The multipolar world has no room for fascist Ukraine’s ideology of war & genocide

Why is Russia determined to demilitarize Ukraine? Because since Obama’s team forced through the installation of an extreme right government in Kiev eight years ago, the country’s armed forces have been controlled by a ruling clique that’s driven by the most destructive ideology in existence. An ideology that rationalizes the persecution, murder, and forced displacement of much of the globe’s population, all in order to fulfill the goal of gaining land for the master race. When Adolf Hitler formulated this ideology, he took direct inspiration from the project by the American settlers to wipe out 90% of the Native population. His aim was to replicate what the U.S. settlers did across Eurasia, with the Jews, the Slavs, and the other threats to the “Aryans” needing to be exterminated to make way for the superior “nation.” Eliminating the Jews was how the Nazis aimed to get rid of the nation’s supposed internal threats, and eliminating the Slavs was how they aimed to acquire a continent’s worth of newly available land.

These facts are basic parts of Holocaust history, but apparently not even the Holocaust’s memory is safe from being damaged by the corrosive effects of imperialist propaganda. The liberals who whitewash Ukrainian fascism want us to forget the most important lessons from the Holocaust, during the most crucial moment ever for humanity to remember those lessons. We’re in a time when the United States government and its allies are doing everything they can to support a new version of the Third Reich within Ukraine, while fascist parties are speedily gaining power across the globe. We’re in a time where our media and academic institutions are taking every opportunity to censor those who tell the truth about the nature of Kiev’s government: that it’s an entity which has facilitated celebration of Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators, and that’s naturally seeking to replicate a Ukrainian equivalent of the Third Reich’s colonization project. This version of the Nazi “Lebensraum” land grab ideology looks like the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass Russian speakers, and the settling of the leftover land by those deemed to be the real “Ukrainians.”

The ideas behind this plan are medieval, if not neolithic. They’re informed by the perception that human history can only ever be different groups vying for control over territory, and that therefore the Jews, the Romas, and the Russian speakers must be trampled on lest these groups inevitably conspire to destroy the Ukrainians. (Whatever “Ukrainian” means according to Kiev’s exclusive and discriminatory definition.) This is why the U.S.-puppeted, ultra-nationalist security state that truly controls the country has pressured Zelensky into going along with a project to bring back the Holocaust, despite Zelensky himself being Jewish. This is why the government has effectively brought back the Nuremberg laws by criminalizing the speaking of Russian. This is why the CIA has been able to aid neo-Nazi terrorist organizations with the government’s complicity. The neo-Nazis and the imperialists share the goal of destroying Russia. If the neo-Nazis fulfill Hitler’s vision for a depopulated Russia, the imperialists won’t care less, because that would be perfectly aligned with imperialism’s desire to win on the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard.

The lesson socialists must learn from this is that when fascists show themselves to be fascists, you should treat them like fascists. You should equip yourself to defend yourself and those you care about from the violence that they’ll try to exact. Russia is doing this by working to disable Ukraine’s military, at the request of the Donbass separatists who’ve freed themselves from Kiev’s rule. Ukraine would have invaded the liberated regions if not for Russia’s intervention. Which, thanks to the recent referendum within these regions for joining the Russian Federation, has succeeded in terms of its goal to protect the bulk of the threatened populations. In reaction to Russia’s taking 20% of Ukraine, and then making this into Russian territory, Ukraine has requested to join NATO. NATO has been forced to reject this request, on the rational grounds that if Ukraine were to become a NATO country, the balance would be tipped towards nuclear war. The imperialists have had to make the same compromise in regards to the question of giving Ukraine long range nuclear missiles, which Washington has refused to do. 

Russia has outmaneuvered the imperialists using the power of the question “are you sure you want to take it that far,” like how the DPRK did. Now all the imperialists can do is continue their proxy war in the futile hope that Russia will still be destabilized.

To try to get this payoff, the imperialists are igniting chaos wherever they can. They’ve instigated a new conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, carried out a false flag in which a Russian pipeline has been exploded, and created a psyop where Putin’s words have been taken out of context to make it appear as if he’s threatened nuclear war. In reality, he’s merely made the Donbass into a part of Russia, which the imperialists have viewed as a provocation in itself. Washington is getting so desperate that it’s acting the way the Nazis likely would have acted during the runup to World War II if they had had the atom bomb. 

This year, the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review omitted the idea of a no use first policy, in contrast to Russia’s ongoing stance that it won’t use nukes unless someone else nukes it. And despite NATO still having one last shred of rationality on nuclear issues (for now) by not letting Ukraine join, it’s backing Ukraine’s attempts to take territory away from regions that are now part of the Russian Federation, ignoring the nuclear risk that this poses. Throughout U.S. imperialism’s decline since the start of the War on Terror and the new cold war, the State Department has shed the old diplomatic norms, which nurtured the idea of detente. It’s increasingly abandoned the idea of diplomacy more broadly. Washington is a mad dog, more willing to do something reckless as it gets more isolated.

The U.S. and its Ukrainian proxies aren’t acting like this because they’re confident they’ll win. They’re lashing out due to how apparent it’s become that they’ll never achieve their destabilization goals. Ukraine’s recent efforts to take back territory have come at strategic costs, costs that will ultimately prove to be fatal. The imperialist media talks about a Russian “brain drain,” but Ukraine has undergone a depletion of its troops that’s rendered unrealistic its goal of restoring the old border arrangement. These exertions are rash actions by a regime that lost hope for fulfilling its Lebensraum ambitions long ago, and is trying to momentarily gain jurisdiction over as many territories as it can before Russia completes its goals. 

These goals never included gaining as much territory as possible; territory is not necessarily vital to winning a war. These goals are the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine so that Kiev is rendered impotent, and can no longer menace the Donbass peoples. Taking back plenty of the Ukrainian-controlled territory will no doubt be a byproduct of that, but land is not Russia’s vital concern.

With this referendum, that vision for a permanently liberated Donbass has already been fulfilled, aside from the remaining work Russia still needs to do in regards to picking off Ukraine’s armed forces. By making the Donbass part of Russia, Russia has established a literal boundary of demarcation that the imperialists won’t cross. The imperialists won’t do anything more substantial than continue to aid Ukraine’s self-defeating land grab attempts. Because if they were to seriously try to wrest back the Donbass region, they would turn the core imperialist countries into one big nuclear wasteland. 

