Tag Archives: Stalinism

UK Polish Leftists on Ukraine

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Photograph by Oleksii Kyrychenko, 10 March 2022. Portrait of his 12 year old daughter in Kyiv.

The beauty of childhood and the tragedy of war, and admirable resoluteness in the midst of great injustice, all in one photo. — MG,Jr.

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Alexander Pademelon Johnson, of Sydney, Australia, made the “swords” graphic and pointed me to the following internet posting by a group of Polish leftists in the UK. (https://www.facebook.com/LewakiUK/)

LewakiUK: Stop talking about the Azov battalion

Just stop it.
Stop posting about it, stop FOCUSING on it.
YEEEEEEEESSSSS! there are neo-nazis in Ukraine. There are nazis across the entire Europe, not just Eastern Europe, including the UK, yet somehow NO ONE organises “sPeCiaL MiLitArY oPeRaTioNs to denazify and demilitarise” sovereign countries.

Were you against military interventions in Iraq? Yes? Afghanistan? Yes? Vietnam? Yeah, so we thought. Were all the people of those countries pure good? No. Were their governments unproblematic? Hell, no. Yet somehow in this case you’re all “omg look at these Azov guys… Hm… looks like these Ukrainians aren’t that innocent after all, huh. I don’t know man, there’s a lot of nazis there, these Russians kinda have a point”.

You are literally repeating Putin’s justification for this war. slow clap
And it comes from the left, of all places on the political spectrum.
It’s Ukraine now, but do you know what Poles and other Eastern Europeans think when we hear or read this from you?

We instantly think: WHAT IF IT WAS US? What if it IS us, next? What would our British FRIENDS do, if it was us.

What if Russia suddenly decided that (and humour us here!), Poland was violating human rights through anti-LGBT policies, anti-abortion bills, and the not letting Afghan refugees through the Polish-Belarusan border due to racism. ALL ARE 100% TRUE. All are wrong, and we know it. We’re literally the left, as in, we were activists against these policies in Poland, before we moved to the UK, or are still involved fighting against them. We know about our countries’ issues, and we know we need to sort ourselves out, but what if SOMEONE decided they’d do it for us, they’d come in with their military and de-…whatever us?

And here you’d be, digging out those articles on the web that happen to be TRUE, but in your hands they would serve nothing more than to further the success of the aggressor’s propaganda, and the implied between the lines argument that “we got what was coming to us”. Some friends, indeed. “Comrades”.
Do you know why it’s not us though? Why it’s not Poland, Latvia, Slovakia?

Because they joined NATO. They joined NATO to have protection from Russia.
Think of countries like Latvia. Less than 2 million people, a tiny military, and a large minority Russian population, some exclusively Russian-speaking, many Putin-supporting.
Latvia has over the years introduced a number of language laws, in retaliation for the Russians dominating public life pre-1989. Would that be a good enough argument for a “military operation”? Of course it would. But it won’t happen, because they’re in fecking NATO. So your “stop NATO expansion” spiels are falling on deaf ears in Eastern Europe, for reasons you need to either accept or not, but just stop talking.

But, back to the main point:
A week or two ago half of you didn’t know about the Azov Battalion, and you didn’t care, because it’s far, somewhere among these savages from the East. Now there’s mentions of some nazis so you “did your research”, and you’re sudeenly experts on Eastern Europe, westsplaining (thank you for that term, Zosia Brom from @Freedom News) our politics and mutual conflicts to us like we’re children.
So let us tell you this – you will never understand us, and how the experiences of multiple occupations shaped our societies, and how that historical experience is present in our everyday conversations, and in our system of values.

In our part of Europe, everyone has had beef with each other, and we are raised with that knowledge about each other. There are CENTURIES of beef between Poland and Ukraine, centuries of bloody and painful history. We put it all aside on day ONE of the Russian invasion.

You can bet your bottom pound that there are leftists, antifascists, completely apolitical people, and, yes – the nazis, fighting side by side in Ukraine right now, because for as long as this war goes on, the enemy is only ONE, and we can go on hating each other later.

