Imperialists always speak with forked tongues, even when they speak the truth. “The war in Ukraine,” the imperialists say, “is a war of Russian aggression. It began in February of 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded the Donbass.” But beware! The imperialist media has no reason to tell “objective” truths. Whether the people reporting on the war know it or not, they’re being used as tools to sell a story to the workers in the West. That story is one the imperialists want you to hear. They pick a point to start their telling: after their own provocations, but before a response. Then they rend their garments and tear their hair, crying about violence and aggression! But what of their responsibility? We never hear of it! Make no mistakes and no equivocations: the Russo-Ukrainian War is the result of a studied policy of aggression pursued by the White House. At every turn, the Euro-Atlantic alliance took steps to heighten tensions between Russia and Ukraine. At every turn, the U.S. imperialists pushed Russia closer to the brink. It was within their power to bring everyone back, to prevent war, to calm tensions; it was simply not within their interests.

If the war didn’t start in February of 2022, when did it begin? What were the provocations and tensions that made it inevitable? Although we could trace its origins back to the imperialist breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the most direct causes of the 2022 war fell into place eight years ago, during the Euromaidan coup that deposed the lawfully elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. In late 2013 and early 2014, the Russian-leaning government of Ukraine was forcibly ousted by CIA-backed Banderists. The economy of Ukraine was at that time oriented almost entirely eastward thanks to the Yanukovych government. 

By 2014, the Eurostates had already been trying to turn Ukraine westward for a decade. Before Yanukovych, President Viktor Yushchenko maneuvered for years to bring Ukraine into the European Union (EU). Yushchenko was aggressive in trying to “contain” the Russian Federation (RF), much to the delight of the Western imperialists. But Yushchenko’s government collapsed in fights with the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s single-house parliament, which scuttled the efforts of the Ukrainian capitalists to further integrate with the West. In 2010 Yushchenko lost the presidency to the RF-friendly Viktor Yanukovych. What kind of man was President Yushchenko, who wanted to bring Ukraine into harmony with the west? One of his final official acts was to award the dead murderer Stepan Bandera the title “Hero of the Ukraine,” celebrating the man who worked in collaboration with the German Nazis to purge the country of Poles and Jews.

In late 2013, the Yanukovych government in Kiev stalled on a trade agreement with the EU that would have gutted the Ukrainian economy and drawn its resources into the more-developed economies of Germany and France. (This kind of economic draining effect had already been seen in the so-called third tier economies of Italy, Spain, and Greece, as the leading EU economy of Germany fattened itself on that of the others.) In order to achieve this refusal, the RF put the squeeze on domestic prices inside Ukraine. Gas prices increased 79% as the Russian Federation applied pressure to prevent a new Euro-oriented trade deal from being ratified. This triggered waves of internal unrest and set the stage for the Euromaidan coup in early 2014.

Ultranationalist political and paramilitary groups like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, the National Corps, and Svoboda took control of the Euromaidan protests. From simple expressions of discontent, the demonstrations were rapidly transformed into a rightist coup. The elections held immediately after the coup were plagued with open corruption and office-purchasing. These are the kinds of “irregularities” a country usually finds itself accused of just prior to a U.S. invasion! Yet here, the elections were applauded by U.S. observers. Among other outrages committed by the new government were the renaming of monuments, streets, and awards in honor of and named after prominent Antisemites and Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, the man President Yushchenko celebrated as he left office. The new, post-coup, interim president, Poroshenko, who had been Yushchenko’s Prime Minister, immediately began attacking the use of the Russian language in Ukraine and supported the slow ethnic cleansing of Russians and Russian speakers taking place in the eastern and primarily Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. His government outlawed Communist symbols and parties in Ukraine and embraced Ukrainian ultranationalism as a credo. In the name of integration with the “liberal” west, the new Ukrainian government launched a crusade that conflated communism with Russian-ness, wielded its new state power like a great hammer that might crush them both. Banderite ultranationalists were placed into the top posts of the Ukrainian government.

Setting the Stage

The story of the Euromaidan and the Russo-Ukrainian war goes back all the way to 1985 with glasnost and perestroika, during which the agents of Western intelligence penetrated deeper and deeper into the ailing Soviet Union and made contact with the black market oligarchs they would use to destabilize and eventually destroy the Soviet states. The history of Western intelligence services interfering with the new “open” Soviet states is too long and complex to cover in this article. Suffice it to say that the crypto-Banderites, who had been lurking underground in Ukraine and waiting for their day, have been cultivated and encouraged for decades by Western intelligence. To clearly understand the course of events leading up to and following the Euromaidan coup, we should turn to 2010 and the relationship between post-Soviet Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the EU.

To fully explore the reasons for the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War, it’s important to understand not only the events of the Euromaidan of 2014, but the shifting position of Ukraine with regard to the EU, and the discovery of oil in the country. Further, we have to understand the deep-seated issue of fascism native to Ukraine and how it affects decision making today. The Ukrainian fascism of Stepan Bandera, Banderism, animates the decision-making of many of the reactionaries now in power.

The roots of many of today’s issues giving rise to the war can be traced back directly to the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko. Viktor Yushchenko was the third president of independent Ukraine. During the 2004-2005 election, Yushchenko’s opponent, Viktor Yanukovich, was initially reported as the winner. Foreign governments and media outlets reported election-rigging, likely as part of a Euro-American plan to shift the country rightward. Yanukovich, as we will see, had been a Soviet administrator who was attempting to develop a semi-independent Ukraine. Yushchenko, a right-wing candidate from the center-right party Our Ukraine, promised to pursue tighter relations with the West and to try to tie the country to the European Union and NATO. As a result of the reports of electoral fraud, massive civil resistance erupted in Kiev and across the country. The U.S. Empire engineered these riots and protests, which even the Guardian reported at the time. “The operation — engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience — is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.”

This has been widely called the “Orange Revolution” and we can see it as a trial-run for what will come when Yanukovich actually manages to win an election in the face of U.S. interference.

The Yukashenko presidency was, as promised to both the people of Ukraine and the ideologues in Washington, characterized by tighter relations with Western Europe, attempts to implement International Monetary Fund (IMF) policy to receive and continue receiving imperialist debt relief, opening agriculture to free market forces, seeking and obtaining NATO membership, membership in the EU, introducing a second house of the Rada to “bring stability” to the government (and we should note that a second parliamentary house, like that of the UK or U.S., is often used for the anti-democratic purpose of defeating popular legislation), the formation of a single Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and giving the status of war veterans to anti-Soviet partisans who fought on the side of the Nazis and Banderite fascists. In essence an unreformed proto-fascist, Yushchenko tried to make inroads during his presidency to hitch Ukraine to the western-imperialist bloc. His ideology appeared vacillating: now siding with the RF, now with the EU. The compass behind his policies, however, has never strayed from his true north: a powerful, sovereign, ethnically homogenous Ukraine.

The entire world economy was rocked by the Great Recession of 2008 as the U.S. housing market collapsed. Speculators preying on low-income members of the U.S. working class who were trying to buy homes brought down the entire financial infrastructure of the U.S. Empire and plunged the world into an enormous downturn.

In Ukraine, this meant lowered demand for steel, its second-largest industry, and subsequent defaults to the RF state gas company Gazprom. Gazprom cut off Ukraine’s gas supply as a result of these debts and Ukraine spiraled into a deep and serious financial crisis. Ukraine’s manufacturing industry shrank by 42% and its construction industry by an enormous 58%. Yushchenko pushed the country into an IMF loan for $16.5 billion USD. As with all IMF transactions, the bank forced the Ukrainian government to implement austerity measures and privatizations of public utilities as part of the loan repayment.

The EU entered into talks with the Yushchenko government to establish a free trade treaty, the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement. The EU desperately wanted to open a free trade corridor with Ukraine to help orient it toward the Eurobloc. Doing so would give Germany and France access to the considerable Ukrainian industrial base built by the Soviets, would completely open a market of 45 million people for German exports, and would contribute to the encirclement and isolation of an increasingly assertive Russian Federation. The talks were ongoing through the end of Yushchenko’s presidency, although they remained unconsummated at the time of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election.

Yushchenko, however, got into serious disagreements with the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. Yushchenko struggled with the Rada in 2007 and 2008, attempting twice to dissolve it. In 2008-2009 his government broke apart; a rift opened between his Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, and his office. These successive crises eroded his political legitimacy and the general attitude in Ukraine began to swing back toward the left-leaning Coalition of National Unity.

