Category: Uncategorized

War and Peace: Points of Information for TUC delegates on the GMB Motion on Ukraine.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

These are pictures of children killed by the almost daily Ukrainian Army shelling of Donetsk City since 2014 on display in the Arbat in Moscow. There are more than 300 of these children. They are not reported here. The GMB Motion writes them out of history. Photo: Dan Kovalik

When you think through what it says, it becomes clear that support for the GMB Motion to the TUC on the Ukraine war means support for two things that contradict everything the trade union movement stands for.

1. The ethnic cleansing of the Donbass and Crimea

2. An unlimited commitment to a war without end and/or an escalation which could lead to a nuclear confrontation that will kill all of us.

To be precise about it:

1 Ethnic Cleansing

The Motion’s point 1 calling for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014 is not compatible with point 3, calling for a peaceful end to the conflict that secures the territorial integrity of Ukraine and carries the support of the Ukrainian people. This is because it eliminates the people of the Donbass and Crimea from the narrative. As we can see from the image above, this is because there has not been one undivided “Ukrainian people” since 2014.

There has been a civil war.

The success of the Maidan movement in 2014 in overthrowing President Yanukovych, backed by the US, EU, finished off any chance of sustaining the binational state in Ukraine balanced between Russia and “the West” that had been viable until then. The people of the Donbass and Crimea rebelled against the overthrow of a President they had voted for. The decision by the new regime in Kyiv to repress them by force was prevented in Crimea by a popularly supported Russian annexation, but the bombing of Donetsk City by the Ukrainian Air Force in May 2014 began a civil war that had already cost 12,000 lives before the Russian intervention in February 2022.

This eye witness account of that day from the Donetsk Anti Fascist site is from EIena Hovhannisyan, a biology teacher:

“At that time we kept up with the news from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. We already knew how people had been martyred in Odessa, Mariupol and Krasnoarmeisk.

I had forebodings of near disaster. It was already hovering over us, but we did not think how tragic, long, brutal, hopeless the events would be. Sometimes it seemed that it was just a bad dream, that I would wake up and everything would be like before. But no. It is an illusion that the war will not touch you. It will touch everyone, sooner or later. We were simply the first to be in the epicentre.

And May 26th I will always remember. The warm, sunny weather and the roar of planes in the sky. From the balcony on the side of the airport black smoke could be seen, you could hear explosions constantly. The first shelling, deaths, destruction, grief and pain. Since that day, there would be no peace in Donetsk for another nine years. But we didn’t know it then.

And that day was endless, filled with horror and pain. The phones were literally ringing off the hook – everyone was trying to find out what happened to their loved ones, whether they were alive or not. In the evening my son arrived from work; his office was a couple of blocks from the station. He told about the horror in the city, about the dead woman vendor from the station market, about the very young guy who worked as a valet. He was killed by shrapnel from a missile fired by a Ukrainian helicopter.

People were falling, screaming, crying, calling for help. Passers-by tried to save the wounded, car alarms howled. The railway station area in any city is the most crowded place. In Donetsk on Privokzalnoye there are markets, shops, banks, the area was teeming with life. They say helicopters flew so low that you could see the pilots in the cockpit. And these pilots also saw that they hit peaceful people.

This was not done by some Hitlerites, but by Ukrainians, with whom we lived in the same country. May 26 was the day that turned everything upside down. There is no and will not be our forgiveness for Ukraine. And there will be no return. (My emphasis).

Were Kyiv a regime that was a target for the US rather than an auxiliary, does anyone doubt that this action would have been universally condemned in our media as that of “a regime that bombs its own people”?

As a result, 50,000 people from Donetsk and Luhansk have been fighting the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Donbass militia since then. They see themselves as Russians, not Ukrainians. The demand of the Donbass Republics from 2014 onwards was to be incorporated into the Russian Federation, on the same lines as Crimea was in 2014. And that has now happened.

So, for the people who live there, the Russian troops are not occupiers, they are their army. The restoration of the 2014 borders would be over their dead bodies, or see them made refugees. Delegates should note that a third of the people who have fled the fighting have fled to Russia (the largest single destination of any country).

The threat of ethnic cleansing in Crimea and Donbass is not a claim by RT or a “Putin talking point”. It is what the Ukrainian leadership say themselves.

In this interview with Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of military Intelligence, is quite clear about what would happen if Ukraine’s war aims were achieved (starting 36:57 minutes in). He is quite blunt that “victory” in the sense of military reoccupation would only be the start of a “difficult” “multi year process” of “reintegrating” territories with a population that is actually hostile and does not want to be reoccupied. Three million people with, as he puts it “a completely different view of the world”.

Budanov states that people with an “altered psyche” who can be “re educated” should be; without specifying what should be done with those that can’t, though “physical elimination” is a phrase he uses “for people with blood on their hands”; so, anyone who fought in the militia. He says that this will have to be done with a carrot and a stick, as the two only work together; and with a “firm hand”. This will be “hard work”.

Many words can be used to describe this scenario. “Liberation” for those 3 million people is not one of them. If you believe in self determination, you can’t support this.

If the people who live in the Crimea and Donbass are to be counted as part of “the Ukrainian people”, their wishes have to be taken into account in any settlement. The imposition of the 2014 territorial borders on them, as this motion advocates, is incompatible with a “peaceful end to the conflict” capable of carrying the support of ALL of the people of pre 2014 Ukraine.

So, the Motion should be rejected on this basis alone.

2. War without end – or to an end for all of us?

Even if you discount those people and their rights, committing to continue or escalate the war until they are crushed, if it is to be taken as meaning what it says, also has to take into account the costs of doing so. There are two levels to this.

1 Crimea

Actually trying to reconquer Crimea, as opposed to engaging in rhetoric about it, is seen by US military thinkers as being likely to cross Russia’s nuclear red lines.

So, support for this motion as it is written means being prepared to risk doing that .Supporters of the Motion should think through what that means.

The danger here is not simply what the Russians would do in this scenario, but what the Americans think they might do; and therefore what action they would take themselves.

If they suspect the Russians might launch nuclear weapons, there is no limit to how rapidly this could escalate. That’s the case even if the minimum gesture were initially deployed – like the sort of very high altitude explosion above the battlefield that NATO envisaged using as an initial warning shot above a conventional Warsaw Pact break through into central Europe during the Cold War. Even in that sort of case, is hard to imagine that NATO response would be to back off. Games of military chicken tend to escalate, especially with no time to find a mutually face saving climb down, and, with the only acceptable political leaders people who are “prepared to press that red button” we would all be standing on very thin ice indeed at that point.

And, if the the threshold were to be crossed, you have to recognise that US nuclear war fighting doctrine is based on an all out “first strike” to prevent retaliation. Which means acting fast, which makes anyone in its sights doubly nervous. As the Russians have over 3,000 nuclear missiles dispersed all across their territory, such a first strike would have to be huge, widespread and comprehensive. It would also have to smash cities, to knock out control and command centres. As long ago as the early 1960s, the Pentagon’s estimate of the impact of such a strike would be that it would immediately kill upwards of 600 million people, many of them “collateral damage” in nearby countries.

That’s bad enough, but studies done in the 1980s showed that a strike on that scale would cause a “nuclear winter”, as debris from city wide firestorms would be flung too high into the atmosphere to be rained out, thereby blocking sunlight and causing a catastrophic drop in global temperatures by up to 10C; devastating plant life and therefore harvests for years. It would therefore be suicidal for all of human civilisation; even if they got away with it and there were no direct retaliation. This is explored in depth here.

So, there are two reasons why Crimea should not be forced back into Ukraine and therefore the Motion should be rejected.

1 The people who live there don’t want it to happen.

2 The attempt to do so could lead to a nuclear war that will kill most, if not all, of us.

2 Donbass

The first reason also applies to the Donbass. The second may not. But, even if it doesn’t, the costs in men and material of trying to reconquer it are and will be appalling.

The current Ukrainian offensive is effectively stalled. Thousands of men have been killed to regain villages in no man’s land that barely approach the main Russian defences. A large proportion of the “game changing” NATO supplies of Leopard tanks and Bradley armoured vehicles have been destroyed in the attempt.

At the moment, the Kyiv government is launching a further mass conscription drive. Men from 18 to 60 have not been allowed to leave the country, and they can be called up at any time. Many are actively reluctant and are having to be effectively press ganged to fight. Kyiv has just banned 16 – 18 year olds form leaving the country too, indicating that they too may be called up. A truly horrific prospect.

Even with mass conscription on this scale, the prospect of “winning” is nil. The prospect of thousands and thousands more men dying is certain.

That is what supporting a continuation of the war amounts to.

Another reason for the Motion to be rejected.

We need a peace deal instead that will save lives and respect the people on both sides of the Ukrainian divide, allow them to put their shattered lives back together; and both sides of the European divide too, as there can be no “just and enduring peace” without a mutual security arrangement that allows everyone to live without feeling threatened, and that has to include the Russians.

Smaller points

The Motion tries to make an analogy with support for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s without noting

a) that the internationalists who went to fight with the Republican side in Spain were from the trade union movement and the Left. Whereas a significant proportion of the people who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine since 2014 have been from the far right.

They look like this. Photo taken in November 2014 in front of Azov Battalion HQ in Mariupol featuring Oleg Pyenya, a volunteer who posted it on his VK page, who can also be seen here in front of another Nazi flag.

A further difference with Spain in the 1930s is that at that time the British government maintained an arms embargo against the Republic, which mostly received support from the Soviet Union. Today, the British government is very keen to supply Kyiv with arms, with BAE systems opening an office in Kyiv as it has, as the Guardian puts it “benefited from increased defence spending as a result of the conflict”. The United States moreover is spending almost as much on this war as it did when fighting directly for itself in Vietnam – which makes it the major protagonist, just using the Ukrainians to do the fighting.

NATO is not explicitly mentioned in the Motion, but no Motion concerned about “imperialist aggression” deserves support if it actively encourages its intervention, as this one does.

NATO is the military core of global imperialism, responsible for 62% of global arms spending (outspending the Russians by 19 to 1) and the deaths of 4.5 million people in the last 20 years of “war on terror”. It is not a defensive human rights organisation. Its refusal to even negotiate about mutual security arrangements with Russia led directly to the war, perhaps because it has a strategic aim to partition Russia into controllable fragments at the end of it.

b) The Motion argues that trade unions in Russia are banned; whereas there are 23 million trade union members there. The main Federation was considered an acceptable affiliate of the ITUC until it suspended itself in February 2022. The Motion also, however, notes that trade unions in Ukraine do not have “full …labour rights”. In fact, since 2014, Ukraine’s labour standards have diverged from compliance with the norms that would be required for EU membership; as more and more of the economy has been privatised, laws have been passed under the tutelage of the IMF and land has been bought up by Western agribusinesses like Monsanto. The reconstruction Plan for post war Ukraine hands the task over to Blackrock, which will sell the country wholesale into a neo liberal dystopia.

For all these reasons the GMB Motion should be rejected.

A reconquest of Donetsk or Crimea by Kyiv backed by NATO, or NATO with Ukrainians doing the fighting, would require massive ethnic cleansing because the people who live there don’t want to be part of Ukraine.

Attempting to do it will cause hundreds of thousands more deaths or a risk of nuclear war.

The TUC should not cheer this on.

Where the main enemy is.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

William I Robinson’s conclusion to his essay The Unbearable Manicheanism of the “anti imperialist” Left implicitly contradicts the rest of his argument.

He writes The U.S. may be the top dog and the most dangerous criminal among competing cartels of criminal states.  We must condemn Washington for instigating a New Cold War and for prodding Russia through aggressive NATO expansion into invading Ukraine.  

Quite so. This point makes it an odd post to be recommended by the editor of Labour Hub, which in lockstep with the hegemonic ruling class narrative in the UK, has spent the last 18 months arguing doggedly that NATO expansion had nothing to do with causing the war. No prods or provocations acknowledged.

