WORKERS throughout Europe are on the march against NATO’s developing war against Russia and the massive attacks on their living standards that it has brought about.
Italian workers demonstrated in Rome, Florence and Genoa against the Western sanctions imposed on Russia and the transfer of lethal military hardware to Ukraine, a day after the first anniversary of the Ukraine-Russia war.
The protesters chanted ‘No to war!’ and called for ‘Peace!’, urging the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government stop supplying Kiev with weapons.
The anti-war protesters also held demonstrations in Milan, Italy’s second-largest city, Pisa, Florence, and Lecce among several other cities.
‘We represent the majority of public opinion that does not want war but wants peace,’ said Maurizio Landini, a socialist in Rome. In Genoa, people took to the streets and chanted ‘Exit Italy from NATO’, calling for Italy’s withdrawal from the European Union and NATO. Other slogans such as ‘Down the guns, raise the wages!’ were also shouted.
‘We know well that it is this system that produces this war. We are workers, students, we are different. As the polls also show, there are 60% of Italians who are against the sending of arms and against this military adventure.’
‘We are convinced that the lifting of sanctions against Russia and the end of this useless conflict is an urgent need. Our vision is to restore relations with our Russian friends and work for the good of the world,’ another demonstrator said.
The demonstrators believe that Rome’s pro-EU policy and confrontation with Russia have led to detrimental economic consequences for Italians, who are suffering from rampant inflation due to Washington’s plan to deprive Europe of Russian energy resources.
The major imperialist power, the USA, is determined to seize an opportunity to undermine Russia as the only way out of the growing economic crisis in the West – and its UK ‘running dog’ is in full support.
The United States has already sent more military assistance to help Ukraine fight against Russia than Washington spent annually to fight its own war in Afghanistan.
Data compiled by German research firm Statista shows that US military aid to Ukraine up to mid-January, covering the first 11 months of the conflict, totalled $46.6 billion.
That compared with an average annual military spend of $43.4 billion dollars in 2022, during the first ten years of the Afghanistan war, said Statista citing data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
‘When calculating the average annual costs of previous wars which the United States has been involved in, the true magnitude of the country’s Ukraine aid expenditure can be seen,’ Statista data journalist, Martin Armstrong, said.
Despite conditions in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen by 10% for the year as a whole, the share prices of US defence contractors have now surged.
The figures however exclude non-military aid, such as the $4.5 billion that US President Joe Biden pledged to fund Ukrainian pensions, government salaries and other Ukraine public spending.
In total, the United States has allocated $113 billion in Ukraine aid. In fact the USA has sent more money to Ukraine than Russia spends on its annual military budget. Russia spends about US$65-70 billion a year. The US sent more than $100 billion, including non-military aid, plus there are the other NATO countries, especially the UK, which has sent billions to the Ukraine at the same time as its war drive has led to a huge inflation being imposed on UK workers.
In fact, the UK workers are financing the Ukraine war with their living standards that have been thrown into the flames as a ‘price worth paying to drive Russia back’.
Even a number of US lawmakers, such as Representatives Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene have called the Ukraine conflict a ‘proxy war’ that the US and NATO are waging.
‘The American people do not want war with Russia, but NATO and our own foolish leaders are dragging us into one. We should pull out of NATO,’ said Greene while referring to the Biden administration’s massive military aid to Ukraine as a ‘proxy war’ against Russia.
UK workers will not be neutral as this struggle to maintain US worldwide domination sharpens. They must force the TUC to call an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy!
