We are under attack from hackers. Its rather obvious why as our small group, the British Section of the LCFI, has stood out sharply against the war drive and in defence of the people of the Donbass and Russia, against the Western-backed proxy war utilising outright Nazis, since the beginning. And we have been outspoken about these issues both since our founding in early 2020 and previously as part of earlier British LCFI group, Socialist Fight, since Maidan and earlier.
In the last day we had over 1500 attempts to hack our website. Gradually accelerating over the last fortnight. Clearly the hackers have a problem with free speech for anti-imperialists. Well we are not going to be hacked out of existence. Whoever the hackers are, they are afraid of what we are saying.
We know the current British government doesnt like dissent. Its worth pondering what the relationship between the government and these attackers might be.
Lutfur Rahman was decisively elected as mayor of Tower Hamlets after the second round of voting
The decisive victory of Lutfur Rahman in winning back the Mayor’s position in Tower Hamlets is an insipring act of political insurgency by the electorate of Tower Hamlets and a serious political blow to the Tory/Zionist and Blairite forces that ousted him in 2015, exposing their corruption, racism and anti-democratic nature. It is very gratifying to see the anti-Muslim racist former Mayor John Biggs decisively thrown out of office. Rahman only narrowly failed to be elected purely on first preference votes: on both rounds he massively defeated Biggs by 40,804 votes to 33,487. All the racist innuendos about suppossed fraud were swept away as this election took place under unprecedented police supervision, exposing all the allegations that there was something somehow illegitimate about Rahman’s previous election victories as smears driven by racist hatred for the Tower Hamlets electorate.
Biggs’ racist record includes banning the cyclists’ Big Ride for Palestine fundraising event for humanitarian aid from holding its closing rally in Tower Hamlets because its attacks on Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing breached the racist Anti-Palestinian psuedo-definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ put about by the so-called ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’. This is a Zionist body whose purpose is to exploit the memory of the Nazi holocaust to suppress and smear support for Palestinian rights, and which by a series of amalgams (its vaunted ‘examples’) seeks to equate criticism of Israel as a racist endeavour (which it clearly is) with denial of the Nazi holocaust. This vile racism is one of many by Biggs as an illegitimate Mayor who was only in office because Rahman was barred from standing on a fraudulent basis. At the first opportunity they got, the anti-racist electorate of Tower Hamlets, including its large Bengali Muslim community, threw Biggs out on his arse in favour of Lutfur Rahman.
This is the militant working class anti-imperialist base that elected George Galloway in 2005, and which later elected the independent Muslim mayor Rahman, whose democratically expressed wishes were overruled by the racist, imperialist parties like those of a colonised population in the days of the British Raj . Now the chickens of racism, Islamophobia and warmongering are coming home to roost.
Congratulations to Lutfur Rahman!
The article below was distributed by Communist Explorations, one of the political forerunners of the Consistent Democrats, as a leaflet in London in April 2015. It has certainly stood the test of time, and was totally vindicated yesterday.
Solidarity With Tower Hamlets Against Neocon/Zionist Coup!
Ten years ago, the working class and oppressed of Tower Hamlets, including many of Muslim/South Asian migrant descent or background, struck an important political blow at imperialism and the Iraq War. They did this by electing George Galloway as MP for Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 General Election, for the left-wing anti-war RESPECT party.
That was very alarming to the rulers of this country, because Galloway had been expelled from Labour for taking a heroic position on the Iraq War, effectively calling for the Arab world to resist the Bush/Blair-led imperialist invasion by force.
This was meaningful dissent against capitalism and imperialism, not the tame kind epitomised by the usual pale pinks of the Labour left, nor even today by the tame social-democratic ‘dented shield’ of Ed Miliband, which consists of little more than pleading with the bosses for less severe austerity to avoid social explosions later.
Now the bosses are seeking revenge against the electorate of Tower Hamlets. They have just overthrown the elected mayor of Tower Hamlets, the first Muslim mayor to be elected in Britain, by a legal coup. Yet Lutfur Rahman was elected as an independent: unlike his opponents in Tower Hamlets, he had no national party machine behind him.
His opponents have three: Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat, as well as the power of the British state, and in addition, the input of the powerful ‘friends of Israel’ factions of all three political parties, whose political influence and international connections in importing Israeli-style attacks on people with a Muslim culture are considerable.
In a complex history intertwined with the crisis of the left, RESPECT in Tower Hamlets disintegrated, though it remains in other parts of the UK. But it left its mark, in a minority electorate that was ‘uppity’, that did not ‘know its place’ in racist capitalist Britain.
Even when RESPECT was supplanted by Labour, ‘uppity’ minorities rebelled and refused to accept ‘safe’ candidates imposed upon them, selecting their own instead. When Labour’s neocons cracked down on them in the usual way, they refused to accept it, Rahman stood as an independent and won – twice, splitting Labour in TH to create a less radical opposition than RESPECT, but still an opposition.
Now the immigrant-bashers and Muslim-baiters in the major parties have ‘legally’ overthrown this victory, declaring it fraudulent and null and void. The current General Election is the cosmetic face of democracy in Britain today. Once in every five years or so, working class people get to vote on who will administer the state machine that really serves those who exploit and oppress us.
The political space to even do this had to be fought for and produced many martyrs for basic political rights – and not just here. From the Chartists to the Suffragettes, to the movements for Civil Rights in America, Ireland, South Africa, to the Middle East today, demands for democracy are vitally important to all of us.
Capitalism and imperialism undermine democracy, and progressively do away with even the gains people have fought and died to achieve. We see that today, as even institutions like local government, which used to have some power in mitigating the worst effects of capitalism on working class people, has been hollowed out to the point of being a joke. The modern form of capitalism, known as neo-liberalism, means that more and more it is big money that calls the shots.
In Britain free speech is under attack more and more from the forces of neo-liberalism – capitalist reaction by another name. The traditional Tories and even Labourites at times have been no slouch at promoting racism to divide the working class, but in recent times they have been augmented with supporters of Zionism and Israel.
It’s no accident that Eric Pickles, the ‘Communities’ secretary who orchestrated the attack on Tower Hamlets elected representatives, is a stalwart of the ‘Conservative Friends of Israel’, and was recently heavily involved in getting a planned academic conference at Southampton University, called to discuss the implications for ‘international law’ of Israel’s founding through the mass ethnic cleansing of the Arab majority population of Palestine, called off amid a plethora of smear and threats, including from pro-Zionist fascists like the EDL.
Nor is it an accident that at the same time that prodigies of exegesis are expended by the legal system to excuse an anti-democratic coup with allegations of corruption, an establishment Zionist MP like Greville Janner, a staunch supporter of Israel, was let off scot-free on grounds of supposed dementia from allegations of numerous child rapes, for which considerable evidence exists.
When anyone gets in the way, or succeeds in cocking a snook at this system, the bosses fight back furiously. These attacks threaten all of us; what is done against Muslims today can be used against others resisting the bosses’ attacks tomorrow.
We, the working class of all colours and creeds, migrant and non-migrant, must resist this with equal, indeed stronger determination.
SOLIDARITY WITH TOWER HAMLETS! DOWN WITH THE COUP – RESTORE THE ELECTED MAYOR!
Every human being who loves freedom owes the Red Army more than he will ever pay in a lifetime.
Ernest Hemingway
May 9, 1945 marks the surrender of Germany to the Soviet Union in World War II, after two months of the Battle of Berlin between the Red Army and the Nazi Army. The so-called “D-day”, the landing of troops from 13 countries commanded by the USA and England on the French beaches of Normandy, occurred a year before the German surrender to the USSR, was an Allied military advance that won the liberation of France, but not victory over Germany. The US victory over Japan was not celebrated until August 15, 1945.
The Second World War began with a dispute between imperialist powers in 1939, but soon, in 1941, it assumed the character of a war of conquest of the USSR by the German Nazi state. The war left destruction never seen before. Deaths reached an estimated total of 70 to 85 million human beings, counting those who died from starvation and disease as a direct result of the war, that is, more than 3% of humanity [3]. Dozens of cities were reduced to rubble. Resources capable of nourishing, clothing, providing housing, health, education and work to alleviate poverty were used for purely destructive purposes. The environment, in many places, with forests and arable fields, has been reduced to ashes. Such devastation reached human behaviour and subjectivity itself: with generalized violence and systematic massacre of populations. Murder developed on an industrial scale. Examples of this were the Nazi concentration camps, the bombing of the German city of Dresden and the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan which was already defeated.
