What fascist Ukraine’s imminent defeat means for the Zionist ideology it’s tied into

Ukraine is on its way to losing. It’s likely that by the end of the year, Ukraine won’t have the resources to launch a counteroffensive against Russia, let alone continue its futile attempts to push back against Russia’s Operation Z. The liberation of Mariupol from Kiev’s brutal fascist militias, the capturing and execution of droves of neo-Nazi fighters, and the forcing of Zelensky to overwhelmingly rely on foreign weapons have made the operation’s success assured. The Donbass republics, after fighting for freedom from Kiev’s policies of ethnic cleansing, will remain independent, and Ukraine will lose a large part of its former territory. 

Zelensky has preemptively responded to this reality by saying that he’ll make what remains of Ukraine a “big Israel,” where the National Guard has a greatly expanded role in daily life parallel to Israel’s police state. This has further revealed the Zionist influence upon Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist regime, which has received Israeli weapons for its partnered Azov Battalion and has this year had Israeli fighters join its war effort. When Ukraine’s defeat becomes impossible for the imperialist media to deny, Zionism will be dealt a blow along with it. This is because Zionism depends on a modern version of “manifest destiny,” where the favored people (who in Ukraine’s case are those who can be considered sufficiently “Ukrainian” despite Ukraine and Russia being one and the same) get their territorial expansion project vindicated by history. When the Donbass peoples prevail over Kiev, history will be shown to go in the direction of self-determination for oppressed nations. And ultimately in the direction of global communism.

Since Ukraine’s fascist 2014 coup, and the consequential effort by the Russian-speaking eastern peoples to gain independence, Kiev has rallied support for its war against self-determination by promising Ukrainians their own Lebensraum. Kiev’s officials have explicitly called for the ethnic Russians to be forcibly relocated should the Donbass separatists lose the war. Which would allow land for the neo-Nazis who’ve been committing war crimes on Kiev’s behalf throughout the conflict, and whose far-right ideological camp makes up this project’s social base. When Kiev loses, Zionism will be repudiated by extension, as Zionism depends on the same ethnic supremacist logic that Kiev uses.

Zionism is the tool that modern imperialism has created for expanding colonialism. It’s based upon the fraudulent “humanitarian” principles that the imperialists have used to justify their crimes since the second world war. The central argument used to justify it—that it’s supposedly crucial for protecting the Jewish people—has gone hand in hand with all the times the U.S. empire has waged war under the “responsibility to protect” rationale. The Zionists have ignored that prior to the founding of Israel, the USSR created a haven for the Jews in the form of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, the self-governing zone within Russia where nearly a fifth of a million people still reside. The vilification of Russia, obviously now apparent in the Ukrainian imperialist proxy war effort that Israel backs, has caused the Oblast to be overlooked in favor of Zionism’s racist vision. Using Biblical scripture as justification, the imperialist powers insisted that the only possible location for a Jewish self-determination project was on Arab land, then imposed a hierarchical ethno-state which violates Palestinian sovereignty while persecuting dark-skinned Jews.

This genocidal project has gained a social base the same way that the United States, Australia, and the other settler-colonial states did: through offering hierarchical benefits to the favored groups which immigrate to the country. The Israelis have narrowed the definition of what it means to be Jewish, both through their systemic marginalization of non-Ashkenazi Jews and through their rhetoric about anti-Zionism being antisemitism. By demonizing all who participate in BDS, including anti-Zionist Jews, they’ve sought to make the Jewish identity synonymous with participation in their settler project. This reactionary ideology, racist both against Arabs and against Jews by proxy, has been coated in the false virtue of U.S. imperialism’s “humanitarian” propaganda. 

When Israel has put Palestinians into the open-air concentration camp of Gaza, committed innumerable war crimes, implemented dozens of discriminatory laws, and engaged in forced relocation to make way for settler living space expansions, it’s all been filtered by the imperialist media through a lens of paternalistic chauvinist narratives. Narratives which claim that the annexation of these territories, even when they blatantly violate international law, has been instrumental for protecting the Jews. And that the Palestinians are therefore unreasonable for demanding their sovereignty, and deserving of whatever consequences war brings upon them. In reality, this isn’t Jewish “protection,” and that’s apparent from the deportations that African Jewish migrants have been subjected to upon coming to Israel. It’s a project to make a select, European-tied part of the Jewish diaspora into oppressors. Zionism is only seen as “protection” because in the colonial ideology, oppressor and oppressed nations must exist, and the only way for a group to be safe is if they become part of an oppressor nation.

Such is the reasoning of the Ukrainian fascists, and those throughout the imperialist bloc who support Ukraine’s war crimes out of supposed love for “human rights.” Ukraine’s supporters haven’t heard of the atrocities committed by Ukraine’s National Guard, because this Ukrainian equivalent of Zionism has been made into a part of our cultural hegemony. Nor have they heard of the mass grave that Kiev created in 2014 when it carried out collective punishment against the population in the separatist areas. Nor of Kiev’s torture of prisoners of war, executions and detentions of political dissidents, statements that glorify Ukraine’s World War II Nazi collaborators, book bans, or support for the neo-Nazi militias as they’ve carried out pogroms. 

