SAMANTHA Power, the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, did not waste any time in attacking the Russian veto of the imperialists’ resolution before the UN Security Council declaring the Crimean referendum to be illegal.
She revealed to the full the fear that the ruling classes of the world hold for the 1917 revolution and the fact that the current crisis of the world capitalist system is awakening revolution on a worldwide scale.
She told the Security Council: ‘We have heard a lot each time the Security Council has met about the echoes and relevance of history. We have heard, for example, about the pleas of the brave democrats of Hungary in 1956 and about the dark chill that dashed the dreams of Czechs in 1968.’
She added: ‘We still have the time and the collective power to ensure that the past doesn’t become prologue.’
She then proceeded to savage, not the Stalinist bureaucracy and Putin its leader, but the source of the ‘evil’ itself.
‘Under the UN Charter, the Russian Federation has the power to veto a Security Council resolution, but it does not have the power to veto the truth. As we know, the word “truth”, or “pravda” has a prominent place in the story of modern Russia. From the days of Lenin and Trotsky until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pravda was the name of the house newspaper of the Soviet Communist regime. But throughout that period, one could search in vain to find pravda in Pravda. And today, one again searches in vain, to find truth in the Russian position on Crimea, on Ukraine, or on the proposed Security Council resolution considered and vetoed a few moments ago.’
The source of the ‘evil’ turns out to be the world revolution of the working class, which was the jumping off ground for the great October 1917 revolution, and then sustained it during the wars of intervention.
The truth is that, driven by the world crisis of its system, the US-EU picked this quarrel with Russia. It organised a coup, using fascist stormtroopers, to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine when it would not line up with the EU and allow the economy of Ukraine to be butchered.
The theory that Putin could just ignore the anger of the Russian workers and would just roll over in front of imperialism was a major miscalculation of the type that Lenin predicted would result in imperialism’s overthrow.
It was no surprise either when the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy abstained on the veto vote, refusing to give full support to its Russian allies. Stalinism, after all, with its basic theory of socialism in a single country, is a system where the interests of the national group is primary, and the interests of the world’s working class and the world revolution is called a myth, or in Stalin’s words ‘a joke’.
Following his abstention, Liu Jieyi, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council that China held ‘an objective and fair position on the Ukraine issue’.
Liu said Beijing vows to ‘continue to mediate and promote dialogue so as to play a constructive role in bringing about a political solution to the crisis’.
However the opposite will happen. The US and the EU will now bring in sanctions against Russia, and Russia will retaliate using its massive energy resources as a weapon.
This means share crashes and a deepening of the worldwide economic and political crisis, at a time when the EU is already on its knees and with countries like Greece already on the brink of revolution.
For Ukraine, EU and World Bank aid will mean huge cuts and a sharpening of the class struggle as the realities of EU policies are brought home to sections of the workers in the west of Ukraine.
Meanwhile in the east, the working class will take action to drive the fascists back to Kiev and beyond and then to organise the overthrow of the US-EU-installed coupist Kiev regime. The leader of the Right Sector, Dmitry Yarosh, yesterday threatened to destroy Russian pipelines on Ukrainian territory, showing what is to come.
Workers soviets are already rapidly emerging in the east of the country. These will be the basis of a new workers government in a Soviet Ukraine.
The main point about the crisis in the Ukraine is that it has arisen out of the world crisis of capitalism and can only be resolved through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
