 Hello. I'm John Ruhr. I'd like to thank Town Meeting TV for giving us this opportunity to present perspectives of peace in the conflict in the Ukraine. We hear so much talk of war is very important to know that there are alternatives. I am with the World Beyond War, which is a global movement to end all war as an instrument of politics among people. I'm also with Physicians for Social Responsibility, which has been working since 1961 to educate the world's population about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Hello. My name is Trey Cook. I'm a member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America and the Reform and Revolution Caucus. I'm a freshman at the University of Vermont. Hi there. My name is Charlotte Dennett. I'm the author of the newly released paper book, Paperback, Follow the Pipelines, which is uncovering the mystery of a lost spy and the deadly politics of the great game for oil. I'm also a member of Wilf, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. And I'm Ashley Smith. I work for Specter Journal and I'm a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the Tempest Collective. Great. Ashley, would you like to begin stating your positions on what can we do about this god-awful mess that the world finds itself in now? Sure. I think the beginning point is we have to understand the nature of the war that's just been launched. Vladimir Putin has launched a war of imperial aggression in Ukraine. And the aim of this war is to overthrow the current democratically elected government and install a puppet regime. And this is part of his project to reclaim Russia's sphere of influence that he sees as having been lost at the end of the Cold War. And part of the aim is to secure the country's pipeline routes, its agricultural industry and natural resources for Russian domination. And this war has caused an absolute catastrophe in the lives of Ukrainian people. War crimes are being committed by the Russian invading and occupying forces. Over a million refugees have fled Ukraine just in the last week. So the left in the anti-war movement must absolutely oppose Putin's war of imperial aggression and stand with Ukraine and its fight for national self-determination and frankly national liberation from an occupying army. At the same time I think we have to oppose the U.S. and NATO and any intervention that would turn this war of imperial aggression into an inter-imperial war between nuclear-armed powers. That would threaten the world with World War III. The U.S. actually has no grounds to be morally criticizing the regime in Russia. Just look at what the U.S. did in Iraq and Afghanistan. The results of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have laid waste to countries, killed well over a million people. And really did the U.S. did the same thing in Iraq that the Russian regime is doing in Ukraine today. So we have to oppose any intervention on behalf of the U.S. and NATO into Ukraine. And really if you understand what's going on in Eastern Europe, part of the trigger of Putin's war was the west was the eastward expansion of the NATO military alliance. And I think a lot of people need to be disabused of illusions in NATO as some kind of defensive or pacifist institution. It's not. It's actually an imperialist institution and was designed that way from the very beginning. The secretary, the first secretary general of NATO, a man named Lord Ismay, famously said the role of NATO is to keep Russia out, keep Germany down, and keep the United States in. That is, it's a means for the U.S. to secure economic and political domination over Europe. And the eastward expansion is one of the things that triggered Vladimir Putin to launch his own war to reclaim that loss fear of influence that Russia once had in Eastern Europe. So the U.S. and NATO are no solution to this crisis. In fact, the U.S. is one of Ukraine's actual oppressors through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The United States has trapped the Ukrainian economy in massive debt, over $6 billion in debt. And the repayment of interest on those loans accounts for about 12 percent of the Ukrainian budget. So money that could go to programs for workers, for poor people, for health insurance, etc., is siphoned off from their economy to pay back the bankers, mainly that reside in the United States. So I don't think the U.S. NATO powers are any solution. I think the actual solution lies in people from below resisting this drive to war and the actual invasion and occupation of Ukraine. That is, the Ukrainian resistance, which is a heroic resistance against an occupying army. The Russian anti-war movement is another part of that international resistance. And the final element is the global peace movement, which we've seen erupt around the world. I think the key thing is the Ukrainian resistance, though, just like the Palestinian resistance, just like the Iraqi resistance to the U.S. invasion. This is a resistance and a fight for national liberation. And we should support it full stop, including its ability to militarily defend itself. I think also the second component of this international movement is the absolutely heroic struggle of Russian people against Vladimir Putin's regime. We've seen thousands upon thousands of people pour out into the streets of the big cities in Russia against this war, and people doing so at great personal risk. People are very concerned that martial law is about to be declared in Russia. Already 9,000 people have been arrested and detained by out of those anti-war demonstrations. And then the third component is the international anti-war movement. And this is of massive size. In Berlin, they had a demonstration of over 100,000 people against Putin's war. So the combination of all those things, I think, is the solution. The heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people, the Russian anti-war movement and the global peace movement. So in that, what should we demand? I think I'll just end on that. Number one, we should demand the immediate withdrawal of all occupying troops that Russia has in Ukraine. That includes the removal of the occupying troops in Crimea and their agents in the separatist republics in eastern Ukraine. We should support the Ukrainian fight for self-determination and self-defense, including securing wherever they do arms for their self-defense. We should oppose U.S. and NATO intervention, especially in the form of a no-fly zone, which some people are calling for, which would trigger a military confrontation between the air forces of the Western powers and the Russian air force as well. And we should oppose the remilitarization of Europe, which is going on with a vengeance right now, and the increase of military budgets in the United States, which is also on the table if you listened to Biden's State of the Union speech. Importantly, we should argue