All the media has shown us is a picture of a nation victim to Russian “imperialism,” aggressed against by Putin for wanting to take back the separatist territories. It’s Ukraine’s U.S.-orchestrated coup, fascist policies, and ethnic cleansing which provide context behind why the Donbass peoples have decided they no longer want to be part of Ukraine. And behind why Russia has intervened on behalf of the Donbass republics, which makes it live up to the “responsibility to protect doctrine” that Washington pretends to enforce. Like the Palestinians, the Russian speakers in the Donbass are portrayed as deserving whatever they get as a consequence for their refusal to bend to the oppressor nation’s will. Because the oppressor nation can’t even be acknowledged as such, it can only be portrayed through a “hear no evil, see no evil” lens.

The fake piousness used by both Zionists and Ukraine apologists, projecting an image of a nation fighting for its “self-determination” despite seeking to crush the sovereignty of the oppressed nations, cultivates an unshakable belief in the oppressor nation’s victory. It’s believed beyond a doubt that the Israelis will fulfill their destiny as “god’s chosen ones,” and that Ukraine will win this conflict. But when the latter claim is proven wrong, the former claim will further be called into question. Zionism is not an ideology with fundamental credibility. It depends on a social contract of giving stolen land to one relatively privileged part of the diverse Jewish diaspora, and its brazen disregard for every international human rights law puts it at odds with all societies outside the imperialist countries. As well as with the oppressed nations inside the U.S. empire’s borders, which seek to defeat colonialism and imperialism in solidarity with the Palestinians.

When Ukraine loses, the U.S. empire’s collapse will accelerate. The world will be brought closer to the dissolution of the United States, and the creation of a post-colonial socialist federation of nations where the “United States” used to be. The process towards global communist revolution will be sped up, and Israel’s colonial project will become less viable as its capital weakens. The imperialists, in tandem with their Zionist running dogs, can call the liberation of the Donbass peoples a Russian “imperialist” project all they like. But this won’t stop the transition to a multi-polar world, the weakening of U.S. capital, and the subsequent coming of the pan-American decolonial socialist revolution. Which will bring Zionism, and all other ideologies which justify violating national sovereignty, far closer to becoming historical relics.

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Mass shootings are a symptom of the declining U.S. empire’s fascist reaction

The mass shootings that this country has been reeling from are symptoms of the U.S. empire’s decline. When empires collapse, they experience waves of violence and instability. After the unraveling of the German empire during World War I, the populace was devastated by the blowback from capitalist exploitation and war, and society reacted by becoming more paranoid and aggressive. The discourse began saturated in antisemitic conspiracy narratives, with the Jews being blamed for “stabbing Germany in the back” and bringing it to its state of humiliation. Political polarization intensified, with fascists coming out to terrorize communities and the communists having to respond with force. Clashes between the Nazis and the original Antifa became regular, mirroring the street confrontations we’ve been seeing so much of in America.

Another parallel to contemporary America was the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt by the fascists which resembled January 6th insofar as it was an act of impatience from the fascists. The vulnerable structure of bourgeois “democracy” would let the Nazis come to power in time, and the Putsch was a trial run for the decisive moment. What would give the Nazis this opportunity was the Great Depression, which discredited the liberal parties and let the extreme right fill the power vacuum. 

Now that the U.S. has had its economic collapse, occurring through the compounding factors of the pandemic and the Ukraine conflict, similarities are again apparent. Biden has been discredited, his sanctions on Russia having cruel consequences for a U.S. population that’s already been devastated by the events of the last two years. And no doubt the 2024 election will be a vast upswing for our own fascists, who are already waging a war against women’s and LGBT rights. The big warning signs that we’re headed for a repeat of history are the violence that our society keeps getting pummeled with, and the state’s enabling of that violence.

Throughout Weimar Germany, right-wing terrorism was routine. And what would later allow it to turn into the Holocaust was the tolerance that the capitalist state had for it. Germany’s DW has written that “The law had turned a blind eye to the far-right. Between 1918 and 1922, it is estimated 354 political murders were committed by right-wing groups and 22 from leftist groupings. Punishments varied. Left-wing assassins were usually given prison sentences - or death sentences. But right-wing extremists were often granted clemency, or received prison sentences of just a few months. Political elites and the justice system in the Weimar Republic were unwilling to shine a light on the true nature of the assassinations. It had fatal consequences. Right-wing secret societies that had numerous connections to the military would later merge with national socialist organizations, spreading terrorism and hate as Hitler's foot soldiers.”

Can you think of a clearer historical parallel to last year’s exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters and then successfully avoided consequences by saying he felt threatened? Under a capitalist state, especially a capitalist state that’s reeling from the pressures of mounting settler-colonial contradictions and economic crisis, the rules get redefined for fascists. The system grows more willing to enable them, viewing their terrorism from the charitable lens of occurring in response to supposed violence from society’s revolutionary elements. The ruling class embraces their brutal solutions to preempt revolution, which grows more plausible the more people’s conditions deteriorate.

This institutional enabling of violence is apparent at every level, from the White House’s funding for Ukrainian neo-Nazis to the court system’s legalization of vigilantism to law enforcement’s negligence on mass shooters. During the Uvalde, Texas shooting, police waited an hour for backup before intervening, despite panicked onlookers having begged them to enter the school where the massacre was taking place. The U.S. empire’s law enforcement, despite being intensely militarized throughout the last decade or so, remains unable to stop the kinds of crimes that the “Back the Blue” movement claims police are crucial for preventing. Due to the function of police under capitalism—which is not to prevent crime but to protect property—the descent into violence is accelerating.

