An elderly tired man and his dog walk for miles out of Mariupol. They walk by burned out buildings and over the rubble of bombed roads. All around them is burning and devastation.
An old lady bent over her shopping trolley pushes it to a sparsely stocked grocer’s. She lives on the frontier and has heard neighbours abuse her as the ‘enemy.’ A man and his family flee from the bombardments. He carries his crippled German Shepherd over his shoulder, struggling with the weight; but he will not leave his dog behind.
This writer cannot ignore the plight of the other animals caught up in this misery, for they are part of, not separate from, the human tragedy.
There are innumerable true and personal stories in this war, swallowed up in the overall suffering of thousands, and most will never be known. They do not interest those who are blasé about war; who talk about advances and retreats, ‘victories’ and defeats, strategic interests and geopolitics.
We socialists are never blasé about war. We know as members of the world’s working class that to participate in the murder of each other at the behest of our exploiters is to be deluded.
With capitalism in overdrive, poisoning the Earth, threatening life with extinction (including the human race), destroying climate balance, pushing us all militarily toward nuclear annihilation, it has never been more urgent for us, the world’s working class – who form 99 percent of the human population – to unite and democratically get rid of the world capitalist system before it gets rid of all of us. Yet in the midst of global disaster, we are still doing the bidding of the 1 percent’s obsession with profit and capital accumulation. This includes fighting their wars, killing one another, in the delusion that we have ‘countries’ to kill and die for. The same old lethal delusion.
We urge the workers of Ukraine and of Russia, and of all places in bloody and senseless capitalist conflict, to realise they have much more in common with their exploited brothers and sisters on ‘the other side’ than they can possibly have with their exploiters at home. We urge them to stop inflicting misery on one another at the behest of heads of state, and to pool their energies in union with one another to overthrow this defunct and deadly world capitalist system – an overthrow which, when we are once united in our millions, can be achieved with relative ease.
So that we can at last, as a united humanity – free from the profit system with its warfare, poverty and devastation – solve together and reverse the damage which world capitalism is now causing.
Let us no longer subject ourselves to lethal delusions such as nationalism. Let us claim the world for all of us, ending wars and frontiers forever.
World socialism, now!
A. W.
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