for the immediate opening of the borders of Europe to all refugees fleeing Ukraine, but not just Ukrainian refugees to all refugees and migrants, including those from the Arab countries as well as the African countries, who are right now suffering racist discrimination against their right of freedom of movement into Europe. Last couple of things we should demand. We should call for the immediate cancellation of all of Ukraine's debt so that they can determine their own destinies when they free themselves and not be trapped in a debtor's prison controlled by the United States. And finally, we have to build international solidarity from below across all borders against this drive to war in Ukraine and demand the immediate end to the war and the withdrawal of all foreign troops. My turn. Hello there. I am looking at this war through a certain lens. I see it. I hope to see it as the last energy war of the century. And that means from World War I up through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we have Ukraine. And I'm going to explain more about it because I've written a book about pipelines and their influence on some of the major conflicts over the past century. The book has lots of maps. And one of the maps I just want to show you briefly, if it's behind me, you're going to throw that. Yeah. Anyway, this, the book, there's pipelines here that run from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon. And the reason I started researching that is because my father was a spy, the first master spy in the Middle East. And his last mission, because he died mysteriously, was to Saudi Arabia to try to determine the route of the trans-Arabian pipeline. This was the largest energy project, even industrial project in the world at that time. And America's exclusive control over the trans-Arabian pipeline boosted into becoming a great world power, much to the dismay of our former allies or our allies. That would be Russia, France, and England. This was during World War II. So in investigating what happened, why his plane crashed after this top secret mission to Saudi Arabia, I began to understand that oil and pipelines had a lot to do with war. And so that's one thing I'll talk about briefly also, though. I think it's on everyone's mind today that there are nuclear plants in Ukraine. And this is a horror. Everyone was horrified last night to see that the largest nuclear plant in Europe, I believe in the world, was attacked. And there's terrific concern about the release of radiation. Apparently, the core reactor was not hit, thank God, but it just drives home the danger of a war in Ukraine. And if we can see the first map that comes up here, this was done showing possible ground forces entering Ukraine. So it was even before this map was done before the Russians invaded. But it pretty accurately describes what happens. And here is that huge nuclear plant there. And then Chernobyl is up to the north. So the insanity of this is palpable to everybody, which is why we should not have ongoing war in Ukraine for that reason alone. But then there's another very big factor in this war. And it's called the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This pipeline has recently been completed. And if we can see the, if you can show the next one map, you can see how it runs from, well, Russia to Germany. And it's Russian built. It's also financed by some European companies. And throughout its construction, the United States has tried to prevent this pipeline from being completed. Why? Because it's going to ship even more natural gas to Europe. Europe already receives 40% of its natural gas from Russia. And the pipeline would supply even more. And this is very threatening to the United States. And it has clearly been stated as such and to the West. They didn't want this to go through. And so what you have is a big power standoff between the United States, NATO on the one side and Russia and its allies on the other side. The next map that you're going to see shows all these networks of pipelines that are running through Ukraine and also through Poland. Now Poland and Ukraine were also against the pipeline. Why? Because they are worried that they would lose the very lucrative transit fees that they would get from having actually Russian owned pipelines going through the country. They were afraid the market would be flooded and they would lose up to a billion dollars annually in transit fees. Now there's also been a warning from Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada. I'm going to read this to you to put it into perspective. He says that he characterized the West's efforts to circumvent Russia's role as a quote significant source of natural gas and oil for European partners. And one of the things that we've been doing over the past number of weeks in is ensuring that there are alternatives to Russia. Not just to make sure that our friends and our allies in Europe continue to be able to function their economies and support their people, but to make sure that Putin no longer draws sustenance from his own economy. So I see it not in terms of an ideological war so much as a war between two gigantic petropowers, both imperial. And we all stand the gas. What can we do to stop it? Now the nukes, Ukraine relies on 40% of its energy from nuclear power plants. So just to end up, I keep thinking about World War I, the beginnings of World War I and entangling alliances. Barbara Tuckman wrote about it in her great book on World War I, The Guns of August. And it was all about how international diplomacy failed in a war that no one wanted. Now I'm going to challenge that a bit because in my research, and I'm almost ending in my research, what really had Britain concerned was the Berlin to Baghdad railroad that was being built by the Germans and was heading straight towards Britain's oil bonanza in Iran and also towards Iraq, which Britain considered a first class war aim. We have to remember that the modern militaries run on oil. That is the big factor of why the great game continues, even as we're trying to find alternative sources of energy. So the faster we move away from oil and gas as a fuel for our industrial and militarized societies, the closer we'll be coming to peace. Yeah, I mean, both the other speakers on this panel made great points. I'm just jarred by the hypocrisy from the American political elite, to be honest. I'm seeing a lot of foils with American foreign policy with what Russia's doing. They went into Ukraine under the auspice of a peacekeeping mission, and that's the same excuse that America has used to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. The total about face from America in support of Ukraine, the consolidation in support, I'm not against it. I'm totally for supporting the people of Ukraine and their struggle, but the hypocrisy is a little bit jarring. And the war hawking that's