The cycle of perpetual war the U.S. empire has engineered in Ukraine—and how to end it

I support Putin’s Operation Z on principle, because it counters Nazism and U.S. hegemony. But it’s at risk of falling short, and of leaving Ukraine’s existence as a fascist state intact. Which would not only allow for an intensification of the human rights abuses overseen by Zelensky’s regime, but lead to a repeat of the cycle of conflict that NATO has engineered within Ukraine.

Even if Ukraine loses the war, and the fascists in Kiev lose control over a wide range of eastern territory, Kiev will be able to tighten its grip on the land it still has. This is what Zelensky plans to do when the facade of Ukraine’s upper hand in the conflict falls apart; he’s said that in the coming years, Ukraine will become a “big Israel,” where the National Guard and other policing forces get a vastly expanded presence in daily life. This will without a doubt lead to more human rights abuses—we must never forget the atrocities that Ukraine’s National Guard committed in the chaotic early months after the 2014 U.S.-orchestrated coup. Their repression of the population will be helped by the neo-Nazi paramilitaries, which are intent on continuing the persecution of the Jews, Romas, and ethnic Russians who exist in large numbers throughout Ukraine’s western nationalist stronghold areas.

With this acceleration of Ukraine’s post-2014 genocide will come an effort by the regime and its NATO puppeteers to rearm Ukraine. After Operation Z is over, the country will effectively lack a military, and its armed Nazis will be virtually wiped out. But the CIA will do all it can to stoke a new upsurge of ultra-nationalism. It’s already doing so by pinning atrocities on Russia without evidence, the objective of this being to stoke the locals into violent hatred for years or decades to come. And NATO has laid the foundations for this violence by shipping vast amounts of weapons into Ukraine. 

In this project’s propaganda department, the imperialists hope to create a new version of the Holodomor, the false atrocity story about Stalin having starved Ukraine. Best case scenario for the U.S. empire, the Kiev regime will harness this confused anti-Russian sentiment to successfully create a new army, built both through conscription and through social engineering; if the CIA can exploit the situation to cultivate a rise in ethnic nationalism, it will be able to put all of Ukraine’s new weapons to use.

With a new generation of armed forces, Kiev will get weapons into the hands of radicalized, angry men who resent the dire situation they’ve been placed in. Then the regime will wage a new war, both against the disfavored ethnic groups and against the independent territories. No doubt this effort to retake the Donbass—the eastern area which has won its independence from fascist Ukraine—will be aided by the entirety of NATO. Including Germany, which has been rearming in response to the Ukraine crisis. If the fascists lose this war, they’ll try to stage a repeat of Hitler’s maneuvers against Russia, complete with a German route stretching through Ukraine. And like was the case during World War II, Ukraine will have Nazi collaborators who are willing to facilitate the atrocities within the anti-Russian siege.

If we see such a development five or ten years from now, where a humiliated fascist Ukraine tries to take revenge, it will fulfill the dream of the U.S. military-industrial complex: an unbreakable cycle of war in Ukraine. The Washington defense contractors are trying to drag on this conflict as long as possible, getting NATO and the Kiev regime to refuse to surrender no matter how much progress Russia makes. What would be best for the weapons industry’s profits is a repeat of the present events several years from now.

Or at least this is how things will play out if Operation Z doesn’t succeed in effectively neutralizing Ukraine. To do this, Russia will need to avoid the trap Washington is attempting to set for it. This trap is designed to lure Putin into a quagmire resembling the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan, which helped weaken the USSR and ultimately destroy the Soviet bloc. The flaw in the U.S. empire’s plan is that today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union of the 1970s. The Russian Federation is on the rise as a global power, even as the U.S. does everything possible to crush it. Washington’s goal in provoking the Ukraine conflict was to weaken Russia, yet the ruble has recovered as the West has suffered comparatively worse consequences from the sanctions. And as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Russia Dayan Jayatilleka has assessed, Putin can avoid the strategic military dilemma that Washington seeks to create for him:

While no one is privy to the thinking of the Russian General Staff, logic indicates that the Western trap of turning Ukraine into a quagmire for Russia could perhaps be avoided by evading the focus on seizing territory and cities, and privileging the doctrine of the greatest military mind of the post-WWII era, Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap who urged a counterforce strategy, or in his words, “the annihilation of the living forces of the enemy,” that is, the liquidation of the adversary as a fighting force….

The biggest error that the Russian state could make is to think that the situation of conflict and blockade could be faced without a united front with the Russian Communists. No tendency or tradition in Russia has the doctrine and experience of facing and waging a political-military-ideological war on a world scale against Western imperialism than Russian Communism has. When the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost its way, it was the Russian Communists who broke away, reconstructed the party, and fought ideologically against the appeasement of NATO and the neoliberal economic reforms that were aimed at liquidating the state. No other political force has greater experience in fighting ideological war internationally. The incorporation of the Russian Communists in the ruling bloc would also cement ties with the Communist parties of China, Vietnam, and Cuba—most crucially, of China.