The Ukrainian Economy, Russia, and the CIS

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union by the imperialists and the defeat of Communist parties and organizations in the breakaway republics, the capitalists who took control of the new and turbulent states in 1991 established an anti-Communist treaty organization to replace the federation of the USSR: the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Ukraine was a founding signatory of the CIS treaty. This created the Commonwealth of Independent States Treaty Organization (CISTO). Beginning in 1991, the CISTO states began negotiations toward a free trade deal — the Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Area (CISFTA). These negotiations were concluded in 2012 and the free trade area established. 

In the meantime, the Russia and the CISTO states sought admission into NATO and the western imperialist alliance, but the RF was rebuffed again and again. Eventually, the RF recognized that the Western imperialists would not ally with them and began establishing their own regional hegemony. Ukraine never came to that conclusion. U.S. agents continued to lead Ukraine on, without any actual intention of allowing Ukraine to join the NATO alliance but rather merely to prevent the new Ukrainian government from closing ranks with the RF. This attempt to keep the RF isolated from its natural allies so it could be opened to Western imperialism again, and would not rise to the status of regional imperialist or even global imperialist power, is at the heart of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The economy of Ukraine grew by leaps and bounds between 2000 and 2008. It was reliant on exports of metals, metallurgy, engineering, chemicals, and food. In the early 2000s, prior to the Great Recession of 2008, the price of metals and chemicals continued to rise and brought a headwind into the Ukrainian economy. Foreign direct investment increased from half a billion dollars in 2000 to $7.81 billion USD just five years later.

President Yanukovych Victorious

In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, from the Coalition of National Unity, won the Ukrainian presidential elections. President Yushchenko’s disgraced reputation brought him only some 5% of the vote. His embattled Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, was defeated by a narrow margin. A former transport manager in Soviet state enterprises and former Prime Minister in the cabinet of the second president of independent Ukraine, Yanukovych, and his bloc, favored closer integration with the RF while walking a “Europragmatist” path. The Yanukovych government continued discussions with the EU, feeling out a path toward the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement.

The 2008 crisis had forced the government in Kiev to rely on Russian economic aid for recovery even as the ruling class sought to court the EU. Although Yushchenko’s prior government had received IMF loans, this was not enough to buoy up the country. Critically, the gas needed to power industry and heat homes came from the RF. Yanukovych’s election represented, in part, a concession of the ruling class of Ukraine; although members of that class clearly wanted closer relations with the EU, access to Russian markets to absorb Ukrainian goods and reduced gas prices were more critical for the development of Ukrainian industry. The Yanukovych government, aware of the geopolitical importance of Ukraine in the defense of the RF (see below), was able to strike a balance and obtain a closer, but not integrationist, trade policy with the RF.

In 2011, the Yanukovych government ratified its entry into a competing treaty organization: the above-mentioned Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Zone (CISFTA), which abolished trade barriers between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Armenia. CISTFA is one of the many treaties between the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which is composed of former Soviet republics. The establishment of this treaty meant that Ukrainian goods could travel without tariffs into Russia, and granted Ukraine access to all of the CIS markets. It also meant that gas prices from the RF would be reduced, both necessary terms for the continued development of Ukrainian industry.

The policies of the Yanukovych government represent in miniature the ongoing problem facing independent Ukraine: being battered between the world-imperialist EU and the RF, which has been seeking to fully integrate the markets of the CIS countries, and even to politically integrate the former Soviet regions.

Back-and-Forth: The Russia/EU Problem

Ukraine is located in a strategic chokepoint between the world-imperialist EU bloc (which is part of the reigning Euro-American Alliance that has divided up nearly the whole world), and the emerging imperialist power of the Russian Federation. The RF’s ability to project power is mostly limited to those states directly on its border and within its sphere of influence, but it has assiduously carved out a small zone of control over the former Soviet republics: the CIS.

Independent Ukraine has thus, since its formation in 1991, leaned first one way and then the other. It is a small state which must balance the predatory concerns of its larger neighbors. It has sought the protection of the RF and shelter in its markets when the ruling class needed to restore profitability, then the protection of the EU and its imperialist ambitions when the ruling class needed to exert its independence from the CIS and the RF. This see-sawing makes of Ukraine a dangerous flashpoint between the Euro-American imperialists and the RF. Its physical location at the mouth of the East European Plain makes it geostrategically critical for Moscow to maintain friendly relations and foreclose the entry of hostile troops into Ukraine; at the same time, it has been vigorously courted by the U.S. Empire in an effort to destabilize the RF and open up the vast raw material reserves of the former Soviet Union to renewed Western exploitation.

The European Union-Ukraine Association, the free trade treaty sought by Yushchenko and the EU, was still being negotiated under the Yanukovych government. Free trade within the EU benefits Germany and France; free trade between the EU and other states benefits the entire Eurobloc, but disparately such that the greatest benefits flow, again, to Germany and France. When trade barriers are lowered, technical experts will tend to move to the place with the highest wages (the imperial centers). Concentrations of technical experts ensure that secondary, high-paying, “finishing” industries (as opposed to primary industries) will follow. The peripheral countries will be reduced to selling raw materials or primary materials to the technically advanced economies, then buying back the completed products at a markup that permits the imperialist metropole to extract even more from the periphery.

Russian industry is focused on the production of primary goods and raw materials. Because Ukraine, under the Yanukovych government, entered into CISTFA, the CIS free trade zone, Ukrainian finished goods found markets within the RF. RF raw materials were exported to Ukrainian industry for secondary processing and completion. However, if trade barriers between Ukraine and the EU were lifted, both Ukraine’s economy and the Russian economy (because, recall, there are no trade barriers between the two at this time) would have been exposed to the market forces of the EU, and to great quantities of European finished goods entering Russia via Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine would have reduced to industrial backwaters while the very expensive finished goods of the EU were resold in a balance of trade for raw resources and primary goods. The RF made it clear throughout the early 2010s that should Ukraine enter into the convention with the EU, it would cut off free trade to its own markets. Ukraine was forced to choose between closer ties to the EU and potential membership in the Euro-American imperialist alliance and closer ties to the RF and some degree of domestic economic freedom. Had Ukraine entered into the EU-Ukraine Association while the Russian Federation’s free trade provisions of CISTFA were still in place, this would have undermined the very careful and public trade policy pursued by Russia. Essentially, without trade barriers between the RF and the EU, advanced production in the EU would destroy the less-profitable industries inside the Russian Federation and re-colonize or re-imperialize Russia, transforming it into a reserve for pumping out natural resources to the advanced economies of Western Europe and forcing it to rely on Western European finished goods.

In 2014, in response to the repeated RF warnings, the Yanukovych government stalled Ukraine’s entry into the EU treaty convention. The government in Kiev, reliant upon the Russian markets, appeared to be poised to enter into more friendly negotiations with the RF purely out of necessity in protecting its own industries from European domination and to retain access to Russian primary goods. Trade sanctions and market instability combined to drive prices of gas even higher in Ukraine; real discontent broke out on the streets. The U.S. Empire and its junior partners, smelling the blood in the water, moved in to replace the Ukrainian government with one that was more pliable and more Westward-oriented.

Discovery of Gas and Oil

In 2010, enormous reserves of oil shale and gas were discovered in the Donbass and off the coast of Crimea.. Data indicates somewhere in excess of 5 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves in Ukraine, and 390,000,000 barrels of oil. European, and especially German, dependence on Russian Oil and Gas has been one of the greatest weaknesses of the western imperialists, and, consequently, perhaps Russia’s greatest strength in its struggle with the Euro-Atlantic bloc. These newly discovered deposits represent enough oil and gas to make Europe entirely independent of Russia, if it could be exploited to the benefit of the EU states. 

In 2012, U.S. monopoly capital (in the form of the Shell and Exxon corporations) was granted exploration rights to the new Ukrainian oil and gas deposits. The Yanukovych government, like the governments before it, was hedging its bets, engaging on the one hand the RF and on the other the Euro-American imperialists.

As of 2021, the top Russian exports were crude and refined petroleum. The industrial sector of the RF is reliant almost entirely on the production and export of natural resources. Its largest companies are the state-owned Gazprom and Lukoil. In order to realize the profits (and thus drive its capitalist internal, domestic markets) in these corporations, it must export massive quantities of gas, oil, chemicals, and grain. It is the third largest oil-producing company in the world, behind only the U.S. Empire itself and Saudi Arabia, a U.S. satellite. It produces 10.5 million barrels of oil a day.