Your comments come from one place, and one place only – never having been under Russian/Soviet occupation. Never living in what is essentially the shadow of Mordor.
Western imperialism, NATO imperialism – those are your main enemies, and we get it. We don’t like them either, but for our nations they are the lesser evil.

Our enemy is Russian imperialism, and on this front, Eastern European countries choose to stick with NATO, because what comes with Russian imperialism is more than extraction of natural resources and economy, but something much worse.

What comes is the russification of culture, the rewriting of history, the banning of books and their authors, the banning of Western media, access to information, limiting civil rights, it’s the comeback of the secret police, the massive propaganda machine, the end of independent media, the censorship of arts, the unexplained disappearances of dissenting individuals, the state repressions, politicising curriculum and indoctrinating children from primary school, the surveillance of the population, the infiltration of universities and workplaces.

Romanians get it, Georgians get it, Lithuanians get it, Poles get it because we have all LIVED THROUGH IT, some of us more than once. That’s why Ukrainians are arming themselves with whatever they can, and if they can’t have weapons, they will carry Molotovs, scythes and pickle jars. Because they know what’s at stake.

They didn’t choose this and they don’t want to face the enemy unarmed and helpless. Not everyone wants to fight, but plenty do, regardless of experience.

We feel for the men who wanted to cross the borders with their families, but were stopped from leaving, separated from their families, and given arms. Most of them have had mandatory military training, so during war they are army reserves. This is why you avoid armed conflict at all cost…
And to those of you that think, or sometimes even tell us point-blank that Ukraine should surrender because they can’t win anyway – wow, that wasn’t even as quick as we thought. Gosh darned it, you stuck by us for almost two weeks now until you decided Ukraine was worth sacrificing for the peace of mind of Western Europe.

We’ve even heard that Ukrainians should protest like Gandhi, maybe stand in front of tanks with flowers and shit. You’ve obviously never seen what pacification of peaceful protests by an army looks like. But some of us have.

Should Ukraine surrender? NO. Not ever. Fuck, no. As lefties, we oppose imperialism, and fascism, which is now what the Russian state is serving their citizens with their new propaganda.
Speaking of which, what DO they say about the war in Russia?

So glad you asked. Apart from the decent folks that are getting arrested by their thousands for opposing the war, despite there being a punishment of up to 15 years in prison for using the words “war”, “aggression, “invasion”, etc., you can hear the rest repeating the version of events peddled by the state:
a) „Today Z is a symbol of the liberation operation for Donbass and liberating Ukraine from their nazi regime, it’s a symbol of protecting the fatherland”- Bikers from Ivanovo

b) „We know what we are fighting for. So that there is no fascism, weapons, so that the Ukrainian nation can live in peace. We will help them. The events of the last few days are reminiscent of June 1941. Almost the entire Europe under Hitler’s flag attacked us back then. Now they have gathered under the flag of NATO and pushed Ukrainian nazis on Russia. The president could not wait for missiles and bombs to start falling on us. If diplomacy didn’t help,we had to start a surgical military operation. – Nikolai Kruchkin, director of the Saransk Museum.

c) „As our boys are fulfilling their mission of denazification of Ukraine, residents of Russia, including KuZBass [notice the “Z”], are encountering unprecedented economic and moral pressure from other countries, and a wave of disinformation about our special operation. The Z symbol is an expression of support for our troops and the unity of our society. – Sergei Civiliev, governor of Kemerovo

Quotes translated from a post on Tomasz Piechal – Szkice Wschodnie (https://www.facebook.com/Tomasz-Piechal-Szkice-Wschodnie-101241165856934/) Thank you for that btw
Wonderful, innit? But you see, we’re familiar with that, too. Because that’s all we had on TV when we were parts of the Soviet Union. There was no ”independent media”. There was no media at all, apart from state media. Right now, Russia is organising “humanitarian convoys” with food to the bombed Ukrainian cities. AND they are bringing film crews. But Ukrainians don’t take the food from them, so they bring actors who pose as ‘deeply thankful’ Ukrainians for TV propaganda.

