Many westerners are having their worst moments right now. As unconscious as they usually are... not clearly seeing Trumpism as fascism and not seeing and shouting stop the genocide in Gaza is despicable and frightening.
I am alarmed by how well we have adjusted- rationalized inhumanity.
The Gazan Muslims are kin to the Jews dating back to when Abraham, very old, took an Arab woman and had a child by her who started the Muslim branch of the Semites. No hatred is more vicious than between close relatives. Jews have faced anti Semitism for many centuries or millenia in many places. Muslims as well, at the hands of Crusaders ( White Christians from Europe) Jews were not able to win land to make their country until the British mandate ended after WW2 and a large part of Palestine where Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived peacefully. Actually Jews for centuries had become white European Jews . Then the British foolishly, without precedent, handed a majority of Palestinian land to the "Jewish" people
who had a religion but not a nationality which they demanded in 1948. Maybe they got it because of geography, oil, access through the Mediterranean to the vast untapped wealth of the East. Imagine, demanding a country, (because a people who were victims and hadn't had a country were just handed over the "country now known as Israel", which they lied and said was a country with no people . And now they're viciously killing the remnants of people who lived their for centuries. I see it is contemptible. But now the USA, hegemon of the world, also a colonizer nation is 100 % behind them. Because they suddenly love Jews? No, because there is riches in oil and gateway to the East and who can guess what else. Especially because Jews have amassed money and therefore power, which is the Satanic god in the wouldn't you know it, wealthy countries of the world . Now these two rogue countries plan and hope to run the world for themselves and their friends and cohorts.
And I say this as a person born a Jew, bot not any more, Ever! Or you might say Never Again.
Sorry but I have to vehemently disagree with you on your position of Putin. The descriptors you used of his behaviors can just as easily be ascribed to Hitler, PolPot
Suharto, Pinochet, Mao, Amin, and quite a few more, but the entity that assumes the
Unquestionable lead for worldwide violence, massacres, carpet bombing, deaths of innocents all over the globe. Any guesses?? I only have one in mind. Maybe you were gaslighting with your Putin comments, but I believe they represent
Your correct position. Why the demonizing of Putin anyway?
Also Andy, Mao does not belong in this group. In Mao's time, there were problems and errors from which lessons must be learned. But also during those decades, life expectancy in China more than doubled, industry grew by more than 10 percent a year during the Cultural Revolution, and by the 1970's China had solved its historic food problem. This revolution saved untold lives. And it will only be a revolution that ultimately saves humanity.
Andy, the reality is that Putin is a capitalist imperialist fascist piece of shit. You are correct that he has not caused anywhere near the scale of death and misery globally that US imperialism has, but that does not change the fact of what Putin is.
But then where do we slot the decades long legacy of US intrusion into countries we find needing “freedom and democracy”
and eliminate their governments through overthrow and decimate all opposition to our violent tactics. Has Russia done this to its surrounding neighbors over long periods of time?? Have they??
Andy I said Putin, not Russia. I'm thinking of Putin's imperialist intrusions into Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Crimea, the "near abroad" region of former USSR republics. "Soft power" in Africa. Putin's private army Wagner Group in Europe, Africa and South America. etc. The most significant intrusion being Ukraine. of course. And again, Putin has not caused anywhere near the scale of death and misery globally that US imperialism has over its long bloody history. But that does not change the fact that Putin is a capitalist imperialist.
Thank you Andy. I don’t know why so many critics of US policy have to include a diatribe on Putin. Is that Paul’s price of admission to the acceptability club whose members couldn’t care less about a word he pens? Maybe he fears he will be hauled off to some.HUAC hearing in DC. The United States and its vassals go to great effort and expense to vilify Putin. Why does Paul feel obligated to pile on?
Paul, I have never made a top 10 list before! You are a great thinker, and a tremendous writer, so why do you have to denounce Putin before you quite correctly list the misdeeds of the Evil Empire? A”pox on both your houses “ attitude is entirely appropriate when discussing the two party system in the US. But Putin and Russia can’t touch the horrors of recent US history. Nor can Hamas hold a candle to Israeli brutality. Do you denounce Hamas before pointing out the obvious in Gaza? George Hunter
Look man, I'm a communist. I get to denounce Putin and the US imperialists and numerous other ruling class criminals all at the same time! And at the end of the day it's not the shifting heads in high places it's the world system of capitalism-imperialism!