The structural roots of this catastrophe are present in the very competitive nature of the capitalist mode of production that intensifies with monopoly capitalism. Imperialism elevates competition to the political-economic level, taking an increasingly military-economic dimension by dividing the world between the imperialist powers. States and their armed forces participate in disputes between powerful industrial and financial groups. The world wars were the product of the imperialist system’s tendency towards aggressive expansionism.
After the first inter-imperialist war (1914-1918), the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Army, created and led by Leon Trotsky, against the invasion of the USSR by a military coalition of 14 countries, prevented the restoration of capitalism in Russia. However, the fact that there were no new victories weakened the Soviet proletariat. The workers’ state (expropriation of the bourgeoisie, monopoly of foreign trade and planned economy) survived, but in a deformed way, with the emergence of the rule of bureaucracy and its political expression: Stalinism.
In fact, the Second World War was not a struggle between democracy and fascism, but a dispute between imperialist powers for world hegemony. German imperialism was no different from other imperialisms: crimes against humanity weigh on all of them. However, German imperialism, despite being subjected to the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, soon recovered from the defeat of World War I, helped by the interest of the big monopolies and other Western imperialisms in crushing the socialist revolution in Germany itself (1919 and 1923) and then invaded the USSR. Under the banner of Nazism, the country soon returned to being a much stronger military power than in the First World War and triggered the Second World War that began with the occupation of Poland on September 1, 1939,
The objective of imperialism was to destroy the Soviet Workers’ State: 70% of the Nazi armed forces and another three million soldiers were deployed against the USSR
Hitler easily won the war in Western Europe, with victories in the Netherlands and France in 1940. It was then that the Nazi military machine turned, in 1941, to its central objective: the destruction of the Soviet workers’ state, the which meant a full-scale counter-revolution. On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa began. To destroy the Red Army, Hitler mustered at least 152 German divisions, including 19 Panzer divisions and 15 motorized infantry divisions, as well as 15 Finnish and 14 Romanian divisions. In terms of equipment, the German forces totalled about 3,350 tanks, 7,200 artillery pieces and 2,770 aircraft that represented 65% of the first-line air force (GLANTZ; HOUSE, 2009).
It was a real disaster for the Soviets. A completely preventable disaster. Even with 39,000 guns and mortars, more than 9,000 planes and 11,000 armoured vehicles, after the first week of battles, there was little left.
“The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, together with the Stalinist sabotage of the Red Army (liquidation of its generals, refusal to prepare the country for the German attack, and the blockade of the resistance in the first days of the invasion), practically led to the destruction of the USSR in 1941”.
COGGIOLA, 2015, p. 178-179
However, after a series of colossal defeats, the Soviets stopped the Nazis at the gates of Moscow, in a battle that officially lasted from 30 September 1941 until 20 April 1942, despite Stalin’s excessive errors. Hitler, at an event in Berlin on October 4, 1941, even claimed that the advance to Moscow would be in its final stages, being the greatest battle in history and that, once killed, the Soviet dragon would never rise again (NAGORSKI, 2015). The cost was very high for the Red Army: 1,896,500 losses among dead, missing, prisoners and hospitalized. It is important to note that, due to the treatment given by the Nazis to Soviet prisoners, most of them were sentenced to death.
The strategic turning point came with the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943. If it won, German imperialism would emerge strengthened both strategically and economically, with possibilities to launch an offensive against Moscow, the Middle East and even Great Britain. However, of the mighty 330,000-strong Nazi 6th and 4th Armoured Army, only 91,000 hungry and exhausted soldiers remained, including 22 generals who surrendered on February 2, 1943. This Soviet victory was consolidated with another in the largest battle of tanks in a war: the Battle of Kursk, between July and August 1943. From that event onwards, Hitler no longer met the conditions for a major offensive against the USSR, dedicating himself only to defensive battles to postpone the final defeat. From a military point of view,
[…] during the European summer of 1942, the German high command had concentrated 70% of its armed forces against the USSR, that is, 179 divisions, not counting the 71 divisions of its allies (22 Romanian divisions, 14 Finnish, 10 Italian, 13 Hungarian, 1 Slovak and 1 Spanish). Thus, that summer, 250 divisions – about 3 million men – were fighting against Soviet forces .
WERTH, 2015, p. 16
The best German troops were on the Eastern Front and not on the Western Front, in addition, the Red Army inflicted 75% of the casualties to the Third Reich army in the war (COGGIOLA, 2015). In an attempt to distort the fundamental importance of the Red Army to the end of Nazi barbarism, the mythology was created that the German defeat was caused by numbers and not by skill, with the Soviet victory obtained at the price of rivers of blood, while the Generals and Nazi marshals were deified for having fought with few resources and a lot of intelligence, and could have won had it not been for Hitler’s disastrous leadership.
In fact, the victorious march of the Red Army was an event of revolutionary consequences, going beyond the military aspect. Vassily Zhukov, the Marshal who commanded the Soviet forces in the annihilation of the Third Reich, thus portrays this progressive movement.
The victories of the Soviet Army helped the struggle for national liberation in European countries occupied by the Nazis. This struggle was led by the Communist Party and other workers’ parties, which united hundreds of thousands of patriots. With the advance of the Soviet Army towards the Dniester and the gateway to the Balkans, the anti-fascist movement became more active in the satellite countries of Germany. In Bulgaria and Romania, the uprising and national liberation armies grew in number. That summer, Bulgarian partisan units numbered around 30,000 fighters, which immobilized the royalist army. In May, the Hungarian Front was formed on the initiative of the communists in Hungary and, in Romania, a national-democratic bloc was formed, which organized an anti-fascist armed uprising.
In Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece, under the leadership of the Communists, the partisans fought very bravely against the fascist invaders in battles that kept 19 fascist divisions occupied and immobilized.
The Polish people, regardless of Mikolajczyk’s treasonous policy and his government in exile, intensified the armed struggle against the Nazi invaders (TCHUICOV, 2017, p. 15).
The USSR flag flying in Berlin signified the victory of the achievements of the October Revolution of 1917, despite Stalinist deformation and Nazi barbarism. The defeat of the Third Reich opened up emancipatory possibilities for humanity as a whole, from national liberation movements in oppressed nations to the struggle for civil rights in advanced capitalist countries. The victory over Nazism was not the work of Russian nationalism, but of the proletariat of the Soviet Union armed against the greatest monster that imperialism has ever created against communism: Nazi-fascism. Hitler’s defeat was the second greatest victory of the world proletariat after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The struggle against Nazism and the expansion of imperialism against Russia: an essay on World War III
US imperialism became hegemonic in the capitalist world after the second world war, it created a series of permanent financial, military, espionage organizations such as the IMF, NATO, the CIA against the USSR and the international revolution. Whenever necessary, imperialism resorted to the worst Nazi methods, torture, chemical weapons, dictatorships against oppressed peoples, whether Palestinians, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Iraqis or Afghans.
After the social counter-revolution in the USSR, NATO’s eastward expansion did not cease. NATO, which had 16 members in 1990, now has 30. The overaccumulation of capital from this process of global expropriation, contradictorily, caused an immense crisis in the USA in 2008 and in the European Union in 2010. Countries such as Russia and China occupied spaces in the world market in a vacuum caused by the retreat of the imperialist powers and became players with extraordinarily large resources, such as the mass of the Chinese workforce, or the Russian energy, military and technological resources. As Moniz Bandeira said, “empires are more dangerous when they decline” [4].
Since the end of the USSR, decadent imperialism has carried out, in new forms and rhythms, another Barbarrossa operation. Dozens of new military bases were established in former workers’ states and former Soviet republics. The entire region was conquered taking advantage of the historical dissatisfaction of those populations with Stalinist bureaucracies, fratricidal wars (Yugoslavia), corruption of rulers, coups d’état, “colour revolutions”, hybrid warfare and the use of Nazi mercenaries to repress resistance. Ukraine to join the EU and NATO.