Alright… let’s have some FAQs

Q: “Why did Putin attack Ukraine?”
A: to finish what he started when he took Crimea, and incorporate the “fake nation” of Ukraine into Russia, duh. For centuries, Russia suppressed the Ukrainian language and culture, and it’s what they are planning now. Putin’s talk about Russians and Ukrainians being ”one nation”, or about Ukraine “not being a real country” is just preparing ground for russification of Ukraine. Do you know that Ukraine used to be called Malorossiya? (Little Russia)?
During Putin’s rule, he and his supporters have long peddled the idea of “ruski mir” – “Russian world” – an ideology that says Russian civilisation extends to anywhere Russians live.
Do you see where this is going?
Get it now???
If not, read this article that the Russian “news” outlet RIA Novosti published by mistake, that was supposed to run AFTER Russia’s “obvious” victory over Ukraine. They promptly removed it, but not quickly enough. It had already been screencapped by multiple readers, and translated into English by a Pakistani newspaper (https://thefrontierpost.com/the-new-world-order/)

Q: Is Ukraine a nazi country?
A: If you think a right wing party with 1.5% support makes a country neo-nazi, then boy, do I have news for you about the rest of Europe.

Q: But don’t you care about the Ukrainian nationalists and the history of nazi collaboration???
A: Don’t YOU care about the Russian Wagner Group and the Z campaign?
But yes, we do care about Ukrainian nationalism, and sadly we know it very well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia
Like we said, centuries of bloody beef between us. None of it matters now. But Ukrainian nationalists =/= Ukrainians.
And Ukraine has never been a threat to us, nor to the safety and independence of any other Eastern European countries, as opposed to You-Know-Who.

Q: Why are there so many Russians in Donbas?
A: Majority of the Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk were settled there when Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, after Stalin-orchestrated Holodomor, the Great Famine, wiped out 4 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. Local population of Donbas was also decimated, so Russian settlers moved in. In 1991, in Ukraine’s independence referendum, most ethnic Russians in Donbas said ‘yes’ to living in free Ukraine, and for years, everything was peachy. What changed the moods? Mostly Yanukovych in 2010, but that part you should know from the news coverage.
And mind you, over 2 million ethnic Russians left Donetsk and Luhansk when separatists started taking over. What does that tell you?

Q: What do Ukrainians want?
A: They want to be left the fuck alone by Russia, and make their own choices. Those choices include joining NATO and the EU, as the second largest European country. You might dislike one or both, but it’s not you having to deal with Putin’s moods on a daily.

Q: “Isn’t fighting for the nation against leftist principles?”
A: Oh, that comment is so fucking rich coming from a country that had to fight for its independence exactly 0 times. Not aimed at you Scots, Irish, and Welsh btw. You know what we mean. fist bump
How the left wing in one of the most imperialist countries on this planet has the balls to tell us we shouldn’t resist imperialists by any means necessary is beyond us.
It’s not fighting for the nation, ya pricks. It’s fighting against being basically colonised. One would think that leftists should support it by default, kind of a low hanging fruit really… but what do we know.
Q:“Should leftists fight alongside the state army?”

A: Who the fuck cares NOW? That is such a first world problem question.
Q: “What do you say about the racism on the Polish and Ukrainian border?”

A: It’s HORRIFIC. We’re deeply ashamed, sad and angry about it. We don’t stand for any of this. Safe passage for everyone NOW! If you want to know what’s happening on the Polish-Ukrainian and the Polish-Belarusan border, please follow Grupa Granica on facebook – they are a collective project of 14 groups and orgs working with refugees in Poland, that is responding to the outrageous treatment of Afghan, Syrian and other BIPOC refugees by our government and Border Force.
Q: “Don’t you think there’s a double standard with the way how refugees from Ukraine are being treated compared to Syrians/Afghans?