George your either/or logic defies reality. This thing of either Putin is bad and US is good, or US is bad and Putin is good, is nonsense. They are both bad, that is reality. And that is what an analysis of what humanity needs must be based on.
All-- you might have noticed that I'm a revolutionary communist for whom left attachment to and defense of Putin is bizarre and creepy. My Lame Left series dedicated a section to the wacky Putin left, which overlaps with the Trunmpenleft.
Affliction #6: . Geopolitical neo-Campism
The Putin Left, Absurd as that Should Sound
In the long and tragic absence of revolutionary socialist states and relevant national and international communist movements nearly half a century after the capitalist road was taken in formerly Maoist China, some left USAers have grasped at the noxious straws of geopolitical neo-campism. A strange and poisonous left attachment to the at once neoliberal and neo-fascist regime atop post-Soviet Russia is promoted by left-identified people who confuse and/or cynically conflate opposition to the arch-criminal US-American Empire with embrace and defense of the imperialist butcher and authoritarian, anti-Marxist tyrant Vladimir Putin. This tendency’s adherents either actually think or cynically claim to believe that there is only one blood-soaked imperialist power on the planet – the United States. Making Orwell blush, they back the blood-soaked criminal Putin’s mass-murderous and openly imperial war on Ukraine in the name of anti-imperialism and “anti-war” politics. Unwittingly, perhaps (though certainly not in all cases), they embrace the Russian imperialism that was explicitly articulated in the February 2022 speech in which Putin announced his “special military operation” – an address in which he attacked the great Russian revolutionary anti-imperialist Vladimir Lenin for supporting Ukrainians’ right to national self-determination.
As the brutal anti-communist gay- and trans-bashing uber-oligarch Putin sends tens of thousands of disproportionately poor Russian conscripts to horrible deaths like so much cannon fodder in Ukraine, as he locks up untold thousands of peaceful Russian antiwar protesters, the fake antiwar Putin left doesn’t call for a new Russian socialist and anti-imperialist revolution. It doesn’t reach out to antiwar groups and people in Russia. No, pseudo-radical Kremlin cheerleaders at places like Grayzone, Mint Press, and Consortium News (to mention just three of the most decrepit outlets of this “left” cancer) double and triple down on the Putin lie that Ukraine is a “Nazi” regime – curious justification for Russian forces’ Nazi-like slaughter, torture, and rape of ordinary Ukrainians....ctd.
The gangster Putin currently has masses of propagandized Russians preposterously believing that Ukraine started the war by attacking Russia with “LGBT ideology.” He will soon sign (or has already signed) a measure granting Russian soldiers, mercenaries, and allies full immunity for any crimes they commit in carrying out the Russian imperialist assault on Ukraine. The Putin left is okay with all this even if it sometimes pretends otherwise. Bring up Putin’s criminality in Ukraine (and elsewhere) from a revolutionary socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist perspective – a perspective that is witheringly and thoroughly critical of US/NATO imperialism and provocation within and beyond Eastern Europe – and the Putin left will reflexively and absurdly accuse you of supporting US/NATO imperialism and of unhinged “Russophobia.” Masters of deflective what about-ism, they pretend to justify Russian violations of international and human rights law (when they are not busy denying those crimes) by bringing up something that every serious radical already knows – that the criminal US Empire has long evaded and trashed the very same law. Their response to radical internationalists (and others) who denounce Russia’s war crimes has commonly been to literally deny those epic transgressions (for example, to claim that the hideous Bucha massacre was Western “fake news”) or to claim that Russian offenses are somehow justified by Washington’s long and horrific criminal record. When you question this childish and reflexive what-about-ism, the Putin left accuses you of being allied with US-NATO imperialism, no matter how radically critical you have always been and still are regarding US-NATO imperialism (please see these two publications of mine, just a small portion of my publications on and very much against US, NATO, and Western imperialism: Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power [2010]; Paul Street, “the World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,” Common Dreams, February 22, 2018. )
Moronically enough, the Putin left seems to have the fascistic uber-oligarch, nuke-mongering war criminal Putin and the imperial butchery of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group confused with Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front. Worse, it appears to have dropped or never understood elementary revolutionary socialist internationalism and class analysis. It has opted instead for geopolitical and “multi-polar” neo-campist alliance with any state on the wrong side of Washington’s imperial agenda.
