The western Bourgeois classes flummoxed by Trump’s Imperialism

 So Trump, the US president, jealous at Putin’s imperialism, starts his own adventure in his own ‘back yard’ (as the press call it) in South America, as US armed forces kidnap president Maduro of socialist Venezuela, strangely meeting little resistance, according to reports. After this, we again find the US president threatening to take over Greenland, possibly even forcibly. This now has a new significance for other western leaders. They were generally quiet or supportive on Trump’s illegal action in Venezuela, but the Greenland threat got them worked up a bit more. Greenland, belonging to Denmark, a Nato member. Nato, a military alliance, has a pledge to defend any member against external threats, but now the threat is the biggest member of Nato, its de facto ruler. What would they say now?

Well, at least a few half-hearted comments about Greenland meant they did not have to remark all that much about Venezuela. But now of course Putin in Ukraine is not so morally different to Trump in South America. Clearly the liberal western press was having an awkward moment finding its ethical high ground. Still, the bottom line, the standard frame, was to support the US, the leader of the Free World. They look for excuses for the leader of the Free World to be so obviously outright authoritarian and imperialist.

Putin in fact has more and better excuses for imperialism in Ukraine, given what happened in WWII and the millions of Russians who were killed by the German Nazis, the invasions of Russia usually being via Ukraine with assistance from some Ukrainians. So, we see that what interests the bourgeois classes and its western media is not really some special democratically based morality, but the interests of its bourgeois class owned corporations who are helped to global success by the force of the US military. In a sense what this means is a return to the capitalist normality of imperial competition, which was only interrupted a little bit by the post world war consensus that such wars should never happen again.

And so, what does this mean? It means we are heading towards another world war; this is always where imperialism ends up, as we should know by now. However, knowing this and doing something real about it are two different things. Our politicians act as if they are living on a different astral plane, their morality and arguments are from an earlier time, outdated as soon as they utter their well-worn phrases, and otherwise quite bizarre, they do not face up to what is happening. But they cannot, not because they do not have this knowledge, but because they are embedded in a system where they depend on the corporations and the military who are pushers of imperialist conquest. They are not in fact our elected representatives, even though of course they act out this role, they are really members of the media state apparatus of the bourgeois class, their job is to perform for this class, to play the role of democratic freedom, a kind of covering up of imperialism with a sugar coating.

 

Genocide is the New Misdemeanour

Well, maybe it is more than that, genocide is now the new black, and in fact it is mostly forbidden by our ruling classes to actively oppose it, or you will be jailed, or bombed. They have bent the stick in the other direction. Our dear bourgeoisie can now be called the class of Palestine Inaction, and they are very relaxed about war crimes. Not in relation to ‘Putin’ though. As far as ‘Putin’ is concerned he is evil beyond words, it is always ‘Putin’s War’ in Ukraine, but not ‘Netanyahu’s War’ in Palestine.

This, rather obvious flaw in their new logic does not raise much of an eyebrow for them though, - by ‘them’ I mean in their media. Their media carries on, business as usual. Oh, how they criticize those times when they were silent about the holocaust, about the genocide of Jews in Germany. Now, they are silent again, in another direction, making the same ‘mistake’.

But they cannot these days just be silent, can they? There is too much technology to make us aware of what is going on in every part of the world if you want to know. So, instead we get a strange stubborn forcing of the argument, something like, you must behave this way whatever the rationality of it, whatever the morality, because this is what we think, this is how we feel. They want their profits, this is what matters to them. It has all become exposed to the light of day.

They obviously do not give a fig anymore about international law, the rules-based order, universal values, humanitarian morality, - or perhaps we should say they no longer care about appearing to give a fig about these things. They will keep on prosecuting ordinary people for, say, shoplifting, though, very severely. But logically the whole edifice of law has collapsed, it cannot continue as if things have not changed, at least without fascism becoming prominent. And this is why we see the rise in nationalism and fascism, egged on by the media which is obsessed with it.

Now our leaders are almost all war criminals, in one way or another complicit in what is happening in Gaza, including people, children, being starved to death, it is such a new reality that many of us are just gobsmacked unable to do or say anything about it.

We are well beyond the stage when this slaughter has anything to do with Hamas and terrorism.

But the US are only using Israel as their policeman and agent provocateur in the Middle East, and for expansion into this vital global oil and sea trading territory.

What does this mean? It means at some point in the future, medium to long term, the Israeli ruling class will come into conflict with their current US overlords and seek true independence. At the moment, Israel is like another state of the US, where things military can be experimented upon. It is a frontier, a wild west. This is something that not every Israeli will want for their children. So, support the protests of Israelis against the Israeli state apparatus.