This is only natural, because the imperialist social order behind law enforcement is what’s producing these shootings. At least one-third of mass shooters have been trained by the United States military. White supremacist mass shooters get radicalized by the propaganda channels that are made possible by the settler-colonial structure. Our culture of militarism is intertwined with our culture of misogyny and violent masculinity, which can potentially explain incidents like the recent one where a non-white man perpetrated a shooting; America’s conditioning of men to be violent impacts men of all colors. There’s data to support this. A study from last year showed that shooters have frequently committed domestic violence or even femicide prior to their largest crimes, stating: “We found that 59.1% of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 were DV-related and in 68.2% of mass shootings, the perpetrator either killed at least one partner or family member or had a history of DV.” These men have a kinship with the police, in that domestic violence is around four times more common in law enforcement households than in the general population. And police are who we expect to protect children.

The U.S. leads the rest of the world in shootings by such astronomical levels not necessarily because of how many guns it has, but because the culture surrounding these guns is defined by the country’s role as the hub of imperialism. Mass shootings in the U.S. far outpace those in other rich countries because the U.S. is not just an imperialist country, but the core imperialist country, the one with a military budget that dwarfs those of its allies. When a country has been at war for virtually all of its history, with its very existence being dependent on one big war against the First Nations, this scars its collective psyche. Its people aren’t able to grow up in a healthy environment, and its men learn that they need to physically dominate women and other men. Constant war propaganda fuels this sense that in order to overcome one’s conditions, one needs to become a warrior, willing to annihilate others for the sake of being in control. This is the motivation behind femicide; “honor killings” is the phrase that’s often applied to when men murder women.

The fascist movement seeks to exploit this sick mindset. By putting forth racist propaganda and paranoid conspiracy theories, it’s trying to instigate stochastic terrorism, where lone wolf attackers instill fear among the population. If Nazi Germany repeats itself in the USA, these attacks are going to morph into something more coordinated, into a systemic mass murder campaign against the most vulnerable groups. These shootings are warning signs for something far bigger.

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Scientific socialism, not accommodating reactionary ideas, is how communists can unite the masses

There’s a difference between trying to please every individual, and uniting the masses. If you accommodate each ideological faction that you encounter as a revolutionary, believing this is what you need to do to build a popular coalition, you’ll end up achieving the opposite and alienating yourself from the masses. Because in a society defined by capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism, there are plenty of people with reactionary ideas. And reactionary ideas are opposed to the interests of the masses.

We can’t enable colonialism

An example of this error, the error of mistaking appeasement of reactionaries for building mass unity, is found in the Center for Political Innovation. Its adjacent polemicists, such as the supposedly Marxist streamer Infrared, argue that communists shouldn’t advocate for the abolition of the United States because the masses supposedly will be alienated from communism should we take this position. But by “the masses,” these types are truly referring to specific elements among the masses, ones that the CPI places excessive importance upon despite these elements actually representing some of the least revolutionary parts of the population. These elements are the labor aristocrats, the petty bourgeoisie, the settlers who own land. These represent a small minority of the masses, not the vast majority of proletarians—including white proletarians—who don’t own any land and therefore wouldn’t lose anything if the land were transferred over to the oppressed nations. 

These parts of the frustrated middle class are more likely to be won over towards fascism than towards communism. And if the “patriotic socialists” believe preventing them from becoming fascists is instrumental for the revolution, they’ve overlooked the elements of the masses that are far easier to bring towards communism. The elements that, due to their extreme subjugation by the United States, are more likely to be repulsed by the American flag than attracted by it.

In contrast to the middle class, the elements of the masses that stand the most to gain from an end to settler-colonial land relations are the elements that have the most revolutionary potential. These are the Black, Brown, and Indigenous proletarians, the colonized lumpenproletarians who’ve been pushed to society’s margins by capitalism, the millions of felons among the lempen who live without civil rights. They aren’t tethered to the settler-colonial order, and they would have everything to gain from the restoration of pre-colonial territorial control for the tribes, the establishment of an autonomous Chicano state, and the establishment of the Republic of New Afrika. 

For this reason, there’s sociological evidence that these impoverished and disenfranchised nonwhites will be the first ones to physically rebel against the state as America’s conditions continue to worsen. In an analysis on why the colonized lumen are the most likely to participate in an insurrection against the state, sociologist Temitope Oriola has written:

Transgenerational oppression of an identifiable group is one of the pre-conditions for an armed insurgency, but this is hardly news. What the U.S. has managed to institute on a national and comprehensive scale is what sociologist Jock Young calls “cultural inclusion and structural exclusion.” A strong sense of injustice, along with significant moments, events and episodes — like the killings of Taylor and Floyd — are also important….There is another, related variable: The availability of people willing and able to participate in such insurgency. The U.S. has potential candidates in abundance. Criminal records — sometimes for relatively minor offences — that mar Black males for life, have taken care of this critical supply. One study estimates that while eight per cent of the U.S. general population has felony convictions, the figure is 33 per cent among African American males. Some of these men may gradually be reaching the point where they believe they have nothing to lose. Some will join for revenge, others for the thrill of it and many for the dignity of the people they feel have been trampled on for too long.

When this revolt begins, the colonized peoples, who will act as its vanguard, will be joined by the progressive elements of the white proletariat and lumpenproletariat. The reactionary minority that the CPI seeks to appease will be fighting against these revolutionaries, or apathetically complaining from the sidelines. These flaws in the CPI’s analysis are an example of a right deviation, coming from that false assumption about how accommodating reactionary ideas is synonymous with constructing a popular coalition. A left-wing example of this error is the idea that gangs are tools for revolution.

