The only side is the international working class

There is lots more guff floating around about the disasterous Georgian adventure in Ossetia. The latest load of agitprop comes from the Guardian in an article quoting Georgian sources that those darned Ruskies are lying about ceasefires and are piling more troops into the area.
The background to the positions being taken is obvious enough. Those on the left are suspected, wrongly for the main part, of being Russian sypathisers. The quasi-argument going,

'You are left-wing. You support the ideas that inspired the Russian Revolution. You read subversive blogs called 'Lenin's Tomb'. Thus you have been seduced by Russian propoganda in the past. You are being seduced by Russian propaganda now. The claims by Moscow of 2000 dead are exaggerated. The Russians are like your Soviet comrades and just as bad. The tanks that rolled into Georgia are a ghostly repeat of those that trundled into Czechslovakia in '68. Therefore the US humanitarian aid is like that it gave Berlin back in '61 and is given to save the cherished principles of the West. If you criticise any aspect of this assisstance, you are anti-American and anti-simetic too.'

By and large that's the argument of comment pages, papers all over the continent and all the other media nozzles. Naturally it's all rubbish. Despite all else, faced with an "either/or" dichotomy - often the best response is to take the "neither" option. It's not that difficult to think outside the circle that some try to place around an argument. Washington is the centre of a brutal postmodern empire. Moscow, the centre of a smaller but no more aggressive state with wider geo-political ambitions. Georgia is a client state of the former. Under the cosh of all these countries' propaganda, economic rigour and police are working people. The main casualty in war is the working class. This relatively small conflict has seen off perhpas fifteen hundred people and left thousands of refugees. There is rarely a clear burden of blame in the outbreak of any conflict. Further, it is not worthwhile to develop argupments with something as flimsy and moralistic as 'blame' at its centre. Imperial-like countries, states that seek to extend their influence by creating energy corridors, friendly regimes and military bases will necessarily come into conflict with other governments doing the same. Millions of Professors of the Obvious have written piles of books on this type of story. We are not interested in their moral arguments. We want to know in whose interests wars were launched when and why then. Analysis is focused on the main acytors involved in war. The leaders, the ruling class(es) to which they belong, the armies and the people themselves.

Of course, the only people able to resolve the problems that lead to conflict in the first place, though, are the working people themselves.

All else, the lies, the sordid deals and phoney calls for peace are all rubble on the road.