This offensive had its peak in the neoliberal 1990s. The economy was profoundly privatized, de-industrialized and suffered a major speculative attack in 1998. Yugoslavia was torn apart by an artificial fratricidal war that involved the direct military intervention of Yankee and European imperialism. All this did not happen without provoking a growing reaction from some peoples and governments in the region, which were forced to renationalise, centralize and plan strategic fractions of the economy, which was in opposition to the imperialist neoliberal orientation. Against this resistance, a strategy was devised to recolonize countries such as Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
This strategy has been explicitly documented. In May 2019, the Rand Corporation, the think-tank of the US military-industrial complex, had listed six options in the matter: 1. Arm Ukraine; 2. Increase support for jihadists in Syria; 3. Promote regime change in Belarus; 4. Explore tensions in the South Caucasus; 5. Reduce Russian influence in Central Asia; 6. Rival the Russian presence in Transnistria.
But even the most sophisticated strategy, under the best prepared logistics and with enormous resources in dollars, weapons and information technology, cannot reverse the trends towards the decline and overcoming of imperialism whose offensive dialectically strengthens a bloc of sanctioned countries, supported by productive forces that are less dependent on speculative financial circuits and that are about to create alternatives for the de-dollarization of their economies. These inter-bourgeois contradictions and between blocks of nations have created tensions that make the current war in Ukraine the prelude to the third world war.
The growing resistance on the part of the Eurasian bloc must not feed any illusions that the bourgeois forces that lead these oppressed nations will be able to offer consistent resistance in the anti-imperialist struggle. For only the proletariat organized in a communist and revolutionary international will be able to carry out this task. The construction of this organism today passes through the tactic of the anti-imperialist united front, which must submit to the strategy of permanent revolution in the face of the inability of the struggle of the Eurasian leaderships to defeat imperialism.
Today, in Ukraine, a new struggle against imperialism and Nazism is being revived. The USSR has not existed since 1991. Russia today is an anomalous capitalist country, at best a regional power. However, it is not an imperialist country. Objectively, the Russian Special Operation in support of self-determination of the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass (eastern Ukraine) is a progressive action for workers and oppressed peoples around the world against the new Operation Barbarossa.
First, because it represents support for the struggle for national emancipation of approximately 3.5 million workers who suffer attacks from a regime born from a fascist coup in 2014, when the US/NATO invested efforts to arm neo-Nazi movements that continue the policy of collaboration with the military occupation of the country by Nazi troops during World War II against the USSR. In Ukraine, the US soon appropriated the country’s energy resources. Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has been placed on the board of directors of the country’s leading gas company, Burisma Holdings Limited. The Pentagon has developed several chemical weapons laboratories banned by a treaty signed by 183 countries since 1972 in the Chemical and Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
Second, by expressing an active resistance to the plans of imperialism in crisis to break up Russia into semi-colonial protectorates.
Third, after World War II it is the biggest imperialist front against a country: military aid to the Ukrainian Nazi government, censorship, economic sanctions, Russophobia, strategic NATO siege, a ban on all parties opposing the regime, torture and persecution of trade unionists , communists and all who seek to clarify the facts. Once again, imperialism uses Nazism against the oppressed peoples, this time much more explicitly, through mercenaries, against the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe.
In short, supporting the self-determination of Russian-speaking regions and the denazification of Ukraine is an anti-imperialist action as it clashes with the interests of world finance capital. On this 9th of May, in addition to commemorating the 77th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism, it is necessary to unconditionally stand by Russia in its fight against imperialism.
The day will come that will be the day of definitive victory over Nazism, when humanity will definitively bury imperialism and capitalism.
Long live the 77 years of the defeat of Nazism! Long live the Red Army! All support for Russia against imperialism and Nazism in Ukraine!
References
COGGIOLA, Osvaldo. The Second World War : causes, structures, consequences. São Paulo: Editora Livraria da Física, 2015.
GLANTZ, David M. & HOUSE, Jonathan. Clash of the Titans : How the Red Army stopped Hitler. São Paulo: C&R Editorial, 2009.
NAGORSKI, Andrew. The Battle of Moscow : the bloody struggle that defined the course of World War II. São Paulo: Contexto, 2013.
The entire focus of this issue is the war in Ukraine, and the defence of Russia and the population of the Donbass from NATO’s proxy war. The lead article is a full-scale expose of the war propaganda and concentrated lying that has characterised this war from the start, with the entire bourgeois media peddling the most hysterical lies in a manner unequalled since the outbreak of the First World War. This is fitting, because what we are talking about is a slow-motion Third World War, or at least overt preparation for it, being waged by US imperialism to try to shore up its declining world hegemony, which has reached crisis point. They are desperately searching for a way to destroy both China and Russia to preserve ‘full spectrum dominance’, ie. US world hegemony. The lead article also focuses heavily on the blatant racism being fomented in Britain by the warmakers, racialised indulgence of Ukrainians going hand-in-hand with abuses against non-whites refugees from the Middle East and Africa, while Russians are blatantly targeted for persecution and sporting and cultural figures, even dead ones, are targeted for racist bans.
The main focus of the issue is the International online forum that took place between Communist and Anti-Imperialist organisations on 26 March. The entire transcripts are in this issue. Along with the May Day statement that was initiated from that forum, has been signed by most of the participants in that forum, and many more. At the time of May Day it had gained the support of 22 organisations from six continents, with more undoubtedly on the way, and an impressive list of individual supporters. It embodies our attempt to create something akin to the Zimmerwald Left that provided a revolutionary focus during WWI, and which laid the basis for the emergence of the Communist International. We desperately need a mass revolutionary international today, to provide revolutionary leadership against the potent threat of imperialist WWIII and climate catastrophe. In this regard also the journal also contains the statements of the LCFI on the outbreak of the war, and also a statement of the South Korean Bolshevik Group, which we also consider highly principled, as well as a statement documenting our work in Britain with the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity, under whose banner we have been active since the Maidan coup in defence of the people of the Donbass.
There are also articles on the French Presidential elections, and the recent consistitutional coup in Pakistan that ousted the hardly-radical president Imran Khan for disobeying US imperialism over Russian sanctions. And there is an important article on the Malvinas War, 40 years after the event, that looks at the implications of today’s rise of China for fighting US imperialist domination in South America.
All in all this issue is very focused on the struggle against imperialism and war and is a significant contribution to rearming the left to struggle against these.
Ukraine’s NATO-puppet Zelenskyy caused uproar by introducing Azov Nazi to Greek Parliament.
The Ukrainian nationalist fetish with Nazism
Russian forces crossed the border into Ukraine on 24th February 2022 and the western world went into meltdown. What is a defensive military operation by Russia was seen by the imperialist West as a full blown invasion into a sovereign territory with Ukrainian history starting in 2022. To have some objectivity and understanding of how the Ukraine ended up here one needs to go back to at least November 2013. The start of the Euromaidan colour revolution, which culminated in violence with the rise of the Right Sector nationalists taking to the streets of Kiev and the forcing out of Viktor Yanukovich, the democratically elected pro-Russian President of Ukraine. This coup was unconstitutionally ratified[1][2] by the Rada on 22nd February 2014 leading to the Russian speaking and populated Donbas areas in the east, Donetsk and Lugansk, declaring autonomy with a referendum[3] that was declared on 11th May 2014. The referendum resulted in 89% voting in favour of self-rule, with 10% against, with a turnout of nearly 75%[4]. Germany, acting for the EU, along with the US and the new illegitimate government of Ukraine, refused to accept the result with Angela Merkel informing Putin that any elections in the East must be held under Ukrainian law. The blatant hypocrisy was that no such consideration or observance of legality and constitutional norms either by the Europeans or the Americans was afforded to the ousting of Yanukovich.
Since 2014 over 14,000 people have died in the ongoing conflict in the East [5] with atrocities being carried out by the Azov Battalion, who were formed as a reactionary force against the self-determination of the people of the Donbass. The self-declared Nazis, who use the Wolfsangel insignia used by the Nazi SS, have a history of carrying out torture and war crimes. The spokesman for the Battalion, Andriy Diachenko, in March 2015 openly told USA Today[6] that 10% to 20% of the group’s members were Nazis and with their zeal they made ideal shock troops to fight ‘separatists’ as an alternative to what was otherwise a poorly organised Ukrainian military. Even the US administration declared them a terror group, which was then overturned by Congress in 2016[7]. But to ensure that training and funding by the Americans and Canadians could continue for this fascist group, it was simply absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard to provide it with the cover of respectability.
