“The policy of Russia is changeless … Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy — world domination — is a fixed star.”

– Karl Marx, 1867

That extraordinary passage by Marx appears in a little-known collection of his writings (as well as those of Friedrich Engels) which was published in 1952 under the title “The Russian Menace to Europe”.

That book aimed to show the fundamental continuity of Russian foreign policy from the tsars through Stalin.

Its editors, Paul W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz, argued that “the analysis made by Marx and Engels of the external as well as internal polices and socio-political trends of Czarist Russia are fully applicable to similar aspects of Stalinist Russia.  The main provisional and final objectives of Russian foreign policy have not been altered …”

It was a bold argument, and one not widely appreciated by the Left during the Cold War.  Many leftists believed Russia played a progressive role in international affairs right up until the end.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was widely hoped that the predatory foreign policy of the tsars and their Stalinist successors had finally come to an end.

And yet within a few short years, those hopes were to be dashed — first by the barbaric war against Chechnya, and later by Russian aggression directed against Georgia.

The seizure of the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were dress rehearsals for the seizure this week of Crimea.

Though few would accept that the Putin regime still dreams of world domination, there can no longer be any question of its dreams regarding the countries of the former USSR — the so-called “near abroad”.

What should be the response of the international Left to the latest Russian aggression, this time targetting democratic Ukraine?

In my view, the slogan “Hands Off Ukraine!” should be embraced by all socialists and democrats but this has not been the case.

In the UK, the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, the Morning Star — which is funded by Britain’s largest union — has enthusiastically supported Russian aggression yet again.

The “Stop the War Coalition” which spearheaded opposition to British involvement in the Afghan and Iraq wars has called on Nato and the USA to back down.  Here’s an example of their thinking:

“Vladimir Putin’s troop movements in Crimea, which are supported by most Russians, are of questionable legality under the terms of the peace and friendship treaty that Russia signed with Ukraine in 1997. But their illegality is considerably less clear-cut than that of the US-led invasion of Iraq, or of Afghanistan, where the UN security council only authorised the intervention several weeks after it had happened.”

In other words, Putin may be bad — but Obama is worse.

Putin’s propaganda message has spread far and wide, and is being embraced by people who should know better.

I don’t only mean publicity-hungry and unprincipled fools like George Galloway or Thom Hartmann, who have sold out to get a show on Putin’s “Russia Today” television channel.

There are plenty of people out there who have no sympathy for Putin, but who are buying into the official Russian propaganda line.

The allegation that Nazi bandits have taken control of Kyiv is patently absurd.  Even the Jewish leadership in Ukraine has gone out of its way to reassure people that there have been very few anti-Semitic incidents.

Of course there are political forces in Ukraine that are vile, such as Svoboda.

The task of the international Left surely is to oppose them, to support the democratic and progressive elements in Ukraine, first and foremost the independent trade union movement.

Those unions were in the Maidan square from the beginning with their flags and banners and played a key role in the revolution which toppled the rotten and corrupt Yanukovich regime.

If the Ukrainian far-Right is to be defeated, it will be defeated by Ukrainians — not by Russian troops.

Democrats in Russia understand all this, and have protested demanding that their country stop its aggression against Ukraine.

Hundreds have been arrested.

The international Left should be focused on supporting those people, our comrades, in Russia and elsewhere who are challenging Putin.

We should not become apologists for Putin and his cronies, as some on the Left have become.

Our message should be loud and clear:

Hands off Ukraine!

No to Russian aggression!

Solidarity with the Ukrainian revolution!

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” – Dr Emmett Brown, Back to the Future (1985)

I hardly ever use phones.  Like many people, I do most of my communication either face to face, or using the net.  That having been said, I find that I’m spending an enormous amount of money on telephones.

On average, I’m spending around £58 ($100) a month for something which I don’t think I really need.

Of that money, about 75% goes to Three, one of the least expensive mobile phone carriers in the UK — where I have one of the least expensive plans (Essential Internet 300 – just 300 minutes per month).  That plan includes a 24-month contract which ends very soon.  The rest is spent on a relatively inexpensive international calling service called “18185” and on SkypeOut credit which allows me to call regular phones using Skype.

So I recently called up Three (because you actually need to phone them to do this) to instruct them not to renew my contract.  And which provider will I be using?