A: Absolutely. We noticed it from day one, the bitter irony does not escape us. No one is asking why Ukrainians have smartphones, or nice looking clothes. People feel sorry for Ukrainian men who were forbidden from crossing the border, yet when Syrian men appeared they said they should have stayed in their country and fought. Baffling!

Q: “Was Holodomor real? Did Stalin actually starve Ukraine?”
A: Yes. Anyone who says otherwise will be banned from this page. No, it wasn’t “nazi propaganda”. Stalin’s soldiers went door to door and confiscated anything that would be edible enough to allow Ukrainians to survive the famine.
PS We take requests for informative posts. Some of us here are historians.

Q: “Should we arm Ukrainians?”
A: YES. Arm Ukraine. Arm Ukrainians. Arm the civilians who want to fight. Arm the volunteers.
UKRAINE CAN WIN THIS. But it needs support.
Even antifascist brigades are joining the Ukrainian resistance and you can’t see why because there’s some nazis there too.
You’re against volunteer legions, because defence is the job for the state.
Some of you suggested that Ukraine should surrender because they’ve been in the Soviet Union once, can’t be that bad.

And too many of you don’t understand why ordinary people are taking up arms in the first place.
Long story short, Western lefties… We’re kinda sick of you. You really eat up what you read on the Internet like Pelicans instead of talking to Eastern European comrades, of which you have plenty around you. And you don’t support us. You don’t support our unconditional right to freedom, and that is the most disappointing.

Our expectations were low, but holy fuck.
Enjoy that boot.
PS Слава Україні. смерт врогом.

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A Reflection on Zionism’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine

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For Americans, Stan Goff perfectly summarized the situation in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem today, and in Palestine generally for the last 54 years:

“Establishment Democrats support ethnic cleansing… There is no Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict.’ It’s the decades-long military occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. I know I sound like a broken record, but my [social media] feed keeps filling up with this weasel worded bullshit that assigns some utterly bullshit equivalency between occupier and occupied. No reasonable and honest person who is even superficially familiar with this issue can describe Israel as anything but an Apartheid state. An Apartheid state that is sustained and protected in its racist aggressions by the United States government with your taxes. Democrats and Republicans. Heretofore I will unfollow anyone who posts this kind of sly ‘moral equivalency’ trash. And no, it is not fucking ‘complicated’; it’s ignorance or cowardice, and it is objectively lending support to this lawless fascist state. That is all.”

The American “political class” runs a white supremacy state; to them, a threat to white supremacy anywhere is a threat to white supremacy everywhere. Hence the knee-jerk fealty to ethnic cleansing in Palestine by Zionists.

This is as it has always been and remains regarding “others” in the territory of the United States and the Western Hemisphere, with: the Amerindians, Blacks (long held in slavery, and ever discriminated against), Mexicans (the American West north of the Rio Grande is Occupied Mexico), and many other designated apart-from-white people.

With the growth since the 19th century of the fossil-fueled industrial power of American white supremacy came the global reach of its campaign of conquest: the Caribbean (1898, and 1959+), Central and South America (from Smedley Butler to Kennedy-Johnson, and Reagan, et al.), Southeast Asia (Vietnam+), South Africa (Kissinger, Reagan, the 1980s for Angola, Namibia, the U.S. support for South African apartheid — I knew a “jackal”: a retired unacknowledged U.S. mercenary-assassin who worked for S.A. in those years).

The World is “the enemy” of American white supremacy, just as Palestine is “the enemy” of Zionism. And Zionists have paid their way into being “honorary white people” — an apt Goffism characterizing our apart-from-white-Christian domestic compradores serving our domestic white supremacy settler colonialism — who are part of that American white supremacy establishment; and have financially metastasized themselves into the careerism of that narcissistic and intrinsically racist political class.

“Indeed I tremble for my country when [I] reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” — Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia).