In a country that has a 17%[8] ethnic Russian population and which has increasingly become Russophobic, it is hardly any surprise that racism is prevalent when Ukraine provides cult status to the Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. The cult of Bandera has whitewashed the history of fascism in the Ukraine and the atrocities that were carried out against Poles, Jews and Communists during WWII, which were to cleanse the land from what they saw as ‘undesirables’, all in the false belief of achieving a ‘state’ in collaboration with the Nazis[9][10]. Ukrainian politicians have deliberately airbrushed over his and the crimes of others by bringing in this fascist son of Ukraine into the sphere of normal day to day life, renaming streets and districts after him, erecting statues and even at one point providing a national holiday in his honour. This is all designed to provide a level of respectability, not only for Bandera, but for their new brand of nationalist anti-Russian fervour. Both Israel and Poland have previously raised concerns and objections through their diplomats against this blatant revision of history[11]. Racism is not unique to the Ukraine but has also been simmering underneath the political landscape within the rest of Europe. However, this rose to the surface once Russian military operations were underway.
Attacks on Russian culture and legitimising Russians as targets
Russian concerns for ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, the autonomous eastern Republics, the failure of Ukraine while acting as a proxy of the US to implement the Minsk II Protocols[12], and with an increasingly belligerent NATO and its own security being security threatened, Russian patience finally snapped. Immediately the British press as well as that of the other European and American media went onto a war footing attacking anything cultural and politically identifying as Russian. This deluge of Russophobia included not only sanctions against any individuals or businesses perceived as having a ‘relationship’ with Vladimir Putin, but have also included Russian and Belarusian paralympic athletes who were then banned from competing by the International Paralympic Committee, the banning of Russian and Belarusian tennis players from Wimbledon, the International Tchaikovsky Competition removed from the World Federation of International Music Competitions , the University of Florida renaming its Karl Marx study room, Bicocca University cancelling a course on Dostoevsky, the Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe) banning Russian felines from participating in events, and Netflix stopping production on an adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel ‘Anna Karenina’. Literally anything associated with being Russian is seen as a ‘legitimate’ target in a whirl wind of cancel culture and cultural vandalism. Compare this to the illegal wars by the US and Britain and the immediate double standards are all too apparent. Where have we seen the call for sanctions to be applied to Britain and the US who consistently prosecute wars with impunity, murdering thousands of innocent civilians indiscriminately in the process?
But it doesn’t simply end there; Andrij Melnyk, the Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany, when being interviewed by the newspaper ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ declared all Russians as enemies[13]. This makes all Russians a legitimate target for violence, which is not any different from the ideology of Da’esh and Al-Qaeda, who announce that all British, American and civilians from other western nations, are legitimate targets in their ‘holy war’ against the West. Where was the denunciation from the EU that a senior foreign diplomat sitting in Germany was encouraging racist violence toward civilians? This anti-Russian bile hit new heights when Ukraine’s own Doctor Mengele, Gennadiy Druzenko, claimed during an interview on Ukrainian television that he had ordered his doctors to castrate any captured injured Russian POWs because they are cockroaches and not people[14]. This was a call for war crimes to be committed, a blatant disregard for the Geneva Convention which provides protection for all prisoners of war. The flirtation with Nazis seems to be commonplace, a live broadcast on the Ukrainian channel 24 consisted of the TV presenter[15] alongside a photo of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann appearing on the screen. He then went on with his racist genocidal tirade “I know that in Russia they call us Nazis and fascists, therefore, I allow myself to quote Adolf Eichmann, who said that in order to destroy a nation, you must destroy, first of all, its children. Because if you kill their parents, the children will grow up and take revenge. By killing children they will never grow up and the nation will disappear.” He then added “You have to understand that it’s about the victory of the Ukrainian people, not about peace. We need victory. And if we have to slaughter all your families I’ll be one of the first to do it, and hope that there will never be such a nation as Russia and the Russians on this earth again.”
War crimes are being committed by the Ukrainians and the silence coming out of western political circles is deafening, when there is a whimper people try to justify it. Questioning any of this instantly earns one a ‘Putin lover’ tag to immediately stamp down on any debate. The clown prince, Zelensky, has been culpable in this, he has sacrificed his people on the NATO altar with a promise that which will never materialise. His outrageous claims to the world audience have been nothing short of a desperate call for NATO to come and save him and a potential escalation towards WWIII. He has deliberately handed out weapons to all and sundry throughout the population, not only making civilians a poorly trained potential target but also putting guns into the hands of fascists and criminals. Some of his outlandish claims have been debunked, including the attack on Babyn Yar that never happened[16] and the ‘bombing’ of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which in reality was fire in a training block outside its perimeter[17], and the destruction of a Turkish mosque[18] in Mariupol, something that Turkey itself refuted. He is a puppet that is having his strings pulled from behind the scenes by those that really have the power, the Americans, the corrupt Ukrainian oligarch criminals and the far right, his performances are worthy of his role as an entertainment actor and not the pin up boy the media are trying to portray him as.
There is ample evidence through witness testimonies given to independent journalists of atrocities being committed by Ukrainian forces towards their own citizens, with claims of beatings[19] and executions of anyone suspected of having sympathy or having collaborated with Russian forces. Interviews with civilians finally escaping areas such as Mariupol after multiple attempts, claiming that Azov soldiers have used them as human shields[20] with threats of being shot should they try to escape. Photographic evidence has surfaced of bodies wearing white arm bands, as also do Russian soldiers as an aid to identify themselves, bodies with their hands tied behind their back some with Russian food aid parcels scattered nearby, as occurred in Bucha[21][22]. Accepting Russian aid could be seen as an act of treachery and it is no stretch of the imagination that such treason would be punished. This is particularly true as in the case of the Mayor of Kherson[23], while acknowledging the distribution of Russian aid, which in itself is hardly the actions of a force that are hell bent on killing citizens simply for being Ukrainian even more so that Russians also live in the population, stated that “So Russians want to send their humanitarian aid, but the people of Kherson are refusing it. Because they are patriots and they don’t want aid from Russians. They want aid from Ukrainians. So we are not receiving humanitarian aid at the moment”. In other words he was forbidding acceptance of Russian aid given the risk of people starving.
Despite Russian forces retreating from the area several days before and the Mayor of Bucha[24] not mentioning any executed civilians in his address to the cameras the day after that retreat, accusations of dead bodies littering the streets and war crimes started filtering through several days after Ukrainian forces announced a sweep of the area, a sweep to filter out any unwanted elements. When the accusations of Russian war crimes surfaced, Russia immediately requested an urgent UN meeting to discuss these accusations, this request was steadfastly refused by the British chair. This refusal flies in the face of natural justice and seeking the truth and is clearly a manoeuvre by the British to cover over what could be an inconvenient embarrassment. Footage has also emerged of executions of bound Russian soldiers[25][26], in stark contrast of an absence of any footage of Ukrainian soldiers being executed. War is never surgically clean, it is incredibly dirty, bloody and inevitably civilians become trapped in the crosshairs resulting in innocent casualties. What is striking is that while footage of alleged atrocities towards Russian soldiers and civilians at the hands of Ukrainian fascists is in the public domain, are the excuses from western commentators who suggest that these are either false, or at best questionable requiring forensic investigation to confirm what had taken place.
Compare this with accusations of Russian war crimes, no such due process is necessary for war mongers like Biden and Johnson to immediately declare ‘genocide’. This guilt without trial not only debases genocide but also undermines the due process required in holding war criminals to account, the guilt is automatic and without any scrutiny. This is just a continuation of the archaic demonisation of Russians, no less than how the Nazis saw Russians as being ‘sub-human’ to justify the barbaric treatment and wholesale slaughter in the East during WWII. Where were the calls and immediate guilt applied to the US and Britain for its wars and appalling loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq? Nearly 1 million people died in Iraq in a brutal military operation described chillingly by the Americans as ‘Shock and Awe’, with the indiscriminate levelling of cities like Mosul and Fallujah. US torture facilities were set up in Abu Ghraib to illegally torture Iraqis away from the prying eyes of the world. Where were the calls for war crime investigations, where are the individuals including politicians being held to account? Anyone daring to expose these war crimes are immediately punished, as were Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the latter who is going through the process of extradition to the US where he faces a potential 175 years behind bars. Where are the sanctions against the main protagonists, the US and Britain? There is currently a war in Yemen, over 377,000 people have died, many being children. Britain is fuelling this conflict by providing arms, yet the appalling number of deaths in Yemen pale into insignificance when comparably much smaller numbers die in Europe. All too often the colour of a person’s skin, along with their cultural and religiously identity, determine the status of victimhood in times of war. What makes this even more sickening is that the US calls for the ICC to investigate Russia, while the US itself applied sanctions on the ICC in an effort to avoid accountability through threats. This hypocrisy is astounding.