We can’t enable gang ideology 

Because gangs are a response to capitalism and colonialism, a bid for self-determination from the oppressed nations that can’t find autonomy from looking to any institutions besides gangs, ultra-leftists assume that gangs can be turned into revolutionary vehicles. But the fundamental character of gangs makes them incompatible with the goals of a vanguard party. They’re military governments that seek to gain access to capitalism’s underground markets, which means that they won’t cede control to a workers state, and that they won’t want the exploitation within these markets to end. The class interests of the lumpenbourgeoisie who run the gangs are in conflict with the interests of the proletariat. The lumpenbourgeoisie don’t want the lumpen to become proletarianized, as in be provided with jobs and alternative social outlets to gangs. They want the lumpen to remain in their desperate position, and therefore able to continue serving the power structure of the gangs.

This reality about the counterrevolutionary class character of the gangs bleeds into gang ideology, which tends to encourage ultra-leftist sentiment rather than scientific socialism. This tendency exists because gang ideology and scientific socialism are incompatible. The former is based around idealistic thinking, instead of materialist analysis. It centers on a concept of “loyalty” that demands uncritical allegiance to the clique, whether this clique is the gang itself or the political cults that ultra-leftism tends to produce. Such a mentality is hostile towards criticism and intellectualism, and provides an ideological rationale for counterrevolutionary actions like adventurism, individualism, and other manifestations of liberalism.

Part of this stubbornness can come from the fact that gang members are more likely to listen to criticism from people within their own community than from outsiders; capitalism and colonialism’s harrowing conditions have made gangs become insulated out of necessity, and this can be hard for outsiders to understand. So gang members can reflect, leave their gangs, and give up any toxic habits they’ve internalized, as some former gangsters I’ve encountered have done. But no one can force these kinds of changes, and if someone from this category turns out to be an active abuser (as I’ve also seen), we shouldn’t enable them out of the hope that they’ll change.

If these reactionary and destructive tendencies influence the movement, the movement won’t be able to gain mass support. It will remain isolated to whatever enclaves it can manage to carve out, running in endless circles of guerrilla struggle, like the Maoist struggles in India and the Philippines. Unsurprisingly, Maoism is also ideologically informed by ultra-leftism, with its unwillingness to bend to material realities which contradict the political cult’s predetermined ideals. When Maoists denounce China for implementing the market reforms necessary to make its productive forces adequate, they’re coming from the same place as the gang fetishists I’ve encountered who denounce communist parties for not accommodating their recklessly violent way of operating. What’s important to the ultra-leftist is not what the conditions call for, but what their ideals claim is right.

For communists to build unity with the lumpen, and to therefore unite with a crucial portion of the revolutionary population in this country, we must recognize that such a thing as gang ideology exists. And that gang ideology can’t be accommodated by Marxists, but made obsolete. To do this, we must not allow the reactionary elements among the lumpen to influence our movement, any more than we should allow the reactionary labor aristocrats to influence our stances. This means not letting active or semi-active gang members into communist parties; they’re a tiny minority of the lumpen, and the majority of the lumpen are women who’ve been economically pressured into doing tasks like sex work. This also means not romanticizing the existence of the lumpen, or overlooking the fact that the proletariat has the unique ability to wield leverage over the economy. 

What we must do is build alternative social and material outlets to the gangs, like the Panthers did with their mutual aid networks and armed anti-racist community patrols. What will also be essential for us to provide are tenants’ unions, and revolutionary education outlets. After we’ve gained power, we’ll also be able to provide a jobs program that isn’t constrained by capitalism’s demand for a reserve army of labor, and therefore can employ everyone who’s able to work.

When we’ve delivered these improvements in conditions for the lumpen, gangsterism and its ideology will be made obsolete. The colonized peoples will no longer have a material incentive to join the gangs en masse, and the lumpenbourgeoisie will be able to get suppressed like it is under China’s communist party. But communists can’t get that kind of power until we’ve gotten the masses on our side. Which does not mean appeasing the reactionary elements of the masses, whether middle class or lumpen. It means acting according to the interests of the masses. Because if we do what’s in the interests of the masses, enough of the masses will support us for us to be able to defeat the capitalist state. 

When it comes to the lumpen question, we can’t approach this task idealistically. We can’t assume we can win over every member of that class, because though the lumpen have great revolutionary potential due to their growing numbers, they’re simultaneously vulnerable to reactionary influence. 

This is where we must take into consideration Oriola’s prediction about some of the lumpen seeking to join the revolution “for the thrill of it.” If someone is trying to carry out personally cathartic violence while acting on behalf of our organizations, they may not be willing to follow the discipline required by democratic centralism, and could hurt the party through alienating acts of violence. Should we encounter these cases of individuals with ulterior motives that aren’t aligned with the revolution’s goals, we must not be afraid to hold them accountable, and purge them should they fail to correct their errors. Which is where revolutionary principles are required. We can’t let our emotional biases prevent us from enforcing integrity in our cadres, or let bad actors use identity politics, past traumas, or other potential excuses as rationales for harming the interests of the masses.

Building unity with the lumpen will require not trying to appease all of the elements among the lumpen, but acting in the interests of the masses. In other words, the equivalent of the approach we must employ towards the masses as a whole.