A few years ago, President Trump promised that he would bring “fire and fury” upon the DPRK. Then he capitulated to Kim Jong Un, because the DPRK had won the negotiations years prior. Recently, one British Prime Minister infamously made a similar promise, getting applause from the other imperialists in the room for declaring a commitment to pushing the button if it comes to that. In reality, what Britain and the other decaying imperial powers will do is keep stirring up trouble wherever they can, while not daring to do something that they know will create blowback they can’t manage. Russia, China, or north Korea are never going to start a nuclear war, the imperialist powers would have to initiate the process. Which they won’t intentionally do.

The dark reality is that though imperialism isn’t suicidal, it’s cultivated the unstable conditions that make nuclear war more of a danger than it’s ever been. All it would take to start World War III is one mistake. For as long as the imperialists have the tools to perpetuate these conditions, our paradigm of unprecedented danger will continue. Our great source of hope is that the transition towards multipolarity can’t be stopped, meaning imperialism’s hand can only keep getting weaker. 

The imperialist media is insisting the winter will make the big difference in finally bringing the Russian economic collapse Washington hopes for. But that would be in spite of a thus-far ineffectiveness in the sanctions that U.S. officials have been admitting frustration over. Russia is winning the war by an honest strategic analysis. China continues to establish credibility for its Belt and Road Initiative, while working to strengthen U.S.-targeted countries in their security mechanisms to prevent color revolutions. The balance continues to tip away from Washington’s favor.

The “might makes right” ideology that the U.S. empire exported to Ukraine has been proven not to speak to some unavoidable facet of human nature, because “human nature” is determined by the given conditions and the conditions are changing. Ukrainian fascism, and ultimately the imperialist force behind it, will be wiped from existence by the unstoppable progression into a new historical epoch. An epoch where a cooperative new global order has been constructed, and where another wave of revolutions can sweep away a decaying monopoly capital.

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Ukraine: the testing ground for the USA’s own fascist terror campaign

One of the most ominous chapters in history is the Jakarta Method. This was the campaign that the CIA carried out during the Cold War in which millions of people involved in the global class struggle were murdered. Starting with the mass violence effort orchestrated by the military dictatorship that U.S. imperialism installed in Indonesia, the Method was exported to Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and the other Latin American countries in which U.S. coups took place. In Indonesia, the violence was the most indiscriminate, and for this reason ended up taking hundreds of thousands of lives. Anyone who was even vaguely suspected of holding socialist sympathies got hunted down, and either murdered or put into a concentration camp. Ethnic minorities like the Chinese were subjected to genocide. 

The bodies of the targets were all disposed of away from public life, which had been fully taken over by a regime obsessed with stoking anti-communist paranoia. The trauma the country had experienced was buried, the records of the atrocities fully censored for decades. These crimes, and the crimes elsewhere that they served as a model for, were instrumental in making capitalism win the cold war. As inequality intensifies, and as fascism rises again throughout the Euro-American countries, a version of the Jakarta Method will soon be replicated in the core of imperialism.

Ukraine’s anti-communist suppression model

Those who’ve gained class consciousness, and therefore become at risk of being targeted by such a purge, may consider drastic options for survival: fleeing the country, resorting to guerrilla struggle so they can escape the state’s jurisdiction, taking one’s political work fully underground. (The latter won’t protect you, as in the digital age all of your past online sentiments are seamlessly archived to be used against you.) Perhaps the militant resistance option will become optimal at some point. But we must not react to this threat we face by doing what the uncommitted U.S. communists of the McCarthy era did, which was panic and fully disband without even bothering to continue their work in clandestine form. We must carefully study the nature of the danger, and respond accordingly.

Part of this is recognizing that America’s equivalent of Jakarta will not be precisely like the Jakarta Method. It will be something subtle, something insidious, something that the untrained individual can’t detect until it’s already too late for them. Our conditions in the core are different from that of the neo-colonies, and therefore will prompt a distinct type of counterinsurgency from the ruling class.

We can get a relatively accurate picture of what this counterinsurgency will look like by examining the fascist paradigm within Ukraine. Since the 2014 U.S. coup, the Ukrainian people have been demobilized. The rise of the neo-Nazi militias, and the Odessa Massacre of May 2014, have left the country in a state of trauma that blunts any kind of revolutionary organizing. The banning of the communist party, and ultimately of all the other anti-fascist parties, has been easy. When communists, Russian speakers, Jews, Romas, anti-fascist journalists, and the LGBT community have been getting violently targeted with impunity, there’s a sense that fascism can’t be challenged. The Banderites are able to rewrite history so that their movement’s Nazi collaborationist roots get glorified, and the country can be modified into an ideal location for NATO proxy war efforts.

The great similarity between the fascism that U.S. imperialism is cultivating in Ukraine, and the fascism that it’s cultivating in the core, is that both thrive on destabilization. Ukraine’s descent into failed state status has enabled the rise of the Nazi militias, which aren’t held in check by law enforcement and can only be eliminated by Russia’s special operation. As the U.S. becomes ever more of a failed state itself, its public services deteriorating as society fails to absorb upsets like the pandemic, our own fascists are exploiting the crisis. In our age of climatic collapse, biopolitics, endless neoliberal austerity, and imperial decline, the capitalist world is in a process of collapse, and fascist paramilitarism is filling the emerging power vacuums. As the system unravels, the ruling class creates proxy forces to suppress revolution. 

We’ve seen this in all the countries which have been torn apart by imperialist wars, and which have seen the rise of U.S.-created terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, ISIS, or Boko Haram. In these destabilized zones, which are constantly growing, the imperialists seek to perpetuate chaos so that they can keep waging war and looting the occupied areas. When conditions in the United States deteriorate enough, this model for proxy warfare will be imported to the core, as always happens with the violence which empires perpetrate abroad.

What makes this counterinsurgency insidious is that it’s based within infiltration. It uses psychological operations to distort revolutionary theory into ideological weapons for reaction, to recruit people with revolutionary potential into themselves being agents for reactionary intrigue. That’s the terrifying subtlety of the American Jakarta: it’s a fascist terror campaign that disguises itself as the opposite, that convinces its targets to support and work for the campaign’s leaders.