Western embrace of Ukrainian fascism
The politicians in Kiev, Washington and Europe have deliberately downplayed the role of NATO expansion [27], the history and rise of fascism[28] and the attacks on the people of the Donbass, which are all documented by the (OSCE) Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe[29] all of which are attempts to delegitimise Moscow. Russian concerns are well founded and well documented, not only just by those on the left but also within liberal and conservative political circles and by ex-NATO personnel. But in this new age of propagandist ‘fake news’, the truth has now become lies deliberately propagated by a compliant ‘free’ bourgeois press. The dismissal of the seriousness and importance of the far right in Ukraine is often supported by claiming that they don’t have a foothold in the Rada and questions about how could a country with Nazi sympathisers possibly have a Jewish President. This is easily explained, while Svoboda secured 10% of the vote in 2012 election and having influenced Ukrainian politics towards the right, it was inevitable that mainstream parties would capitalise on this by simply adopting the same territory. This is in no way different from how the Tories stole the UKIP vote by adopting their politics in the UK elections. Britain left the EU on a wave of nationalism without UKIP ever gaining one seat in a Parliamentary election.
Having ultra-nationalists absorbed into the political and state machinery, such as the police and military, is tantamount to having successfully carried out a coup d’état and getting their dirty hands onto the levers of power. Zelensky was financed by the energy oligarch and then governor of Dnipropetrovska region, Igor Kolomoisky, who himself is also Jewish. It was also Kolomoisky who financed the Azov Battalion, which was initially formed as a volunteer group in May 2014 born out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang, and the neo-Nazi Social National Assembly (SNA) group. Both groups have historically engaged in xenophobic behaviour and neo-Nazi rhetoric, physically attacking migrants, Roma and the LGBT communities. The founding leader Andriy Biletsky[30] boasted in 2010, that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen (inferior races)”. No argument is required to understand the fascist nature of this group, those that support it, and indeed the state which accommodates such fascists. Biletsky was an MP in the Ukrainian Parliament up until 2019 after having been elected in 2014. For so long the bourgeois press were reporting on the nature and danger of these groups and the political situation in Ukraine, yet in this conflict they have now become heroes. Fascists that have been whitewashed and sanitised for western consumption by the same who were denouncing them, proof indeed that neoliberal capitalism and fascism are bedfellows in times of crisis.
Refugees and racism
Refugees fleeing the conflict have not been spared. While considering that Ukraine is not a member of the European Union, in effect a ‘third country’, white Ukrainians are being welcomed with open arms. The British government have even set up a scheme that financially provides £350.00 per month for anyone who is able to take in Ukrainian refugees. Contrast this with the fences put up on the Polish/Belarus border, which prevented refugees from other non-EU countries reaching safety and which contributed to a number of unfortunate souls freezing to death in forests. There have been multiple reports of African and Asian students fleeing the conflict in Ukraine not being allowed to board trains in Kiev, a policy of indigenous first. Those that did make it to the border crossing into Poland were aggressively questioned and redirected into immigration detention centres, while white Ukrainians were immediately welcomed and provided with safe places, support and schooling for their children.
Europe in brazen racist mode: ‘Welcome’ to white Ukrainians; Cages for non-whites.
The bourgeois press had no problem at all in accommodating this sickening racism[31]. These are just a sample selection comments of such, this from the BBC – “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed.”; CBS News – “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan…This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city.”; BFM TV – “It’s an important question. We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing…We’re talking about Europeans.”; Spanish TV news channel La Sexta – “These aren’t like the other children that we’ve become accustomed to see suffer on TV, these children are blond with blue eyes, this is very important.”; ITV, This Morning – “The US has used [a thermobaric bomb] before in Afghanistan. But the idea of it being used in Europe is stomach-churning.” The latter comment emphasises that Europeans are seen as civilised, despite the horrendous history of conflict on the continent, while those that Europe seeks to exclude are barbarians who are used to such violence.
The empathy for ‘fellow Europeans’, while a distinct lack of it is shown to refugees from elsewhere that are deliberately being left allowed to drown in the Mediterranean and the English Channel in the attempt to reach fortress Europe is sickening. It is plainly clear the there is a hierarchy of what constitutes as a human being. The European Union offshores its legal responsibilities by paying Turkey €billions annually to ensure that refugees from outside don’t reach Europe, despite the fact that it is Western bombs that are raining down on them to begin with. Britain seeks to also offshore its legal responsibilities with the UK Foreign Secretary, Priti Patel, announcing on 14th April while Parliament was in recess, that it has partnered with Rwanda to take in any refugees coming into the UK. There are only a handful of countries globally that treats refugees in this appalling manner, Australia being one of them, which also has a horrendous colonial history with its mistreatment of the indigenous population. The other being Israel, the colonial settler state that racially mistreats Palestinians with impunity and who also offshore their refugees to Rwanda. Perhaps the despicable Patel had an insight into this provided by Israel, given her history of dirty dealings with the ethno-state, which were previously carried behind the scenes of Theresa May’s government and without May even being aware that she was trying to bury handing British overseas aid to the Israeli military before Patel was sacked for her treachery.
Not only does Rwanda have its own history of genocide being carried out but the present Rwandan government has a problem with corruption and human rights abuses, something that the British government were only raising concerns with just over 9 months ago[32]. These concerns have now been miraculously waived to facilitate official British state racist policy towards people fleeing persecution. But this comes at a cost. This ‘partnership’ is set to cost the British taxpayer a fortune with the Tory MP Andrew Mitchell, claiming that it would be more cost effective to place refugees in the Ritz and provide schooling at Eton than to send them to Rwanda. However, this is not about cost, something that even the corrupt Labour Party fail to understand, it is a ‘flag waving’ policy from a disastrously failing government designed to pander to its right- wing base and divert attention from the narcissistic Johnson. What the British treatment of refugees should be about is the UK fulfilling its legal obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which is to allow refugees to claim asylum wherever they wish and to treat them with dignity…. just as the Ukrainians fleeing the conflict are being treated. There is no such prerequisite as to how people fleeing war should travel, or how they claim asylum. The all-too-common term of ‘illegal refugee’ is a simple term for governments to hide behind and shirk their responsibility from the consequences of their own foreign policy.
War objectives and the stepping-stone to further conflict with China
The US has declared its intention to continue the conflict by the supply of weapons and other assistance to Ukraine, Biden has announced another package of additional military aid to the tune of $800 million on 13th April 2022[33]. The British government has also announced further military aid with the provision of Stormer armoured missile launchers[34]. This will do nothing to alleviate the issue that Ukraine finds itself in and will only prolong the suffering of civilians while the conflict continues to its logical outcome. The attack on the Moskva missile cruiser off the coast was a symbolic act, very much as the sinking of the Belgrano was during the Falklands conflict, an act to affect morale. However, all this has achieved is to further cement Russian resolve and to escalate retaliation. Russia is in this for the long run and while western political commentators claim that the ‘invasion of sovereign territory’ is to annex the Ukraine and absorb it into a ‘greater Russia’, the reality is completely the opposite. Russian objectives were clearly defined at the beginning of this conflict; prevent Ukraine becoming a NATO member to ensure that missiles could not be placed 5 minutes flying time from Moscow, something that the Americans would never allow if it was Washington; degrade the Ukrainian military, particularly when it came to the Azov Battalion, who have been terrorising the people of the Donbass; and to protect the autonomous regions of the Donbass. All of these objectives are being met.