coming from people in charge. In the last eight years, we've spent, I'd say, I think $450 billion in humanitarian aid to Ukraine. In the last couple days, we've sent $380 billion. In the last year, $1 trillion. Wait, let me just make sure I got that number right. Yeah. And I think what that shows is that we don't have a consistent and principled stance in the U.S. because we have consolidated power in the hands of a few. Again, total hypocrisy. We're blaming the Russian oligarchs now. We didn't blame them earlier. They have trillions of dollars in offshore bank accounts, as reported by the Pandora Papers. If we really want to have lasting permanent change, then we should distribute some of that wealth to other people. We need to have international corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, income taxes on some of these billionaires, and use that money to create lasting sustainable energy projects. The reason that they're able to spin around like this is those oligarchs have control over petrochemicals. Russia, 8% of the world's petrochemicals come from Russia alone. If we have sustainable energy that's owned locally by people and publicly owned, then we don't have to worry about as much these energy wars. And we have a sufficient way to protect people. Not just with like the private sector, but going back to like the public sector politicians again. What the American political leach to do right now is support mass movements in the U.S. and in Russia internationally. We need to have masses of people come together, not relying on what we think are good elites, or wagging your finger at bad elites. We need the people to actually come up and say, hey, there's a Russian guy that, you know, sells their body, like sells their labor for a way to sustain themselves. There's someone like that in Ukraine. 5000 Russians have been arrested so far in anti war movements. We're not hearing enough about that in the U.S. That is pressuring the Russian elite to do a total turnaround. You've already got a few of them that are ready to pull out of the war. And we should be hearing the same stuff from American progressives. I'm disappointed that I'm not hearing more of it from DSA candidates like AOC or other so called progressives that are no longer associated with us like Jamal Bowman, they need to be using their platform to support masses of people to affect actual change, permanent change, redistributing wealth, sustainable energy, those sort of things. We also need permanent change in how the U.S. handles its foreign policy. We need to disband NATO. We need to divest from the nuclear weapons transportation systems nationally. We have legislation in Vermont right now that you can go out and call your Congress people about to divest from that. We need to get rid of the F 35 program, but we can't just have spontaneous actions when stuff is really, really bad. We need to have permanent organization and a sense of solidarity with one another so that we can really bring about systemic change. I think that's the point that I'm going to lead with. Thank you, Trey. So eight days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, what have we learned so far? First, we learned that war sucks. War sucks the life out of the people that kills and maims. It sucks the life out of life for the millions of refugees now fleeing Ukraine. It sucks the life out of the economy. Look at the stock market currently look at the stock market collapse in Russia. Look at all the needs that aren't being met every day for Ukrainians now. War sucks the life out of individual liberties. If you are a man in the Ukraine, you're not allowed to leave if you're between the ages of 18 and 60. There's no freedom of press in Russia in Ukraine and very little now in the United States in terms of understanding the Russian point of view. Individual liberties are always the sacrifice at the altar of war. War sucks the life out of our humanity. It multiplies the hate and the desire for the revenge. And whether the Ukrainians or the Russians win this if it's a bloody war, it will simply sow the seeds of the next war. The second thing we learned is that possessing thousands of nuclear weapons does not prevent war yet risks ending life for all of us. Russia in the United States possess over 90% of the world's nuclear weapons and neither side will renounce the privilege of using them first if they so feel like it. Putin in fact has put his weapons on high alert, which doesn't mean a whole lot because Russian weapons and the United States are both dedicated to a policy of always having certain amounts of nuclear weapons on high alert. So what can be done now? How can Ukrainians and their supporters act in a way and how they act will have much to do with how much bloodshed, environmental, economic and moral damage there will be in the coming years. If the Ukrainians choose primarily violence to win their freedom, they will end up fighting probably a long protracted war, which will increase the death destruction and create countless refugees. Think of the current states where this has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen, untold human misery. Sending more arms outside fighters will make this more likely. And if Ukraine somehow manages to push the Russians back using arms, it runs the risk that Putin will either use nuclear weapons or B damage the nuclear power plants in Ukraine in his retreat, similar to the way Saddam Hussein devastated his country by igniting all the oil wells in his defeat and leaving those smoke plumes over much of the Middle East. Nonviolent actions, on the other hand, can be very effective. They include certainly sanctions. And I agree sanctions leveled at ordinary people to make their lives miserable have not been proven to be effective, but a cause of almost as much misery as war itself. But sanctions against oligarchs and others who support Putin can be very valuable. Bending Russia from the swift banking system so that they can't profit and pay for their wars makes a lot of sense and stop in buying their gas. I'm flabbergasted to find out that US is still paying for Russian oil even as we speak. How serious are we about really helping the Ukrainians? Then there's universal civil resistance. We see many pictures of citizens blocking the streets, even tanks, changing signs to confuse the invaders, changing maps, putting up signs that you're not welcome. There's countless ways of letting the Russians know they are not welcome. Consider the grandmother who engaged the Russian soldier who was kind of flustered about what he was doing there in the first place, telling him to put sunflower seeds in his pocket so that when he is killed, at least flowers will grow from where he died. Noncooperation means that all Ukrainians can fight for their country. Arm struggle means that only the physically strongest minority can fight. Civil