Caveat: F-Zelensky Too, or Fight Capitalism, Not its Wars
Revolutionary Marxist criticism of the ridiculous and dodgy Putin left should not be taken to mean support for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Left-identified folks who are jubilant over the recent German and US decision to send more advanced tanks to Zelensky’s military are engaging in their own variant of heedless tankie-ness. There’s no call for jumping in bed with Western imperialism here. While Putin’s invasion is unjustified, it was not unprovoked by the US led-West. It could perhaps have been avoided had Washington said clearly that it had no intention of incorporating Ukraine into NATO. The invasion has clearly been welcomed by the Biden administration as an opportunity to weaken a leading geopolitical rival – Russia – by saddling Moscow with a “Vietnam” on its own borders (the same sentiment was behind US provocation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s). The war in Ukraine is a great profit-making windfall for US arms-makers and oil and gas exporters. Uncle Sam, whose blood-soaked Empire (replete with more than 800 bases in more than 80 countries and accounting to 40 percent of global military spending) and crimes (No Gun Ri, Operation Tiger Force, “many My Lais,” the Highway of Death, Fallujah, Nissour Square, Guantanamo Boy, Bagram Air Force base, the destruction of Libya, Bola Boluk, the direct and indirect invasion, domination, and torture of dozens of Third World countries…the list gone on and on and on) dwarf those of Russia, has been crying about Ukraine all the way to the bank. Biden has no more regard for Ukrainian lives than the psychopath in the Kremlin.
Biden and his commanders are perfectly content to see masses of ordinary Ukrainians die in a prolonged war. As combined Ukrainian and Russian civilian and soldier deaths run into the many tens of thousands if not past a hundred thousand by now, Washington and US media sell the Ukraine War as a grand historic battle between “democracy,” represented by Ukraine, and “autocracy,” represented by Russia. This is absurd. The notoriously corrupt Zelensky government represents oligarchs and suppresses trade unions and left parties. The US itself is an open corporate and financial plutocracy wrapped in the deceptive flag of unmentionably bourgeois democracy – a late bourgeois republic still suffering under an 18th Century slaveowners’ charter and now teetering on the edge of authoritarian/fascist consolidation. The United States has long supported and still supports despotic regimes — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, all US client states, are good examples today — that it considers to be on its economic and geopolitical side in the world capitalist system.
To make the Ukraine War even more problematic, to say the least, it raises the specter of World War III. The conflict dramatically elevates the very real threat of thermonuclear war, with Putin repeatedly declaring his willingness to use nuclear weapons in existential defense of Mother Russia while the US and its partners send ever more lethal weaponry into battlefields located on Russia’s vast, repeatedly West-invaded southwestern underbelly. Imagine an imperial reversal, with Russian and Chinese weapons being used by soldiers fighting the US in Canada and/or Mexico. Would Washington be brandishing nuclear weapons in such a situation? Do bears defecate in forested areas?.
Gosh, whatever could go wrong?
Thanks to how the Ukraine War has jacked up the menace of global Nuclear Winter while accelerating the eco-exterminist extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently placed its Doomsday Clock at the most extreme level of peril in history: 90 seconds to Midnight.
Hello? Those parts of the left who have gone all in with Zelensky – this includes some self-described radical socialists (surprisingly enough to this writer) along with the standard cruise-missile Democratic Party liberals and progressives – are playing with fire, putting 8 billion human beings at risk for the sake (they seem to think) of 44 million Ukrainians.
The war in the Ukraine is a lethal nightmare that must be ended as soon as possible, something that requires some undeserved concessions to the monstrous Putin. Meanwhile hundreds of millions of people across the global South deserve and require assistance in the struggle for liberation from oppression. When do we arm the Palestinians? Any US military support coming for the masses fighting a right-wing coup in Peru and living under dictatorships and autocracy in Egypt and the Saudi kingdom? Of course not: the US remains aligned with reactionary forces in these nations and around much of the world, no small part of why it has not found much support for its embrace of the Zelensky government in the global South? When do we the people take over the US Empire and use it to liberate the imperially super-exploited peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, where US and European imperialism has provided openings for Chinese and Russian imperialism?
