly pronounce the way legal regulation occurs in British Columbia as effectively moribund. It is not little old’ me, I can say, it is King’s Counsel Peter Gall. If the LSBC restorationist thugs torture me and shove bamboo up my nails, I’ll shout, ‘it wasn’t me, sire, it was Peter Gall KC!’

The rejoinder that the LSBC as it presently exists is ‘democratic,’ and that no reform ought to take place because it might upset the precious ‘democracy’ of the LSBC, is risible. The LSBC is at times led by its membership in the most general and diffuse sense, but in point of fact it gets led alternately by an extremely bureaucratic, terse and alegal staff, and a few Olympian Bencher Gods who descend to attend to the affairs of mere mortals, including law, basically never. When the membership passes a motion which the Benchers or staff don’t feel or imagine to be feasible or worth pursuing, they just don’t, as they haven’t with the member resolutions on Articling Student protections passed at the last Law Society AGM. In this respect, some in the profession speak about shepherding the LSBC as though it were an incredibly unwieldy tanker, being pulled gradually and precariously by tiny ropes towards purpose. And, if that is the case, that is not a good institution. Really, consider, an institution which constantly has to be apologized for in its incoherence, inability, delay, and irrational social hierarchy, as in, ‘oh, it doesn’t mean it, it’s just an impossibly incoherent 155 year old institution, it just needs to be coaxed,’ is not a good institution. It is insane that this institution, of this importance, has been trivialized to the point where complete incapacity is habitually normalized and hand-waved away.

The legal community ought to be democratic, absolutely. Indeed, it ought indeed to have a greater and more expansive democratic mandate than it presently does, to both inform, educate, and empower the public to engage with legal life and what the legal system can do. To debate important legal and societal issues, but to do so from within the public sphere itself, and not as an in-camera thought-correction session. Legal professionals, as leaders of the community, ought to animate and suffuse the most important issues of the day, as they oftentimes labour at the most trivial. I am not convinced this is accomplished by the present yearly system of furious closed-doors debate, leading to ambiguous quasi-referendums on literally the most important and salient issues of the day, and the legal community’s orientation towards these questions. This system in fact mystifies and stupefies, both the profession itself, and certainly the public, rather than explicates and educates. On the one hand, who elected this tiny body of 14,000 licensees, alone and apparently apart from society, to arbitrate and determine questions of such significance? Is the public comfortable with this purported determination, this self-assertion (basically ex-nihilo, because the LSBC is so old) of jurisdiction to adjudicate such questions – to effectively exclude those who do not pledge fealty to the LSBC and its ideological horizons from participation in legal life? And, on the other hand, only a handful of those licensees actually participate in any given AGM. The question has become too much trying to convince these 14,000 licensees, and even among them a particular caste of networked cliques, rather than what ought to be the object and aim, convincing the public, and, more importantly, the Court. I know what the Court would have said to a number of ill-advised member resolutions over the past number of years, none of it favourable. And that is precisely the problem, that Law Society politics has taken on this para-legal existence, such that one can succeed at law, but not at LSBC.

Its detractors wail and cry for the “independence of the bar,” and the “rule of law.” A few things on this:

(1) The new Legal Professions Act is not the Draconian cartoon its detractors make of it. It is actually a legislative document, a piece of statutory engineering, which succeeds precisely because it pre-anticipates the values which would be marshalled against it otherwise, and weaves these into its basic substrate. I’ll give you an example: in the Trial Lawyers Association of BC suit they have specifically named Mr Kevin Westell as ‘thee’ Counsel supposedly and allegedly under threat. In these submissions he is billed as the everyman journeyman lawyer, and it is menaced that he might be put in the box, subjected to star chamber procedures, just for zealous advocacy! Can you imagine? Except Mr Westell isn’t just Joe-Q-Public everyman lawyer, he also happens to sit on the LSBC’s disciplinary committee, and has a direct interest in the legitimacy of a system in which there is no public law obligation to serve the interests of access to justice, no public law obligation to encourage and facilitate reconciliation, no particular need to remove barriers to practice, and not with any particularity for any disadvantaged groups, and no public law obligation to do so in a timely, transparent, proportionate way. In other words, Mr Westell has an interest in precisely the kind of unaccountable star chamber which the TLABC submissions project onto and decries about the new Legislation. What the new Legislation actually provides is something like a disinfectant for unaccountable, star-chamber processes on the part of the legal regulator, which would mark an unwanted change for the insiders of the LSBC. I think it is hypocritical to posture as this impartial practitioner whose Charter rights are menaced, when you are an active-duty Charter menacer, and I think the submissions of the Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia suffer from this defect. As for the LSBC’s submissions, they too misrepresent and mischaracterize the new legislation with shallow, falsely heroic mystifications, little more intellectually grounded than nursery rhymes. If this were Doug Ford or Danielle Smith going after the Law Society, I would almost certainly oppose it. But that’s not the case here, and what the BCNDP Government passed was a piece of legislation which is strong and defensible because it already knows and includes and statutorily enshrines all the important values which legal practitioners care about, and avails them of these provisions as a shield for them to wield actually against that legal regulator – to say, ‘here, you must allow me to challenge these authorities unmolested,’ as though it were an ancient writ. The new Legal Professions Act actually strengthens, enriches, and codifies all the liberties which legal practitioners could want to ward off against unacceptable state intrusion.

(2) The LSBC is not the knight in shining armour for the principles of the independence of the bar and the rule of law that it purports to be when under threat of legislative reform, it just isn’t. And it is dishonest and malign to pretend, for ulterior purposes, that it is that kind of institution. The LSBC protects its monopoly over the provision of legal services, that’s it. Everything it does, from onboarding legal developments in the Court, to directing and governing practice, is not structured and geared towards the promotion and preservation of zealous advocacy, but towards the promotion of the direct personal interests of licensees, and in particular its most affluent, well-established licensees. On the one hand it is easy to say, ‘oh, well it’s vital for the Law Society to keep the head-choppers and maniacs out of the legal profession,’ or the massive fraud embezzlers, the dupes of foreign money launderers, and the like, that’s fine, there is obviously a role for that. But the LSBC goes much farther than that. They are actual brain-washers, as ludicrous as 60s batman villains henchmen, like, ‘get in the brain-wash box.’ It is not enough for them to be qualified, it is necessary to swear fealty. It exists on the moral spectrum well above cult, and a few notches above mafia, but nonetheless well short of what one would expect when one hears the phrase ‘legal regulator.’ It is country-club, basically. A dressed up country-club, certainly, a nice country club, but nonetheless a country-club, and one which functions with as few preservative safeties, guardrails, processes as one would find in a gate-kept country-club. If the Law Society were the institution it pretends and purports to be under threat of its monopoly over the provision of legal services being taken away, this noble, shield on heart defender of zealous advocacy, then it would be worth preserving, obviously; except it isn’t, so it is not. And, this is the flip side of the coin of the new Legislation actually providing the kinds of protections its detractors complain of it lacking, because what the LSBC is trying to protect isn’t the independence of the bar, but rather its own private, institutional independence. That kind of ‘independence,’ is not good, actually.