Vindicating Jayatilleka’s optimism about the strategic smarts of Russia’s communists, this week Russian Communist Party official Roman Kononenko said the following to interviewer Fergie Chambers…

RK: I think in the current stage of the conflict, only complete military defeat of Ukraine can be a resolution of this conflict, because even if they sign any kind of truce or peaceful agreement, nothing would end. Looks [like] we have an entire Russian border with an anti-Russian population. I think even if we would sign a peaceful agreement, and leave everything as it is, nothing would end. The shelling of Russian territories would be continued as they happened for years already, and yeah, yesterday they attacked the Belgorod region, the Kursk region and the Bryansk region. We need to put an end to this. Unfortunately, at this current stage, this is the only solution.

FC: When you say complete military defeat, does that imply, a partition of Donbass, as well? And does it also imply the end of Euromaidan [right-wing protest movement]? Does it imply a change of the Kiev government entirely?

RK: Complete capitulation of the Kiev government, and a new government should come. I think there must be some provisional government. Of course, the new government should be democratically elected, but under new conditions, not under control of fascist forces.

If these three criteria aren’t met—the total military defeat of Ukraine, the solidification of a united front between Putin’s camp and the communists, and Zelensky being replaced by a leader through truly democratic elections—Washington will get what it wants. What it wants is to keep Russia in a cycle of war that won’t end until the country is thoroughly destabilized, and the imperialists can swoop in to install a new U.S. puppet regime. Such a scenario won’t materialize as long as Putin’s opportunistic personal motives don’t define the actions Russia takes, and the communists are who drive the denazification effort forward.

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Ukraine: how the U.S. empire uses propaganda to turn people into monsters

The atomic bomb isn’t the most powerful weapon that the U.S. imperialists have ever used. There’s an even stronger tool that it constantly uses to inflict violence, and that tool is propaganda. It doesn’t merely cause harm to the people it targets, it turns them into monsters. Monsters who are willing to kill their fellow human beings for the benefit of American capital, and believe they’re doing so for a righteous cause.

In Ukraine, the imperialists have done this by indoctrinating their favored ethnic group to hate Russians. Which is an absurd project on its face, because “Ukrainians” aren’t truly a distinct ethnic group from Russians, and “Ukraine” isn’t truly a separate nation from Russia. Ukraine is inextricably tied to Russia, with their connection going back centuries. Ukraine is where the concept of Russia began, with the three identities of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians having originated in the Kievan Rus a millennium ago. This is indicated by the conclusion of Serhii Plokhy in Cambridge University Press that “There is little doubt in my mind that the Kyivan-era project involving the construction of a single identity had a profound impact on the subsequent identities of all the ethnic groups that constituted the Kyivan state.” Whatever cultural differences exist between the two countries, they’re within the same family tree, and a relatively young one as far as cultural lineages go. The borders which make up Ukraine as we know it today are historically recent, and not reflective of this reality of how Russians as a nation are indigenous to the lands within those borders. When Putin says Russians and Ukrainians are one people, he’s right.

The worldview the imperialists have pushed upon the Ukrainians says that this history doesn’t matter. That Russians are not only separate from the vulgar and exclusionary concept of what modern Ukraine’s government claims “Ukraine” means, but are historic threats to the country’s livelihood. After Ukraine’s borders were drawn up amid the Russian Revolution, the imperialists began seeking to manufacture fissures among these two arbitrarily different identities of Russian and Ukrainian. They portrayed the regional nuances in their languages and cultures as an unbridgeable gap, as a fundamental discrepancy in values and character where the U.S.-favored Ukrainian group was portrayed as superior. Thus began the campaign to Balkanize Russia, which was founded upon the idea that Ukraine isn’t part of Russia.

This depended on the fabrication of an atrocity story, where Russia was accused of committing genocide against Ukrainians. After the 1932 famine—which was part of a historic cycle of famines that after then became broken by Stalin’s agricultural collectivization—the Nazi propagandists made up an account of Stalin having deliberately sought to starve Ukrainians. Even though in reality it was the petty-bourgeois kulaks who had created the famine by reacting to the class struggle through destroying food out of sheer greed, some amorphous supposed flaw in Stalin’s collectivization policy was named as the cause. The lie was picked up by William Randolph Hearst, the U.S. media monopolist who had been instrumental in manufacturing consent for Washington’s initial global imperialist projects over three decades prior. From there, it became part of the worldwide anti-communist orthodoxy that the Russians had engineered a famine in Ukraine.