But the wider point, that the US “may be the top dog and the most dangerous criminal among competing cartels of criminal states” means that the Tricontinental Institute, Code Pink, The International Manifesto Group and No Cold War among others critiqued in his article, have got it right; that the US is the core of the imperial system that needs to be opposed in the global struggle for socialism; because that “may be” is a way of saying “is” without quite saying “is”.

The way Robinson poses it in the rest of his article however is that we are almost in a multipolar world already, and the USA is just first among equals. This is far from the case. Its capacity to subordinate the rest of the developed world to its economic, political and military needs makes it the lynch pin of the global imperial system. The EU, Japan, UK, and even smaller wealthy countries like Australia and New Zealand, are tied to it as auxiliaries prepared to sacrifice their own economies for its needs, and integrate their militaries into US global leadership. This integration of all the major developed imperial powers, subordinates the weaker to the US, but allows them together to dominate the rest of the world. Between them, direct US allies account for 67% of global military spending; and the US alone accounts for more than half of that. “Top dog” indeed.

And the US has almost 800 overseas military bases in over 80 countries, as we can see here. China, by contrast, has one (8 fewer than Turkey).

What a Global Empire looks like

This is not a matter of show. The war on terror, from 2001 to the debacle of the flight from Afghanistan, killed 4.5 million people; and did so without establishing a single viable, functioning, let alone democratic, state anywhere they intervened. It has been argued that the creation of chaos in countries like Syria and Libya has been seen in Washington as preferable to allowing regimes they disapprove of to function effectively.

This is underpinned by the Death Star level planet destroying weight of the US nuclear arsenal, the biggest of big sticks, which has hitherto allowed them to speak as softly or loudly as they like. And this is not simply for “deterrence”, or to threaten non nuclear states. The US nuclear “first strike” doctrine envisages an exterminist attack on China or Russia. This would be suicidal, as the scale of such an attack would generate a nuclear winter, but the top brass are as deeply into denial about this as they are about their equally fatal failure to rise to the level of the challenge of climate breakdown, and their planning is regularly updated.

Direct military intervention, by their own forces or using proxies, as they are trying to do with ECOWAS in the current crisis of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger trying to get out from under France Afrique in the Sahel, are only the sharpest form of intervention. Sanctions are also devastating and are imposed “against countries that violate the interests of the United States” as Wikipedia puts it with disarming frankness. At any one point, this is a significant slice of, primarily, the Global South, as we can see here.

These sanctions are designed to cripple economies but also kill people in large numbers. Half a million children in Iraq in the 1990s, over 40,000 in Venezuela in the last decade, to pick just two examples.

This is sustains the (“rules based”) world economic order, which keeps the Global South underdeveloped through the normal functioning of the international trade system, US dominance of finance, low prices for Global South commodities and high prices for loan capital, including from international institutions like the IMF and World Bank, that have imposed the “Washington consensus” privatising development agenda that is anything but developmental. The utter failure of the US allied countries in the Global North to provide the – completely token – $100 billion a year contribution to the Global South to enable fossil fuel free development, at the same time as the US alone has stumped up more than $120 billion to fuel the Ukraine war, is emblematic of how this rotten system works. As Vijay Prasad has pointed out “one in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line” and fewer than 20% have access to electricity.

At the outset of World War 1, Karl Leibknecht argued rather bravely in the Reichstag that “the main enemy is at home”. In the light of the above assessment of the structure of global imperialism, we have to recognise that the main enemy, while the Pax Americana exists and the struggle for full spectrum dominance and a “New American Century” is driven onwards, is always in Washington.

Footnotes. Short points on the rest of Robinson’s article

“Manicheanism” is a Persian theology from 300 BC that poses the world as the site of a cosmic struggle between good and evil; which are posed as moral absolutes.

Cold War thinking is Manichean. “Win, win” global cooperation is not. Demonisation of rivals, or just people who think differently, as “evil” is a characteristic of Manichean thinking.

It makes a rational assessment of the motives of opposing forces very difficult, because all analysis is shrouded in a red mist of moral repugnance; which is itself all too often a form of projection. This is evident in most establishment media coverage of the Ukraine war, in which all atrocities are attributed to the Russians, while butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of the Azov battalion.

This is often given added vehemence by sections of the Left who back this line, partly because they they need to stoke a lot of moral outrage to drown out the awareness in the backs of their minds that doing so is becoming an auxiliary of “the top dog”.

Its the same the whole world over?

The core of Robinson’s argument is that, while “the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the West’s radical political, military and economic response to it may signal the coup de grace of a decadent post-WWII inter-state order” and “the emerging global capitalist pluralism may offer greater maneuvering room for popular struggles around the world “ nevertheless, “the crisis of hegemony in the international order takes place within this single, integrated global economy.” Essentially all states are capitalist and much of a muchness. No state is any different from any other. All are converging on nationalist revivalism and this is the primary context for the “escalating economic turbulence and political chaos” we are heading for.

The paradox of this argument is that the Manichean zero sum calculations made by the US Foreign Policy establishment, that confrontation, decoupling and, in extremis, war with China is necessary to stop its rise, is not reflected in a Manichean mirror image in China’s stance. Their approach is to maintain globalisation, for global cooperation to find “win win” solutions and “a common home for humanity”. The former is leading us towards Armageddon and sections of the Left are being swept up with it. The latter is the basis of a way out.

Because China, and other states that see themselves as Socialist, dance to a different drum. Robinson acknowledges China’s “rapid industrialization, technological progress, and advanced infrastructure” and that “China has not followed the neo-liberal route to transnational capitalist integration.  The state plays a key role in the financial system, in regulating private capital, in massive public expenditure, especially in infrastructure, and in planning“. And that’s the point. “The state plays a key role” The key role in fact. And it is a state run by a Communist Party with 90 million members. It is not run by the private sector. It hasn’t been since China “stood up” in 1949. That’s the difference.

Four ways this shows.

  1. Poverty Reduction Robinson acknowledges that China “has lifted millions out of extreme poverty” then moves swiftly on. Let’s be more precise about this. 850 million people lifted out of poverty in the last 40 years. To make that relatable, because statistics don’t have an emotional impact, think of one friend and what it would mean for their life to be lifted out of extreme poverty. Then imagine a city the size of London full of friends like that. Then imagine 100 of those cities full of friends like that. That’s the scale of China’s achievement. Another way of looking at it is to imagine the whole population of Europe (740 million people) living in extreme poverty in 1993, and being lifted out of it by now. Plus an additional 100 million people. This is not normal for developing countries subject to imperialist domination. It has been a state driven mission.
  2. Wages As you can see from this graph, wages in China have consistently grown faster than in the rest of the world. This is one reason that the rule of the CPC is popular and most people in China see their country as a democracy, in the sense of it being run in the interests of the mass of the population. Fewer than half of respondents in the United States thought the same about their country, because they know full well it isn’t.

3. Belt and Road Initiative The overall impact of this is genuinely developmental and far more “greening” than Robinson makes out. As argued here, “Research indicates that the BRI has significantly promoted the carbon intensity reduction of countries along the route”, and, though this is uneven, a recent study by CGS analysing “17 environmental, economic, and social indicators” in Africa found “consistent improvements across 12 indicators through 2050 across 1.5°C scenarios” thanks to to BRI impacts. Even the World Bank projects that “BRI transport projects could reduce travel times along economic corridors by 12%, increase trade between 2.7% and 9.7%, increase income by up to 3.4% and lift 7.6 million people from extreme poverty.“

4. Climate Breakdown The investment that China is putting into the energy transition is projected by the IEA to be double that of the US and EU put together next year, as you can see here.

They are also spending twice as much on energy transition as they are on their military. The US is spending 18 times as much on its military as on the energy transition. Which sums up their relative priorities.

The Left in the Global North – which has never overthrown its own ruling class and lives in a relatively comfortable niche of permanent opposition made bearable by the higher standards of living made possible by global exploitation- tends to be dismissive of the struggles of people in developing countries who have. This niche has been tolerated hitherto here, but, with US dominance increasingly under challenge, both economic concessions and democratic spaces are being inexorably squeezed, and dissent increasingly categorised at treasonous.

Currents on the Left who, to prove their independence of mind, find themselves habitually parroting the same attack lines on the same targets as the State Department (and at the same time) should reflect that perhaps their opposition to “campism” has led them to pitch their tents in the wrong camp.

The West vs Russia – was it all inevitable?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This look at Mike Phipp’s review of Gilbert Achar’s The New Cold War- The United States, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine, is because it represents an archetype of the thinking among sections of the Left that have fallen into becoming cheerleaders for NATO; despite their recognition that, as the author approvingly quotes Achar it “continues to push, global relations in the worst possible direction, (my emphasis) at a time when the world should be focused on fighting the greatest threats that humanity has ever faced short of a nuclear Armageddon—climate change and pandemics—as well as the socioeconomic consequences of global economic crises related to these same threats.” So should we all.

The title of the review is a belated acknowledgement by the author that this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine, but a war between Russia and “the West”. “The West” can be described in many ways. “Global North” is another label for it. The most developed, advanced, dominant countries in the world, united militarily in NATO with the United States at its core is another. And it is, indeed, pushing global relations in the worst possible direction. The tragedy of the position taken by the author is that the logic of it provides them with left cover to do so.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990, the way that pushing global relations in the worst possible direction manifested itself was a drive by the United States to “dominate the post Soviet space”. This is thoroughly documented, but the author ignores it because it is such a blatant move by the dominant global imperial power to extend its dominion eastwards; with the ultimate aim of control of Russia itself, “a gas station masquerading as a country” as Senator Lindsay Graham put it. Understanding this makes supporting NATO’s war aims under the guise of supporting Ukraine’s national self determination an unsustainable posture; therefore the only possible position is disavowal. Look right at it, and not see. Or try to talk it away…

So, let’s look and see.

Dominating the post Soviet space meant not only moving to absorb Eastern European members of the former Warsaw Pact into the USA’s political, military and economic orbit, but also breaking the USSR down into its constituent republics, and seeking to control the leadership in Russia while this took place.

By 1992, precursors to the neo cons, often with direct fossil fuel interests like Dick Cheney, argued for partitioning Russia into smaller parts immediately, the better to dominate it and, “get the gas”. This is now back on the agenda, both in Ukraine and the US. The more cautious heads, who won out in 1991, felt that this would lead to uncontrollable political and economic chaos that would be more trouble than it was worth, particularly with several thousand nuclear weapons in the mix. They went for holding the country together under the control of a biddable President (Yeltsin) while shock therapy shattered its economy and reduced it to its knees as a competitive power.

Politically, in Eastern Europe, this also meant disinterring old nationalist identities from the shadows that, in their rejection of a common Soviet past, celebrated collaborators with the Nazis as national heroes, particularly in Ukraine and the Baltic States.

Economically, as the author puts it, “The IMF-blessed economic reforms plundered the former USSR, wrecking the economy and impoverishing the mass of people” throughout the nineties. GDP declined 3% in 1990, 5% in 1991, 14.5% in 1992, 8.7% in 1993 and 12.7% in 1994 and didn’t recover sustained growth until 1999. Between 1988 to 1999 per capita income in Russia dropped from $3,777 pa to just $1,331 pa.

This also involved overt anti democratic action, backed by “the West”. Again, as the author puts it ” when the Russian parliament became a centre of opposition to the policy, the then President Boris Yeltsin dissolved it and ordered the military to shell the building in 1993″ killing 147 people and wounding 437, according to Yeltsin’s own officials. The anniversary of this event on October 4th passes in silence in the West every year. Hardly surprising as the US at the time praised Yeltsin’s “superb handling” of the situation.

It is evident that Western shock therapy could not be carried through without repression. The author puts this mildly. “There’s no doubt that the economic policies imposed on Russia by the West contributed significantly to this process.” Indeed.