We must act with the masses as our guide

When I say that if we act in the interests of the masses, the masses will unify with us, I don’t mean the masses will automatically follow us after we’ve laid down decrees. The relationship between the revolutionaries and the masses is not one of paternalistic commandism, because the masses are the ones we’re working on behalf of. To work on behalf of them instead of acting like we’re they’re masters, we must not compromise our principles, while at the same time not being obtuse for those outside the studied circles of Marxism. The way to do this is through the mass line, a Maoist idea that the Maoists are right to practice despite them being incorrect on other things. Scott Harrison from Massline.info describes it in this way:

The mass line is the primary method of revolutionary leadership of the masses, which is employed by the most conscious and best organized section of the masses, the proletarian party. It is a reiterative method, applied over and over again, which step by step advances the interests of the masses, and in particular their central interest within bourgeois society, namely, advancing towards proletarian revolution. Each iteration may be viewed as a three step process: 1) gathering the diverse ideas of the masses; 2) processing or concentrating these ideas from the perspective of revolutionary Marxism, in light of the long-term, ultimate interests of the masses (which the masses themselves may sometimes only dimly perceive), and in light of a scientific analysis of the objective situation; and 3) returning these concentrated ideas to the masses in the form of a political line which will actually advance the mass struggle toward revolution. Because the mass line starts with the diverse ideas of the masses, and returns the concentrated ideas to the masses, it is also known as the method of “from the masses, to the masses”. Though implicit in Marxism from the beginning, the mass line was raised to the level of conscious theory primarily by Mao Zedong.

This approach is applicable to what I’ve said about how accommodating the reactionary ideas among the masses will actually undermine our attempts to unite with the masses. Because the mass line doesn’t demand that we accept or entertain every backwards sentiment that we encounter from individuals; if we encounter a proletarian who likes to display the U.S. flag, we shouldn’t tell him he’s right to do this, as the CPI would claim. Nor should we attack him and everyone like him as fascists, because many who wave the U.S. flag aren’t fascists. Only ignorant. We should open up a dialogue on this continent’s colonization, and put forth the Marxist analysis on why that flag exists. This analysis being that the United States was created to extract wealth from the Indigenous lands, and from the labor of primarily colonized peoples. If the flag-waver is white, we can remind them that the white proletariat and lumpenproletariat are also exploited under the capitalist system that the settler state has brought to this continent. As well as that one has an obligation to support reparations for colonialism, no matter what color one is.

Will these arguments trigger the sensibilities of reactionaries? Of course, but we shouldn’t care what reactionaries think. If someone reacts to a nuanced and respectful case for class solidarity with angry vitriol, they’ve already chosen their side in this conflict. And like I said, these middle class MAGA types aren’t the group that has the most revolutionary potential. The groups most likely to become this continent’s revolutionary vanguard, to learn the theory, to volunteer for being part of the revolutionary fighting force, are the groups that have been subjugated the most by capitalism and colonialism. They’re the parts of the masses which can manifest the changes required for improving the conditions of the masses as a whole.

Mobilizing these parts of the masses does not require bending to the will of every ultraviolent, ideologically backwards, or otherwise flawed individual who we encounter among the lumpen. That will only make us unable to win over the masses. What it does require is the mass line’s approach towards the masses: finding out what the masses desire, formulating an analysis on these desires from a Marxist perspective, and articulating this analysis to the masses in a way which assures them that we’ll improve their conditions. And if this makes any reactionaries unhappy, we should pay no mind to them, other than when it becomes necessary to defend from the violence that they’ll try to inflict upon us. The reactionaries are not our friends but our enemies, because they’re enemies of the masses.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

White supremacy, the denial of colonialism’s crimes, & the perpetuation of violence

As long as ignorance about this continent’s colonization is perpetuated, as long as our society is conditioned to overlook the scars that continue to define it, the violence we’ve seen this month will persist. And as the U.S. empire’s decline continues, the reaction from a threatened settler-colonial apparatus will make the violence keep getting worse. When the latest product of the online hate sphere shot up a store in Buffalo, New York last week, killing ten black people, he was acting on behalf of this reaction. He was carrying out the logical conclusion of the belief that whites have a right to rule this land, and that their rule must be maintained by any means necessary.

“It is hard to understand the nationalistic ocean in which you swim, and it bleeds into your understanding of history,” observes the YouTuber Hello Future Me in his recent video about Zuko, the prince of the genocidal Fire Nation from the anti-imperialist series Avatar: The Last Airbender. “Fire Nation children are taught that the Air Nomads had a military, that it was not a genocide, it was a fair fight. And Zuko was likely taught the same. In Nazi Germany, they made sure to depict the Jews as a nefarious, rich, powerful group, undermining the German people and society, rather than the reality: a diaspora of disconnected small communities….when Auschwitz workers were asked how they could possibly participate in these atrocities against civilians, they answered that to them, enemies were everywhere. They were told they came from every walk of life, they were academics and they were businessmen, not just soldiers. They were trying to destroy their people in every way culturally and socially. And so the line between civilian and soldier simply disappeared. They were all enemies of the state. That’s the sort of belief that Zuko was brought up with. An honorable war with the goal of spreading prosperity, and that there never was a genocide, but a war against those in the way of progress. And this is, in a way, a kind of child abuse. Lying to them about the world, and dictating their role in it.”

Such is the way that U.S. children are brought up. The school system doesn’t give them adequate access to information about the genocide of indigenous people, or about the ongoing history of institutional racism in this country. A 2014 study found that in all states, schools implicitly teach that there was no genocide, virtually omitting the term and portraying the violence as having been part of an inevitable conflict. “All of the states are teaching that there were civil ways to end problems,” said professor Sarah Shear about the curriculum contents documented within the study, “and that the Indian problem was dealt with nicely.” Avatar is art imitating life, the life of denial and structural violence that we in the core of imperialism navigate.

