Workers Must Turn Imperialist War into Revolution here ♦ NATO uses Ukrainian fascists here ♦ Can workers do the impossible again here ♦
US-Russia War in Ukraine: Fascist War Criminals vs. Fascist War Criminals. Workers Everywhere Must Turn Imperialist War into Revolution for Communist Workers’ Power
USA, March 25— The US government accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine on the same day as the death of Madeline Albright. She was US Secretary of State during the war on Iraq. A reporter once confronted her with the fact that the war killed half a million Iraqi children. “We think the price is worth it,” she responded.
The hypocrisy of US imperialism and its media lapdogs has no limit. Liberal newspapers and commentators emphasize how Putin is lying to the Russian people. And he is. But meanwhile US media are massively lying to people here and worldwide.
The US rulers insist that Putin, an “evil madman,” started the war. But they have known for twenty-five years that NATO expansion into eastern Europe would likely cause war with Russia. For example:
Cold War strategist George Kennan (1998) warned that NATO expansion would provoke “a bad reaction from Russia.”
Analyst John Mearsheimer (2015): “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path” and the “result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked … [We are] in fact encouraging that outcome.”
According to the Rand Corporation, “Since 2014, the United States has provided over $2.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine.” Ukraine deployed these against lightly armed Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. The “vast majority” of these separatists, while armed and trained by Russia, “consist of locals—not soldiers of the regular Russian military.”
The liberal US media portray Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government as a brave model of democracy. But in 2019, they reported that many considered the comedian-turned-candidate to be a puppet of the Russian oligarch Kolomoisky. Zelenskyy is an actor. Others (whether oligarchs or the CIA) write his scripts.
CBS and NBC are singing a duet about “Russia’s alternate reality”—meaning its references to “Nazi Battalions.” As if those didn’t exist.
From 2015-2017, the US House of Representatives unanimously amended its Defense Appropriations Bill to “limit arms, training, and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion.” Under Pentagon pressure, this amendment kept disappearing.
A 2018 law stipulated that “none of [these] funds may be used to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” Representative Ro Khanna declared that “White supremacy and neo-Nazism are unacceptable and have no place in our world.”
But Ro Khanna today: “The Ukrainian fight against Russia is a totally justified war … we ought to be supporting the Ukrainian people with money in arms in that fight.” No mention that the Azov Battalion is now part of the Ukrainian National Guard. Or that fascists worldwide are rushing to join them.
Putin openly envisions himself as a new Czar reviving the old Russian Empire. Russian workers and soldiers need to take a lesson from 1917 and overthrow his capitalist regime. So must the rest of us.
But let’s also learn from the mistakes of the Bolshevik revolution. The socialism they fought for was another form of capitalism. It evolved into today’s Russian imperialism. We must mobilize directly for communism.
And nationalism (or patriotism) is never a good thing. It turns worker against worker, soldier against soldier, and helps only the capitalist rulers. As The Communist Manifesto said, working people have no country. We are one international working class.
Committed fascists are perhaps 10% of the Ukrainian force fighting the Russian invasion. The other 90% may be following their tactical leadership, but most could become convinced of class-conscious communist internationalism – if the fascists don’t win them politically first.
The same is true in India and in the US military. A 2020 Military Times poll found that “about one-third of active-duty personnel have witnessed signs of white supremacy in the ranks — and nearly half consider it nearly as menacing as foreign terrorism.” Friends of Red Flag have reported sharp struggles between racists and anti-racists on several bases.
In these situation, even small numbers of active communist organizers inside the military can be decisive. Every Party collective must plan how to contribute to this work.
US, Russian, and Chinese imperialists – and national capitalists worldwide – are intensifying their bloody conflicts. We must intensify the fight to defeat nationalism and win masses into the ranks of the International Communist Workers’ Party.
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NATO Uses Ukrainian Fascists to fight Russia
Russian missiles struck a military base at Yavoriv in Western Ukraine on March 15th, killing “international volunteers” fighting with the NATO-backed Ukraine forces. Among those killed were ex-members of the British Parachute Regiment, which massacred civilians in Ireland in 1972.
The British reactionary rag The Sun quotes an observer who describes this pick n’ mix bag of reactionaries as “a Star Wars canteen. There were gun nuts, biker gangs, tough guys, American religious people there to do God’s work, war addicts.”
These volunteers having nothing in common with the International Brigades who embodied proletarian solidarity during the anti-Fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). They are mostly fascists who will find good company among their hosts in Ukraine.
NATO is using Ukrainian people to do its fighting while NATO and the US supply the arms and ammunition. US-NATO imperialists are using Ukraine to fight a war against its challenger, Russian imperialism.
Ukrainian Fascists have a long history
Émigré Ukrainians established the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929 after their defeat in the Russian Civil War. They modelled it on Mussolini’s Italian fascists. The OUN sought to infiltrate the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It employed terrorist methods to try to break it from the USSR and establish an ultra-nationalist fascist regime.
The OUN split in 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. One faction, the OUN-B led by Stepan Bandera, established an independent government of Ukraine in Lvov, and declared allegiance to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. It established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and massacred Poles, Jews, and other Soviet citizens. The OUN-B was a major participant in the Holocaust.
After the Red Army smashed the fascist Axis powers, many UPA members remained in the USSR and the Polish Peoples Republic as terrorists. They were eventually crushed, but survived abroad in the US, Canada, and Britain, where they received funding from the US CIA.
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, many Ukrainian exiles and their descendants returned to Ukraine. They established fascist parties based on the OUN heritage, including the Svoboda Party and the Right Sector.
