The deep-rooted and essential causes of a war are revealed not in how a war begins but, rather, how it develops and to what it leads. The American Civil War was not caused by the firing on Fort Sumter. The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand did not cause World War I. 1/
That the Civil War was ultimately about the destruction of slavery (and the resulting unfettered growth of modern capitalism In the United States) would become clear in historical retrospect. 2/
That the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo was little more than a trigger event for the eruption of long simmering inter-imperialist conflicts was apparent in 1914 only to the most farsighted Marxists (especially Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg). 3/
In the mass of hysterical commentary on the #UkraineRussianWar, it is all but impossible to find - outside of the World Socialist Web Site - any attempt to place the outbreak of the conflict in a broader geopolitical, not to mention, historical context. 4/
Learned academics - even those who have grappled for decades with the complex problem of historical causation - are in a state of intellectual collapse and are content to let CNN, MSNBC and, of course, the New York Times, think for them. 5/
Here are just a few questions that are not, but should be, asked: 1) What is the relation between the domestic crisis in every country (including Russia), exacerbated by the pandemic that has claimed 20 million lives, to the eruption of war? 6/
2) What is the relation between the wars that have been waged without stop by the United States over the last 30 years, often with NATO collaboration, to the rapidly escalating confrontation with Russia? 7/
3) Is Germany's decision to triple its military budget and effectively do away with all post-World War II restraints on its armed forces nothing more than a spontaneous response to the Ukraine war? Or has the war provided Germany with a pretext for long-planned rearmament? 8/
4) Having vastly expanded NATO and moved its forces hundreds of miles eastward, does the United States view the war as an opportunity to inflict a massive defeat on Russia, leading to its eventual break up? What is the relation of this confrontation to conflict with China? 9/
5) What are the global corporate and financial interests that benefit from war and would profit from the breakup of Russia and unfettered access to its immense resources on the Eurasian landmass? 10/
But the most important question that is not being asked: What will be the consequences if this confrontation escalates into a nuclear war? What will be left of the planet? 11/11
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