You only have to look at the sources behind this lie to know the agenda behind it: projection. In addition to Nazi Germany of course having been a genocidal power, the United States had by that point used crop sabotage as a crucial weapon in defeating the continent’s indigenous peoples, and it was maintaining a eugenics and concentration camp program which would directly inspire Hitler’s atrocities. Since then, Washington has continued to use mass starvation and other war crimes to subdue the nations which disobey it, with U.S. sanctions currently creating a famine in Afghanistan. Yet Ukraine’s petty bourgeoisie has been eager to hold on to this narrative about how the communists are the ones who commit genocide. And with the Soviet Union’s dissolution, this narrative has evolved into a general hatred towards Russians, which provides the founding myth for the modern Ukrainian fascist project that these modern kulaks have acted as the social base for. 

The “Holodomor” is the Big Lie that served as the foundation for all the other lies the post-coup Kiev leaders have pushed to justify their proxy war against Russia: the idea that Putin annexed Crimea out of some imperialist drive rather than realpolitik in response to NATO’s expansion; the war crimes throughout the Donbass and broader Ukrainian conflicts that have been blamed on Putin, but that lack real evidence of Russian culpability; the narrative that Russia intervened this year unprovoked, when Kiev was clearly planning to invade the newly independent Donbass republics. (Kiev didn’t even recognize their legitimacy, and it had used extreme violence to try to subdue them beforehand.) The post-coup governments have been preparing for the current war propaganda campaign from 2014 onwards, aggressively promoting the Holodomor and other anti-Soviet narratives while censoring communist speech which would dispute these lies. 

The regime has gone so far as to portray Ukraine’s World War II Nazi collaborators as heroes who “liberated” Ukraine from communism, and has criminalized the challenging of this perception towards the country’s “founding fathers.” What’s been happening in Ukraine this last decade is a nation-building project, where the U.S. empire is purging every trace of Ukraine’s Russian heritage and constructing an artificial new “Ukraine” which exists in a vacuum within time. The last thousand years of deep ties to Russia no longer exist in this view, the only thing that’s ever existed is “Ukraine” as the fascists want us to understand it. With every new atrocity story, another facet is added to the mythology that the Ukrainian nationalists have built around Russia. And the more of a rationale exists for the atrocities that these nationalists themselves carry out.

The pogroms, beatings of political dissidents, shootings of ethnically or politically disfavored individuals, and other vigilante or paramilitary violence within post-coup Ukraine wouldn’t be possible without the government, or the fascist historical narrative the government puts forth. Ukraine’s political and military structure, infiltrated on every level by neo-Nazis, has fostered an environment increasingly resembling Nazi Germany. A dystopia in which the Army itself has come to use the slogan “Glory to Ukraine,” the rallying cry of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. “There are records showing that during the court hearings against OUN's leader Stepan Bandera in 1936, his supporters were accompanying the slogan 'Glory to Ukraine' with a hand-throwing fascist-style salute,” said Oleksandr Zaitsev, a historian from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, when the Army began using the slogan in 2018. As much as the West’s liberal media insists that “Slava Ukraini” is an innocent thing to chant, and that backing Ukraine in the conflict is a morally simple matter of backing “sovereignty,” the sinister reality of the situation grows ever more apparent.

In all likelihood, Ukraine will lose the war, and the regime won’t be able to attack the eastern republics which have successfully fought for freedom from this new fascism. But the myth of a century-long Russian victimization of Ukrainians will remain, and the imperialists will try to use it to foster a neo-Nazi resurgence within the country. Let’s hope the denazification process is extremely thorough.

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Rational self-interest, not “Russian imperialism,” is why Putin has intervened in Ukraine

Is imperialism Russia’s motive for intervening in Ukraine? Given that Russia is a capitalist state, and imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism according to Lenin, this possibility is worth interrogating—even if to repudiate it, as I’m going to attempt to do. Answering it depends on answering three questions. Does modern Russia’s socioeconomic character make it imperialist? Can Russia’s encroachment into Ukraine be considered an imperialist venture regardless? And if neither of these are true, then what is Russia's incentive? 

I argue that the answers to the first two are “no,” and that Putin’s actions can be explained by the theory of neorealism—which argues that the current structure of international relations makes war inevitable. Analyzing Russia’s actions through this lens can explain why Putin didn’t decide to take this action until this year. Putin has explicitly said that his intentions are to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine. Which reflects both the attitude he’s had towards Ukraine’s neo-Nazi paramilitary violence throughout the Donbass conflict (violence that’s been directed towards ethnic Russians), and his broader disappointment in the Soviet Union’s dissolution and Ukraine’s consequential alienation from Russia. It’s long been ideal for Putin that Ukraine would return to Russia’s sphere of influence. But to explain why he’s just now committed to subduing Ukraine, rather than in 2014 when the Donbass conflict began—or over two decades ago when he became president—we need to examine the factors that made him commit.

