Report by the editors of The Multiplural World, July 12, 2026 (with a postscript dated July 18)
Of the three most deadly and illegal wars being waged by the imperialist powers in 2026, only one received central attention (as it should) at the June 20 London conference. That is the genocidal war being waged by the U.S./Israel against the people of Palestine. A special in-person address to the conference was delivered by Mustafa Barghouti. He is General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI, also known as al-Mubadara) and head of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society.
Meanwhile, the U.S./Israel war against Iran received little attention, while several invited speakers dismissed the very existence and gravity of the NATO proxy war against the peoples of Russia and of Ukraine.
Reference: A four-hour video on YouTube of the speeches delivered to the ‘International Conference Against War’ held in London on June 20, 2026 is here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/YOVqOJ1iU58
The conference was organized by the ‘Stop The War’ coalition and its related groups and individual members.
Two guest speakers to the conference spoke on the war in Ukraine. Igort Romashuuk from Ukraine promoted a theme of ‘Neither Zelensky nor Putin’. Similarly, a Russian citizen now living in France focused all of his remarks on the Ukraine war on condemning the Russian government. Nothing was said by either speaker of the paramilitary coup in Ukraine in February 2014. The government of the Russian Federation blames the 2014 coup and the NATO and Ukraine military provocations that followed for the deadly decline into warfare by the post-coup regime in power in Kiev.
Both Ukraine speakers received hearty applause from the hundreds of audience members attending the day-long conference.
One speaker who might be expected to speak on Ukraine was Eddie Dempsey, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT). Much to his credit, he participated in a reporting and solidarity delegation in April 2015 to the future Donetsk republic (Donbas region) of the Russian Federation, back then still a province (oblast) of eastern Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine’s dirty civil war in Donbas was raging, backed by the NATO powers. The delegation was acting in solidarity with the pro-autonomy movement in Donbas (falsely labelled by Western ideologues as a ‘separatist’ movement) and in opposition to the civil war unleashed by the governing regime in Kiev (intended precisely to crush the pro-autonomy movement).
This was a courageous and visit to take at the time, considering the utter hostility of Western governments and their tame media to the pro-autonomy movement in Donbas. Dempsey came under condemnation by mainstream media in Britain earlier this year for the 2015 Unfortunately, Dempsey did not address the war in Ukraine in his six-minute remarks (241’ mark) to the antiwar conference.
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn referenced Ukraine in his brief remarks to the conference, but only by falsely comparing the inter-imperialist World War One to the current war situation in Ukraine and Europe. Today, an imperialist proxy war is being directed against the Russian government and people and against the anti-fascist people of Ukraine.
One invited speaker summed up the viewpoint of many conference organizers in declaring, “We [antiwar activists] face neither East nor West, but forward.” In other words, the war drive being waged by the imperialist countries today against Russia and tomorrow against China is of little consequence for the future of the world.
All this reminds of the years during the American War in Vietnam, when many of today’s leaders of Stop The War abstained from the worldwide movement against that war. They were under the sway of the ‘International Socialists’ current of the day which advocated a right-wing slogan appearing to be left-wing, namely: ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism’. This outlook was mistaken at the time and could not be more mistaken today.
The people of Russia, who are anti-fascist in their large majority, and the anti-fascist people of Ukraine are today in the forefront of resistance to capitalist degradation and imperialist war. The government and people of China are organizing to prevent a similar fate of civil war and imperialist war from befalling the people of Asia.
Presentations at the day-long conference in London spoke not a word of the global warming emergency and how this emergency is driven by the same, destructive dynamics that are generating the rise of imperialist warfare in the 21st century.
Postscript, July 18, 2026: ‘Counterfire’ leftists in Britain examine modern-day war…withoout mentioning the imperialist war threats and sanctions directed against Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba and others. Reference: ‘The Price of war’, essay published by Counterfire journal, July 16, 2026
[The main essay published further up this page examines the June 20 antiwar conference in London organized by the Stop The War coalition and attended by several thousands of people. Members of the ‘Counterfire’ Trotskyist group play a leading and very influential role in Stop The War. The essay wrote of the June 20 conference: “The U.S./Israel war against Iran received little attention at the conference, while several invited speakers dismissed the very existence and gravity of the NATO proxy war being waged against the peoples of Russia and of Ukraine since 2014 and intensified since 2021.” The reason for this lacune is the absence of a scientific (Leninist) understanding of imperialism as the ‘highest stage of capitalism’. This lack of understanding leads most leftists (including Trotskyists) in the Western world to falsely label Russia (with its state-capitalist economy) and socialist China (with its mixed socialist/capitalist economy themselves as being ‘imperialist’ due to allegedly authoritarian political systems. In other words, ‘imperialism’ is not examined, using scientific methods, as as a social and economic system. Rather, the term and the concept are used as epithet, for countries or peoples against whom deep, decades-old prejudices continue to be accepted as received wisdom in the West (including by leftists!). Such is the lamentable state of Marxism in the Western, imperialist world.]
