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act as if they are living on a different astral plane, their morality and arguments are from an earlier time, outdated as soon as they utter their well-worn phrases, and otherwise quite bizarre, they do not face up to what is happening.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.

 

Ukraine Russia War – Fascist Corruption

Recently some of the Ukrainian president’s closest friends, confidantes, and advisers, as well as people in his political party, have been strongly suspected of corruption by the internal agency, called Nabu, that not so long ago Zelenskyy tried to prevent from doing its job through legislation in Ukraine’s parliament, only to be made to reverse this by massive protests. The corruption involves alleged kickbacks from contracts for the big Ukrainian energy company, Energoatom. One of the suspects fled the country, allegedly to Israel, just hours before his home was raided in the investigation, apparently being tipped off. This was Timur Mindich, the old friend of Zelenskyy and former business partner in his media production company, Kvartal 95, which helped Zelensky get elected and gain power, as well as providing a team of close advisers afterwards, all helped by money and political encouragement from the west.  Another close friend, adviser, and Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, who was inseparable from Zelenskyy until now and was the key figure in the so-called peace negotiations with foreign governments, was Andriy Yermak. Yermak also worked for Zelenskyy’s media production company, as a lawyer at first, from 2011. Other figures involved are Ukraine’s ex deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernishov, who was also under suspicion in another case of corruption, the justice minister Herman Halushchenko, and the energy minister Svetlana Hrynchuk, plus a good number of other less well-known individuals. All of these were members of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People political party. Yes, the name seems somewhat ironic to say the least.

The western media state apparatus does not dwell much on these matters, although they report it, the person who appears to be the focal point of the corruption, president Zelenskyy himself, completely evades their suspicion, even their speculation, when you might have expected otherwise. So much money and praise has been heaped upon this fascist leader, now no longer elected in Ukraine but essential to the western media, that they cannot easily retrace their steps. It was similar with Aung San Suu Kyi, you may recall. But that moment when the Canadian parliament, with Zelenskyy in attendance, gave an actual old Nazi two standing ovations, was obviously highly emblematic.  

The bourgeois state media spin on this is that it demonstrates that Ukraine is a society with a democracy on the right path to solving its enormous corruption problem, as if this were just a fly in the ointment, it is after all the only way to paint it positively for them. It is a standard response that excuses everything. If they lose a conflict, they will also say it was due to the mass peace campaigns, which "show how vibrant our democracy is." 

We will not dwell on how western workers might feel about their money and weapons being gifted to a foreign fascist leadership while they are deprived in the cost of living crisis, but ask how must the poor Ukrainian workers feel being sent to the front and risking their lives, and often dying, for these people. They are suffering in the energy blackouts caused by Russian bombing, but having their money and energy siphoned off to fill the pockets of their own corrupt leaders, in the midst of this war, rather than support the effort, must be extremely galling. This again is not mentioned, even speculated on, by the western media state apparatuses, who dutifully follow their bourgeois class’s imperialist aims.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/4/17/why-is-a-heroine-of-ukraines-revolution-charged-with-murder

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/2/what-will-the-sacking-of-zelenskyys-no-2-change-for-ukraine

"Several months later, NABU published tapes exposing large-scale corruption within the president’s inner circle. Although, initially, the chief of staff was not directly implicated in the scandal, reports were soon leaked that the “Ali Baba” mentioned in the tapes was none other than Yermak. The recordings also suggested that it was Yermak who may have ordered the security services to launch the attack on the anti-corruption agencies back in the summer, though no formal charges have been brought against him.

Even after not only the opposition, but also some of the president’s allies began demanding Yermak’s resignation, Zelensky fought to the bitter end for his chief of staff. "

https://left.eu/ukraine-government-turning-blind-eye-to-fascism-in-its-ranks/

"As Mr Korotkykh's case demonstrates, the ultra-nationalists have proven to be effective and dedicated fighters in the brutal war in the east against Russian-backed separatists and Russian forces, whose numbers also include a large contingent from Russia's far right.

As a result, they have achieved a level of acceptance, even though most Ukrainians are unfamiliar with their actual beliefs.