An old socialist slogan seems relevant here: Fight the rich, not their wars. It’s up to the Russian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It’s up to the US-American people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It up to the Ukrainian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It’s up to the people of the world to organize, with as much international coordination as possible (socialist revolutions typically take place in one nation at a time — the all-at-once dreams of 1917-1919 are a Trotskyist fantasy that Lenin understandably but only briefly shared ) to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering world capitalist system.
Also stupid and/or cynical is some US leftists’ neo-campist identification with the fake-communist state-capitalist post-Mao Chinese state. Sharing the Putin left’s mistake of thinking – or pretending to think – that there is only one relevant capitalist-imperialist power on Earth (the United States), they absurdly portray the counterrevolutionary Deng Xiao Ping – Xi Jinping regime (1976-present) as an example of anti-imperialist “industrial socialism” (actual language from the Marxist geopolitics guru Michael Hudson). Some of these China-touting leftists should apply for jobs in China’s sprawling industrial hinterland, where workers driven to despair and suicide by their alienating and exploited work lives. Post-Mao China is so “socialist” that these viciously oppressed workers are repressively policed by a hyper-authoritarian state tasked with keeping the Chinese proletariat producing oceans of surplus value for national and global corporations for whom the Chinese revolution has been ironically turned into an historically unprecedented pooling of cheap labor power — a disastrous and remarkable windfall for the eco-cidal world capitalist system. The restoration of capitalist social and production relations in post-Mao China — insidiously “justified” by supposedly communist state officials under the bourgeois counterrevolutionary Deng Xiaoping’s insipid pronunciation that “to get rich is glorious” — has of course fueled skyrocketing class inequality inside “communist” China over the last four decades
Raise the absurdity of calling contemporary China a model of anti-imperialist socialism and left China campists will accuse you of supporting US imperialism – this no matter how witheringly critical you are of US imperialism. How dare you suggest that noxious, authoritarian and eco-cidal, labor-exploiting capitalism-imperialism can be found anywhere but in the United States?
Left Campism Was Bad Enough Before Capitalism Was Fully Restored in Russia and China – Now It’s Truly Insane
Western left campism was problematic when it was over-attached to Joe Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (genuinely revolutionary-communist) China, the Third World nationalist Hanoi government, and the Soviet-aligned Castro regime. Far too many post-1917 Western leftists came to badly over-identify the cause of socialist revolution with a supine posture towards the Soviet Union (such cringing subordination helped create the almost comically anti-revolutionary revisionism practiced by the US “Communist” Party, which once absurdly claimed that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism”). Certain formerly Maoist intellectuals and activists couldn’t break their attachment to the line from Beijing even after Chinese capitalist-road counterrevolutionaries overthrew Maoism and reintegrated China into the world capitalist nightmare, with disastrous consequences.
Still, previous officially socialist and Marxist state recipients of often excessive Western left love and obedience often had legitimate anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist credentials and accomplishments. It is beyond bizarre and quite disturbing to see the campist affliction extended to a fascistic and war-criminalized capitalist oligarchy like Putin’s Russia and to a chilling state-capitalist, arch-authoritarian, and counter-revolutionary behemoth like the so-called People’s Republic of China.
Putin is arguably the leading hero and agent of the resurgent fascist right in the world today. It’s not for nothing that white supremacist neofascists across Europe and the United States identify with him.
Leftists in this strange post-Cold War neo-tankie space (left-identified folks oddly attached to Russia and China long after both countries transitioned to capitalism-imperialism and with the former state helping leading global fascism) garner faux-radical street cred with some US lefties because they have aligned themselves with official state enemies and rivals of the US Empire. That might seem “badass” and bold, radical even, but it is actually a deeply conservative and anti-revolutionary surrender to bourgeois rule and the nightmare of capitalism-imperialism, with all its attendant oppressions. The dream of a unipolar global Pax Americana was always just that – a dream, an unachievable dream lodged in the power-mad minds of Washington planners. A more multi-polar world capitalist system is still very much a world system wired to destroy life on Earth via environmental ruin, war, pandemicide and authoritarianism/fascism. Never confuse the anarchies of capital and the capitalist world state system with the forward march of socialism.
Many westerners are having their worst moments right now. As unconscious as they usually are... not clearly seeing Trumpism as fascism and not seeing and shouting stop the genocide in Gaza is despicable and frightening.
I am alarmed by how well we have adjusted- rationalized inhumanity.