But he still kept his slaves to the bitter end, banking on God’s justice continuing to sleep. And such is the attitude of the anguished self-absolved collectively guiltless perpetrators of today, and which drives their hypocritical equivocations and torturously convoluted hyperbole in defense of continuing with the slow-motion genocide in Palestine (as in Xinjiang, as in…) of the “others” to be dispossessed and discarded as fast as the marketplace of world public moral consciousness will bear.

For me it all begs the question: when do we reach the point where we deserve our own destruction?

The phrase “never again” should have been emblazoned on human memory many times in the past, for example searingly by Guernica in 1937, but tragically it never seems to fully catch hold as a guiding principle for human beings.

To my mind, one significant impetus to the eruption of World War II in Europe in 1939 was the failure of the Democracies including the United States to defend the Spanish Republic and stamp out fascism in Spain during 1936-1939. The retreat into nationalist comfort (as today with vaccine nationalism) and ‘the Democracies’ not-so-covert anti-socialist collaboration with the fascists in Spain, Italy and Germany during the 1930s, doomed them to be sucked into the genocidal maelström of 1939-1945. And we are yet not free of that poison. [1]

While “collective guilt” of the German people for the crimes of the Nazis was officially disavowed by the triumphant United Nations, after 8 May 1945, in the vital interests of pacifying, stabilizing and rebuilding Germany and the rest of devastated Europe without a resurgence of fascism — which itself was first sparked by the draconian punishment of Germany after World War I — it nevertheless was a moral truth. That the German people of the 1930s and 1940s (with the exception of an incredibly brave and noble minority) overwhelmingly supported the Nazi regime, is plain fact. [2]

But such collective guilt cannot be assigned to the children of those times, who have strived so vigorously to create a socially enlightened postwar Germany, a nation that is far more forthright in acting to compensate for the wrongs of its past than the United States has ever been about its Amerindian Genocide or its Black Slavery and Jim Crow (which latter was so instructive to the Nazis fashioning their race laws of 1933).

But such collective guilt can be assigned today to the self-styled Jeffersonians who are the adult perpetrators, enablers, and equivalents of 1930s “good Germans” in Israel and America (and China, etc.) acquiescing to the slo-mo genocides of the moment, like the vividly repulsive violent expropriations in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, and the aerial bombings in Gaza (84 years after the bombing of Guernica).

Can we be so sure that “God’s justice” will conveniently continue to sleep for us, as the Jeffersonian white supremacists hoped in the 18th and 19th centuries, and our American exceptionalists and Zionists hope today? Can we be so sure that our white supremacist equivocations today will escape retribution as was visited upon the European and American democracies, and on perfidious Russian Communism [3], after their failures to support the obvious moral imperatives of defending designated outcast “others” from persecution: European Jews (1933), Ethiopia (1935), Spain (1936), China (1937), Czechoslovakia (1938), and Poland (1939)?

In fact, “God’s justice” looms before us and without pity on even our children, in the forms of the climate crisis and the crisis of the destruction of Nature and habitability on Planet Earth. Today’s children have no share in the collective guilt of their parents and grandparents for creating and expanding that planetary crisis — by the decades-long fossil-fueled orgy of exclusionary industrialized capitalism in all its forms — yet those children are facing the brunt of these accelerating catastrophes. That bald fact is pointedly stated by Greta Thunberg, voicing the judgment by humanity’s robbed future on its greedy present that is also its future discredited past.

To extract ourselves from the climate crisis would require widespread cooperative altruistic action over the long term. None of those four qualities: “widespread,” “cooperative,” “altruistic,” “long-term,” have been exhibited simultaneously by human civilization in the past. The most accurate guesses about humanity’s future are likely to be arrived at by using the imagination without invoking any of those four qualities.

To salvage optimism in these times it is necessary to realize that there are no physical barriers nor prohibitive scientific “laws” preventing humanity from exhibiting “widespread cooperative altruistic action over the long term,” even starting tomorrow, to effectively and justly stop the slo-mo genocides underway now and the crisis of accelerating bio-inhospitality, and to compensate for the wrongs of the past. Such optimism, though logically limited by “realistic” thinking, is essential for heartening and motivating the people seeking to expand the scope of those collective altruistic actions. Greta and her generation deserve our best efforts — for life.

