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.

On 21 December 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the comedian-president of Ukraine, was flown on a U.S. Air Force jet out of his war-devastated country to beg for alms from his American masters in front of the U.S. Congress. Zelenskyy is the representative of the fascist-infiltrated government in Kiev and serves at the pleasure of a loose coalition of Banderite leaders — men who profess loyalty to the vision of the ultranationalist, antisemite, and murderer Stepan Bandera who organized mass executions during World War II. Before his televised debut, Zelenskyy stopped over at the White House to receive assurances from the decaying Joe Biden that the Banderite government of Kiev would continue to receive U.S. support. The U.S. imperialists, through their gerontocrat mouthpiece Biden, announced that they would not abandon the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Indeed, the mobile corpse at the head of the U.S. executive said that he had “never seen NATO or the EU more united about anything at all.”

With these promises in hand, Zelenskyy delivered his speech to the U.S. ruling  classes with a bald-faced recognition of the truth — ”Americans won this victory.” Despite the fact that Ukraine is even now being reduced to a smoldering ruin, despite the fact that millions and billions of dollars in war machinery and materiel is being destroyed, Zelenskyy began by recognizing the power of the U.S. propaganda machine. He praised that the “victory” Ukraine has already won is, in Zelenskyy’s own words, a “hearts and minds” victory, a triumph of propaganda and intelligence. He thanked, in essence, the most powerful media presence in the world. With the U.S. imperialist war-lobbying machine at his side, how can he lose? In fact, by June of 2022, Ukraine had already lost 50% of its military equipment. On June 13 one of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that Ukraine needed at least 1,000 howitzers, 300 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles, and 1,000 additional drones.

An estimate of Western-donated totals indicates somewhere around 200 howitzers, 51 MLRS, 250 tanks, and 700 armored vehicles have made it into Ukraine.
Zelenskyy went on to use the language of decolonization to describe Ukraine: Yet we have to do whatever it takes to ensure that countries of the Global South also gain such victory.” He hasn’t lost his gift for comedy! The “Global South” is dominated and colonized by the very U.S. Empire that Zelenskyy serves. The largest, most powerful empire in the world can’t “decolonize” anything!

This battle is not only for territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

Here, Zelenskyy appeared to be auditioning for yet another role — the battered president standing up against fascists, painting the Russian Federation with the same brush as Nazi Germany. This kind of rhetoric harkens to the world-shattering conflicts of World War I and II and, in good European style, Zelenskyy casts this war as one between democracy and destruction, between a free way of life and a dictatorship. But, like everything else in his presidency, for Zelenskyy this is nothing more than an act; this is no war between democracy and totalitarianism. Zelenskyy’s own government is shot through with fascists, and this big man of democracy role is merely a kind of sleight of hand. The real script is being written by the heirs of Stepan Bandera. Only a comedian could, with a straight face, defend the erection of statues to the antisemite and murderer of Poles Bandera, whose paramilitary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists killed 35,000 Ukrainian Jews and between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles.  A fine deflection from his own Banderite government!

It’s of no small moment that Zelenskyy stood before the U.S. Congress to make this impassioned but bankrupt plea. It was the U.S. Empire and its machinations that put Ukraine on the frontlines. It is the insatiable drive of the U.S. imperialists for the natural resources of the Russian Federation, the pathological refusal of the U.S. ruling class to integrate Russia into the world-imperialist machine, and the bloody-minded desire of U.S. Cold Warriors who were sad to see the war end in their favor that put Ukraine on the path to war. For thirty years, the U.S. Empire has manipulated little Ukraine. The president of that embattled country must come to the U.S. and nowhere else to hold out his cap and beg for bullets, guns, bombs, even nuclear war. After all, Zelenskyy merely asked the U.S. to hold up the bargain its agents have been whispering in his ear since he took office. Make us like you, he says. Make us part of the imperialist West. And if his countrymen down to the last must die to fulfill the Banderite ambition? So what!

Zelenskyy went on to describe the Russian onslaught. “Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour. Trenches in the Donbass change hands several times a day in fierce combat, and even hand fighting.” But who, oh President Zelenskyy, invited that war? Who was it that loudly courted NATO, that loudly asked for the U.S. Empire to involve itself in the affairs of Ukraine? Whose government was it that waged a war of ethnic cleansing in the Donbass for the past three years? Oh, well, of course, Mr. Zelenskyy has nothing to say on those subjects.

But he admits that the Russian forces “have a significant advantage in artillery. They have an advantage in ammunition. They have much more missiles and planes than we have ever had.” The unspoken corollary: the U.S. must make up the deficit. You got us into this, Zelenskyy says without saying, now it’s up to you to get us out.

Of course, Zelenskyy couldn’t help but accuse the Russian Federation of what Ukraine itself has done. As early as February, Zelenskyy was releasing the prisoners in Ukraine to form penal battalions to fight the Russians. Yet, the comedian-president said to the Congress that “They [the Russians] sent convicts to the war.” And again, he cannot resist the comparison of Russian president Vladimr Putin to the Nazis: “[J]ust like the brave American soldiers which held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944… [b]rave Ukrainian soldiers are doing the same to Putin’s forces this Christmas.”

But President Zelenskyy reminded Congress that the $68 billion USD sent by the Congress up to November 2022 is not enough money to win the war. “Financial assistance is also critically important.” The gross domestic product of Ukraine is only $200 billion USD; Zelenskyy warns that the entire output of the country is insufficient to win the war.

And what does winning look like, to this comedian president? “Ukraine has already offered proposals which I have just discussed with President Biden,” he said. Peace to President Zelenskyy looks like the Russian Federation voluntarily cutting the price of its gas and oil, guaranteeing food exports from Ukraine, releasing all of its prisoners, delivering over the sovereign regions of Donetsk and Luhansk back to Ukrainian war criminals and Banderite fascists, withdrawing all troops, submitting to an internal war crimes tribunal, and signing a peace treaty. Victory, in other words, is the complete capitulation of the Russian Federation and the return of the Banderite militias to the Donbass where they will continue to murder unopposed.

Zelenskyy, who once told a reporter that the fact that he was Jewish “barely makes 20 in [his] long list of faults,” under whose administration statues of the notorious antisemite and killer Stepan Bandera have multiplied, whose administration is staffed by open far-right fascists, demands that the U.S. help his government reconquer the Donbass so those same fascists can return to their ethnic cleansing. So much for the vaunted democracy and freedom! He then went on to say “We’ll celebrate Christmas. Celebrate Christmas even if there’s no electricity.” Throughout his speech he said the word Christmas no less than nine times.

At a time when the decrepit Biden White House has proved its value to the U.S. capitalist class by crushing the railroad workers movement, at a time when the consumer price index in the U.S. is soaring and inflation is spiraling out of control, at a time when student debt relief was dangled only to be canceled, at a time when the domestic population of the U.S. Empire desperately needs some kind of monetary relief, Biden and the other cronies of the big capitalists have chosen to spend over $60 billion in war machinery, ammunition, and supplies for the Ukrainian army rather than to give any relief to the U.S. working classes. Zelenskyy is their reasoning. The rugged face of the handsome actor-president serves as a stand-in for argumentation. It now merely needs to flash his photograph in the news or mention his name on the radio for standing ovations and tearful protestations of loyalty to Ukraine to spill from the lips of regular U.S. citizens (nearly always in the form of the fascist phrase Slava Ukraini).

This is a war against Russia; this is a war against the Empire’s European partners; but this is also a war against the working class. It is a war against the working class in Russia, which suffers. It is a war against the working class in Ukraine, which chafes under the fascist yoke. It is a war against the working class in the U.S. Empire, which must make sacrifices so the U.S. government can enact its capitalist masters’ bloody will in Eastern Europe and remake the map of the world.

We must not be duped by Washington or Kiev. When they send in the clowns, we must be prepared with the real facts that led to this conflict. When they cry crocodile tears about human rights abuses, we must remind them who created the abuses, who funded the murderous fascists that perpetuate them, who even now send money and materiel to them so they can continue their depravities. We are not fooled by the funny man from Ukraine.

Washington, we see your hand in the shadows.

José Pedro Castillo Terrones, the democratically elected, legitimate president of Peru, has been ousted by the right-reactionary wing of Peru’s ruling class. President Castillo, a former union leader and school teacher who stood as the candidate of Free Peru, a Marxist party, ran on the most progressive platform in the country’s history, and beat Keiko Fujimori, leader of the right-fascist and neoliberal Popular Force party, in the 2021 elections. Since those elections, every reform put forward by President Castillo’s progressive government has been obstructed by a reactionary-right opposition bloc in the country’s Congress. This obstructionism has earned the opposition-dominated Congress a staggering 10% approval rating from an increasingly disgusted public. Initially, Castillo attempted to reach conciliation with the moderate wing of the opposition; he governed as a moderate left-wing social democrat for 18 months, despite his radically progressive election platform and the clear mandate he received from his political base in Peru’s working classes and peasantry. From the start of his presidency, Castillo lacked the necessary revolutionary infrastructure to see through his ambitious plan. The Castillo government was unable to dislodge Peru’s entrenched political establishment, characterized by right-wing neoliberalism and anti-Indigenismo racism. 

Finally, on 7 December, 2022, in an attempt to purge the government of these rightist-reactionary  obstructionists, President Castillo dissolved the Congress, formed a provisional government, instituted a national curfew, and called for the formation of a new, popular Constituent Assembly to draft a new, popular-democratic constitution. 

President Castillo’s last-ditch effort to save Peru from another right-wing dictatorship has seemingly failed. Nevertheless, now is the hour to stand with President Castillo and denounce the right-wing Congress, the treasonous armed forces of Peru, and Peru’s colonial-capitalist oligarchy. Now is the time to stand firmly against the imperialist machinations of “our own” U.S. monopoly capitalists and their minions in “our” U.S. imperialist federal government, who interfere in the internal politics of Peru for the purpose of resubjugating and recolonizing yet another Latin American country.

Class Struggle in Peru

The territory that is now the Republic of Peru was conquered by Spain in the middle of the 16th century. This conquest expanded Spanish rule over the Americas and brought with it a caste hierarchy. This hierarchy, called casta (literally “lineage”), divided the subjects of the Spanish empire in the New World into racial categories: peninsulares, the Spanish administrators born in Spain; the criollo, or Spanish born in the so-called New World; mestizos; mulatos; indios; zambos; and negros. High positions in the government of New Spain were more or less reserved for peninsulares.

At the beginning of the 19th century, wars of independence swept through Central and South America. Peru remained loyal to the crown throughout much of this period. It was Simón Bolívar the Liberator himself who brought republican rule to Lima. In 1821, a congress of Peruvian aristocrats sent a plea to Bolívar for assistance in winning their independence. Although this congress of Spanish aristocrats would not maintain any kind of actual, institutional continuity, it is telling that even at this early stage in Peru’s formation, the decision to fight for independence from Spain was made not by the people, but by a narrow group of unelected, unrepresentative, elite officials.

The early republic was unstable, and it was replaced by a series of criollo strongmen after 1830. The criollo nobility refused to recognize Indigenous people of Peru as citizens until the 1860s. During the 19th century, under the Monroe Doctrine set forth in the 1820s, the U.S. consolidated its imperial hegemony over the Americas, systematically driving out its Western European rivals. By the early 20th century, the Peruvian planters and landowners, supplied and financed by the U.S. Empire, ruled the country in an uneasy truce with the powerful Peruvian military.

In 1895 the Partido Civilista, planter-aristocrats opposed to military rule, established the so-called “aristocratic republic.” Ostensibly liberal — that is, inspired by Enlightenment values — strict property and literacy requirements effectively meant that essentially only criollo landowners could vote. During the late 19th and early 20th century, these powerful criollo families developed plantation agriculture along the country’s coasts and their Partido Civilista dominated the presidency; planters served in the cabinet, the senate, and the chamber of deputies. Almost every sugar and cotton planter occupied some political position. The planters brought 17,000 Japanese workers into the country from 1898-1928 to work their plantations and increase sugar production. Even though the aristocratic republic saw the rise of very powerful pre-capitalist plantation and mine owners, the mining industry, plantation agriculture, and other areas of the Peruvian economy in the early 20th century were heavily financed by foreign, primarily British, capital.

In 1920, a progressive constitution was adopted and the old planter “aristocratic” families fell from their stronghold. Plantation agriculture had declined, the price of sugar on the world market collapsed in 1921, and growing professional, artisan, and capitalist classes displaced the largely unorganized semi-feudal planters of the coast. President Augusto B. Leguía courted these new class-elements which were primarily focused in the country’s cities. He began a program of public works and infrastructure improvement that included new streets, sewers, and public buildings in Lima. Rural infrastructure was expanded through a forced-labor system that drafted indios, Indigenous, labor. In order to finance this development, Leguía borrowed freely from the U.S. and other outside capital.

In 1924, reform leaders in Mexico, who had been forced out by Leguía’s political repression, founded the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), a Pan-Americanist, anti-imperialist, pro-Indigenous political party. In 1928, the Peruvian Communist Party was founded, in part by José Carlos Mariátegui, who was himself a former member of APRA. In 1929, the worldwide economic crisis and the beginning of the Great Depression destabilized the Leguía government and undermined its base among the urban capitalists. 

Leguía’s government could not weather the storm. In 1930, the military, which had been so powerful during the 19th century, again took action. A military junta removed Leguía and the presidency then passed from military figure to military figure until the so-called Primavera Democrática, the Democratic Spring, of 1939. A general election was held on 22 October, 1939 and the victor, Manuel Prado Ugarteche, was elected by a huge margin. 

From 1939-1968, something approaching a liberal-democratic republic governed in Peru, although the occasional interference of the armed forces would continue throughout the 20th century. During the latter half of the 1960s, the Peruvian military intervened yet again, and the long-antagonistic relationship between the military and APRA became more hostile as new revolutionary Communist forces sprang up in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, including the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), which launched an open insurrection in the middle-60s. The military, by and large under continuous leadership (unlike the civilian government) began a long campaign of suppressing the various Communist guerilla movements.

Operation Condor and the Shining Path 

In 1968, the U.S.-friendly capitalist regime was again toppled by the Peruvian Army, which installed itself as a military dictatorship. To forestall a revolution from below, the Peruvian armed forces instituted what they called a “revolution from above.” The military enacted a sweeping agrarian land reform project that redistributed farmlands from the wealthiest families in Peru and helped alleviate the country’s worst land-poverty. The army nationalized whole industries, and placed the economy under the control of the Peruvian working people.

The very next year, 1969, the Peruvian Communist Party – Red Flag (Bandera Rosa), which had itself split from the original Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), split again. The splitting faction, led by Abimael Guzmán, founded the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. Bandera Rosa had split with the PCP over which “camp” — that of the Soviet Union or of the People’s Republic of China — to follow during the Sino-Soviet Split. In turn, Sendero Luminoso split from Bandera Rosa because of a disagreement over tactics. Whereas the majority of Bandera Rosa believed it would be necessary to remain a mostly legal party, and that direct war with the Peruvian state was out of the question, Guzmán and his followers claimed that only an immediate, years-long, low-scale, violent insurrection could free Peru from capitalism; this, despite the fact that it was capitalist provocateurs who most loudly advocated for open war and terrorism, and despite the near-century of evidence proving the ineffectiveness of direct confrontations with the Peruvian state. In the ten years from 1969 to 1979, Sendero Luminoso built a strong base within student organizations and recruited almost exclusively from among radicalized university students; its central leadership included several highly-placed university professors, Guzmán among them. In this it was typical of “Maoist” parties of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the Western imperialist world, perhaps in an attempt to replicate the Maoist Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In 1980, when the party turned away from mass organizing toward open warfare with the Peruvian state, its roots among university students would wither.

In 1975, an official with close ties to Yankee capitalists, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, became the military’s new leader. Just like that, the military dictatorship became yet another puppet-regime for Yankee capital. Because the dictatorship was anti-democratic, it lacked strong roots among the people; even though it was widely popular, it had few defenses against usurpation from within. An official like Bermúdez was thus able to simply step into office and retool the state apparatus built up by his predecessor. The Bermúdez regime brought the Peruvian government into the fold of Yankee imperialism, joining the U.S.-designed and financed Operation Condor, a continent-wide campaign of political repression and anti-Indigenous, anti-labor, anti-Communist state terror that suffocated the oppressed of Latin America during the 1970s and 80s.

In 1980, the military government caved to mass pressure, and relinquished power, permitting elections for the first time in decades. APRA, which had led the campaign for democracy and had earned itself mass support from the common people of Peru, won the 1980 elections and formed the new government. Peru began its slow and still-incomplete transition to a semi-democratic republic under a liberal constitution.

At the same time, in 1980, Sendero Luminoso, having amassed about 500 members, abandoned its base in the university campuses, and launched its doomed insurrection against the Peruvian state, which it called a “protracted people’s war,” after the military strategy of the Communist Party of China during the Chinese revolution. In truth, Sendero Luminoso never earned the widespread support of the people — the key to the Chinese Communists’ success. Instead, Sendero Luminoso fought not only against the Peruvian state, but also against everyone, from other Communists to peasant villages, who did not join their crusade. It attacked the new 1980 elections as illegitimate, and did the same following the APRA’s 1985 electoral victory; it branded the APRA “revisionist” and the APRA-led government its enemy. When Sendero Luminoso militants attempted to establish “base areas” in the Peruvian countryside, the party was met with stiff resistance from the peasantry, who were largely against its insurrection. Sendero Luminoso members resorted to acts of terrorism, massacres, and brutal methods of execution against the peasants in villages that resisted its occupation. Indigenous communities and leaders in the Peruvian countryside were similarly terrorized by Shining Path militants. Although Guzmán and his clique called themselves “Maoists,” there was little in their tactics that Mao would recognize; they did not serve the people, they did not build popular workers’ and peasants’ councils, they did not bring literacy to the countryside, they did not redistribute the land, and they did not listen to criticism from the masses. Rather, they told the people that the time had come for warfare, and rather than attempt to prove themselves as revolutionaries and win over the poor masses of Peru, they butchered individuals and whole communities who objected to their methods. Other Peruvian Communists have characterized the Shining Path’s activities as similar to those of the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Shining Path’s anti-union, anti-campesino and anti-Indigenous terrorism drove the poor masses of Peru not only from their faction, but from Communism as a project; every Communist faction in Peru was now forced to overcome the people’s widespread fear and distrust. This dangerously weakened the left-wing political alliances that had so often triumphed over even the most violent right-wing repression throughout the early 20th century, and strengthened the right-wing political camp representing Peru’s capitalist and landlord oligarchy. The right-wing parties soon clawed back their power.

Fujimori

In 1990, APRA was defeated by the far-right presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori, who ran on an extreme right-wing platform of neoliberalism, anti-Indigenous racism, and militarism. These politics, which came to be known as Fujimorismo, were cut from the same cloth as those of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime in Chile.

Pinochet came to power in a 1973 military coup, in which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, relatively moderate Marxist president, was murdered; thousands of Chilean civilians were tortured, murdered, and disappeared by the Pinochet military junta. Chile under Pinochet was used as a testing grounds for the model of economic policy known as neoliberalism — a model developed in the halls of the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, which centered on the sweeping privatization and austerity, which sought to increase the capitalists’ profit rates by gutting the welfare state and depriving workers of basic rights to assembly and organization. As Chile descended into autocracy, its poorest citizens suffered ever deepening inequalities and worsening poverty. The damage done by the Pinochet regime can still be observed in Chilean society, even three decades after the country’s transition back to democracy.

Fujimori was little more than a puppet of Western capital. His government received a $715 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development. The neoliberal economist Hernando de Soto, who received money from the notorious CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, became Fujimori’s chief economic advisor, his “personal representative,” and was often referred to as the “informal president.” De Soto helped institute “Fujishock” — the privatization of 250 industries that had been nationalized by the revolutionary military dictatorship, the devaluation of the country’s currency by 200%, causing nearly half the country to drop below the poverty line, the lifting of price regulations, a 300% tax increase, and the sale of large sections of the country’s economy directly to U.S. corporations. De Soto advocated for the wholesale collapse of Peru’s society to rid it of the “dead weight” of the poor.

To enact this horrific plan, Fujimori used his powers to dissolve the Congress, suspended the constitution and replaced it with one of his design, and ruled as a dictator from 1990 until 2000. The Fujimorists, led by his daughter Keiko, now dominate the Congress.

The character of the Peruvian Congress has not fundamentally changed since the time of the aristocratic republic. The old colonial planter-aristocracy has evolved into the modern-day classes of industrial capitalists and agricultural landlords. The dictatorship that once ruled Peru, a dictatorship of the old aristocracy, has transformed over the last two centuries into a dictatorship of U.S.-backed urban capitalists and rural landlords — but an assembly for the class-dictatorship of the oppressors, the Congress still remains.

Peru in 2020

Peruvian society has sharp class divides which map to the old Spanish racial stratification. Although the poverty rate has fallen since the days of Fujimori (down to a low of 20% in 2019), by 2020 it was on the rise again and has, in 2022, reached 25%. The urban elite, Peru’s comprador bourgeoisie, live almost entirely in Lima, and comprise roughly 3% of the total population. These capitalists are overwhelmingly white in a country where 60% of the population is Mestizo and 26% Indigenous. As opposed to the general poverty rate, the poverty rate of those whose mother’s tongue is Quechua, Aymara, or any other native language is at least 70%. White wage earners in Peru earn nearly 2.5 times the average wages of other national groups.

The cities also host petit-bourgeois professionals and domestic servants. There is a substantial campesino and agricultural worker population in the rural areas, and a large class of proletarian workers employed in extractive and manufacturing industries.

With the caveat that some of this information is now out of date, the agricultural labor force of Peru is 6% of the labor force; 0.5% employed in mining; 12.6% in manufacturing; 5% in construction; 26% in finance; 5% as domestic servants; and 44% in various other “services.” This breakdown is tellingly inexact — we do not know, for instance, anything about the informal economy of unreported work that thrives in the cities, nor can we discover the class-composition of the “services” encompassed by that broad term.

Peru is the world’s second-largest producer of copper, zinc, and silver and Latin America’s second-largest producer of gold. It is among the primary mineral-producing countries in the world. This wealth is siphoned off by the imperialist Euro-American bourgeoisie, who own the largest mining companies in Peru — Dynacor for instance, by far and away the largest mining concern in Peru, is a Canadian company. Its shareholders are Canadian, French, and American.

The Fujimori dictatorship established the so-called “Lima Consensus” to open the country to foreign capital and break the revolutionary national policies of the APRA. The Lima Consensus was cribbed by the Fujimori regime from the same playbook the CIA handed Augustin Pinochet thirty years earlier: extreme market deregulation, privatization of all industries, no or very low social spending, the invasion of Indigenous territories by mining and logging companies, and the slaughter of oil protestors in the Amazon.

In 2020, Peru was in the hands of the neoliberal comprador elite. They administered Peru for the benefit of their class and their Euro-American allies, having crushed the resistance of Indigenous groups, APRA, Communist guerillas, and other left-wing groups. The country’s Congress, which is its legislative body, has been more or less continuously held by right-fascist parties in alliance with Keiko Fujimori (Alberto Fujimori’s daughter), the leader of the fascist Popular Force.

Victory of the Left in the 2021 Elections

The 2021 Peruvian election saw Marxists, Social Democrats, and those fighting for Indigenous rights make gains in the Congress as the social base for Fujimorismo degraded. For two decades, the poorest of Peru have suffered under the Fujishock doctrine; despite Sendero Luminoso’s alienation of the campesinos and workers, the continuous assault on the laboring masses of Peru by the neoliberal comprador elite of Lima has seen a broad resurgence in left alliances across the country.

Pedro Castillo was a campesino who fought against Sendero Luminoso and led a series of teacher’s strikes for wages and improvement of conditions. He entered the presidential election under the Free Peru ticket. He has since met publicly with the Sendero Luminoso representatives from MOVADEF, their United Front organization. As Castillo won the presidential election (facing off against arch-fascist Keiko Fujimori in the second round), left-wing parties gained traction in the Congress for the first time in decades.

Free Peru won 37 seats, up from zero; Together for Peru won 5 seats up from zero. Still, the fascist and right-liberal parties retained the vast majority of Congress seats. Out of 130 seats, Popular Force held 24, Popular Renewal 13, and Popular Action 16. Liberal-reformists like Popular Action have historically aligned with the shifting Fujimorist majorities.

Castillo’s victory over Fujimori was narrow — a mere 44,000 votes. Since his accession to the presidency, certain sects of the U.S. and Western Marxist movement have denounced President Castillo as a social imperialist and called for intensified war in the countryside against the state. Nevertheless, Gustavo Petro of Colombia, AMLO of Mexico, Luis Arce of Bolivia, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Indigenous farmers organization CODECA of Guatemala, and numerous other left anti-capitalists have voiced their support for Pedro Castillo and denounced the Congressional coup regime of 7 December.

“Moral Incapacity” and the Peruvian Fascists

The traditionally aristocratic Congress of Peru has the constitutional power to recall its president — a power it reserves to prevent the kinds of national-left revolutionary dictatorships like that which held the country in the mid-1960s. The clause under which the Congress can recall the Peruvian president is in the case of “physical or moral incapacity” — a clear cipher, a transparent phrase designed to permit the removal of any moderately left-wing president who threatens the U.S.-comprador axis.

President Castillo, immediately upon accession, was battered by international outrage. While the Yankee-imperialist mouthpiece, the New York Times, hailed him as the “clearest repudiation of the country’s establishment,” the election triggered mass capital flight out of Peru. Capitalist credit-rating agency Fitch penalized Peru with a credit rating downgrade in response to the election.

The comprador right and their hardened fascist core immediately began preparations to combat Castillo. For his part, Castillo came out fighting: he appointed former National Liberation Army (ELN) fighter Héctor Béjar as his Foreign Minister. Béjar was immediately set upon by the Peruvian media and attacked for his statements that “the Shining Path was trained by the CIA.” The Congress began the process of launching a show-trial to impeach Béjar for his part in the ELN, casting him as a criminal. Béjar was asked to resign 19 days after the government was inaugurated to prevent him from speaking to the Congress and presenting a strong case for the working class and campesinos in Peru.

Labor Minister Iber Maraví was accused of having ties to the Shining Path and censured by the Congress. Keiko Fujimori attacked the president as the head of a “terrorist government.” Rather than permit Maraví and the rest of his government to be subject to increasing attacks from the ultra-right Congress, Castillo dissolved his cabinet.

On 6 October, 2021, in a misguided attempt to protect the fragile Free Peru presidency, Castillo appointed Mirtha Vásquez Prime Minister and a host of centrists and rightists into his cabinet. Free Peru itself began to support action against President Castillo as he ran to the right to avoid the threat of a confrontation with the Congress. On 20 November, 2021, Popular Force, Go on Country, and Popular Renewal attempted the first of three impeachments, but lacked the 87 votes needed to oust Castillo and reinstate a right-wing terror government. Right-wing violence has been rising as the ultra-rightists struggle to rid themselves of Castillo. The formation of La Resistencia is a direct response to the election; this paramilitary organization has threatened and harassed members of the Castillo administration and attacked both civilians and government officials.

Despite his attempt at avoiding the sword of the ultra-right Congress, Castillo and his supporters still struck at their economic base: On 20 November, for instance, the Castillo government refused to extend the operations of four mines in Ayacucho. On 3 November, the Castillo government began a land reform plan that, although it would not redistribute the land itself, would put an end to the “bosses and the landowners… eat[ing] from the sweat of the poor and the peasants.”

Twice before, the ultra-right compradors and fascists in the Congress have attempted to impeach Pedro Castillo under the “moral incapacity” clause. The Castillo government’s moderation toward the right actually left it more vulnerable to the third and final attempt at impeachment: isolated from its true and natural allies on the left, he was isolated and vulnerable to this last thrust. Rather than permit the fascist-dominated Congress to go forward with its plan, Castillo reversed a year of capitulationist backpedaling and made use of a Fujimori-era presidential power to dissolve the Congress itself. On 7 December, 2022, using legal powers of the president, he enacted a curfew, established an emergency government, and called for a Constituent Assembly to replace the Pinochet-like Fujimorist constitution.

Many of Castillo’s compromise rightist and centrist ministers resigned in protest. His rightist Vice President was sworn in the next day. Perhaps predictably, the Congress refused to be dissolved. The right across Peru has rallied together and, in a blatantly illegal maneuver, has removed President Castillo from office and placed him under arrest.

Power to the Pro-Castillo Forces

Immediately following the Congressional coup to oust Castillo, the country erupted in protest. Each day following the coup, protests of thousands to tens-of-thousands have rocked the country. On 14 December, Dina Boluarte, Castillo’s renegade vice president and current illegitimate coup-president of the country, declared a national state of emergency. The coup government has stripped democratic rights from the people of Peru: the rights to refuse troop quartering, freedom of movement, assembly, and personal freedom and security have all been suspended. On 15 December, the Peruvian Armed Forces opened fire on protestors in Ayacucho, killing 8 and injuring 52.

Even the Yankee-imperialist newswire Reuters reports that “Peru’s ‘forgotten people’ rage against political elite after Castillo arrest.” Despite his vacillating, Castillo represents the hopes of the racialized lower classes, the campesinos, the industrial workers, the seasonal workers, and the Inidgenous peoples fighting the Congress and the blood-soaked U.S., British, and French companies encroaching on their ancestral territories. Peru is now the focus of a continent-wide Pan-American struggle against European exploitation. The protests carry banners and placards that denounce Dina Boluarte, the traitor-minister, as an assassin, her hands dipped in the blood of Castillo and of the people.

From his cell, President Castillo wrote “I was chosen by the forgotten men and women of deep Peru, by the dispossessed who have been neglected for over 200 years.” The people have no faith in their ultra-right Congress, dominated by the heirs of Fujimori and Pinochet. The people have no faith in the courts of Peru, and only recently has their faith in the possibility of the great equalizing revolution been restored after decades of disillusion and abuse at the hands of certain so-called Communists behaving little better than the CIA’s own death squads. Although Castillo has been far from steadfast, he is now standing with his people, against the abuses of the racialized caste system inherited from the Spanish; Castillo stands with the people, against the capitalist exploiters. We, too, stand with the people of Peru!

We call for justice for the people of Peru, and death to her assassins; we call for the restoration of the rightfully-elected president of the country, and the immediate dissolution of the rebel Congress! Only in solidarity with the people can reform of the criminal abuses, those installed by the United States Empire and its puppet regimes, be purged from the government of Peru.

Over the past few days, mainstream news outlets and social media platforms have been flooded with images and videos of large protest demonstrations in the streets of China’s cities, from Shanghai to Chengdu to Ürümqi.

Western imperialist media mouthpieces foretell, in their gleefully bloodthirsty chorus, catastrophic, bloody consequences for the Communist Party of China (CPC), the country’s leading party and the vanguard of China’s socialist revolution. The imperialist media circus is once again attempting to conjure a counter-revolution from nothing.

Fortunately, in this case, the Western world-imperialists are impotent.

The demonstrations are not, for the most part, counter-revolutionary. True, a small minority of the demonstrators are anti-Communists, and the Western imperialist media has made sure to amplify this tiny contingent, to misrepresent it as a popular voice. The vast majority of the demonstrators turned out to express frustration with, and demand changes to, a specific policy — not to stage a coup.

The protests have centered on a policy known as zero-COVID.

Zero-COVID is an approach to the COVID-19 pandemic of systematically preventing transmission and outbreaks of the virus through strict measures, including mass testing, lockdowns, quarantines, and, of course, vaccinations; non-essential businesses, schools, sports venues, transportation services, and other public facilities are temporarily closed down; working and learning from home, inasmuch as possible, temporarily becomes the “new normal.” In China, these measures have been coupled with massive programs of financial, logistical, domestic, and other forms of social support, provided to citizens by the State. The goal of a zero-COVID policy is to virtually eliminate COVID-19, to bring new cases down as close to “zero” as possible. Safeguarding human life — and, in particular, protecting the most vulnerable sections of the population, including the elderly, the disabled, and persons with preexisting health conditions — is prioritized above all other concerns, and some freedoms are sacrificed for this cause.

As one might expect, zero-COVID policies disrupt economic activity. A government that implements zero-COVID does so knowing that some sectors will grind to a halt, while the economy as a whole will stagnate.

From the capitalist’s point of view, this means that zero-COVID is, above all, simply bad for business. Critically, zero-COVID means that the workers will be staying home — staying safe, in other words — when they would otherwise be working. This, in turn, means reduced productivity, less market activity, and, hence, lower profit margins for the capitalist. That’s why nearly every single capitalist, from Jeff Bezos down to Jeff “small business owner,” has fought to end lockdowns and get the U.S. Empire’s “idle” population “back to work” — regardless of the toll on human life, regardless of the mass death that follows. And as for the elderly, the disabled, and persons with preexisting conditions? “If they’re going to die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” answer the capitalists; they turn Scrooge’s most infamous line into an explicit call for social mass-murder.

A society organized on the basis of fulfilling the people’s needs, of developing socialism, tells the capitalist to shut up and deal with it, and carries on protecting the population as best it can. This is the case in the People’s Republic of China and other countries carrying forward socialist revolutions, like Cuba and Vietnam.

Unfortunately, these countries are in the global minority.

Most of the world’s countries are not socialist, but capitalist, and many of those under capitalist dictatorships are neo-colonies, dependent on and effectively ruled by foreign imperialists.

The United States and other Western countries are capitalist class-dictatorships. In other words, the property-owning, profiteering classes, especially the monopolists, effectively rule the U.S. and other capitalist countries, because they effectively “own” the government — because they’ve “bought” the ruling parties, down to the last politician, and down to the last county and municipality. Therefore, public policy in the U.S. and other capitalist countries is ultimately decided not by the great majority of the people, but by a small class of monopoly-capitalist rulers.

In line with the will of the capitalists, most of the world’s countries, including the U.S., have adopted, instead of zero-COVID, various policies described as the “living with COVID” approach. This means allowing the disease to spread freely, while also “mitigating” the death toll with vaccinations and various preventative half-measures. The ultimate goal of “living with COVID” approaches is not to eliminate COVID-19, and not to minimize the death toll, but to develop “herd immunity” — which means allowing the population (the “herd”) to get infected en masse, and to thereby develop immunities to the disease. In no uncertain terms, the “herd immunity” approach condemns much of the population — millions, on a global scale — especially the most vulnerable people, to preventable, painful, and pointless deaths. In fact, COVID-19 has proven itself highly adaptable, to such an extent that “herd immunity” is effectively impossible — even if it was desirable.

But talk is cheap, and any windbag can carry on about ideal ethical principles. Let’s get scientific, and compare the real, empirical results: zero-COVID versus living-with-COVID, country by country.

As of November 29, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a country of about 1.412 billion people (currently the most populous country on Earth), has suffered 15,957 reported COVID-19 deaths since the virus was identified. This means that about 1 in every 100,000 Chinese residents, or about 0.001% of the population, have died of COVID-19 — the third-lowest mortality rate by country.

Similarly, in Cuba, a country of about 11.3 million people, has suffered only 8,530 reported COVID-19 deaths; thus, about 1 in every 1,300 Cuban residents, or 0.078% of the population, have died of COVID-19. Cuba has managed to keep mortality rates so low despite the fact that the island is encircled by a U.S. military blockade, which keeps the country in a state of artificial, externally imposed poverty.

Meanwhile, the United States, a country of about 332 million people, has suffered 1,079,477 reported COVID-19 deaths — the most deaths of any country on Earth, by far. This means that about 1 in every 300 U.S. residents, or about 0.3% of the population, have died from COVID-19 — one of the highest mortality rates by country. This is despite the fact that the U.S. is one of the most highly developed countries on Earth, with a very high per capita income and human-development index score.

The situation in the United Kingdom, which has, for the most part, pursued a similarly disastrous “living with COVID” approach, is likewise dire. The U.K., a country of about 67.3 million people, has suffered 212,585 reported COVID-19 deaths; about 1 in every 300 U.K. residents, or, again, about 0.3% of the population, has died of COVID-19. This is despite the fact that the U.K., even more so than the U.S., is a wealthy country with a highly developed economy.

The results are indisputable.

On the one hand, the living-with-COVID approach has been catastrophic, resulting in several million preventable deaths worldwide. The governments of capitalist countries have eagerly sacrificed these millions of lives upon the altar of profit; the political leaders of these countries, from top to bottom, have offered up these millions of human souls to satiate the greed of their monopoly-capitalist masters. The wealthiest billionaires in the world, most of whom are based in the U.S., have more than doubled their net-worth since the beginning of the pandemic, while the vast majority of the world’s population has become poorer — while billions of people around the world continue to sink deeper into manufactured poverty.

On the other hand, the zero-COVID approach, as pursued in the People’s Republic of China and some other countries, has saved millions of lives. The governments of these countries, whatever their flaws, have proactively intervened to sacrifice all other concerns for a single, paramount concern: protecting human life. Drawbacks and legitimate public frustrations notwithstanding, the Communist Party of China’s zero-COVID approach has, by any scientific and humanitarian measure, been an unparalleled success.

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated, in the most striking colors, the contrast between capitalism, a mode of production centered on the drive for profits, for the accumulation of vast wealth by a few masters of industry and finance, and socialism, the process of developing a new mode of production, centered on the common good of humankind.

Despite the success of zero-COVID, after enduring two years of lockdowns and other measures, much of the Chinese public is understandably frustrated. In the past few months, the Central People’s Government has begun to ease restrictions, but implementation of these decisions at the local level has been slow and, in some cases, improperly handled, and this has heightened public frustrations.

The recent wave of protests were sparked, among other things, by a tragic fire that broke out in a residential building in Ürümqi, the capital of the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on Thursday, November 24, killing ten people and injuring at least nine more. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, and even as it raged on, false rumors circulated that China’s zero-COVID policy was to blame for the fatalities — namely, it was rumored that barricades set up to enforce lockdowns in the city had prevented residents from escaping the building, and that pandemic-control staff had blocked the way of firefighters. In fact, residents were not prevented from escaping the building; instead, those who died were trapped in the building by fire and smoke, and were unable to escape. In fact, the firefighters were not blocked by medical staff or by barricades; their approach was blocked by cars parked in front of the building; residents who escaped the building desperately attempted to jumpstart stalled cars and move them, but were unable to do so in time for the firefighters to save everyone. Lastly, in fact, the fire was started by a faulty electrical socket, and was unrelated to the lockdown.

These facts notwithstanding, the tragedy heightened tensions in Ürümqi. City residents and people across China blamed the local government of the Tianshan District of Ürümqi for failing to properly implement the directives of the Central People’s Government to ease restrictions, and for maintaining what are widely perceived by the public as unfair and excessive measures.The resulting wave of country-wide protests have been opportunistically infiltrated by small groups of anti-Communist professional activists, who are attempting (so far, unsuccessfully) to foment counter-revolutionary sentiments. There are indications that these agents provocateurs are backed by the U.S. State Department and its web of extra-governmental pro-imperialist organizations. The “job” of these well-paid agents is to destabilize China under a “pro-democracy” guise; their long-term goal is to instigate a “color revolution” that will dismantle an “enemy state” and replace it with a capitalist regime, thereby securing the interests of Western imperialism. This strategy dates back to before the Cold War.

Fortunately, these efforts are already losing steam. The Central People’s Government is responding to popular demands, local governments are correcting their errors, and thus, as of Tuesday, November 29, the protests are already beginning to disperse.

Meanwhile, videos posted to Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, show scenes in which a few anti-Communist demonstrators have been isolated, dwarfed, and rebuked by the many pro-Communist counter-demonstrators; anti-Communist slogans are being ignored or drowned out.

Contrary to the Western imperialist media’s narrative, the people of China broadly and overwhelmingly support their Communist Party.

Why, then, is the Western imperialist media bombarding us with reports of mass enmity among the Chinese public toward their Communist Party? Why do the imperialist mouthpieces foretell of an imminent counter-revolution, of an imminent collapse of the government of China?

Why, moreover, has “our” mainstream media gone to such lengths to demonize China’s zero-COVID approach?

On the one hand, it is standard practice for the Western imperialist media to insistently and falsely foretell of the defeat of its enemies. The Western world-imperialists are threatened by the rise of China to the position of an emerging global superpower, capable of defending itself and forging international alliances on its own terms. South–South cooperation, carried on under Chinese leadership, is a threat to the Western imperialist hegemony — not least because it demonstrates the possibility of a world order based not on imperialism, on military brutality, economic exploitation, and mass impoverishment, but, instead, on internationalist partnerships, on mutual development and prosperity.

On the other hand, moreover, “our” monopoly-capitalist rulers are reeling from repeated, increasingly frequent, and increasingly severe economic and political crises. The imperialists want to divert the attention of the Western public; they want to redirect our outrage, which should be aimed at “our” rulers, to the governments of foreign “enemy” countries. In the U.S., the imperialists encourage xenophobia, jingoism, and “American exceptionalism” in order to keep the masses ignorant and confused, to keep the masses from recognizing their true enemy, and to thereby prolong the capitalist dictatorship.

The imperialists who rule the U.S. Empire — who rule us directly, and who indirectly rule the billions of people in the colonized countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America — have consigned millions of us to die needlessly, all to enrich themselves.

The Western imperialists, “our own” rulers, are our true enemy.

That is why China and its zero-COVID policy absolutely must be demonized in the Western imperialist media, and by Western imperialist politicians.

If the masses of the U.S. Empire and of the other Western countries realized who our true enemy is, if we began to rise up against the capitalist regime that is mass-murdering, by social neglect and cruelty, millions of our loved ones, our friends, and our neighbours, then the dictatorship of the monopoly-capitalists, their iron rule, their despotic regime of terror and brutality, would soon come crashing down.

On Tuesday, November 15, a wayward Ukrainian missile hit the village of Przewodowe in eastern Poland, just a few miles from the Poland–Ukraine border, killing two civilians.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the Associated Press, citing an anonymous (and, in all likelihood, nonexistent) U.S. official, falsely reported that the missile was fired by Russian Federation forces into Poland. This false claim was disseminated throughout the Western capitalist press.

Naturally, the Russian Federation government immediately and repeatedly denied responsibility for the strike. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on Wednesday, November 16, which read:

[T]he Russian Federation immediately provided comprehensive clarification on Russia’s armed forces not being involved in this incident.

Despite this … the media [in NATO countries], without looking into the situation, scrambled as one to spread absolutely fake and unfounded allegations about Russia potentially being responsible… We see this mayhem as a deliberate effort made as part of a systematic anti-Russia campaign conducted by the West around Ukraine. At the same time, the speed with which accusations against Russia were made by the Kiev regime is notable. Kiev [takes] every opportunity to … consolidate Western support as the Zelensky regime appears to have tired its patrons.

We are confident that an impartial investigation and publication of the results will expose the facts of this provocation.

Remarkably, despite the ongoing inter-imperialist conflict between the Russian Federation and NATO, the two sides actually seem to be in unanimous agreement on this fact: The missile that struck Poland was decidedly not fired by the RF military, and was, in fact, most likely launched by the Ukrainian Air Force. This agreement on the facts is perhaps a first in the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict’s eight-year history.

Already by the night of November 15, President Biden stated to reporters, “It is unlikely [given] the trajectory that [the missile] was fired from Russia.” Biden’s statement followed an “emergency” meeting of the G-7 imperialists (the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Britain, plus the European Union) and NATO.NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, of Norway, in an address on Wednesday, November 16, following an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NATO’s top executive body) stated the following:

We have no indication that this was the result of a deliberate attack. And we have no indication that Russia is preparing offensive military actions against NATO [i.e., Poland and other NATO member-states]. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the incident was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile, fired to defend Ukrainian territory against Russian cruise missile attacks.

Stoltenberg, in customary NATO fashion, then proceeded to lay “ultimate blame” for the Ukrainian misfire on the Russian Federation.

For its part, the Polish government immediately forgave Ukraine.

On Wednesday, November 16, President Andrzej Duda of Poland stated in an address, “It is unfortunately highly probable that one of the missiles fired by the Ukrainian air defenses fell in our territory.” He added that the missile appeared to be an old Soviet-era model, and acknowledged that “There is no evidence, at the moment, that it was launched by the Russian side. It is highly probable that it was fired by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense.”

Later, speaking to reporters, Duda, whose government has been focused on “calming down” the Polish public, emphatically insisted, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, indicates that this was an intentional attack on Poland.” 

Meanwhile, the United States, which leads NATO and the whole Western imperialist axis, both politically and economically, immediately acknowledged the findings of NATO’s “preliminary analysis.” Multiple U.S. military officials have conceded that the missile was almost certainly Ukrainian, not Russian, in origin.

Following President Duda’s remarks, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that the U.S. government concurs that “this explosion was most likely the result of a Ukrainian air defense missile that unfortunately landed in Poland.” Austin also echoed, however, that the Russian Federation bears “ultimate responsibility” for Ukraine’s misfire.

Citing “Western diplomats,” Reuters reported, that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has been coaching foreign diplomats from NATO member-states and other U.S.-aligned countries, “asking them to adopt a cautious approach and to be ‘measured’ while the United States worked out how it would respond.” On Wednesday, November 16, the day after the incident, the Associated Press, along with the numerous outlets that had repeated its false report as fact, were forced by NATO’s consensus to issue a correction to its initial report:

In … a story published November 15, 2022, [the AP] reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made [in fact, the missiles were manufactured in the Soviet Union, and were thus not simply “Russian-made” — a common misconception that has been repeated by many Western media outlets] and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.

By the time this correction was issued, however, the damage had been done. The AP’s false report reignited the fervorous jingoism that the Western pro-imperialist press has worked so tirelessly to instill in the North American and European public, with yet another tale of Russian war crimes. Every time public support for NATO’s proxy-war with the Russian Federation wanes, or gives way to the fear of a potential escalation to world war, even by an inch, the Western pro-imperialist press applies another dose of — typically false — pro-war agitation. This formula hasn’t changed in decades; it’s been reapplied to each subsequent American imperialist war of aggression, whether against Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam and Cambodia, Korea, Yugoslavia, Haiti, or the greater part of Latin America. The Associated Press wasn’t concerned about their report’s truth. The point, after all, was its effect. 

Despite this remarkable international consensus, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the CIA-installed, NATO-backed, puppet-dictator of Ukraine, has continued to insist that the missile was fired by Russian, not Ukrainian, forces.

In a video uploaded on November 16, Zelenskyy stated, “Today happened what we warned of a long time ago… Terror is not limited to our national borders… [T]oday, Russian missiles hit Poland… How many times has Ukraine said that the terrorist state will not be limited to our country?”

Zelenskyy went on to say that “This is a Russian missile attack on [NATO’s] collective security. This is a significant escalation. We must act.”

Zeleneskyy implored the Polish government to invoke Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows a NATO member to invoke the principle that “an attack against one is an attack against all,” and thus compel NATO to consider collective military action. Poland, alongside fellow NATO member-states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, already invoked Article Four of the treaty in February, shortly after the Russian Federation launched its invasion of Ukraine; the fourth article may be invoked when a member-state perceives a military threat, but has not been directly attacked, in order to procure military reinforcements from its NATO allies. This has resulted in a build-up of several thousands of NATO troops along NATO’s “eastern flank.” Now, in no uncertain terms, Zeleneskyy was imploring Poland, as a NATO member-state, to initiate a world war between NATO and Russia — a world war between nuclear-armed powers.

Zelenskyy’s blustering has been repeated by other Ukrainian government officials.

On November 15, Ukraine’s Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov tweeted an especially bizarre statement: “Poland. This is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the reality we’ve been warning about. We were asking to close the sky, because [the] sky has no borders. Not for [Russia’s] uncontrolled missiles. Not for the threat they carry for our [EU and NATO] neighbors. Gloves are off. Time to win.”

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba similarly tweeted on November 15, “Russia now promotes a conspiracy theory that it was allegedly a [Ukrainian missile] that fell on [Poland]. Which is not true. No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages.” Kuleba’s claim of a “Russian conspiracy theory” was made despite the fact that, by that point, NATO, including Poland itself, had already acknowledged that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces.

In response to the Ukrainian government’s continued false assertions, the Russian Ministry of Defense reiterated in a statement its assertion that “The statements of various Ukrainian sources and foreign officials on the fall of alleged ‘Russian rockets’ in Przewodów are a deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation.” The statement also claimed that “All [destruction] in the residential quarters of [Kiev]” were caused not by Russian missiles, but by “self-destruction of the air defense missiles launched by Ukrainian forces from the foreign-manufactured air defense systems deployed within the [Kiev] city limits.”

At a November 16 meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the “maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine,” the Russian Federation’s Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya spoke of “the attempts by Ukraine and Poland to provoke a clash between Russia and NATO. The completely irresponsible statements made by the leaders of these two countries cannot be interpreted any other way,” he said.

Citing Zelenskyy’s false statements (the same statements we quoted above), Nebenzya said, “This is not just an intentional attempt at disinformation, but a conscious attempt to involve NATO, which is conducting a proxy-war with Russia in Ukraine — to [draw NATO] into a direct conflict with our country.”

Nebenzya proceeded to say that, “The Russophobic authorities of Poland … unequivocally stated that they were the target of Russian attacks… And this is in spite of the fact that photos published … leave no doubt that Ukrainian air-defense missiles had crossed into Poland. And now this has been confirmed even by NATO.”

Nebenzya added, “If not for that [evidence], all these facts would be concealed from the [Western] public, in order to promote the [narrative] of Russian guilt.” He cited other instances in which Ukrainian missile misfires have been blamed on the RF military, and reminded the Security Council that the Ukrainian government has imposed laws banning civilians from publishing photo and video evidence of Ukrainian war crimes on social media.

Finally, responding to the claim that the RF bears “ultimate responsibility” for the Ukrainian misfire, Nebenzya said that “We would not find ourselves in this situation if not for the fact that, in 2014 … with the direct participation of a number of Western states, a bloody anti-constitutional coup had not taken place.”

The RF permanent representative referred to the CIA-manufactured Euromaidan coup, which overthrew the previous Ukrainian government. The coup ousted an internationally neutral president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installed a pro-NATO, pro-European Union regime, led by the Zelenskyy government since 2019.

While the leaders of the Western imperialist axis will, of course, not subscribe to the overarching narrative of the Russian Federation government, and while NATO continues to cast “ultimate blame” on the RF for the Ukrainian misfire on Poland, the facts of the incident are now established beyond dispute.

In fact, President Biden has now directly countered Zelenskyy’s claim that the missile was fired by Russian forces.

On Thursday, November 17, when asked by a reporter for his “reaction to President Zelenskyy saying that the missiles that landed in Poland were not Ukrainian,” Biden simply replied, “That’s not the evidence,” before waving and walking away.

Why have NATO and the Russian Federation agreed on the facts?

Why has even the President of the United States, the central, foremost, unrivaled leader and figurehead of the Western imperialist axis, acknowledged the fact that NATO’s great rival, the Russian Federation, did not strike Poland?

For all their imperialist machinations and ambitions, neither the Western imperialist axis nor the Russian Federation stand to benefit from nuclear war. The only possible outcome of such a world war is, as it always has been, mutually assured destruction. Even the most bloodthirsty imperialist is forced to the table of diplomacy by this fact. Both “sides” of the proxy-war in Ukraine have thus taken great pains to ensure that, whatever happens — no matter which “side” gains and loses more, and no matter how much destruction Ukraine suffers in the process — the inter-imperialist conflict remains a proxy-war, that it remains within its prescribed bounds, and that it does not escalate to a world war. 

Only President Zelenskyy and the deranged leaders of his military-dictatorship regime have departed from this international consensus. As the war in Ukraine rages on, the Zelenskyy regime grows increasingly desperate for a direct war between NATO and the Russian Federation — no matter the toll. If the war does not end soon, we may well see the Zelenskyy regime resort to even more drastic measures to provoke a world war, and we may well live to see the unimaginably violent collapse of the existing world order.

The Western imperialist axis created and unleashed this monster. Now, the common people of Ukraine, of Russia, and of Europe, especially the working classes and the poor, are suffering for it. If this monster cannot be contained or destroyed, then the rest of the world, the rest of humanity, may lose everything.

This publication was launched on 22 August 2022, the two-hundred-thirty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Haitian Revolution on the island of Saint-Domingue. In an article for our launch of the Red Clarion, we covered the history of that revolution in some detail. Since the day the revolution broke out across the island, Haiti has been the subject of vicious imperialist attack. From Napoleon to Jefferson, and from Jefferson to Biden, the Western powers have tried to bring the rich lands of Saint-Domingue back under the direct political control or indirect financial control of Western, Euro-American capital.

Haiti was forced to pay enormous war indemnities by the international capitalist order for the “theft” of property from France — the “theft” of the bodies of freed Black slaves and the land stolen from the Taino people by the European invaders. The U.S. Empire has considered Haiti a U.S. protectorate since its early days as a settler-republic, dictating terms to the Haitian government and repeatedly invading the island-nation whenever it takes a step toward independence.

From 1915 to 1934, the United States Empire ruled Haiti directly through an invasion force of U.S. Marines that seized the island by order of then-president Woodrow Wilson. The invasion of 1915 was engineered by U.S. capital. The National City Bank of New York, for instance,  funded rebels to destabilize the government on the island. After invading, the U.S. installed pliant puppet regimes and created a police force, called the gendarmerie, to protect the property and interests of American capital on the island. With U.S. direction, the gendarmerie and Marines put down rebellions, tortured thousands, murdered thousands more in summary executions, and built infrastructure on the island through forced slave-labor.

In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president of Haiti. He was a former priest and a liberation theologist, and he worked to normalize Afro-Caribbean culture in Haiti. He took office in February of that year and by September he was removed by a right wing coup regime that immediately began a campaign of terror against Aristide’s supporters. We now have evidence that one of the junta’s members and the leader of the right-wing death squads, Emmanual Constant, was paid by the CIA.

Nevertheless, opinion turned against the counter-revolutionary regime both on the world stage and in the U.S. After all, the USSR had been forcibly dissolved and the specter of Communism was supposedly on the wane. Enthusiasm for Cold War-era policies was at a low ebb. Aristide had strong support among the Congressional Black Caucus and the emigree communities of the U.S. and, as a former priest and liberation theologian, also had the implicit blessing of Pope John Paul II. On September 19, 1994, 25,000 U.S. military personnel were once again on the island and marching into Haiti. President Aristide was restored to his democratically-elected office. 

In 2004, fed up with Aristide’s pro-Caribbean policies and leftward leanings, the U.S. once again intervened and funded right-wing paramilitaries, removing Aristide from his position for a second time. Aristide’s replacement, René Garcia Préval, launched a series of privatizations of the Haitian public sector. One of the coup plotters, Michael Joseph Martelly, would go on to sit as Haiti’s president from 2011 to 2016 with the support of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Martelly reconstituted the most dangerous elements of the Haitian military and created a government council of businessmen and bankers (which counted Bill Clinton among its members) to “manage” the Haitian economy. Haiti’s most recent president, Jovenel Moïse, presided over further instability; he was assassinated in 2021 by gunmen who have been publicly associated by the New York Times with the CIA — for trying to curb narcotics trafficking on the island.

Today, the United States Empire once again stands poised to launch an invasion with the blessing of the United Nations and warmongering liberals the world over. Acting president Ariel Henry, suspected of “masterminding” the assassination of his predecessor Moïse, has refused to step down in compliance with the many and various Haitian government organs and agencies that have declared his retention of power long after the assassination illegal. He has been in power since 20 July 2021, but no vote has ever been held to confirm him in office, despite his promise that “his administration will be a brief stage in a series of transitions to genuine democracy.”

Current Haitian Political Economy

In 1957 François Duvalier (known in Western culture as “Papa Doc”) became President of Haiti and would remain President for the rest of his life. The U.S. Empire viewed him as a counterbalance to Cuba and Castro, and thus helped him suppress the traditional Haitian mercantile elite through the creation of a paramilitary police force (the Tonton Makout). Under the presidency of his son Jean-Claude, clergy and local leaders began to organize the country’s poor communities into self-help organizations and peasant organizations. As the power of the repressed classes grew through organization, Jean-Claude slowly lost control of the country and, in 1986, he fled.

President Aristide was elected on 7 February 1991 as a result of this growing peasant power. Although the U.S. had acquiesced to his presidency as a matter of fact, Aristide’s attempts to reform the corrupt Haitian army and suppress the power of traditional Haitian business and mercantile elites in the led to the coup of September 1991. Aristide said of the coup, “The bourgeoisie should have been able to understand that its own interest demanded some concessions. We had recreated 1789. Did they want, by their passive resistance, to push the hungry to demand more radical measures? Pep la wonfle jodi-a li kapab gwonde demen! [‘the people who are snoring today may roar tomorrow!’]” .

By 2018, the ruling class in Haiti had consolidated its power and established a new, loyal, Haitian army. A handful of extremely rich and powerful families and individuals have a monopoly on the distribution of staple commodities. Gregory Brandt, president of the French-Haitian Chamber of Commerce controls soap and oil production. Clifford Apaid owns textile factories employing nearly 10,000 Haitians and subcontracts for U.S. garment production — his family controls 1/3rd of all Haitian the textile industry. Marc-Antoine Acra and his family are Haiti’s biggest importers or rice and sugar, and control the sheet metal, paper, and plastics industries of Haiti. Rueven Bigio runs GB Group, which is the dominant financier of the country.

Before the murder of President Moïse, Haiti operated as a semi-presidential republic, with a President, who is head of state, elected by popular vote to a five-year term and a Prime Minister, who is head of government, appointed by the president and selected from the members of the majority party in the National Assembly.

As one might expect from an imperialized colony, the Haitian state is essentially absent. Ordinary Haitians refer to the apparatus as the “phantom state.” NGOs provide around 50% of all health services and 80% of primary and secondary schools. Since the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, parasitic capitalist enterprises in the guise of NGOs and “aid” have spread through the Haitian economy. The World Bank runs the Haitian Reconstruction Fund and other NGOs and capitalist aid programs essentially run their “services” directly.

Mass Outrage and Imperialist Interference

In an economy dominated by foreign capital leeching resources to the U.S. and Europe, and in a political environment in which the last elected president was assassinated and usurped by his own Prime Minister — who now sits in his dead predecessors office, refusing to hold elections or submit to the authority of popular assemblies, a stand-off between the poorest segments of the population and the military terror-regime supporting the ruling class is threatening to descend into open civil war. The capitalist media, of course, casts the poor and laboring classes as “gangs” and the unrest as “political instability,” but knowing the history of Haiti and its current political crisis, we can see through this flimsy claim.

After decades of illegitimate government by the ruling classes, plundering of the public wealth, and the installation of U.S.-backed terror regimes, the criminal un-elected “Interim” President Henry has called for U.S. intervention. Rising energy prices (fallout from the Russo-Ukraine war), an outbreak of cholera, acute famine conditions, and the failure of the Haitian government to take any steps toward alleviating the multiple crises, have devastated the country. Opposition groups, many with substantial bases in the peasantry and poor working classes, are demanding that President Henry step down. Rather than relinquishing his grip on the country’s political system, President Henry announced the end of all fuel subsidies from the government in September.

Overnight, petroleum fuel prices doubled. The already-soaring cost of living threatened the lives of many of the country’s impoverished working class. Protests broke out in Port-au-Prince on 11 September, 2022, the day Henry announced the end of the subsidies. On 12 September, the so-called “G9 Family and Allies,” a paramilitary organization led by an ex-police officer that worked to keep the peace for President Moïse, dug a trench around the largest oil terminal in Haiti. This trench now encircles a critical depot of Port-au-Prince, in which 70% of the country’s oil reserve is held.

The demands published by the G9 and its ex-cop leader are that Henry immediately resign and that the government take steps to reduce prices of fuel and basic staple goods required to survive. On 11 October, Henry begged the U.S. capitalists to prop up his government. On 15 October, the U.S. Empire and its junior partner, Canada, sent the first armored cars and military equipment while their puppet-secretary in the U.N. called for “armed action” to remove the fuel blockade. On 17 October, the U.S. Empire and Mexico called for a non-UN force to occupy the island. On 21 October, the UN Security Council froze Haiti’s assets, instated travel bans, and imposed an arms embargo. Most foreign embassies in Haiti have closed.

As the people battle their corrupt government for economic relief, the imperialists prepare their invasion forces as they have so many times in the past. Despite the words of the Haitian anti-corruption organization Nou Pap Domi (“Historically, no U.S. or U.N. intervention has really addressed Haiti’s problem,” which is the “social and economic apartheid”), the U.S. capitalists continue to drum up energy for a direct attack. In Washington, the Biden government salivates over the potential this crisis will have on the November midterm elections in the U.S. and stalwart “progressives” like Elizabeth Warren have been sounding the trumpet for invasion. 

No to Intervention!

It is the duty of Communists within the imperialist West — the U.S. Empire and its junior partners — to oppose intervention in Haiti either through direct means or through a client state like Brazil. The problems of Haiti’s economy and politics come from the U.S. and Europe; its internal structure has been rearranged and reorganized for the benefit of international capital and the local Haitian ruling class since Jean-Jacques Dessalines helped free the island.

To the extent that the ruling powers of the U.S. Empire sit up and take note, we must make it politically untenable for them to launch their invasion. If they do launch it, we must combat it at home by increasing war friction and fatigue, through ceaseless agitation, and through the support of the Haitians and their self-determination in international solidarity.

The “crimes” against property committed in the Port-au-Prince uprising of 11 September and the unrest across the country are merely the crimes of the empire coming to fruition; they were grown from the seed of U.S. deposition or acquiescence to the deposition of the popular President Aristide, from CIA intervention and drug-smuggling, and from the support of the U.S. Empire for the comprador ruling class of Haiti, which ruthlessly exploits its people on behalf of the World Bank and U.S. monopoly capital.

On Monday, October 24, thirty of the most “progressive” Democrats in the U.S. Congress, comprising one-third of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), sent a letter addressed to President Biden concerning the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian conflict. Despite lavishing the Biden administration’s militarization of Ukraine, on which the U.S. has spent more than $50 billion dollars since February, with praise, the CPC Democrats also implored President Biden to “pair military and economic support … with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.” The CPC Democrats claimed that the U.S. has a responsibility to “reduce harm” and urged the president to “seriously explore all possible avenues,” to a “peaceful settlement,” including “direct [talks] with Russia.”

“If there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue,” argue the CPC Democrats in their letter.

That the CPC Democrats did not rule out direct negotiations is particularly noteworthy. The political climate in the U.S. over the last several years has become dominated by Cold War-style jingoism and Russophobia. The Democrats and their mouthpieces in the capitalist media have made, and are making, a concerted effort to demonize Russia and whip the American public into a state of frenzy — to psychologically prepare the American public for a full-scale war with the Russian Federation. It was thus remarkably clear-headed for the CPC Democrats to continue advocating diplomacy.

It has become worryingly normalized for liberal political commentators to make absurd comparisons between the ongoing Russian invasion and the Holocaust, and betweeen Putin and Hitler — a glaring instance of the new wave of Holocaust revisionism that’s become mainstream in liberal political discourse.

Adding irony to absurdity is the Western liberal whitewashing of a phenomenon that has been euphemistically termed Ukraine’s “Nazi problem.” Since the 2014 CIA-manufactured Euromaidan coup, in which the current regime seized power, the Ukrainian government has armed and mobilized thousands of Ukrainian fascists, most notably the infamous neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and carried out numerous war crimes againt ethnic minorities in Ukraine. The Russian government’s stated goals for the 2022 invasion, to “denazify and demilitarize” Ukraine, are obviously cynical, but have nonetheless drawn attention to the unavoidable fact that the CIA-installed, NATO-backed Ukrainian regime is thoroughly fascistic.

The CPC Democrats soberly noted that, in addition to its thousands of deaths, combatant and civilian, and millions of refugees, the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian conflict has also heightened the threat of nuclear war between the two military powers with the greatest stockpiles of nuclear arms — the U.S., with over 5,000 warheads, and Russia, with over 6,000. The consequences of such a war are nearly unthinkable. In their letter, the CPC Democrats rightly caution against “the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation” and a potential “World War III,” going on to state that “it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict.” 

The CPC Democrats made room in their letter to praise the U.S. puppet president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for making a statement to the effect that a diplomatic solution with Russia would be necessary. This is rather hypocritical, as President Zelenskyy has repeatedly demanded, as recently as this month, that NATO carry out “preemptive” nuclear first strikes on Russia.

Still, for all their hypocrisy and American exceptionalism, we must acknowledge that the CPC Democrats were remarkably principled to advocate diplomacy and a “peaceful settlement,” not least because, despite being the “right” thing, the anti-war position is highly unpopular in today’s frenzied political climate, and out of step with the aggressive imperialist policies advanced by the Democratic Party’s established leadership. A letter signed by only thirty representatives, and lacking any definite demands, wouldn’t have really affected the Biden administration, but it at least broke from the Democratic Party’s apparent consensus on perpetuating U.S. imperialist aggression.

But this small act of political “courage” — if we could be generous enough to call it that — didn’t last long.

The Democratic Party’s majority center-right wing, principally led by President Biden and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, took the letter as an opportunity to castigate their political opponents on the CPC and to consolidate Democrat support for the Biden administration’s policy of continuing to militarize Ukraine. Within 24 hours, bending under political pressure from the Democratic Party leadership, as well as from the Ukrainian government, the thirty Congressional “progressives” rescinded their letter to the president, abandoned and disavowed their calls for diplomacy, and obediently fell in line behind the Biden administration’s warmongering.

On Tuesday, October 25, House Representative Pramila Jayapal (Washington), chairperson of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (and the first signature on the CPC’s letter), released a statement apologizing for the letter, claiming that it had been “drafted several months ago” and “released by staff without vetting.” Needless to say, this “excuse” sounds unconvincing, and in fact, an anonymous source cited by Politico stated that Rep. Jayapal had personally approved the letter for release on Monday. Pinning the “mistake” on staff was an attempt to save face.

Rep. Jayapal characterized the call for a diplomatic resolution as a “distraction at this time,” adding that the CPC Democrats have “strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance” to Ukraine, and would not “seek to pull the plug on American support for President Zelensky [sic.] and the Ukrainian forces.”

Rep. Jayapal’s “excuse” was reiterated by other CPC Democrats, including in tweets posted by House Representatives Sara Jacobs (California) and Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), who each backtracked on the letter’s call for diplomacy in a similar fashion.

Among the thirty Congressional Progressive Caucus Democrats who signed and subsequently backtracked on the CPC’s letter to President Biden are four self-avowed “socialists” who hold membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The Marxist Unity Group, a significant faction of Communists struggling within the DSA, posted a statement concerning this betrayal on Twitter:

Every DSA member in Congress has voted, against DSA’s official position, for tens of billions of dollars in arms for an imperialist proxy war. Now the Congressional Progressive Caucus retracts its weak criticism of U.S. policy in Ukraine after only a day. DSA members must speak with one voice against militarism and war. We need a socialist caucus in Congress separate from the pro-imperialist “Progressives.”