(3) The legal profession, and society, would be immensely and enormously edified and bettered by a legal profession not afraid of and cowed by its legal regulator. Yes, legal professionals should have to uphold the highest standards of conduct, in keeping with their position in society. At the same time, the regulator ought not hold a monopoly over what constitutes the highest standards of conduct, because allowing them to do so results, invariably, in an unrealistic, unobtainable, patrician sophist ideal, against which those who are committed to actual causes in society are judged unfavourably. Those who actually contend, and attempt to intervene on behalf of the least well off in society, are the most heavily thought-policed by this Keystone-Cops squad of ‘professional’ brain-cleaners. As a sub-point, please do not misconstrue this as endorsement of vestigial and unenlightened anti-indigenous sentiment, to the extent that it is present within the BC legal community. Such opposition to the regulator is actually wrong and embarrassing, not because one ought not challenge the legal regulator, but because they are challenges to and contempt for the rulings of the Court on the subject. The LSBC is pretty barely and superficially a promoter and defender of Reconciliation and our Constitution, anyway. If it were such a thing it would have been issuing daily condemnations of opposition leader John Rustad calling BC Provincial Court Judges ‘Pedophile Lover.’ It didn’t.

Many access to justice problems are actually a matter of it being a risky and dangerous to attempt to help those in distress. The LSBC, by design, makes this actually as difficult, treacherous, and unpalatable for legal practitioners, and aspirant legal practitioners, as possible, precisely to drive up and inflate the cost of legal services, because this is what the tiny clique which directs the LSBC want. This has a direct and overwhelming negative effect on society. Society is paying for the LSBC’s self-defeating self-dealing, and the absence of a reliable supply of assistance with basic and oftentimes seemingly trivial legal services. The LSBC excludes those who don’t pledge fealty to this insular, sort of vaguely mason-like agreement, the greasy handshake. That is bad for the British Columbia Public, that is not the LSBC fulfilling its mandate to protect the Public, that is the LSBC harming the BC Public by knowingly depriving it of legal services by being an impossibly obtuse, self-dealing aristocratic garden-party. The rule of law would actually be strengthened by legal practitioners unafraid to say the wrong thing, or stand up for the wrong cause, lest they be subject to endless procedural persecution by their regulator, an otherwise completely unaccountable, quasi-public, quasi-private institution.

You can feel free to disagree, I know many do. I have found the opposition of the Canadian Bar Association to the new Legal Professions Act in particular disappointing and superficial. Law Societies have worked, and continue to work today, enormous injustice through procedural persecution and exclusion, historically on racial and ideological grounds – and I would contend continuing on class grounds. Many of the filtration mechanisms of the LSBC seem explicitly like class-based weeding out systems, rather than serving any rational form of preparation for legal practice. It is actually an incredibly progressive development for the independence of the bar, the rule of law, and the protection of rights in British Columbia and Canadian society, that a cold, bureaucratic, and risk-averse regulator be constrained by at least some basic guardrails in how it can treat legal practitioners, and aspirant legal practitioners, as are provided by the new Legal Professions Act.

For my part I will never be ashamed or sorry for endorsing and promoting the utility of this legislation, whether it becomes implemented or not, because my values aren’t determined by a greasy handshake, and I’d rather throw in with Immanuel Kant than the petty, aggrieved little surveillance, intimidation and retribution state they’ve got going on at LSBC HQ. I hope the Honourable Justice Skolrood sees right through the false heroism and chestbeating hysterics of this gaggle of affluent, insider persecutors. I sincerely hope he sees this entire exercise, where the most affluent, insider connected lawyers in British Columbia collude to inhibit and impede rational, reasonable, even enlightened, regulation of the legal profession, by an independent body conceived of for precisely this purpose, as ridiculous and grating to any of the British Columbian Public savvy enough to know it is going on.

We won’t know for months, maybe many months. Oh man, too many months. But until we do, and while arguments commence, just remember, the people who are ready to stride on into Court portraying themselves as the white hats, and the Government Man as the tyrannical bad guy black hats, it might just be that the biggest tyrants of all are LSBC insiders finally and justly being deprived of their arbitrary, irrational, archaic and fiat privilege. The access to justice crisis exists because these people, who subject legal aspirants and newly called lawyers to the same kind of Draconian unfairness which they menace and project onto the new legislation, consciously, knowingly, concertedly restrict the supply of possible provision of legal services, in order to inflate its pecuniary value. In doing so they derange both the BC legal profession, and BC public. I don’t think that’s consistent with the white hat cliche.

Multipolarity and So-Called Ultra-Imperialism

 

What do we mean when we say “Multipolarity”? Is this term analytically useful and commensurate with Marxist analysis and the critique of political-economy? The trouble is that the pre-eminent Marxist analysis of Imperialism, Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was written and released during the First World War, and therefore its analysis pertain to a situation in which there was only Imperialism. This situation changed, partially by Lenin’s own hand, with the foundation of the Soviet Union. Suddenly there existed a situation which was irrevocably different to Lenin’s own analysis, precisely because something unique had come into the world: a state which reflected the interests of the working classes, namely, industrial labourers and small peasant farmers. In some respects Lenin’s analysis of Imperialism remains exactly true, eerily true, right down to our present day, and yet in a crucial respect – the existence of a Proletarian State – it is always-already obsolete, and has been since shortly after it was written.

What is the risk of dismissing the analysis of multipolarity? What interests does it serve to deny the analytic utility of multipolarity? Well, for example, a churlish ultra-leftist might reject the analysis of multipolarity, and advocate for a biblical exegesis of Lenin’s original text, because they either denied the class character of the Soviet Union, or, later, because they denied the class character of the People’s Republic of China. For such an ultra-leftist, a literal and unreconstructed reading of Lenin’s text is advisable because the situation remains simply a contest between competing imperialisms. But such a reading is not possible, and crucially at odds with Lenin in a different way, in its jettisoning the exact class character of imperialism which Lenin articulates. While Lenin was writing in a situation in which no proletarian state existed, their coming into existence would have altered Lenin’s analysis of the situation, because imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and a territorial-power configuration dedicated to the abolition of the capitalist modes of production and exchange in the last instance would, naturally, function differently.

At the same time, can the analytic of multipolarity be abused or used in a manner which is either analytically useless, or harmful? Of course. It does so in instances where it is deployed as synonymous with what Lenin rebuked in Kautsky, the belief in the possibility of perpetual and enduring ‘super-imperialism’ or ‘ultra-imperialism,’ which is either the dominance of one imperialist hegemon, or an agreement between and among imperialists for the joint division and exploitation of the earth. Ironically, this supposition, or postulate, becomes most prevalent in an era of inter-imperialist rivalry, because during an era of untrammeled hegemony it is not even a question. It only becomes a question for social theorists as changes in the development of the forces of production alter the balance of power between imperialist powers, such that what hadn’t needed to be negotiated previously, because of an established balance of power, becomes unsettled, and suddenly comes into question. It goes like this: in spite of relative changes in the balance of geopolitical power as a result of technological development, capitalist powers can be politically persuaded to adopt mutually beneficial and peaceful arrangements for the continuation of the human species. Lenin said, correctly, that this was absolutely impossible, that it was a pleasing fiction meant to delude and distract the working class from their own salvation.

"In the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German ‘Marxist,’ Kautsky, ‘inter-imperialist’ or ‘ultra-imperialist’ alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics." (295)

In Lenin’s time, a single dominant economic hegemon, had been in decline, but nevertheless was able to ensure what it asserted was a relatively peaceful division of the world. In another article Lenin emphasizes how false these supposed periods of “peace” actually are, writing of the breakdown of so-called "“peaceful” capitalism" that “even in that period, roughly between 1871 and 1914, “peaceful” capitalism created conditions of life that were a very far cry from actual “peace”, both in the military and the class sense. For nine-tenths of the population of the leading countries, for hundreds of millions in the colonies and backward countries, that epoch was not one of “peace” but of oppression, suffering and horror, which was the more terrible, possibly, for appearing to be a horror without end." In such a period, the point is not that the so-called “peace” of “peaceful imperialism” is real, as much as imperialism is in a position to ensure its continuation irrespective of its falsity and oppression. An era of the breakdown of the rule of a dominant economic and geopolitical hegemon is, by contrast, “much more violent, spasmodic, disastrous and conflicting, an epoch which for the mass of the population is typified not so much by a ‘horror without end’ as by a horrible end." (104)

In our time, the United States is progressively declining as the world economic hegemon, and its geopolitical relationships are becoming belligerent, brittle, and warlike. There are open and loud calls from prominent voices in the United States to enforce its ‘rules based international order’ by the same gunboat diplomacy that the British had conducted the Nineteenth Century Opium Wars. Is it a progressive development that, as a result of the development of the forces of production and exchange, and the concomitant international balance of power, the United States is less and less able to unilaterally assert its dominance over the face of the globe? Maybe, but not necessarily on its own, if it only meant that this power fell into the hands of other imperialist poles equally or moreso committed to the capitalist modes of production and exchange. Power being distributed in the hands of several capitalist imperialisms, each with their accumulated layers of chauvinism and reaction, is not necessarily an improvement or progress from fiat dominance by one capitalist imperialism and its layers of chavinism and reaction. The ‘peace’ which results from each of these kinds of arrangements, for the overwhelming preponderance of humanity, is equally false.

The emergence of the People’s Republic of China as a competing economic hegemon, however, is genuinely novel and unique, just as the emergence of the Soviet Union had been novel and unique. Economic, social, and civilizational success by a Proletarian power formation is not reducible to an analysis which only features Imperialisms precisely because its development works at cross purposes to those of Imperialism. Its emergence reflects a genuine, inspiring, noble effort towards the transcendence of the capitalist modes of production and exchange. And sometimes people deploy the term ‘multipolarity’ to reflect the declining ability of the United States to guarantee these modes of production and exchange in the face of a power bloc coming into existence around a state which is dedicated to their abolition. That is analytically unique, and worth indexing in a manner which social scientists can refer to as a delineated phenomenon.

So, if what is meant by ‘multipolarity’ is simply a hope in imperialism being attenuated because of the emergence of inter-imperialist rivalry, then this is exactly synonymous with what Lenin correctly pilloried as Kautsky’s ‘superimperialism’ or ‘ultraimperialism’ and ought to be dismissed as a bourgeois chauvinist fantasy. However, if what is meant by multipolarity is a concrete analysis of the world system focusing on the element which was not present when Lenin was writing, namely a Proletarian State in its own development, where that Proletarian States is able to challenge the economic domination of the Imperialist States, then it is a vital and necessary analysis. In this latter case, Multipolarity is not synonymous with ‘peaceful’ ultra-imperialism, but rather synonymous with the epoch of the transition from capitalism to communism, the becoming obsolete of the capitalist modes of production and exchange.

So the problem is that the term ‘Multipolarity’ can imply both something which is erroneous and already correctly rejected by materialist analysis, the theory of so-called ‘ultra-imperialsm,’ as well as something which is correct and novel with respect to our most thorough materialist analysis, the emergence and development of a Proletarian power formation, which challenges the continued existence of the capitalist modes of production and exchange. The tension between the former, banal, erroneous connotation, and the latter, novel and vital substance, makes the handling of the term “Multipolarity” in a materialist manner a challenge.

Cynicism and Stupidity on the Frontiers of NATO

 

I hate cynicism and stupidity. I hate cretins who parade their stupidity and low, incompetent, ignorant, chauvinist thought and thinking around as though they were profound somehow. One of the reasons I will always have time for Peter Sloterdijk, the philosopher, for whatever his other intellectual failings, is his incisive diagnosis and ruthless assault on cynical reason, the basic operating system of the modern cynical cretin.

 

I can think of no finer example of such stupidity and cynicism, such cynical, cretinous reason, than the sneering, posturing resolution, spearheaded by the United States and passed yesterday at the United Nations, A/ES-11/L.7 “Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.” I want to tell you about this resolution because I think it is exemplary of the total falsification of recent history going on right now, not to mention the absolute orgy of historical revisionism and effectively holocaust denial which has accompanied it.

 

This resolution purports to emphasize the need to – quote “reach, as soon as possible, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine in line with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

 

But that is not what the US promoted resolution does, because of a cynicism, because of a stupidity. What cynicism, what stupidity? It is that the resolution expresses its “commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters.” Why is this stupid, you might ask, why is that cynical?

 

It is stupid and cynical for two reasons, first the General, and then the Particular:

 

(1) The notion of the United States relying on and promoting itself as the champion of the notion of the inviolable sanctity of the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of other nations is absurd and offensive. Maintaining this charade requires the compulsory adoption of the memory of a goldfish. The US posturing as the champion of these principles is absolutely farcical beyond farcical given the overwhelming and habitual violations of these principles by the United States itself, even just in the past twenty years.

 

The United States, a barely 250 year old genocidal settler-colonial state, whose land was obtained entirely and unambiguously by primitive accumulation by dispossession – that is, theft, plunder and violence – is going to lecture and hector the world on the sacred principles of territorial non-intervention. Okay. . .

 

The United States which twenty years ago illegally invaded Iraq and which has occupied it, on again off again for the past twenty years, is going to get up on its high horse about the sacred inviolability of sovereignty and internationally recognized borders, is it? Three years ago Iraq’s democratically elected and sovereign parliament voted 170-0 to expel US troops! How did the US respond? By telling the Iraqis that if they expelled US troops the US would destroy their central bank and leave them worse off that the worst days of the war! That United States, now, is going to herald itself as the champion of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of poor, mistreated peripheral states.

 

The United States which operates a network of totally illegal unilateral economic sanctions to coerce less affluent states, that United States is going to ride in on its mighty tiny high high horse as the deliverer of the weak and vulnerable?

 

The United States of the drone war over the skies of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen. The United States which killed 500,000 Iraqis and which displaced tens of millions of others. Which raided Afghanistan for its resources and left it a desicated heap in the hands of same Taliban they had 'liberated' it from. That United States is going to hector and lecture from the pulpit on the subject of respecting the sovereignty of other nations, is it?

 

Incredible. Cynical for those who manufacture such heinous, insidious codswallop, and stupid on the part of those why buy it. It is hypocrisy incarnate, the Great Satan chiding and scolding, and a passive audience applauding the irrational spectacle. As China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted this week:

 

"The US is the No.1 violator of sovereignty and interferer in the internal affairs of other countries. Since the end of WWII, the US has sought to subvert 50+ foreign governments, interfered in elections in 30+ countries & attempted assassination on 50+ foreign leaders."

 

And (2) – the second reason why this position being promoted by the US and its vassal states is stupid and cynical – is that one of the many particular egregious violations of sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of other states by the United States over the past twenty years was the illegal and totally undemocratic coup d'état which the United States orchestrated in Ukraine in 2014.

