For what’s now been a full ten years, the United States has been empowering the fascist movement within Ukraine to carry out atrocities. And these crimes in many ways mirror what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians. The scale of this mass murder effort has been much smaller, buy it’s still mass murder, and the perpetrators would have massively expanded the horrors if Russia hadn’t intervened. Studying the story of Ukraine’s fascist terror campaign is crucial for building a new world, one where things like the occupation and genocide of Palestine no longer exists. Because these evils, committed against the Donbass, are ones that the empire has for the most part succeeded at concealing from Americans and Europeans.
Some within the North Atlantic sphere, like the Irish demonstrators pictured above, have responded to the crimes against Donbass in the same ways that many are now responding to the crimes against Gaza. But they’ve been in the minority. It was only when the Palestinian genocide accelerated last year, and certain sickening realities became impossible to ignore, that Washington’s nature as a genocidal entity got exposed to most people; or rather most people within the core imperialist countries. Everyone who’s experienced Washington’s genocides has always known this, but it’s easy for we within the core to remain ignorant about our government’s role. Which is a problem that we have to fix.
We need to build a mass movement against imperialism, and do so while keeping these recent failures in mind. Imperialism’s crimes should not have had to get this bad for there to be a popular reaction within the imperial sphere; it’s not acceptable for us to have only mobilized afterwards. We should all have been protesting like this prior to October 7, because 2023 was already the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children; moreover, a genocide against Palestinians has been happening for the last 76 years, since the Nakba began. We also should have been mobilizing against the evils our government had been committing in Donbass, and Yemen, and Sudan, and so many other places.
Had we done these things, this new expansion of the genocide wouldn’t have been able to happen. I don’t condemn the USA’s people because of this; rather I condemn the leaders of the country’s established activist organizations. Long ago, they retreated into leftism, and thereby abandoned the masses; by keeping our movement insular, they’ve played a crucial role in letting things get to this point.
We can’t turn back time; hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are already dead, and many more are holding onto life while their injuries slowly destroy them. The only thing we can do now is aid the effort at getting justice for Palestine, which is going to represent an extension of the justice effort within Donbass. The project to hold the officials behind the Gaza genocide accountable is inseparable from the project to hold Kiev’s criminal rulers accountable, because all of these actors are on the same side. This is the side of imperialism, which decided that Donbass and Palestinian lives were expendable for the sake of maintaining global monopoly domination.
There are plenty of voices that try to separate Donbass from Palestine, but all of their arguments are defeated by the reality of what Kiev has done to its targets. The Ukrainian coup regime, motivated by an ideology that glorifies Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, has pursued collective punishment like how the Zionist state’s officials have. The Banderite government has described the targets of its aggression as sub-human, articulated plans to forcibly relocate the Donbass people via “filtration camps,” and established a legal paradigm that makes Russian speakers into an otherized group. Kiev has used so many of the methods for terror that the Zionist state is using: drone striking civilians, having the armed forces commit atrocities, deliberately cutting communities off from essential resources, putting huge numbers of children in the ground.
Kiev has proven that the peoples of Crimea and Donbass were right to vote for leaving Ukraine’s jurisdiction. The Russian-speaking peoples in these places feared that Ukraine’s post-coup government wouldn’t treat them with respect, and the way in which Kiev has reacted to their decision demonstrates its Nazistic character. It was constitutional for these places to have broken from the capital, but the Banderites don’t view Russian speakers as deserving of constitutional rights, nor of human rights. So Kiev tried to forcibly retake the land, hiding behind a narrative about wanting to bring “democracy” to the eastern lands when its true goal was Ukrainian Lebensraum.
The outcome has been the creation of mass graves throughout Donbass, parallel to the mass graves in Gaza. And for as much as Russia gets portrayed as the aggressor, had it not stepped in during February 2022 these graves would have become much bigger; in that month, Kiev had increased its shelling of the Donbass by 400%, showing it intended to invade and fulfill its ethnic cleansing goals.
Can you call this genocide? I believe so, for the same reason that what “Israel” is doing to Lebanon’s people can be considered genocide. There’s no clearly defined amount of deaths that a genocidal campaign needs to involve in order to qualify for that label; as soon as a state starts successfully working to destroy a people, in whole or in part, it’s already descended to that lowest moral status. If the assault on Lebanon is a genocide, even though its death count isn’t as big as Gaza’s, then the assault on the Donbass fits the same category. Russia’s effort to provide justice for Donbass represents hope, though; hope that justice will also come for the Palestinians. The situation used to look hopeless for the Donbass communities; seemingly without recourse, they were under threat from a military that was led by genocidal maniacs, and that was supported by the world’s largest superpower. Then a sufficient counter-force appeared, and demilitarized not just Ukraine but also the wider NATO war machine.
This development left that war machine weaker in time for the Al Aqsa Flood operation, which was itself partly inspired by Russia’s success in fighting the United States. Now the Palestinian resistance, in tandem with Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, have weakened Zionism enough for the “Israeli” settler state to be in existential crisis. “Israel” is expected to experience $100 billion dollars in economic losses this year, entered into an energy crisis that will last as long as its wars do, and so far seen at least half a million citizens permanently leave.
The end outcome is for Zionism to end; it can’t survive when it loses its demographic dominance over Palestine, which it’s inevitably going to if “Israel” continues on its present path. “Netanyahu is escalating because Israel is losing its war against the Palestinian people,” writes the CPBG-ML, “and the only path he sees to ‘victory’ is one that will involve his imperialist masters directly, bringing in US and European forces to do the fighting for him. In fact, there is no path to victory for the zionist-imperialist cabal. The workers of the USA and Europe will not fight for this bankrupt cause. The fascists that the imperial gang raised in Ukraine are getting their just desserts and are showing what will be the fate of any who are drawn down that poisoned path.”
The “Israeli” officials will likely evade justice for longer than the Banderites will; the imperialists see Ukraine as expendable, but are going to support “Israel” until it no longer exists. How long “Israel” lasts depends on whether it wants to pick the kind of fight with Iran that Ukraine picked with Russia; such an escalation could happen, but it’s also possible that “Israel” will simply keep engaging in symbolic strikes against Iran, held back by the economic and nuclear risks.
I personally don’t expect Iran to deliver justice in exactly the same way Russia has, though it’s instrumental in wearing down Zionism’s strength. It’s likelier that the final blows against the Zionist entity, and the efforts to put its war criminals on trial, will be carried out by the Palestinians themselves. When they have their own state, and “Israel” has completed its collapse, Zionism’s foremost victims will be able to work with their many allies towards rectifying an immense injustice. We’ll see how many “Israelis” are interested in truth and reconciliation, but what happens next is not going to be their choice. It will be determined by the ones who, for so long, haven’t been able to have autonomy on their own land.
————————————————————————
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 pressures amid 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.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment