Joe Biden’s trip to Europe seriously raised the danger of war—even, quite possibly, a humanity-ending war—to a new level. Biden made headlines by ending his most important speech of the trip with the statement that “for God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.” Respected pro-administration commentators said that this “runs the risk of extending the scope and duration of the war.” And while the Biden administration tried to have it both ways, immediately saying that Biden didn’t really mean that Putin should be removed and the regime overthrown, if you read the whole speech you will see that Biden in fact cast this whole war as “the test of all time” and as a struggle between “liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
The Real Cause of This War
In fact—and as Bob Avakian (BA) has written and as we have proven in article after article by him and others on this site in the past six weeks—“the essence of the conflict between the U.S. and countries like Russia and China is not one between ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism,’ but is a matter of rivalry among imperialist powers, all of which are monstrous oppressors of masses of people, and none of which represent or act in the interests of humanity.” (See “Shameless American Chauvinism: ‘Anti-Authoritarianism’ as a ‘Cover’ For Supporting U.S. Imperialism,” by Bob Avakian.)
To be clear: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is itself a naked power grab, a totally unjustified military slaughter conducted under phony pretenses. At the same time, it’s just the kind of thing that the U.S. has done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam and scores of other countries around the world, incurring hundreds if not thousands of times the horror, damage and suffering that Russia has done in Ukraine. For these very reasons, BA goes on to say in the very next sentence in the above-mentioned article, “What is called for, and urgently now, is to oppose all imperialist marauders and mass murderers, and all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation, while giving particular emphasis to opposing ‘our own’ imperialist oppressors who commit their monstrous crimes ‘in our name’ and seek to ally us to support them on the basis of a grotesque American chauvinism, which we must firmly reject and fiercely struggle against.”
Biden on the Rampage
Biden’s whole trip was timed to coincide with pouring more NATO troops, including many U.S. troops, into the countries bordering Ukraine, within easy striking distance of Ukraine. He sent more weapons into the region and provided a higher level of arms to Ukraine (though this was apparently not enough to satisfy the increasingly rabid and irresponsible Ukrainian leader Zelensky). Three “summit meetings” of three different groupings, including one of NATO and one of the European Union, were held to escalate the threats and the economic warfare being waged in retaliation for the Russian invasion. U.S. officials—and the U.S. media—continually discussed the very real threat of Russia resorting to chemical or nuclear weapons… while conveniently downplaying the fact that the U.S. war-fighting doctrine also includes using such weapons. (For more on the real threat of nuclear war, go here to see a segment on this from the RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show or read last week’s revcom.us article “The Ukraine War… The Horror—and the Heightened Risk—of Nuclear War.”)
Meanwhile, the media continued on its campaign to portray Putin as yet another one of the “as-bad-as-Hitler” caricatures of whatever leader they’re going after and setting up to take down. The Sunday New York Times lived up to its role as a propaganda instrument for the imperialists with a front-page article that ran for pages and pages portraying Putin as having become intoxicated with an “anti-Western” and sheer, irrational hatred. In fact, Putin is a monster insofar as he is the instrument and servant—and must be—of the capitalist-imperialist system running Russia and what that system requires to thrive. And in this, he is no different than Biden, Trump or Obama. Yet the American media indulges once again in its villain-of-the-year, good guy/bad guy mythology designed to take in the gullible. Whether Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar, Khaddafi, or Manuel Noriega, they each received the Hitler-of-the-Month treatment from U.S. leaders and the marionettes in the U.S. “free press,” with Hussein and Khaddafi murdered as a result (one by U.S.-dominated “legal process,” the other by a lynch mob, which then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made a joke about). Putin, of course, knows this history very well and is forced to take Biden’s threat very seriously indeed.
Biden’s simplistic rhetoric, outright lying and phony posturing would be laughable were it not so deadly serious in its consequences and the further horrors it could yet unleash. By shipping yet more arms and soldiers to the region, by ramping up the economic warfare against Russia, by dominating the last five days of news coverage with rank distortions and shameless demagogy, and by ending with what could be—and largely was—interpreted as a direct threat against Putin himself, Biden and the U.S. ruling class as a whole have made the world a considerably more dangerous place than it was one week ago.
This system must be ended before this system ends humanity.
