While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT

THE European Council met this week to consider sanctions against Russia. Germany, France and Italy, for the second time, anticipated the event with a private conclave to see how their common interests can be asserted against the Anglo-American alliance and its followers in eastern Europe.
Italian premier Mario Draghi, just returned from a transatlantic trip, and Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz from pow-wows with Vladimir Putin are determined, it seems, to find a workaround.
Italy is dependent on Russian energy and Draghi is dragged in two directions. He argues on one hand that it is essential Putin does not win this war, entreating: “We must maintain unity on sanctions. Italy agrees with the package, as long as there are no imbalances between member states.”
Dutch premier Mark Rutte dispelled this delusion with an iron fist in a velvet glove.
“I and Mario Draghi are great friends and we have always resolved our differences.
“The question is what we mean by price cap... If for price cap we mean on state subsidies to lower bills, then we would need a lot of money from the national budgets of Italy and the Netherlands.”
The EU’s much trumpeted but rather less evident unity is already fractured over the domestic cost of sanctions.
Normally, for Nato and the EU, neoliberal economics and cold war politics are a common denominator. But this European Council was a cockpit of conflicting interests, with Hungary’s refusal of EU unanimity over the prohibition of oil and gas imports matched, outside this charmed circle, by Turkey, which is imposing extravagant conditions on Sweden and Finland’s adhesion to Nato.
As the European Council met the Dutch — who made a song and dance about refusing to pay for their energy imports in roubles — reported Russia had cut off supplies.
On the sanctions issue, an eventual and untidy compromise of sorts has resulted in proposals for an embargo on imports by sea with Hungary able to rely on its oil deliveries by pipeline.
Twenty-seven nations are formally signed up but Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia consent to the new compromise only on condition that their exemption is of an indeterminate duration. Sanctions will supposedly stop 90 per cent of Russian oil, but the three quarters of a million barrels a day which transit through the pipelines over Ukraine and other states will continue to flow.
The economic problems arising from the political crisis are eroding the basis for a co-ordinated response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Draghi has special problems. As Italy’s prince of austerity economics — famous when director of the European Central Bank for saying that he would do “whatever it takes to prevent the euro from failing” — he now finds the euro in trouble.
Today is Italy’s Festa della Repubblica. Italy’s annual inflation rate has risen to 6.9 per cent, the highest level since spring 1986. ISTAT, the national statistics agency, blames an extra rise in energy prices, while the increase in its index of domestic purchases like food and household goods rose again to the highest level in a quarter of a century. Eurozone inflation as a whole hit a new record high of 8.1 per cent.
If the war is testing the common purpose of the capitalist world it has also brought out sharp differences in analysis and theory in the world communist movement and has thrown into sharp relief the highly contested notion of present-day imperialism.
The left-wing Italian daily paper Il Manifesto — born in the spirit of 1968 and which in its long moment of nostalgia still describes itself as communist — last week made the compelling point: “Now that the war has placed the pillars of post-Soviet communism on diametrically opposed positions, the attempt to recover must overcome another major obstacle.”
For those of its readers who remain engaged with communist politics Il Manifesto referenced the ideological differences on the Italian left which express themselves in schism and a proliferation of parties claiming the heritage of Italian communism.
The war in Ukraine has brought to a head all of the differences which confound any unity project not just in Italy but throughout the world.
Il Manifesto touched on the stance taken by a large number of communist and workers’ parties which condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The critical section of their joint statement argues: “The decision of the Russian Federation to initially recognise the ‘independence’ of the so-called ‘people’s republics’ in Donbass and then to proceed to a Russian military intervention, which is taking place under the pretext of Russia’s ‘self-defence,’ the ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘defascistisation’ of Ukraine, was not made to protect the people of the region or peace but to promote the interests of Russian monopolies in Ukrainian territory and their fierce competition with Western monopolies.”
The Greek communists developed a comprehensive critique of the Russian capitalist formation and in a long piece in their daily newspaper Rizospastis launched a detailed attack on the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), accusing it of “complete silence on the real causes of imperialist wars, which, like the one that has broken out in Ukraine, are waged for the interests of the monopolies and the bourgeois classes and not the peoples.”
The Greeks describe these as “wars over raw materials, the mineral wealth, commodity transport routes, geopolitical pillars and market shares.”