actions that do not threaten individual Russian troops are more likely to create the defections that we're seeing already some and could see a lot more of among Russian troops, as well as win support back in Russia and prevent many deaths. But total noncooperation, not giving one inch to any of the demands of the Russians while they're in your country, at the same time not threatening them with the very thing they're threatening you with, is exceedingly effective. Research shows that such an approach actually historically has been proven to be more effective than armed resistance to an invading power. Thirdly, we can find a way to give Putin an opportunity to save face. So Sun Tzu in his ancient book, The Art of War, said that when your enemy is contained, to a certain extent, in an impasse like Putin is now, that you should build him a golden bridge to allow his retreat. Call for a ceasefire and withdrawal of all Russian troops in return for something he asked for earlier, that is a moratorium on the expansion of NATO, something that is easy for us to do and discussion of removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe, just as a prelude to eliminating all nuclear weapons. And this could be just the incentive Putin needs to withdraw his troops saying, we got what we wanted. No more danger from Ukraine to us. So what can we do in Vermont? We certainly support war victims and refugees. We can call the White House and lobby our congresspeople for saying no to war, no to preparations for war, and no further weapons sales to anyone. We can call for that return to the negotiating table with the NATO status of nuclear weapons in Europe up for negotiation. We've got to give Putin that reason to retreat while saving face before he destroys the entire country. We need to reinvigorate, as my friends have said, both the anti-nuclear and the anti-war movements everywhere. The best time to stop wars is before they start. What can Vermonters specifically do in addition to these things? There is, right now in the House of Representatives in the Vermont legislature, Joint Resolution H7, which says Vermonters strongly oppose any preparations for nuclear war. If this had been done a long time ago by enough places around the country and around the world, there might not be nuclear weapons that Putin can threaten us with now. This is one step toward preserving our future. Thanks. Comments. Well, I forgot to say something, so if you don't mind. Go ahead, Charlotte. Just to make it a little clearer. One thing about the Berlin to Baghdad railroad was that it was being built by the Germans for the Turks and in return the Turks were granting oil concessions to either side of the railroad. That was another reason. A second thing I forgot to say is that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been sanctioned. It was the first item that was sanctioned since the war began and that shows you how important that pipeline is. And actually since then all the about 150 workers have been laid off because of the sanctions. And well there's no telling whether it'll go go back online ever again. It was supposed to be certified by Germany by this summer. And who knows what's going to happen between now and this summer. Another thing I forgot to mention is that the US is flooding supplies of natural gas into Europe. You see this is all a struggle for markets. And the biggest backers of Trump were the fracking gas owners in the west and southwest. They were his principal source of income. And right now they are pushing to have more of their fracked gas coming into Europe. And that's that's a considerable concern. And they're also and not not only the conservatives. I mean you have like the former economic adviser to the IMF has recently said that canceling the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline may have been based on sound environmental logic. But now the timing seems awkward. It seems that we must bring in we must return to developing domestic oil and gas. And so this is of concern to all climate activists. This this war is just turning everything on its head. All the all the advances that we've made with all alternative energy to protect the climate are now being stymied. And that in itself should be a big cause for demonstrations. And let's see. I think that is all I want to say. I just wanted to come in on a couple of things. I wanted to underscore something that I've been shocked by in the media which is the racism of the coverage of what is happening in Europe because you've got reporters saying this is happening in a civilized society as opposed to wars that happen in uncivilized society. And I think there's a systemic race racist portrayal of wars in the global south as opposed to wars now in the heart of Europe. And that's important to say because that is impact impacting the rights of migrants and refugees globally because there are some acceptable refugees and migrants that is white Ukrainians and they're unacceptable migrants and refugees. And that's North Africans Arabs people from all over Africa who right now are being barred at the European Union's borders. They're not being allowed admission into Poland and other countries in Europe. And frankly Britain is not even letting Ukrainians in. So it gives you a sense of the hypocrisy that's deep in in in the this war. The second thing I wanted to come in on is I don't agree in the framing this conflict as fundamentally between great powers. This conflict fundamentally is about Russian conquest of Ukraine. That is the war. They're underlying interimperial dynamics but if we don't begin with the actual war that's being waged which is the Russian conquest colonization and occupation of of Ukraine we're going to start wrong because we have to begin with opposing the actual war that's being fought and stop it from becoming an interimperial rivalry a war between great powers which as I said would threaten World War three between nuclear armed powers. But right now the war is a is an occupation by Russian Russian forces. And then I think there's something about that that is I want to elaborate a little bit more about about how we can end this war. And it reminds me of how the Vietnam War was ended. And I think that we have to go back to that precedent and learn from it because it was a national liberation struggle as well. The Vietnamese people rising up against the U.S. as an occupying military imperialist force in their country. And they rose up and fought a military resistance that was supported by an international anti-war resistance that then grew into the U.S. troops themselves so that the soldiers revolted and refused to carry out the fight. I think that's the hope from below in this circumstance. So I support the entire Ukrainian resistance civil and military plus the Russian anti-war movement. And most importantly the attempt to fraternize with Russian