In 2021, 45% of the natural gas consumed in the states of the European Union came from the Russian Federation; almost all of the rest comes from within EU states. 90% of oil and natural gas imported into the European Union (EU) states came from Russia. The RF had been one of the largest suppliers of liquefied natural gas to the EU from 2017 on. The exploitation of Ukrainian oil and gas sources and the opening of Ukraine to drilling and export would have destroyed Russian state revenue. On the eve of the war, it was clear that the U.S. imperialists were pursuing a strategy designed to clip the wings of the RF by foreclosing the one economic strategy that had permitted it to retain some regional independence from the West.

Geopolitical Concerns

Lastly, we come to the military-strategic problem: the North European and East European Plains. These are regions of flat terrain, uninterrupted by substantial geographical barriers to troop movement. The North European Plain is very narrow in the north of Germany, but opens wider and wider the farther east you go, until it reaches the Urals. Because the East European Plain runs all the way to the Urals, Moscow lays exposed to rapid troop movements. It was this fact of geography (in part) that allowed the Wehrmacht to able to rapidly cross and occupy such great tracts of Soviet land, from the border all the way to the Moscow suburbs, eighty years ago and, 130 years before that, allowed Napoleonic France to accomplish a similar feat.

Ukraine sits at the point where the North European Plain joins the East European Plain. It’s at this juncture, on the eastern border of Ukraine, that the plain grows so wide that a general defense of the entire territory becomes untenable. The western border of Ukraine, however, is relatively narrow and forms a natural line of defense between Moscow and Europe. Little Belarus, a staunch ally of the RF and a member of the CSTO, projects outwards in an exposed salient, flanked to the north by NATO members Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Ukraine sits to the south of Belarus. Should Ukraine become hostile to the Russian-dominated CSTO, Belarus would be nearly enveloped, and the East European Plain would be held by enemy hands at nearly its widest extent, making land defense on a continuous front essentially impossible.

And so, in 2014, Ukraine was precariously positioned. The West wanted access to Ukrainian oil and to establish a friendly, NATO ally on the doorstep of the East European Plain. The Yanukovych government, much to the frustration of the Western imperialists, kept a cool distance from the EU. The stage was set for the Euromaidan and the events that would lead directly to the war. U.S. intelligence assets needed only one more part of the equation: connections with the Banderites.

Banderism

No understanding of modern Ukraine is complete without examining the subterranean force behind the right nationalists in that country: Ukraine’s own home-grown fascist ideology, Banderism. Western capital traditionally finds its strongest allies in the little fascists of the nations it wants to exploit. Ukraine is no different in that respect. Banderists, for their own reasons of “national regeneration,” despise Russia — and that is useful to the suits in Washington.

The Banderite Past

Before the 19th century, Ukraine was not considered ethnically or nationally distinct from Great Russia. The very name, Ukraine, means “border march.” The 19th century saw a number of major nation-building projects: from France and Italy to Ukraine, countries across Europe embarked on efforts to unify the people in their territory into a single “nation” with a shared history and ethnic identity. The territory of Ukraine was, in the 19th and early 20th century, divided between the Tsarist Empire to the east and the Austrian dominions in the west.

Nation-building began among the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the late 19th century, rooted in figures like Taras Shevchenko. Ukrainian nationalism and antisemitism were intimately linked. In 1905, amid the backdrop of the failed revolution in Russia that same year, a pogrom was carried out by monarchists and nationalists in Kiev that killed 100 Jews. During the First World War, the fragments of Ukraine controlled by Austria and the Tsars were themselves at war with one another. By the time of the Russian Civil War, both reactionary “White” (aristocratic, monarchist) armies and nationalist armies carried out pogroms. In 1919, for example, a series of brutal pogroms in and around Kiev were carried out by Ukrainian White volunteer army forces. It was not until the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923 that parts of Ukraine were at last able to exercise self-determination. In the west, Germany and Poland took over large swathes of territory and threatened the new Soviet republics in the former Russian Empire.

The parts of Ukraine in the Soviet Union were recognized as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the Polish-controlled regions, the Ukrainian language was suppressed. Members of the Eastern Orthodox Church and those who were recognized as being Ukrainian nationals or ethnically Ukrainian had fewer rights under the Polish Republic. This suppression led directly to the development of Banderism through the heightened nationalist movements that arose in reaction. In the early 1920s, inside Polish-occupied Ukraine, nationalists founded both the Ukrainian Military Organization and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). 

In the 1930s Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian far-right nationalist, rose to prominence inside the OUN. He was involved with several assassination attempts on Polish officials. He was tried by the Polish authorities and sentenced to death but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment before it was carried out. It was this trial that established him as a household name among Ukrainian nationalists and which marks the beginning of the formalization of the vicious Ukrainian form of fascism that we now call Banderism. Bandera was freed from prison during the partition of Poland and he moved to Nazi Germany where he started working directly with the Abwehr and Wehrmacht. By 1940 he was the head of a splinter faction of the OUN, founding the OUN-B or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — Banderite. By 1942, the term Banderite was widely associated with the murderous antisemitism and anti-Polish actions of the OUN-B.

Bandera was proclaimed providnyk (the equivalent to the German Führer and Italian duce) at the Second General Congress of the OUN. It was at that same congress that the fascist salute and the call-and-response “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine”), “Heroiam Salava!” (“Glory to the Heroes!”), so recently thundered from the pulpit of the United States Congress, were adopted. In October of 1942, the OUN-B, operating now in German-occupied Ukraine, formed its own army and death squads (the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Ukrayins’ka povstans’ka armiia, or UPA), carried out pogroms and massacres, and received nearly continuous material and political support from the German Nazi authorities. Banderism was embodied in the manifesto of the OUN-B, “Ukrainian National Revolution,” calling for the annihilation of “Ukrainian ethnic enemies.” The OUN-B stated that “When it comes to the Polish question, this is not a military but a minority question. We will solve it as Hitler solved the Jewish question.” This manifesto incorporated specific calls for ethnic violence against Jews, Poles, and Russians. “Kill the enemies among you — Jews and informers.”

According to the Banderite plan, only an ethnically homogenous Ukraine could stand on its own. They planned for an “annihilation action” and a Ukrainian version of the Nazi Generalplan Ost: the “evacuation or annihilation” of all non-Ukrainians. As the Red Army withdrew from Ukraine in the face of the Nazi advance, pogroms were organized in the cities by OUN-B and the UPA. In L’viv the UPA, in participation with the Nazi units, killed 4,000 Jews. In all of Ukraine, the pogroms carried out by Bandera’s forces are estimated to have killed 35,000 Jews. The murder of Poles was even worse: between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles were murdered by the UPA during the war.

Modern Banderism

Banderism was suppressed during the Soviet period. Nazi collaborators went underground. The Soviet government engaged in what was called “de-nazification,” preventing former Nazis living in the East German Republic and the agents of their Eastern European collaborator regimes from holding political office. There were trials, even executions. Bandera himself, who had escaped to the West under the U.S. policy of patriating and adopting Nazis, was killed by KGB agents in 1956. 

What about the West? Banderites have a distinguished history working with modern U.S. intelligence agencies. The CIA recruited Mykola Lebed, a Gestapo-trained leader of an OUN group and overseer of the murder of the Jews of Krakow, to work in their West German intelligence services in 1947. He was then smuggled into the U.S., hired by the Pentagon, and worked in CIA fronts like the Prolog Research Corporation.

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, established in 1940 before the World War, still operates today. It is, as the journalist Russ Bellant wrote in “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republic Party,” an umbrella organization made up entirely of OUN-B fronts. U.S. President Reagan welcomed Jaroslav Stetsko, a Banderite ideologue who had helped Bandera compose the OUN-B Manifesto and who personally oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in L’viv, into the White House in 1983.

The U.S. courted these Banderites during the entirety of the Cold War, hoping to use them to overthrow or destabilize the Ukrainian SSR. Today, the stronghold of Banderism is the Western Ukrainian city of L’viv, but the ideology has adherents throughout the government. After the expulsion of Yanukovych by the Euromaidan, there was a sudden explosion in Nazi and Banderite monuments and dedications inside Ukraine. This is the tail end of a process that began as early as 1991 — with the collapse of the Soviet authority in Ukraine, the Banderites emerged from the shadows, particularly in the “European” western half of the country. For instance, in 1996 the journalist Ivan Matveychuk wrote that “For five years ultra-radical nationalist organizations are [sic] conducting a well-organized propaganda campaign against not only the left, but all Russians and Jews. B. Borovich, a mayor of Ivano-Frankovsk, recently told the schoolchildren of the city to ‘follow the true path of Stepan Bandera!’”

