From the Memory Hole 2014: Corbyn Was Right About Ukraine

From the Memory Hole: Corbyn’s Unheeded Warnings on Ukraine

Three years into a war that’s fed the military-industrial complex while decimating working-class lives on both sides, Trump demands peace while Starmer beats the drums of endless conflict. How did we get here? Let’s retrieve two prophetic voices from Orwell’s memory hole—Jeremy Corbyn’s warnings from Parliament and his later public statements in 2014.

“In Parliament this week,” Corbyn observed then, “there were a number of tin-pot generals using the opportunity of the Ukrainian crisis to insist that Britain should rapidly and exponentially increase military expenditure.” How familiar that sounds today, as Starmer pledges British troops for a war that’s already cost us billions.

Corbyn understood Ukraine’s complex history—its role as the original heartland of Russian civilization, the bitter legacy of Stalin’s famines, the Nazi collaboration during World War II whose echoes could be seen in “Nazi insignia and racist slogans in Kiev only a week ago.” He recognised what today’s hawks conveniently forget: Ukraine’s deep linguistic and ethnic divisions, reflected in every census and electoral map.

“The EU has got very close to NATO,” he warned. “NATO has been pushing very hard to expand eastwards. Inevitably Russia is going to get very nervous if NATO sets up bases all around its borders, that in turn encourages Russian militarism.” His analysis was devastating in its clarity—each step toward militarisation would breed more militarism.

Most damningly, he exposed Western hypocrisy: “The self-satisfied pomposity of Western leaders in lecturing the world about morality and international law has to be challenged.” He reminded us of drone strikes over Pakistan, the illegal invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay—a litany of Western violations of international law that makes their moral posturing over Ukraine ring hollow.

Prophetically, he warned about NATO’s role in inflaming tensions: “I’m quite alarmed by the way in which the NATO general secretary seems to be ramping up the ante all the time. It’s not his job to go around promoting wars, he’s meant to be answerable to a number of different governments. He appears to be behaving as though he’s some free agent that could say and do what he likes and develop this very very dangerous scenario.”

The solution he proposed? “Can’t we go back to the point where Ukraine was a nuclear-free country that was not going to be a member of any alliance, either with Russia or with NATO and start to de-militarize and de-escalate the situation?” Not flag-waving nationalism or military escalation, but a return to Ukraine’s status as a neutral nation.

His understanding of Ukraine’s tragic history was profound: “Ukraine has been the war ground of Europe for two centuries… millions have died in Ukraine from famine, from war, from occupation and from disasters.. let’s not visit that upon them again!” Yet visit it upon them we did. The civil war that raged in Donbas from 2014 ended abruptly when Russian forces crossed the border on February 24, 2022. Coincidence? Or the inevitable result of ignoring voices like Corbyn’s that called for de-escalation and dialogue?

His solution? “Can’t we go back to the point where Ukraine was a nuclear-free country that was not going to be a member of any alliance, either with Russia or with NATO and start to de-militarize and de-escalate the situation?” Not flag-waving nationalism or military escalation, but a return to neutrality and peace.

The warning was explicit: “We should oppose any foreign military intervention in Ukraine, as that would only succeed in that country reliving its traumatic past as a battleground where Russia and Western Europe vie for supremacy.” Yet here we are, three years into exactly the kind of great power conflict he foresaw.

Even more prescient was his warning about economic exploitation. Noting the IMF’s early involvement in Ukraine, he observed it would “be met with a horse laugh in Greece and other places which have been on the receiving end of mass unemployment, the privatisation of public services and the destruction of welfare systems at the behest of the bankers of the world.”

Today, as Starmer positions Britain as the last hawk standing—even as Trump and Putin move toward peace—Corbyn’s words ring with painful clarity. Instead of heeding his calls for de-escalation and dialogue, we’ve wasted three years proving him right about everything: NATO’s aggression, Western hypocrisy, the danger of military escalation, and the exploitation of Ukraine as a battleground between great powers.

Remember this the next time they try to silence anti-war voices. Corbyn saw the writing on the wall in 2014, understanding both the historical context and the dangers ahead. The tragedy isn’t that he was wrong—it’s that he was right, and they made sure nobody listened.

The question now isn’t whether peace will come—it will, because the American empire has changed its mind. The question is whether we’ll learn from this bloody lesson, or let them shove the truth back down the memory hole, again…

Paul Knaggs