What the Marxist Unity Group, as with many U.S. Communists, failed to say, is that the Democratic Party is fundamentally an imperialist party. Both it and the Republican Party exist to serve the interests of differing factions of the U.S. imperialists — the most powerful stratum of the capitalists who, through military and economic power, have conquered, carved up, and divided among themselves the majority of land and water on Earth. When the prevailing faction of the imperialists demand war, as they do now, even the most “progressive” Democrats in Congress will, before long, bend under pressure and abandon even the most threadbare commitments to diplomacy, to peace, and against militarization.

The 2022 midterm elections are just around the corner, and as election day nears, the duty of Communists is to speak with absolute clarity: A vote for either major party, for either the Republicans or the Democrats, for either the “right-wing” or the “left-wing” of American imperialism — even a vote for a “progressive” or “socialist” Democrat — is inevitably a vote for endless wars of aggression. World peace will never be on the ballot in the U.S. Empire. Only by smashing this whole rotten political system can we once and for all end America’s imperialist wars.

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Characteristics of Political Mobilization

Political mobilisation in Venezuela is very different from in Jamaica.

In Jamaica, there are 2 main political parties and they have their own branches like women, youth, young professionals, and labour unions. There is a sense of cohesion and the parties’ branches fall totally under the party, with the exception of the unions which have a greater degree of an independent identity88. You either support one party or the other; the parties don’t have coalitions with other organisations that aren’t subordinate to them or seen as one of their branches. Also, we don’t really have social movements in Jamaica; the activist space is dominated by NGOs.

In Venezuela, things are different. The Bolivarian Revolution is supported by a broad base of political parties, unions, social movements, communes, and collectives. Some political parties that support the Venezuelan government have existed from before Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro started their political careers. There are many people and organisations in Venezuela who don’t support or aren’t aligned with the ruling party but still support Nicolas Maduro.

Caracas

In Caracas, the pro-government political mobilisations are massive. I can never see where they start or end, as they are always and endless sea of people. You can see multiple flags of different political movements and parties, like the PCV and ORA.

Mérida

We were told that Mérida is an opposition state and that we should take extra measures with our security because it was one of the opposition strongholds during the Guarimba riots in 2017. You could see cracked windows and bullet holes in buses.

Nevertheless, we never really encountered any problems apart from some minor jeering when we visited Pico Bolívar. The jeering usually seems to be only playful, though we were warned of the risk of escalation into violence.

While we had a demonstration in the streets against some newly-announced sanctions, random persons on the street cheered along, some joined us, some waved from their windows with their pro-government flags and banners, and I vividly remember a truck driver smiling and cheering along even though it meant he was in traffic. Someone even took a photo with some of us. We got a few bad stares, but all of the persons who gave us bad stares were white.

Lara

Lara has a strong presence of communes and communal bodies. The PPT, a pro-government party which is distinct from the PSUV, has very strong support in Lara. When we had a meeting with the Governor of Lara, she was wearing a PPT jacket instead of a PSUV jacket even though she is from the PSUV. The PPT is one of the parties that existed before the Bolivarian Revolution or before the political careers of either Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro. The PPT is stronger in some municipalities in Lara than the PSUV is.

We saw persons of all ages involved in activities held by the commune that we visited in Lara. A sense of unity and collective pride existed there. We had some difficult conversations there about some internal issues in the Bolivarian Revolution, but unity was still able to be maintained through necessary compromises.

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)

It’s important to note that the Communist Party of Venezuela openly supports Maduro and the government. They had supported Hugo Chavez, they have endorsed Maduro in the last 2 presidential elections, and they have maintained a coalition with the PSUV, the party of Maduro and Chavez, during legislative elections.

I don’t know how popular the PCV is, but I have met more persons – both young and old – who are from the PCV than from any other party, including the ruling party. I know more than a handful of PCV supporters who I met in Jamaica, and even more that I’ve met in Venezuela.

The PCV isn’t uncritical of the government, and their analysis of the situation is very different from the PSUV’s analysis of the situation, despite the fact that they’re allies. Of course, different persons or organisations don’t need to agree with each other on everything to be allies; the point of noting this all is that the people and organisations who support Maduro don’t do so blindly or without reason, and Maduro’s supporters are sensible people who can think for themselves. I knew this before visiting Venezuela, but I needed to point it out to others who ignore the support that Maduro has and only focuses on the expressions of the opposition. In the West, common discourse will find every reason to explain why some people support the opposition in Venezuela, but their discussions always omit reasons that people support the government; sometimes they make silly assumptions that the people only support the government because of welfare, but even this is false as I witnessed for myself that self-governed communes and community-based initiatives that don’t benefit from the government are still ardent supporters of the government.

There are grievances which are negative sides of the PSUV’s relationship with the PCV, but those specific things are typical in any multi-party democracy where a dominant coalition partner takes pride in its ‘majority’ within the coalition and feels no need to make concessions to their minor allies. These things are issues with the PSUV as a party and many of its functionaries, not specifically Maduro; I know this well because I’ve encountered issues with some of them myself and heard of some things from others, but these others are still people who support Maduro and the government. Criticism of the PSUV is distinct from criticism of Maduro.

Maduro is not a perfect leader; no-one is. This doesn’t mean that the PCV only supports him because he is the ‘lesser evil’ – it means that disagreements and criticism can exist among different forces which are aiming for the same general long term goals, especially about the path to take to get there and the pace of following that path. Criticism of the government doesn’t have to mean that persons want to change their government; many organisations and people want changes but push the government to make the changes rather than to try to overthrow the government, and that is the approach that the PCV and many other organisations and movements take. They see progress as a process, and they understand themselves to be a part of that process. rather than finding themselves antagonistic towards the government’s efforts.

It’s also important to note that the PCV takes a more hardline position on some issues. They opted not to re-join the National Assembly when the PSUV made peace with some sectors of the opposition, because they still see it as a body that it is contempt; they see the current assembly as “the key tool of imperialist aggression” – they support the Constituent National Assembly instead, and believe that it “should have taken forceful action” against Juan Guaidó when he proclaimed himself to be president. Outside of Venezuela, the Constituent National Assembly is painted as a body that was solely created to increase the PSUV’s power, but this is clearly not the case if a party that is critical of the PSUV has endorsed the body and has even complained that it doesn’t go far enough in making moves against the opposition.

The West spreads the idea that Maduro is an authoritarian dictator; however, inside Venezuela, some people complain that he isn’t authoritarian enough. Those who support or empathise with the opposition should be somewhat relieved that it is Maduro and the PSUV who are in power, and not someone from the PCV or the average supporter of the government who impatiently wait on the government to make certain moves and wish that the government would brutally crackdown on the big Capitalists and some opposition leaders.

Internationally, those who bash Maduro and the Venezuelan government don’t only do so from the right-wing; many self-labelled Socialists in the West also bash Venezuela because it still has a market economy, or other things that give them reasons to say that Venezuela doesn’t have ‘real’ or ‘pure’ Socialism. Ironically, these clowns are not anywhere close to building Socialism in their own countries, and they make excuses for compromising and supporting weak Capitalist candidates all the time. I prefer to listen to the PCV than to some Western chauvinists.

The PCV leader says that the party openly discusses Venezuela’s internal contradictions with international allies but specify that their struggle with the PSUV is an internal one and that they unite with the PSUV against the opposition locally and against the US internationally. It’s not the place of outsiders to get involved in the internal struggles of Venezuela’s Left; Comrades will of course offer their opinions and share them with each other, but that is not the same as bashing and discrediting. There is a responsible way in which Comrades and allied organisations can offer advice to each other or even to engage in critique with each other; it can be harsh, but these things should be done with discretion and in specific spaces.

Perception of Police

My friends and Comrades from different parts of Venezuela have very different views/opinions on police. My Comrades in Caracas and Petare have very negative views of the police, despite being hardline supporters of the government. This shows that their opinions of the police and of the government don’t impact each other much, if at all.

I attended a memorial service for 6 Comrades who were murdered in Barinas; there was a sense that the police were not doing enough to address the incident. Despite their negative views on police, the Comrades who mourned their deaths were hardline supporters of Maduro and the government; the murdered activists and the Comrades who mourned them were Chavistas after all, and the movement that they were from also strongly supports the government. They have held demonstrations, but they are not of the same nature as the opposition demonstrations.

When we stayed in the apartment complex in Carora, there was an interaction with police that made me and some other Comrades uncomfortable, because of our general feelings about the police in the places that we are from; a Comrade from Brazil explained how police in Brazil are reactionary, and Comrades from Caracas and Petare showed some slight discomfort. The police were there for our own protection and offered to escort us, and they interacted mainly with an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who was with us as security; a Comrade was telling me that the police officers’ intentions were good but that people would look at it in a negative light. However, the people in Lara who were hosting us said otherwise; she told us not to worry and that “the police here are different” as the Comrade from Brazil explained how bad the police in Brazil are.

I felt more comfortable after this, i.e. after our hosts in Carora told me that the police actually have decent relations with the people, even though the police in Caracas seem to be less successful with that. At another point, a Comrade from Mérida told us that the police in Mérida aren’t very aggressive or violent. A friend from Petare told me that the police in different parts of Venezuela are different, that police in Caracas and Petare are awful and don’t respect human rights but that I can trust what I’m told by Comrades from other parts of Venezuela.

We sometimes hear of how brutal police in Venezuela are, and the point of this section is to show that their character is not reflective of the character of the Bolivarian Revolution. After all, supporters of the government are open and honest about their negative views on police, and some of the police themselves are involved in the attempts to discredit or unseat the government.

On Peaceful Coexistence

I had a conversation with a Comrade about the topic of China and its role in countering the US’ hegemony and said that I would one day consider writing to the Communist Party of China on the matter. Like Khrushchev and the revisionist leaders who came after him in the USSR, China has been pursuing a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West; the idea is to maintain global peace and stability and prevent war. I have also engaged a Comrade from Cuba on this topic.

What exists in the world right now is not peaceful, and what they are trying to prevent is not violence; violence is already happening everyday as a result of US hegemony. Economic warfare continues against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, the DPRK, and other countries. The world has watched while the US and its allies attempt to destroy Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. The peace that we are trying to preserve is an illusion, while people in particular countries experience violence daily.

While progressive governments have good intentions in reconciliation with the West, they are attempting to avoid war and the most overt forms of violence while leaving themselves vulnerable to continued strategies by the imperialists to weaken them and strike again later. We saw this with the Cuban government attempting reconciliation with the US, as it has been doing for decades, with the intention of ending the brutal blockade; however, we saw that the US was intending to replace an old regime change strategy to one that they considered smarter and more effective.

While making it clear to the world that they are allies, certain countries have still negotiated with the US on an individual basis instead of forming a strong united front. Cuba, the DPRK, and Iran have all negotiated to improve their own standing – and this is understandable and expected that each country will put itself first and that such negotiations are conventionally bilateral, but conventions have all been based on existing practice rather than things set in stone. The problem is that the US will negotiate with one country while attacking 3 of its allies, and the country that it’s negotiating with is backed into a corner to be nice and maintain a smiley face with the US because it’s backed into a corner about its own conditions.

But peace between the US and other countries is a fantasy. Even during peace time, the US won’t respect other nations’ sovereignty; it was built by the destruction of many other nations as it expanded its borders Westward under a “Manifest Destiny” doctrine. As we pretend that a peaceful world under the current conditions is possible, we weaken ourselves every day; at what point do we say that enough is enough? When will we challenge and overthrow the hegemony?