Without the educational tools to give Americans awareness of white supremacy’s existence, and with reactionary pundits currently seeking to stir up hostility towards the very concept of white supremacy, atrocities like the Buffalo shooting are becoming more common. The idea that school curriculum must be censored in order to prevent the proliferation of “critical race theory,” a specifically legal phrase that reactionaries portray as encompassing every statement arguing for institutional racism still existing, has led to rampant paranoia. If someone believes there’s a conspiracy to divide us by our race through promoting anti-American disinformation, they can easily believe there’s a conspiracy to replace white people, the lie that motivated the Buffalo shooter.

The racist propaganda proliferated by Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and other reactionary demagogues has the goal of preserving the demographic balance that the settler state depends on. To maintain its power, the settler state requires a numerical and land control advantage for the favored race—the whites—and the ability to exploit the colonized races. The colonized must remain either in the minority, or minoritized, treated as second class citizens so that an apartheid political exclusion can be maintained. The U.S. empire’s internal colonies can’t be allowed to gain the leverage to overtake the imperial hegemon. This is why right after the settler state was pressured into giving civil rights to black people, it created a new Jim Crow in the form of the mass incarceration system. A system that only partly consists of the infamously high-proportioned U.S. prison population; there are millions more who live without civil rights due to having criminal records.

In response to this persecution, as well as to the disproportionate poverty and police brutality that keep getting worse for America’s internal colonies, these colonies have been rising up. The 2020 George Floyd protests were the largest demonstrations in the history of the country. In reaction, the settler power apparatus has been waging counterrevolutionary war against this stirring decolonial revolt. The Minneapolis riots led to the creation of a mercenary company that’s been stalking and intimidating local activists, setting a precedent for nationwide use of unaccountable paramilitaries against liberation movements. Reactionaries are manufacturing paranoia about a plot to destroy America through racial police atrocity stories, which they claim are fabricated. It’s like how Umberto Eco describes fascism’s conspiratorial mentality:

To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

There is indeed an effort to bring about the end of the United States, but it’s not the product of an engineered outside destabilization scheme as the fascists imagine. It’s merely the inevitable outcome of the colonial contradiction in this country. The idea that the United States is a prison of nations, and that it must be abolished and replaced with a socialist federation of formerly colonized nations, is the position of communists who’ve correctly analyzed our conditions. And it will naturally gain mass support from a populace that’s increasingly suffering from the impacts of America’s decline. The solution is to scrap this failing project of the settler state, and build our society anew under the guidance of a vanguard party.

This is the realization that most colonized peoples, as well as most of the whites who are exploited by capitalism, will come to as they gain class consciousness. But as Eco observed, fascism can gain support for its hateful ideas by tapping into the frustrated middle class. By reaching out to the members of the labor aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, or those who aspire to be part of these classes, and telling them that they can address the aggravation created by their conditions through waging war against those beneath them. These useful idiots of capitalism get radicalized into being the footsoldiers in the counterrevolutionary war, whether this means joining a fascist militia or committing lone wolf hate crimes. Either fulfills the goal of terrorizing the revolutionary parts of the masses, which under our conditions disproportionately consist of colonized peoples.

“What does it mean to deconstruct those beliefs?” Hello Future Me says. “Beliefs that are deeply tied to your understanding of how the world works, and your understanding of yourself? The psychology of radicalization and deradicalization helps articulate how this happens….one study [cited in the video] found that cultures which place a value on honor and obedience are more prone to radical nationalistic ideologies because they can more easily exploit people’s fear of losing significance. Deradicalization, then, centers on finding a new significance.” The video cites a paper titled The Psychology of Radicalization and Deradicalization: How Significance Quest Impacts Violent Extremism, which states that “Deradicalization may occur if one came to regard one’s radical means as morally unacceptable, ineffective or both, and hence unlikely to promote one’s significance….deradicalization may reflect a weakening of such influence [by] falling outside of its sphere.”

The only way we can end these racist attacks is by making that sphere of hate nonexistent. Which will require the abolition of the United States, and the construction of a workers state which unifies the oppressed nations against the forces of reaction. Under this post-colonial federation, promoting racist lies won’t be allowed, and the source of the violence will be cut off.

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Warning signs of genocide as the capitalist world undergoes collapse

Gramsci wrote that the period between the existing order’s stablity and the existing order’s downfall is the time of monsters. Fascism, which Gramsci had personal experience with from being imprisoned under Mussolini’s Italy, is a symptom of capitalism’s decline. Therefore it can be seen as the bid for survival by a doomed old system, full of bluster but ultimately impotent. This is the only encouraging thing I can take away from the frightening state that the capitalist world has entered into.

There have been deportrations, racist terror, national oppression, and other current horrors for as long as the capitalist state has existed, and all the way back to when its correlating factor of colonialism began. But fascism, especially in the second great wave it’s now undergoing, represents an especially extreme kind of threat within capitalism’s history. It represents the danger that the ruling class, in an attempt to stop humanity from breaking free of capitalism, will end up destroying a large portion of humanity. Of course, capitalism and colonialism already have killed hundreds of millions. But hundreds of millions more will die, if not billions, should fascism fulfill its goal of building upon these genocides.

In the context of climate catastrophe and the nuclear age, the potential for tragedy is unprecedented. Estimates show that tens of millions of lives could be lost due to the impacts of global warming throughout this century. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has concluded that humanity is closer than ever to nuclear war. With the degradation of the global ecology, and the warming of the planet, there’s a likelihood that worse pandemics than Covid-19 will arise during our generation. All of these factors are warning signs for genocide. With reactionary regimes like Hindutva fascist India and Bolsonaro’s Brazil overwhelmingly leading the world’s major powers, the way governments respond to this century’s crises will be centered around the scapegoating of vulnerable groups, the militarization of society, and the erosion of freedoms. 