Efraim Zuroff of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that “Ukraine has more statues 4 killers of Jews than any other country”.

The Drums of War

Why do the imperialists sound their drums and trumpets for the fascists in Kiev? It’s not as simple as the common fascist ideology of the U.S. imperialist ruling class and the murders in Kiev. Yes, Senator John McCain met with an applauded Ukrainian fascist Oleh Tyanhybok. Yes, Senator Christopher Murphy, a Democrat and supposedly an opponent of gun violence, stood on the platform with the murderous Tyanhybok. Yes, the leaders of both parties gladly and warmly welcomed the Neo-Nazi Azov leadership in October of 2022, long after their ties were public.. But the criminal conspiracy of looters that rule in Washington doesn’t honor ideological alliances; it has no friends except those who, for the moment, can continue to serve its interests. No — the Russo-Ukraine war was promoted by the U.S., arranged by the U.S., and finally brought about by U.S. manipulations that had very little to do with the fascists in power in Kiev. Washington would not lift a finger to save its favorite white-supremacist fascist rulers unless its agents knew there would be some remuneration for the Empire.

You will hear the breathless protestations of the agents of capital — the paid agents and the unwitting ones — more and more in the coming year as they moan with faithless mutterings that Ukraine was unjustly attacked; that NATO is a peaceful alliance; that a ruthless and expansionist Russian Federation was merely seeking to claw a little more territory, a few hundred-thousand square miles, from Europe. You have already heard, no doubt, news anchors and U.S. politicians alike decry the “asiatic barbarians” and their Oriental despotism.

But no; the U.S. ruling class wanted this war. It sought this war. It manufactured this war. There is no surprise in the halls of Washington, or if there is, it is only that the Russian Federation would not let itself be manipulated forever, hedged forever, trimmed and attacked in small, cutting ways forever.

The U.S. acted along several lines to bring about the conditions for the Russo-Ukraine War: economic provocations, threats to Russian oil and gas industries, and finally the general strategic impossibility of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance.

Euromaidan

In 2014, Yanukovych stalled the trade talks with the EU. The Radka had already approved the agreement, but the RF was exerting ever more pressure to prevent Ukraine from entering into a free trade zone with the EU. The RF signaled its displeasure by interrupting trade with Ukraine and, on the eve of the ratification, it offered economic aid packages that exceeded what Ukraine would gain from the EU and a promise to reduce the price of natural gas. This was unacceptable to certain elements in the Ukrainian ruling class, including Yanukovych’s political opponent, billionaire (and the man who would, as a direct result of the Euromaidan, become president) Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko later said “I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel — Channel 5 — played a tremendously important role.”

The Maidan protests broke out in the West of Ukraine — in the traditionally Banderist cities. They lacked majoritarian support throughout the country and, in fact, most of the eastern portions of Ukraine didn’t participate in the protests. It is most likely that the initial irritation in Ukraine was organic. A real outpouring of working class anger at the now-this-way now-that-way policies of Kiev, frustration at the capitalist excess of the oligarchic ruling class that had captured the country in the years after 1991, the protests were nevertheless directed not at emergence of Banderists in the leading government posts of the west, but rather at Yanukovych for failing to bring Ukraine closer to Europe. Once the protests had begun, the Banderists wasted no time. The most active protesters in Kiev were members of the fascist-Banderist Svoboda. In L’viv, protesters captured the regional administration, declared a “people’s council” and proclaimed the Svoboda-staffed local councils as the only legitimate governing bodies. Right Sector led attacks on the police in Kiev. Nazi and founder of the Social-National Part of Ukraine Andriy Parubiy was declared the media’s “commander of Maidan.”

The protests in Kiev were strengthened by a hard backbone of fascists. “A sweet, ol’ grandmother is pouring Molotov cocktail in a nationalists’ bottles; and a manager of a large company is carrying ammunition to the student… For some, its ‘we need a couple of crates of AKs and grenades, we’ll sort things out here quickly,’” wrote Ilya Varlamov on his livejournal, during the protests. The city was cut apart by barricades: piles of burning tires in the streets, lit day and night by militants, blazed every night. The nationalists and the Banderists had control.

In Odessa, Communists built an anti-Maidan camp at the historical city center. Fascists, Banderists, and nationalists stormed the tent camp, forcing the Communists into the Trade Unions House nearby. The Banderists surrounded the building and, lobbing petrol bombs, set the Soviet-era structure ablaze. They killed 46 people in the Trade Unions House and injured some 200 others. Although there was an investigation, the Banderite government never formally tried or punished anyone.

The U.S. Empire got involved. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy met with Svoboda and applauded the fascists, giving their support to the protestors. A leaked phone call from Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state, to the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine reveals Washington’s hand in promoting and advancing the Euromaidan protests. On the call, the ambassador and Nuland banter over who should be in the post-Yanukovych cabinet — weeks before Yanukovych actually resigned.

On 22 February 2014, President Yanukovych fled Kiev for Belarus. The Banderites had ousted the president. They selected businessman Petro Poroshenko as their interim president. Poroshenko signed an integration treaty with the EU and began the long, brutal war of ethnic and ideological extermination in the Donbass.

As a result of the Euromaidan, Ukraine has become the world’s training ground for the far right. Since the Euromaidan coup, Banderite Ukraine has been making noises about joining the NATO alliance. If Ukraine did join NATO, it would be a strategic death knell for the Russian Federation. Indeed, it would so clearly provoke an unwinnable war that the public-facing leaders of NATO have been very firm in denying Ukraine’s continuous applications. And yet… U.S. imperialist diplomats and advisors have allowed and encouraged the Ukrainian hope that Ukraine would join NATO, have encouraged its Banderite government to crow about NATO applications, and have hoped to spook the leaders of the Russian Federation with this apparition.

The U.S. Empire has refused to permit the Russian Federation to apply to join NATO, forcing it to form CSTO as an alternative. U.S. imperialist agents visited Ukraine frequently, and the U.S. Empire extended the arms of its regime-change machinery in the guise of the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Freedom House, the Open Society Institute, and even the CIA.

The Cession of Crimea and the War in the Donbass

Immediately following the Euromaidan coup, the eastern regions of Ukraine erupted in pro-Russian protests. Russian speakers and their neighbors rightly saw the triumph of Banderists and proto-fascists like Poroshenko as a threat. As if to prove them right, the Banderists in charge of the new government set to work repealing the Ukrainian law that made Russian a protected minority language. Even the fascistic Hungarian government noted that repealing the protected status of Russian in Ukraine “could question the commitment of the new Ukrainian administration toward democracy.” Although the ultrarightists abandoned this plan, in 2017 they did pass an educational law requiring all classes in Ukraine from the fifth grade onward to be taught in Ukrainian — ending teaching in Russian and other languages of national minorities.

When Yanukovych fled, counter-protests exploded across the country. Crimea, far in the southeast of Ukraine and mostly ethnically Russian, joined in the pro-Yanukovych/anti-Banderist protests that erupted in Odessa and the Donbass. In Crimea, the protests specifically targeted the interim government. Formation of people’s militias and civil defense forces spread across the peninsula. The RF pledged support to the Crimean civil defense forces. A pro-Maidan rally of some 5,000 to 15,000 people demanded the resignation of the Crimean parliament. On 27 February, the parliament of Crimea held an emergency session while surrounded by what Western observers have called “masked and unmarked Russian soldiers” — “little green men.” At that session, the Crimean parliament appointed a caretaker government and deposed the Prime Minister of Crimea.

A 25 May 2014 referendum voted 95.5% to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. On 18 March 2014, the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol was recognized by the Russian Federation as an integral federal subject. This once again secured anchorage for the Russian Black Sea Fleet for the first time since 1991, brought the recently discovered gas deposits in the Black Sea under Russian control, and coincided with the beginning of the War in the Donbass. Two breakaway republics were founded in the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kimitaka Matsuzato, a professor of the Slavic Research Center at the University of Tokyo (and someone lacking in Western intelligence connections or grants) wrote that the republics legalized their local Communist parties. The republics joined together to form a united front to expel the Banderite fascists and defend against the coup in Kiev. Professor Matsuzato wrote in his article The First Four Years of the Donetsk People’s Republic,

As early as May 2014, several lawyers in the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] such as Elena Shishkina and Vitalii Galakhov, started to ascertain and record cases of destruction, death, injury, and torture and other war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Army and paramilitaries in the DPR territory.