Weaponizing the left against itself

Even on a surface level, psyops play an indispensable role within America’s fascist movement, and the same applies to European countries with resurgent fascist presences such as Germany. In both of these places, QAnon has gained a wild amount of influence. This psyop, which has been amplified and quite possibly created by members of the same “deep state” its followers decry, fills the role of the fascist manipulation tactic which leverages public anger at systemic failures. Chris Hedges has written about these reactionary efforts to tap into popular discontent: “The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice….As in the past, these new fascist parties cater to emotional yearnings. They give vent to the feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, despair and alienation. They promise unattainable miracles. They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories including QAnon. But most of all, they promise vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed the nation.”

This psychological attack method, in which the ruling class creates appalling conditions and then uses the pain caused by those conditions to sell its ideological poison, is behind the perpetual explosions in violence that our society experiences nowadays. Whether directly or not, our government is creating these mass shootings. It’s taking the despair and anger that so many feel towards the world, and diverting it towards hypermasculine, ultraviolent fantasies. The militaristic propaganda that Americans are saturated with, and the lack of constructive social outlets under a decaying neoliberal order, combine to make violence feel like the only recourse for angry men. These are the social sicknesses that create a perfect environment for far-right stochastic terrorism, in which demagogues use racist rhetoric to radicalize growing amounts of these men to murder fascism’s targets. 

That’s how we’ve gotten the initial stages of American Jakarta, where neo-Nazis are massacring people of color while wearing Ukrainian paramilitary insignias. In time, Ukraine could become a more direct source for U.S. white supremacist terrorism, because there’s a years-long-running pipeline of American Nazis going to Ukraine to gain combat experience. U.S. imperialism is engineering a global feedback loop of violence that could end with America experiencing its own Odessa. The courts have already set a precedent legalizing right-wing vigilantism against protesters.

That’s only the most detectable aspect of the threat. And given how aggressively liberals whitewash Ukrainian Nazism, it’s not even fully perceptible without first doing the work to reject imperialism’s narratives. The more insidious aspects are the ones in which the psyops exploit revolutionary discontent, and use it as a tool to manipulate us into aiding counterrevolution. 

What does this look like? We can see it abroad every time leftists get won over towards supporting one of imperialism’s terrorist organizations under the impression that they’re fighting for liberation. The anarchists who’ve joined Azov regiments because they’re fighting against Russia; the anarchists and other western chauvinist leftists who’ve embraced Rojavan “socialism” when Rojava has carried out ethnic cleansing; the Maoists who uncritically support the insurgents in the Philippines when these insurgents are being weaponized against China; all of these examples show how leftists will inevitably be used against themselves when they aren’t operating based upon principled Marxism.

Even those who call themselves Marxist-Leninists aren’t immune to the counterrevolutionary ideas which imperialism nurtures. As Professor Derese G Kassa has written about the counterrevolutionary consequences of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front’s rule, under which Ethiopia became an apartheid state:

[The TPLF] was founded by young radical Marxist Leninist intellectuals who bitterly fought their fellow school mates about the primacy of the “National Question” in Ethiopia as opposed to “Class Struggle.”...Then there is the ascetic, self-effacing, Front idolizing culture where the organization itself occupies a mythical status and those that died in the struggle sat on a pedestal as “martyrs” of the revolution. In fact, the language of political violence in TPLF is awash with biblical terms such as “sacrifice”, “shedding blood”, “salvation” [harinet] etc. One wonders if the millennia old Christian traditions of Tigray melted with its nationalist cum Marxist import. Even after three decades of incumbency, TPLF old guards do not relent to remind us that they “shed their blood” and “sacrificed their brothers and sisters” to accede to power.

Now the imperialists have used the TPLF to start a civil war in Ethiopia, motivated by reactionary desire to restore Tigrayan ethnic supremacy to a country which recently shook it off. The destabilization campaign these terrorists are carrying out, launched to try to destroy the BRI’s presence within the horn of Africa, fits with the ideas of the western ultra-leftists who share ideological kinship with the TPLF. These ideas are race reductionism, the romanticization of violent struggle for the sake of it, and opposition towards anything that doesn’t live up to the ultra-left standards for what’s “revolutionary.” They’re reactive, rather than dialectical. They leave no room for historical materialism, a Marxist analysis of contradictions, or the other pragmatic facets of communism. And this leads their adherents to embrace militant antagonism towards whatever things are deemed the enemy, which imperialist atrocity propaganda is now painting Ethiopia, Eritrea, and China as.

These psyops come from the same place QAnon came from, and use the same emotional tools. They exploit popular discontent to create cults that threaten revolutionary progress. The underlying factor is false consciousness, where the targets of the psyops are led to believe they’ve found the solution to society’s ills. The way to immunize yourself from these deceptions is to realize that if a political ideology’s conclusions are informed not by empirical evidence and social practice, but by assertions that can only be traced back to more assertions, then it’s not a scientific belief framework. It’s a cult. These controlled opposition groups gain followers not through rigorous examination of conditions and ideas, but through emotional appeals that leave out the information which discredits their demagogic claims.

This is what we must keep in mind as we train and equip our cadres for physical resistance against the violence which the revolution’s enemies seek to bring upon us. Militancy is indispensable, but the idea of militancy can be twisted into something that serves these wrecker cults. You can be as armed and trained as you like, but if you’re informed by poisonous ideas, your strength will end up being used against the revolution’s interests. We must avoid this kind of error at all costs if we want to survive the purge.

Importing U.S. imperialism’s model for picking off enemies

When I say “at all costs,” I’m talking about costs that can be genuinely difficult to accept. When you choose not to enable wreckers, you reject the potential for relationships with groups and individuals who can appear on the surface to be incredibly attractive. Movement infiltrators are trained to be charismatic, and to preach ideas that make the members of the cause feel inspired. When these wreckers form organizations, these organizations provide their members with the benefits of a cult: community, guidance, the sense that one is validated. 