It will be a repeat of the way the capitalist states acted when faced with the Great Depression nearly a century ago, except now there’s not just a new depression, but a climate crisis. As well as new technologies for governments to use to enact violence. Mass digital surveillance, online censorship, border walls with intensive monitoring systems, and the use of modern military weapons in policing are all repressive tools employed by Israel against the Palestinians, for instance. And these tools are getting exported to numerous other countries in the imperialist sphere. This is the making of a dystopia, where the evils within places like Gaza get expanded to poor communities across the globe.

But we don’t have to wait to see these kinds of nightmare scenarios. The collapse risk factors that capitalism has created, largely by the deliberate designs of U.S. imperialism, have already had grievous human costs during recent years. The U.S. empire has taken advantage of global warming to set off the war in Syria, and is driving forward its cold war against China by manufacturing humanitarian crises across Africa. Global inequality and neoliberal exploitation have caused six million to die from Covid so far. Washington’s fascist coup in Ukraine has brought war back to Europe, which arms contractors seek to perpetuate for profit.

Beyond Ukraine, with its six million conflict refugees and its Third Reich-esque atrocities by the Kiev regime, imperialism’s fomenting of war and instability throughout the Global South has produced history’s biggest refugee crisis. Which has fueled a rising fascist movement across the core imperialist countries, whose people are reeling from an ever-worsening depression and looking for something to blame. With class consciousness expanding among the global proletariat and the lumpen, the bourgeoisie are determined to stoke hatred among the frustrated middle class, which is fascism’s social base. The goal is to weaponize this class against the majority of the masses who may support a revolution. Which will entail the counterrevolutionary tactics from Nazi Germany, military regime-era Indonesia, Pinochet’s Chile, and history’s other examples of regimes which have carried out anti-communist extermination campaigns.

The goal of these campaigns is to terrorize the masses into submission. Ukraine under the post-coup regime provides a current example; Kiev has used the National Guard to commit atrocities against civilians, aided neo-Nazi militias that have beaten communists, enabled pogroms, banned books, tortured political dissidents, and detained or killed its opponents using slogans like “one less traitor.” The fact that all of this has been assisted by the United States government is an ominous sign for the American people, and for those throughout the rest of the U.S. bloc. Our government is waging war against abortion access and LGBT people, with reactionary lawmakers rapidly assaulting civil and human rights. Where is this leading? We can get a clue from the full-on Nazism that our governmental officials, including its liberals, are supporting. The ruling class will ally with fascists in order to preserve its own power, and imperialism is aiding fascism’s takeover.

The racial mass shootings we keep seeing are part of this process. Random violence is good for the fascist movement, because fascism’s entire objective is to wage war against those it deems inferior. The more fear these attacks instill, the more the movement succeeds. This is why the ruling class, through its reactionary media demagogues, has nurtured a pipeline of hate. A pipeline that runs through Ukraine, where many U.S. white supremacists go to get combat experience for the violence they plan to commit at home.

Fear is the most important tool that the fascists and their ruling class backers have. And in this moment of unraveling for our institutions, economy, environment, and safety, fear’s potency is multiplied. One gets the sense that something inconceivably bad is coming, perhaps sooner than we think. The fascists seek to weaponize this dread. But this means that if we master fear, we can resist them.

The demobilization of the masses comes from keeping us atomized, from making us feel like we have no one to turn to as our conditions worsen. Building communities is how to overcome this aloneness. But it has to go along with a correct theoretical understanding of what our conditions are, and of how we must respond to those conditions. If we merely react to our circumstances, engaging in undisciplined violence and setting up insular political cults, we’ll only harm the interests of the masses. It’s through a dedication to learning theory, to criticism and self-criticism, to building ties with the masses, that we can win. These aspects of revolutionary intelligence are just as important as building one’s body, and training with weapons, and studying martial arts.

This is because whereas the fascists thrive off of unpredictable spatterings of bloodshed, as their strategy is to incite fear wherever possible, communists have the opposite strategy. We seek to make the masses as safe and secure as possible, which requires earning their trust as the protectors of communities, the providers of essential resources, and the sources of hope for a future free from today’s miseries. The fascists are at war with the masses, while we fight on the side of the masses. But we need to act like we do, which requires putting the interests of the collective before the interests of the individual. Our dire conditions can make us feel like retreating into individualism, like lashing out at the world. But that’s what the enemy wants us to do.

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U.S. empire seeks to use Ukraine to destabilize Eurasia, in the model of how it destroyed Yugoslavia

The U.S. empire has a playbook for balkanizing countries. It inflames ethnic tensions by fabricating atrocity stories, and spreading them around in the areas where it wants conflict to arise. To do this, it singles out an ethnic group (represented by a vilified government) and paints it as a perpetrator of genocide. It backs terrorist groups to fight against the demonized government, or installs leaders that will fulfill Washington’s goals for proxy warfare, or both. It provokes the targeted country into responding, then imposes sanctions on the country. It uses “humanitarian” narratives to give the region’s breakup the illusion of having occurred organically, and of having been done in response to human rights abuses or war crimes supposedly committed by the target.