Outrages by the fascist-infiltrated Ukrainian military have continued unceasingly since the Euromaidan. Banderite fascist parties and organizations inside Ukraine, including Right Sector and the Azov Movement, continue to hold high positions in the military, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Defense. The indiscriminate murder of civilians, the shelling of schools and residential blocks, vile live crucifixions, starvation of entire towns and cities, attacks on water supplies, and worse have been the normal every-day experience of the Ukrainians and Russians living in the Donbass.

These vicious, fascist Banderite forces have been earmarked $105.5 billion from the U.S. imperialist Congress since 2022 began. We have all seen the self-congratulatory photographs of militiamen and regular Ukrainian army soldiers (complete with Nazi Sonnenrads, Banderist Wolfsangels, and other fascist symbology on their clothes) receiving Stinger missiles. Smug, self-assured “social democrats” have smeared their social media with vile imagery of “Saint Raytheon” in Ukrainian colors. The imperialist press and the guerilla social media attachés from the U.S. State Department have been beating the drums of war loud enough to drown out the truth: that the government of Ukraine is in the thrall of detestable fascists.

The Provocation

Under Yanukovych, Ukraine had adopted a non-aligned status. The Rada codified a law preventing Ukraine from joining military alliances — a clear move of conciliation toward the RF, assuring Russia that Ukraine would not strategically endanger the CIS. One of the obvious motives in supporting the Euromaiden from the point of view of the West was the reversal of this non-aligned status, and indeed, Poroshenko did so. In June of 2017, the Rada passed legislation declaring NATO membership as a strategic foreign and security policy objective. There was a new presidential election in 2019 in which Poroshenko was ousted and the comedian-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was elected, likely with U.S. backing.

Zelenskyy sent out a clear message that Ukraine was interested in joining NATO. In September of 2020, Zelenskyy approved a national security strategy calling for eventual NATO membership. In June of 2021, the Secretary of State of the U.S. Empire Anthony Blinken said, point-blank, “We support Ukraine membership in NATO.”

In January of 2021, on the eve of the invasion, Vladimir Putin delivered a long speech setting out the Russian position. “[I]n December 2021, we nevertheless once again made an attempt to agree with the United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything is in vain. The U.S. position does not change. They do not consider it necessary to negotiate with Russia on this key issue for us, pursuing their own goals, they neglect our interests.”

Clown Prince Zelenskyy

Enter the actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, cap in hand, begging for a handout from the men and women who put his country up on the frontlines to be ground into hamburger. Prior to his election to the presidency of the Banderite Ukrainian government, Zelenskyy was a stand-up comedian and television actor. He was backed by former employees of the international management firm McKinsey & Company, pro-NATO Ukrainian generals, and the second-richest man in Ukraine, Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

Zelenskyy’s political campaign was utterly devoid of meaningful policy. He ran on a simple platform of national regeneration and “at least I’m not Poroshenko” (the outgoing Banderite president who was rocked by scandals). He did not hold one rally, but rather ran troll farms online, did online events, and used the publicity of his Ukrainian-language television show, Servant of the People (which he also named his political party) in which he portrays a school teacher who is unexpectedly elected to the presidency and proceeds to “clean house” by machine-gunning corrupt members of the Ukrainian parliament.

There was a substantial push from Western imperialists like Howard Buffett (the son of Warren Buffett), the lobbying firm Signal Group (paid through a mysterious agent who appears to be a self-employed lawyer in the U.S.), Christina Pushaw (press secretary for U.S. criminal and governor Ron DeSantis, and former employee of Mikheil Saakashvili), and others.

But who is Zelenskyy? He is an actor, hired to play a role. His job is to give a public face to a corrupt and venal dictatorship of Banderites and ultranationalists. As early as February of 2019, the European Union was investigating the open proclamation of numerous Ukrainian police officers to be Banderites. We must now assume that Zelenskyy was elected with the tacit compliance of the U.S. Empire and the Banderite forces inside Ukraine. The Banderites and ultranationalists have long been an arm of the U.S. foreign intelligence services. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, worked closely with a former Banderite in the 1950s, Mykola Lebed, to destabilize the Ukrainian Republic. Andwhere have we seen the Clown? In no less than the U.S. magazine Vogue, on U.S. television, dressed in a tactical turtleneck and playing the embattled president on news shows and through broadcasts, asking the United States to engage in a nuclear war with the Russian Federation. All along, the right warmongers in the U.S. have been encouraging and even cheering for “NATO no-fly zones,” the invocation of NATO Article 5, sending U.S. soldiers through Poland, and other provocations that would inevitably escalate to nuclear warfare. Zelenskyy is the voice of this warmongering movement. Although he is directly the puppet of the Banderite regime in Ukraine, that regime would not exist, could not have continued to exist, without the support of the imperialists in Washington. Imperialist policy from Washington has magnified the fascist threat within Ukraine, has trained it, has helped elect its “softer” face.

U.S. Empire against the Euro-Alliance

On its face, the conflict now raging inside Ukraine is a war between the Russian Federation and the state of Ukraine. On another level, this is a war between NATO and the Russian Federation, addressed above. On yet a third level, this is a war between the U.S. Empire and its junior partners, the Euro-Alliance.

Although the states in the EU have their own interests that are mutually opposed or exclusive, the EU bloc continues to maintain its cohesion. As its military and economic centers, France and Germany control the general direction of the Union. Together, the member states of the EU are capable of exerting imperialist pressure on the world stage, engaging in imperialist war, etc. In the 30 years following the destruction of the Soviet Union, however, the EU has acted only when and where the U.S. Empire granted sanction. It has been, essentially since the end of the Second World War, a junior partner to the U.S. imperialists, forced to follow the lead of U.S. capital because of its relatively weaker position on the world stage.

As a result of the changing status quo in Europe, the discovery of the Ukrainian gas reserves, and the general decay of the U.S. Empire, the long-term strategy of the ruling class in the United States has shifted to ensure the continued subservience of the Eurostates. The EU’s own representative for foreign affairs (chief diplomat), Josep Borrell, said in October of 2022: “Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia…. [a]nd access to the big China market, for exports and imports, for technological transfers, for investments, for having cheap goods. I think that the Chinese workers with their low salaries have done much better and much more to contain inflation than all the Central Banks together. So, our prosperity was based on China and Russia — energy and market…. On the other hand, we delegated our security to the United States…. You – the United States – take care of our security. You – China and Russia – provided the basis of our prosperity. This is a world that is no longer there.”

European capital doesn’t want to serve the U.S. Empire. It has been forced to by the last great inter-imperialist crisis of the late 1940s. Capitalism in Europe crumbled and its chief beneficiary was the U.S. settler-republic which really, for the first time, was able to fully step onto the world stage as the leading imperialist power of the West. Since 2018 at the earliest, the U.S. Empire has been clipping the wings of the EU. The 2019 sanctions on Nordstream 2 are a perfect example of this trend. As the war approached, thinking in the U.S. Empire changed, spurred on by the deepening threat of general capitalist crisis. Now, the U.S. Empire must reduce the EU and the NATO member states to economic dependencies if it is to survive the contraction of the capitalist economy that will follow this latest crisis. The EU has been content to be a partner of the U.S. Empire — but ultimately, empire brooks no partners, only subjects.

The proxy war in Ukraine between the Russian Federation and NATO is going quite well according to the scoreboard kept by the United States. Russia has been forced to spend countless lives and untold treasure in war machinery while the EU has been decoupled from Russian gas and forced to buy U.S. product. Even better from their eyes, the EU is suffering brutal de-industrialization as the gas prices necessary to perform certain industrial and chemical operations make them no longer feasible.

The U.S. gets two things it wants: a pliable and open Russia which it can exploit, and the European Union put on a leash. But let us not bandy words about: the mere fact that the Russian Federation is a target of NATO aggression cannot transform it into anything other than it is. When a war between two capitalist states is the result of competition over domination — in this instance, the “regional security” and economic control of the Russian Federation over Ukraine on the one hand and the world-spanning imperialist system of the Euro-American alliance threatening to reduce Russia to a client state rather than a competing power on the other — this war does not, by virtue of its inevitability, become something to be celebrated. Indeed, both powers, the Russian Federation no less than the Euro-American NATO alliance, are acting in the interest of capital. In the case of NATO, this is the capital of the U.S. Empire and its Western European toadies. In the case of the RF, this is the capital of the huge state monopolies and the post-Soviet civil service class of robber-princes that command them.

“When one individual inflicts injury upon another such that death results, we call that manslaughter. When society places hundreds in a position that they inevitably meet early & unnatural death … its deed is murder just as the individual.”