These psyop-engineered cults can be so big that they’re not even organizations, but millions-strong communities, QAnon being an obvious example. The important thing is that those drawn into the rabbit holes feel like they’ve found their path in life, and they can’t imagine what they would do if they decided to accept all the evidence showing their leaders are con artists. Their psychological dependency can run so deep that even when they know about this evidence, they simultaneously disbelieve it, because they see those positive things the cult brings them as unbearable to part with.

When these psychological control tactics are applied to people who’ve already attained class consciousness, but who haven’t learned how to see the warning signs for a con, it gives agents of reactionary intrigue extremely dangerous amounts of power. It makes the targets of the infiltration emotionally bound to the malicious actor, and this goes double if that actor has managed to create an entire organization dedicated to promoting their psyop. Fill a person’s need for connection, and when you display red flags to that person, their impulse won’t be to cut you off, even if that’s the principled thing to do. It will be to give you the benefit of the doubt, and to even be more grateful for the relationship precisely because of the ways in which you’ve mistreated them. That’s called trauma bonding, where the manipulation target is conditional to construct a mental narrative in which the relationship’s negative aspects are merely obstacles to be overcome to make the bond stronger.

If you’ve heard about the false predictions that QAnon has put forth, and about how the cult’s followers rationalize this as all part of “the plan,” this vicious cycle sounds familiar. These psyops attain a grip over one’s mind that can’t be shaken until one experiences the consequences of believing its lies, and by then it may be too late. The goal of the Vietnam War’s Phoenix Program was to use infiltration as a means for “neutralizing” the anti-imperialist resistors, which is being done inside the United States insofar as the feds can find genuine radicals. 

By employing these toxic relationship dynamics to recruit radical organizers into their operations, and by creating entire pseudo-revolutionary ideologies to sell their destructive agenda, wreckers are wielding great psychological weapons. Weapons that can lead radicals into getting themselves picked off, or into assisting in efforts to pick off other targets. Setting up targets for assassination has always been a tactic of infiltrators, but with the intensification of class conflict, violence is getting more common as the thing that these wrecking missions are intended to end in.

“This is an injustice to those who developed sound theory which is then warped for maximum negative impact and sold to young minds as truth,” writes Media for Justice in an analysis on how infiltrators use disinformation and twisted “liberation” theory to manipulate psychologically vulnerable individuals. To the counterinsurgency’s orchestrators, you’re either a weapon or a target. And by employing these perverted types of theory, self-described socialists can be turned into weapons as easily as reactionaries can. In Ukraine, this phenomenon is shown by the anarchists who are fighting alongside Nazis to frustrate Russia’s anti-fascist operation. 

If these anarchists have been won over towards this task, they can no doubt be compelled to follow the Ukrainian government’s implicit instructions for tracking down and murdering hundreds of individuals who support Russia. Ukraine has doxxed a list of people who it’s supposedly found to be Russian assets, opening up the possibility of a mass murder campaign in the vein of Jakarta. Should any murders happen, these Avoz-aligned “revolutionaries” will at the very least be complicit, and could be among the direct participants in the crimes.

There are countless ideas that the counterinsurgency’s agents use to promote their agenda of destruction, and there are countless types of people who these agents either pretend to be or started out as before being recruited. But there are underlying characteristics that can be identified among these bad actors. One is that they have class interests which make them detached from the means of production. This category includes both the petty bourgeoisie (who tend to be drawn to reactionary psyops) and the lumpenproletariat (which as Marx said can get drawn into their own types of reactionary intrigue). Someone of any social class can have revolutionary potential, but it’s the proletariat that’s the most reliably revolutionary class, because it’s the class with the clearest material interest in establishing socialism. So the ruling class seeks to weaponize those both above and below the proletariat against the socialist cause.

As the lumpen and the petty bourgeoisie have fundamentally different conditions—with the lumpen being divorced from the proletariat due to dispossession and the petty bourgeoisie being divorced from it due to being exploiters—the psyops targeted at them take on different characteristics. Think of a white Christian paranoid fantasy, versus an ultra-leftist fantasy that fetishizes gangs and “revolutionary” violence. (Predictably, when members of the lumpen become reactionary intrigue agents, they tend to be the gangster types of lumpen.) 

These are the two broad types of narratives that destabilization agents put forth. Which one of them someone falls for depends on whether they’re predisposed towards right opportunism or ultra-leftism. Whichever forms these psyops take, their goal is to discredit the essential idea of Marxism, that being class struggle. They obscure the indispensable role that proletarian revolution has in attaining society’s liberation, and claim that “liberation” means something else. Whether that’s vacuously glorifying “America,” some identitarian-obsessed version of “communism” that excludes the white proletariat, or a vague plan to have the criminal enterprises lead “the revolution.” These “revolutionary” plans are anything but, and can only end in further destabilization.

When you’ve been led to discard scientific socialism, when you’re being fed ideas that a serious examination shows to be ahistorical, when you’ve been persuaded to ignore your better judgement by defending somebody who has the red flags for being a wrecker, you’ve put yourself at serious risk. Especially in our current environment where the forces of reaction are increasingly out for blood. Operation Phoenix used infiltration to “neutralize” 81,740 members of the Viet Minh, with 26,369 among them having lost their lives. And the U.S. empire has carried out parallel mass extermination operations against liberation movement members in the core. 

The victims of this include not just the Panther leaders who were set up by infiltrators to be assassinated by police, or who were mysteriously dismembered during California’s famous serial killer wave. They also include the hundreds of radicals, especially Black radicals, who were massacred in Jonestown. As Michael Meiers writes in his book Was Jonestown a CIA Experiment, Jones and his CIA handlers carefully orchestrated a psyop to convince the world that he was a communist, and that the People’s Temple was Marxist: “If Jim Jones had his way history would remember him as a psychopathic communist whose drug-induced paranoia triggered the mass suicide of his followers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has studied Jones knows that he projected an image to the public that was almost exactly opposite reality and that unravelling the cloaks of illusion that surrounded him might well be compared to viewing the dance of the seven veils. As each veil is removed another is exposed; a veil on top of a veil, on top of a veil.”

The Temple sought to associate itself with the Cuban government and the Russian embassy in order to sell this narrative about it being a communist organization. Behind the scenes, Jones was being backed by prominent right-wing figures and intelligence operatives, and was giving anti-communist speeches throughout Latin America.

His purpose was to lead communists into a situation where the feds could gather intelligence on them, and where they could be subjected to CIA mind control drug experiments inside a South American concentration camp. We can absolutely expect such tragedies to occur again within the history of U.S. anti-communist infiltration, whether it takes the form of regular cult sexual abuse or develops to the same destructive scale that Jonestown did. This is because if there’s a new Jim Jones in operation today, we don’t know who they are. They could be the leader of any of the pseudo-Marxist organizations that now exist, and there could be multiple actors within multiple organizations who’ve taken on the role of Jones.

I’ve drawn parallels between the Jonestown story and a couple of Intelligence operations, those being COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS (the latter of which was about gathering information on the groups that supposedly host foreign infiltration projects on U.S. soil). But after learning about how the Phoenix Program used intrigue to pick off tens of thousands of communists in Vietnam alone, I now view Phoenix as the one which encompasses the violent types of counterrevolutionary schemes I’ve been studying. During the War on Terror, there have been increased efforts to apply Phoenix to the imperial center. And with the acceleration of imperial decline that Washington’s failed Ukraine geopolitical gamble has brought, as well as the testing ground for violence that Ukrainian fascism has provided, this importing of Phoenix’ tactics is accelerating.

We’re facing a “turnkey” tyranny, where all our government has to do to import the worst aspects of imperialism’s violence abroad is turn the key. As Douglas Valentine writes in The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World…

Fifty years later, the US government has expanded Phoenix worldwide, with all the missionary zeal of Jesuits. Only now its cadres are more highly indoctrinated. There is little resentment anymore among the rank and file….Phoenix fulfilled its destiny in the wake of 9/11 and became the template for policing the empire and fighting its eternal War on Terror. So successful were Phoenix operations in overthrowing the Ba’athist Party regime in Iraq that David Kilcullen, one of the US government’s top terrorism advisors in 2004, called for a “global Phoenix Program.” The threat of a global Phoenix Program is that it will become fully activated in the United States. If the CIA and military are successful at psychologically neutralizing suspected terrorists, what is to stop them applying the full systematic extent of Phoenix-style operations to include political dissidents, immigrants and despised minorities in America, just as they did in Vietnam?

Be careful who you trust. Be careful which organizations you join. Look into the backgrounds of leaders or individuals who seek to place themselves as messiahs or as exceptional; they’re the narcissistic opportunist types who tend to quietly associate with fascists despite claiming to be Marxists, or who display signs of being-crypto-fascists themselves during crucial moments. 

When someone demonstrates the signs of being a wrecker, don’t appease them by maintaining a relationship. Rip them out of your life like a tumor. Prepare yourself and your cadre to physically defend from them beforehand, because the USA’s Phoenix Program loves to recruit genuinely unhinged con artists. Con artists who have the potential to turn violent, or to at least start stalking their targets, when rejected. Understand that you’re not immune to propaganda or manipulation, and constantly critique yourself for any missteps you’ve made so you can avoid them in the future. There are true monsters out there, monsters that the highest levels of government have deliberately created to try to exterminate us. We must gain revolutionary intelligence knowledge, and use this knowledge to survive the point when Phoenix gets fully implemented where we are.

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Neo-colonial apologia, imperialist hypocrisy, & the chauvinism driving pro-NATO liberals

None are more hypocritical than the Americans who say that Russia is waging an imperialist war. The same goes for when they say China is carrying out a colonial genocide, or when they say the DPRK violates its people’s human rights, or when they say Cuba is anti-democratic. The biggest of these projections is the one in which Americans say the PRC is carrying out neo-colonialism. Because not only are the U.S. and its wealthiest allies themselves guilty of neo-colonialism, but the central motive behind their cold war escalations is to maintain this neo-colonial extraction.

The Ukraine proxy war is about maintaining parasitism

“Stand with Ukraine” is a euphemism for “we must defend neo-colonialism.” The perpetual robbery of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is the indispensable economic basis for the USA, and for all the countries that have joined in the USA’s effort to use Ukraine as a cudgel to destabilize Eurasia. Their riches aren’t built off of their own merits, but off of the continuation of colonialism’s siphonings from the vast majority of the global population. Since 1960 alone, $152 trillion have been transferred from the Global South to the imperialist countries, obviously without any transfers in the other direction apart from predatory loans. This has followed centuries of theft from these countries which was so extreme that Africa, an unfathomably rich continent, had come to be one of the world’s “poorest” places by the standards of the colonial thieves who pretend Africans handicapped their own civilizations. With the emergence of neo-colonialism, in which capital rather than material goods is the primary export from the core countries, even the outlying colonial resistor Ethiopia got assimilated into the global market structure which makes up modern imperialism. 

So was the case for countries like Haiti, which had managed to fight off domination by slavers during imperialism’s previous era. No one was spared this new paradigm of enslavement. In the age of New Imperialism, the only way for an exploited country to escape its exploitation is by refusing to comply with the policy demands of foreign capital. Which comes at the cost of the imperialists using sanctions to try to starve its people, and bringing war to it if that’s what’s needed to subdue the disobedient government. The material assets that the imperialist powers find so much pride in possessing, from the USA’s unparalleled wealth to the British Crown’s jewels, all come from theft. And for the settler colonies among them, that includes theft via internal imperialism in addition to the external kind. The oil that U.S. executives are making great profits off amid the resource cutoff from the Russia sanctions is being extracted within occupied indigenous land. While the inhabitants of the exploited countries bear the humanitarian costs from the economic crisis the war has created, and the U.S. empire’s internal colonies suffer the most from the wartime sacrifices, these parasites build their personal empires from the catastrophe’s byproducts.

The liberal academics, activists, NGO members, and commentators who provide the “progressive” side of the Ukraine proxy war’s narrative backing don’t dispute that neo-colonialism is real. Yet their recognition of the existence of U.S. imperialism is rendered inconsequential by their promotion of imperialism's propaganda. The fact that they know imperial extraction is happening makes their pro-imperialist stances all the more reprehensible, because they’re consciously complicit in the warfare which keeps global exploitation going. They would say that they’re merely concerned about “human rights,” or whatever other slogan the State Department is using. But they’re not being truthful. They know the wars Washington is waging in the name of these “concerns” are what prop up the neo-colonial structure, as not even the most elite of the imperialists believe Washington invests its resources for altruistic reasons. It invests its resources in the hope to benefit capital.