Firstly, is imperialist ambition one of these factors? According to Stanfield Smith of Monthly Review Online, Russia is not an imperialist power, because it “plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries’ labor and resources.” By this, Smith means that Russia lacks the strength of capital to have an imperialist relationship to the Global South. He comes to this conclusion by examining how well Russia matches up with Lenin’s definition of imperialism—which depends on the country in question wielding international monopoly and finance monopoly power—and finding that Russia’s strengths in these areas range from marginal to negligible. For instance, though Russia has a substantial export of capital, this consists largely of capital flight, which doesn’t necessarily presuppose the exploitation of the peripheral countries. Russia lacks this exploitative role because its biggest strength by far is in its military, which doesn’t facilitate the kinds of global exploitation that come from the countries with stronger capital.

For these reasons, writes Smith, Russia is closer to a semi-peripheral country than to a core country, lacking any dominant role in monopoly and finance capital. But does this mean any intervention it carries out can’t possibly be imperialist? It doesn’t, as there are examples of countries that aren’t part of the socioeconomic core but that still violate the sovereignty of their neighbors in an imperialist fashion. Israel and India, for instance, have been acting as colonial powers (respectively in Palestine and Kashmir) despite lacking the capital leverage to be imperialist powers. So if one concedes that Russia is imperialist, they could still argue Putin’s intent is at least one of imperial ambition in such a vein. Yet this argument also lacks sufficient support. Because upon examining the factors that motivated Putin to carry out Operation Z, as his intervention in Ukraine is called, you don’t find a Russian leadership that decided to act on a whim. You find a leadership that had been pushed into intervening through increasingly intense pressures, and that therefore has acted reluctantly—and how often can one say that a country which engages in colonialism is doing so reluctantly?

The reality is that Russia, rather than being a predator that’s been feverishly waiting to strike in Ukraine since 2014, has done everything it can to stall this intervention before being pushed into it by NATO. Operation Z is a last resort for a Russia that’s wanted to avoid war, but has been backed into a corner by the conflict-producing dynamics that neorealism observes. Putin may have a desire to protect the ethnic Russians in the Donbass from neo-Nazi militias, and to reverse the blow to Eurasian unity dealt by the USSR’s breakup, but he hasn’t seen Operation Z as worthwhile until the circumstances have left him with what he sees as no alternative. Putin knew there would be great economic costs to this maneuver, though he perhaps didn’t anticipate the reunification of the Western powers that came from his intervention. He’s made a trade-off.

Something analogous to this was argued by John J. Mearsheimer of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank which has a historic pro-U.S. bias but was still willing to publish his argument. Mearsheimer wrote in his 2014 essay Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin that “the taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.” Crucial to Mearsheimer’s argument is the idea that the 2014 transfer of power in Ukraine was not a democratic revolution, as the West claims, but a coup against a democratically elected leader. Mearsheimer sees this view of Ukraine’s recent history as correct, and concludes that it explained Putin’s annexation of Crimea later that year. 

With this installation of an anti-Russian regime along Russia’s borders, argued Mearsheimer, it was only “realpolitik” for Putin to have taken this step, as this occurred in a larger context of NATO expansion since the Cold War. When Mearsheimer referred to realpolitik, I believe he was arguing from a neorealist lens; according to a neorealist interpretation of the leadup to 2014’s crisis, the Western powers had perpetuated an international order that unavoidably leads to conflict. By creating a pattern of NATO expansion, then assimilating Ukraine into the pro-U.S. bloc, the West had created a threatening presence right next to Russia. Which made it in Putin’s best interests to respond to the Crimean pro-secession vote by annexing the territory, and backing separatists in the other parts of eastern Ukraine. He sought to create a buffer against whatever aggressions he feared would come from the new regime in Kiev.

Does an equivalent explanation apply to Operation Z? As indicated by the observation of Miron Lakomy of Politeja magazine, it’s evident that the Kremlin has a historical basis for viewing broader Ukraine, and not just the Donbass, as essential to take back into the pro-Russian bloc. In his 2016 article The Game of Ukraine: Conflict in Donbass as an Outcome of the Multilayered Rivalry: “the Kremlin wanted to keep NATO borders as far away as possible. Ukraine was, therefore [sic] perceived as the ‘last line of resistance’ against accelerating expansion eastwards.”

Is it any surprise, then, that Putin would carry out an operation to take away the post-coup Kiev regime’s paramilitary and military powers? If anything, it’s surprising that Putin didn’t do this years earlier. And he’s still holding back by merely making it his mission to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, rather than to depose Vladimir Zelensky like how Bush overthrew Saddam Hussein. The West has cultivated a situation where Ukraine could join NATO, which would lead to nuclear weapons along Russia’s border. And where Kiev has a regime which doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the newly independent Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic, which may have led to Ukraine invading these territories if Putin hadn’t preemptively gone after Ukraine’s forces. Operation Z serves as a way to ensure against Ukrainian aggression against the Donbass republics, and to create a deterrent against the Russian nightmare scenario of Ukraine joining NATO.