 

I’m going to read to you an excerpt from a piece by the Marxist Socialist Historian and Ecologist John Bellamy-Foster, written last year. If you have the time I encourage you to read it for yourself, it is called “The US Proxy War in Ukraine.” I think this piece is important, very important, because I view Mr Bellamy-Foster as the kind of deep, substantive, historically grounded thinker which the cretins and ghouls, spooks, plutes, NeoCons and chauvinists are trying to drown out and censor right now. His piece is a properly historical-materialist analysis of the present conflict and its antecedents. In this piece, Bellamy-Foster writes:

 

"The proxy war started in 2014 when the Maidan coup, engineered by the United States, took place in Ukraine, removing the democratically elected president, and putting ultra-nationalists largely in control. The immediate result though was that Ukraine began to break apart. Crimea had been an independent, autonomous state from 1991 to 1995. In 1995 Ukraine illegally tore up the Crimean Constitution and annexed it against its will. The Crimean people didn’t consider themselves part of Ukraine, and were largely Russian speaking, with deep cultural connections to Russia. When the coup occurred, with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in control, the Crimean population wanted out. Russia gave them an opportunity with a referendum to stay in the Ukraine or join with Russia. They chose the latter. However, in the eastern Ukraine the primarily Russian population was subjected to repression by ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Kyiv forces. Russophobia and extreme repression of the Russian-speaking populations in the East set in—with the infamous case of the forty people blown up in a public building by neo-Nazis associated with the Azov Battalion. Originally there were a number of breakaway republics. Two survived in the Donbass region, with dominant Russian-speaking populations: the republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

 

A civil war thus emerged in Ukraine between Kyiv in the West and Donbass in the East. But it was also a proxy war with the U.S./NATO supporting Kyiv and Russia supporting Donbass. The civil war started right after the coup, when the Russian language was basically outlawed, so that individuals could get fined for speaking Russian in a store. It was an attack on the Russian language and culture and a violent repression of the populations in the eastern parts of the Ukraine.

 

Initially, there were about 14,000 lives lost in the civil war. And these casualties were in the eastern part of the country, with something like 2.5 million refugees pouring into Russia. The Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015 led to a ceasefire, mediated by France and Germany, and supported by the United Nations Security Council. In these agreements the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics were given autonomous status within Ukraine. But Kyiv broke the Minsk agreements again and again, continuing to attack the breakaway republics in Donbass."

 

One really has to be serious here, an illegal and undemocratic coup is the single most violent and consequential violations of sovereignty which can possibly occur, it is the absolute seizure of political authority. In 2014 the US orchestrated the illegal deposing of the duly elected President of Ukraine, who was from the eastern regions now in question, and the installation of an extreme right-wing, ethnonationalist, white supremacist government.

 

Imagine, I really want you to imagine, if by means of foreign funding, support and coordination, the Ottawa Convoy protesters had managed to depose Trudeau and assume dictatorial control of the government and its entire state machinery. They immediately abrogate all our Constitutional obligations towards indigenous peoples, and begin a campaign of racist terror as state policy. Imagine then that the peripheries of Canada object, and say ‘no, we want nothing to do with this criminal, illegal regime which has sprung up and been recognized by foreign saboteurs.’ Would the international community campaign passionately for and insist upon maintaining such a nightmare government’s “territorial integrity?” That is what is being proposed here. Insisting on the ‘territorial integrity’ of Ukraine means forcing the eastern regions to live under an illegal coup government which came into existence as a result of a US orchestrated coup in 2014 and which immediately proceeded to ban Russian as a language, bomb predominantly Russian cities which ceased to recognize them as a Government, and ethnically persecute the Russian speaking and culturally Russian minority in the east.

 

After the 2014 coup it was a primitive accumulation goldrush for the United States in terms of buying up Ukrainian resource industry and assets on the cheap. It was a deluge of shitty American failsons on a profiteering crusade. That is really what the issue with Hunter Biden is, for example – not the coked up gun and dick pics on his laptom – but that he was sent along with so many other McKinsey caste losers to hover up resources in the aftermath of a coup orchestrated, in part, by his father.

 

Ignoring this, trying to edit out or obscure the last decade of Ukraine’s history and its primary causes, doesn’t actually contribute to the promotion or achievement of peace at all. There is so many lies and falsehoods, such a suffocating cloud of amnesia going on right now regarding the now decade-long war in Ukraine. The US started this war in 2014 with an illegal and undemocratic coup, it should end with a peace agreement, but that won't come from one-sided Western jingoism.

 

Because of these two reason, because the United States promoting itself as the champion of the inviolable sanctity of the sovereignty of states is absurd, and because the US has specifically and overwhelmingly been interfering with Ukraine and Russia’s sovereignty for the past ten years, the United Nations General Assembly resolution promoted by the United States is stupid and cynical, a product of cretins, for cretins.

 

That is why it is stupid and cynical, stupid on the part of those who uncritically believe it, and cynical on the part of those who don’t, but say so because they profit by saying so, because while the US calls their resolution “Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine” – its actual effect is the opposite of that, to retrench positions and mischaracterize one another in a belligerent and warlike way. The US is saying ‘peace’ when, for all practical purposes, they mean ‘war.’ This is THE MOST GROTESQUE CYNICISM! And Joe Biden, and Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, Chrysia Freeland and Victoria Nuland are all THE MOST GROTESQUE CYNICS! To try to warp the meaning of Peace to mean more war, expanded war, exacerbated war, more arms transfers, more arms production, profits for Raytheon, profits for Lockheed Martin – ‘MAKE PEACE, MAKE A BUCK FOR NORTHROP GRUMMAN AND GENERAL DYNAMICS!’ - that’s not peace, that’s war.

 

Yesterday on the CBC they had on a figure from the “Canadian Centre for Global Affairs.” It is hardly the first time they’ve had someone from the CCGA on the air to intone on foreign affairs. Murray Brewster, currently enthusiastically promoting the war from the Kiev forces frontlines, has had the CBC publish literally hundreds, literally hundreds, of articles over the years advocating for increased military expenditure where the only cited source is a figure from the Canadian Centre for Global Affairs. Do you think that in any of Murray’s articles, or on TV yesterday, they ever informed the audience that the Canadian Center for Global Affairs is funded by, among others, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, the Department of National Defence and Lockheed Martin? No, of course not, in spite of having been specifically told to do so by an otherwise completely toothless CBC Ombudsman, Jack Nagler.

 

This war is stupid and cynical. There are those who are manufacturing and selling the war, which is cynical, and there are those who are passively consuming the war, as spectators, which is stupid.

 

We are being sold this war by those who profit by its prolongation and exacerbation, and they are selling it and promoting it falsely under the banner of ‘peace.’

 

That is the most cynical lie, and its promoters not only manufacture this lie, but manufacture the stupidity in the populace necessary for them to passively receive this lie. They blight out basic truths, like that the US orchestrated an illegal and undemocratic coup in 2014, like that the US is one of the most predatory and insane forces on the planet today, that they regularly and habitually violate and warp the sovereignty, independence and integrity of other nations for their own narrow gain, they obscure these truths from view, demonize them, stigmatize them, censor them.

 

This is more than just kulturkampf, the military-political wings of the richest imperial states, whose weapons and resource industries profit by the prolongation and exacerbation of the war, have a direct strategic and financial impetus to criminalize inconvenient speech and expression.

 

Consent is being manufactured for catastrophic, clash of civilizations, absolute war. If you oppose it, or criticize it in any way, you are informed you are the minority and should be quiet. DON'T! Speak out against this madness now. Oppose the war! Oppose Western intervention! Oppose this proxy war. This is a border dispute. The post-coup Kiev regime abused and ethnically oppressed the eastern regions for eight years, in contravention of the peace agreements which they signed and agreed to. There is no reason why this conflict cannot be resolved by means of a negotiated peaceful settlement. Oppose this garbage proxy war. Oppose this war. Oppose the war in Ukraine. Oppose the US using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia. Oppose its prolongation and exacerbation. Oppose weapons transfers. Fight against the spiraling out of control of yet another garbage, propagandized US proxy war. Oppose this war. Oppose this garbage US proxy war. Oppose its mystification, oppose the lie that this war began in 2022, as opposed to in 2014 when the US orchestrated an illegal coup. Oppose weapons transfers. Oppose the exacerbation and prolongation of the war by profiteers.