But he then makes an arbitrary detachment of the military dimension of US policy “It’s less evident, in my view, that US-led military policies played the same role”, on the basis that “they did not impact on the life of ordinary people in Russia in anything like the same way as the economic destruction.” As if the military, economic and political dimensions of a single policy can be divided from each other. As if the economic destruction could have been guaranteed without the military threat of the US in the full flush of its unipolar moment. This serves a purpose because, if NATO expansion is conceded to be a real, and very widely understood, threat in Russia, the whole house of cards resting on the oft repeated phrase “unprovoked invasion” collapses.

Instead, the author spins his argument around speculation about how the rise of Vladimir Putin – as an embodiment of nationalist self assertion – might have been avoided. This implies that – far from being inherently locked into a push for its own dominance, the US could have applied a different policy, one that built up and integrated Russian into a “common European home” perhaps and, instead of shock therapy, applied a Marshal Plan to the “post Soviet space”. The implication of this is that he shares Gorbachev’s delusions about the nature of US imperialism. That it is possible that it could genuinely lead the world in the interests of anything other than its venal ruling class. As though the Marshal Plan itself were an act of selfless generosity, rather than a hard nosed intervention by the US to prevent Europe going Communist – reviving flattened European competitors to revive as the price paid – allowing Western European Social Democracy half a century of delusion that its welfare states were a tribute to its own strength and wisdom rather than the temporary price paid to stave off the red threat.

This gets quite surreal when discussing Putin’s proposal to join NATO in 2001. Nowhere does the author consider why the US turned this down. The clue is in Putin’s own statement, that “Europe (my emphasis) will reinforce its reputation of a strong and truly independent centre of world politics soundly and for a long time if it succeeds in bringing together its own potential and that of Russia, including its human, territorial and natural resources and its economic, cultural and defence potential.” A strengthened European pole inside NATO with Russia as a hefty and unshiftably consolidated component part is the last thing the US wanted then, and now, as it would put its own hegemony in Europe at risk.

But, not letting the Russians in, and continuing to expand NATO at the same time, while fomenting or taking advantage of political crises in Russia’s “near abroad” in Georgia and Ukraine particularly meant that Russia, with the 20 million dead from World War 2 seared into living memory, was bound to feel under threat. Because it was, in fact, threatened. It takes an extraordinary level of dulled empathy to ignore this; or treat it as some sort of irrational paranoia on their part – or attribute it to a personality defect on the part of President Putin – all of which have become articles of faith among these currents.

In presenting the “colour revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine as “attempts to break free” the author swallows the US narrative whole. Becoming imperial junior partners of the United States is not the same thing as to “break free”.

His argument that local actors have agency – which they do – is presented as in itself a sufficient refutation of any notion that these movements were “Western orchestrated” or “designed to encircle Russia militarily”; as if all three can’t be true at the same time.

This is odd, because the author comes close to acknowledging the point when he states, “Equally, from the standpoint of the opportunities available to self-interested Western capitalism, any military or diplomatic arrangement with Russia which left the latter’s hegemony over these states intact would be less than satisfactory, especially given the exploitable, mineral-rich nature of some of them. If opportunities for a grand US-Russia rapprochement were missed, it was not accidental. (my emphasis)”. Quite so.

There is reckoned to be $12 trillion worth of rare earths and related minerals, most of it in the rebellious region of the Donbass; which “self interested Western capitalism” would like under its control, regardless of the rights or views of the people who live there.

The Maidan movement in Ukraine had popular support in Western Ukraine. The hegemonic political current within this is passed over without comment, the better not to acknowledge the strength of the far right. To do so is embarrassing, so best not. The US and EU were also active participants in the process, and the aim to pull Ukraine decisively into the Western orbit economically and politically, and to begin to pull it in militarily, had been part of the agenda since 1991. Not to acknowledge this is disavowal again.

What is even stranger about this is that the argument is completely inverted when it comes to Eastern Ukraine and Crimea. When people there rebelled against the overthrow of a government they had, for the most part, voted for, their “local agency” is dismissed by the author’s camp as completely invalid, and reduced to them being simply Russian agents.

This is where the author’s central argument, that “for socialists, the central starting point is the human and social rights of the peoples in the states involved, which could not be sacrificed to great power bloc considerations” exposes itself as utter tosh. The human and social rights of the people of the Donbass, who rebelled against Kyiv in 2014 and have been shelled and bombed by the UAF daily ever since, and mobilised in tens of thousands into the Donbass militia, are ignored completely, of no account, dismissed, written out of history. Some people, it seems, are more equal than others.

Its also evident that Ukraine itself is part of the “post Soviet space” that the US and its allies were, and are, seeking to dominate. The impact since separation in 1991 has also been to wreck the economy. As Renfrey Clarke has noted “World Bank figures show that in constant dollars, Ukraine’s 2021 Gross Domestic Product was down from the 1990 level by 38 per cent. If we use the most charitable measure, per capita GDP at Purchasing Price Parity, the decline was still 21 per cent. That last figure compares with a corresponding increase for the world as a whole of 75 per cent.”

Even before the war, Ukraine had the worst death rate in Europe and was losing 600,000 young people to emigration every year. The country has been asset stripped at an increasing pace, especially since 2014, with Western agri-businesses buying up land, and the post war reconstruction deal aimed to be run by Blackrock seeking to recoup the debts Ukraine has run up to the West by acting as its henchman/military frontier state/ willing sacrificial victim. This is grotesque any way you want to look at it, and will be crippling, whatever the residual assets and territory controlled by Kyiv.

Self determination, it won’t be.

I remember this when it was all fields… What kind of housing and where?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Recent contrasting visions of housing development from Michael Gove and Lisa Nandy pose some questions about what kind of homes we want to live in, where we build them, in what kind of communities, with what level of facilities, what standards they are built to (in terms of carbon emissions/sustainability size/dimensions and quality) who builds them and how (and what their motivation is) who owns them and is responsible for upkeep?

There is a consensus between both major Parties that “home ownership” is an aspiration and a good thing in itself. This presumes

  • an atomised pattern of housing that is presumed to be for individuals or families acting as consumers first, members of a community second*.
  • that those individuals or families are in a position to afford to buy and them maintain them: which is increasingly not the case. Go for a walk around an average suburb and you find a lot of houses in a bad state of repair, with owners unable even to “keep up appearances”.

A market not simply determined by demand exceeding supply – but also massively distorted by the intervention of finance capital seeking assets, and doing so by bumping up land prices to an astronomical extent – requires house prices to stay high, but mortgages to be sufficiently affordable not to cause a crisis. What happened in new developments like Chafford Hundred in Essex during the property crisis in the early 90s, when a slump in prices combined with increases in interest rates and half the properties in the area were repossessed, is a stark warning of what can happen when the market fails – as it must when prices get overheated, as they now are. The attempt by the Bank of England to cut inflation by raising interest rates, thereby paradoxically raising the price of staying in your house if you have a mortgage, is heading in that direction.

This points to a paradox. With a growing population unable to find somewhere affordable to live, with two thirds of childless single adults aged between 20 and 34 still living with their parents, a trend that rose by a third between 2010 and 2020, its generally agreed that the UK is 4.3 million homes short. Hence the pressure on both potential governments to have a plan to build a lot more of them. But, if a lot more of them are built, there is a downward pressure on prices. And a lot of property investment relies on them staying high.

This is putting the market above people’s needs and wants.

Ask almost anyone what they want and its a place to live that’s affordable, spacious enough to spread out in without feeling squeezed, solidly built so there are not a lot of costs in maintaining it, well insulated so energy bills can be kept low, with access to green spaces (if not a garden, then a local park, grass verges and street trees, maybe allotments) and amenities within walking distance and decent transport links. If construction is determined by the market and the demands of developers, the homes that meet and exceed these standards will be for the people who can afford them the most; places like the Welborne development in Hampshire. Homes for the rest of us, for sale or rent, will be poky, crammed together, built with corners cut and materials skimped on.

Gove’s announcement, counterposing dense brownfield urban development to “concreting over the green belt” aims to hit two targets at once.

  • Defuse the nimby reaction in leafy Tory rural seats that put paid to previous Tory housing growth targets after they lost the Chesham and Amersham by election to the Liberal Democrats in 2021.
  • Allow population growth to be housed by keeping it urban; so that existing city facilities don’t have to be replicated in new developments, thereby cutting costs.

If done properly, this should implement 15/20 minute neighbourhoods, which is easier to do in cities; and this should be a cross Party consensus. A dense local population provides demand for shops and services and keeps them viable. There are so many cafes and bakeries in Paris because there are seven storeys of apartments built above them full of people who will be popping in and out for a baguette or expresso. This also, however, has to be combined with integrated town planning that takes account of transport needs – ensuring public transport links and pedestrian/cyclist priority to inhibit space gobbling cars – and green spaces; so the dense population has air to breath and space to share and regenerate its soul.

Gove’s approach is a bit more Wild West and desperate than that.

Part of it is a “make do and mend” set of proposals on buildings conversion that relax the criteria for permitted development rights. As this would be market led and carried out in the interests of developers and landlords, it is likely to see a rash of glorified living cupboards being shoved into old office developments by inserting ticky tacky partition walls. This would be a triumph for the same entrepreneurial spirit that has already led to people living in partly converted garages and family homes carved up into tiny flatlets, but with more of an official nod and a wink.

This could be a further step towards shanty towns, or new suburban slums, accelerating the downward slide we are already seeing in many areas. The absence of space and proper cooking facilities in Homes in Multiple Occupation is a boon for fast food outlets; but also leads to a tsunami of litter and infestations of rats and foxes happy to fatten up on the half eaten chicken wings that alienated people dump in the streets.

We should also bear in mind, when listening to Gove wax lyrical about beautiful architecture uplifting the human spirit, that Conservative MPs voted down Labour proposals that private rented homes should be “fit for human habitation”. Presumably they think that people who can’t afford to live anywhere other than an unventilated room with a bed and Belling in it should just see the black mould on their walls as a motivation to make better lifestyle choices; or, perhaps, that anyone living in places unfit for human habitation do not deserve to be classified as human.

This was not received well.

The Local Government Association noted that “expanding permitted development rights risks creating poor quality residential environments that negatively impact people’s health and wellbeing, as well as a lack of affordable housing or suitable infrastructure.”

Shelter said that “Converting takeaways and shops into homes and restricting building to city centres won’t help. It could risk creating poor quality, unsafe homes that cause more harm than good” and instead the government “should put its money where its mouth is and get on with building a new generation of social homes.”

Moreover, property consultancy Knight Frank’s said the plans are “unlikely to have meaningful impact on housing supply”.

The exception to an insistence on city brownfield sites is “Garden Villages”. Gove rhapsodises about Welborne as an example of these. Semi rural middle class enclaves which look as though they are designed to cement a population of Conservative voters into Blue Wall seats.

Welborne, is a 6,000 home development between Southampton and Portsmouth, that will be built over 30 years with a £2billion price tag. It has self consciously retro architecture, with a limited range of design styles that is almost regimental. Look at the images of how they imagine it on their website and there’s something eery about it. A replica of an imagined past; with the same monstrous quality as if a contemporary composer were to write in exactly the same style as Haydn. No matter how good it was, it would still sound wrong; out of time and out of place. About half of the houses have chimneys as a motif (hopefully not for wood burners, which would be worse) and there is no sign of solar panels. It looks like a Homes fit for Heroes Council estate but with more generous proportions, steeper roofs and semi bowed windows – for that Georgian gentrification look – and wider grass verges; each house defended from the others by a dense wall of privet. It presents itself as a place for people who are so nostalgic for the past that they want to live in a replica of it, but with lots of mod cons. Presumably it will be possible to twitch the curtains by remote control.

Needless to say the proportion of homes that will be classified as “affordable” will start out at 10% (rising to “up to 30%”, which seems unlikely). So, 90% of the homes will be unaffordable for people on average incomes, which will define the sociology of the place and determine its character from the off. They might as well have a sign reading “No Riff Raff” on the approach roads.

And it will be roads. Connections to anywhere else will be via a new Junction on the M27 that is a confirmed part of the development. The possibility of a rail link is at a more exploratory stage, though essential if a vision of green streets designed to facilitate walking and cycling internally is not to be fatally undermined by a need to have a car to get anywhere else. The images on the site have nice mature tree lined streets with relatively few parking bays. How this would stand up to the pressure of frustrated, and well heeled, car owners demanding a place to park can only be imagined.