Not only does their stance enable Washington’s sanctions, backing of terrorists, support for genocidal proxy war states, military occupations, bombings, drone strikes, propagations of disinformation designed to sow violence, outright resource theft from places like Syria, and other criminal actions, but it enables the enforced poverty of billions. All of these crimes make the Global South vastly less equipped to absorb the climate crisis, which these liberals claim to take seriously.

The current imperialist scheme to break up Russia and recolonize China isn’t going to work, as these powers are too strong and united to be beaten at this point. But the fact that liberals are backing this pathetically desperate maneuver, with all the human costs it’s having, shows they’ll do anything to try to preserve their share of imperialism’s dwindling spoils. That includes condemning the working class in the core countries to further deterioration in their conditions from the sanctions blowback, even after half a century of neoliberal attacks on their livelihoods. It also includes exploiting the conflict to impose more privatization and austerity onto the Ukrainian people, even after they’ve suffered especially badly among those impacted by the post-Soviet corporate shock policies. 

The imperialists are creating more neo-colonies in eastern Europe, while bringing those in the core ever closer to the conditions of the neo-colonies, in the hope that this will stop capital’s demise. They also hope the Nordic states joining NATO will restore U.S. hegemony. In reality, these developments have accelerated the decay of the imperialist bloc, subjecting more places to militarization and austerity that will intensify capitalism’s contradictions. Imperialism needs a social base of well-bribed labor aristocrats in the core to function, and neo-colonial extraction is the only way to maintain that social base. The more the imperialists lose control over the neo-colonies, the more they’ll be forced to contract their capital, and the more those in the core countries will experience the harm from imperialism’s inward turn. The great oil, arms, and financial profits our ruling class is enjoying can’t reverse the system’s decline as long as its global extractive base keeps disappearing. Imperialism’s benefactors are living on borrowed time.

Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine, which is only one among a series of destructive U.S. projects to counter the emergence of a multipolarity, was launched to try to maintain that neo-colonial equilibrium. The hope of the imperialists is that Russia will be destabilized. That would leave China vulnerable to getting subdued, and eliminate the BRI’s threat towards neo-colonialism’s enforced underdevelopment. The opposite will happen. When the exploited countries gain the ability to stand on their own feet economically, they’ll be freed from the predatory relationship to the core which perpetuates their exploitation. This scenario would mean a drastic weakening of capital, so capital’s allies from all parts of the ideological spectrum will never stop supporting imperialism’s machinations. That’s why this country’s “left” has consistently united with the neoconservatives not just on the current funneling of weapons to Ukraine, but on the bombings of Syria, the murders of Libya and Yugoslavia, the coup attempts against socialist governments across Latin America, and Washington’s hybrid warfare tactics against China.

U.S. & its proxies on the verge of being even further discredited

It’s crucial that the benefactors of this parasitic global order foist the blame for our crises onto Washington’s adversaries, because otherwise the truth of the situation would be apparent. Under no circumstances can the context of U.S. meddling that led up to the Ukraine conflict be recognized, or else the myths they depend on will become impossible to ignore. The 2014 phone call showing Obama’s team facilitated Ukraine’s transition towards an ultra-nationalist government can’t be discussed. Neither can the evidence that the protests leading up to the power transfer were U.S.-backed. Neither can the over eight-year-long U.S. backing for self-described National Socialists in Ukraine. Neither can the stated intentions of post-coup Kiev officials to ethnically cleanse the Donbass, which (along with the regime’s already consistent racial war crimes pattern) is what compelled Russia to intervene on behalf of the Russian-speaking population. 

Apologia for neo-colonialism, in which the western economic and political model gets fetishized as the only proper option for the entire globe, is at the root of this denial of the U.S. interference in Ukraine. The reason behind why deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych declined to join the EU, provoking a U.S.-backed uprising by kulak descendants, is because the EU had offered Ukraine a deal of neoliberal restructuring. The imperialists were trying to turn Ukraine into a neo-colony, which they’ve ultimately succeeded at through their coup and the conflict it led up to. They’ve manufactured a domino effect of crises within the country, and then within the world more broadly, in order to force through their desires for full Ukrainian economic subjugation and Eurasian instability. 

Ukraine has already been thoroughly looted by western corporations, so all the imperialists can now wring out of it is labor surplus from an increasingly destitute population. All while Zelensky turns Ukraine into a “big Israel,” where the country’s notoriously brutal National Guard gets inserted into daily life. Creating this police state is the only way the ultra-nationalists can hope to maintain control in the next few years, now that Ukraine’s economy has been almost cut in half and Ukraine’s military has been so effectively reduced in number. When Zelensky is freeing convicted torturers and child molesters so that they can fight, you know the Ukrainian imperialist compradors are getting desperate. Their blatant disregard for the laws of war, in which they’ve needlessly placed combat locations in places that put civilians at risk, has already discredited them to the point where even Amnesty International is talking about their war crimes. 

The war will drag on through the winter, picking off ever more of Ukraine’s generation of fighters as Europe suffers from the sanctions blowback. How long the imperialists will be able to keep it up after then is dubious. At some point, a breaking point will be reached. The conflict will be forced to shift towards an irregular kind, where the CIA’s neo-Nazis carry out random terrorist attacks in place of any actual military strategy. NATO’s propagandists will endlessly insist that the war can still be won, while manufacturing more atrocity stories to rally sympathy for their defeated fascist project. Ukraine will be a shell of itself even more than it is already, economically crippled and without the tools it needs to fulfill Washington’s scheme for wider chaos.

Maintaining hatred for Washington’s rivals is the only way this failing cold war endeavor can keep up its charade as something viable. False flags must routinely be directed against Russia, like they were against Serbia, Syria, and Washington’s other past prolonged war psyops. As the imperialists routinely shift the focus of their propaganda between Russia and China, the same demonizing lens must be held up to the Belt and Road Initiative, and to China’s policies in the crucial BRI node of Xinjiang. However conclusively the narratives of “rogue states” and “human rights abuses” can be debunked, the State Department’s propagandists will never stop repeating their lies, as these lies are what hold together the extractive setup. 

