The winter of capital
This weekend’s elections were very important for the fate of Europe. No, we are not talking about the miserable staging of the Italian round of elections, but about the referendums held in some occupied territories of Ukraine for annexation to the Russian Federation.
With them, the proxy and regionalized “world war” being fought between Russia and NATO takes a formal turn with important practical consequences. From the moment the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye officially become part of Russia, Putin’s regime can claim that any Ukrainian attack in these territories will be read as an attack on Russia itself. The result is the order for general mobilization, the proclamation of martial law, and the transformation of its industry into a war economy to defend the homeland.
With this strategic shift, the Russian government moves away from the rhetoric of Special Military Operation – a neologism taken in inspiration from “international police missions,” “peacekeeping missions,” “humanitarian wars,” and other fanciful Doctor Strangelove sorties of the much-hated West – to the declaration of outright war. Demonstrating the farcical nature of any electoral mechanism, which always photographs the power relations between dominants and never an abstruse as non-existent “popular will,” Putin ordered partial mobilization even before knowing the referendum outcome, recalling the first three hundred thousand reservists.
From now on, all those states that have been arming the Kiev regime for months and that have enabled it to resist so effectively and to counterattack with unexpected successes become cobelligerent. Those who arm a state to which war is formally declared are also (almost) at war. Europe and the United States will now have to take responsibility for a conflict that they have fueled by all means, with the aim of bleeding the Russian enemy dry, hoping to achieve maximum results with minimum effort, i.e., by sending Ukrainian ascari1 to their deaths.
Rather than expire in the partisan readings of the court pen-pushers and opposing supporters, which as internationalists and enemies of every state we cannot but reject, reiterating our hostility against all sides in the war, it is worth dwelling on a couple of thoughts. Continue reading “Italy: ‘The winter of capital’” →
