The violence we’re seeing in Ukraine is going to be replicated and amplified throughout the rest of the sphere controlled by U.S. imperialism, including within the U.S. itself. The genocide that Ukraine has been committing since the U.S. coup 8 years ago, and the atrocities that the fascist Kiev regime has been committing throughout the recent conflict, are a picture of what the U.S. settler state will do during the tumultuous coming decades. This is indicated by how mercenaries—a historic facet of dying empires and a growing fixture within Washington’s military operations throughout the last two decades—are one of the tools the empire has been using to stoke war in Ukraine. Like how the battlefield Washington has created in the Donbass has served as a training ground for white supremacists around the globe, proliferating violent neo-Nazism, Washington’s paramilitaries in Ukraine will make the atrocities of entities like Blackwater more common around the globe.
“In addition to the US-NATO military investments in Ukraine, writes Manlio Dinucci of Eurasian Defense, “there is the $ 10 billion investment foreseen by the plan that is being carried out by Erik Prince, founder of the US private military company Blackwater - now it is renamed Academy - which has supplied mercenaries to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department for covert operations (including torture and murder), gaining billions of dollars. Erik Prince's plan, revealed by an investigation [from] Time magazine, consists in creating a private army in Ukraine through a partnership between the Lancaster 6 Company, and the main CIA-controlled Ukrainian intelligence office. Through them, Prince has supplied mercenaries in the Middle East and Africa. It is not known, of course, what would be the task of the private army created in Ukraine by the founder of Blackwater, certainly with CIA funding. However, it can be expected that it would conduct covert operations in Europe, Russia, and other regions from its Ukraine base.”
To further disprove the argument that NATO and the Ukrainian regime are separate from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militias, Prince’s mercenaries are fighting alongside the Azov Battalion. The Nazi terror that the CIA has been cultivating within Ukraine evidently could be expanded to other parts of Eurasia, the growth in genocidal violence facilitated by Washington’s network of private military contractors. As Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists exploit the bloodshed to stoke support for their ideology, and as the U.S. military-industrial complex seeks to perpetuate the war to create another endless weapons demand source, the present violence will no doubt intensify. And Academi, which is potentially still the world’s most powerful mercenary army, intends to aid in this process.
The next places that this mercenary/Nazi network targets could be Kazakhstan, or Belarus, or (most likely) the Russian Federation. It might carry out false flags, as it’s already been potentially doing throughout the Ukraine conflict in its routine attempts to claim Russian war crimes. Or it could attempt coups within these countries, like Washington’s neo-Nazi Catholic militia in Bolivia successful did in 2019. Several months ago, NATO did this within Eurasia by cultivating a network of terrorists who perpetrated widespread violence within Kazakhstan, which the imperialist media portrayed as entirely organic protests despite the role of the CIA’s front groups in stoking the unrest. However far the mercenaries take these tactics abroad, no doubt they’ll be used within the U.S. empire’s own borders.
To a growing extent, they already have been. Since last summer’s police killing of black Minneapolis resident Winston Smith, one corporation has been using a private mercenary company to patrol its premises. As documented by Unicorn Riot, the contractors have been repeatedly violating the civil rights of those within the community surrounding the site, subjecting them to surveillance, traumatic brain injury, and arbitrary detention (which they call “citizens arrest”) for asking nonthreatening questions or simply acting as they normally would. The company’s prerogative is to collectively treat the community as an enemy, making de-escalation of any sort out of the question. The company is called the Conflict Resolution Group, but its founder Nathan Seabrook started it for a different purpose: to repress the city’s supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. Seabrook founded CRG in reaction to the George Floyd protests, which caused him to remark that Minneapolis is a “shithole.” It appears he’s hoping to clean the streets of crime, which in CRG’s judgement requires waging war against anyone they encounter who could be part of the city’s social movements.
“We’ve been watching you” is one of the things these mercenaries said to those who’ve sought to document their activities. Protesters have also reported the mercenaries listing personal information about them during confrontations, using their aggressive surveillance tactics as a tool for intimidation. The yelling of their names during these incidents is what’s made it an evolution in repressive tactics, where private police without any accountability make their engagement with the community purposely intrusive and even more violent than regular law enforcement. Terror is what this approach is, carried out by a private fusion center.
They’ve made this list of targeted individuals so that they can know better who to detain in partnership with the city’s police. One protester has reported that “The supervisor of the security company stated details about me … He’s taking my personal property out of my pocket pointing out and talking about it and basically saying identifying things about me and correlating it to my property … like, ‘Yo, How do you know that about me bro, you’re a private security company’ you know what I’m saying?” Another protester reported in October that “CRG (yes it is still CRG) recorded us, played MLK speeches & music to drown out our voices, shined spotlights in ppls faces, harassed folks who were holding space, addressed ppl by their names, have already tried to take the [police brutality victims] memorial down tonight, and threatened to shoot us.” They were successful in destroying the memorial, which as Unicorn Riot observes was clearly motivated by a desire to suppress the effort to rectify Smith’s murder: “Since July 14, CRG has provided armed patrols in the multi-block radius of Seven Points and from the now-fortified parking ramp where Winston Smith was killed. They’ve assaulted, detained, surveilled, and threatened community members as well as helped to eradicate a community garden and grieving space, all while in concert with the Minneapolis Police.”
The nature of these tactics, and their proliferation within the imperial center, mirror what the empire has been cultivating within Ukraine. Like how Academi treats Ukraine as a base for inflicting violence throughout not just Ukraine but broader Eurasia, CRG has treated its site as a base for stalking the area’s activists. Both are cultivating a climate of violence and terror within their ranges of influence, with CRG strangely taking on the aesthetics of an actual war state by putting up razor wire in the neighborhood it’s patrolled. In time, if not already, mercenary companies like CRG will begin collaborating with the white nationalists operating within U.S. borders. Seabrook is clearly motivated by reactionary ideological stances on the conditions within this country, which say that vigilantes are needed to beat back the unruly and dangerous groups that threaten the nation. Nazism aligns with this standard conservative view, so Nazism will prove a perfect fit for the terror that these mercenaries carry out in this country in the near future.
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