THE front page of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph carried an article headlined ‘Vladimir Putin “weaponising” world’s food supplies.’
This story of the dastardly Putin being responsible for plunging hundreds of millions of people across the world into starvation was faithfully reproduced by LBC radio and other news platforms.
According to this account, which is attributed to unnamed ‘Western officials’, Vladimir Putin is weaponising global food supplies by ‘stealing grain and destroying agricultural equipment as part of his war in Ukraine.’
These unnamed officials claim that the Kremlin is believed to be dismantling the infrastructure required for food production and blocking ports to prevent wheat and other cereals from leaving Ukraine – known as the ‘breadbasket of Europe’.
It is now claimed that these Western officials fear that Russia has embarked on a ‘deliberate policy’ of disrupting food supplies and sparking a global crisis.
Without bothering to produce a shred of evidence, Western ‘sources’ are insisting that Russian troops have destroyed grain silos and food infrastructure in cities including Kherson, Lugansk and Donetsk in a deliberate policy to exacerbate a ‘pre-existing bad situation’ that has created a ‘major threat to global food security’.
All of a sudden, Putin has been transformed from a ‘stupid, sick and pathetically paranoid leader’ of a military adventure destined to be crushed by the united forces of NATO and world imperialism into a devious evil mastermind with the power to starve the world into submission.
This is a desperate attempt by the imperialist powers to place the blame for their global food crisis onto the backs of Putin and Russia. Only last week, Foreign Secretary Truss was claiming that the Ukraine war was ‘our war’, and must be fought to a finish!
Now with no limit to how high bread prices will rise worldwide, the same imperialists are screaming with fear that the war they started and encouraged with massive arms shipments will trigger massive class struggles at home, driven by massive bread price increases, and that ‘their right to rule’ will be ended by socialist revolutions.
The US, UK and NATO are responsible for starting what Tory Foreign Secretary Truss claimed is ‘our war’.
It was they who organised, and financed the fascist led coup in Ukraine in 2014 in a deliberate drive to push NATO forces up to the Russian border and so provoke a response from Russia.
The US, supported by Britain, deliberately started this war to return Russia to capitalist domination and now they are hysterically blaming Russia for defending itself.
The bread crisis that they helped develop is now turning into a force that will drive uprisings by workers and the poor across the world to remove them
The Telegraph reported that record food prices have proved to be ‘the last straw’ for many countries already on the brink of a crisis and that Western intelligence agencies are ‘closely monitoring the situation’ terrified of a mass uprising across Africa and the Middle East
However, the massive increases in food prices are not just hitting the poorest countries of the world.
On Wednesday, official figures showed that the price of food in the UK had risen at its fastest pace in over a decade in April helping push the inflation rate to a forty-year high of 9% and heading even higher.
Inflation for workers, who spend the greater majority of their pay on food, energy and rent, is even higher than this official figure.
It won’t just be another ‘Arab Spring’ that the ruling class will have to deal with in the period directly ahead, but a worldwide ‘revolutionary spring’. Workers and the impoverished masses are fast reaching the conclusion that poverty and starvation is indeed the ‘last straw’ and are not prepared to live under a capitalist system prepared to organise nuclear war and millions of deaths to ensure world domination for profiteering bosses and bankers.
Capitalism in its final imperialist stage can offer only a future of poverty, starvation and war for workers and the people of the world.
The enemy of the working class and masses of the world is not Putin and it certainly isn’t the Russian workers. It is the ruling class at home.
The only way forward today is to turn the imperialist war against Russia into a workers-led civil war against the real enemy at home – the ruling class of capitalists and bankers. Humanity must consign capitalism into the dustbin of history!