soldiers and win them to an anti-war position. I think these people are being used as cannon fodder for Putin's war. And I don't think they really believe in it. And there's a potential that they will lay down their guns and refuse to fight. And the final thing I hope this ends in is a revolution that overthrows over throws Vladimir Putin because I don't think he will stop his expansionist aims through diplomacy or anything else into Eastern Europe. He has a very clear aim to reclaim lost spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. So I think we're in for a protracted battle that can only be one and stopped from mass struggle from below in Ukraine, in Russia and globally. Yeah, I agree with most of what Ashley said. I think that we need to look at Vietnam War and see that there were young people that didn't want to participate. They didn't want to be drafted. They didn't want to go out and fight. A lot of these people are conscripts that were tricked into going out and going into combat. It's a wildly unpopular war as it touched on earlier. A lot of their legislators are already dealing about face and, you know, didn't take sanctions on the U.S. to get the American student movement to oppose the war. It took students recognizing that they had a very real material interest in opposing the war. Their lives were being gambled by capitalists being gambled by the wealthy. And I do think that is the hope. Mass movement, not a reliance on good liberals or bad conservatives or bad oligarchs, what have you. The answer isn't going to be sanctions that crippled their economy. It never has been. It didn't work with Sudan. It doesn't work with Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia. No American economic sanctions are going to resolve this. And I think what they're trying to do right now is get more people cozyed up to the idea of Western control over finance by just this one time opposing the bad guy. And, you know, I'm young. I don't remember the Iraq War, but there are a lot of people that remember Freedom Fries, a lot of people that remember weird American propaganda. They got people real hot in the idea of intervention. There are a lot of problems going on in the world right now, and none of them are solved by American involvement. And all of them are made worse by American military involvement. That's where we're at. Yeah, I agree. The Ukrainian people have a right to resist any way they choose violently or non-violently. I would just hope that they do make that decision with enough awareness of what evidence we have of which works better. Yes, the Vietnamese beat the Americans in a long protracted war. The Afghans beat both the Russians and the Americans in a protracted war. But look at the price they paid. We killed four million Vietnamese. That's a really high price to pay. We know from historical, empirical, political science studies that over the 100 years from 1900 to 2006, that in cases of 320 people's trying to overthrow an occupying power or overthrow their own dictator, that if they used primarily nonviolent rather than violent resistance, they were twice as likely to succeed. People just have to understand that. I grew up with a threat of the Soviet Union and being told that they were going to dominate the world unless we had lots of nuclear weapons and a stronger military. And to my shock and everybody else's in the space of less than a year in 1989 and 1990, the people of Russia and the Warsaw Pact who hook up and said, we're not playing this game anymore. We're simply not going to support the Soviet Union. And they fell not with a massive war with tens of millions of deaths or a nuclear war with billions of deaths, but with a few thousand deaths and the Soviet Union fell. If the Ukrainians choose a violent resistance, then I think they should expect possibly if they're unfortunate to see the same outcome for their country that looks like Iraq and Afghanistan. If on the other hand, they use civil resistance, they may get closer to what Czechoslovakia did against the Soviet invasion in 1968, not total independence from the Soviet Union, but they got to keep their own government that the troops came in to replace. And they did it with almost no loss of life. So it's totally their choice. I would just hope that we give them enough information to say that the choice always is never between violent resistance and doing nothing. This third way of civil resistance is very sophisticated, very well outlined and can be taught and learned and it's used. Ukrainians in fact used it to a large extent in their Revolution of 2004 when they had deposed a Russian leaning dictator. I don't know how many Ukrainians remember that well or what it was about, but it was extremely successful. The Serbs did it. NATO bombing of of Belgrade and Serbia for for many days, five billion dollars worth of bombs killed thousands of people didn't dislodge Milosevic, but civil resistance did young students in the outpour movement in just a few months were able to to depose this brutal guy Milosevic. We just got to know that there's another way because even if the Ukrainians win with violence, it's not going to solve their economic problems. And worst of all, it's going to keep the world locked in the belief that violence is the final arbiter of conflict. And sooner or later, that belief is going to do us all in with weapons of mass destruction. I used to think until very recently until the war that we would come out of this COVID nightmare with a much better understanding of the huge inequalities that exist in the world and that we would try to bring a new paradigm into play. And the reason I say that I actually used to I got my master's degree in art history in Florence, Italy of all places. And why are you laughing? No, I think I didn't know that. That's awesome. That's great place to get it. I mean, I'm jealous. I wish I had done that. Yeah, right. Yeah. One of my past lives. And anyway, but I'll always remember a fresco and it showed the black plague. And one of the results from the black plague was the Italian Renaissance. In other words, there was this new birth of thinking science came to the fore against religion. There's a great birth and culture. And that's what I want. I want a new Renaissance in the world. Now this has happened. So it behooves us to get out in force and say, we're not going to take it anymore. These endless wars have got to stop. I do agree with you, Ashley, that Russia invaded wrongly and that the territorial integrity of Ukraine should be protected by the same token. I don't go along with saying that this was a unprovoked war. You may disagree with me, but from what I've read, Putin tried to get the United States to say in writing that it would no longer push against Russia's territorial borders and its security. And as a matter of fact, it's been largely argued that