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England

We have been betrayed. For three years, we have been abandoned, misled, shepherded to our dooms. Millions have died. Hundreds of millions have been disabled. All the while, respectable faces with plastered-on grins breathlessly offer hopeful platitudes, assuring us we’ll all be ok. Just trust the system.

You could be forgiven for not realizing we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, considering the total absence of media coverage. If it was important, you’d surely be hearing about it, right? The last variant you heard about was likely omicron. The last you heard about vaccines was likely “we strongly encourage everyone to get boosted.” The last you heard about masks was that they work, but they’re not required. And why would you bother wearing masks anyway if, as the United States president himself proclaimed, “The pandemic is over”?

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

For infectious disease experts, the emergence of an unknown human pathogen — quickly identified as a novel virus — necessitated a pretty clear course of action: contain it, characterize it, and share information as freely as possible. Days after the first cluster of cases were found in Wuhan, Chinese health authorities issued a warning to the WHO. The full genome of the virus that would come to be called SARS-CoV-2 was released to the world before it was even documented outside of China. Coronavirus labs around the world began mobilizing rapidly to study the virus, including creating synthetic versions to study in cultured mammalian cells to learn as much as possible about its life cycle and pathogenicity. 

Why did experts mobilize so quickly, even before human-to-human transmission was conclusively proven? The primary reason is the precautionary principle: when dealing with an unknown, if you don’t know conclusively that it isn’t dangerous, presume the worst case scenario and take the proper precautions. If that wasn’t enough of a reason, researchers figured out pretty quickly that this was a relative of SARS, which has caused enough mayhem on its own to warrant every measure possible to avoid a repeat tragedy. This principle was particularly upheld in China, which had borne the brunt of the SARS crisis, but true precaution never truly materialized in the capitalist world.

After a brief experiment in precautionary measures (stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, quarantine guidelines) many countries in the West quickly saw the writing on the wall — these precautions were not sufficient to stamp out the emerging pandemic. There were measures that could have stopped the virus in its tracks: contact tracing (testing every single person who was in the vicinity of a potential case), enforced quarantines combined with guaranteed paid time off for even the hint of exposure, mandating fitted respirators (and distributing multiple N95s to every resident). But these measures would have required central governments to nationalize key industries, companies to pay employees not to work, and individuals to get comfortable with some discomfort in the name of social welfare (although many already were). These measures would have been a tremendous imposition on the free market, and even then, there was no guarantee they would completely eradicate SARS-CoV-2.

Even half measures, like local mask mandates, were better than nothing, and they did keep many people safe in the beginning. But despite them being utterly insufficient in the face of the crisis we were thrust into, they were still too much for the capitalists to tolerate. They were “harming the economy” by impeding production and discouraging consumption. Tiny protests, led by business owners demanding an end to “restrictions,” garnered massive media attention. Less than 2 months after their implementation, stay-at-home orders were already on their way out, even as cases continued to rapidly climb. Injected into every news story about the pandemic was a consideration for the malaise of the capitalists, whose economic ruin would surely spell the end of our society. The drive to “end the pandemic” began almost as soon as the pandemic arrived in the U.S.

The Lies and the Truth

Near the beginning of the pandemic, you may have heard a common refrain from public health sources: if we address the situation properly, it’ll look like we overreacted. And yet, by the time community transmission started ramping up in the U.S. in March 2020, we had already failed to “overreact.” The consensus had already come in from the highest levels: at all costs, do NOT start a panic. World leaders at the time, including the U.S.’s Donald Trump, the U.K.’s Boris Johnson, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, and Italy’s Giuseppe Conte, all spent the first few months of 2020 exhorting the public not to “give in to fear.” Following precipitous stock market crashes in February and March of 2020, every market analysis firm reported on the tremendous financial damage being done by “coronavirus concerns.” The overwhelming narrative in the early days was that fear of the virus would be worse than the disease it causes. This philosophy manifested in several ways, including outright lies that still haunt us to this day, driving misinformed “personal risk assessments” among the population, including:

• Masks don’t work.
• Masks do work, but cloth masks are fine.
• Stop the spread by washing hands, standing 6 feet apart, and sanitizing surfaces.
• COVID is not airborne
• COVID is airborne, but that’s not the main way it spreads.
• The only people harmed by COVID are old and immunocompromised people.
• Children don’t get COVID.
• Children can get COVID, but they can’t spread it.
• Reinfections are rare.
• Breakthrough infections after vaccination are rare.
• Reinfections and breakthrough infections happen, but they’re mild.
• Once enough people have been exposed, herd immunity will end the pandemic.
• Viruses naturally evolve to become less deadly.
• Once you recover from acute infection, you’re out of the woods.
• Long COVID is psychological, not physical.
• Long COVID is physical, but not a big concern.
• Heightened lethality of non-COVID diseases is due to “immunity debt.”

The list of officially-sanctioned lies could potentially go on for pages. The most critical feature of the misinformation is that it is always centered around that same core philosophy of minimization. That trend continued to evolve throughout the pandemic: whether it’s Anthony Fauci admitting that he discouraged masks because he didn’t want to trigger panic-buying, the CDC shifting its metrics from transmission levels to “community levels” in soothing pastel colors, school districts touting their supposed low transmission rates, or any of the other examples of public health malpractice, everything has been geared toward pushing people to underestimate danger rather than overestimate. This pattern has continued to this day, with officials attempting to head off panic in the face of the extremely infectious and immune-evasive XBB.1.5 variant (colloquially referred to as the “Kraken” variant).

Before going further, let’s clarify what that danger actually is. Because of how complex biological systems are, it is difficult to convey all the nuance of a viral pandemic without getting too technical. Nevertheless, we can make some pretty clear assertions, based on condensing hundreds of scientific studies into a few paragraphs. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it:

COVID is airborne. Airborne transmission is different from droplets, which are large particles containing the virus, expelled when you speak, cough, sneeze, etc. Droplets are heavy enough that they will eventually drop to the ground or nearby surfaces, meaning it’s relatively easy to contain: any physical barrier — like a cloth mask or plexiglass — will block these droplets before they can reach another person. “Social distancing” is a concept that applies to droplet transmission, under the presumption that the virus-containing droplets will fall to the ground before reaching someone 6 feet away. Sanitizing surfaces kills any viral droplets that have landed on them before someone can touch them and then touch their orifices.

However, COVID is not confined to droplets. We have known for years that it can spread through aerosol as papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Risk Analysis demonstrate going back to 2020. Aerosol is composed of much smaller particles that bounce around between air particles, and can stay suspended and infectious in the air. Picture someone smoking: the behavior of the smoke is much more akin to the behavior of viral aerosols. Can you still smell the smoke behind a plexiglass shield? How about if you’re six feet apart? In a crowded, enclosed space, how many people would breathe in the smoke of one smoker? Measures designed to protect against droplets aren’t exactly pointless against COVID, since it also spreads via droplets. But just because you’re not spewing COVID-laden spittle in someone’s face does not mean you’re keeping your germs to yourself.

You can get COVID over and over. The idea that you become immune to COVID after getting infected or vaccinated is based on the concept of immune memory. Every time a pathogen enters your body (either through infection or vaccination), your immune system mounts a defense to stop it: first a broad “kill anything that moves” phase we call innate immunity, then a phase of adaptive immunity, which is targeted to kill the specific thing that triggered the immune response. Pieces of the invader are used to create, recruit, and activate a variety of immune components — including antibodies, T cells, and B cells — that are trained to recognize that specific pathogen. Some cells of the immune system, called memory cells, are kept around from that second stage as a sort of permanent record. If the exact same pathogen shows up again, the immune system already knows what to look for. This is the key behind vaccination: expose your immune system to a harmless piece of the virus, and it’ll remember it when it encounters the real thing.

Except this isn’t even close to the whole story. For one thing, the snapshot stored in your immune memory is just a physical piece of the pathogen, and viruses evolve very quickly. As the virus changes, the real thing starts to resemble the record being kept by your immune system less and less, and it becomes easier and easier for new variants to evade adaptive immunity. The more people that get infected, the more times the virus randomly mutates — and the more likely it is that a particular combination of those mutations makes a virus that is unrecognizable to your immune system. For a while, the WHO used to categorize these mutants as “variants of concern,” giving them each a new name. When the virus mutated enough to evade the immunity to the wild-type virus, they named it alpha. The lineage that was able to evade alpha was called beta. Delta was particularly immune evasive and its mutations brought high levels of lethality. Omicron was so different from all existing strains that it was practically able to infect everyone, no matter when they got infected and/or vaccinated. And then… they stopped giving the variants names. “Omicron” is still used to describe every descendant of that original variant, despite the dozens of highly-infectious, highly dangerous variants circulating today, none of which look enough like omicron itself for your immune system to efficiently recognize them.