This is at conception stage. Garden villages that have actually been built have been described as “Amazon deserts”. Sparsely served with amenities, so nowhere to go or meet people locally, socially isolating, dependent on cars to get anywhere that has anything worth getting or doing. Places to store people when they are not working, or while they are, if doing so remotely. Exactly the opposite of what we need.

Lisa Nandy, for Labour, proposes to

  • Restore centrally determined local housing targets and make it mandatory for LAs to have housing plans.
  • Organise new construction through Local Development Corporations.
  • Build on the green belt -and make it easier to reclassify agricultural land to build on it.
  • Shift balance in renting so social housing is more common than private renting.
  • make house building central to Labour’s investment plans.

This poses a number of questions.

What standards will these homes be built to?

Building anything now that is not zero carbon emissions is storing up an expensive retrofit job for the future. If these homes are not part of the proposed £28 billion annual green transition investment they become part of the problem. Apply proper standards and they are part of the solution.

  • Will they have solar panels and heat pumps fitted as standard?
  • Will they be designed to be properly insulated to keep cool in summer and warm in winter without too much use of energy?
  • What specification will there be for design(s) to minimise construction waste and recycle unused material from one site to another?
  • What specification will there be for minimum spaces/facilities per person, so that total numbers are not inflated by building lots of small units.
  • Will any sophisticated control technology be designed to be as simple as possible to operate?

Will they be built in communities?

  • What local commercial, social and community facilities will be required to make any development viable on the 15 minute model?
  • Will the transport infrastructure require affordable, regular and reliable public transport links to larger centres with streets designed around people not parking spaces?
  • Will there be car clubs so the flexibility of occasional car use does not require the – personal and social -burden of owning one?

How will they be built and who will build them?

  • If Councils have the responsibility to develop the local housing plans to meet the local housing targets, will there be a mandated target that most of them will be social housing at the highest standards (as above) at genuinely affordable rents? The imperative to squeeze out the deplorably neglectful and chaotic private rented sector clashes here with Nandy and Starmer’s obsession with the “dream of home ownership”. The notion that inequality is best dealt with by means of “aspirational social mobility” up a structure that remains increasingly unequal, rather than actually reducing inequality was never viable, but in the Anthropocene is an absurdity. Building a massive new wave of Council Housing at genuinely affordable rents would be the best solution to meet people’s needs. This is crucial, alongside scrapping “right to buy” because housing associations have become developers rather than social landlords and council estates contain a mix of tenures because of it. Many of the houses or flats where tenants have exercised the right to buy are now owned by developers or large-scale private landlords who invariably charge much higher rents than councils. This will only stop when renting socially is restored as a good thing in itself, and no longer denigrated as just safety net for people who can’t afford to buy. Affordable social renting also allows geographical mobility. There are streets, even towns, where people are stuck with deteriorating properties and no work to pay for improving them, unable to afford to go anywhere else or to sell house that as no-one wants. To deal with a similar situation in the 1970s Housing Improvement Areas were introduced and the local state stepped in, took over these streets through Compulsory Purchase Orders, improved them and then rented them.
  • This relates to who will build these homes. The best way to do it would be Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations, with a unionised workforce on decent terms and conditions, proper training through FE College hubs (including a climate module to develop a sense of mission) and an option for workers building new Council Homes to take up a tenancy after working for six months. When this was done in New Towns like Stevenage, it had a knock on effect of greater civic engagement after it was built. This is in contrast to the sense of resentment that comes off luxury housing construction sites; where workers are putting up places to live (or invest in as an absentee owner) that are so far beyond their wages that it can’t help generate a profound alienation. If this work is contracted out to developers, as it is at the moment, their imperative to maximise profit will determine everything else; and all other goals will be subordinated. Developers prioritise the latter. they are building profits first and homes a long way second.
  • Which relates to the question of who will be on the Local Development Corporations and who will have the whip hand? Will there be community and trade union representation or will it primarily give developers quasi state powers? It has to be said that Gove aims to develop outer East London using an LDC to override the powers of the London Mayor and any local accountability at all, building Docklands 2 down through Thamesmead, a linear riverside development (on a flood plain) that when first envisaged in the late 80s was referred to as Heselgrad.
  • There is an additional problem with leaving developers in the driving seat, which is that if the private housing market begins to collapse, as it is now, developers will stall developments as they fear they won’t be able to sell; then any ‘affordable’ social rented property that is part of it will also be stalled because they are tied together.
  • We should note that the current definition of ‘affordable’ requires a minimum income of about £80,000, especially if through shared ownership, more than double the average UK income of £38,000 pa. Council rents, are the only level that is genuinely ‘affordable’.

What parts of the green belt will be built on; and is it necessary?

  • Nandy usually refers to brownfield sites within the green belt, disused garages and so on, but by making it easier to reclassify agricultural land, its clear enough that a wider range of places is envisaged. So this poses all the questions above about standards, community facilities and public transport links.
  • However, there are over 35,000 empty properties just in London and 100,000 around the country that could be CPO’d by local authorities, and this could limit the extent of any need to build on the Green Belt. In London in particular, many of the luxury flat developments built in the last decade or so along the Thames are empty because they are bought by finance capital as investments. In Kensington and Chelsea one in eight homes is long term unoccupied and one in three in the City of London. It is scandalous that they are lying empty when it takes hundreds of thousands of pounds and 80 tonnes of CO2 to construct a new house. So, CPO first, new build second would save time, money and resources; in the case of London about a year’s worth of new builds.

Will Labour stand up to the developers?

  • Developers will want new build first, subsidies, the minimum of demands and the maximum profit.
  • In recent years, they have pushed back hard against net zero standards on grounds of cost – and the Cameron government caved in to them. They are now campaigning hard against a demand from Natural England that they take into account the impact of new developments on water tables, and look like they are going to get away that too.
  • They will do so again. Building homes to the standards we need will cut into their bottom line, or cost more. They will argue that targets can only be met if standards are relaxed. In the same way that Harold Macmillan built a record number of houses in the late 50s by relaxing the standard size expectation for each unit. Architectural shrinkflation.

The signs in this are not good. Labour’s overall approach to business was summarised by an unnamed executive in a long report in the Evening Standard (25/7/23) as “the plan is clearly ‘don’t force us into loads of new rules by your behaviour. Sort it out yourselves, make some money, then we’ll take the tax to pay health and education’.”

In building its a starting point that there will have to be “loads of new rules” if we don’t want to replicate what we’ve had up to now.

*With 36% of households being single individuals in Scotland and 30% in England and Wales the scope for the exploration of more shared accommodation to cut costs (all round) and loneliness should be much more on the agenda than it is.

Ukraine, Ecocide and Complicity – or, why the climate movement should not allow itself to become a fig leaf for NATO.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This poster is displayed on the side of the Dutch Embassy in Moscow and shows the number of people killed in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022. If you walk down the Arbat in the same city you will see hundreds of poster sized billboards memorialising the children killed by Ukrainian shelling into the Donbass in that time. If you go to Donetsk City, you will see a memorial garden for these children. That shelling continues daily even now.

Framing an argument to bury the truth

There is a manipulative form of polemic that starts with a particular image, or emotive incident, that is guaranteed to mobilise an empathetic emotional response from a viewer or reader. If you watch BBC News reports on Ukraine, and think about what they are doing as well as what they are saying (and not saying) you will see this in an almost perfect form. Everything is geared to eliciting an emotional, sympathetic response on the calculation that – because emotion always trumps reason – this will then blot out questions about why these events are taking place; because it will be taken for granted who is to blame.

You might argue that that’s what I’ve done here, but images like that above will never appear on the BBC, or in the Guardian, because its the wrong sort of emotional response. The wrong dead children. The wrong sympathy. None of these kids will have Fergal Keane deployed, with sad backing music and beautifully filmed mordant images of grieving parents, your heart strings will not be expertly plucked to resonate with theirs. But they are just as dead. And the imposition of an ideological no fly zone, through the current banning of RT and policing of social media, means that you are very unlikely to see them anywhere else either. But they are just as real. So, this is just a small challenging counter image to stick onto the gigantic montage of images that have created the one sided picture that you’ve been exposed to already.

And if the deaths of those poor people in the pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk this week is to be taken as justification and fuel for sacrificing even more people to pursue this war with an enhanced sense of moral indignation; is that not equally true for the people in Donetsk?

Because in narrative framing, anything that is out of sight is out of mind. In the case of wars, some people’s deaths are framed as their just deserts because they have the misfortune to belong to a people or state targeted by ours. As the infamous Sun headline crowing over Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of the Krajina in the Yugoslav wars put it, “Serbs you right”.

The Climate Movement and truth

There is now a move to align the climate movement in the Global North/West with the war aims of NATO. A press conference in Kyiv at the end of June, with President Zelensky, Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg, announced a European body to evaluate “the environmental damage resulting from the war, formulating mechanisms to hold Russia accountable and undertaking efforts to restore Ukraine’s ecology”.

A Commission to examine the ecological damage done by the war as such is, however, not what this Commission is. Such a Commission would have to recognise that the way to stop the ecological damage is to end the war. NATO does not, yet, want to do that, so this Commission is structured to attribute all the blame to one side. Participants in this Commission from the climate movement, whatever their intentions, will find themselves providing a moral fuel to continue the war with single minded righteousness: thereby providing a thin green fig leaf for the most destructive militaries in the world. These are now rapidly expanding and increasing their carbon boot print to an unprecedented degree; and intend to use it. This Commission’s effect will be to prolong the war; thereby generating ever greater ecological damage and human loss.

A frame that aims to “hold Russia”… and only Russia…“accountable” means that ecological damage committed by Ukraine or NATO are either outside their purview, or considered not to exist.

Shells and missiles fired by the Ukrainian armed forces are no more ecologically benign than those fired by the Russians. In the case of the depleted uranium shells supplied for British Conqueror tanks, they can be worse. Ignoring this requires a level of cognitive dissonance that can only be sustained by an act of intense will; or generated by a red mist of moral indignation – generated by the the narrative framing above – sufficient to enable people to look straight at it, and not see it.

Anyone arguing that any ecological damage is ultimately the Russians’ fault “because they invaded” should not forget that this war started in 2014; when the Ukrainian Air Force bombed Donetsk city, opting for a military solution to a political crisis. Does anyone doubt that this would have led the Kyiv government being universally denounced in the West as a regime that “bombs its own people” had they been US opponents?

If you think that the road to peace runs through a Ukrainian victory, have another look at the picture of that girl in the ruins in Donetsk, and the picture of the Crimean Theatre students below, and reflect on the fact that the full realisation of Ukrainian/NATO war aims will involve the ethnic cleansing of their whole region; and that Kyiv has been completely explicit about that.

Theatre students in Simferopol Crimea wearing orange and black ribbons and singing songs on Victory Day May 6th 2023. Photo Dan Kovalic. For a view of how Crimea broke from Ukraine in 2014 and what it is like now see Dan’s article with Rick Sterling here.

President Zelensky was quite blunt that this Commission will be “support for Ukraine”, in the context in of him rejecting any prospect of a ceasefire and frozen conflict and promising to continue the war regardless of the cost. That cost will be measured in escalating environmental damage and human lives and the devastation of his country. The remark of the US officer in Vietnam who remarked that “in order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it” haunts his speeches.

Collusion in confusion

Participation in a Commission on partisan lines will by definition require collusion with an a priori propagandist interpretation of any event. Four extreme examples of this that pass for conventional wisdom in the West so far.