that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was a pledge made that the NATO expansion would not occur. And what happened? It occurred. So you have the humiliation of the Russian people and their leaders. What happens when a leader gets humiliated? Look at what happened with Germany. I mean, it's just insane. So there's problems to be spread around on all sides. Now with regard to the refugees, this is very interesting development. And actually, the news media has sort of gingerly touched upon it that students of color, for instance, can't even get on the trains. I mean, this is outrageous. And this begins to lend credence to the idea that has been argued that there is a strong right wing, if not fascist or neo-Nazi element in Ukraine. We need to look at that. We need to see just how strong it is. But the fact that even the media has touched on it suggests to me that the reason is because of the power of the Black Lives Matter movement that got us to think about the racism in our own country to the point where there are more, for instance, Black reporters that have major positions in our television programs. And so it came out, which is some embarrassment, I think, to everyone who's like ra-ra Zelensky and Ukraine. I'm all for the people. And I have heard recently that Zelensky has been resting protesters and imprisoning them. So the other aspect is that the refugees are making Europe nervous. Why? Because when the influx of refugees from the Middle East was going on, mostly from the Middle East, it gave a rise to the new right in Europe. So you're going to have this incredible flood of refugees into Poland, for instance. What's that going to do? And I just heard it on the radio this morning coming over that there is great concern. It's going to revitalize the new right neo-Nazi movement. So we got to watch that very carefully. I'll just come in a little bit more about the refugee and migrant question, because I think this is pivotal. And it's something where the U.S. not only right, but political establishment, including the heart of the Democratic Party, has no ground to stand on. If you watched Biden's State of the Union speech, one of the things he ranted on about was border securitization. That is, he's enforcing Trump's anti-migrant border policy as we speak. The very same things that the EU is doing against black and Arab migrants, the United States is doing against not only Mexicans and Latin Americans, but people from all over the world who are right now held outside of the United States, pursued by ICE, thrown into detention facilities and deported. So I don't think it's just the political right that is anti-migrant. This is true all over Europe. The political establishment is anti-migrant. And the right will use it for their own benefit to advance their reactionary nationalist program. But we should be no one under no illusion that it's across the political spectrum of the ruling classes that control the European states. And the other thing is I think we should contrast that with the enormous sympathy that regular people have showed to refugees and migrants. And I think there's a real discrepancy between what the right says, what the political establishment and the wellspring of generosity we've seen towards all migrants from among regular people. And that should give us tremendous hope. I did want to come in on the question of sanctions a little bit more because I'm not sure if I support sanctions. And I'm not sure if I oppose them. And I want to explain that a little bit. Why don't support them? It is impossible to have smart sanctions. The sanctions that have been posed on Russia by Europe and the United States are having systemic effects on the entire Russian economy. And the main victims of that are working class people in Russia and the people who are leading the anti-war movement in Russia. And my concern is that this sanctions regime will drive Russian people into the arms of Putin, which is what happened immediately after the US went into Serbia. It temporarily boosted the fortunes of Milosevic and only after the war was concluded was he overthrown by a popular revolution. So I think the sanctions are a dangerous game and they're actually a form of financial warfare, frankly, that we should be cautious about. But at the same time, I don't think we should lead on the question of opposing sanctions because for the Ukrainian people, it seems as some means of self-defense against an occupying army. So I think it's a debate we have to have out in the movement as it develops and most importantly, listen to Ukrainian voices and Russian voices about what they're saying so that we don't take a position that's against the facilitation of a development of a mass popular movement in both countries from below, which I think is the hope in the situation. And then more on the question of sanctions. I find it hard to take seriously when the U.S. celebrates boycott, divestment and sanctions from Russian companies when they do they not only don't support it, but they declare it as anti-Semitic to support the same thing against the state of Israel. Or trying to make it illegal. Right. Or trying to make it illegal when Israel is an occupying military garrison state on stolen land who should be subject to genuine boycott, divestment and sanctions, which is actually being called for by the Palestinian people. So it's a bit rich to hear all of this stuff going on in New Hampshire where they're criminalizing BDS towards Israel and now they're enacting it against Russia. And I think we need to expand our consciousness because I think there are two big national liberation struggles that are fighting immediately. There are several around the world. But the one in the headlines are Palestine and Ukraine. And rather than have a different policy towards each, we should have a consistent policy of we're on the side of the liberation struggle. Final point I wanted to make in this little comment is about climate change because I think we have to see what is going on because all the climate change discussion is out the window. With the increase in the price of oil and natural gas, all the frackers are coming back. All the pipelines are being rebuilt. And the pro-green technology that is going to be funded is tied up with US imperialism. It's not politically innocent. In other words, we're seeing an attempt to rebuild the infrastructure that's at the heart of the problem of climate change. And the US is trying to now open the market of Europe to exported liquid national gas from the United States that's mostly fracked gas. So you've got a really scary thing in which now the US, which is one of the big oil producers and natural gas producers in the world is trying to push Russia out of Europe and replace the pipelines with their own shipped natural gas over into Europe. So I then think we're every crisis in the world system which was already