The western part of Ukraine has been relatively untouched, the military conveys outside of Kiev seem to have been in a holding capacity while military operations were concentrating in the South and East of the country. It is becoming increasingly clearer that the easter part of Ukraine will be partitioned off to protect the Donbass from the horrendous war that has been raging for the last 8 years. Russia has a huge conventional military and is a nuclear superpower, an overhang from its Soviet Union days. Anyone of the belief that Russian resolve will erode and crumble are deluded. The policy of the US and its allies to fight to the last Ukrainian will fail. In a partition scenario, should this indeed be the case, then at some point a territorial demarcation point will placed within the country. This then removes all possibility of guerrilla warfare and is more likely to result in negotiations and buffer zones. This already has a precedent and is similar to Cyprus in 1974 and which still exists up to today. Additional pressure in the application of sanctions is unlikely to have any effect, which in all likelihood was to be expected by Putin as they were used as a tool in 2014. What is clear is that Russia does not rely on the export of capital, it is an exporter of raw materials. It will simply apply its trade elsewhere. While Russia is the world’s most sanctioned nation[35] any glance of the world map will show that there is a clear disconnect between the US and its western allies, including Australia, and that of the remainder of the world[36] who understand the colonial mindset of the Global North better than anyone. The only people who will be paying for the consequences of this ridiculous economic war will be the working class on all sides.
This conflict in Ukraine was completely unnecessary but deliberately engineered, it wasn’t as if Russia hasn’t been objecting over the last 8 years and it was certainly clear as to what Russia’s red lines were and what those consequences would be should they be crossed. The US and its allies have been playing games and using Ukraine as a football in an attempt to undermine Russia. The end objective is clear, it is an attempt to degrade and subordinate Russia to further pave the way for increasing global domination by the world’s hegemonic power, a power-hungry monster that increasingly ravages the planet through war on peoples and devours natural resources in an insatiable quest for profit. China, which has become the factory of the world for Western capitalism, has flexed its economic muscles which is an unexpected by-product of the outsourcing of manufacturing by the west who have been taking advantage of China’s cheap labour. This is something that the US does not seem to like. Increasingly aggressive US rhetoric aimed at China with forays into the South China Sea, the Indo-Pacific AUKUS Pact, and surrounding China with compliant client states is lurching the world towards WWIII and nuclear annihilation.
As Communists we need to recognise this, that defeat for Russia will be a catastrophe for the left globally and will set out this path. For this reason we must advocate for the defence of Russia in this conflict, recognise the aggressive role of and stand for the defeat of NATO, the neutrality of Ukraine, and for the self-determination of the people of the Donbass. While we defend Russia we recognise the Bonapartist nature of Vladimir Putin and that of the Russian political landscape, we also recognise that Ukraine exists as a nation and that only Socialist revolution will provide the answer to these problems.
The current situation in Pakistan is very complex. Pakistan is in a state of turmoil, with the economy staring at a meltdown. It is a huge country with 220 million people, and the ruling class has deep links with the West due to 200 years of colonial rule. It was also an ally of the US in the war against the Soviets and helped to destroy the communist government in Afghanistan in the 1990s. The US poured billions of dollars into that project.
Vladimir Putin and Imran Khan
All the political parties’ economic policies are neo-liberal capitalist policies designed by the IMF. What the IMF has done to the Pakistani economy (and other Third World economies) is nothing short of criminal, galloping inflation, rising cost of living, deindustrialization and no real growth. The debt crisis and what the IMF has done to Pakistan has destroyed the country. 27 Power Stations have been closed because they do not have enough oil, there are areas without any electricity 24/7.
Political parties in Pakistan are dominated by large landed capitalist families who play ball with the military. Imran Khan (IK) is a right-of-centre politician who was able to use his celebrity status to get ahead in politics and work with the military to get votes.
Imran Khan (IK) Prime Minister of Pakistan was ousted by a vote of no confidence. Although IK has the support of the middle class, he did not get a majority of the votes in the general election, other tiny parties lined up to provide IK with a majority but crucially he had the support of the military. The military is known as the “umpire of Pakistani politics” They have now withdrawn their support and IK’s party has split and some have now joined the opposition. The military bureaucracy is far stronger than any/all parties.
The old elite, the feudal inheritors claim that they became concerned that IK had not been able to come up with an effective team and deliver on his election promises.
For 3 years the opposition has been demanding a vote of no confidence in IK. They said that IK had failed to fix the crumbling economy (inflation is nearly 20%) and root out corruption.
IK tried to postpone the inevitable and delay the vote to oust him by going to the Supreme Court against his own MPs (seeking lifelong disqualification for aligning with the opposition) the Supreme Court ruled that IK’s attempt to dissolve Parliament and call new elections was unconstitutional.
IK popularity has nosedived with rising inflation and high unemployment. The economy is in tatters.
IK’s Government has done very little for the majority of the people. It went back to the IMF for help. The IMF has suspended its programme in Pakistan and there is going to be a balance of payments crisis in Pakistan. They need about 5 billion dollars. (Pakistan has gone to the IMF 23 times)
The IK Government has suppressed the voices of laid off workers activists. The government did nothing for women’s rights activists, instead of supporting the Sexual Violence bills put forward by the Women’s movement, the government sent the Bill to the Council of Islamic Ideology which dismissed the Bill…
Thousands of people have taken to the streets to defend IK, and he has had many large rallies since the vote of no-confidence.
The Military plays a central role in Pakistan. Since 1947 No Prime Minister (PM) in Pakistan has completed a five-year term. The Military took over each time.
Now the fact is that the US has several Military bases in Pakistan and has in fact extended its military presence there because of Pakistan’s geo-political situation and US plans to extend the Middle East war wider. In order to justify its counter-terrorism programme, the US has increased its covert support for “terrorists”
In 2005, a US National Intelligence Council and CIA report predicted a “Yugoslav – like fate for Pakistan -such as was recently seen in Balochistan” (Energy Compass 2.3, 2005) Further, this report stated that by 2015 Pakistan would be a “failed state” with “complete Talibanisation and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons” (Times of India 13th Feb 2005)
It is not surprising that the US wanted IK out, he has done several things which would incense the US. He was a longtime critic of the US war in Afghanistan and the West in general. According to the New York Times and the Pakistani Media, relations became rather strained with the US after the CIA and Pakistan were in talks about a US Military base in Pakistan for Drones. Pakistan agreed to the base but only if Drone strikes were signed off by the Pakistan Military, so the strikes would be against the “terrorists” who the Pakistan Military deemed to be anti-Pakistan and not those they considered friendly to Pakistan. The US disagreed, but the Pakistan Government denied that these talks had taken place.
IK said that he is the victim of a foreign conspiracy hatched in the US. He said he was asked to join yet another US war and he said NO. When he was asked about US bases in Pakistan he said “Absolutely Not”
IK’s position on Afghanistan, Ukraine etc. would not have pleased the US. IK praised India’s Foreign Policy on Ukraine in maintaining a neutral stance. (India buys oil from Russia) IK was in Moscow when the war began in Ukraine. He went to Russia with the blessings of the Army to get a deal on oil and wheat, once the US contacted the Army and stated its displeasure at the way Pakistan had voted at the UN on Ukraine.
IK has not helped his case by expressing support for the Taliban!! and Osama bin Laden. A General in the Indian Army said on TV that the US thinks that Pakistan has been two timing them with the Taliban, that this was why the US had the failure in Afghanistan, this is of course a fiction, the US war was doomed to end just the way it did.
IK has said Muslim Countries have let down Palestine and Kashmir…
He also said that the PM of India Modi is a Fascist and a Nazi…(there was no response from India.)
Most damning of all was the emergence of old videos of IK being extremely critical of Pakistan’s Army, mentioning genocide in Baluchistan and that they have killed people and taken money from the US.
All of the statements IK had made and which his enemies are now using to gloat over his downfall are true – but an Indian General said the fact that IK raised the issue of material transmitted to the Pakistan PM’s Office regarding a discussion between American Assistant Secretary of State Lu and his Pakistani counterpart, in front of a public rally is unheard of and this sealed his fate. IK waved a piece of paper at a public mass rally which he said was proof that he was the victim of a US hatched conspiracy.
The Indian general said that Pakistan did not conform to the norms of diplomatic behaviour….
There will be a massive Trust deficit in the diplomatic community re Pakistan, and nobody will want to speak to a Pakistani diplomat “.
