For a global pact, now, for a common, universal future of justice and peace.

About the “war in Ukraine”.

Declaration of the Agora of the Inhabitants of the Earth – Italy

The nature of the “war in Ukraine

The inadmissible invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia is a criminal act, contrary to all rules of international law and human rights. On the face of it, it is a “war between Russians and Ukrainians”, the reasons for which exploded especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991. It led to violent conflicts in 2004 and, in 2014, following the coup d’état carried out by a group of Ukrainian nationalist, fascist-Nazis, with the strong (and widely documented) support of the United States The coup led to the replacement of the elected pro-Russian president with an unelected anti-Russian, pro-Western/US president.

The US has been steering the anti-Russian turnaround of the ‘new’ Ukraine for years with a lot of dollars and aid. Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014 and its support for the pro-independence uprising against the Ukrainian government by the Russian populations of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions was seen as inevitable. For its part, the United States intensified and accelerated its action, via NATO, by presenting itself as the defenders and liberators of Ukraine and all of Eastern Europe against Russia’s expansionist aims.

As is clear from the above, however, the internal Russian-Ukrainian reasons would not have led to the current massacre invasion if other reasons had not shown that the “war in Ukraine” is first and foremost and essentially the last (?) phase of the war between the USA and the USSR (and later Russia) which for decades divided the world into two blocs and sowed the seeds of hatred, conflicts and wars between peoples and between social groups within the peoples themselves.

To be more precise, everything indicates that we have been living in a new historical phase for the last twenty years, that of “global war”. What do we mean by “global war”?

A global war

We can define the current “war in Ukraine” as one of the main violent expressions of a “global war” on a planetary scale.

There are three reasons for this.

The first reason. Given the great imbalance that has built up over the past thirty years between the US and NATO on the one hand and Russia on the other, to the benefit of the US, the main interest that drives the US and (“its”) NATO to actively support the war in Ukraine is not the defence of the Ukrainian people. It is mainly the opportunity to significantly reduce the “world power Russia” militarily and politically. For at least twenty years, the US has been preparing for war against Russia by systematically trying to expand NATO’s operational presence in all territories bordering Russia, including “independent” Ukraine.

This is despite repeated promises and agreements with Russia not to expand NATO to the East. And they did so, despite Russia’s protests, with the 2014 coup. With Finland and Sweden officially applying to join NATO these days, all of Russia’s European neighbours (considering Belarus a Russian ally) are now part of NATO. So much for the Berlin Wall! The US armed offensive wall against Russia on European soil is over 2000 km long, and most importantly it is filled with weapons, including nuclear warheads, only minutes away from Moscow.

For the US and the vast majority of NATO member states, the objective of the “Ukraine war” is clear: (a) win it to reduce Russian global power, (b) thus maintain global military and political supremacy, (c) reduce the West’s energy and food dependence on Russia and promote the economic power interests of the large US and European multinational corporations, also to “legitimise” ever more massive investments in nuclear and even falsely renewable energy (such as shale gas) in defiance of global sustainable development goals.

This explains why, in response to a recent hint by Ukraine’s Zelensky of a (sincere?) opening to ceasefire talks, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen insisted that the EU wanted Ukraine to win the war, and NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg of Sweden announced that it would take a longer and more painful time for Ukraine to achieve final victory over Russia. President Biden’s decision to allocate $33 billion to the reconstruction of Ukraine is along the same lines: no peace, but winning the war against Russia and reducing Ukraine to a new colony and a new “allied” (satellite).

Calls not to help Ukraine with arms, but to seek an end to the war with Russia as soon as possible, have remained misplaced. The power of Ukrainians to decide on the war is very limited. The US and the EU via NATO decide. So much for “freedom for Ukrainians”! The statement of 14 May in Florence by Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for International Affairs, “In helping Ukraine, our will is to defend the weakest against the strongest” is a pure mystification.

We denounce as irresponsible and criminal this declared will to war and destruction whose main direct victims are the Ukrainian and Russian peoples and, indirectly, the poorest peoples of Africa and Asia who are suffering and starving in greater numbers than ever before due to the disastrous effects on the distribution of grain produced in Ukraine as a result of the economic sanctions (and Russian reprisals) adopted by the EU to punish and bring the Russian economy to its knees.

Putin’s dictatorial ambitions to reconstitute the power of Great Tsarist Russia are not the only key factors in the war in Ukraine. We also denounce the mystifications, lies and hypocrisy of the undeclared but real belligerents who, in defiance of treaties, agreements and promises, have committed clear violations of international law and have massively contributed to exuding and fuelling the ongoing war with the will to win it.

The second reason shows the importance of global geopolitical and military strategies in relation to the “war in Ukraine”. The haste and relentlessness with which the US/NATO and, in a subordinate position, the EU, want to win Russia starting with Ukraine is due to one crucial element. For some years now, the US has done nothing but openly attack China, claiming that it sees China as its new systemic enemy. And Europe has taken the same strategic line: the President of the European Commission has declared China to be Europe’s systemic enemy.