bad. Climate change, economic crisis, the pandemic, on and on and on and on. That's all being dramatically exacerbated by Putin's invasion and occupation of Ukraine and the response of the great powers to that, which is to worsen every single problem in the world. The benefit of that is, and I'll give you an example, 70% of Egypt's grain comes from Ukraine. There are no ships coming from Ukraine to Egypt now to transport that grain. We could see that trigger breadrides. And if people remember back to the beginning of the Egyptian Revolution, it began with breadrides against the price of food. So this is going to provoke mass struggle from below. And I think we have to keep our eyes on that struggle from below across borders and build solidarity in it. It's going to make every single contract that comes up next year in the United States more intense. They're about to raise interest rates, which is going to cut into corporate profits and corporations are going to try and take that out on workers. So you could see the contract negotiations go bad in the United States and a wave of strikes in the United States. We need to be building solidarity between that mass populist struggle from Ukraine to Russia to Egypt to the United States because that's the hope out of this horror that the world's powers have thrust us into. Actually, I agree that the worst outcome of this is to a total setback for the climate movement and the environmental movement and a total setback for workers' rights and so forth. But the third is, is it a setback for the peace movement? When I hear you say, I support military resistance as Ukrainians, do you mean to the extent that you're happy with the hundreds of millions of dollars that you mentioned, Tray, or being poured into the country and we should continue to do that? My position is this. I don't support NATO at all. I don't support the US government at all. But I support the right of people to defend themselves and to secure munitions however they need to to preserve their national independence. There's a long history to this. The Vietnamese liberation struggle probably would not have won if it didn't secure arms and munitions from China and the Soviet Union. I think both China and the Soviet Union were reactionary states, oppressive, horrible dictatorships. In the case of the Soviet Union, an imperial power of its own. But the Vietnamese liberation struggle was armed by those powers. And I supported their liberation struggle. The problem is the subjection of those liberation struggles to the demands of the power that supplies the arms. And that's the biggest danger. That's why I pair the demand about secure defensive weapons so that you can protect your country's independence with a demand against the United States and NATO to cancel the debt because that's the vehicle to trap Ukraine in a position of subjection to Western powers. So this is going to be an ongoing, ongoing battle. And we have to debate it out. But, you know, the IRA took weapons from all over the world. In their national liberation struggle to free Ireland, which if you listen to Irish politicians, they're quite fiery about Ukraine and Palestine. You should listen to them. Richard Boyd Barrett gave an incredible speech on the floor of the Irish parliament in support of the Ukrainian-Palestinian liberation struggles. And there are many other examples. The Spanish Revolution got guns from the Soviet Union. Not enough guns. And that would have made a big difference if Franco was overthrown in the Civil War by the Republican forces. So I'm not a pacifist. I'm for, by any means, necessary. But that doesn't mean doing stupid things. So I think we have a point of agreement that where we disagree is whether the military resistance should be supported. I am in agreement with you about the civilian resistance. I think that's incredibly powerful and most powerful because if you can flip the troops, which is about fraternization, you know, that can really change the situation on the ground. I think the most powerful force is, say, Russian workers' strike. That is where Putin can't function, then. If all the industries of Russia are shut down, if gas and oil workers' strike, Putin's done for. So I hope the anti-war movement and the popular struggle of all its character, you know, topples these regimes. We need a little bit of revolution here in the United States, as well as in Russia, Ukraine, the rest of the world. Yeah, I agree with Ashley that the power that people have right now isn't at ballot boxes or necessarily with guns. What it really is about is your relationship to production. I do feel a little silly right now telling Ukrainian people that they should, you know, stop defending themselves and hope that Russians reorganize in a way that can, like, halt the war machine. But if we want to see, like, lasting change and a permanent solution to imperialist warfare, then we do need that kind of working-class organization where people are willing to have, like, tremendous acts of solidarity. And we don't have that in the U.S. yet. There's a lot of people in their workplaces that feel atomized. They're not talking to their coworkers. They're not active in their unions. Little things like that, if you're watching this and you're trying to think of some way that we can organize in the U.S., that's it. Talk to your coworkers. See what their grievances are. Organize in your workplace to see how you can improve it. And that will expand exponentially. If you're in Starbucks, talk to your coworkers about a union. Then that goes to union activity in your state. Vermont has a very active AFL-CIO. If Vermont has an active AFL-CIO, that goes to New England, then the country, and then the world. It's a lot of very slow grinding to make the world that we want, but there are no shortcuts to permanent liberation like this. On the point of sanctions, I just want to circle back to that. I do support the call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. Against Israel, but I think it has a different relationship to the U.S. than the Ukraine. It will be way more effective because in a lot of ways, Israel is the 51st state. It really is just an American puppet state where we get to have a military outpost in the Middle East to wage war on other places. I do think it's different with Ukraine. I mean different with Russia because they aren't as relying on us. And if we go back to our previous analysis that this war was caused by consolidation of power in the Russian oligarchy, then we shouldn't be calling for blanket sanctions because that only sharpens inequality and consolidates more wealth domestically and people that already own productive forces. That's going to go out of the agrarian sections of Russia that money's going to go right back into energy. It's going to go right back into petrochemicals. The food exports, that's going to China right now, it's