They detail the wealth-producing resources of Ukraine as “its mineral wealth such as the Ukrainian titanium irreplaceable for the aeronautical industry, the ports of Mariupol and Odessa, the fertile arable land of Ukraine, the shrunk-in-relation-to-the-years-of socialism but equally important industrial base of Ukraine, and the huge network of energy pipelines that cross this country” and note their “great significance for Ukraine, as well as for Western capital.”
The Russian communists responded by asserting that the military conflict in Ukraine is essentially a national liberation war of the people of Donbass and that from Russia’s point of view it is a struggle against an external threat to national security and against fascism.
They assert that with US and EU support, Kiev deliberately sabotaged the Minsk Agreements.
The CPRF argues that, “With the blessing of its American principals Ukraine was preparing to launch a military operation to seize Donbass and then Crimea in early March of this year.”
In fact the Russian communists argue that far from the war being waged in the interests of its bourgeoisie, the Russian oligarchs are against the military operation in Ukraine, strive to become integrated into the world oligarchy and are suffering considerably under sanctions, “seeing their palaces and yachts taken away and their bank accounts frozen.”
The Russian communists argue that is they who pioneered the demand for the Donbass to be integrated into the Russian Federation and that from the outset, the Russian state leadership did not support the idea of a referendum on the formation of Donbass people’s republics.
They say that following the Minsk-2 agreements, Russia a priori assumed that Donbass would remain part of Ukraine, albeit with a measure of autonomy and until the beginning of the military operation the Russian leadership insisted on compliance with Minsk-2, which would leave Donbass as part of Ukraine while they, the CPRF, since 2014 have been urging the Russian leadership to recognise the independence of Donbass.
How significant is this dispute? Almost all protagonists in this argument share elements of a common analysis; that the eastward expansion of Nato is in essence imperialist, that the Maidan coup was direct imperialist intervention by the US and the EU and that the post-Maidan attacks on the Donbass region reflect right-nationalist and neonazi influence in successive Ukrainian governments.
The argument turns on an analysis of the Russian capitalist formation and Russia’s war aims.
The peculiar and protean nature of Russian capital makes its arriviste oligarchs weak competitors internationally, while on home territory the tendency of competition to breed monopoly and for monopoly to breed competition is limited by Putin’s power to license their operations.
This argument is not going to be resolved by holy writ, even that as concrete as Lenin’s texts on the subject. In purely quantitative terms the post-Soviet era has seen Russia lose its allies and buffer states while attempts to expand the reach of Russian capital do not rival the massive expansion of Western capital even to its doorstep and in Russia itself.
Russia has been more concerned to reassert its influence in the peripheral states of the former USSR rather than compete globally in the same league as more established capitalist states.
Russia exports energy and raw materials, while its manufacturing is much diminished and substantially replaced by Western imports. Sanctions will compel it to direct capital investment to domestic manufacturing and deepen its economic relations with China.
Today’s sanctions impose burdens on those EU states compelled to impose them rather more than on the US. The imperialist character of this war is not only a clash of unequals with the Ukraine as both battle ground and proxy, but also a subterranean struggle within the Western alliance.
Britain’s willing subordination to the US assumes domestic form in Keir Starmer’s drive to make any reasoned examination of the ways in which Nato’s expansion mirrors the flow of capital an offence leading to expulsion from his party.
When the leader of Labour choruses the catchlines of looney tunes like Tobias Ellwoood, Tory MP for the Eastern Front, we know that for every expansion of capital in the acquisition of new markets and new sources of raw materials, the critical faculties of right-wing social democracy diminish to the point of extinction.
Between these two, the interests of that section of British capital most directly tied to the US — in particular the arms industry and aerospace — is perfectly represented. As is Labour’s loyalty to the Atlanticist strategy to weaken and isolate China.
Wars destroy an enormous amount of materiel and are thus an excellent way to overcome a crisis of overproduction. Across Europe the capitalist interests that most directly profit from war exercise a less direct influence than they do in the US and Britain.
Meanwhile, the utility of this present crisis in putting a stop to Russia’s undersea pipeline to Germany has created both a political crisis in Germany and put much of its export-orientated manufacturing sector, which depends on this energy, out of sorts. France has a different energy mix and different geostrategic aims to the US-British lash-up.
And fracked US gas has a new market.
Nick Wright is writing from Piemonte in Italy — he blogs at 21century manifesto.

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