COVID screws with your immune system. Upon infection, SARS-CoV-2 immediately gets to work suppressing attempts to stop it. It hijacks your cells’ machinery to shut down production of crucial immune system alarms. This includes the component used to present pieces of the virus on the surface of the cell to tell the immune system “Hey! This cell is infected, and here’s the culprit!” This component is necessary for specific immune cells to identify the target and proceed with the adaptive immune response, leading to both delayed innate and adaptive immune response.

When immune cells arrive on the scene, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to infect them as well. Monocytes, which are involved in ushering in the adaptive immune response, get infected by SARS-CoV-2, and are reprogrammed to prevent them from presenting antigens and teaching the adaptive immune system what to look for. T cells rush to become cell killers, causing the signature massive tissue damage that can be fatal in severe cases. Every infection depletes your body’s reserve of naïve T cells — that pool of “blank” immune cells your body keeps on hand for later deployment and specialization — damaging your ability to mount an effective immune response to future infections — including other pathogens. This is why, no matter how many people get infected or vaccinated, we have not — and will not — reach “herd immunity.” Naïve T cells are also necessary for stopping the cell-killing activity of activated T cells, which is a factor in the severity of acute COVID. Worse still, the population is steadily becoming more vulnerable to infections of all types. We are in the middle of an alarming surge of diseases beyond just COVID: RSV, influenza, strep A, and many others are hospitalizing people in record numbers — opportunistic infections, handed the gift of a softened-up population of victims.

For a while, vaccines were highly effective against severe acute infections — not because they prevented infection or created lasting immunity, but because they prompted your body to create antibodies to the virus, which can persist in your blood for months. If you got infected while these antibodies were present, it helped your immune system compensate for the virus’s suppression of adaptive immunity. Your immune response was less likely to go haywire, cause massive tissue damage, and lead to severe clinical outcomes. However, by the time boosters became available, the vaccines were already obsolete: they were engineered to target the original version of the virus, which you were already unlikely to ever see again.

COVID evolves rapidly. An idea has been floating around for years that SARS-CoV-2 will naturally reach an “evolutionary ceiling,” where it can no longer adapt around our immune systems, and will become no more pathogenic than a cold. This is predicated on a misunderstanding of evolutionary and viral dynamics. The main factors guiding the evolution of the virus are: how well it can spread from person-to-person, how well it can infect cells, and how well it can evade the immune system. This latter factor is the most crucial since, as previously noted, the virus’s effect on the immune system is a significant driver of its danger. The idea of an evolutionary ceiling stems from the notion that, in order to adapt around our immune system, the virus needs to change, and those changes necessarily impact its other features — namely its ability to spread and infect. But this is not the case.

As the virus spreads, it racks up mutations. Every new host gives the virus trillions of opportunities to mutate before sending it on to the next victim. By the time SARS-CoV-2 first took over the world, it had already diverged so thoroughly into separate lineages, giving rise to variants like alpha, beta, delta, and omicron. The Omicron lineage eventually emerged with another profoundly unique and highly-infectious set of mutations, and followed the same pattern. In its wake, it left behind many more child lineages, each distinct enough from each other to create a “variant cloud.” For months, the various omicron sublineages have been unable to outcompete each other, because none has had a set of adaptations so exceptionally advantageous as to outstrip the spread of the others. However, as the mutations continue to accumulate across all lineages, it’s only a matter of time before a new mega-variant emerges. It will sweep across the population, again diverging as it goes, spawning new lineages of its own — and leaving millions dead and disabled in its wake.

COVID is persistent. We’ve known for years that other coronaviruses, like SARS, can persist in your body long after initial infection. This is likely a byproduct of their evolutionary history; they evolved to spread through bat populations and survive bats’ unique immune systems. Bats are very long-lived for their size, potentially living for decades, even with multiple different infections quietly simmering inside them. However, in humans, these viruses’ tactics for suppressing a well-regulated bat immune system present a form of overwhelming force, which wreaks havoc on our bodies.

After the chaotic and potentially-lethal initial stage of acute infection, the virus is able to settle in for the long haul — evidence has been found in the gut, in human waste, and among “cured” patients. This can happen whether the acute phase was disastrous and hospital-worthy, or quiet enough for you to experience no symptoms at all. By this point, the virus will have suppressed your body’s immune memory, infiltrated throughout various organ systems — including your cardiovascular, nervous, and renal systems — and begun pumping out a steady supply of new virus. Of course, this persistent infection causes damage to the various organs where the virus has made its home, especially since it can trigger further inflammation. Your immune system is constantly trying to smoke it out, damaging more organ tissue as it does so. Your risk of heart attacks, strokes, neurological symptoms, and death in general are much higher during this persistent phase — and it only gets worse with every reinfection. It still remains unclear how long this persistent phase can last — certainly as many months as have been studied so far.

Evidence has been mounting for years that COVID is actually a type of autoimmune disorder, with several components of your immune system turning against your own cells. Not only are pro-inflammatory molecules heightened in both the acute infection and in so-called long COVID, high levels of antibodies against normal cellular pieces have been found in over half of patients hospitalized with COVID. The implications of COVID triggering autoimmunity are broad and can get fairly technical, but needless to say, the population being infected over and over with such a debilitating virus is catastrophic.

The Motive

Why would governments, public health officials, news media, business leaders, and every other trusted voice tell us outright lies (such as “COVID is not airborne!”) and avoid highlighting crucial truths (such as COVID’s propensity to damage immune systems)? Why would such a simple thing as distributing and mandating the proper usage of high-quality respirators — a layup of public health policy — be portrayed as being so toxic that to suggest it would get you laughed out of the room? Why would institutions like the CDC casually mention the existence of long COVID with one breath, and with the next, pat themselves on the back for “diminished hospitalizations”? Why has the entirety of public health policy contracted down to “Get vaccinated and you’re free”?

Part of it is simple ignorance: in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot we didn’t know. There were clues, of course; hypotheses based on what we knew about other coronaviruses. We could have guessed at airborne transmission, immune suppression, viral persistence, and rapid evolution, but we didn’t know these things conclusively. We didn’t know the exact numbers for case fatality, transmission, long-term symptoms, etc. But we didn’t need to know. The precautionary principle could have guided us to keep up avoidance and containment practices until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. And yet, the clearer the picture has become, the more we have reduced those measures, instead of ramping them up. COVID is more dangerous than initially expected, and yet we have continued to make ourselves more vulnerable.

The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. The capitalist system depends on constant growth: constant production, constant consumption, constant expansion of profits. Even brief pauses — such as a month-long stay-at-home order — have disastrous effects on capital. Implementing the mass prevention strategies necessary to slow down transmission (daily rapid testing, contact tracing, guaranteed paid leave for exposed workers, high-quality respirators, etc.) is expensive, and eats into profits. An information campaign explaining why everyone needs to stay home, instead of contributing to “the economy,” eats into profits further. Winding down all non-essential business and keeping it shuttered until the true end of the pandemic would contract the economy down to only what is necessary for society to function. The opportunities for financial capital to invest in new, profitable enterprises would vanish faster than they reemerge.

For capitalism to function, it requires two things: a steady supply of workers producing value and an unending flow of consumption to realize that value as profit for the capitalist. The onset of a pandemic presented a challenge on both of those fronts. Workers getting sick en masse and being forced to stay home for a couple of weeks — or even dying or becoming disabled and exiting the workforce altogether — was only one potential headache for the capitalist class. Far worse was the prospect of workers staying home out of precaution, thereby grinding production to a halt. Consumers staying home and buying only the essentials would prevent the realization of profits across huge swathes of the economy, cutting off the flow of capital necessary to keep the whole system running.

The moment it became obvious to market analysts that COVID was more than just a local Chinese outbreak, it triggered utter panic in the financial sector. Fears about the slowdown of profits led to several mass stock sell-offs from investors, lowering stock value, triggering even more panic-selling, across multiple different days. This wasn’t just speculation: decreased demand for oil rapidly triggered a massive price war that caused prices to spiral for months until becoming negative, with the holders of oil futures paying to offload their contracts. Without ramping demand back up, production of this and other key commodities would be financially toxic.