  • The oft repeated narrative that the Russians were shelling the Zaporozhe nuclear power plant, when it was occupied by their own troops. Even after the Ukrainians admitted they were doing it, the media here still tried to muddy the waters. Ukraine being not only willing to shell a nuclear power station but having actually done it is not something they want us to dwell on. Especially now. The statement from President Zelensky at that press conference with Thunberg and Robinson alleging a Russian plan to blow up the Zaporozhe power station in the coming weeks is particularly alarming in this context; because it might be a cover to resume the shelling – with the blame preemptively allocated -as a pivot for global outrage and mobilisation, as argued by Dmitriy Kovalevich here.*
  • The bizarre accusation that the Russians blew up their own Nordstream gas pipelines releasing up to 350,000 tonnes of methane, doing an enormous amount of environmental damage. It has been a US aim to cut Europe off from Russian gas supplies for over a decade; well before the war. Blocking the certification of Nordstream 2 in February 2022 was a big victory for them. But only a provisional one, because the Russians remained in control of the pipelines and any peace settlement would see them turned back on. Blowing them up rules that out and stops the Russians having that option. It takes peculiar mental gymnastics to imagine that the Russians would destroy their own infrastructure to hand a geopolitical advantage to the United States. Articles by Seymour Hersch detailing US involvement have been largely suppressed in the media here.
  • The case of the ammonia pipeline blown up in Kharkiv is similar, in that the flow of ammonia from Russia to the West had been shut down by the Russians weeks previously as a tit for tat for the West not fulfilling its obligations under the Russia- Ukraine grain/fertilizer deal; so blowing it up would only make sense for a force trying to cut all potential trade between Russia and the West.
  • Claims from the UK Ministry of Defence that the depleted uranium shells they have supplied with their Conqueror tanks are really nothing to worry about, repeated in the media with a straight face. The use of these munitions in Iraq has had horrific impacts. For example The Falluja Hospital’s birth defects Facebook page, where medical staff catalogue cases, reveals the striking diversity and quantity of congenital anomalies. Babies in Falluja are born with hydrocephaly, cleft palates, tumors, elongated heads, overgrown limbs, short limbs and malformed ears, noses and spines. The use of these shells will poison wherever they are used in Ukraine for years after the guns fall silent, while the British politicians who supplied them have roads named after them in Kyiv.

A further example and exemplar of the approach that we are likely to see more of in the framework of this Commission is a recent article on Open Democracy Khakhovska dam destruction is part of the climate emergency. This makes the valid point that the dam’s collapse is environmentally disastrous, but then rests the gigantic accusation of “ecocide” on a conditional presumption, that the destruction of the dam is “likely to have been the work of Russian forces”. “Likely”. Not definitely. Not even probably.

“Likely”. So, how likely? If your brief is that all ecocide is carried out by the Russians, it becomes necessary not even to ask this question; allowing carte blanche to the Ukrainian/NATO side to do their worst and just attribute the consequences to the other side. “Likely” is a small word, easily passed on from when reading at speed, but it is an admission that everything that follows by way of emotional mobilisation could very well be applied against the cause the author supports if readers allow themselves to think and question a bit.

Because its a matter of public record that the Ukrainian armed forces have been shelling and firing HIMARS missiles at this dam for months.

Their military and political leaders hastened to delete posts bragging about doing so as soon as it was breached, but many of them have been recorded and are in the public domain.

Taking a step back, there are three possibilities for how this dam was destroyed. Longer analyses of this can be read here and here, but in a brief summary these are the theories.

  1. The Russians blew up the dam to enable them to withdraw troops from the riverside to redeploy them against the main expected thrust of the Ukrainian army offensive further east; even though this would deplete water supplies to the Crimea. Resecuring this supply after Ukraine cut it off has been one of their main military objectives, and remains one. So, it would be an oddly self destructive to imperil it. It has also been reported, from Ukrainian sources, that Russian troops dug in on the east bank of the Dnieper were taken by surprise by the inundation; which would not be likely if their command were responsible for blowing the dam. More to the point, the Russians were in control of the dam. All they had to do to create a flood would be to open the sluice gates. No need to blow it up, so, why do so?
  2. The Ukrainians blew it up to wash away Russian minefields and defensive positions on the lower lying eastern bank of the river. Their earlier attempts to do so, to cut off the Russian forces on the West Bank before their withdrawal last Autumn, are well publicised. So, whatever the case in this instance, it was something they were prepared to do, it was well within their moral compass, with all the consequences that flow from that. They also appear to have been releasing water from dams higher up the Dnieper in order to keep the flood going; which is odd behaviour by anyone trying to minimise damage.
  3. The dam had been so weakened by the long term effects of the shelling and missile attacks on it that a build up of pressure from a greater volume of water building up behind it in the run up to the breach was too much for it; and both the Russians and Ukrainians have had to improvise a response.

Its hard to see the first option as anything other than the least “likely”, but judge it for yourself.

The media narrative in the UK, however, is not characterised by rational analysis or balanced judgement. The sort of spluttering rage you get from Simon Tisdall in the Observer is more characteristic;. “Of course the Russians did it…Only this malevolent Kremlin regime would wilfully inflict human and environmental havoc on so vast a scale…That’s what they do, these mobsters.” The sound of a man shouting down his own doubts because, as he admits “It’s impossible to prove at this point.” Obviously also a man with no memory of the 4.5 million people killed by the “War on Terror”, nor the far greater environmental destruction in Iraq inflicted by us and our US allies nor, more recently Yemen, thanks partly to the expert training provided by the RAF and RN to their Saudi counterparts; not to mention the after sales service provided by BAE systems making sure that their missiles were accurately targeted.

That’s why the argument on Open Democracy that “it is not enough to just lobby against fossil fuel extraction; we must recognise that the end of Russian imperialism is key to the struggle for climate justice” is so disoriented. It lets the the US and its allies, the world’s dominant imperialism, with the biggest military carbon boot print, completely off the hook to such a degree that it lines up behind its war aims. Anyone who thinks that the route away from the environmental damage caused by this war is via a Ukrainian/NATO victory has lost touch with reality; both in the concrete practical terms of the enormous human and environmental damage that would be required to secure one, and the horrendous consequences for the world of a triumphant retooled US alliance seeking to partition the Russian Federation, take charge of its fossil fuel reserves, really get stuck into oil and gas extraction in the Arctic, and get ready for the war in the South China Sea they’ve been pushing for; with Taiwan as the same sort of sacrificial victim that Ukraine has been.

Taking this stance would also sever links with movements and governments in the Global South; where people who have been on the receiving end of the US imperial system for decades see through its pretensions and fear its ambitions. It would be a disastrous course for the climate movement in the Global North to take. This is particularly in the context of governments like the UK cutting its commitment to global climate finance citing, among other things, “the costs of including help for Ukraine being included in the aid budget.”

Instead of becoming partisans of either side in this war, or any other, whatever our individual views, the climate movement here should stand for an end to the war, oppose militarisation, and campaign to get the global military boot print fully included in the Paris process, with a target to measure, monitor and cut it as fast as possible.

Post script. * The International Atomic Energy Agency has now confirmed that there are no Russian explosives set on the power station.

Let’s get out from under the carbon military boot print

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Irrespective of what stance you take on the war in Ukraine, or anywhere else, in March last year, US author Meehan Crist wrote the following in the London Review of Books, “One of the worst outcomes of the war in Ukraine would be an increasingly militarised response to climate breakdown, in which Western armies, their budgets ballooning in the name of “national security” seek to control not only the outcome of conflicts but the flow of energy, water, food, key minerals and other natural resources. One does not have to work particularly hard to imagine how barbarous that future would be”.

Crist’s point is simply to describe the world we already have, but a bit more so; and her prediction is exactly what is happening.

  • The US has raised military spending to $858 billion this year; up from $778 billion in 2020.
  • France has announced an increase from a projected E295 billion to E413 billion in the next seven years (an average of E59 billion a year).
  • German spending is rising sharply, from E53 billion in 2021 to E100 billion in 2022 and is set to go further.
  • Japan aims to double its military spending by 2028 and is also debating whether to start deploying nuclear weapons.
  • In the UK, the government’s aim to increase military spending from 2.1% of GDP to 2.5% by 2030 comes on the back of what is already among the highest per capita military spends in the world.
  • NATO, the core alliance of the Global North, already accounted for 55.8% of global military spending in 2021 before any of these increases.
  • Other direct US allies – with a mutual defence pact – accounted for another 6.3%.
  • So, the direct US centred military alliances account for three fifths of global military spending and yet they are now raising it further at unprecedented rates. These are the world’s dominant imperial powers, acting in concert to sustain a “rules based international order” in which the rules are written in, and to suit, the Global North in general and Washington in particular.

The carbon boot print of these militaries is not measured under the Paris Agreement. It is, nevertheless, huge and growing; and we can’t pretend it isn’t. At the moment, the carbon boot print of the US military alone is the same as that of the entire nation of France. This is incompatible with stopping climate breakdown; both in the direct impact of production and deployment, the diversion of funds which are urgently needed to invest in the transition, and the potential impact of their use – which could kill us all very quickly; particularly if nuclear weapons are used. John Bellamy Foster’s Notes on Exterminism for the Twenty First Century Ecology and Peace Movements should be required reading for both movements.

Because this military is not sitting idle. The first phase of the Wars for the New American Century – in the form of the War on Terror since 2001 – have been calculated by Browns University at 4.5 million people; three quarters of them civilians killed by indirect impacts of US and allied military interventions. The scale of this is because doctrines like “shock and awe” are not simply an impressive displays of explosive power, but specifically designed to smash energy and water systems, both clean water supply and sewage treatment, within the first twenty four hours of an intervention to reduce surviving civilian populations to a state of numbed misery and demoralisation. “Why do they hate us?” I wonder. 4.5 million people is about half the population of Greater London, or three quarters of the population of Denmark and twenty two times as many as have died in the Ukraine war so far (assuming total casualties of 200,000, most of them military on both sides). It’s a lot of people. *

Their deployment and use more widely against opponents that are more resilient than Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya- which this escalation of expenditure and increased integration of alliances makes possible – would, even if it did not go nuclear, be catastrophic both in its direct loss of lives but also in the disruption of global supply chains leading to widespread economic unravelling. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a war in the South China Sea that closed down shipping lanes would have a rapid impact regionally – “Taiwan’s economy would contract by a third, while Singapore’s economy would fall by 22%, according to the baseline estimate. Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia would suffer falls of between 10% and 15%” – but would have a knock on effect everywhere else affecting 92% of global trade. The attempt in the Global North to set up “secure supply chains” – defining economic policy increasingly around military imperatives (“securonomics”) is not to avert such a conflict, but to make it economically manageable, and therefore more likely.

This scale of military expenditure also dwarfs their domestic investment in combatting climate change, urgently needed because the wealthiest countries put the heaviest weight of emissions on the rest of the world, both historically and through their per capita footprints now: let alone helping Global South countries develop without reliance on fossil fuels. This has a wider implication, with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network reporting that progress towards the UN Sustainable Development goals has been static for three years.

Pledged to commit $100 billion a year to help the transition in the Global South, more than ten years ago, they have never been able to eke out this money, have never hit the target, have tried to use loans (debt trap) instead of transfers, sought to apply conditions and control. The US contribution to that is now aiming for just over $11 billion by 2024. This is now reckoned to be a tenth of what’s needed. This is despite 66% of their populations agreeing that this support should go in, and only 11% against. The contrast with the $77 billion they have stumped up to fight the Ukraine war with no trouble at all in the last year is quite startling. News that Finland is planning to cut development aid to countries in Africa that don’t line up behind the Western line on Ukraine is an ominous sign of how far backwards this could begin to go; with any attempt at global governance through structures like the UN abandoned and notions of international obligation and mutual humanity giving way to even more overtly colonial attitudes and practices than we already have. Although the notion that the Global North can “build a wall” and keep the human consequences of climate breakdown out is a fantasy – as the climate is breaking down behind the wall too – it probably won’t stop them trying.

The USA and its allies pose themselves as “Global Leaders”. They could and should be, as they are the countries with the greatest concentrations of wealth, power and technical know how, communications and education, but they are falling horribly short; because they see leadership as the same thing as dominance – and subordinate everything else to that.