None.  No one.  No provider.

I’m throwing my mobile phone away.

(Not really — I’ll probably recycle the damn thing.)

But wait a minute, what if I want to have a, you know, conversation with someone who’s not in the room?  What used to be called a “telephone call”?

I’ll be using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) for that — meaning Skype, but possibly alternatives as well, such as Viber.

I can already hear the objections.

Sure, you’re saying, but isn’t using Skype kind of clunky on a laptop or desktop?

It is, which is why I’ll be using an iPod Touch.

Well OK, that works, but what if I want to call you?

I’ve purchased a Skype online number — it’s a local number in London.  It costs me £3.35 a month.

What if you want to call someone who’s not on Skype?

On the rare occasions where that might be case, I’ll use SkypeOut.

That’s great when you have WiFi, but what about the times you’re out and about?

First of all, I nearly always have WiFi.  I have it at work and at home and in most cafes I might go to.

But on the off chance that I’m somewhere where I want to make or receive a phone call on a 3G or 4G network, I need a portable WiFi hotspot with me.  So I’ve purchased a Huawei E5332 Unlocked Mobile Wi-Fi Modem on eBay for about £35.00.  I’ll need a SIM card for that, so I’ll be taking the £5.00 a month data-only plan from GiffGaff, giving me 500 MB of data.

In other words, my monthly expense will be £8.35 (that’s the Skype Internet Number and the GiffGaff data-only SIM plan) — not £58.87.  I’ll be saving £50 a month.

There remains the issue of how to deal with SMS messages.

Here are my thoughts:

• I’m encouraging people who need to instant message me regularly to sign up to Telegram Messenger, which works on a wide range of devices and is faster and more secure than WhatsApp (which doesn’t work on an iPod Touch or even an iPad).
• If someone does send me an ordinary text message to my phone, BT reads it out to me automatically.
• Finally, the Huawei device has a way to handle text messages which I’ll need to explore — an indicator lights up on the device and I can then read the message online.

So why do it?

First of all, I’ll save £600 ($1,000) a year.

I’ll have better quality phone calls — including free video calls when it’s Skype-to-Skype or using Apple’s FaceTime.

And the device I’m using has all the same apps and wonderful high-resolution Retina screen that the latest iPhone has — but weighs less and looks way cooler.

In fact I was stopped by someone on the Tube the other day who asked me if what I was using was an iPhone 6.  (For the non-techies among you, there is no iPhone 6 — not yet.)

It just doesn’t get cooler than that.

So I’m ditching the mobile phone after 16 years of using one.

Phones?  Where I’m going, you don’t need phones.

 

 

Update: Totally ahead of the curve on this one.  WhatsApp had an outage yesterday triggering a massive number of new users for Telegram Messenger.  They’re claiming to have 100 new users signing up every second. Here’s one news story about this.  And now, my original post:

If you’re concerned about your privacy online, and you should be, the announcement this week that Facebook has purchased WhatsApp for US$19,000,000,000 will be a cause for concern.

By coincidence, I was searching earlier this week for something like WhatsApp that would work on my iPod Touch.  WhatsApp, incredibly, will only work on phones and not all mobile devices.  It won’t work on an iPad, for example.

I came across Telegram Messenger and have just started to use it.  It’s not just a WhatsApp replacement — it’s my SMS replacement too.  (For most, but not all, SMS messages.)

Telegram is the free brainchild of brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov, the founders of VK, the largest social network in Russia.

Its unique selling point is that it offers end-to-end encryption.  Here’s what they write about it:

Secret chats are meant for people who really want secure messaging. All messages in secret chats use end-to-end encryption. This means only you and the recipient can read those messages — nobody can decipher or intercept them, including us here at Telegram. Messages cannot be forwarded from secret chats. You can also order your messages to self-destruct in a set amount of time after they have been read by the recipient. The message will then disappear from both your and your friend’s devices.  One last difference between secret and ordinary chats in Telegram is that secret chats are not stored in our cloud. This means you can only access messages in a secret chat on their device of origin.

To prove their point, Pavel and Nikolai have offered a huge prize to anyone who can crack their encryption — read what the BBC has to say about this.

I’ve signed up to use Telegram — which is available for Android and iOS (including Internet-connected iOS devices like the iPod Touch and iPad) — and look forward to trying it out.