Capitalism also relies on a reserve army of labor to keep labor costs artificially deflated. A contracted economy, in which any worker willing to work is a rare commodity, tips the balance of power in favor of workers. Workers could more easily bargain for higher wages and safer working conditions (including liberal COVID leave). Most worryingly of all, in the context of long-term precautionary measures, the population would get used to a dangerous notion — that we have value beyond our labor and our consumption. When faced with the prospect of death or disability, the contradictions become sharpened in our eyes. Hundreds of millions of workers would suddenly ask “Why am I risking my life for this?” The frustration at a choice between abject poverty and potentially contracting a debilitating condition would galvanize workers to stand up for our rights. Waves of labor mobilization, rent strikes, workplace lockouts, boycotts, and more would sweep the country — and the world. It would be the greatest challenge to the political power of the capitalist class in a century.

The Strategy

Actually solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world. It would have necessitated deep international cooperation, massive investment in clean air infrastructure, a persistent information campaign (and censoring of hazardous misinformation), efforts to build public trust in government, guaranteed paid leave, nationalization of key industries, and more. Basically, it would involve massively undercutting the philosophy of free market capitalism.

Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.

There are three main ways this hegemonic narrative around COVID has been propagated to the public: official rhetoric, public policy, and media framing. These three facets of idea propagation feed into each other, and all three are maneuvered in various ways by the interests of capital. The process by which a hegemonic narrative is crafted in the capitalist sphere is not quite as straightforward as one might expect. It’s not a simple matter of a state propaganda department deciding on a central doctrine, issuing scripts to paid actors, and imprisoning all who dissent. There is no party line for the capitalists, no single convocation of business elites, and relatively few shadowy backroom deals. Explicit planning meetings are held — independently — among the leadership of different ruling class parties and distinct business interests, and their similar class interests lead them to similar priorities. But the way narrative unity of this sort is achieved is not through an all-powerful conspiracy. Instead, the “decision” for how to frame events arises organically from the interplay of the many individual sectors that comprise the ruling class propaganda machine.

The tone struck by what we think of as official sources sets the stage for the broader social response. This rhetoric comes from a variety of places — heads of state, government agencies, individual experts, think tanks, and other entities imbued with a sense of authority. These are voices that we are socialized to pay attention to. When they speak, they easily garner media attention. A news outlet that ignores or disputes these sources loses access to them and invites flak, thereby harming their ability to sell more news. These voices are generally in the room when policies are crafted — or crafting the policies themselves. What “the experts” say matters, and the particular experts being promoted by governments and corporations have steadily coalesced around rhetoric that minimizes the public health threat of the virus.

Official rhetoric does not always come to total agreement on presentation. The two-party system in the U.S. is often characterized by competing “official” stances, even when both stances are de facto acceptable to the established capitalist order. Throughout 2020, many prominent figures, including Donald Trump, attempted to prematurely declare the end of the pandemic. The Great Barrington Declaration attempted to launder the notion that attempts to mitigate the pandemic were harmful, and that we should instead try to reach “herd immunity” by allowing the virus to run rampant through the population. This was a non-starter in terms of propaganda material, since we could all see the devastation in plain sight. However, this was still valuable to the ruling class, because it laid the groundwork for a potent narrative — that of the “level-headed pragmatists” guiding us through the pandemic. Against the backdrop of conspiracy theories, bunk cures, and political disengagement from the reality of the pandemic, there came a promise from the liberal wing of the ruling class: “Unlike our opponents, we actually care, and we will get you through this.” Despite the difference in tone, the trajectory of the policies themselves has largely been preserved across political lines.

Pandemic public policy has been both shaped by and indicative of the official rhetoric of whoever happens to be in charge. It has reflected the recommendations of experts — those experts which had been chosen by the ruling government. In places governed by more liberal tendencies, curfews and cloth mask mandates lasted longer, instilling an implicit message that, unlike those science-denying conservatives, the liberals were “following the science.” This meant that, when these half-measures were rescinded, it seemed obvious that now people could feel safe putting themselves at risk.

Every policy choice has acted to shape the public’s perception of the pandemic. Mandating that businesses put stickers on the floor to demarcate 6 feet of distance hammered home the false notion that being 6 feet apart from others protected you. Requirements that bars and restaurants be closed for indoor dining made people reckon with the fact that these necessarily-unmasked spaces were dangerous. Reversing that restriction while mask recommendations were still in effect created confusion and demonstrated that the recommendations were meaningless. School districts shuttering physical classrooms put every parent on high alert for their children’s safety, while so-called “hybrid learning” taught people that safety was a parent’s choice. As school districts moved away from virtual school altogether, the message became clear: there is no reason to worry about your children getting sick. Steadily, measures put into place to protect people from the virus have been reversed, until the current state of affairs, where every public health “policy” has become instead a recommendation — and those recommendations don’t even come close to establishing true safety.

Economic measures taken during the pandemic have worked in a similar way to public health policy. In the beginning, policies were put in place to help the people who would be economically impacted: paycheck protection programs, tax credits, expanded unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, stimulus checks, and student debt deferral. This aid was granted to ensure that the economic situation for the working class never got so despondent that workers would have greater incentive to rebel through labor militancy, rent strikes, or even violent uprisings. As these measures dried up, they came with the accompanying message: “You’re on your own now.”

Throughout the pandemic, media attention has been focused on reproducing official rhetoric through op-eds and interviews. The experts promoted above all have always been selected based on their proximity to power, both in terms of their official appointment and their rhetorical line. As governments and agencies solidified their pandemic-minimization rhetoric and policies, individuals who championed that line became even more appealing. The lure of manufactured conflict allowed media companies to profit by highlighting astroturfed, unpopular movements protesting all forms of public health policy. Depending on their particular cultural bent, news corporations could position themselves either as “freedom-fighters,” standing up to the government tyranny of half-baked precautionary measures, or as “champions of reason,” pushing back against misinformation and science denial.

In all cases, the pivot in 2021 was palpable. Now that vaccines had arrived, there was a feasible narrative for transitioning away from “economically-disruptive restrictions.” As soon as you got vaccinated, you were free to get back to normal. “Fresh air smells sweeter without masks!” proclaimed the first lady, triumphantly. Summer of 2021 was full of freshly-inoculated people enjoying significant levels of antibody-based protection, and cases were at their lowest point. The media trumpeted this wonderful news at every opportunity, showcasing ecstatic public health officials, booming businesses, and throngs of maskless people, while ignoring the still-omnipresent circulation of background cases.

Prognosis

With every new major variant, cries of “No one could have seen this coming!” quickly give way to “At last, the pandemic is over.” The same refuted myths of herd immunity, hybrid immunity, and vaccinated immunity keep cropping up, only to be dashed to pieces by the next wave. In the latter half of 2022, we entered a phase of multiple overlapping variants — all deliberately still referred to by their parent, omicron, to avoid panic. The baseline of weekly infections and deaths have remained higher than at any other phase of the pandemic, save for spikes as a new dominant strain emerged. The expert, government, and media line has stagnated at a calibrated silence, interspersed with the occasional recommendation to get vaccinated. Fitted respirators are recommended (lumped in with less-effective cloth and surgical masks), but they are not mandated, and rarely even modeled. Schools are fully in-person, despite their established role as hotspots of community transmission. At every opportunity, governments, corporations, and community organizations congratulate themselves on making it through the pandemic.

This is not simple negligence on the part of those who govern and shape our society. It amounts to social murder: the establishment of policies that place large numbers of people on the path to an early and unnatural death. You have the right to health, and that right is being deliberately stripped away from you with a policy of mass infection. Just because the choice isn’t being made with the specific goal of eliminating us (such as in the case of genocide), doesn’t absolve the choice itself. And that choice is being continually reaffirmed every day. The calculation has been made with no special regard for human health; only the preservation of the social order. Too much death and disease could challenge the power of the ruling class; 15 million excess deaths is just the cost of doing business.

We are at a crossroads in this ongoing crisis. As we continue to pretend everything is normal, the virus continues to evolve. Multiple lineages are circulating, accumulating mutations that help them evade immunity and run roughshod over defenseless populations. The next uber-variant is likely already here: the XBB.1 lineage is as different from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus as that virus was from SARS, and has an even higher ability to infect cells. With every wave that washes over us, our organs and our immune systems become weaker. Life expectancy is declining at an alarming rate. We are an increasingly disabled population, with no community support — or even awareness. The longer we allow ourselves to be governed by a culture of individualism, capitalist greed, and ignorance, the sicker we will all become.