How many more countries will be invaded or bombed? How many more people need to suffer the brutal effects of blockades and economic warfare? We condemn these things, but we allow them to happen. Why do we aim for peace with an entity that commits so many acts of evil? Why does it satisfy us to have peace with a government that is bombing and destroying another country at the very same time?

Where do we draw the line? It wasn’t drawn after the wars in Viet Nam or Korea, it wasn’t drawn after the invasion of Grenada, it wasn’t drawn more recently after the invasion of Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands, it wasn’t drawn after the destruction of Libya, it hasn’t been drawn after decades of a genocidal economic policy towards Cuba, and it hasn’t been drawn after the US decided to engage in economic warfare against the peoples of Venezuela and Iran.

At the end of the Sao Paulo Forum, Maduro spoke of one day going on the counter-offensive against imperialism; true anti-imperialists are eager for the conditions to be right to do this and for it to be done. One could argue that it is already being done by the people’s movements resisting neoliberal policies and puppet governments in Haiti, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, and other countries.

Still, I want to know; when do we move, from just surviving despite imperialism, to overthrowing imperialism? We will have no room to construct Socialism if we always have to worry about the imperialists intervening and violently re-imposing Capitalism on our peoples.

This idea that we must try to aim for peaceful coexistence and resist confrontation at all cost is not working, considering that the cost is that people are suffering and even dying in the violent conditions that the hegemony has imposed on them. The times of ‘peace’ that we have are not peace in the real sense, and the balance of power isn’t shifting; imperialism continues to grow stronger while countries that are resisting imperialism are focusing on their own survival. We are not buying time when we accept the imaginary peace; we are weakening ourselves with delusion as we let our guard down. Peace does give us some time to manoeuvre, but we often get too complacent in these times rather than reminding ourselves that we are in a constant struggle.

This is not a rejection of peace. We want peace, but we can’t keep letting our guard down in these times of nominal peace. This is also not a call for war; war is already being waged by imperialists so anti-imperialists wouldn’t be starting one. This is also not a call to take any sudden reckless actions to intensify war, but it is a call to recognise the reality we live in and that our efforts towards peace may not actually be bringing about peace for our peoples. This is something to bear in mind, going forward. Our final goal can’t be coexisting with imperialists who don’t value our lives.

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The most radical thing we can do, then, is to reshape our international relations in light of this reality. Again, this doesn’t mean supporting any sort of violence. It can be something as simple as radically changing our trade relations to decentre the West and give it less power. Our dependence on trade with the powerful Western countries gives them the power to coerce and control us. They have hegemony over the global economy, and demanding to remain assimilated in this current economy will always have us on our knees.

Individually, progressive Nationalist governments in the Third World have been doing this. They have tried to take control of natural resources from the hands of multinational entities, and they have faced sabotage and intervention; this is not a critique of these countries. This is a critique of the other nations which sit and watch this happen, offering nice-sounding critique after the fact but not doing anything concrete.

We cannot live like this. We cannot be smiling with the West while it strangles Cuba and other nations that we care about. The international community must draw a line and take concrete action, something more than just verbally denouncing the blockade at UN sessions each year, or more than throwing shade with vague language to criticise the US. If this spineless faux-clever approach that we take to the world’s problems now was the same one that we had applied to the problem of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes in the 1930s, the Nazis would have dominated the world at the time.

Other Things

There are good things that happened that don’t have detailed notes, like a meeting with someone who will soon be sent to head Venezuela’s diplomatic mission to Jamaica, an Afro-descendants’ meeting in November that we got invited to, public canteens where people who don’t have food can eat for free, a visit to a potato farm, a visit to an archaeological museum that focuses on the history of indigenous peoples in Western Venezuela, our visit to the national pantheon, things I learned about veterinary services in Venezuela, and some other things.

Conclusion

My experiences in Venezuela are anecdotal, as anyone’s experience would be if they spent a considerable amount of time there and wrote a report. This does not mean that I spent time to talk to more than 30 million Venezuelans or that I know everything about Venezuela, but I know enough to say the things that I have said.

Despite the limitations of my observations and analyses, I think they are important experiences that depart from the narratives that are actively pushed by Western media. The things that I witnessed and experienced were not 100% positive; nonetheless, they have reaffirmed my confidence in the Bolivarian Revolution and in people’s movements in other countries – including my own – in general.

This report doesn’t have a particular central/single aim beyond documenting the things that I witnessed and experienced so that they are not lost in memory. Where some things are highlighted, the reasons that they’re being highlighted are explicitly stated. Things in this document may be cited as a reference for the organisation’s positions on issues in the future.

The counterinsurgency model the U.S. Empire uses is one that’s based in a dual (or rather contradictory) strategy. This is a strategy of crude brutality, along with efforts to win over “the hearts and minds” [Ed: that is, counterinsurgency] of the people who are being violently occupied. It’s an absurd way of waging war, one that murders millions of a given country’s people while simultaneously depending on the establishment of a good relationship with those lucky enough to survive the genocide. It’s the logical conclusion of neo-colonialism, which demands that the imperialists dominate the peripheral countries through perpetual warfare while acting like these neo-colonies are “independent.” And the most ridiculous part is that at this stage in U.S. imperialism’s decline, it doesn’t even have any viable alternatives to this self-defeating warfare model. Washington continues to use it because it’s at least a strategy, not because it’s a strategy that works.

As shown by imperialism’s pivot towards hybrid wars since the catastrophes of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, Washington seeks to avoid implementing that counterinsurgency strategy whenever it can. It now tries to avoid the blowback from ground invasions, with their inevitable provocations of guerrilla uprisings, by instead utilizing asymmetrical warfare whenever possible. Washington’s use of such covert, indirect warfare in places like Syria, Ethiopia, and Myanmar is able to keep its global machinations going, without it having to resort to reckless actions in most cases. But the day is coming when Washington will have no choice but to apply its infamously awful counterinsurgency method in the worst possible location: the U.S. Empire’s domestic territory itself.

Evidence has appeared throughout the last decade indicating that if our government assesses there’s an existential threat towards capitalism from an internal uprising, it will occupy U.S. cities the way it occupied Baghdad during the Iraqi revolt. Many times, I’ve cited the military analyses showing this sentiment’s presence among the ranks of the national security state. So I need not again repeat the many outrageous statements included in these documents. But I’ve recently realized the explanation for why the wild scenario of internal siege that they describe still hasn’t materialized, and it’s not a comforting explanation.

What I’ve found is that the only reason why our government hasn’t so far taken the most extreme measures in fighting off internal revolt is that it’s still able to sufficiently co-opt and demobilize the liberation movements. The 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, which came right after the country had reached a social collapse tipping point with the pandemic, showed that the country is closer to decolonial socialist revolution than it’s ever been. The people are getting radicalized by their conditions at an unprecedented rate, losing faith in their ruling institutions due to the appalling reality of their surroundings. All that’s missing for revolution is the construction of an organizational means for mobilizing the people towards revolution. When that task gets fulfilled, the capitalist state will be seriously threatened, and the state will react with a level of internalized violence that it’s never shown before.

When the uprising happened, Trump wanted to carry forth the plans to exact that kind of violence. He declared that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and he sought to deploy 10,000 troops in Washington DC alone to suppress the demonstrations. But, because the Democratic Party could manage to co-opt the struggle, and because the forces of reactionary intrigue sufficiently frustrated the revolutionary organizers, Trump’s mentality didn’t win out for the time being. The country got only a taste of the worst-case scenario when Trump deployed federal agents to black-bag random protesters, and detain them in unmarked vehicles. State terror came, as well as paramilitary terror, but it was the palest shadow of what would eventually come, what our ruling class will do when it can no longer break up and divert the forces of discontent.

The propaganda tools the ruling class used to dissipate the uprising were utterly dull and uncreative, only able to succeed because no visible alternative to their pitch existed. As Martin Schoots-McAlpine wrote about the 2020 counterinsurgency against BLM, the COINTELPRO infiltration, pro-police psyops, state violence, and agent provocateur chicanery were followed by a bland drive to vote for Biden in November:

Despite the lack of success of the official Democrat cooptation attempt of the George Floyd Uprising, I want to point out one of the more insidious ways that the Democrats are attempting to coopt outrage against police murders through social movements themselves. It is worth first pointing out that Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, is a supporter of the centrist-wing of the Democrats, specifically Elizabeth Warren….neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are even pretending to deliver on promises like this. Biden does not support medicare for all, and was an architect of the current racist criminal justice system. The #WhatMatters2020 campaign is a cynical sheepdog campaign, bringing black people angry at the current injustices of American white-supremacist capitalism back into the Democrats.

This is the alternative to revolutionary politics that our ruling class is presenting: a decrepit and discredited neoliberal husk of a party, unable to inspire the people in any way. The people are disillusioned with this cycle of false promises from a so-called “left” that keeps telling them to vote for their class enemies, and ripe for embracing the solution that Marxism provides them. All Marxists need to do is carry out the work towards organizing them, and towards raising them up to the level of an ideologically trained cadre member. Then revolutionary politics will grow strong. Which we are capable of doing, so long as we get the education on revolutionary intelligence needed to protect our cadres from COINTELPRO agents and other types of wreckers. We can outsmart the state’s sabotage tactics, and build a movement that makes the state no longer so comfortable.

Throughout this mass work, we must continuously engage in the physical development of our cadres. Because as soon as our mass work becomes effective enough, the state’s calculus will change. It will no longer view the liberation movements as manageable through co-optation efforts. It will treat them as literal insurgencies, to be crushed with actual military force. Not merely National Guard interventions or attacks by militarized police, as happened in 2020, but military operations on the level of what the U.S. has carried out in places like Iraq. The government may bomb entire neighborhood blocks, as it’s done in recent history via law enforcement. It may use drones to attack “terrorists,” mostly harming civilians as is the case for Washington’s “surgical strikes” abroad. It may start outright massacring crowds of protesters, which it wouldn’t even need troops to do since our police have been effectively turned into domestic armies. 

There’s no telling how far the U.S. ruling class will take it. What we can be certain of is that such a stage of counterrevolutionary violence will initially center around paramilitarism, because the last thing the government wants to do is alienate its own people by directly waging war against U.S. citizens. The country’s fascists will be deputized to hunt down all who are judged to be a threat to capital, a process that the government could assist in by doxxing the targets. This is something Washington’s puppet fascist regime in Ukraine has done to hundreds of individuals, who it’s put on a list of supposed Russian assets. We should see this, along with the Kiev regime’s fomenting of Banderite terror, as experiments on a testing ground for the U.S. Empire’s own fascist crackdown.

The closer we get to that breaking point within the U.S. Empire’s internal social stability, the more vigilant we must be. Stay on the lookout for fascist activities in your area. Stay on the lookout for infiltrators within the liberation struggle. Pay attention to the historic warning signs for a looming counterrevolutionary purge. Read Che’s accounts of how revolutionaries have in the past evaded capture by bourgeois dictatorships, and about how they’ve managed to use the bourgeois state’s reactive brutality against it. There is a route towards this land’s liberation, however strong the state’s weapons are. The key requirements are the support of the people for throwing off the bourgeois state, and the sufficient tactical and ideological training of our cadres. When these criteria are met, the state will maneuver towards crushing the struggle. But if we respond properly, that maneuver will backfire on it.