The Gazan Muslims are kin to the Jews dating back to when Abraham, very old, took an Arab woman and had a child by her who started the Muslim branch of the Semites. No hatred is more vicious than between close relatives. Jews have faced anti Semitism for many centuries or millenia in many places. Muslims as well, at the hands of Crusaders ( White Christians from Europe) Jews were not able to win land to make their country until the British mandate ended after WW2 and a large part of Palestine where Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived peacefully. Actually Jews for centuries had become white European Jews . Then the British foolishly, without precedent, handed a majority of Palestinian land to the "Jewish" people
who had a religion but not a nationality which they demanded in 1948. Maybe they got it because of geography, oil, access through the Mediterranean to the vast untapped wealth of the East. Imagine, demanding a country, (because a people who were victims and hadn't had a country were just handed over the "country now known as Israel", which they lied and said was a country with no people . And now they're viciously killing the remnants of people who lived their for centuries. I see it is contemptible. But now the USA, hegemon of the world, also a colonizer nation is 100 % behind them. Because they suddenly love Jews? No, because there is riches in oil and gateway to the East and who can guess what else. Especially because Jews have amassed money and therefore power, which is the Satanic god in the wouldn't you know it, wealthy countries of the world . Now these two rogue countries plan and hope to run the world for themselves and their friends and cohorts.
And I say this as a person born a Jew, bot not any more, Ever! Or you might say Never Again.
The War in Ukraine didn't have to happen. The USA (NATO)/military industrial complex and Johnson made it happen.
Our unconditional love fest with Zionofacist Isreali has created a Palestian ethos of: if not now when will we be delivered to our homelands.
Peace dialogue diplomacy respect is the answer to forever wars.
Sorry but I have to vehemently disagree with you on your position of Putin. The descriptors you used of his behaviors can just as easily be ascribed to Hitler, PolPot
Suharto, Pinochet, Mao, Amin, and quite a few more, but the entity that assumes the
Unquestionable lead for worldwide violence, massacres, carpet bombing, deaths of innocents all over the globe. Any guesses?? I only have one in mind. Maybe you were gaslighting with your Putin comments, but I believe they represent
Your correct position. Why the demonizing of Putin anyway?
Also Andy, Mao does not belong in this group. In Mao's time, there were problems and errors from which lessons must be learned. But also during those decades, life expectancy in China more than doubled, industry grew by more than 10 percent a year during the Cultural Revolution, and by the 1970's China had solved its historic food problem. This revolution saved untold lives. And it will only be a revolution that ultimately saves humanity.
Andy, the reality is that Putin is a capitalist imperialist fascist piece of shit. You are correct that he has not caused anywhere near the scale of death and misery globally that US imperialism has, but that does not change the fact of what Putin is.
But then where do we slot the decades long legacy of US intrusion into countries we find needing “freedom and democracy”
and eliminate their governments through overthrow and decimate all opposition to our violent tactics. Has Russia done this to its surrounding neighbors over long periods of time?? Have they??
Andy I said Putin, not Russia. I'm thinking of Putin's imperialist intrusions into Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Crimea, the "near abroad" region of former USSR republics. "Soft power" in Africa. Putin's private army Wagner Group in Europe, Africa and South America. etc. The most significant intrusion being Ukraine. of course. And again, Putin has not caused anywhere near the scale of death and misery globally that US imperialism has over its long bloody history. But that does not change the fact that Putin is a capitalist imperialist.
Thank you Andy. I don’t know why so many critics of US policy have to include a diatribe on Putin. Is that Paul’s price of admission to the acceptability club whose members couldn’t care less about a word he pens? Maybe he fears he will be hauled off to some.HUAC hearing in DC. The United States and its vassals go to great effort and expense to vilify Putin. Why does Paul feel obligated to pile on?
That's a keeper for the Top Ten list of Most Asinine Comments I've ever received :) Bravo!
Paul, I have never made a top 10 list before! You are a great thinker, and a tremendous writer, so why do you have to denounce Putin before you quite correctly list the misdeeds of the Evil Empire? A”pox on both your houses “ attitude is entirely appropriate when discussing the two party system in the US. But Putin and Russia can’t touch the horrors of recent US history. Nor can Hamas hold a candle to Israeli brutality. Do you denounce Hamas before pointing out the obvious in Gaza? George Hunter
Look man, I'm a communist. I get to denounce Putin and the US imperialists and numerous other ruling class criminals all at the same time! And at the end of the day it's not the shifting heads in high places it's the world system of capitalism-imperialism!