Meanwhile the Palestinian people, if they continue to be led by a resistance made up of mainly religious fervour, engaging in adventurist terrorism and doing exactly what their opponents want, are doomed to a slow and torturous death, fated by western imperialism, and its media.

THEORY: An Anti-Imperialist view on the Russia/Ukraine Conflict

 In the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa, Ontario, on Friday, September 22, 2023:

“Canadian lawmakers cheered and Zelensky raised his fist in acknowledgement as Hunka saluted from the gallery during two separate standing ovations. Rota called him a “Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”

Zelensky was in Ottawa to bolster support from Western allies for Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion.”

From <https://www.timesofisrael.com/canadas-parliament-trudeau-and-zelensky-give-inadvertent-ovation-to-nazi-war-veteran/>

“The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies issued a statement Sunday saying the speaker’s adulatory remarks ignored “the horrific fact that Hunka served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, a Nazi military unit whose crimes against humanity during the Holocaust are well-documented… [It] was responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians with a level of brutality and malice that is unimaginable”. “

From <https://www.timesofisrael.com/canadas-parliament-trudeau-and-zelensky-give-inadvertent-ovation-to-nazi-war-veteran/>

Yaroslaw Hunka’s adulation happened while the Speaker of the Canadian Parliament was making introductory remarks before the address of the Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky, with him in attendance. This was obviously a sensational event for the mainstream media to cover, but, apart from The Times of Israel, it generally decided not to emphasize his presence, or that Zelensky “raised his fist” to salute Hunka, who in fact received two standing ovations during Zelinsky’s state visit.

So, there it was: the sudden collective amnesia of the western ‘free press’. The praise of Hunka was to be passed off later as an oversight by the Canadian authorities and particularly the Speaker, who later resigned.

Is that all it was?

As far as I can tell, there was no official response made to this astonishing event by Israel’s government, although anti-fascist Jewish groups in Israel (and of course elsewhere) remarked on it.

In February 2022, a full-scale conflict had started in Europe, between Russia and Ukraine, when Russia invaded Ukraine, although there had been ongoing fighting at least since 2014 and the Euromaidan protests. Russia called it a “special operation’ and ‘de-Nazification’. The western media said repeatedly that this was ‘Russia’s war in Ukraine’, solely instigated by the Russian president, for “no reason” or because he was simply ‘evil’.

On the surface it was simple, Russia had invaded Ukraine, the underdog to giant Russia, and this was against international law, which was technically correct.

But the reasons for the conflict between Russian and Ukraine were multiple, and of course there was a historical context:

1) The west/US sought expansion into Ukraine via NATO, which is a military alliance that Russia opposes, thus in the end, militarily,

2) Russia sought to keep Ukraine in its orbit for its own profits and strategic interests,

3) Some Ukrainians have a deep enmity towards its large Russian neighbour and its exploitation of its country, including some (like Hunka), and their descendants, who fought alongside the Nazis during WWII against Russia as the then Soviet Union,

4) Russia and Ukraine are ethnically intermixed to a high degree, and Russian sympathisers were being discriminated against and ethnically cleansed with the help of the corrupt Ukrainian state. There was violence particularly in the breakaway Donbas region, which did not support the western movement, its resistance in Ukraine favoured Russia.

In the past, there was the 1918 invasion of the Soviet Union by Poland through Ukraine, and the soon to follow invasion by the German Nazis via Poland and Ukraine, both with some assistance by significant Ukrainian far-right nationalist groups. Given the SU/Russia, the then ally of the west, lost over 22 million people in WWII, there is obviously a lot of sensitivity regarding the perceived push by the west and NATO to bring Ukraine into its fold, no matter what the current political reality of this is. Being completely ringed by the military alliance of NATO member nations whose principle is ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’ is not welcomed by Russia from its historic and strategic point of view.  To boot, the major western participants in the conflict have been unable or unwilling to divest themselves from their Cold War perceptions of Russia, probably the advanced capitalist democracies needed to continue their profit-making from their security industries, just like Russia, and thus to retain a large, obvious enemy to generate fear into their possibly rebellious social classes, as well as an ogre to blame for all of its own capitalist economic shortcomings, such as the current second bout of austerity and rampant inflation, and the so-called ‘cost of living’ crisis.

Thus, western capitalism sought to expand its capital via Ukraine, it has resources such as vast grain production, and an educated, exploitable white working class. It does not matter to capital whether the resources are large or small (for instance, Ukraine’s trade in surrogate mothers, troll farming, etc.), any expansion is the rule. Additionally, two big recent global crises, the 2008 financial crisis, and the global pandemic, seriously disrupted the processes of capital expansion for a while, and capitalists, globally, desired some form of compensation for their apparent losses, as well as a scapegoat for the economic problems.