The leadup to what Putin has done was centered not around a resurgent Russian imperial drive, but around a mounting threat to Russia. The evidence is against the Kremlin seeking to go out of its way to engage in warfare; Russia both lacks the capital capacity to have any immediate material stake in imperialist aggression, and Putin held back from this intervention for eight years, even amid frequent Ukrainian shellings and fascist paramilitary atrocities throughout the Donbass. But Russia is functioning in an environment of geopolitics, where the U.S. and its allies have maintained an international order beyond the Cold War that’s designed to cultivate conflict. And now that Russia has given into the pressure, and intervened to protect its strategic interests, we’ve seen a good example to support neorealism’s argument. Neorealism says that countries have no path other than war in the present international order, which evidently applies to non-imperialist countries like Russia.

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The U.S. empire wants to exploit the climate crisis to gain leverage amid its decline

Today, there are two worlds. The one where a bright, prosperous life is being built for humanity, and the one where the forces of greed are bringing humanity backwards through destruction and intensified subjugation. The side of greed is increasingly threatened by the progression of history, so it’s ever more desperately trying to crush the side of progress. It will do anything to stop the rise of global communism, and to maintain the bloody reign of the U.S. empire. That includes exploiting the climate crisis to bring the rest of the planet down with it, and to come out on top by default. If the imperialists aren’t defeated, they’ll burn the world down just to spite the material reality that they so despise being confronted with.

This mad reactionary struggle, where the forces of capital and empire will sacrifice tens of millions of more lives and the biosphere’s existence for the sake of keeping their profits up, is indicated in the growing contrast between the warring sides of progress and reaction. The side of progress—China, Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the other anti-imperialist countries—has been experiencing unprecedented advances in living conditions. China has lifted over 800 million out of poverty and eliminated extreme impoverishment; Vietnam has had a parallel success at improving living standards; the DPRK and Cuba have continued to build up the structures supporting their end goal of similar prosperity, despite the grievous harm that U.S. sanctions are still able to cause towards them; even Ethiopia, an anti-imperialist country that’s undergoing a famine at the hands of imperialist destabilization, is coming to stand on its own feet economically with China’s aid. 

Similar stories of resilience and incremental progress are to varying degrees shared across the rest of the places that have broken free from imperial control, such as with Venezuela’s anti-poverty victories or with Bolivia’s rebuilding its social support systems after the reversal of its 2019 CIA coup. It’s mainly because of these anti-imperialist successes, particularly the Chinese example, that liberals like Bill Gates or Steven Pinker have been able to point to data showing that global deprivation has been going down in many respects. What they leave out is that this last half-century’s unprecedented progress in getting people better lives has overwhelmingly come from socialism, mainly Marxism-Leninism specifically. As much as liberals throughout the West seek to devalue China’s Marxist-Leninist example by calling it “state capitalist,” and leaving out the context of how China’s governmental structure is fundamentally based around proletarian democracy, the reality is that poverty has been combated in spite of capitalism. Which is ironically the system they aim to defend by making these arguments.

On the other side, in the parts of the world that remain under Washington’s grip, things have been getting worse. Inequality in the United States and essentially all the other imperialist countries, including the Scandinavian ones, has been growing. In the imperial center most of all, this has correlated with intensifying systemic injustices, such as a deadly militarization of the abusive police, an expansion of an inhumane for-profit prison system through migrant detention, and climate-related environmental crises that have pushed the poorest deeper into desperation. In the U.S. empire’s neo-colonies, the trend has looked different, but the situation has been deteriorating in other ways that the liberal optimists neglect to focus on. In Brazil, for instance, inequality may not have been increasing during the same decades when it was rising throughout the imperialist countries, but since the pandemic hit, the poverty alleviation progress it had made has been swiftly undone. And that progress itself happened within the context of Brazil having already been one of the hemisphere’s most unequal countries prior to the pandemic.

In Brazil, to preempt the turn towards the emerging multipolar order, the imperialists will at some point apply the destabilization tactics they’ve already used on places like Ethiopia. These tactics consist of the aiding of terrorist groups, the instigation of civil wars, the sabotage of infrastructure via proxy forces, starvation sanctions, meddling that incites violent unrest, coups or coup attempts, and disinformation campaigns designed to ethnically divide the local populations. Many of these maneuvers have already been used in Brazil in the last decade—they’re how Bolsonaro got into power—and such tools have recently been used in Haiti, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. 

Eventually, all of Latin America will be subject to the empire’s chaos-manufacturing efforts, as will all of the rest of the exploited world. It’s the logical conclusion of how Washington has chosen to react to the global rise of class struggle: by trying to make countries into failed states before they can break free from neo-colonialism, and by trying to destabilize countries which have already broken free. With the coming of the new great-power competition, all a country has to do to become a destabilization target is join China’s Belt and Road Initiative; this is the offense that’s made Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Eritrea subject to U.S. subversion efforts. The factor that provides a boost to every front of Washington’s growing campaign to manufacture crises, the variable that the imperialists clearly see as their windfall in an increasingly desperate moment for U.S. hegemony, is global warming. 