George your either/or logic defies reality. This thing of either Putin is bad and US is good, or US is bad and Putin is good, is nonsense. They are both bad, that is reality. And that is what an analysis of what humanity needs must be based on.
All-- you might have noticed that I'm a revolutionary communist for whom left attachment to and defense of Putin is bizarre and creepy. My Lame Left series dedicated a section to the wacky Putin left, which overlaps with the Trunmpenleft.
Affliction #6: . Geopolitical neo-Campism
The Putin Left, Absurd as that Should Sound
In the long and tragic absence of revolutionary socialist states and relevant national and international communist movements nearly half a century after the capitalist road was taken in formerly Maoist China, some left USAers have grasped at the noxious straws of geopolitical neo-campism. A strange and poisonous left attachment to the at once neoliberal and neo-fascist regime atop post-Soviet Russia is promoted by left-identified people who confuse and/or cynically conflate opposition to the arch-criminal US-American Empire with embrace and defense of the imperialist butcher and authoritarian, anti-Marxist tyrant Vladimir Putin. This tendency’s adherents either actually think or cynically claim to believe that there is only one blood-soaked imperialist power on the planet – the United States. Making Orwell blush, they back the blood-soaked criminal Putin’s mass-murderous and openly imperial war on Ukraine in the name of anti-imperialism and “anti-war” politics. Unwittingly, perhaps (though certainly not in all cases), they embrace the Russian imperialism that was explicitly articulated in the February 2022 speech in which Putin announced his “special military operation” – an address in which he attacked the great Russian revolutionary anti-imperialist Vladimir Lenin for supporting Ukrainians’ right to national self-determination.
As the brutal anti-communist gay- and trans-bashing uber-oligarch Putin sends tens of thousands of disproportionately poor Russian conscripts to horrible deaths like so much cannon fodder in Ukraine, as he locks up untold thousands of peaceful Russian antiwar protesters, the fake antiwar Putin left doesn’t call for a new Russian socialist and anti-imperialist revolution. It doesn’t reach out to antiwar groups and people in Russia. No, pseudo-radical Kremlin cheerleaders at places like Grayzone, Mint Press, and Consortium News (to mention just three of the most decrepit outlets of this “left” cancer) double and triple down on the Putin lie that Ukraine is a “Nazi” regime – curious justification for Russian forces’ Nazi-like slaughter, torture, and rape of ordinary Ukrainians....ctd.
....
The gangster Putin currently has masses of propagandized Russians preposterously believing that Ukraine started the war by attacking Russia with “LGBT ideology.” He will soon sign (or has already signed) a measure granting Russian soldiers, mercenaries, and allies full immunity for any crimes they commit in carrying out the Russian imperialist assault on Ukraine. The Putin left is okay with all this even if it sometimes pretends otherwise. Bring up Putin’s criminality in Ukraine (and elsewhere) from a revolutionary socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist perspective – a perspective that is witheringly and thoroughly critical of US/NATO imperialism and provocation within and beyond Eastern Europe – and the Putin left will reflexively and absurdly accuse you of supporting US/NATO imperialism and of unhinged “Russophobia.” Masters of deflective what about-ism, they pretend to justify Russian violations of international and human rights law (when they are not busy denying those crimes) by bringing up something that every serious radical already knows – that the criminal US Empire has long evaded and trashed the very same law. Their response to radical internationalists (and others) who denounce Russia’s war crimes has commonly been to literally deny those epic transgressions (for example, to claim that the hideous Bucha massacre was Western “fake news”) or to claim that Russian offenses are somehow justified by Washington’s long and horrific criminal record. When you question this childish and reflexive what-about-ism, the Putin left accuses you of being allied with US-NATO imperialism, no matter how radically critical you have always been and still are regarding US-NATO imperialism (please see these two publications of mine, just a small portion of my publications on and very much against US, NATO, and Western imperialism: Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power [2010]; Paul Street, “the World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,” Common Dreams, February 22, 2018. )
Moronically enough, the Putin left seems to have the fascistic uber-oligarch, nuke-mongering war criminal Putin and the imperial butchery of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group confused with Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front. Worse, it appears to have dropped or never understood elementary revolutionary socialist internationalism and class analysis. It has opted instead for geopolitical and “multi-polar” neo-campist alliance with any state on the wrong side of Washington’s imperial agenda.