In fact, in 2022, China – usually presented in our media as a negative force on climate – invested 70% more in renewable energy generation than the USA and EU combined, just under half the global total on its own. Next year, according to the International Energy Agency, China will account for 70% of new offshore wind, 60% of new onshore wind, and 50% on new solar PV installations. So, the “international leaders” have a lot of catching up to do.

The US and EU are some way behind, and nowhere near where they need to be. Instead of investing on the scale needed to hold the global temperature increase below 1.5C, they are tooling themselves up militarily to try to deal with the consequences of failing to do so; in an effort to sustain their global dominance. If they are leading us anywhere, its to Armageddon.

A report from the US military in 2019 sums up the paradox. Reflecting that, if climate breakdown continues at its present rate, countries that are already water stressed will be getting beyond crisis point within two decades and that this will lead to “disorder”. Their conclusion was that this means that

1. they will be intervening in these crises, and

2. will therefore need to build themselves in a secure supply chain of water so that the troops who are dealing with people in crisis because their environment has run out of it, will have enough to keep them going in the field!

Reflecting further, that on our current trajectory, climate impacts within the United States itself would lead to infrastructure breaking down, followed by the social order breaking down, followed by the military itself breaking down; as it faced overstretch trying to maintain order as civil society failed. Nevertheless, they also note that the rapidly increasing melt of the Arctic ice shelves and permafrost means that new sources of the fossil fuels that are causing the crisis in the first place to be available for exploitation and that a key task for them would be to make sure that the US gets the lion’s share of them. As a study in self defeating thinking, it can’t be beat.

To repeat the point at the beginning, regardless of anyone’s stance on any given war taking place now, and who should “win” it, its this drive and acceleration of military spending that the climate and peace movements should be combining to hold back – both to avert the growing risk of conflict, because arms races tend to end in wars on the momentum of their own dynamic (which requires a lot of demonisation and conflictual stances to fuel and justify it) and to allow saved funds to be used to avert the climate crisis itself. A bottom line demand is that the military carbon boot print must be accounted for in the Paris Process and a mechanism agreed for reductions to a common per capita level, combined with common measures and investments for increased global cooperation in lock step with it.

*Casualty figures in Ukraine are easy to come by but hard to trust. 200,000 assumes a parity between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries; whereas figures from Mossad, among others, indicate significantly lower Russian losses (at perhaps a fifth to a third of the Ukrainian level) so 200,000 may be a high estimate. One notable feature of this war is that civilian casualties have been a fraction of the military losses – the opposite of the trend from the mid twentieth century onwards; during which “there has been an increase in civilian fatalities from 5% at the turn of the 19th century to 15% during World War I (WW I), 65% by the end of World War II (WW II), and to more than 90% in the wars during 1990’s, affecting more children than soldiers”. From https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.765261/full#B12

An argument with the BBC on climate coverage and a debate in the Metro letters column.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496
Crop burning in Northern India. By the end of the decade almost half the Indian population will be trying to live in an average temperature of 29C. Photo: Ishan Tankha / Climate Visuals Countdown

Coverage of the climate crisis in the media is usually pushed to the margins and framed to deflect serious attention to it. The BBC seems to be on a mission to normalise it, to make it background. The tabloids mix oh goody, we’re going to be “Hotter than Morocco” front pages with shrieking calls for the “Eco Mob” to be banged up so we can enjoy the snooker (or whatever) and weird articles in rightist broadsheets like the Telegraph that spread misinformation – their latest that solar panels becoming less efficient at above 25C is a fatal flaw, not the marginal problem that it actually is – in that peculiarly gloating tone always used by people trying to take refuge from a changing reality in a timeless common sense that has actually long past its expiry date.

In the face of all this, its worth having a go at times, so…

My complaint to the BBC (The World Tonight).

You reported on Antonio Gutierez’s warning that the world is heading for a 2.8C average temperature increase, with all that follows from that, without seriously addressing it – and then didn’t seriously address it. There was no follow up. No comment from anyone else. It was then not referred to again during the summary of the news in the middle and end of the programme.

On any objective judgement, this was overwhelmingly the most significant item on the news and should have been treated as such. None of the other issues threatens the whole of human civilisation within the lifetime of children living now. Simply reporting the warning then treating it as somewhat less significant than the well merited demise of Boris Johnson, or the sad death of Glenda Jackson, is part of the process whereby a fundamental crisis in our civilisation becomes wallpaper, as if it is “something we have to get used to”, as one of your anchors put in in a previous programme, as if we are going to be able to, as if the crisis we are at now is going to stop there.

A warning like that should be stopping the clocks and making us sit up to deal with it, not passing quickly on to all the displacement activity we are busy with while we wait for things to fall apart around us. Could you please, please live up to your mission as broadcasters and treat this with the seriousness it deserves? Thank you

Their reply; which reads like stalling…

Thank you for contacting us and for sharing your concerns about The World Tonight, broadcast on June 15.

However, we’re not able to reply to your complaint without more information. If you could provide us with the specific time at which the relevant news item was heard, we may then be able to address your complaint.

If you’d like to listen back, we’ve provided a link to the programme below…

My response

You asked for details of when the item occurred in the programme. Its 5 minutes 50 seconds in. As the essence of what I was saying was that Antonio Gutierrez’s warning is something that should be taken seriously and be given far more extensive coverage – instead of being mentioned once then passed over in silence for the rest of the programme – the fact that you couldn’t find the clip rather illustrates my point. By contrast, diverting though it is, Boris Johnson’s latest shenanigans will barely be a footnote if there is anyone left to write History in 2100. I honestly despair of your coverage sometimes; like the way that Labour’s pledge to stop new oil and gas exploration on PM on Monday (about half way through) wasn’t debated in the framework of this being imperative but very difficult – leading on to a serious examination of what would need to be done to do it and what changes would need to be made – but a sneery and fatalistic dismissal from Evan Davies and his guest that it could be done at all. Perish the thought that this country might be able to rise to a serious challenge. Not your finest minutes.

The Metro Letters Page is full of letters that their authors think are “gotcha!” challenges, which are actually deflections from having to think through an issue that, if they took it seriously, would scare them shitless. Here’s one I responded to earlier.

Tuesday 6th June

Kate Taylor (Metro Talk Mon) says that demonstrators from Just Stop Oil are neither “moronic” nor “cowardly” . People cause greenhouse gases and the UK population today is 67 million and will be 77 million by 2050. World population today is 8 billion, up from 2 billion 100 years ago.

Will Kate Taylor and members of eco-groups pledge to have no more than one child, never to travel in a petrol/diesel vehicle, turn off their gas supply, take no foreign holidays, eat less meat, use no mobile phones nor electrical goods and never attend music festivals or sporting events? Eco talk is cheap.

Clark Cross, Linlithgow

Thursday 8th

Clark Cross (Metro Talk Tuesday) says “eco talk is cheap”. What he’s missing is that failure to act on the breakdown of our climate will be very costly in all respects, and sooner than we think.

On our current trajectory 2 billion people will be trying to live in an average temperature of 29C by 2030; including half the population of India.

So, while it’s a bit late for me just to have one child, I have to admit that I’m extremely grateful not to have any grandchildren (much though I’d love them) because the world we are heading for unless we make drastic changes will be a nightmare by the time they are adults.

So, whatever we can do we must do, as individuals and as a society.

Paul Atkin, London 

Friday 9th

Paul Atkin (Metro Talk, Thurs) says “we must do all we can as individuals and a society” to fight climate change. The oil, gas and coal-rich countries are still exploiting their reserves, while China, India and others have agreed only to “phase down” not “phase out” coal. What would Paul suggest the UK, with one per cent of global emissions, can do to penalise these countries before we all fry?

Clark Cross, Linlithgow

This was my reply that they didn’t print, perhaps because it poses questions outside any framework acceptable to them.

Clark Cross (Metro Talk Friday) suggests that the UK should “penalise” China and India before doing anything serious to avert climate breakdown on its own behalf. 

Leaving aside the suicidal quality of this, and awkward facts that India’s per person carbon footprint is a third that of the UK, and that China is the only country in the world investing in renewable energy on the scale needed – half the global total last year and 70% greater than the USA and EU combined – we are still left with historic responsibility.

This country became wealthy partly through burning vast quantities of coal. Our contribution to the greenhouse gases currently over heating the world is about 7% of the global total. Seven times our fair share. So, we have a responsibility to fulfil there; and we need to cooperate with the rest of the world to do it, not look for conflicts. Time is frighteningly short.

Paul Atkin, London

Ukraine Chief of Intelligence drops the mask on forcible reoccupation of Crimea and partition of Russia

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The 26th May is the ninth anniversary of the beginning of the shelling of Donetsk by Ukrainian forces in 2014. For the Donbass Ukrainians that opposed the new Maidan regime this event marked the point of no return. It followed the burning alive of the anti-maidan protestors in Odessa on May 2nd 2014 and Ukrainian forces trying to storm Mariupol that same week. The shelling has continued daily ever since, including today, killing several people. Yet, listen to the news here and there is silence about that. The casualties caused by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro were reported however, and President Zelensky’s comment that this showed the Russians to be “fighters against everything humane and honest” was not put in the context of what his own forces are doing. An enemy of the United States would be accused of “shelling his own people”.

Nevertheless, most people who support the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, or call for a Russian military withdrawal and restoration of the pre 2014 borders, sincerely assume that this would be a liberation for the people who live in the Donbass and Crimea; and that this is where the war would stop.

This interview with Kyrylo Budanov – the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence (the GRU) – by a journalist who has been making a film supporting the Ukrainian war effort released last week, shows that the Ukrainian high command (and journalists) have no such delusions.

Budanov says a number of interesting things in this interview, some of them revealing, some quite far fetched. He is, after all, an intelligence officer, so he has access to a lot of information; but, as an intelligence officer, a large part of his job is to spin false but instrumentally useful narratives. He is also a firm believer in the notion that if you will something hard enough, it will come to pass and that Ukraine will “win”, despite their succession of grinding defeats since the new year and the terrible cost in lives that is the price of carrying on.

At the same time, he is secure enough in the presumed support of his audience to describe what the sort of victory he wants would look like. In the same way that the Guardian is now so sure of the allegiance of its readers to Ukrainian nationalism that they can reveal that, when collaborating with the Nazis in WW2, they killed around 100,000 Poles, a massacre described as “genocide” by the Polish government as recently as 2016.

In the interview’s final section, about what would happen in Crimea if Ukraine’s war aims were achieved (starting 36:57 minutes in) he is quite blunt that “victory” in the sense of military reoccupation would only be the start of a “difficult” “multi year process” of “reintegrating” territories with a population that is actually hostile and does not want to be reoccupied. Three million people with, as he puts it “a completely different view of the world”*. The interviewer uses the euphemism “three million not very devoted people” and Budanov states that those people with an “altered psyche” who can be “re educated” should be – without specifying what should be done with those that can’t, though “physical elimination” is a phrase he uses elsewhere. This will have to be done with a carrot and a stick, as the two only work together; and with a “firm hand”. This will be “hard work” he says.

Many words can be used to describe this scenario. “Liberation” for those 3 million people is not one of them. If you believe in self determination, you can’t support this.

His comments at the end section about “a new security architecture in the world” are put in context by a section “About the Future of Russia” a little before this (at 32.45 minutes in). In this, the interviewer pulls across a map of the Russian Federation – “your famous map” with the partition borders – that Dick Cheney and Zbigniew Brzezinski originally proposed back in 1991 as a way to manage the “Post Soviet space” most amenably for the US – drawn in in thick blue felt tip lines; remarking that “its been shown a lot”. Not in the media here it hasn’t. It might make people wonder a bit.

This isn’t Budanov’s map, but is similar. If you google US aim to partition Russia and click on images, you get a number of variations.

Budanov uses a number of euphemisms about “unanimous transformation” of Russia and the prospective partition being “conceptual”, and speculates that the more defeats the RF suffers the more it will break up, starting with the Caucasus. His confirmation, when discussing the prospect that “new states” will be imposed on the wreck of the RF that, “Russians are well aware of this” gives a tacit recognition that the Russian security concerns raised in the run up to February 24th were real and existential.

