Richard Boyd Barrett: Demands Consistent Opposition to Imperialism

As many other speakers have said, Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a bloody, unjustified criminal endeavour which has led to absolute carnage, and that carnage continues. The scale of human devastation is unknown because both sides don't want to admit how many people have been killed, but some estimates would suggest that more than a million people have either lost their lives or been injured and maimed. I think Ukraine admits to about 50,000 of its military personnel being killed, although some suggest that it could be double that, the numbers that have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of more have been injured, maimed. In Russia, some estimates would suggest there might be 250,000 military personnel dead and hundreds of thousands more beyond that maimed and injured. One report I read recently suggested that Russian ministries had distributed more than 200,000 prosthetic limbs because so many soldiers are losing their arms and their legs. It is disgusting, and it is undoubtedly Putin is the instigator of this unjustified imperialist endeavour. The Taoiseach was absolutely correct to call it imperialism. The people of Ukraine have been absolutely justified in resisting this brutal invasion of their country. The problem I have, and it is why I do believe our neutrality is in danger, is that the government and European Union leaders then go from that to say that their main concern in all of this is to defend the international rules-based order and our neutrality and imply that they have a consistent set of principles when it comes to opposing imperialism, brutal invasions and wars. And that, self-evidently, is not true. So, we have had 19 rounds of sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union, not a single round of sanctions by the European Union against Israel for the crimes they have committed against the Palestinian people, even when those crimes have reached the level of Israel being in the dock for genocide and, to my mind, undoubtedly guilty of genocide. Not a single round of sanctions. We have, in fact, you would believe in here with the speeches from the ministers that when they rightly describe Putin as a brutal imperialist thug, that he is the only one in the world. There is barely a mention of the slaughter, that is, the genocidal slaughter being evicted on the Palestinians, where that slaughter could not have happened were it not for another imperialist power, or several of them, the United States, who have armed Israel to commit the genocide against the Palestinians, and are every bit as much an imperialist power as Putin and his regime, are indeed the more minor players in the European Union like Germany and Britain, France and Italy who have also provided the military means to Israel to continue the slaughter and refuse to impose any sanctions. You see, the problem is, if the United States and the European Union actually do not show any serious regard for international law, for any sort of consistency when it comes to principles, is it any surprising? Is it a surprise that the signal that is sent out is, all of that is nonsense and actually the truth is, you take what you can get at through military means? And in fact, I would go further and say that many in the European Union who have long wanted to see a European army and ratchet up military expenditure, which by the way in the European Union had dramatically increased before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, dramatically increased as part of the ongoing process of militarisation in the European Union and of NATO expansion. Russia spends a shocking 19% of GDP on arms, so that is on military expenditure. So you know, it is starving their own people and immiserating their own people. But they spend 149 billion, do you know how much NATO spends? 1.5 trillion, 10 times what Russia spends on arms. Thousands of billions of euros that should be going into health and housing and education, into addressing the cost of living, being used to make missiles and weapons and bullets and ammunition, which is then sold on. If it's not used in this war, it's given to Israel, given to Saudi Arabia, given to dictatorships and brutal regimes all over the world, also guilty of inflicting horror on their own populations. If we are serious of trying to stop the slaughter in Ukraine or indeed anywhere else, we have to have consistent principles and we shouldn't be aligning ourselves with any of these powers in the world who are guilty of this imperialist competition and militarism which will drive this world into a very, very dangerous and dark place, which will make even Gaza and Ukraine, well I won't say look like a tea party because it's just so horrific, but it could bring us to an even worse place. Democrats and Democrats are here now running from Iran-