IN her notorious speech on Wednesday night, at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London, the Tory Foreign Secretary and would-be successor to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, declared that Britain is in a state of war with Russia.
The fact that the working people of the UK have not been consulted about this life and death struggle is obvious – they will have to do the sacrificing, the fighting and the dying!
Truss announced ‘We are already stepping up in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is our war – it is everyone’s war because Ukraine’s victory is a strategic imperative for all of us.’
Again, she is speaking for the ruling class – the working class has never even been consulted about this ‘life and death struggle’, that is a ‘strategic imperative’ for the boss class.
Truss admitted that this was not without risk but she insisted ‘We have always been risk takers.’
In other words whether British and US capitalism have a future is to be decided by whether the US-UK alliance can destroy the Soviet Union and China, and are able to force the working class to accept the enormous pauperisation required to raise the vast funds to fund such a war.
The imperialists want to restore their former glories, and it is to be done off the backs of the UK and US working classes.
Already stock markets are crashing and the cost of living is rocketing upwards.
In fact Russia has already hit back at the imperialist powers.
‘High-precision, long-range air-based weapons of the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in Kiev,’ the Russian ministry of defence said on Friday in its daily briefing on the conflict in Ukraine.
Russian defence forces carried out a range of airstrikes on Thursday, destroying three power substations at Ukrainian railway hubs and a Tochka-U missile launcher, that it said had carried out an attack on the Russian-held city of Kherson.
Meanwhile, Vyacheslav Volodin, who as the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament often voices the Kremlin’s views, said that Washington is trying to profit from the war by indebting and enslaving future generations of Ukrainians.
‘Lend-Lease is a commodity loan, and not cheap: many future generations of Ukrainian citizens will pay for all the ammunition, equipment, and food that the United States will supply,’ Volodin said.
While the Biden administration has sent tens of billions of dollars to aid Ukraine, Russia has already said that the dramatic amount of Western weapons sent for Kiev means that we are fighting in a ‘proxy war’ against NATO.
The UK government has now said that it is deploying around 8,000 troops for exercises across Eastern Europe in a show of strength against Russia.
According to defence officials the months-long drills in countries, stretching from Finland to North Macedonia, also involve allies including France and the United States.
Britain is deploying 72 Challenger 2 tanks and 120 armoured fighting vehicles along with artillery guns, helicopters, and drones for the ‘exercises’, some of which are already underway.
‘The security of Europe has never been more important,’ the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace said, calling it ‘one of the largest shared deployments since the Cold War.’
The UK and US working class must oppose this obvious preparation of an imperialist war to smash Russia and China, killing millions of people in the process.
Lenin put forward the slogan in 1914 to turn the imperialist war into a civil war.
In fact the Russian revolution was the direct outcome of the 1914-18 imperialist slaughter which the Bolsheviks opposed from day one.
In Britain the TUC have called a massive demonstration in London on 18 June. This must become the platform for the calling of a general strike to kick out the Tories, bring in a workers government and begin the smashing of US and EU imperialism.
This is the only way to defeat the imperialist conspiracy to restore capitalism worldwide which would be a calamity for the peoples of the world!
