Views on Ukraine war

I have cautiously supported the Ukrainians and the Ukraine war, but I will include two dissenting views on the left, the first of which cites a new book on the issue from Monthly Review. These articles do not necessarily reflect my views.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/12/the-war-machine-keeps-turning/

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/12/pers-a12.html

The exposes of American propaganda are important and essential but the question of the Ukraine war is tricky. The question of American global hegemony is of critical importance as is the danger of nuclear escalation but the plain fact remains that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven so chillingly genocidal that regardless of politics one moves to rescue a drowning swimmer. The conflict is a true tragic deadlock: if you oppose the war after the fashion of the Vietnam protests you end up with Russia attempting to eliminate a whole people. If you support Ukraine you end up with their need to take back Crimea, and so it goes, like quicksand perhaps. The destruction of infrasture may be a coward’s or weakling’s tactics, but it is very real in practice and exhibits war crimes on a level that is hard to fathom. Putin’s invasion was a piece of monumental stupidity, and if he succeeds he will escalate further and the war will start over with another bite out of Eastern Europe, or so it seems. Nuclear wild card apart, the US will end up after this with increased global hegemony because we would not choose after this any consideration of either Russian or Chinese hegemony. That could be dead wrong. Still, we cannot predict this situation with any confidence. I think that the American imperial legacy has thrown into entire discredit the whole legacy of American civilization, but with Russian/Putin idiocy at this level it seems to make a comeback.
Still, exposing the lies here is essential and one has to consider what we are not getting from the news. The implications of the leaked documents are unclear but do they really change anything?
In any case, this is a challenge to the self-styled opinion leaders on the left who might assume agreement based on rhetoric against Yankee imperialists. Russia and Chinese are leftover messes of the left.

In the battle of the Romans against the Scythians I tend to side with the Romans, and their vaunted hegemony. In this case, …? In the end, both China and Russia are victims of the failures of Marxism, no doubt to oversimplify. The best thing that could happen is for the US to move to a postcapitalist transition in a post-Marxist neo-socialism done right, the issue of hegemony given over to a new and just International. In the endless claptrap by political idiots about ‘national interest’, a decent version of the above would more surely be in the real ‘national intrest’ of the slowing sliding away yankee doodle operation. My reverse propaganda is a version of ‘democratic market neo-communism’, liberalism as a trick play morphed into a sane neo-communism. That is the issue. This whole affair is really about the aftermath of Marxism, and the real aftermath must start over: in my The Last Revolution I consider a modeling tool that can sift through these combinations in a double play against rancid liberalism and rancid communism. I offer the same scale of thought to endgame commie grotesques of both Russia and China. Russia is haunted by its socialist failure and can never live it down without doing it right.  Putin’s fanatasy of a greater Russia as of yore would be plain silly if it weren’t actually being attempted by this psychopath.  Such a transition could be far simpler and realizable than we realize from the bad theories of Marx. That will require a level of intelligence absent in the post-communist after life of Russia, and essentially the same for China. I would demand a socialism in which I don’t get murdered in the first week. Such a thing doesn’t exist yet. But the temperatures are rising.