 

Having relied on the authority of John Bellamy-Foster I’m going to end with some of his words. He said of the present moment:

 

“All of this is a lot to be absorbed in a short time. But I think it’s important to understand the two prongs of the U.S./NATO imperial grand strategy in order to understand why the Kremlin considers itself threatened, and why it acted as it did, and why this proxy war is so dangerous for the world as a whole. What we should keep in mind right now is that all of this maneuvering for absolute world supremacy has brought to us to the brink of a global thermonuclear war and global omnicide. The only answer is to create a massive world movement for peace, ecology, and socialism."

 

Thank you, love and solidarity for everyone who’s made it out to support real, actual peace today.

 

The Wages of the Spectacle – Panegyric for Sy Hersh

 

Does the Spectacle mandate that you be a passive Spectator? No, in fact the Spectacle invites intervention, it just invites a multiplicity of wrong interventions, based on deficient, distorted information. And in this way one remains a Spectator to the Situation, even while active, in being unable to actually change or substantively inflect upon the Situation. The Spectacle alternately invites Spectatorship, on the one hand, and incorrect, deluded, or mystified intervention, on the other, and in this way the Spectacle perpetuates itself with us inside it. What is it that the Spectacle is meant to obscure, or make impossible? Lucid, concerted, knowing intervention into the Situation. The more historically situated and contextualized the intervention, the more the Spectacle seeks to demonize, stigmatize, and exclude it. Why? Because lucid, historically situated knowledge of the Situation threatens to diagnose and oppose the Spectacle in a way that knowledge gained by mere naive sense – that is, the empiricism accrued by a subject naively developing within a contemporary Capital-Nation-State – cannot.

 

One shouldn’t be paralyzed by the fear of wrong intervention into not acting, not speaking, especially when it is vital and necessary to do so, but at the same time one should be cognizant that the Spectacle invites, and rewards, stupid, ill-informed acts and speech. We are suffocated and bamboozled by an overproliferation and over-amplification of insipid, cretinous acts, and insipid, cretinous speech, and it does not threaten the Spectacle to inadvertently perpetuate that low, shallow thought. This, incidentally, is the phenomenon most specifically diagnosed in Gilles Châtelet’s exemplary text To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies tr Robin MacKay (London: Urbanomic, 2014).

 

For whose benefit is the Spectacle? It is tempting to say ‘for the owning class, of course.’ But that isn’t true, or isn’t complete at any rate. The Spectacle exists to perpetuate a number of anachronistic and obsolete categories, including the owning class of the richest imperialist states, the bureaucracy of their respective states, as well as diffusely the bigots and hatemongers of society as they misdirect the anger which ought to be directed towards the first two categories onto the heads of the marginalized and the vulnerable. The Spectacle deflects responsibility for the actual, it invents pseudo-villains and pseudo-cures, it is a reality denying and reality distorting machine.

 

For every imperialist owning class of the richest imperialist states there are chauvinist popularizers of reaction, bloviating balding, frustrated white men who view their exclusion of other voices as a noble self-sacrifice to keep the partisan, activist mob at bay. Those who envision themselves as the last intellectual bastion of sanity in a world gone mad. Jordan Peterson in the West is a prominent example, but perhaps the paradigmatic example is France’s Bernard-Henri Lévy, Nouveaux Philosophes. Whether on television or in print, these popularizers of reaction are small-minded self-involved chauvinist tyrants and charlatans, mashing together mismatched concepts in an effort to bamboozle the public. Gilles Deleuze was asked once, "what do you think of the "new philosophers,"" and he responded "nothing, I think that their thought is worthless." He says they use concepts which are "coarse as a hollow tooth. . . grotesque melanges, superficial dualisms: the law and the rebel, power and the angel." And, secondarily, Deleuze says, "the weaker the content of the thought, the more important the thinker becomes, the more the subject of enunciation asserts its importance in relation to the empty utterances." There is an omnipresent generalized appeal to authority. Between these two procedures, the superficial and erroneous use of shallow concepts, and the generalized appeal to authority, the 'New Philosophers' "sabotage work." The Spectacle promotes and rewards stupidity, it disproportionately platforms and amplifies it, precisely because the overwhelming majority of means of communication are privately owned mouthpieces, and the few that are not are nonetheless

 

The Spectacle requires the promotion of stupidity and the censorship of knowledge. This is particularly apparent in the case of Julian Assange, where from Assange we now know about the American treatment of prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay, civilian murders by American troops in Iraq, and the expansion of the drone-war throughout the middle-east, but particularly in Yemen, and because of these revelations, the US has Assange kept in captivity by UK authorities, in abominable conditions, pending the resolution of his legal appeals process. For the Crime of revealing true information to the international public, the United States is individually persecuting Assange. But it is also true, in the cases of Jeremy Corbyn, a politician, Steven Donziger, a lawyer, and Seymour Hersh, a journalist. Each of these figures was subject to relentless, erroneous, unjustified character assassination precisely because they had exposed the Spectacle to historically grounded knowledge about the Situation. In the case of Corbyn it was knowledge to the effect that society is unequally structured to benefit a tiny ruling class at the expense of a dispossessed and impoverished underclass. In the case of Mr Donziger, it was that Chevron had severely ecologically degraded key portions of the Amazon river basin. And in the case of Sy Hersh it is, most recently, that the United States committed infrastructural terrorism against the Nordstream2 Pipeline in order to compel Germany and the EU into greater compliance with its world hegemonic project.

 

The case of Hersh is particularly enlightening. In our shallow, superficial discourse in the West today, there is very little in the way of the weighing of speech and thought. Because of the profusion of superficial, puff thought among the kept televisual lackeys in the most affluent imperialist states, the contending thought is never subject to real verification, that is thoroughgoing scrutiny. Rather contentions and allegations simply drift across our screens, this outlet says this, that outlet says that, and they say it until whatever phenomenon or personages has drifted from the memory of the public whose brains they have turned to mush.

 

For the liberal bobble-heads in the West, anything which doesn’t accord with the prescribed NATO/Atlantic-Council version of “the truth” is labelled “disinformation,” or “a Kremlin-and-or-Chinese talking point” effectively irrespective of its empirical validity. They have said this with respect to the precipitous and provocative encroachment of NATO against Russia, they have said it with respect to the US orchestrated coup in Ukraine in 2014, as they say it with respect to the reasonable expectations of the signatories of the Minsk Peace Accords. But saying this about one of the most decorated and interrogative journalists of a generation is more difficult. When an American liberal today denigrates Seymour Hersh, to try to deny the allegations he has recently made with respect to the United States having bombed the Nordstream 2 pipeline, they oppose themselves to a figure which revealed US perpetrated massacres in Vietnam, the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, and the RAT-line in Syria, by which America armed Al-Qaeda proxies through intermediaries in Turkey in what was later revealed to have been a 1 Billion dollar CIA project named Timber Sycamore.

 

The Spectacle tolerates incredible, almost unimaginable amounts of both insipid, empty speech, as well as false speech which promotes erroneous action and the perpetuation of the Spectacle. What it cannot countenance is truth, digested, historically grounded and contextualized truth, and its expression is demonized, stigmatized and reviled from by the Spectacle, and in particular the privately owned means of communication in the richest imperialist states, and their atrophied, emaciated public institutions of expression, if any. In this way, what the Spectacle and its technocratic institutions, the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab in particular, decry as “disinformation” is, more often than not, information. And what they promote as information is chauvinist, imperialist disinformation. The promotion of this present conflict in the West requires the strict policing of an almost incredible shortfall of even recent historical knowledge, the demonization and stigmatization of even basic inferences from the actual Situation.