If these lies get sufficiently exposed, as the momentum of history amid U.S. imperial decline will ultimately make happen, the illusion of NATO’s role as an innocent justice enforcer will be irreparably shattered. The Iraq and Afghanistan invasions have already cost the imperialists so much narrative ground that they’ve had to resort to concealable warfare tools, and a discrediting of NATO’s fighting capacity in Ukraine would expose them even more damningly. 

When the Kiev regime loses, Washington’s TPLF terrorists in Ethiopia will become less able to propagandize for their own destabilization project, which has been floundering as is. U.S. anti-Chinese militarization, which is intensifying a new occupation of historically colonized places like Africa, will get placed under more scrutiny. Imperialism’s warfare, whether in direct military form or in proxy form, will get fully revealed to be being nothing more than one big terrorist operation. This is because if Washington and NATO can’t win against Russia, when they’ve insisted they can, there’s no reason to support them, or to believe anything they say. As far as the Global South is concerned, Washington lost credibility as the “humanitarian” enforcer a long time ago; the formerly colonized countries have rejected Washington’s call for sanctioning Russia because whereas Moscow has a history of aiding decolonial struggles, Washington has an even more recent history of murdering millions for the sake of profit. The false human rights pretenses the U.S. has used in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and so many other places have cost it the respect of everyone besides its imperial allies, and even those allies are now having to be coerced into going along with its cold war escalations. 

By instigating the war in Ukraine, Washington made a risky geopolitical chess maneuver. When this maneuver backfires, it will lose credibility not just as a humanitarian actor, but as a military power. From there its economic hegemony will crumble as well, destroyed by the further shift away from the dollar which Ukraine’s conflict has been bringing closer. With Iran and Venezuela’s pivots away from the petrodollar, Washington has found its status at unprecedented risk of being lost. So it’s used absurdly expanded sanctions as a desperate bid for subduing these and the other disobedient countries. The endless assertions that Ukraine is winning are about covering up the reality of this strategy, which is that when you sanction a gargantuan section of the world, that section is able to become economically self-reliant. When Ukraine is lost, and Russia comes out from the crisis even stronger, that fantasy about imperialism engaging in some masterstroke against multipolarity will be shattered. There’s no way the rise of the post-American world can be reversed, and to try to reverse it only speeds up the process.

The signs become more apparent every day that such a narrative collapse is approaching. We can see it in how the imperialist narrative managers, despite their supposed assuredness that Ukraine’s recent counteroffensive represented confirmation that Kiev will win, are now frantically calling for more NATO weapons infusions in response to Russia’s military involvement expansions. The truth is that Kiev’s regaining of that one stretch of territory was not a strategic victory, but a purely PR-motivated decision. A decision which gave Russia pivotal new advantages. Operation Z was never about gaining land for the sake of it, that’s what the colonial powers want from the wars they wage. It’s been about taking away Kiev’s military tools for violating the sovereignty of the independent Donbass republics, and about eliminating the Nazi militias which also menace the Donbass people. It’s been about ensuring the wellbeing of the Russian people, without asking for anything more.

Russia continues to be on track to achieve this. It doesn’t aim to occupy all of Ukraine, but to make Ukraine lose its ports on the Black Sea while making the breakaway of the Donbass permanent. The Kiev regime’s fixation on gaining soil for the sake of it, at the cost of intelligent military strategy, has sealed its fate as another fascist relic, like the Third Reich or Mussolini’s fascist government. This absurd warfare practice is directly informed by the deficient counterinsurgency strategy of the U.S. empire, which drives Kiev’s actions both politically and ideologically.

Self-destruction & cannibalization are the system’s responses to its decline

Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists have been trying to forcibly relocate the Donbass Russian speakers, and then let those deemed to be the real “Ukrainians” settle the leftover land, because like Hitler before them, they’re taking example from America’s model for colonial genocide. They embrace U.S. settlerism’s sick philosophy that might makes right, and that the supposedly superior nation must grab up land from the savages to enable its own development. 

It’s a medieval, if not neolithic, worldview. It’s rooted in the idea that earth’s natural resources being finite justifies whatever actions a people take to gain more of those resources. Such a barbaric way of thinking encourages a country to treat those outside the “superior” population as detritus, to view them as nothing more than irritating obstacles in the chosen people’s quest for dominance. When one’s counterinsurgency strategy is based around terroristic brutality towards the local population, of course it fails. The U.S. failed to nation-build in Iraq because Iraq’s people didn’t want to be colonized, as Ukraine has been met with a successful separatist revolt because the Russian speakers don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. And since Ukraine’s fascist takeover has been another U.S. nation-building project, it counts as a direct loss for U.S. imperialism.

The ancient empires, like Rome, lasted so long because they understood the need to facilitate societal development within their colonies to avoid provoking unmanageable revolt. The U.S. empire, being based in the wildly unsustainable system of capitalism, doesn’t build anything. All it does is destroy and loot, which becomes truer as Washington desperately spreads chaos to try to stop the BRI. As a consequence, it’s unable to keep a stable social contract with any of the peoples it’s colonized or tried to recolonize. The only reason why Latin America isn’t already fully socialist is because the CIA has had to carry out dozens of coups throughout it, so the empire can maintain neo-colonial control over the hemisphere. The same goes for Africa and Asia, with imperialism’s tactics for delaying revolution in those places morso involving direct invasions. Now that imperialism’s means for exacting such counterrevolutionary violence are growing weaker, more and more countries are breaking from its control. Their worker movements are able to gain growing amounts of leverage, while the BRI spreads its development projects. 

Even successful recent U.S. coup efforts, like the recent one in Sri Lanka, haven’t produced sustainable political projects. Sri Lanka continues to be a powder keg for mass economic discontent, one whose class contradictions are now being furthered by its new neo-colonial regime. It’s also undergoing an anti-Chinese militarization process at the expense of its people. This applies to the rest of the neo-colonies, which have in the last couple years been hit by even more privatization, austerity, and wage cuts. The IMF has exploited the pandemic to impose these policies onto 81 struggling impoverished countries, and has in the process dug its own grave. The peoples of these countries will rise up. Between the pandemic and the climate crisis, they have no choice.