Even without possessing any political power or impressive wealth, we ‘ordinary, everyday adult people’ can individually add our mite to such good collective action by disavowing collaborationist lies (say it: the Israeli occupation of Palestine is apartheid, and ethnic cleansing), by speaking the truth plainly and without fear (“You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future”) [4], by being honest witnesses (#SayHerName, Breonna Taylor and at least 103 others) [5], and by not allowing our words to be self-censored nor our attitudes to be submissively polite so as to cloak the repulsive moral nakedness of “our” political leaders, emperors and parasites.

[My thanks to Kathryn Morse, Stan Goff, and Louis Proyect.]

Notes:

[1]
“The Silence of Others” is an intense (especially for me) documentary about the efforts of the survivors of torture and persecution by Franco’s fascistic dictatorship in Spain (1939-1975), to gain justice.

The Spanish state, with many Francoists still ensconced in positions of authority and power, and shielded by the Amnesty law of 1977, resist tooth and nail all judicial efforts to provide such justice for the victims of these crimes, via the internationally recognized (and very little adhered to) judicial principle of universal jurisdiction for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and there being no statute of limitations for prosecuting them.

My father (a Spaniard born in Cuba) had an uncle, a violinist in a symphony, jailed by the Franco regime after the Civil War (he had regained his liberty by the late 1960s).

The Spanish Civil War continues to cast a long, long shadow on the character of Spaniards, and on the character of humanity. And there are too many new reflections of that cancerous fascism flickering on today around the world.

The Silence of Others
https://thesilenceofothers.com/

[2]
The Accountant of Auschwitz
http://www.accountantofauschwitz.com/

Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz
https://www.netflix.com/title/81070008

Benjamin Ferencz
https://benferencz.org/

[3]
The Nazi-Soviet Pact: A Betrayal of Communists by Communists
[An excerpt from Bini Adamczak’s book “Yesterday’s Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future.”]
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-nazi-soviet-pact-a-betrayal-of-communists-by-communists/

Intense. In the 1980s I read about the prisoner exchanges in 1939 of escaped German communists (antifascists) — and veterans of the Republican (socialist) side in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War — pulled out of asylum in Russia and given back to the Gestapo, and escaped Russian anticommunists (czarists and fascists) pulled out of asylum in Germany and given back to the NKVD. According to books by Michael Voslensky (Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class), Roy Medvedev (Let History Judge) and other similar authors whom I have now forgotten: the NKVD took the Communist Party membership cards away from their communist now-prisoners, and then with a Gestapo officer present verified the identity of each individual to check them off a Gestapo ‘shopping list,’ while similarly verifying the identity of an anticommunist prisoner being given to the NKVD in exchange. Then both the Gestapo and the NKVD led their repatriated prisoners away for executions in private.

The reason that Communist Party membership cards were removed by the NKVD, excommunicating those individuals from the CP, was so that the Gestapo would not be shooting “communists”: those in good standing with the Stalinist party of that time.

Very large gears turn in the machinery of power, indeed, and are lubricated with the blood of many lives whose identities have been erased from memory.

In the 2000s I met a woman who is a Spaniard born in Arkhangelsk (in West Arctic Russia), as her parents were Spanish communists who escaped Franco’s fascist Spain on the defeat of the Spanish Republicans in 1939. Her daughter and my youngest were friends in a girls chorus in San Francisco. She said that Stalin wanted the Spanish Communists as far from Europe (western, southern, central) as possible. She is a survivor (and very Russian), and obviously did not believe in any ideology. She made it real for me, without having to say very much.

All of this literature about the largely unnamed and long forgotten victims of betrayed better futures, is also about the historical achievements of the successful practitioners of the Arthashastra, The Prince, The Pentagon Papers, and the more recent derivatives of such manuals of “statecraft.”

[4]
Greta Thunberg speaks
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/18804443.Greta_Thunberg

[5]
SayHerName
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SayHerName

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