Caveat: F-Zelensky Too, or Fight Capitalism, Not its Wars
Revolutionary Marxist criticism of the ridiculous and dodgy Putin left should not be taken to mean support for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Left-identified folks who are jubilant over the recent German and US decision to send more advanced tanks to Zelensky’s military are engaging in their own variant of heedless tankie-ness. There’s no call for jumping in bed with Western imperialism here. While Putin’s invasion is unjustified, it was not unprovoked by the US led-West. It could perhaps have been avoided had Washington said clearly that it had no intention of incorporating Ukraine into NATO. The invasion has clearly been welcomed by the Biden administration as an opportunity to weaken a leading geopolitical rival – Russia – by saddling Moscow with a “Vietnam” on its own borders (the same sentiment was behind US provocation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s). The war in Ukraine is a great profit-making windfall for US arms-makers and oil and gas exporters. Uncle Sam, whose blood-soaked Empire (replete with more than 800 bases in more than 80 countries and accounting to 40 percent of global military spending) and crimes (No Gun Ri, Operation Tiger Force, “many My Lais,” the Highway of Death, Fallujah, Nissour Square, Guantanamo Boy, Bagram Air Force base, the destruction of Libya, Bola Boluk, the direct and indirect invasion, domination, and torture of dozens of Third World countries…the list gone on and on and on) dwarf those of Russia, has been crying about Ukraine all the way to the bank. Biden has no more regard for Ukrainian lives than the psychopath in the Kremlin.
Biden and his commanders are perfectly content to see masses of ordinary Ukrainians die in a prolonged war. As combined Ukrainian and Russian civilian and soldier deaths run into the many tens of thousands if not past a hundred thousand by now, Washington and US media sell the Ukraine War as a grand historic battle between “democracy,” represented by Ukraine, and “autocracy,” represented by Russia. This is absurd. The notoriously corrupt Zelensky government represents oligarchs and suppresses trade unions and left parties. The US itself is an open corporate and financial plutocracy wrapped in the deceptive flag of unmentionably bourgeois democracy – a late bourgeois republic still suffering under an 18th Century slaveowners’ charter and now teetering on the edge of authoritarian/fascist consolidation. The United States has long supported and still supports despotic regimes — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, all US client states, are good examples today — that it considers to be on its economic and geopolitical side in the world capitalist system.
To make the Ukraine War even more problematic, to say the least, it raises the specter of World War III. The conflict dramatically elevates the very real threat of thermonuclear war, with Putin repeatedly declaring his willingness to use nuclear weapons in existential defense of Mother Russia while the US and its partners send ever more lethal weaponry into battlefields located on Russia’s vast, repeatedly West-invaded southwestern underbelly. Imagine an imperial reversal, with Russian and Chinese weapons being used by soldiers fighting the US in Canada and/or Mexico. Would Washington be brandishing nuclear weapons in such a situation? Do bears defecate in forested areas?.
Gosh, whatever could go wrong?
Thanks to how the Ukraine War has jacked up the menace of global Nuclear Winter while accelerating the eco-exterminist extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently placed its Doomsday Clock at the most extreme level of peril in history: 90 seconds to Midnight.
Hello? Those parts of the left who have gone all in with Zelensky – this includes some self-described radical socialists (surprisingly enough to this writer) along with the standard cruise-missile Democratic Party liberals and progressives – are playing with fire, putting 8 billion human beings at risk for the sake (they seem to think) of 44 million Ukrainians.
The war in the Ukraine is a lethal nightmare that must be ended as soon as possible, something that requires some undeserved concessions to the monstrous Putin. Meanwhile hundreds of millions of people across the global South deserve and require assistance in the struggle for liberation from oppression. When do we arm the Palestinians? Any US military support coming for the masses fighting a right-wing coup in Peru and living under dictatorships and autocracy in Egypt and the Saudi kingdom? Of course not: the US remains aligned with reactionary forces in these nations and around much of the world, no small part of why it has not found much support for its embrace of the Zelensky government in the global South? When do we the people take over the US Empire and use it to liberate the imperially super-exploited peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, where US and European imperialism has provided openings for Chinese and Russian imperialism?