(So, the truth is irrelevant, just “proper diplomatic behaviour” – is what matters.)
Huge Protest in Lahore after Imran Khan was ousted as Pakistan’s Prime Minister
The Indian General also said the US is watching all countries which have not condemned Russia. He said the EU, US and Germany wrote to every country which was neutral and said “Please don’t be neutral, please condemn this aggression”
Once IK had divulged the contents of the EU letter, the US was very angry and conveyed this to the Pakistan Army Chief who promptly went on TV and in English said that the Foreign Policy of Pakistan will be in line with the US, despite the fact that the Army knew what IK was going to Russia for and agreed with his stance, they were not willing to do anything to upset US interests.
Pakistan’s geo-strategic location on the border with Afghanistan is of immense importance, especially to the US, it provides a pathway to Central Asia. Pakistan has extensive oil and mineral resources which is largely in the Balochistan region. Balochistan makes up more than 40% of the land mass of Pakistan. The Iran-India pipeline will transit through Balochistan. There is a deep sea port (Gwadar) in Balochistan on the Arab Sea, not far from the Strait of Hormuz, where 30% of the world’s daily oil supply is shipped.
Foreign oil/gas contractors such as BP, Italy’s ENI, Austria’s OMV and Australia’s BHP are in Balochistan – Pakistan’s oil/gas companies which have the larger stake in the oil fields were privatised under the IMF/World Bank in 1994. Pakistan plans to finalise a Russian built gas pipeline despite international pressure.
The new government is clueless, the Prime minister is just another right-wing politician. not in office to serve the people but to serve his own interests. His brother is in prison for criminal activities. The cycle starts again.
The new PM is going back to the IMF to beg for renegotiation of the debt because he needs money to buy oil. He is under tremendous pressure to get rid of whatever subsidies are in place and raise the price of gas.
Pakistan needs a Communist/Worker’s Party which breaks from the elite and ruling class agenda, for workers’ power. Every other Party has come and gone including the Military. They have all gone to the IMF and done what the IMF instructed them to do. The Communists are the only ones who are willing to think outside the Neo-Liberal Capitalist box. Nationalise the Mines, oil and gas and break with Imperialism.
The groups involved in the March 26th panel and initiating the May Day Statement are putting out a call for joint actions on May Day through marching together at May Day marches. This is happening in London on May 1st in London. The March itself will assemble at Clerkenwell Green at 12 noon.
The two agreed slogans of the bloc are:
• Down with NATO’s proxy imperialist war in Ukraine!
• for the right of Russia to defend itself against imperialist encroachment!
For any further information about this initiative please email ma********@********il.com .
Arch-Neoliberal Emmanuel Macron (left) vs ‘moderate’ fascist Marine Le Pen
The current French election epitomizes the ‘choices’ that the capitalist system offers to working class people in the absence of revolutionary class politics. Arch-neoliberal Emmanuel Macron topped the poll in the first round on 10th April with 27.85 of the votes, followed by the fascist Marine Le Pen on 23.15%, with the leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in third place with 21.95%. Thus, in the second round on 24 April, Macron faces Le Pen, and Mélenchon is eliminated.
There is a real possibility of a Le Pen victory in the second round, mainly because Macron is an arch-enemy of French working class people who has launched many attacks on democratic rights, living standards, welfare, pensions in the past five years, as well as pandering to anti-migrant racism and Islamophobia in a way that rivalled that of Le Pen. One factor that militates in favour of Le Pen in the second round is that while Le Pen has sought to play down the essentially fascist politics of her party (now called National Rally, previously the National Front) for many years now, there was another far-right candidate, Eric Zemmour, a Jewish reactionary who particularly specialized in anti-Muslim attacks, who gained 7% of the vote. Naturally he has endorsed Le Pen for the second round. But Macron will not inspire class conscious workers to vote for him even against a fascist: many such people consider him equally odious.
There was a working-class popular uprising against Macron’s attacks in late 2018, that of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) who initially exploded against rises in taxes on fuel, and taxes on pensions. The fuel tax, in a typically mendacious half-truth, was ‘justified’ by claims that Macron was doing something about climate change. However as usual, he was attacking the poor: only 20% of the money raised by these taxes was even being spent on anything to do with overcoming the use of fossil fuels to produce energy – the rest was just the usual transfer from the rich to the poor, as of course were the taxes on pensions. All these just happened to coincide with cuts in a wealth tax. The far right attempted to exploit this movement but were driven away by those involved, and it began to show its potential to shift French society and politics to the left before the pandemic struck.
Gilets jaunes confront CRS riot police
Macron’s response to the gilets jaunes was to attempt to brutally crush it by police terror – there were dozens of terrible cases of protesters being maimed, lost eyes and limbs, by police use of deadly high-explosive munitions against protesters. In fact, many may look at the way Macron treated the gilets jaunes and conclude there is little difference between this kind of criminal brutality and the behaviour of actual fascists in power in any case.
Mélenchon is a left-wing opponent of NATO and the EU, and of neoliberalism, albeit not a revolutionary. But many who can be won to a revolutionary position and party support him and must be addressed by Marxists with their tactics. His strong showing is undoubtedly linked to his support for the gilets jaunes, his involvement in attempts to unite this revolt of workers and lower-middle-class people outside the framework of the bureaucratized and class-collaborationist trade unions, with trade union militants in the period of the peak of gilets jaunes activity before the pandemic. Mélenchon called prominently for an amnesty for all gilets jaunes protesters victimized, charged, and convicted in his election campaign. This was certainly a campaign with a real class-conscious aspect to it that Marxists should have given critical support to.
He only narrowly failed to knock out Le Pen, which really would have been a political earthquake, as side by side with his strong showing, the candidate of the historically important French Socialist Party gained a tiny 1.75%; which was a product of the long record of this party in neoliberal treachery, anti-working class attacks, racism, and involvement in international imperialist crimes in North Africa and the Middle East. His narrow failure was partly the responsibility of some of the no-hoper leftists who stood in the first round, like the long-decayed Communist Party (2.3%), the so called ‘New Anti-Capitalist Party’ (0.8%), and Lutte Ouvrière (0.6%) who if they had withdrawn in favour of Mélenchon would likely have seen Le Pen knocked out in the first round. If Mélenchon is deemed critically supportable, then all efforts should have been made to maximise his vote in the crucial first round.
Leftist French Presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Quite correctly, Mélenchon has refused to endorse Macron for the second round. It would be fatal to class politics and class consciousness for the working class left to endorse a bourgeois reactionary like Macron as a supposed ‘lesser evil’ to Marine Le Pen. Le Pen’s rise to the position of not only coming second in the first round, but seriously posing a threat in the second, is a result of the further demoralization of the working class through the support of much of the workers movement and left for Macron as a ‘lesser evil’ to Le Pen. Five years ago, Macron was a new political entity. Though he had been a minister in the administration of the neoliberal ‘socialist’ Francois Hollande’s preceding administration, he split and founded his own (bourgeois) party, En Marche, beforehand and won the election as an overtly neoliberal pro-EU chancer, a sort of French Thatcher/Blair composite, but without even a labour movement connection. Now he is a discredited chancer, and if re-elected will only further undermine the working class.
Marine Le Pen fortunately does not have a fascist military cadre, steeled in battles against the working class, as Hitler did. If she somehow wins the second round, she will likely try to use her position to create one, but that can be nipped in the bud by determined action from below from the labour movement and the left, which must be prepared to use force in an (initially) defensive sense to stamp such things out. Indeed, the defence of the democratic rights of the French workers necessitates such a force, whoever wins. If Macron wins narrowly, which seems likely, despite his sudden hypocritical reversals of rhetoric to try and placate left-wing voters, he will no doubt be even more keen to adopt elements of Le Pen’s programme, particularly the anti-migrant hatred and Islamophobia, if not her kind of attacks on democratic rights more generally. We already saw that with the gilets jaunes.
The election takes place in the context of the war in Ukraine, and for several years now, one of the tactics of the Russian government has been to try to curry favour with various dissident trends in Western politics, including far right elements like Trump or Le Pen who it judged may be more isolationist than mainstream bourgeois politicians like Macron. There is an aspect of this that is a descendant of the Stalinist ‘tactic’ of the international popular front, seeking an alliance with whichever faction in the imperialist countries is considered ‘peace-loving’, i.e. more likely to leave Russia alone. Likewise with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Stalin and Hitler, which proved to be Stalin’s biggest political mistake, which disarmed the USSR against the Nazi invasion, precisely Hitler’s biggest operation in World War II.