Meanwhile, the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was in a similar position as other leaders of big capitalist nations with similar economic problems, and he obliged the western powers by openly attacking and invading Ukraine. Ukraine’s ruling class had provided enough provocations by their ethnic attacks on Russian sympathisers and suppressions of the Russian language. The Euromaidan uprising in 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine, was a part of this movement, and this uprising had many populist far-right elements who were either in power or gained power following this. Thus, when Russia caricatured the Ukrainian nationalists of this general movement as fascists, they could easily point to some salient facts. There were indeed neo-Nazi movements in power in Ukraine, even entire Nazi battalions associated with its armed forces, such as the Azov. These were things the western media tended to ignore or commented on only in passing, framing it as not essential to the just “struggle for freedom” of Ukraine from Russian imperialism and, as they supposed, its socialism. The latter was a fiction, because what was being imposed by Russia had been and was still Russian capitalism, but the west seemingly found it impossible to forget that Russia had been the Soviet Union, and still hankered for old Cold War terms of engagement.

That the president of Ukraine regards some neo-Nazi troops to be his heroes, as well as names new brigades, governed by the interior ministry, ‘storm troopers’ (this name was at first repeated in the western press gleefully, as if it automatically predicated a successful counteroffensive), tells us something about the Ukrainian state, as well as the psychological condition of the global bourgeois classes who support its defence. There were very few concerns expressed about the rising Nazi phenomenon in the western media. The Russian bourgeoisie meanwhile exploited some nostalgic fondness for its Soviet past to expand on the theme of them heroically fighting the same war against the Nazis. From the beginning the western media was not interested in the perception of Russians about its borders, so we heard little about Putin’s complaints and the discussions between Russia and the EU prior to the ‘hot’ conflict.                                                                                                               

Western capitalism achieved one aim with Russia, it rid itself of the Soviet Union and its socialist economy (such as it was), and replaced it with a capitalist economy, and a democratic parliament, of sorts. But this victory of capital inevitably led to the rise of a very well-armed, but raw, capitalist competitor nation. On the surface, there was a moment that you might have thought the new ‘free’ Russia could join Europe, the EU, and form a bloc that could easily compete economically with the US and China, and provide balance, stability, and therefore peace to the globe. Of course, US capital could not allow this to happen, it threatened its hegemony, so it acted against it.

Thus, this conflict was to a large part the result of this economic competition. Russia represented a threat to the US because it was a militarily powerful force that could potentially be part of Europe. The US bourgeoisie understood that the only way Russia could be constrained was by neutering its threat somehow.

Some of the opportunist Ukrainian ruling class, for their part in this conflict, do not look inwards to Ukraine to solve their problems, they instead look to the west, to the US, to Europe, but some remain loyal to Russia, their neighbour. Some openly invited imperialist military interventions by the US and Europe. But it is not the intention of the west to win this war in any way that could help the working-class people of Ukraine. They say that victory for Ukraine must mean it regains all its lost territory and Russia must be obviously defeated and lose all confidence in its military. But this completely ignores that Russia is a nuclear power. And in any case, how could this be an end? And what would a humiliated Russia be likely to do? Ukraine’s far-right have the aim of destroying Russia as such. The president of Ukraine repeatedly asked early on for ‘closing the skies’ by the west, thus an escalation to a level that openly invited NATO involvement (perhaps this was the expectation of the president of Ukraine, that such an intervention could be along the lines of the US actions in Libya, but Libya was not an historic associate of Russia, nor a close neighbour, or in NATO). This was widely treated as justified and sensible in the jingoistic western media, but it would mean WWIII and global annihilation, thus we saw some death cult aspects of the Ukrainian Nazism. In any case, there was a constant gradual escalation of the conflict and the stakes in it, so that you could be forgiven for thinking that the conflict was an end-in-itself for both the US and Russia, they were so deaf to any other course of action.

The former Labour Party leader and MP Jeremy Corbyn dared to disagree with the political consensus in the west and called for peace-making rather than giving arms to Ukraine. But the real argument against arming Ukraine was not primarily for peace: Ukraine has its own rich businessmen and billionaires, yet the Ukrainian state asks the western powers for armaments to be given, and it must because the Ukrainian state hardly taxes its own businesses and the rich. And gifting arms to Ukraine is to also give them to this class, who are not trustworthy, and the arms will fall into the hands of the far-right.