An old socialist slogan seems relevant here: Fight the rich, not their wars. It’s up to the Russian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It’s up to the US-American people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It up to the Ukrainian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It’s up to the people of the world to organize, with as much international coordination as possible (socialist revolutions typically take place in one nation at a time — the all-at-once dreams of 1917-1919 are a Trotskyist fantasy that Lenin understandably but only briefly shared ) to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering world capitalist system.
China Syndrome
Also stupid and/or cynical is some US leftists’ neo-campist identification with the fake-communist state-capitalist post-Mao Chinese state. Sharing the Putin left’s mistake of thinking – or pretending to think – that there is only one relevant capitalist-imperialist power on Earth (the United States), they absurdly portray the counterrevolutionary Deng Xiao Ping – Xi Jinping regime (1976-present) as an example of anti-imperialist “industrial socialism” (actual language from the Marxist geopolitics guru Michael Hudson). Some of these China-touting leftists should apply for jobs in China’s sprawling industrial hinterland, where workers driven to despair and suicide by their alienating and exploited work lives. Post-Mao China is so “socialist” that these viciously oppressed workers are repressively policed by a hyper-authoritarian state tasked with keeping the Chinese proletariat producing oceans of surplus value for national and global corporations for whom the Chinese revolution has been ironically turned into an historically unprecedented pooling of cheap labor power — a disastrous and remarkable windfall for the eco-cidal world capitalist system. The restoration of capitalist social and production relations in post-Mao China — insidiously “justified” by supposedly communist state officials under the bourgeois counterrevolutionary Deng Xiaoping’s insipid pronunciation that “to get rich is glorious” — has of course fueled skyrocketing class inequality inside “communist” China over the last four decades
Raise the absurdity of calling contemporary China a model of anti-imperialist socialism and left China campists will accuse you of supporting US imperialism – this no matter how witheringly critical you are of US imperialism. How dare you suggest that noxious, authoritarian and eco-cidal, labor-exploiting capitalism-imperialism can be found anywhere but in the United States?
Left Campism Was Bad Enough Before Capitalism Was Fully Restored in Russia and China – Now It’s Truly Insane
Western left campism was problematic when it was over-attached to Joe Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (genuinely revolutionary-communist) China, the Third World nationalist Hanoi government, and the Soviet-aligned Castro regime. Far too many post-1917 Western leftists came to badly over-identify the cause of socialist revolution with a supine posture towards the Soviet Union (such cringing subordination helped create the almost comically anti-revolutionary revisionism practiced by the US “Communist” Party, which once absurdly claimed that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism”). Certain formerly Maoist intellectuals and activists couldn’t break their attachment to the line from Beijing even after Chinese capitalist-road counterrevolutionaries overthrew Maoism and reintegrated China into the world capitalist nightmare, with disastrous consequences.
Still, previous officially socialist and Marxist state recipients of often excessive Western left love and obedience often had legitimate anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist credentials and accomplishments. It is beyond bizarre and quite disturbing to see the campist affliction extended to a fascistic and war-criminalized capitalist oligarchy like Putin’s Russia and to a chilling state-capitalist, arch-authoritarian, and counter-revolutionary behemoth like the so-called People’s Republic of China.
Putin is arguably the leading hero and agent of the resurgent fascist right in the world today. It’s not for nothing that white supremacist neofascists across Europe and the United States identify with him.
Leftists in this strange post-Cold War neo-tankie space (left-identified folks oddly attached to Russia and China long after both countries transitioned to capitalism-imperialism and with the former state helping leading global fascism) garner faux-radical street cred with some US lefties because they have aligned themselves with official state enemies and rivals of the US Empire. That might seem “badass” and bold, radical even, but it is actually a deeply conservative and anti-revolutionary surrender to bourgeois rule and the nightmare of capitalism-imperialism, with all its attendant oppressions. The dream of a unipolar global Pax Americana was always just that – a dream, an unachievable dream lodged in the power-mad minds of Washington planners. A more multi-polar world capitalist system is still very much a world system wired to destroy life on Earth via environmental ruin, war, pandemicide and authoritarianism/fascism. Never confuse the anarchies of capital and the capitalist world state system with the forward march of socialism.
From https://www.paulstreet.org/the-lame-left-seventeen-afflictions/