It’s appropriate that whereas the anti-imperialist bloc has been building up its living standards, and has been reducing its emissions through the environmental progress of countries like China, the imperialist bloc has been continuing to worsen its climate impacts. With every raise in the U.S. military budget, the planet gets hit harder by the single largest institutional source of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the American war machine.

Some dare call it conspiracy, though I would say it’s merely a byproduct of capitalism’s innate processes. Capitalism led to imperialism, which exacerbated the climate crisis. The climate crisis then made it far easier for the imperialists to destroy the nations that are rising up against them amid the decline of Pax Americana; Syria was an example of this, as the country’s drought was exploited by Washington’s jihadists to start off the war. Pentagon documents have indicated that U.S. strategists aim to inflict similar climate-related harm on Bangladesh (a BRI country), and last year Kamala Harris provided insight into the military elite’s attitude towards global warming by stating that water wars will no doubt happen in the near future. Harris said this sentiment has been repeated many times by U.S. military insiders, who clearly have intentions for using climate catastrophes as pretexts for intervention. Of course, those interventions won’t come before these countries have been targeted by CIA-backed terrorists, who will be portrayed as heroes in alternative to the demonized governments. 

The U.S. empire aims to leverage global warming to greatly shrink the global range of civilization, like it’s already used Covid-19 to try to do; Washington’s tightening of sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and other countries throughout the pandemic, its exploitation of the virus to demonize China, and its use of the crisis to impose further global austerity measures are only a prelude to what it will do in the coming decades. Because this pandemic’s impacts will be small compared to the cumulative impacts of the climate crisis. We must build solidarity within the global communist and anti-imperialist movements to stop the forces of reaction from succeeding, to keep the side of progress from being torn apart by this vicious scheme.

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“We will become a big Israel”: inspired by Zionism, Zelensky aims to intensify Ukraine’s genocide

One of the many infamous details about the post-coup regime in Ukraine is that it’s taken arms shipments from Israel. Specifically, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, a paramilitary that’s directly allied with the highest levels of the country’s government, has received Israeli weapons. This was shocking news for anyone not already aware that Israel has always been ideologically aligned with Nazism, given Zionism’s nature as a racist ideology which calls for the creation of an ethno-state built on genocidal land theft. And for Zionism’s opponents within the global anti-colonial movement, Israel’s aiding of Ukrainian Hitlerites has served as yet another damning angle to discredit the Zionist project. 

This last month, as Russia has successfully advanced its effort to kill off these neo-Nazi terrorists, Zelensky has reacted in a way which further exposes Israel’s racist nature—as well as the racist nature of his own regime. He said at a briefing for Ukrainian media that “We will become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face. We will not be surprised if we have representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in cinemas, supermarkets, and people with weapons. I am confident that the question of security will be issue number one for the next ten years. I am sure of it.”

In the mentality of Zionist doublethink, this statement is perfectly benign. When he promises to model Ukraine off of one of the most belligerent, dangerously militarized, and oppressive states on the planet, there’s no cause for alarm—because according to what the Zionists say, Israel isn’t any of these things. Supposedly its heavy presence of soldiers who publicly beat Palestinians with impunity is a necessary measure to prevent terrorism, or whatever the fascistic Israeli regime defines as “terrorism.” Supposedly all within Israel have equal rights, despite the dozens of discriminatory laws that mistreat Arabs and nonwhite Jews alike. Supposedly it’s been the natural order of things for Israel to isolate Gaza’s population to a tiny strip where no one leaves without Israel’s permission, and where civilians get deliberately bombed, shot, and starved.

Conversely, the Nazi collaborators in charge of Ukraine—who predictably are Zionists themselves—claim that their policies mirroring these Israeli apartheid atrocities are not atrocities at all. When investigators have uncovered mass graves in the Donbass filled with hundreds of residents killed by Kiev’s slaughter and collective punishment, the blame is all shifted onto Russia. When Zelensky has worked with the neo-Nazi militia members who are killing Jews, Romas, political dissidents, and ethnic Russians, it’s fine because Zelensky is Jewish. When the Ukrainian National Guard has committed numerous atrocities against civilians in partnership with the militias, it’s acceptable for Zelensky to name the National Guard as something that should be vastly expanded in its presence during the coming years. Surely the public won’t further be endangered by this. At least not the ethnically “Ukrainian” members of the public, who make up the social base for the racially hierarchical new nation that Kiev has invented.