What Peace in Ukraine Requires

 

I – Peace in Ukraine is Possible and Desirable

 

Contrary to the increasingly belligerent, jackbooted chorus in the West, peace in Ukraine is both possible and desirable. It is only a tiny, predatory minority, the owning classes in the richest Imperialist states, who desire and promote the prolongation and exacerbation of this decade long conflict. This war can end in a peaceful, negotiated settlement, and should end that way, and it cannot arrive at that destination, as the jingo chauvinists in the West maintain, by inflaming the belligerents and flooding the conflict with advanced weaponry. Tens of thousands on both sides have already perished in this war, it is senseless, stupid, irrational and repulsive that the conflict be allowed to continue. Peace in Ukraine today requires three things: (1) An Immediate Ceasefire; (2) Intervention by a Broad Array of Non-Aligned Parties; and (3) The Direct Participation of the Proximate Aggrieved Parties.

 

II – Peace in Ukraine Requires (1) an Immediate Ceasefire, (2) Intervention by Non-Aligned States, and (3) Direct Participation of the Aggrieved Parties

 

(1) An Immediate Ceasefire

 

There are those in the West who have come to promote the carnage of the war in Ukraine as a holy and inviolable necessity. All manner of advanced death-dealing machines must be flooded to Ukraine without delay. Fatheaded bloviating men who pontificate how glorious it is for others’ children to die in this flesh devouring permanent war economy zone. Ukrainian forces are beating up children to send them to the front lines to get atomized within hours. Is the same thing not occurring in Russia? To a lesser extent, yes, it is, where mobilization of a semi-reserve professional elite within Russian society is being met with resentment by that affected professional caste that the lower ranks of Russian society ought to be conscripted. Nevertheless the problem is more acute on the Ukrainian side, where Ukrainian fighting bodies are starting to be used up as a total resource. There exists a human life-extinguishing zone, and both sides revile from it, as well they should.

 

Russia has largely been able to outsource the last few months of the war to a Private Military Contractor, Wagner Group. Between international hires and redemptive prison labour, Wagner has effectively fought the battle of Bakhmut/Artemvisk for the past six months, and all of Ukraine’s resources have been tied up in retaining this territory. But why outsource the ‘Special Military Operation’? Was it to abandon it to private hands in hopes that they could better manage the affair than the Russian Federal Assembly? No. This was to buy Russia time. Time for Uralvagonzavod to ramp up production of T-90Ms and Armatas. Time to fortify the entire Novorossiya territory with massive military earthworks making the territory easier to defend. Russia has liberated the regions it came to liberate, the Donestsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, and the land bridge to Crimea, and has spent the past six month retrenching these positions against Kiev/NATO incursion. Moreover it has spent the past six months planning out and supplying itself for its next offensive phase of the war, gradually making its way up along the east bank of the Dnipro river, “liberating” larger cities like Kharkov or Dnipropetrovsk before marching on Kiev in earnest.

 

I put “liberating” here in scare-quotes. Why? Because unlike the liberation of the regions which Kiev had been making war on for the past eight years, Donetsk and Luhansk, cities further into the territorial body of Ukraine demonstrably do not want to be part of Russia. That does not change the hard power fact that Russia can do this if it chooses to, progressing slowly through siege warfare to the ultimate defeat of Ukraine as a State.

 

But our ‘military experts’ here in the West disagree. They say that the NATO countries can procure or produce sufficient munitions and military hardware to prosecute a prolonged military campaign. They say that they can get these arms to Ukraine, and that Ukraine ought to keep fighting. Their progressively losing territory, and bodies, is merely a short term shortfall which will be made up for in deliveries of the most death-dealing of contemporary armaments, F-16s, Typhoons, Leopards, Abrams, HIMARS, MANPADS, weapons with which Kiev might strike deep into Russian territory. If there is a death-dealing machine, it has all been promised to Zelensky and associates.

 

So each side is not exhausted and is in effect spoiling for a prolonged, bloody, intractable fight. The foreign policy blob of Washington and its associated vassal states is committed to perpetual subsidization of weaponry for Ukraine, while Russia, aggrieved not only by NATO expansion, not only by the coup which the US perpetrated on Ukraine in 2014, but the eight year long civil war against the eastern regions, is committed to these regions’ liberation from oppression by and terrorism from the US proxy regime in Kiev.

 

Indeed none other than that venerable American State-Thought machine the RAND Corporation recently identified this as the aporia of "Mutual Optimisim About the Course of the War" as the primary and overriding "Impediment to Ending the Conflict." The RAND Corporation report found that

 

"Both Sides believe that their relative power, and thus ability to prevail, will improve over time. The centrality of Western assistance to Ukraine's war effort, and the uncertainty about the future of that assistance, has led Moscow and Kyiv to different conclusions about which of the two will gain the upper hand over time. The conflict is therefore not resolving the information problem in the way that the literature leads us to expect; both sides have grounds for optimism about the possibility of making gains by continuing to fight. Historically this kind of mutual optimism has made wars difficult to end."

 

What is being proposed, and indeed promoted, is at least a months long, if not years long, or decades long campaign of war between the US and NATO, one side, and Russia on the other, in which hundreds of thousands of troops, to say nothing of civilian casualties, will die. Initially with predominantly the bodies of the proxy state in Kiev, but who is to say that would remain the case? Presently troops are withdrawn from the Kiev proxy state to be trained in Western states on advanced armaments, and there are already calls to supplement Kiev’s troops with Western troops. How easily we might stumble across that Rubicon over the coming months of unparalleled carnage and destruction?

 

It does not have to be this way. It does not have to be that hundreds of thousands of young lives, full lives, actual lives, have to be mulched up by great hulking war apparatuses in a slow, churning cacophony of exploded munitions. There must be a peace, there must be a peace process, and an equitable and rational assessment of how to reconcile the opposing local populations. There must be an immediate ceasefire. Nor, for that matter does it have to be the case that thousands of lives are lost today along the eastern front of the war. In the battle for Bakhmut/Artemvisk the average life-span for a Ukrainian conscript is 4 hours. It is consuming thousands of lives per day. Blown to bits like so much gore in a reality that is, frankly, unimaginable in its horror.

 

(2) Intervention by a Broad Array of Non-Aligned Parties

 

Intervention by a broad array of neutral and unaligned parties. Anyone who is actively transferring weapons and armaments to the conflict are disqualified. This would mean that neutral third countries like China, Brazil and India would mediate the conflict. And, of course, one would already hear the pained cries from the Western warkhawks that ‘China is not neutral!’ Except they are, at least insofar as this conflict goes. China could end this conflict tomorrow with a single swift deployment of manpower and equipment, it could directly and reliably supply military hardware to Russia which could end this conflict in a matter of weeks, with the result being the total military defeat of the regime in Kiev and its forcible depoliticization, and yet it doesn’t. Why doesn’t it? Because, reliable China, that repository of technocratic rectitude, condemns the unilateral violation of sovereign territory. It has condemned Russia for the invasion of February 2022. Nevertheless, while for the active belligerents against Russia right now, the US, the EU, UK, and Canada, the inquiry ends here, for the unaligned countries it does not. Why, they ask has this situation arisen? Why did Russia feel compelled to invade Ukraine? The unaligned countries refuse to endorse and support either Russia, or indeed Kiev, because they know that no one in the story of this conflict is innocent, and that all of the active belligerents are responsible for its genesis. They know that the overwhelming majority of the world, the labouring masses of the world, have nothing to gain, nothing to profit from this war at all. They know that those who promote the exacerbation and prolongation of this war most loudly do in fact have a financial stake in its exacerbation and prolongation. This is what makes them singularly qualified to intervene, because they refuse to merely choose between the binary narratives of the conflict as manichean good versus evil narratives.