Earlier, Putin hoped to be accepted into the imperialist club (G-7). His bourgeois geopolitical illusions actually helped the expansion of NATO to the East. China and Russia tacitly supported the invasion of Libya in the UN Security Council abstaining on the creation of the no-fly zone that wiped out Gaddafi’s resistance to Libyan fascist mercenaries, NATO agents, as Azov are today.
Russian support to Trump backfired badly , as he tore up the INF treaty to enable introduction of ‘short range’ nukes into Eastern Europe, obviously a key element of NATO expansion. However, the bourgeois alternative to Trump in the US, the Biden Democrats, were up their necks in the Maidan coup in 2014 and have driven the world to the kind of confrontation and hysteria over Ukraine and Russia’s military action to defend the Russian/Russophone population that was last seen over the Korean War in 1950. Which also happened under a Democratic administration, of Truman. The pro-war liberal hysterics now claim that this particular Russian tactic ‘proves’ that Russia is ‘fascist’, or even that Russia is somehow responsible for the rise of far-right currents to contend for power in the imperialist countries themselves … a remarkable claim, as they arm Nazis with Western weapons and bloodthirsty torturers and mercenaries with immense capital investments as the vanguard of their anti-Russian and anti-Eurasian offensive.
Whether in France or the US, the varied policies of political support to supposedly ‘lesser evil’ or even ‘progessive’ (!!!) bourgeois figures and currents fails even in its own terms. Vote Democrat against Trump and his racist hysteria and attempts to incite fascist violence in the US, and you get Biden instead who funds Nazi violence in the Ukraine and whose efforts have reached the point where it can be said that, over Ukraine, the imperialist bourgeoisie is more and more openly seeking to rehabilitate Nazism itself, while threatening WWIII. In France, a vote ‘against Le Pen’ by the left in favour of Macron will in practice lead to a Macron regime that resembles much of what a Le Pen regime would do. Choosing between the Strangler and the Axe-Murderer has only one predictable outcome – murder. The left needs to steel the working class to fight back militantly against either murderer.
Liga Communista and classconscious.org have launched an appeal for groups and individuals to sign an open letter to be distributed on May Day 2022 against the imperialist NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and for the right of Russia to defend itself against imperialist encroachment.
The open letter hopes to build on the momentum of the panel initiated by the two groups held on March 26th “Marxists speak out against the conflict between Russia and imperialism”.
As the imperialist offensive deepens in Ukraine and the drive towards WW3 accelerates, it is an essential political task for anti-imperialist forces to also deepen our collaboration. We must work together to build the socialist leadership of a genuinely anti-war movement that is built upon the twin goals of fighting imperialism and building socialism.
Some of the groups involved in the March 26th panel are putting out a call for joint actions on May Day through marching in a united front style bloc together at May Day marches. This is a separate political initiative. To join this initiative please email ma********@********il.com .
OPEN LETTER FOR MAYDAY
On May Day, the international day of solidarity of the workers of the world, the following groups and individuals proclaim our united opposition to the greatest threat to the global working class: imperialist war. We declare our refusal to accommodate ourselves to the war drive of world imperialism against Russia. We hoist on our banners today the following:
• Down with NATO’s proxy imperialist war in Ukraine!
• for the right of Russia to defend itself against imperialist encroachment!
Those on the Left who seek to emulate the propaganda of the ruling class by reducing this global conflict to a national struggle for Ukrainian “self-determination” ignore the following:
Although Russia has been a capitalist state since 1991 it is not an imperialist power in its own right. Imperialism is more than when one state employs military force against another. Imperialism is a stage of capitalism represented by the dominance of finance capital. Russia is not part of the “imperialist club” but a relatively backward, dependent capitalist economy.
The military operation of Russia in Ukraine is a desperate effort to stop it from being used as a spearhead in the long held plans of western imperialism to turn Russia into a semi-colony to loot its vast internal resources. Ukraine’s integration into the NATO war machine was well advanced before Russia launched its defensive military operation. Russia faced the prospect of its entire western border becoming part of the NATO alliance and a staging ground for the deployment of advanced weaponry, including nuclear weapons, missile defence systems and troops aimed squarely at Russia.
The 2014 Maidan Coup led by fascist shock troops on the ground and guided by US imperialism, installed an effective puppet government in Kiev. Since the coup this government has not only been a direct tool of US imperialism, but has violently suppressed all Leftists, ethnic Russians, and other minorities. The repression provoked a bloody civil war in Ukraine as residents of the Donbass established the Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk to defend themselves from the violently Russophobic Kiev regime and its fascist attack dogs.
This is why we reject the policy of “revolutionary defeatism” being advocated by many centrist Marxist tendencies. It is not enough to just oppose NATO intervention in Ukraine. Opposition to imperialism means extending support to those in it directly in its cross hairs. This means offering support to both the Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and to the Russian state. Russia has the right to defend its sovereignty by militarily force against imperialism’s proxy war.
We are also committed to the genuine independence of Ukraine. However this cannot be achieved under the aegis of an imperialist war alliance that is using Ukraine as pawn.
We oppose the proxy war in Ukraine because it is part of imperialism’s drive to World War 3. The efforts to subordinate Russia through sanctions, war and regime change, are part of US imperialism’s ever more reckless efforts to maintain its global hegemony and reverse its economic decline against both its imperialist rivals in Europe and rising China. The rivalries are fuelled by the ongoing capitalist economic crisis deepened by the Covid19 pandemic. A NATO victory in Ukraine would not lead to peace but only advance imperialism’s war plans against China.
A war between NATO and its allies against either Russia or China risks wiping out billions of lives in a nuclear war and unleashing horrors that would dwarf the worst infernos of the 20th century.
On May Day we recommit ourselves not only to resistance to imperialism but to building an independent movement of the working class internationally to overthrow capitalism through world socialist revolution. The signing and sharing of this statement on May Day is aimed at starting to rebuild concrete links between the genuinely anti-imperialist Marxist forces as part of this process.
The struggle against imperialism must be forged into a struggle against the capitalist system and all the capitalist ruling classes! War will only truly end when there are no more nation states or classes!
Workers of the world unite!
Groups that have already signed include:
ABC de Luta (Brazil)
Anti-Imperialist Aotearoa (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Bolshevik Group – (South Korea)
Classconscious.org (Australia/USA)
Communist Party of the Brazilian People.
Communist League (Brazil)
Consistent Democrats (Great Britain)
Fração Trotskista – Vanguarda Proletária (Brazil)
Frente Revolucionária dos Trabalhadores/FRT (Brazil)
Frontiera Vermelha (Brazil)
Komite Esperansa (Marxist Educational Movement – East Timor)
Militant Trend Bolshevik (Argentina)
New Communist Party – Great Britain
David Ajetunmobi, on behalf of Nigeria Automobile Technicians Association, NATA
Partido Comunista dos Trabalhadores Brasileiros/PCTB (Brazil)
Partido Obrero Socialista (Costa Rica)
Planning Beyond Capitalism (US)
Red Line, Group for Workers’ Counterattack (Greece)
Revolutionary Communist Action (Greece)
Socialist Fight (Great Britain)
Socialist Party of America (US)
Socialist Unity Party / Partido de Socialismo Unido (US)
Socialist Workers League (US)
Young People’s Socialist League (US)
US Friends of the Soviet People
Individuals that have already signed include:
Mark Andresen – Great Britain
Marcelo Bastos – Brazil
Irene Bolger—Australia
Joana Marisa Borges Boaventura – Brazil
Anthony Hubert Codjoe, Ghana
Chang-Won Kim – South Korea
Issac Cohen – Great Britain
Mark Copestake – Great Britain
Andy Coombes (UNITE member) – Great Britain
JM Considine – Switzerland
Botagoz Datkhabaeva – Kazakhstan
Moises Delgado – US
Alex Jordan Dillard – US
Will Eberrle—Switzerland
Jane Elliott – Great Britain
David Fox (Australia)
Mike Gimbel – Retired Executive Board member, Locak 375, AFSME, AFL-CIO, US
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