There’s obviously a great deal of cognitive dissonance involved in the U.S. bloc’s support for what Zelensky has done, and plans to do. Everything is blamed on Putin, even though Putin’s hand was forced by the security threat that Washington had created by making Ukraine into a potential location for weapons of mass destruction. As we see Kiev expand its state violence by placing its own people under a militarized police state, we’ll be told it’s merely a proportionate response to Russia’s supposed war crimes. Which parallels the rationale for Israel’s abuses, in that “they’re at war” is used to excuse every human rights violation imaginable.

This is already the case when it comes to Ukraine, and has been the case since Obama’s team installed an ultra-nationalist regime in the country in 2014. When Crimeans overwhelmingly voted to join Russia due to the explicit threats of ethnic cleansing from the new Kiev officials, the imperialist media utterly omitted this indispensable piece of context so that they could demonize Putin. When the Kiev regime became indirectly scrutinized even by Western NGOs like Human Rights Watch for its complicity in atrocities, all we heard was a collection of Russiagate fairy tales which served to whitewash what the Ukrainian side was doing. When Kiev made it clear through these provocations that it intended to invade the newly independent DPR and LPR this year, this wasn’t mentioned either. All we’ve ever been informed about is what Russia has done in response to these threats, as well as atrocity stories that are as lacking in evidence as the Douma attack.

The consequence is a vast hole in our discourse, where the full scope of the Kiev regime’s evils is always concealed. Even when the pogroms, torture, shellings of civilians, beatings, and other horrors have gotten too severe for the Western media to not report on, these things are invariably presented in a way which lets the Zelensky government itself appear innocent. That’s how anyone is able to get away with the argument that Ukraine can’t be fascist because Zelensky is Jewish. Barack Obama was president of the United States for eight years, and under him, we saw the biggest loss of U.S. black wealth in history, the expansion of police militarization, and the cultivation of the conditions that allowed Trump to win. His skin color didn’t stop U.S. settler-colonialism’s genocide against Africans, and against other colonized peoples, from being continued and expanded. Nor did it stop the U.S. empire’s global violence, which is what brought about the Ukraine crisis. 

Identity politics is always the angle that liberals use when defending their token war criminal leaders, and it’s always dishonest for a simple reason: the violence hasn’t gone away. And according to the natural tendency of capitalist collapse, where fascism steps in to try to preserve the bourgeoisie’s threatened power, the violence keeps getting worse. It’s what we saw with Obama when Trump filled the liberal power vacuum, it’s what we’re seeing with Zelensky as the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists stoke further hatred, and it’s what we’ll see with Biden when a Republican fascist replaces his discredited administration.

Ukraine will come out of this conflict unable to attain its goal of a modern Lebensraum land grab within the Donbass region. Russia is simply doing too good of a job at destroying its military, and of eliminating the fascist militia members at the head of the atrocities. The regime—and the fascist movement adjacent to it—will react by turning inwards, directing its racist anger towards the people it can still hurt with impunity. That’s how Israel is reacting to the growing threats to the Zionist project, desperately trying to complete its genocide against Palestinians as U.S. hegemony wanes. And barring something unforeseen, fascist Ukraine will take the same path, ratcheting up the abuses several times over to compensate for its humiliation by Russia.

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Relentless criticism of all things: the key to not being led astray from revolution

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” was the conclusion that Lenin came to in the section of What Is To Be Done? which pertained to the concept of “freedom of criticism.” As Lenin assessed, this concept had been twisted by the opportunists to refer not to the kind of criticism which improves revolutionary work, but which seeks to discredit revolutionary work. They had made it mean the freedom to attack the ideas of class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, and overthrowing the capitalist state. The counterrevolutionaries had taken criticism, a crucial part of Marxism, and made it diametrically opposed to Marxism.

This shows how nothing is above criticism—even the concept of “criticism” itself. Any facet of revolution can be co-opted, just as anything revolutionary can be commodified by capitalism. When you see liberals appropriating the language of class struggle to make empty promises for votes, it’s like when companies sell Che Guevara shirts; the things that these words and figures stand for get drained of their meaning, twisted into tools for perpetuating the system. The challenge is knowing when we’re aiding in this dynamic of distorted revolutionary theory, because when we do, it feels to us like we’re promoting sound theory.

For instance, when headlines recently reported that Los Angeles gangs are sending their members to follow and rob wealthy residents, online leftists reacted with praise. But what about the class character of the organized crime entities receiving the praise? What about the material impacts of the act? Gangs are fundamentally petty bourgeois in nature, and they’re used by the CIA to distribute drugs to marginalized communities while sowing division among the lumpen. This is reflected underneath the surface of this Robin Hood-esque media narrative about those LA gangs; what they’re doing is not actually revolutionary, because it’s not furthering any workers movement. If anything, it’s creating an excuse for intensified policing of the city, which is already one of the country’s most horrifically unequal and misery-ridden places. If you want to glorify thus, you should consider exactly what you’re portraying as good, and how this might impact the decisions that you make as an organizer; would the conditions truly call for your group to start imitating the gangs by committing crimes, or would you only be entertaining a fascination with the violence of a lumpen environment that you’re not even necessarily connected to?