 

The corollary is that belligerents to this conflict, with both Russia and the United States first among them, ought to play as little of a directing role as possible. The belligerence within the United States towards Russia is no less than the belligerence which exists towards the United States in Russia, and no more justified or rational. Indeed it has been revealed this month by veteran Journalist Sy Hersh that it was the United States which surreptitiously destroyed several of the Nordstream 2 pipelines. The US is not merely supplying material to Kiev, it is an active belligerent in the conflict.

 

(3) The Direct Participation of the Proximate Aggrieved Parties

 

If there is to be a meaningful and durable peace, it has to be the peace of the local populations who have been aggrieved by the exacerbation of the situation by the broader powers and belligerents. Since 2014, the state in Kiev has been at war with the two breakaway republics in the eastern regions, the People’s Republic of Donetsk, and the People’s Republic of Luhansk. It is between these parties, Kiev on the one side, and the self-declared republics in the eastern regions, as well as Crimea, including along the landbridge to Crimea, that peace has to be made. Russia has interests in such negotiation, as do the US and its immediate vassal states, but if there is to be a peace, it will have to be between the erstwhile state of Ukraine and the regions in the east which no longer wish to remain in Ukraine.

 

Crimea immediately voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia after the 2014 coup, which was immediately, of course, recognized by Russia. The West disputes and denigrates this vote, as it does every international plebecite which demonstrates popular contempt for the United States, but it is nonetheless the case that an overwhelming majority of Crimea turned out to vote, and voted to leave immediately. These other two republics of the eastern regions, however, were stranded within the asserted territory of the Kiev regime. It has to be remembered what a traumatic, provocative event the 2014 Maidan coup was – the duly elected President of Ukraine, elected predominantly by the eastern regions, as politically opposed to the parties favoured by the west of Ukraine, was removed from office in an undemocratic coup. The eastern regions, the People’s Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk, ceased to recognize the state in Kiev as a legitimate political authority. It is precisely because of the civil war which arose as a result of the US orchestrated coup of 2014 that the US proxy regime in Kiev was compelled to sign the Minsk peace agreements, which pledged that Kiev would (a) withdraw militarily from the eastern regions, (b) recognize the territorial autonomy of the eastern regions, and (c) implement economic development for the eastern regions. Of course Kiev did none of these things, and rather continued to degrade conditions of life for the eastern regions. In 2014, Petro Poroshenko, the mad racist chocolate baron who initially assumed power in the post-coup regime in Kiev, declared that “We will have jobs, they will not. We will have pensions, they will not. We will have support of children and pensioners, they will not. Our children will go to kindergartens and schools, theirs will be sitting in cellars.” This was the policy pursued for the following eight years, and continued under Vlodimir Zelensky, though he ran on a platform of doing otherwise.

 

Last month a pro-Ukrainian reporter was was bothering an older lady from an eastern city still under the control of Kiev. She said to this lady 'the Day of Ukrainian Unity is this Weekend.' The lady shrugs and says, 'I don't know.' The pro-Ukrainian reporter insists: "Unity of Ukraine is not important in your opinion?" And the lady thinks to herself and then says "Why Ukrainians? The whole world is for peace. So that people are kind." And the pro-Ukrainian reporter insists "but we're at war and need to unite to win against the Russians." The lady appears visibly annoyed, she doesn't want to have the argument, she says 'I don't know, I'm not into politics." And the pro-Ukrainian reporter says "war is politics?" And the lady says "yes, politics of course." So the pro-Ukrainian reporter says "politics of what country?" and the lady says "all countries, America's, Ukraine's, Russia's." And here the pro-Ukrainian reporter insists: "Who is the aggressor? Who started the war?" And the lady says, without a moment's hestitation, "Ukraine." Incredulous, the pro-Ukrainian reporter says "Ukraine started the war?" and the lady says "yes." The pro-Ukrainian reporter asks "against whom did Ukraine start the war?" and the lady says "2014 against its own people." Again, incredulous, the pro-Ukraine reporter says "Ukraine attacked itself?" and the lady, again, without hesitation, says "yes. Whose people are in the Donbas?"

 

There exists a population within Ukraine for whom Zelensky, fighting this war with perpetual and indiscriminate Western assistance is a hero, a champion for freedom and democracy, and, at the same time, there exists a population within the disputed eastern regions for whom Zelensky is a pathetic idiot, who is waging a war in total contravention of his central election promise to end and resolve the then eight year long civil war, and who is selling himself, and Ukraine, to the Americans, at the expense of Ukrainian bodies. This latter population is specifically targeted for reprisal by the proxy regime in Kiev, silenced, censored, banned from Parliament, arbitrarily arrested and tortured. If there is to be a meaningful peace, both those who are culturally Ukrainian and those who are culturally Russian, those on both sides of the now decade-long civil war, must have a prominent and central position in the negotiations. Not Kiev on one side and Russia on the other, nor Russia on one side and the US on the other, but rather Kiev on one side and the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk on the other.

 

These are the parties between whom peace has to be made. Bracket aside the territorial distribution question. Prior to the US orchestrated coup of 2014, it remained possible for culturally Russian and culturally Ukrainian populations to live together in peace within the eastern regions. As a result of the precipitous increase in hostilities, as a result of the 2014 coup, and as a result of the eight years of civil war perpetrated by Kiev against the eastern regions thereafter, that is no longer possible. A peace settlement has to be realistic about what can be achieved in terms of healing the wounds which have accumulated over the past decade as a result of this conflict. It needs to put these parties into dialogue with one another while finding a way to, for the immediate future, keep them apart within an intelligent and rational territorial distribution.

 

III – Rage Against the Demonization and Denigration of Peace

 

Those who oppose the cessation of hostilities often purport to be working in the ultimate interests of peace. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made this claim, for example, on January 5, 2023, stating that: “Weapons are – in fact – the way to peace.” This is a dangerous, cynical lie, the purpose of which is to legitimate NATO military expenditure and expand the territory of accumulation and extraction by the US and its immediate vassal states.

 

In the Western countries calls for peace, for a negotiated end to the war, are demonized, denigrated and censored by the mouthpieces of the owning class, the privately owned means of communication. The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, The Economist, the Atlantic, all promote the prolongation and exacerbation of this war, and alternately stigmatize or ignore calls for the war to end. Basic, true information is labelled ‘disinformation’ by the lapdogs of the US State Department, the Atlantic Council and their associated personages.

 

In opposition to this stultified heap, which monologically preaches the merit in perpetual subsidization of a US proxy state to conquer territory it never controlled in the first place, calls must grow to end this irrational proxy war. The Western public must demand an immediate end to the carnage, an immediate ceasefire, the abolition of the Bakhmut meat-blender, they must demand that peace negotiations be directed and led by non-aligned parties, and that the US and Russia be recognized as active belligerents who must themselves make peace, and the public must demand a peace process which really and substantively heals the wounds of the last ten years of civil war and great power struggle.

What Do We Mean When We Say We Remember?

