Why is being against war so hard?

Winter is coming. Not a line from Game of Thrones but a meteorological reality in the Northern Hemisphere.

Before the rains stagnate the battle lines for another 6 months, a new victim falls in this conflict of rival capitalist blocs. Azerbaijan’s barely reported attack on its besieged Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has led to Armenia’s complete surrender.

Despite being a member of Putin’s ‘near abroad’ Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Russian peacekeepers have only been able to negotiate the terms of Armenian surrender.

Putin’s humiliation has been orchestrated by Azerbaijan’s key ally, NATO’s Turkish president Erdogan. The Special Military Operation in Ukraine has made Russia impotent in its own backyard.

This lightning war did not last long enough to present those who claim to oppose war to agonise over which belligerent to support.

In Ukraine, despite the bloodiest three months of carnage in a NATO resourced offensive, frontlines that have barely changed will once again be frozen.

The wars. second anniversary on February 24th will be energetically marked by a reconstruction and strengthening of the unbreachable frontiers of conflict.

A conflict that has an echo in dividing lines between pro (supporters of one or other belligerent) and anti-war (against all belligerents) in what was once the revolutionary milieu.

Why is opposing war so controversial amongst some of those who lay claim to revolutionary tradition? It is an unmitigated catastrophe. 10 million displaced, an estimated 500,000 casualties with 150,000 dead. $1 trillion cost and half the world hungry or paying the price of austerity driven by war profiteers.

In part this is explained by our natural reaction of horror and sympathy at the scale of suffering and injustice – laudable instincts that are then manipulated to support one side or the other on the basis of just or unjust, legal or illegal war. This is the fog which leads us do a distorted narrative of good versus evil.

Rather than seeing the Ukraine and Russia conflict as corporate corrupt capitalist states fronting international capitalisms global rivalry at the expense of workers on both sides, the false narratives direct us to moral platitudes.

A David versus Goliath. An innocent victim against a violent aggressor, leading us to a simple binary outcome of supporting the goodie against the baddy. This is the logic of the pantomime not the analysis of revolutionary internationalists.

The individuals here are not Russia and Ukraine, but their thousands of workers with everything to lose and nothing to gain.

Those who can’t see the fault of this logic should ask themselves why and whom did they choose to support when Ethiopia attacked Tigre? Or when Eritrea attacked Ethiopia, or Rwanda attacked DRC? Indeed, where was their moral outrage over Nagorno-Karabakh?

Some argue it’s not for revolutionists in the capitalist heartlands to form a perspective on conflicts elsewhere. This they say, in the contemporary language of culture wars, is ”West-splaining’. An uncomfortable resonance with Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 comment that we have no business

in a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”. That was at the abyss of WW2.

Internationalists then knew how to respond. Freedom Press’s ‘War Commentary’ and the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation’s ‘Solidarity’ opposed the war throughout, culminating in a prosecution in 1945 for their categorisation of Britain as a ‘Warfare State’.

Their efforts included contributions from such luminaries has Guy Aldred; Paul Mattick; Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Communist Workers Party.

This failure, through confusion or design, to unite on an Internationalist position of Revolutionary Defeatism has necessarily caused rifts with former comrades. It has also forged new links with others. An historical if familiar realignment of revolutionary forces is taking place, as it did after previous betrayals of principle in 1914 and 1939.

We are again at an abyss and the chaff of liberalism and left social democracy is sorting itself out from Revolutionary Internationalism.

We continue to fight for the escalation of class war on the Home Front. Undermining Capitalism’s ‘Social Peace’ here frustrates their drive to war, all war. That is what we mean by ‘No War But The Class War!’