The Azov Battalion is one such group. They identify with the legacy of the OUN and its armed force, the UPA. They are a paramilitary group with a lot of street power. They use Nazi symbols and espouse fascist, nationalist, and antisemitic ideas. Since the 2014 Maidan coup and civil war, the Azov Battalion has been incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine.
Fascists are influential in Ukraine today and form the backbone of Ukrainian nationalism. The old Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera is today considered a Ukrainian national hero. The current President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, (who is Jewish) said during his election campaign, “Stepan Bandera is a hero for a certain part of Ukrainians, and this is a normal and cool thing. He was one of those who defended the freedom of Ukraine.”
The white supremacist USA had no problem installing a Black president in 2008. Likewise, today Ukraine has no problem placing a token Jewish president in charge to hide the deeply fascistic and ethnocentric Ukrainian nationalism.
This white supremacist, antisemitic Nazi group is getting a free pass from Western media, including some who had previously exposed its Nazi ideology. Now this is all ignored or ‘forgotten’ in the name of fighting Russia.
Azov has received weapons and training from NATO member states. It has used its training to murder Russian Muslims in Ukraine. It has also used civilians in Mariupol as human shields to defend their fiefdom.
The support for extreme nationalism and fascism is quite in keeping with NATO’s history. They never ceased supporting Ukraine’s Nazi groups and now are using them for the purpose which perpetuated their existence: to fight NATO’s war against Russia.
Ukraine Crisis Challenges the Working Class to do the “Impossible”: To Build Real Communism on the Ashes of Capitalism-Imperialism
“They are all no good!” said the MTA bus driver to Red Flag distributors. “They are all capitalists-imperialists threatening a nuclear WWIII.”
“Communism sounds great in the books, but it hasn’t existed anywhere. I have no faith humanity can build such a system,” was his response to our argument that communist revolution will end these genocidal wars. He did, however, take an extra paper for a friend.
Another driver did not take Red Flag, but in response to the Ukraine crisis and the menace of a nuclear world war, she asked:
“What can we do?”
This question is on the minds of millions of workers worldwide. It demands communist answers.
First, the war in Ukraine is between two imperialists blocks – US imperialists and their NATO allies versus Russian and Chinese imperialists – fighting for world domination.
Second, this war is a capitalist class war against the international working class. We do the suffering, fighting, and dying. Taking sides is a deadly mistake. Our historic task is to be the grave diggers of capitalism: To organize a revolution to bury forever all capitalists-imperialists and build a communist world.
Third, war is an inevitable feature of capitalism. Capitalism is based on competition for maximum profits with the goal of “peacefully” taking over or eliminating their rivals.
For example, in 1908 there were 223 car manufacturers in the US. Today there are only 3 US companies to reap all the profits. The others were either taken over or went bankrupt.
International competition among imperialists is not so “peaceful”. Their competition for maximum profits requires world domination. World domination requires powerful armies to defend the imperialists’ top dog position or to fight for it.
Dethroning the US as the dominant imperialist power – a position it held since 1945 – will require a world war. It took WWI and WWII for the British to cede their throne to US imperialism.
Facing WWIII, can a small communist party, like ICWP, mobilize millions for revolution?
This question is on many people’s minds, including many of our coworkers, friends, and Red Flag readers. Many think it is impossible.
History shows, however, that the working class has done the “impossible” many times before. We can do it again!
In 1912, after 7 years of fascist repression, the communist Bolshevik Party had been reduced to a handful of activists: about 200 in all of Russia. WWI erupted in 1914 radicalizing millions of Russian workers, peasants, and soldiers.
Thousands joined the communists. In1917, a quarter million Bolsheviks lead the Russian masses to overthrow the Russian rulers. Thus, was born the first working class socialist state in history covering one sixth of the world’s area.
They then fought heroically a 5-year civil war to defeat the Russian capitalist fascist armies backed by 14 imperialist invading armies, including 80 thousand US Marines, bent on “strangling the baby in its crib.”
Before, during and after WWII, the workers and peasants in China did the same. In 1937, a small Chinese Communist Party began organized armed warfare against Japanese forces which had invaded China. They successfully survived the scorched-earth war policy of the fascist invaders which murdered over 30 million, mainly Chinese peasants.
After vanquishing these fascist hordes in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party – with a Red Army of 3 million and a militia of 20 million – defeated the US backed nationalist regime and led the Chinese working masses to power in 1949, establishing socialism over one fifth of the world’s population then!
Can the world’s workers do the same today?
History answers with a resounding YES! This time we will do it better. Our predecessors’ victories inspire us. Their failures strengthen our resolve. We learned from their mistakes to fight directly for communism. Socialism – state capitalism – transformed the communist rulers into vicious capitalist-imperialist exploiters and oppressors.
We fight directly for worldwide communism: a world without money, wage slavery, private property, markets, borders, or nations. Nothing will be bought or sold, especially our labor power.
This will eliminate the competition for jobs, the material bases for racism, sexism and xenophobia used by the capitalists-imperialists to divide, and superexploit us.
Production will be only to meet human needs, not for profit. Communist collectives will guarantee the participation of all in making all decisions affecting our lives.
In a classless communist world, there won’t be any need for wars or even weapons. Collectively we will share and take care of the world’s natural resources.
Join ICWP, distribute Red Flag and recruit your co-workers, your family, and friends – especially industrial workers and soldiers – to help once again accomplish what seems “impossible”: make real communism a reality!
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