 

"These comments are sure to be welcomed by fifty or sixty people; a large number given the times in which we live and the gravity of the matters under discussion." [Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)]

On October 24, 2022, Melanie Joly, Liberal Minister for Foreign Affairs wrote that “we mark the 77th anniversary of the Charter of the United Nations, the document that created the UN.” The same day Canadian Ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae tweeted out "Happy UN Charter day. Worth fighting for!" [exclamation point!] Comrades, have you ever heard anything so nakedly cynical in your entire lives?

What are the very first words of the Preamble to the UN Charter? Does anyone know? Everyone should. These words should be branded on the hearts and minds of everyone who loves peace. It reads: "We the people of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind."

In his statement on so-called ‘Veterans Week,’ this past week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote, quote: "In times of war, in military conflicts, and in times of peace, we’ve counted on our women and men in uniform." Hashtag 'Canada Remembers.' What does this even mean? ‘Counted on them’ to what end?

What is it which Canada Remembers? Does Canada remember that the two world wars directly consumed one hundred and forty-five millions souls, and tens of millions more who died from the destabilization, displacements, degradations of conditions of life and rampant illnesses which the world wars gave rise to? What is being remembered when we remember on remembrance day? Is it blonde haired blue-eyed hometown boys dying in the trenches for freedom and democracy? Is it Paul Gross in Passchendale (2008) in a pornographic aestheticization of Sir Douglas Haig shoving 150,000 men into a mud coated meat-grinder? Why were the wars?

This past week Kentuky Fried Chicken apologized because its German chains had somehow sent out an app alert which read - and I quote - "It's memorial day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!" Incredible. Incredible! Akin to Robert Musil’s ‘A Racehorse of Genius.’ A phrase which immediately decontextualizes its referents beyond all recognition. It’s the anniversary of Kristallnacht, be sure to remember with fried chicken.

This is how ‘remembrance’ occurs for us today. As a totally recuperated pastiche, with the most heinous crime known to man, the foundation stone of the Holocaust, being casually juxtaposed into an advertizement for fried chicken. There is infinitely more truth in this than falsity. The truth is in the desensitization and decontextualization of the Holocaust which it is exemplary of. This ad is representative of the anaesthetic quality of the spectacle, how it inures and makes one numb to the horrors of the twentieth century by evacuating them of any meaning.

I remember that this past month, 52 nations – most pale as ghosts, or otherwise honorary whites – voted AGAINST a UN resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other forms of racial discrimination. More open ambivalence towards the glorification of historical fascism than at any point save for the 1930s. In. . . uh. . . I guess, solidarity with Ukraine?

What do we mean when we say we remember?

I remember that settler-colonialism inflicted tens of millions of deaths on the pre-Columbian indigenous populations of what are called North and South America. I remember that this was, and remains, the most heinous genocide known to human civilization, and that the Holocaust is merely a rationalized form of colonial depopulation, imbued with twentieth century technology. I remember that our state, Canada, continues its genocide against indigenous peoples to this day, and that this is reflected in indigenous populations’ overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, in poverty and desperation of First Nations communities, and the development of the Residential School System into the Ministry of child and family services.

I remember that Britain was an enthusiastic participant in the slave trade until 1807, and only abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1833. Between 1640 and 1807 more than three million Africans were trafficked to the colonies under the aegis and flag of the British Empire. The funds generated by this trade were used to found the Bank of England.

I remember that in the 1870s British rule starved five million people in India to death as its bountiful grain was was plundered and exported for profit. I remember that it was the British who first rationalized the use of concentration camps in the Boer War. I remember that tens of millions of Africans were exterminated by various colonial powers in the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’ between 1890 and 1914.

I remember that while Hitler exterminated six million Jews, three million Poles, and three million captured Soviet citizens, Winston Churchill concertedly starved four million Bengalis in 1943. I remember that he said of the famines, occurring under intense grain import sanctions imposed by Britain, that the famines were the Bengalis own fault for breeding too much.

What are the wars? What do we mean when we say we remember the wars?

In the meeting of the Reichstag of December 2, 1914, Karl Leibknecht was the only member to vote against the provision of war credits. It is often misunderstood to be the case that Liebknecht spoke at this meeting, he didn't. He was forbidden to do so by the President of the Reichstag. Instead, the text of his reasons for voting against the provision of war credits was circulated to the German Press, all of whom declined to print it. We receive Liebknect's remarks, historically, from their printing in foreign presses.

Liebknecht wrote that "this War, desired by none of the people concerned, has not broken out in behalf of the welfare of the German people or any other. It is an Imperialist War, a war over important territories of exploitation for capitalists and financiers."

Liebknecht wrote of the social chauvninists of the day, who rationalized their calls for belligerence under the banner 'Against Czarism!,' that such slogans had been quote "invented for the occasion. . . to exploit the noblest inclinations and the revolutionary traditions and ideals of the people in stirring up hatred of other peoples."

The same is true of Social Democrats and the American Empire today. Those who marshal together lofty phrases and high-minded ideals in the service of the model of reaction, the United States.

I remember that the United States stands before us today dripping from head to foot in the blood of over a million Iraqis, and several decade or longer occupations, just in the past twenty years. I remember that the United States lied us into these wars by claiming that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which never materialized.

I remember that it was the US who gave rise to Al Qaeda, the force that perpetrated 9/11, by arming, training and facilitating extremist groups as a cudgel against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and that the response to even the slightest blowback from doing this – a tiny sampling of what the US habitually inflicts on other countries, over decades and decades – was unimaginable carnage. In the first month of the Iraq War the US directly killed 15 thousand Iraqi civilians.

I remember that it was the United States which engineered and inaugurated the now eight year long civil war in the Donbas. I remember that the US doesn’t care about the societal catastrophe they inflict, so long as it secures more territory for accumulation.

I remember the regime in Kiev openly celebrating perpetrators of the Holocaust in the street for the past eight years. I remember that the figures lauded as the ‘Heroes of Ukraine’ in ‘Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes’ killed - by the conservative figures of Raul Hilberg, in the volumes of The Destruction of the European Jews - between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews, Poles, and other ethnic minorities over the course of the Second World War.

I remember the mad chocolate baron, Poroshenko, speaking of the Donbas, saying “We will have jobs, they will not. We will have pensions, they will not. We will have support of children and pensioners, they will not. Our children will go to kindergartens and schools, theirs will be sitting in cellars." I remember their failure, or refusal, to implement the peace agreements which they agreed to.

I remember that the international working class has no stake in this present war. I remember that this war, like the First World War, is an imperialist war, a war fought by monopolist blocs for territories of extraction. I remember that the pious banners flown in support of the present war are as cynical as they were at the outset of the twentieth century!

There is no profit to the international working class in the prolongation or exacerbation of this war, in subsidizing and escalating a war of aggression to conquer and subdue the eastern regions! The watchword of the international proletariat must be peace! Peace now! Peace without pre-conditions, peace without the prosecution of further war as some kind of prerequisite!

One year after the outbreak of hostilities in the First World War, Leibkneckt wrote that "The masses in the warring countries have begun to free themselves from the official webs of lies. . ." and that "The mad delusions about the ‘holy aims’ of the war have given way more and more, the enthusiasm for the war has dwindled, the will for a rapid peace has grown powerfully all over. . . The enemies of the people are counting on the forgetfulness of the masses – we counter this with the solution: Learn everything, don’t forget anything!"

If it is to pierce through the spectacle which surrounds us and numbs us, anesthetizes us to the reality of history, this is what I believe remembering has to mean: Learn everything, don’t forget anything!