His statement “we don’t need Russia in the form that it exists now”, underlines this and, given where the partition plan originated, cannot be defined as defensive.

*If you want an insight into why the people in Donbass might have a “completely different view of the world” – which Budanov suggests is a result of “propaganda” – consider these personal accounts from the day the Ukrainian army started shelling Donetsk city on May 26th 2014. These are from the Donetsk Anti Fascist site.

Marina Kharkova: “May 25 was the last day of peace in Donetsk, as the family celebrated the birthday of my father, a miner. The mood was anxious, restless and tense because of the general situation, but nothing yet seemed to portend tragedy. On the morning of 26, on my way to work, I heard the sounds of flying planes and distant explosions. Everyone had gathered in the largest office and was listening to an employee who lived near the railway station. She cried and told how Ukrainian planes and helicopters had bombed from the air, how their nine-storey building on Privokzalnoye had been shaking, how women killed by shells were lying directly on the pavement bleeding, how the minibus she was travelling in had hurtled away from the danger zone. She sat in silence, clutching her heads, trying to comprehend. Tanya was given water and sedatives – she was so sick. Then, by inertia, they tried to get on with their business. The rumble outside the window increased, though the office was far away from the airport. Ambulances and cars with militia were whizzing down the street. After three in the afternoon everyone decided to stop their pointless attempts to pretend to be busy and drove home. The understanding of what was happening came at once, although the consciousness was still trying to cling to yesterday’s peaceful day. The 26th of May was the point at which “it will never be the same again”.

EIena Hovhannisyan, a biology teacher: “At that time we kept up with the news from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. We already knew how people had been martyred in Odessa, Mariupol and Krasnoarmeisk. I had forebodings of near disaster. It was already hovering over us, but we did not think how tragic, long, brutal, hopeless the events would be. Sometimes it seemed that it was just a bad dream, that I would wake up and everything would be like before. But no. It is an illusion that the war will not touch you. It will touch everyone, sooner or later. We were simply the first to be in the epicentre. And May 26th I will always remember. The warm, sunny weather and the roar of planes in the sky. From the balcony on the side of the airport black smoke could be seen, you could hear explosions constantly. The first shelling, deaths, destruction, grief and pain. Since that day, there would be no peace in Donetsk for another nine years. But we didn’t know it then. And that day was endless, filled with horror and pain. The phones were literally ringing off the hook – everyone was trying to find out what happened to their loved ones, whether they were alive or not. In the evening my son arrived from work; his office was a couple of blocks from the station. He told about the horror in the city, about the dead woman vendor from the station market, about the very young guy who worked as a valet. He was killed by shrapnel from a missile fired by a Ukrainian helicopter. People were falling, screaming, crying, calling for help. Passers-by tried to save the wounded, car alarms howled. The railway station area in any city is the most crowded place. In Donetsk on Privokzalnoye there are markets, shops, banks, the area was teeming with life. They say helicopters flew so low that you could see the pilots in the cockpit. And these pilots also saw that they hit peaceful people. This was not done by some Hitlerites, but by Ukrainians, with whom we lived in the same country. May 26 was the day that turned everything upside down. There is no and will not be our forgiveness for Ukraine. And there will be no return.

From the diary of a Donetsk woman who wanted to remain anonymous: 26 May 2014, from the balcony, I saw planes firing missiles. My husband, coming home from work, told me about the dead in the station square. At the same time as the airport was being bombed, the fighting moved into the city, on Kievsky Avenue linking the city and the airport. People who had lost their jobs or shelter, relatives or loved ones, went to volunteer for the militia. And every day there were more and more of them, including my acquaintances, as the war gradually touched everyone.

It is difficult to describe the sensations of trying to sleep to the sound of shelling outside your windows. The deafening and resounding explosions are somewhere close by. Your heart sinks each time, because no one knows where the next shell will land. But when you see the dawn, you realize that another night is behind you, all your loved ones are alive today.

In addition to the fighting at the airport and the aerial bombardment with unguided shells, Ukrainian snipers shelled the Putilovsky Bridge. This road was then called the “road of death”: civilian cars with people were burnt and shot, and in the Putilovsky Grove there lay the bodies of both civilians unluckily caught up in the active fighting and the militiamen trying to save people. For several days, the bodies were decomposing in the terrible heat: there was no opportunity to pick them up and bury them.

An ambulance was also shot up on the road to Donetsk airport. Its crew, Artem Kovalevsky, the ambulance driver, paramedic Sergei Kozhukharov and doctor Vladimir Vasilievich, miraculously survived and managed to get out of hell.

They told reporters from the local branch of Komsomolka in Donetsk how they managed to survive when Ukrainian snipers shot even those who had managed to run into the wooded area.

Victoria Sergeyevna, neurologist: I was on duty that day, the hospital was far away from the airport, but we all knew what was going on. In the evening, many people of different ages with strokes or suspected strokes were brought to our department. People’s chronic illnesses were exacerbated by the stress. The statistics of deaths from heart attacks and strokes during the war has increased dramatically compared to the peacetime. And these are also our victims of the war, just as innocent as the victims who died under shelling”.

Postcards from Amsterdam; ask not for whom the tram tolls?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Holland is flat. Everyone knows that Holland is flat. But you have to go there to appreciate just how flat it is.

All the way between Antwerp and Amsterdam via Rotterdam, its as though someone has ironed the landscape. You could play billiards on it, if it wasn’t so wet. Many of the fields are covered in greenhouses; completely solidly; acre sized greenhouses that add to the impression that you are not in a landscape but a simplified two dimensional version of one. It must make a lot of planning much simpler to not have to consider inclines.

The only bumpy bits of ground are dykes and dams. Even the houses are low. Single storey with dormer roofs, so they look like they are squatting on the ground and ducking to avoid being blown away.

Alongside the fields are irrigation and drainage canals. These are also on a level. No need for locks; there are no waterfalls or any sense that anything is not under control. As 25% of the Netherlands is below the current sea level, this is just as well. It makes the country acutely aware of the rapid increase in the sea level rise that is now baked in by climate change.

Like Bangladesh, Holland is one of the most threatened mainland countries. The urgency of the situation is partly counterbalanced by the technological and engineering self confidence that comes from having been reclaiming land from the sea for over 2,000 years. All the same, the level of rainfall gives the impression that the sea is trying to take it back by aerial assault and the scale of the rise now coming is well beyond anything experienced in that period.

Holland is also extraordinarily neat, a tolerance of urban graffiti tags notwithstanding. The contrast with Belgium – which, outside Brussels, looks like a part of France frozen in about 1953 and neglected ever since, presenting itself as the Benelux down at heel twin, at least alongside the Eurostar route – hits you in the face as soon as you cross the frontier in either direction.

Photo: PA

This is the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. Unlike the buildings around it, which have a handsome, distinctive elegance, this is a neo classical imperial brute, with such heavy black bars on the windows that S and I thought it might be a prison. No accident that Donald Trump, when President, decreed that all new official government buildings should be constructed in this kind of neo classical imperial style. Rome casts a long shadow in the imagination of insecure powers seeking the timeless legitimacy conferred by Doric columns. In the middle of the roof at the apex of the pediment is a statue of a muscular Atlas holding up the world; flanked by a pair of lesser figures embodying law and force. In this way, those with wealth and power, whose existence is held up and sustained by the genuinely Atlas like labours of millions, present themselves to the world as if it is them that’s doing the supporting. Its long past time we shrugged them off.

Pushing off from the lights. Photo: SLAW

Bikes are everywhere. People often ride them with a distinctive and very dignified posture; leaning to the rear with very straight backs. And all sorts of people. Tall, grey haired elderly men cycling alongside each other holding a conversation, couples giving each other rides with extension seats on the back, families with the children in a cargo bike style bucket at the front – holds up to three – sometimes with a cover as you can see above, or perched on a crossbar seat or baby seat behind. Mums with kids alongside.

Bike stands at every station. Photo: SLAW

There are bike stands everywhere, bristling along the pavements outside apartment blocks like iron hedges, and bike lanes, clearly demarcated on every road; which are organised as follows: pavement, bike lane, pavement, car lane, trams, car lane, pavement, bike lane, pavement. Standardised. Rational.

Heavy wheeled black electric bikes – known as “fat bikes” – whizz along in the bike lanes too, but the push bikes don’t hang about either. They come not single spies but in battalions. And fast. A critical mass that eclipses the car. What we need everywhere.

No one feels the need to wear lycra (or helmets). There is strength, and normality, in numbers. No one is intimidated by the rain. They just put on sou’westers and ponchos – sometimes not even that – and keep cycling. Bike on through the storm. Bike on through the rain. And you’ll never bike alone.

People prioritise practicality over aesthetics; there were more old fashioned chain guards than I have seen for years and lots of people attach plastic crates – of the sort that you might store beer or milk bottles in – between the handlebars on a frame over the front wheel to carry things in.

No one bats an eyelid if a cyclist rides their bike into a metro station. Railway stations have bike grooves running down stairs for cyclists to have an easier ascent or descent as you can see below.

Young lad gets his bike down the steps without bumps at Zaanse Schans station. Photo: SLAW

The trams are wonderful. Regular, frequent, reliably knitting the city together. The entrance doors are in the middle, exits at the front and back. Immediately inside the entrance doors are enclosed information booths with helpful tourist and transport guides sitting in them to help anyone who might need it.

There are still cars, but motorists are generally outnumbered by cyclists and people using the trams. The deep almost atavistic clang of the tram bell is like a tocsin for car based cities.

The number 12 tram coming into the stop at Concertgebouw in the rain. Photo: SLAW

Names for bands inspired by Amsterdam or that sound better in Dutch: Electric Bendybus. Soul Patch. Schnitzelhaus. Toeslag. Stroopwaffel. Sloterdijk.

Yorkshire tea? Photo PA

The Dutch for full fat milk is Volle Melk and for half fat milk its Half Volle Melk: so literally half full milk. No matter how much you’ve drunk, its always half full.

The Dutch for public urination is Wildplassen, which has a slightly adventurous tone to it; as well as being a bit onomatopoeic. It is, of course, Verboden (and there are street signs saying so). Certainly more so than in London on a Saturday night. Stag dos please take note.

Near the tram stop by Concertgebouw is a little evangelical kiosk, with bibles and tracts, emblazoned with the legend God Zoekt jou; which seems to imply that He/She zeukt you whether you liked it or not. I’m not sure I do.

Photo: PA. Trees at Keukenhof with a decidedly Middle Earth sort of feel

Tulips in Amsterdam. There will be a generational watershed at this point between people who will now have Max Bygraves in their head for the rest of the day, and those that don’t.

Keukenhof (literal translation, kitchen court) is a vast Park about twenty minutes south west of the city that has a spectacular flower display every Spring; mostly tulips. Most flower displays – or greenery in general – are reviving, and induce states of contemplation and reflection that give us a break from everyday pressures, reducing stress as we walk through a Park. When I used to develop migraines at school I would walk home through Hampstead Heath; and the immersion in greenness would usually soothe the worst of it by the time I’d got to Golders Green. A point all urban planners should keep in mind, given the pressure from developers to squeeze in just one more lucrative unit.

The display at Keukenhof is contemplative to an almost hallucinogenic degree. I’d expected to spend an hour or so looking around before getting restless, but we spent the whole day and felt a bit regretful at having to leave. The sheer scale of the planted beds, and the artful juxtaposition of colours and shapes – and the more subtle assault of the aromas – overwhelms the senses into a different sort of consciousness. Who needs drugs when you have a sea of tulips?

When you look long into the floral display…

A small parade of stilt walkers wafting silky wings, floaty trousers and drifty music steps, smiling beneficently down from giraffe height as they pass. A toddler with her eyes wide and mouth agape totters after them with entranced steps, completely awestruck. Pied Piper moment.

