NATO's illegal war against Iran, as well as its proxy war with Russia, in Ukraine, cannot be divorced from this global imperialist competition. Indeed, in the last week, that has become glaringly obvious, as Ukrainian imperialism, has attacked Iranian ships in the Caspian Sea as well as its increasing missile and drone strikes deep inside Russia, killing Russian workers. Its not the first time Ukrainian imperialism has involved itself in the region, as it sent military forces to support US and UK imperialism in their previous illegal war and occupation of Iraq. Ukrainian imperialism has also been involved in the civil war in Sudan etc. Yet, not only do the western imperialist powers and their apologists, but, also, the social-imperialists of The Ukraine Solidarity Committee, continue to ludicrously claim that “poor little Ukraine”, much like “Poor Little Belgium”, in WWI, is merely engaging in an act of national self-defence, to assert its right of national self-determination, much, as is, of course, claimed by the Zionists in relation to their genocidal acts in Palestine, and Lebanon.
And, of course, the other side of that is true, also. NATO's hypocrisy is shown in its argument that it had to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran, because the Zionist state in Israel had claimed that Iran was within weeks of developing a nuclear weapon, much as the same had been claimed in relation to Saddam Hussein and WMD, in 2003. When Russia argued, on better grounds, that NATO had been continually expanding up to its borders, despite previous assurances it would not, and so launched its invasion of Eastern Ukraine, as a similarly pre-emptive action, NATO and its apologists, including the social-imperialists of the USC, dismissed that argument. Marxists, have no truck with either side of these imperialist wars, and we reject and expose the hypocrisy being shown by them.
Marxists do not support Russian imperialism, in its invasion of Eastern Ukraine, but we reject the hypocrisy of NATO imperialism, in claiming that Russia had no grounds for doing so, especially when, NATO and its Zionist ally has used precisely the same argument to justify its illegal war on Iran, much as it did in Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. As Trotsky noted, Lenin described this plainly in relation to WWI.
“Imperialism camouflages its own peculiar aims – seizure of colonies, markets, sources of raw material, spheres of influence – with such ideas as “safeguarding peace against the aggressors,” “defence of the fatherland,” “defence of democracy,” etc. These ideas are false through and through. It is the duty of every socialist not to support them but, on the contrary, to unmask them before the people. “The question of which group delivered the first military blow or first declare war,” wrote Lenin in March 1915, “has no importance whatever in determining the tactics of socialists. Phrases about the defence of the fatherland, repelling invasion by the enemy, conducting a defensive war, etc., are on both sides a complete deception of the people.” “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?””
Neither Lenin nor Trotsky, saw any reason, whilst exposing the hypocrisy of British, French and Russian hypocrisy, and their claim that Germany-Austria started the war by shooting first, to side with German-Austrian imperialism, in that war either! Their clear Marxist approach, based on the interests of the working-class, as a global class, was to issue a plague on both their houses. Trotsky adopted the same approach in relation to the Balkan Wars, including the claims that this was a war of liberation against Ottoman oppression. Trotsky saw no reason not to tell the truth about the hypocrisy and war crimes that were taking place on both sides of that conflict. And, yes, while he and other Marxists supported the struggle against Ottoman oppression in the Balkans, they saw that as a struggle that has to be waged by the working-class, leading behind them the masses, not one that is to be delegated to the bourgeoisie, and still less to a bourgeois state.
“But it is not at all a matter of indifference by what methods this emancipation is being accomplished. The method of “liberation” that is being followed today means the enslavement of Macedonia to the personal regime in Bulgaria and to Bulgarian militarism; it means, moreover, the strengthening of reaction in Bulgaria itself. That positive, progressive result which history will, in the last analysis, extract from the ghastly events in the Balkans, will suffer no harm from the exposures made by Balkan and European democracy; on the contrary, only a struggle against the usurpation of history's tasks by the present masters of the situation will educate the Balkan peoples to play the role of superseding not only Turkish despotism but also those who, for their own reactionary purposes, are, by their own barbarous methods, now destroying that despotism...
Our agitation, on the contrary, against the way that history's problems are at present being solved, goes hand in hand with the work of the Balkan Social Democrats. And when we denounce the bloody deeds of the Balkan 'liberation' from above we carry forward the struggle not only against liberal deception of the Russian masses but also against enslavement of the Balkan masses.”
(Trotsky – The Balkan Wars, p 293-4)
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