Similar flaws in thinking can be found when anarchists momentarily seize city blocks, or when Maoists engage in guerrilla warfare, and leftists who haven’t yet been adequately acquainted with theory assume that these things deserve support. When these little victories occur, we must always ask: why are they so small in scale, and why are they so often temporary and tenuous? The anarchist Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that was created two years ago wasn’t strategically built to last, but as a symbolic gesture that didn’t improve oppressed people’s conditions; this was shown by the project’s welcoming of liberals who promptly dismantled it, and by the picking of a location that was strategically absurd from a guerrilla warfare perspective. Namely near a militarized police station, during a time when the state’s forces hadn’t been made vulnerable in a way which would have let a breakaway zone there be sustainable.

The Maoist guerrillas in India and the Philippines have a better grasp of military theory than imperial center anarchists, but they too approach the struggle from a place of reaction rather than of practicality. It was Filipino communists who convinced me to stop supporting the Maoist guerrillas of the Philippines; their argument was that the Maoists are serving only to hold back the revolution by engaging in guerrilla struggle that’s based not around correct judgement of the conditions, but in ultra-leftism. 

As Stalin said, the ultra-lefts are as much opposed to revolution as the rightists are. And though the context in these places today is different, we see this reflected in how the Maoist organizations of the last half-century have conducted themselves. As Prakash Karat of the Communist Party of India Marxist has assessed, the Naxalite Maoists have stuck with a dogmatic embrace of adventurist tactics:

Naxalite tactics had been characterized by a dogmatic and sole reliance on armed struggle in its first phases. This was based on the sectarian ‘people’s war’ thesis put forward by Lin Biao at the ninth congress of the CPC (Communist Party of China). In India this brand of adventurism was interpreted by Charu Mazumdar to be the tactic of individual terrorism. After the debacle of this tactic in 1970-71 many groups split away condemning the ‘annihilation theory’.  However the pro-Charu groups have persisted in defending this ‘revolutionary line’ and continue to be practitioners of terrorism. The pro-Lin Biao groups in West Bengal, the Vinod Mishra group in Bhojpur, the People’s War group in Andhra Pradesh, and the Venu group in Kerala have all in some form or another continued to rely on the line of annihilation. The difference exists only in the emphasis. The CRC (Venu group) began talking of a ‘revolutionary mass line’ in 1979, by which they mean that annihilation of any enemy must be part of the mass struggle and resorted to only if the masses of an area approve of it. Except for the extreme fringe of the pro-Lin Biao groups the other groups who uphold [this] line currently talk of annihilation of the class enemy as an extension of the mass line. Though many groups have denounced the past practices as wrong, the condemnation has stemmed more from the failure of the tactic rather than any honest self-introspection as to its anti-Marxist character. Even those who renounce it as anti-Marxist, still cling to the theory of permanent armed struggle.

This was written in 1985. The consequence of the Naxalite faction’s lack of willingness to self-criticize on a fundamental level, and reject the adventurist ideas that led to these errors, has entrenched the division within India’s communist movement. The split that happened in Russia’s communist movement before the revolution has repeated itself, with the ultra-left faction continuing armed struggle despite there still being demonstrable evidence that electoralism is worth pursuing—and that refraining from going on the offensive is likely the way to gain the broadest support from the masses. In both the Philippines and India, ultra-leftism has produced factions which represent the adventurists that Lenin warned about:

When Marxists say that certain groups are adventurist, they have in mind the very definite and specific social and historical features of a phenomenon, one that every class-conscious worker should be familiar with. The history of Russian Social-Democracy teems with tiny groups, which sprang up for an hour, for several months, with no roots whatever among the masses (and politics without the masses are adventurist politics), and with no serious and stable principles. In a petty-bourgeois country, which is passing through a historical period of bourgeois reconstruction, it is inevitable that a motley assortment of intellectuals should join the workers, and that these intellectuals should attempt to form all kinds of groups, adventurist in character in the sense referred to above. Workers who do not wish to be fooled should subject every group to the closest scrutiny and ascertain how serious its principles are, and what roots it has in the masses. Put no faith in words; subject everything to the closest scrutiny—such is the motto of the Marxist workers.

Whether the problem is right opportunism (as we see in the social democrats) or adventurism (as we see in many anarchists, Maoists, and ultra-left fetishists for gangs), this scrutiny is the way to stop us from being led astray. Have Maoist guerrillas, gangs, and anarchists done good things? At times yes, but that doesn’t exempt them from ideological scrutiny. The same goes for Marxism-Leninism, despite it representing a superior revolutionary route to all of these factions; we must judge something by how well it advances the global proletarian movement, not by what it claims to be.

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Ukraine’s U.S.-backed mercenaries, imperialism’s inward turn, & the evolution of colonial violence

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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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.