In fact, scientific and technological changes coupled with economic and social changes over the last 30 years:

– have consolidated the global military and political supremacy of the United States, despite its unseemly defeat (the precipitous American abandonment of Afghanistan) and its disastrous military presence in Syria,
– eliminated the ideological-cultural clash between capitalism and communism, as the overwhelming majority of world powers (G20 member states), including Russia, have adopted the basic principles of the global market, competitive and financial economy at the international level,
– For a while, extremist Islamist movements emerged in its place, which have been and remain the cause of some “local” crises and wars,
– changed the nature of the holders of political power and ‘people’s sovereignty’.

The political power of “national” states and parliaments has been shifted loosely into the hands of private entities, in particular the large multinational, global, industrial, and financial corporations. The power of control and influence of these subjects over the political decisions and strategies of the states has become increasingly strong and, interestingly, also accepted by the majority of (powerless?) citizens. It can therefore be said that ‘national’ sovereignty remains, legally, institutionally and formally, that of the states, while the real sovereignty of the people is today in the hands of a very small and politically ‘unaccountable’ ‘people’ of the few powerful holders of global financial, industrial, commercial and technological power. Think of business and finance in the energy, agri-food, environmental, health, information and communication sectors. The control and use of, for example, computers and information and communication technologies play a crucial role in the “war in Ukraine”, especially by the US and NATO.

Thus, the economic security of a country has become, de facto, behind the alibi of “national security”, the security of the interests of the most powerful multinationals in the various countries. This is the macroscopic case of the three most powerful private equity funds in the world, all three of which originate in the United States. The BlackRock fund alone manages $9.5 billion, twice the wealth produced by Germany in 202! The same applies to GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) and Big Pharma (of the top 15 companies in the world, the majority are American).

These “masters of the earth” have convinced the United States, supported by its military alliances on all continents, such as NATO, that the global political-military, technological and economic supremacy of the United States remains good for the world, renewing a slogan in vogue in the early 1950s: “What is good for the United States is good for the world”. Any attempt or development that jeopardises the maintenance of this supremacy is seen as an enemy of US global supremacy and thus, in their view, of the good of the world and the well-being of the world’s population.

Today, economic globalisation and technological ‘revolutions’ have helped to make China the second largest modern economic power in the world, if not the largest in terms of gross domestic product. The supremacy of the United States is being challenged. The US fears that China will succeed in imposing the yuan as the preferred currency for world trade in place of the dollar and will come to dominate the financial markets through virtual currencies, notably Bitcoins. American supremacy in today’s web media is also threatened by the new Asian generation, driven by the huge potential Chinese market.

The direct interest of the US/NATO in the war in Ukraine is part of this global context. Their victory over Russia in the name of (?) Western and global values of freedom and justice would, according to their experts, restore credibility and light to the US on the world stage.

Consider the fact that we are in the presence of a war launched by the US simultaneously

a) against the world and
b) against the life of the Earth.

The third reason closes the circle of “logic” and characteristics of “global war”.
When President Biden warned Putin that the US would not tolerate an inch of Russian occupation of Ukrainian soil, he clearly expressed the vision of world domination that Ukraine “is ours”. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries they claimed that America (both Americas as a whole) “is ours” (according to the Hoover Doctrine). (early 1900s)

And when, last October, the private company NYSE, which manages the Wall Street Stock Exchange, the largest stock exchange in the world, decided with full sovereignty and legal independence to open up a new class of financial assets, i.e. all the elements of the natural world of the planet, according to the proposal of the investment fund BlackRock, we are clearly faced with an offer of private financial appropriation of life by the stock exchange operators of the world on a Globo-American basis. Indeed, this is already happening in the grain sector on the world markets. Thousands of shareholders of large agribusinesses are reaping huge profits (e.g. Syngenta) while hundreds of millions of already starving people are being made worse off, suffering and dying of hunger. Thus, the more wars continue, the more the populations of the weakest countries are bruised, impoverished and deprived (including migrants), and the more the profits of the arms manufacturers and exporters, including the US, UK, France and Germany, and later China, Russia and Modi’s India, excel.

We denounce the transformation and reduction of the world into a global field of technological, military, political, economic, social and cultural war. The fact that the security of the global power and supremacy of the American companies and dominant groups has been transformed into global economic security and, from there, into global military security, is an act of global domination and irresponsibility. It is unacceptable that the strategy of the global agenda for the next 15 years should be defined by and subject to the US-led global war against China. This is a theft of the world’s future.