The equivalent crisis is happening in Europe, especially Germany, which has undergone U.S. meddling that’s forced it into rejecting Russia’s Nordstream pipeline. Because of the sanctions blowback, Germany is now in a depression, sure to get more damaging as the energy crisis combines with a climate-impacted winter. Washington’s closest allies are being strong-armed into acting against their own interests, placing ever more pressure on their leaders to cease the sanctions. Stalin assessed that the three big contradictions of imperialism are antagonism between the exploiting and exploited countries, the intensification of class contradictions caused by global monopoly capital, and division among the imperialist powers. We’re seeing these cracks within the system get bigger as Washington takes reckless actions to try to reverse its decline.

Imperialism is a dying order with a shrinking global social base, which was always tiny to begin with. Mao predicted that upwards of 90 percent of the global population will ultimately rise up against imperialism, and that remaining less than 10 percent are who’s cheering on NATO. These warmongers are stubborn in their desire to see their parasitic lifestyles continue, because they can’t see any other way society can be set up. They’re stuck in that ancient, barbaric mindset, in which someone always has to be trampling over another. In the modern age, in which we can point to working examples of societies successfully developing towards communism, this philosophy of inevitable human competition lacks credibility on its face. 

Socialist China has lifted a record amount of people out of poverty, with Vietnam following a parallel path. Laos and Cuba are progressing towards such a point of economic development. The DPRK has already developed so far along the path to communism that it’s abolished taxation, and hasn’t even needed to carry out market reforms like the other workers’ republics. Existing socialism has proven wrong the reactionary argument that history can only involve one group subjugating another. The big lie the imperialists tell, propagated through their narrative about “imperialist” Russia and China, is that if the U.S. weren’t exploiting and murdering the peripheral peoples then another player would be doing so. Communism, and the multipolar order more broadly, are showing a cooperative economic and global model is possible.

Imperialism’s weakening grip, & how we in the core can throw it off

The emergence of the new cold war’s alliance between Russia and China, which has lately been deepening despite Washington’s attempts to use Ukraine as a wedge issue between the two, reveals how ineffectual Washington’s hand has become. No longer can it successfully stoke division among its challengers, whether Russia and China, Iraq and Iran, or China and Vietnam. The imperialists have been attempting to do so with their coup efforts in the former Soviet states, which have failed apart from the proxy warfare fiasco of Ukraine. Kazakhstan has been defended from NED terrorists by Russia’s peacekeeping forces, and Washington’s more recent coup attempt in Uzbekistan hasn’t succeeded either. It’s in Uzbekistan where Russia and China have been working to strengthen their ties, following a Chinese diplomatic meeting with the Uzbeks themselves. Eurasia’s unity, and collective economic vitality, only grow stronger. 

The “big Israel” the Ukrainian compradors aim to create will be a tiny sliver of the landmass, next to a Donbass breakaway area that will likely soon vote to become part of the Russian Federation. It’s only a matter of time before this state fully collapses, along with much of the rest of the capitalist world during our age of intensifying climate chaos. And Israel itself will have to try to navigate a new order where its biggest ally Washington has largely pulled out of southwest Asia, in order to expand a desperate anti-Chinese military buildup in the Indo-Pacific. The Zionist criminals have been empowered by this emergence of a more anarchic international order, but so have the states that oppose them. Iran has become more influential than ever, Assad’s government has survived, Lebanon continues to be ruled by the same Hezbollah entity which fought off Israeli occupation, and Yemen has been won by the anti-Zionist Houthis. As a favor to their Zionist proxy, the imperialists are attempting a color revolution in Iran. But color revolutions these days invariably fail within countries that are strongly part of the anti-U.S. bloc.

The parasites are undermining themselves. Their system of destruction and violence is being replaced by a new world. The tasks of revolutionaries in the core are to lift the people up to the knowledge level of a trained cadre member, better educate and train our own cadres, and build solidarity with those fighting imperialism abroad. Crucial to this is defending imperialism’s targets from the slanders that constantly get brought upon them. Not just because this helps these peoples counter Washington’s violence, but because this is essential for equipping us in our own struggle against the U.S. empire. Be a chauvinist, and the consequences of this will come back to you. If socialists in the core only focus on their own local conditions, without standing up for anti-imperialist countries or studying how the empire operates, they’ll be wiped out by what’s coming.

During the Cold War, the last time the imperialists were struggling against an existential threat, they reacted by orchestrating genocides within numerous Global South countries they feared would break from neo-colonialism. Indonesia’s “Jakarta Method” of suppressing communism involved the systematic mass murder of every person suspected to as much as have socialist sympathies. This method got exported to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Bolivia, and the other victims of the CIA’s coup spree. Since then, it’s evolved into violence campaigns like Plan Colombia, the Zionist-assisted effort to pick off political dissidents that could be revitalized should the fascists replace Colombia’s current centrist government. As long as the fascist military leadership and personnel remain, capitalist reaction will have the tools to carry out new mass exterminations. 

The equivalent is on its way to happening in the United States, but here the fascist backlash will look different. So far, during its early stages, it’s resembling not the Jakarta Method, so much as the Kiev coup regime’s anti-communist suppression model. This is a model where fascist terrorists are given the tools to exact massive bloodshed, and where these terrorists gain the protected status to do so with impunity. Crucial to instigating the counterrevolutionary terror are psyops, designed to demonize the targeted groups and identify these targets in the eyes of the fascist terror agents. Anti-communist hoaxes were used to stoke Indonesia’s reactionaries into a violent frenzy, but here the process is subtler. Our spooks have refined their manipulation tactics, learning how to infiltrate revolutionary groups in an insidious fashion that can’t be detected by an untrained mind. They’ve come to weaponize our revolutionary passions against us, manufacturing cults that claim to oppose the system while leading us into peril. 

We must learn the nature of the counterinsurgency we face, and proceed with vigilance. The foundation of this education on revolutionary cadre intelligence is to study what the empire is doing abroad, so we can avoid falling victim to its destructive campaign. Only then can we hope to destroy the enemy from within.

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