The floral display also looks into you. Photos: SLAW

The attached tulip museums inform that tulips originated in central Asia, were named after the turbans worn in the region and the Ottoman Empire, were the subject of one of the first stock exchange bubbles (tulip mania) in the 1630s with, at one point, a single bulb being priced at the equivalent of 67,000 Euros; and that Holland now produces 75% of global bulb supply (but not at 67,000 Euros a pop).

Raskolnikov in the butty shop. There are lots of shops doing sandwiches of an adventurous sort right across the city. Sitting waiting for our order, I glance across at the other customer. A small young man sitting under a personal black cloud, with closed off eyes and a pale complexion, faded sandy mustache, dressed in a black hoody, with the hood pulled up across a black beanie hat, over a black t shirt with a machine pistol logo which, as poses go, is rather menacing, and trousers made for a giant, but cut down to “fit”, jagged and flappy at the bottoms, rent around the pockets, cigarette pack in one, bottle of water peeping out of the other, and exuding an air of misery and menace; until his sandwich is delivered, at which point he smiles and his existential gloom seems to lift into the heavens.

The historic windmills at Zaanse Schans stretch along the east bank of the river Zaans. Only two of them are on their original site. All the others were moved here, along with a number of traditional wooden houses, to make a tourist theme park that would also preserve them. As such it is a reconstruction of the past by concentrating it in one area, rather than an authentic preservation of the area itself.

Inside the windmills of your mind…Photo: SLAW

The windmills are a very impressive piece of early modern technology. The sails, wooden frames with canvas stretched over, rotate at a rapid rate, turning a big wooden gear cog inside that, in turn, concentrates a massive force to rotate millstones or vertical crushers to pound pigment, grind corn, split logs. There is nothing smooth about this, though the synchronisation of the gear wheels is brilliantly thought out, and the forces involved are overt, heavy, dusty; and the whole mill shakes as a crusher hammers down. The rapidity with which timber could be turned into planks gave Holland an advantage in shipbuilding that underpinned its early seventeenth century naval prowess. As this was at the same time as the eighty years war of independence against the Spanish Empire; perhaps Cervantes was making a geopolitical comment about the relative modernity of the embattled powers when he wrote about Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

Built of wood and/or with thatched upper structures, they were very vulnerable to fire and at least two of them had to be rebuilt after burning down in the nineteenth century.

Water logged logs with windmills on the Zaans. Photo: SLAW

In the wooden structures alongside are a set of museums with large shops attached, which are best seen in between coach parties. There are a lot of these and, as the museums are small, tend to jam solid when they are in. The clog museum shows a range of clogs that vary from elegant “Sunday Clogs” – with carefully painted scenes on them – through to betrothal clogs, that an aspiring suitor would hand carve and decorate for his intended – on to industrial clogs, which had a 3cm thick front end that dyke workers could use as a fulcrum when levering up basalt blocks and other heavy weights. The cheese museum is basically a shop run by the Henry Willig company – which makes cheese and chocolate, but not at the same time thankfully – with a short film in the reception area to show how cheese is made. The nice thing about this is that they have stands with people looking Disneyesque in traditional bonnets and clogs – I’m tempted to say that this is a bit “cheesy” – who let you try little slivers of different types of cheese. Dutch cheese – basically Edam – was considered exotic when I was growing up in the 1960s. As a result of being exposed to it at an impressionable age I have retained a prejudice that it smells and tastes of feet and and has the texture and “mouth feel” of rubber. It was good to have this dispelled with some strong but subtle varieties; the characteristically blunt Dutch designations of “young cheese” and “old cheese” notwithstanding. “Glorious goat” is pretty good.

By the Double Headed Phoenix café/bar – which specialises in making their own liqueurs, and gives you a shot of one of them in a tiny glass with squirty cream on top if you ever have a coffee – is the toilet. As most of the visitors are coach parties of a certain age, the queue is a long one. I am standing in a long line behind about half the population of Taiwan when we are suddenly disturbed by a furious woman from New Zealand, venting her frustration that the turnstile both costs and doesn’t work, and that the woman giving helpful advice has put her nose out of joint because she’s telling her what to do- “you have to pay to get in and it doesn’t work, then she says you have to stand on a spot, and it still doesn’t work. I’ll just hold it. I can’t wait to get out of this country!” Hopefully she will have found a toilet she can get into before then. The angriest I’ve seen anyone for days. It all seemed a bit over the top. The woman she seems to have been taking exception to was a young black cleaner; who went out of her way to explain how to get through when I had the same problem with a good deal of grace and charm. Which wasn’t her job, but she did it anyway. I wonder how much of the NZ woman’s angst was bound up in resentment at having to take instruction from a black cleaner? Hopefully not, but, if so, it illustrates that racists are never happy.

The Anne Frank House leaves you emotionally numb. Even when you know what happened. Especially when you’ve read the book. The original building, the warehouse owned by Otto Frank with the secret annexe at the back, is encased in a newer structure. The queue is long and quiet and let in in time slots booked long in advance. Everyone gets a hand set with recorded information that works when you point it at stations on the tour. There are a lot of people going round. Not a lot of conversation. This is not a place to make light of, but no one seems to be ghoulish either. Each station hammers home the story we already know with details we didn’t; and everyone walks through the warehouse, up the steep narrow stairways and into the tiny rooms that 8 people hid from the Nazis in for just over two years – kept alive by a tight group of close friends on the outside – with increasingly grim expressions. They were discovered and arrested in August 1944, just two months after D Day had given them hope, but 9 months before Amsterdam itself was finally liberated on May 5th 1945. By this time, everyone in both families was dead, except for Otto Frank, who managed to survive Auschwitz long enough for the Red Army to get to . His wife and daughters died in Auschwitz or Belsen. Anne was 15.

Anne’s diary, a thoughtful, deeply felt, sharply observed, articulate and witty account of growing up in almost impossible conditions with a threat of imminent arrest, degradation and death constantly in the background, is a deeply humane document that stands as a rebuke and witness to everything the Nazis did and what they stood for. As a narrative about individual people it engages readers empathy in a sustained way that statistics, or photos don’t. We tend to make the former abstract and flinch away at the latter. Primo Levi’s books of memoires about Auschwitz have a similar impact.

This is a spare summary. Hyperbole isn’t necessary. The facts speak for themselves. At a time that the far right is reasserting itself across the Global North, racist narratives are the daily bread of the tabloids and peddled by Ministers at the despatch box, the Great Replacement Theory gets aired at Nat-Con conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, and far right demonstrators in Israel call for “death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn!”; we have to assert implacably that “never again” applies to everyone.

I was also left with a greater sense of admiration for Otto Frank, who made sure his daughter’s diary was published and the house opened as a museum. Frank’s concern when the diary was first making an impact in the late sixties and early seventies to emphasise the human side of it and downplay the politics was something I didn’t think was right as a zealous young activist at the time. While the story only made sense in the context of the Nazis racist exterminism, perhaps what he was trying to do in pushing them to the margins of the story of his daughter’s life was to at least keep her memory safe from being defined solely by the people that murdered her. But, the interaction of the personal and the political has meant that they are now more in her shadow than she in theirs.

A spare, controlled, thoughtful and incredibly resilient man, who looked after the diary while she was writing it without ever reading it because he’d promised her he wouldn’t, his wistful remark after doing so that, however close the relationship, no parent fully understands their child, shows what a good father he was. I get the impression that, having lived through the worst that humanity could do, he spent the rest of his life looking for the decency in people and, because he was looking for it, by and large he found it.

Photo: PA.

With thanks to my daughter, seen here sheltering from the mother of all thunderstorms in the café at the American Book Centre, without whose creative imagination, formidable organising skills and zest for life this trip would not have happened.

Hart of Whiteness?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Its a little known fact, and not a lot of people know it, that from 1896 to 1898, while he was writing “Heart of Darkness”, Joseph Conrad lived in Stanford Le Hope in Thurrock; initially in a house he described as “a damned Jerry-built rabbit hutch”.

Thurrock has a habit of playing down its historically illustrious residents. At the back of Grays Hall was an arboretum attached to the house that Alfred Russel Wallace built near a worked out chalk pit; after working out the theory of evolution around the same time as Charles Darwin. The story goes that Darwin, having agonised about his hypothesis and hesitating to publish it for about twenty years was bounced into doing it when he heard that Russel Wallace was about to do so himself, securing himself the popular historical status and making Russel Wallace a more obscure figure that only people interested in Natural History will have heard of.

Russel Wallace lived at The Dell for four years from 1872 to 1876, describing the arboretum below it as  “a bit of a wilderness that can be made into a splendid imitation of a Welsh valley“. The house was made of concrete, as a tribute to the burgeoning local cement works, flourishing at the time and scouring out bigger, deeper pits progressively to the West; with factories getting ever larger all the way up to the huge excavation that now houses the Lakeside Shopping Centre, filling the air with dust and giving the town a definite sense of nominative determinism.

However, once he left, the arboretum fell into gloomy disuse, becoming an adventure playground, known as “the big woods” to generations of kids plucky enough to scale the 6 foot high walls (which got easier as time went on, as footholds became more secure from repeated use and the bits of broken glass set on the tops, which cut my Dad’s bottom as he tried to get across on one occasion in the mid 1930s, wore away) or brave the tunnel that was like a portal through from the playing fields of Treetops School – running through the gloom listening for the voice of outraged authority heat seeking our trespasses – which we were sure would not be forgiven.

None of us living near Russel Road, or Wallace Road on the estate alongside had a clue who Russel or Wallace were, let alone that they were the same person. And there has, possibly thankfully, been no movement of Social Russel Wallaceists.

The White Hart, shortly before it closed.

This is the pub that gave the town a bad name. A selection of Gollie dolls hanging behind the bar, like as the landlord put it “they used to hang them in Mississippi years ago“. After the notoriety gained from a Police raid that confiscated the dolls last month, they tried to carry on, replacing them with new ones, claiming that the police were over reacting, that there was nothing racist about it, that the landlord being seen wearing a Britain First T shirt was the kind of thing anyone might do – as the landlady said in an odd echo of Prince Andrew logic, “I don’t think Chris is a supporter of Britain First, he was just wearing that shirt because it was convenient at the time” – because, who wouldn’t wear one of those if it just happened to be lying around, and, indeed, who wouldn’t have one just conveniently lying around?

When I took this photo about a month ago, the pub looked stone dead already. No one was going in or out. A contrast with the Theobald’s Arms just over the road, that had a set of lively customers spilling into the road. A disgruntled looking middle aged man with a sour expression, and a face that seemed to be made of red brick dust, was staring balefully out of a first floor window like Mr Rottcod at the beginning of Gormenghast.

They shut two weeks later after two of their beer suppliers – Heineken and Carlsberg – and the company that cleaned their barrels and lines decided they didn’t want their products associated with this and boycotted them.

Probably the best boycott in the world.

Riverside Ward, where The White Hart is, a densely populated area of former council flats built in the seventies and the sort of recent flats shown in the photo above and cookie cutter housing stretching down towards the Wharf. It is the seventh most deprived of the 20 wards in Thurrock. It is 75% White, 13% Black, 8% Asian and 4% other ethnicity, with fewer pensioners and more young people than most. It has a higher incidence of smoking and binge drinking, adult and child obesity and hypertension than national averages; and life expectancy a year lower for women and three years lower for men. It has a much higher crime rate than Thurrock averages, but well below national. Only 43% feel safe going out after dark, but 49% are generally happy with the area. (1)

It returned a Labour Councillor with 1,191 votes to her Conservative opponent’s 386 in the local elections on May 4th this year. Riverside has been consistently represented by Labour, even though at the high water mark of Brexit mobilisation, the combined Conservative/UKIP vote was some way ahead. In 2016, the successful Labour candidate polled 857 votes, just ahead of UKIP on 748, with the Conservatives at 379. The turnout then was 27%. This May it was down to 19%, so nothing to be complacent about. The Conservatives have stood Black evangelicals as their candidates for several elections in a row, which might be suppressing their vote among the white racist component of their supporters.

1 Stats from here

2 Stats from here