Since the CIA carried out this type of scheme in Yugoslavia during the 1990s, the empire has applied aspects of it in many other places. Washington has inflamed a proxy war in Syria by aiding terrorists within the country, used Assad’s response to demonize the government with false atrocity stories, imposed sanctions, and backed the Kurds in creating a breakaway state. The latter tactic is a parallel to NATO’s installations of racist leaders within Yugoslavia’s breakaway states, with Assad playing the same role as Serbia’s Milosevic. And despite the glorification of Kurdistan by Western leftists, that state is as racist as those other ones; the reactionary Kurds the U.S. backs are inspired by the Zionist theorist Murray Bookchin, and have predictably been committing ethnic cleansing.

In Ethiopia, the imperialists have been supporting the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, a terrorist organization that’s used crop sabotage as a weapon in its civil war. The CIA has been justifying this fissuring of the country by its proxy through false atrocity accounts, attributing unsubstantiated stories of cruelty to the government. Sanctions have been imposed there too, worsening the country’s famine. In Afghanistan, the imperialists are using sanctions to create the conditions for a similar terrorist proxy insurgency, so far unsuccessfully. They’re also attempting to foment this kind of destabilization in Myanmar, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, and—most prominently—Russia.

For the most part, the imperialists are failing to break up the countries they want to subdue. But if they can successfully apply the Yugoslavia model to Russia, they’ll gain the leverage to do the same in numerous other places. Washington has pivoted towards Russia as a target in its new cold war because if China loses Russia as an ally, it will be more vulnerable to Washington’s attempts at weakening and balkanizing the People’s Republic. Then the great-power competition may well be won by Washington, allowing Eurasia to be turned away from multipolarity via the destabilization of its pivotal central states. If Eurasia is subdued, the geopolitical game of chess will be won by the U.S. bloc.

Ukraine is the weapon that the imperialists are trying to use to set off this engineered Eurasian collapse. And they’re employing the same tools from the initial parts of the Yugoslavia destabilization campaign: demonization of the targeted leader and national identity (these being Putin and the Russians), fabricated or false flag atrocity stories (like the Bucha massacre), installation of a racist hostile regime (this being the regime put in by the 2014 Euromaidan coup), and the provocation of a defensive response used to create further war crimes accusations. There are especially parallels between today’s Western disinformation about Ukraine, and the CIA’s propaganda targeting the Serbs. The CIA would carry out attacks and blame them on Milosevic, like how Ukraine’s U.S. puppet regime carries out attacks that get blamed on Russia.

For Russia, a full application of the Yugoslavia model would look like a Soviet-esque failure of the country’s economy, bringing the downfall of the state as Russia currently knows it. Washington would then be able to install a leader like Alexei Navalny, the openly racist opposition figure who’s even further to the right than Putin. This would go along with the country’s balkanization, necessitating multiple puppet leaders being installed at once. Whichever of these breakaway states continues to defy the U.S. will be targeted with proxy warfare, carried out by new U.S. puppet states that have undergone the kind of fascist coup that Ukraine has. The U.S. doesn’t just want to return Russia to the Yeltsin era of a Russian Federation that’s subservient to Washington. It wants to eliminate the possibility of Russia again asserting its independence by plunging it into fascism, and cutting it into several pieces. This would be the ultimate neocon dream, where Russia is divided and conquered.

The problem is that this is a total fantasy. The exact opposite is happening in this proxy war, with Washington seeing success from the side it wants to subdue and failure from the side it wants to win. Russia is bouncing back from the sanctions, experiencing an upswing in the power of the ruble. And the sanctions themselves are so absurdly overkill that they’ve had unintended benefits for Russia; the withdrawal of U.S. fast food chains and other companies from Russia have provided an opportunity for Russian businesses to fill their role, making Russia more economically self-reliant. At the same time, the sanctions are harming the economies of the imperialist countries far more than they’re hurting Russia’s. 

Which ironically is making the collapse of these countries more likely, and the collapse of Russia less likely; whereas Russians are overwhelmingly unified behind Operation Z, with a liberal minority being the only ones to oppose it, the drastic maneuvers Russia’s enemies have made to counter the operation are exposing their own lack of credibility. Most of the world hasn’t gone along with Washington’s sanctions because Washington is self-evidently hypocritical. It claims to care about “sovereignty,” yet it’s the country that’s invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and numerous other countries. It claims to care about “human rights” and “democracy,” yet it’s internationally infamous for having a deeply unreliable “democracy” and for violating the rights of its own people. The world is unwilling to follow its lead because of this, and these contradictions are making its people less likely to tolerate the economic impact on their lives from the sanctions. 

How can we believe that prices are being raised for “freedom” when our government obviously doesn’t care about our freedom, let alone the wellbeing of our children? Right now, there’s a baby formula shortage in the U.S. that the Russia sanctions are exacerbating. How can this be for the greater good by any stretch of the imagination? These questions are what many Americans are asking, and as a consequence, these Americans are going to become more open to revolutionary radicalization.

Most ironic of all is that the process of splitting up which Washington wants to happen in Russia is instead unfolding in Ukraine. The Donbass peoples have fought back and won their independence, forming the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. They’ve done this because Washington’s puppet regime in Kiev has done what the imperialists accuse their enemies of doing: flagrantly violating human rights, committing war crimes when their people rebel, and using their own people as human shields. Ukraine, Washington’s beloved tool for sowing death and destruction in Eurasia, is going to be left with greatly diminished territory. Russia’s recent gains in Mariupol have made victory for Russia, and for the ethnic Russians fighting Ukrainian fascism, overwhelmingly likely. It’s satisfying to see the schemes of the imperialists unravel.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.