Think, to give just a paradigmatic example, of how US ruling groups tried to discredit Chinese (and also Russian and Cuban) Covid 19 vaccines by claiming that good vaccines, sicur, were only American and, incidentally, European. Moreover, they fought fiercely against South Africa and India’s request two years ago to temporarily suspend WTO rules on private intellectual property rights (patents on life). For US leaders, private patent rights over living organisms, of which they hold a large part, are an inalienable and unassailable principle of their supremacy and they do not want to lose it. They do not want to transfer competences in this field to the World Health Organisation (WHO) of the United Nations, because they risk being outvoted. On the contrary, they retain the competences of the WTO/WTO (World Trade Organisation) because they retain a decisive decision-making power there. The health of almost three billion people does not count. The only thing that matters is the defence of the economic power interests of the US global corporations.

Never in the past has there been such an explicit logic of domination.

What can we do about it?

As the Agora of the Inhabitants of the Earth, we consider it urgent to denounce the unacceptability and illegality of this global war based on the principle of domination, commodification and privatisation of life.

The universes of the “I” have annihilated the universes of the “we” (with the exception of the national-corporatist, socio-racist and xenophobic, and ultra-liberal “Only the strongest will survive” universes).

We denounce the corrosive and destructive spirit of the despoiling of the universal rights of all the inhabitants of the Earth, human beings and other defeated species of the Earth’s community of life.
Let us deplore the culture of hatred that this global war reinforces against all those who do not accept the current global neo-colonial domination. especially of the US/NATO/EU superpower.

A small example of the great hypocrisy and cynicism to which the current glove war has led: the EU also drew lots to finance economic and military aid to Ukraine from an ad hoc fund “for peace actions” (sic)!
We denounce the absence of plural and participatory democratic forms of world government, from the local to the global, multi-community, promoting and defending the rights and lives of all the inhabitants of the Earth.
The current dominant groups do not want such a government. They want to dominate. They are predators.

We are fighting for the recognition of Humanity as a legal and political institutional subject to regulate global living together.

The military invasion of Ukraine by Russia is a disaster, a criminal act. It is the harmful and unacceptable product of the ongoing “world war”, which is just as harmful and unacceptable.

War has never solved problems, it has only destroyed human lives and the lives of the Earth’s military.

Therefore, we propose

a) The obvious: a halt to military operations, with a commitment by Russia to withdraw its troops beyond the borders of the territories invaded last February, and by Ukraine to stop receiving military aid from the US and the EU in accordance with the Minsk Treaties, and by the US to stop forcing Ukraine to join NATO.
b) The opening of peace negotiations between Russians and Ukrainians with a view to a “No more war between Russia and Ukraine” pact.
c) Negotiations between Russia and the European Union for a new pan-European security and cooperation agreement for the 21st century, without the participation of the United States, China, India and Brazil, but invited to attend as friendly observers.
d) The exit from NATO of those European countries that wish to do so as part of a thorough review of NATO’s “Atlantic” status and functions, to take account of global changes and new social and environmental needs.
e) The opening of a “founding” process of a European Community based on peace, including i) the proposal for the unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons by the new UN and ii) the co-founding of a European civilian army.
f) The launch within the UN from 2025, even before the end of the 2015-2030 Agenda, of the definition of a Global Pact for Peace, Security and Solidarity among all the inhabitants of the Earth for the preservation and care of the global living community of Terra. We propose that this pact be called “Agenda 2045” in honour of the centenary of the UN nsacita5on.

The future of life, of peoples and of the global community must be freed from the exclusive and pirate mortgages of nationalism, from the mercantile private appropriation of the essential and unbearable common goods of life, from totalitarian financial performance, from the technocratic imperatives that prevail over life and fraternity.

Freedom and justice are murdered when they are dominated by the freedom of purchasing power. The meaning and rights of life are not for sale and cannot be bought.

17 March 2022

First signatories. Members of the Agora of the Inhabitants of the Earth-Italy,
(in alphabetical order)

Ancona Giuseppina, psychotherapist, Catania
Barbera Guido, CIPSI, NGO, Rome
Cecchi Luca, Monastery of the Common Good, NGO, Verona
Comina Francesco, writer, journalist, Bolzano
Blue Community, NGO, Latina
Corso Carmelo, former civil servant, Palermo
D’Ambrogio Roberto, architect, Bolzano
Fasciano Ettore, former employee, Verona
Fasoli Fiorenzo, political exponent, PRC, Verona
Ferrari Paolo, doctor, Verona
Foti Alfio, L’Altra Storia, NGO, Catania
Libanti Paola, Monastero del Bene Co,PRCmune, NGO, Sezano VR
Loporcaro Michele, teacher, farmer, Altamura
Mazzoni Elena, Rome
Montalto Maurizio, lawyer, Naples
Moramarco Loretta, lawyer, Altamura
Morea Roberto, Transform yourself! Europe, NGO, Rome
Musacchio Roberto, Transform Italia and Altramente, NGO, Rome
Perrone Nicola, NGO CIPSI, Rome
Petrella Riccardo, Professor Emeritus, Sezano
Rondelet Anne, housewife, Sezano
Salvio Consiglia, teacher, NGO for water as a common good, Naples
Savio Roberto, journalist, IPS, Other News….Rome
Villa Emanuele, l’Altra Storia, NGO, Palermo