The volunteer Azov Battalion is a case in point."  *

* The idea expressed in this article by the BBC writer that Ukrainians are somehow more unaware of what Nazis are is somewhat ridiculous, given the history of their country, and its invasion by Nazi Germany. They would have at least as good an understanding as UK citizens, except it would be likely influenced by the years of imperialist imposition by the late Russian Soviet Union and later Russia.

The Brechtian element of radical Pop

There is an unheralded modernist Brechtian aspect to some pop music. By Brechtian I mean a technique used by Bertolt Brecht, the famous playwright, in his theatre. This technique was sometimes called the 'alienation effect'. It was a way to distance the audience from too close an identification with the characters being played in the performance, so that they were not, in a sense, hypnotised by the narrative but relatively distanced. This technique is not to be confused with alienation in the more usual usage, such as by Marx or Durkheim, where it describes a negative state of mind or feelings. In fact, Brecht"s effect could be regarded as a kind of antidote to alienation in the ttraditional sense.

When I was young I found myself liking certain types of popular music across the genres that they belonged to, and this made some things a little awkward, given it involved transgressing specific fashions that went with the genres and different peer groups. There was a time when I liked Ska and some reggae of the Trojan records type, but also Jimi Hendrix and Cream. The fashions that went with these two kinds of music were completely different, the former being generally skinhead and the latter hippie. I had this way of being more of a skinhead at my school, a secondary modern mixed comprehensive, but out of school I could be more of a hippie (this sounds difficult especially with the hair but we had feathered haircuts that could be long). But the two fashions were more than just that, of course they were ways of acting and living. The media was critical of both but the more working class skinhead fashion and the music was often framed in the media of the time as racist, even though it was obvious we liked black music. In my school there was a black skinhead girl, she was tough.  Most of the free images of skinheads are of more recent origin, I don't remember seeing any swastikas on skinheads in the 1970s, later this was a punk thing and I suppose there was some crossover in styles then. Ironically the most white music was 'cock rock' with their anthems.

The attitude of the skinheads was, at least superficially, completely opposite to the hippies, skinheads embraced violence or at least did not shy away from it, and were cynical about liberal attitudes. The hippies were into peace and love and flower power, although of course they protested. My skinhead style was not the full on crew cut hair, red braces, whiteT-shirt, Levi 501s and boots, but the variant that was more common at school, Levi Sta-Prest trousers, loafers or brogues, Ben Sherman shirts, maybe a tank top jumper. It may seem, because of the media, that skinheads were right-wing in politics, but I was not aware of this personally, some were right wing, others were not, like myself, I was a socialist, my Dad was a shop steward, but skinheads were more from the working class, while hippies seemed to be more bourgeois.

So what about the music? You can see that the difference in these so called sub-cultures made it difficult to like music across this divide, but I did, because I found something similar in certain artists. For instance, I liked the sound of early Bob Dylan records, and I liked the sound of some of Ken Boothe, and Prince Buster. To just jump around a bit (probably in time as well as across these boundaries), Jimi Hendrix sometimes reminded me of Ska. The feature that made the similarities was, I would now say, the Brechtian effect, the rather raw, obviously also electronically mediated, 'mistake' filled, sound that 'revealed the transaction' between the techniques producing the sound and the listener. The Beach Boys had partially developed this sound, and so had others, the Shangri-Las, the Phil Spector wall of sound, it goes back to Leadbelly (Huddie Leadbetter) maybe. Ok, it is not just a sound, it is the arrangement, so partly also a studio product. Some of it merges into blues with Janis Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Company. 

Clearly, wI am not talking about such pop music being radical in what it says in its lyrics, its stories, the 1960s 'protest songs' for instance, but more its form, and this form was not specific to a particular genre. 

When I finally became an art student it was easier to negotiate these differences. Art students have their own weirdness and did not fit into anything very obviously, but it still bothered me, or to be more accurate saddened me, that my new peer group was generally more hippie and more embracing of that cultural position, because they were more bourgeois. In the meantime I was becoming more bourgeois, leaving behind my now proscribed skinhead past, and in a sense also my family. This made me want to understand what was going on with these categories into which I did not easily fit. It seemed to me that something was being censored by the media frame, not to put it too finely, and we were being channeled away from this Brechtian formal aspect of radicalism that crossed over these dividing lines.