not going to other places because China's the only place that's willing to engage in trade with Russia and they are going to have a stronger alliance, not anything near like a second camp. It's silly to view the world as like only bipolar. Now there's multiple poles of attraction but we shouldn't be supporting sanctions in Russia. We should be supporting a consistent position on holding oligarchs everywhere, U.S., Russia, every country accountable to taxation. There is a large amount of that money that is not being distributed to people and it's not even like crazy redistributive tax measures that people are calling for. It's just the basic like participation, like liberal, what is it? The liberal tax is where you're supposed to pay to just like do your part to keep society together. They're not giving into that part. We need to all just be consistent with our position everywhere. If you want to support national liberation struggles in Ukraine, you should support them in Palestine. Like I said, it's jarring to go onto my Instagram and see all these celebrities that are calling for fundraisers to the Ukrainian military or see apps to change it to the Ukrainian flag or all these other things. Of course I support it. I'm just upset that you're not consistent about it when it's Palestinians. I saw footage on Twitter of a power plant. It was blown up. You could see the comments like, oh my God, all these people are dead. This is so terrible, all the carnage and someone's like, oh, that's just Palestine. Everyone's like, thank God. It's not white people that are getting killed. And I saw another post, no, not a post. It was like a regular news coverage where they were talking about thermobaric bombs where the guy said, these were used in Afghanistan but it's stomach churning to think that it's happening in Europe now. Why is that? Why are you cool about it in other places? Why are these people that you care about now? I think Ukrainians are gonna have a, a long road ahead for their migration but it's not gonna be as difficult as the Syrian refugees did. I saw footage this morning of Berlin accepting with warm arms, food and stuff for a bunch of Ukrainians coming in on trains. I saw footage of how they treated Syrian refugees too. It's not consistent. I think that you need to recognize that no matter what someone looks like, no matter what they talk like, what you do to sustain yourself, how you make your living, that's what really separates us. That's my contribution. I'd like to give a little bit of a historical background to the whole Palestine issue, which involves, guess what, oil. Now, this is very not known and one of the reasons I harp on it so much is because it has been hidden from view. Why? It's because it's considered a national security issue. Why? Because oil is the fuel of military. If you aspire to be a great power, you have to have control over enough oil so your military machines can keep fighting because the Germans learned that lesson. They ran out of gas in both World Wars. But the origin of the state of Palestine, very interesting, we look to the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which the British government approved the idea of a national homeland for the Jews. Well, I started looking into, there are two sides of that declaration. It was actually just a letter and the letter was from Foreign Secretary British, British Foreign Secretary Balfour to a Rothschild, Walter de Rothschild, who is from one of the biggest oil families in the world at the time. What we have learned, and there are some Israelis that are now getting documents declassified, is that they were very concerned about, again, the getting that oil of Iraq shipped safely to a terminal point on the Mediterranean. And that point was Palestine. So they needed that oil to be in protected and protecting pipelines brings in the whole military connection to these energy wars. They needed it to be offloaded in a place that they could rely on, namely a place that was occupied by European Jews who had set up colonies in Palestine. This is an angle that is not well known. Now I wanna take it to, oh, we're out of time. Well, I hope you... No, we got time. Well, all right, wait, just real quickly. Then we bring it... John wants to get in, that's all. Yeah, we bring it, wait, one more little quickie thing. I could talk about how the Jews were sold out during World War II because of the U.S. wanted Saudi oil, all right, and they didn't wanna upset King Ibn Sa'ab. But then we take up to Iraq, the Iraq war. Benjamin Netanyahu was cheering for it all along, and the reason was he wanted to reconnect an old pipeline that was built from Iraq to Haifa. And it was closed during the war, 1948 war, of independence for Israel. And he wanted it reopened and he even bragged that the oil will soon be flowing to Haifa. And the only reason that didn't happen, one of the only reasons is because the guy that was gonna replace Saddam Hussein, his name was Ahmed Shalabi, he was an Iraqi in exile, he came up with a fiction of weapons of mass destruction. So once that got out of the bag, they couldn't put him in power, and then the whole thing fell apart. But I wouldn't be surprised if they're still angling for that pipeline to go through. Well, I wanna thank everybody for being here and sharing your views, and we hope we gave our listeners some ideas to think about and how to approach this mess in Ukraine. Just as importantly, what the post-Ukrainian war world is gonna look like if we survive it, if we survive it at all. And hopefully we'll be more environmentally conscious, less war-prone, less dependent on military, and not more. And it's a choice that we're gonna have to make through and after this conflict. Thank you for organizing this, John. Yeah, thank you. No more war. Thanks to Channel 17 for putting this on, too. Echoing the call earlier for a permanent and standing organization, you can follow Vermonters for Peace on Instagram. That is V-E-R-M-O-N-T-E-R-S, underscore F-O-R, underscore P-E-A-C-E, Vermonters for Peace. We will be announcing some teachings at the University of Vermont and other actions statewide to oppose the war as it escalates. And you can check out followthepipelines.com website that I've set up, and we're putting a lot of our information on that website. And check out Spectre Journal where we've got tons of statements and analysis of how and why we should oppose the Russian war in Ukraine. And I just want to thank everybody. It's very brilliant comments. And the world is at stake right now, and we've got to get ourselves organized. And most importantly, build a domestic peace movement in solidarity with the Russian peace movement and the Ukrainian national liberation struggle and all our struggle against world imperialism in this wretched system we live under. We're fighting for a world that puts people before profit and power.