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bevin's avatar

I noticed right at the end of the Medvedev presentation a clear warning to the Baltic trio- the three states run by fascist emigres- involved in the racist persecution of Russian speaking people, on which the Donbas persecution post 2014 was modeled, states which also, in a manner closely related, celebrate Nazi military 'victories' including massacres of civilians.

Medvedev makes it clear that this has to change. It is to the eternal discredit of our own countries that our governments, and public opinion, do not second Medvedev's simple and civilised plea. Let them go to the beaches of Normandy and explain to the world how, eighty years after D-Day we march side by side with those celebrating the Waffen SS, the Concentration Camp Guards and the 'police' forces which carried out the genocide by bullets.

No wonder the Russians don't choose to attend this hollow parody of the opening of a Second Front.

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"...History, of course, will put everything in its place. Sooner or later, the population of Europe will give a harsh assessment of its traitors, who sacrificed its well-being to their overseas masters. But it's not about the grades. The question is what other price Europe will have to pay for the fatal mistakes it has made. And how this will affect the fate of hundreds of millions of its inhabitants..."

This is the passage that first struck me. I have recently read GDH Cole's "Europe Russia and the Future" written in September 1941 in the early phase of Barbarossa.

Among much else Cole-a very influential historian and political actor whose work is still important and deserving of attention- takes the view that European capitalism is finished.

He identifies Europe, in a way that decades of propaganda has tended to obscure, as a place in which every ruling class on the continent had allied itself with Germany in the war against the Soviet Union.

And in which, by the same token, all resistance to those ruling classes came from and was led by working class militants who saw Nazism as the current political expression of capitalist rule.

The exception Cole noted was that of his own country-the UK- in which the government was still wedded, often despite the interests of the war effort and the nation, to the capitalist system.

And Cole recognised that for capitalism to survive after the defeat which it was going to suffer (saving a Nazi victory) in Europe it would be necessary for the United States, in which capitalism reigned supreme, to revive it.

This included his view that only by becoming a satellite of the United States could the capitalists in Britain survive and that this would mean that they would need to act as an agent of US capitalism in Europe.

Eighty years on his analysis, long discounted as NATO and the Marshall Plan, the isolation and de-clawing of European Communist Resistance movements (which dominated the political arena in the summer of 1945, when I first started paying attention to such matters) looks remarkably prescient.

Consider for example that, in allowing the Communists to be sidelined, in encouraging them to lay down their expensively acquired arms and step aside to allow those who they knew had been, months earlier supporters of Hitler's regimes, to come to power, posing as democrats and sponsored by the occupying armies, Stalin and his government were doing exactly what Putin, Medvedev et al did before February 2022- trusting and deferring to their 'valued colleagues' in the West.

The point is that, as Cole noted, the old polity of Europe died in the Second World War and it could only be replaced by an expanded Union of Soviet Republics- in which, as events since have shown to be the case- each nation would preserve and develop its national culture within the limits of a defensive geopolitical bloc. Or by something rebuilt and dominated by US Capitalist interests on the remnants of the Nazi economy- a process that would involve Britain and France becoming, as coadjutors in the Occupation, US satellites. The US price for their surrender being assistance in reconquering their empires in Asia.

Europe is now waking up to the fact that the US Occupation is coming to an end and that the institutional detritia of that occupation, the EU and NATO included, is losing its purpose.

NATO loses its purpose when European states are forced to come to terms with their Russian neighbour. The days when silly cadet statesmen/women from militarily and economically insignificant countries like the Baltic states, Rumania, (the list is as long as the Organisation's membership roll) can jump up and threaten the world with US nuclear weaponry, US armies and US bases is, mercifully, ending. The age of make believe in which the representatives all the sovereign powers met and decided after much discussion and full examination to follow their orders from Washington is ending as the black earth of Ukraine turns green again.

As to the EU, which had the single purpose of stamping out the last traces of the real compromises that "Social Europe" had made after the war, as the price paid for enrolling the support of the Social Democratic movements, Trade Unions and cooperative sectors behind the new 'democracies' with their mixed economies, a task which it fulfilled in Maastricht and Lisbon after half a century in which free schooling, free healthcare, generous pensions, short work weeks, long vacations and a wide spectrum of social benefits and individual rights had characterised the social contract.

Under the EU, in Germany, France, Italy etc austere regimes have almost totally eroded the gains- socialist inspired- made in the post war years. The final cost of agreeing to rescue by US capitalism has been the surrender of all interests to the US.

The Hegemon may be under pressure in West Asia- in Europe his interests reign supreme. And will continue to do so until, as is bound to happen soon, he withdraws to the extreme right of the stage.

And the catalyst has been the war in Ukraine, which is what Medvedev seems to me to be saying: Russia has no ill will towards Europe, it has no particular ambitions, economic or strategic. But it cannot and will not live with rabid enemies poised on its borders- nobody cares if Ukrainians want to indulge in Bandera cults or sacrifice small domestic animals on memorials to the sadists who ran Concentration Camps. Just do it quietly, Don't frighten the neighbours. Sibg the Horst Wessel song by all means, if you must, but don't teach people to hate slavs and dream of eradicating them, Jews, Gypsies or anyone else (immigrant refugees and Chinese being the obvious temptation for them).

And don't spend your mental energy and treasure on whoring arounbd the world looking for powerful nations to do your dirty work for you: no more alliances against Russia, China, Iran or anyone. We all want peace. and the leisure necessary to examine the problems facing us all- the real problems not the idiotic fantasies and fears of the people of declining aristocrats a hundred and fifty years ago.

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