What is Russia’s extra special threat to the west that seems to be underlying all this? Russia once had a working-class socialist revolution, in 1917, which ushered in years of Soviet rule. Putin fights this legacy almost as much as the western bourgeois classes. Yet, no matter how far from socialism the Russian bourgeoisie goes, with all its billionaires rivalling western ones, it will never be enough punishment for western capitalism. Western capital interests will never trust it, as a giant power, so the push against Russia is always towards its eventual complete dismemberment. Putin understands this, and he uses old Soviet imagery and styles for a kitsch version of its WWII heroism to resist this movement. Hence, we may know that the Soviet Union must still be remembered at least to some extent fondly in the Russian Federation.

So, under the thin veil of western rhetoric about freedom and democracy there is another agenda than winning the conflict for the benefit of the local people: the war must be won or lost but both according to the aims of capital. This means that the bottom-line is that no working-class interests will be served by either winning or losing in such a war. The outcome that is desired by the external imperialists for Ukraine is not a truly free Ukrainian working class or people, but one that is in debt and beholden to giant external capital interests, whichever it is. Such a fight therefore is not a true struggle for self-determination. And this is why the west supports the Ukrainian fascists - because fascists can be relied upon to be selfish, profiteering, mercenary, corrupt, etc. and will sell out their own working class and people, while not really being interested in self-determination for Ukraine.

As for the Ukrainian bourgeois class, the president and his advisors rule the roost, but in the style of running a TV series in which they direct a storyline, while parliament is very quiet. The president, elected by the Ukrainians for his TV image fighting against the prevailing corrupt elite, had been an actor in a series where he played the president, he was thus made to order, the perfect candidate for the starring role he was to play in the west’s global media, since he could stick to the script. Just before the invasion by Russia, he had nevertheless become very unpopular at home, according to some Ukrainian polls. Even so, as we cannot fail to witness, since the war he has been seen all over the globe, and onto Zelenski’s shoulders has been placed all the hopes and interests of the global bourgeois classes. In him they had an archetype hero of the ‘free world’ to prove that the complaints of their own working-classes were selfish and unpatriotic.

Zelenskiy is an indefatigable performer, and this is how he ended up in the Canadian parliament, participating in giving two standing ovations to a Nazi war veteran.

Ukraine should indeed defend its sovereignty, but not in a way that only succeeds in getting Ukraine further into debt to foreign interests, and betting on the far-right in this struggle, as the west is now doing, is foolish and dangerous, as it has always been. More arms should not be sent to Ukraine because it escalates the conflict, in which the working classes of both Ukraine and Russia should stop killing each other, because it only serves ruling class interests on both sides. There needs to be a ceasefire and negotiations for peace. To achieve this, the imperialist struggle must be converted into a class struggle.

The shocking event in the Canadian parliament happened in September 2023, shortly after, on October 7^th of the same year, Hamas, the elected rulers of the Gaza Strip, the coastal Palestinian territory fenced-in by the Israeli occupation forces, broke out and attacked and killed Israeli citizens and others. About 1200 were killed and others were taken as captives back into Gaza, including soldiers and civilians. There followed an Israeli retaliation that killed thousands, mainly Palestinian children. The western media had been always insistent on pointing up, even without the normal corroboration, the war crimes of Russia during its attacks, for instance on a village in Ukraine where evidence was allegedly found, but the very same media was now noticeably blind to the killing of over 30,000 fenced-in Palestinians by bombing, invasion, and siege, by the far-right Israeli government of its ruling class. Note that foreign journalists were forbidden to enter Gaza, by Israel. The glaring difference in the framing and reporting of the two conflicts became stark. The hitherto pouncing on any infraction by Russia, could now be set against the open vocal support of an Israeli far-right government regime intent (as they often boasted themselves), upon genocide, no matter how strenuously this was disguised by supposed humanitarian concerns.

Was this why there was no apparent official response by Israel to Canada’s praise of a Nazi? Was not Israel supposed to be the protector of all Jews worldwide? Could it not in this circumstance have said something condemning? But there was at least this in The Jerusalem Post:

“Resignation of Canada’s speaker of the House of Commons lower chamber is a “first step to acknowledging responsibility for this wrong," Israel's new Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, Michal Cotler-Wunsh told The Jerusalem Post this week. She added that Canada needs to acknowledge its historic sin of not allowing enough Jews into the country during the Holocaust and immediately afterward while allowing Nazis to immigrate.”

By ZVIKA KLEINOCTOBER 3, 2023 00:15Updated: OCTOBER 3, 2023 16:28

From <https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-761391>