Sista’s Place in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, was filled on April 18 to celebrate the 42nd anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence. The event, which included representatives from Zimbabwe’s mission to the United Nations, was organized by the December 12th Movement.

The people of Zimbabwe fought long and hard for freedom from racist white colonial rule. It was an armed struggle that won Zimbabwe’s independence on April 18, 1980.

More than 70,000 Africans gave their lives for independence, while the U.S. Senate voted to give financial aid to the racist regime by subsidizing chrome imports.

President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe was sentenced to hang when he was a teenager. Fortunately he was reprieved but his companion freedom fighter was executed.

Since 2000, Zimbabwe has been under cruel sanctions from the United States and the European Union for taking back the land from white settlers and returning it to Africans. That’s what should have happened in the U.S. following the Civil War.

The U.S. sanctions are hurting the people of Zimbabwe. Yet Zimbabwe’s people and their Zimbabwe African National Union―Patriotic Front government have pushed forward. The country has the highest literacy rate in Africa.

Africans built Great Zimbabwe

Kingston Ziyera from the Zimbabwe Mission to the U.N. helped set the militant tone of the meeting. He spoke of Zimbabwe’s accomplishments in many economic areas.

A good example is bottled oxygen, which is used in hospitals and welding. Hundreds of patients tragically died in India when hospitals there ran out of oxygen at the height of the COVID-19 surge. Zimbabwe is now producing all the oxygen it needs and has started to export the commodity.

Comrade Ziyera expressed Zimbabwe’s solidarity with Palestine. Thousands of former white settlers from Zimbabwe are now in the apartheid state occupying Palestine.

Omowale Clay spoke for the December 12th Movement. D12 has championed Zimbabwe for decades.

Field Marshall Coltrane Chimurenga, a D12 leader who passed away in 2019, is buried in the Harare Provincial Heroes’ Acre. He was given a 21-gun salute by the Zimbabwean military.

Clay said Zimbabwe has become a beacon for Africa. He emphasized the struggle of the Palestinian people. “Unity is our greatest weapon,” exclaimed Omowale Clay.

Colette Pean from D12 spoke about a tour that’s being organized later this year to go to Zimbabwe. Pean described how beautiful the African country is.

A top attraction is Great Zimbabwe, one of the largest stone fortresses in the world. Pean told how British colonialists were so embarrassed by this African feat of engineering that they claimed it was really built by Phoenicians! (It wasn’t built by UFOs either.)

Colette Pean described how healthcare workers and all of Zimbabwe’s people fought back more successfully against COVID-19 than did the United States government. Zimbabwe closed its borders and took other measures against the pandemic weeks before the U.S. did.

Compare Zimbabwe with Pennsylvania, a state with at least 17 billionaires. While Pennsylvania has 13 million people, Zimbabwe has around 15 million people.

As of April 19, some 5,464 people have died in Zimbabwe from the coronavirus. In Pennsylvania, 44,539 people died from COVID ― over eight times as many. 

Jihad from Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, read a moving solidarity statement that was greeted warmly by the audience. There’s solidarity with Palestine throughout Africa.

While the sanctions against Zimbabwe have hurt the country, so will the sanctions against the Russian Federation hurt the people of Zimbabwe. That’s because Zimbabwe imports much of its fertilizer from Russia.

Despite these difficulties, Zimbabwe will never surrender. Long live Zimbabwe!

Join us THIS THURSDAY 4/21 at the Zionist consulate at 12 PM for an Emergency Rally as we demand an end to escalating Zionist violence across all of Palestine and an end to the ongoing Nakba.

Over the past few days, Palestinian worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque have been repeatedly ambushed by the Zionist Occupation Forces. The IOF have used sound grenades, fired tear gas, detained the youth, and brutally attacked worshippers, leaving several injured and the mosque in poor condition. In Gaza, Zionist warplanes have dropped bombs around Khan Yunis and remain in the skies threatening further aggression.

For Zionist aggression to end and for our liberation to be realized, nothing short of the full eradication of Zionism is required. Join us as we send this clear and unwavering message to the Zionist regime in front of the consulate at 11766 Wilshire Boulevard #1600, Los Angeles. The rally will begin promptly at noon. We look forward to seeing you there!

Co-Organized by: American Muslims for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, Al-Awda, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, Yalla Indivisible, Palestinian American Women’s Association, US Palestinian Community Network, Free Democratic Palestine Movement, Union of Palestinian Women

Endorsers include: Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, ANSWER Coalition, Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, LA4Palestine

In Texas and Alabama, transgender youth are facing forcible detransition. A law passed by Alabama’s legislature and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey April 8, and an executive order by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in February, not only ban gender-affirming care for children, but subject their parents and health-care providers to prosecution. 

This means that even kids who have been transitioning for years, who have lived as and always been known as a girl or boy to their peers, would be forcibly “outed” and denied the care they need to grow up happy and healthy – even banned from using the restroom they choose at school.

These measures directly contradict the recommendations of medical experts, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association. 

A University of Washington Study released at the end of February found that trans youth who got gender-affirming treatment experienced a 60% drop in depression risk and a 73% drop in suicidal thoughts, on average. 

“Our study builds on what we have already seen from an already staggering amount of scientific research,” study lead author Diana Tordoff told HealthDay News. “Access to gender-affirming care saves trans youth’s lives.”

Tennessee and Arkansas already have laws banning gender-affirming care. Nearly half of U.S. states currently have similar legislation pending. 

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that about 1.5 million people in the U.S. openly identify as trans – that is, less than half of 1% of the U.S. population of 330 million.

Slander campaign

In recent weeks, a new campaign of dangerous slander has accompanied this effort, as right-wing politicians, news outlets like Fox News and social-media bigots shout about the LGBTQ2S community and its supporters as “groomers” or pedophiles for supporting gender-affirming care for youth. 

Mainstream corporate media like the Washington Post have published pieces questioning whether trans people’s right to exist has “gone too far,” demonstrating that this bigoted campaign has traction within the capitalist ruling class beyond the fascist right that now dominates the Republican Party.

This slander campaign has gone hand-in-glove with the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which bans any mention of queer and trans issues from schools, and the British government’s decision to exclude trans people from the ban on so-called “conversion therapy” that forcibly seeks to change people’s sexual and gender identities.

The grotesque anti-trans campaign echoes the rhetoric of other anti-LGBTQ2S witch-hunts, like the one targeting gay men during the AIDS crisis. It is having dangerous consequences for the trans community, which already faces a high rate of murders and violence. Trans people have been harassed and threatened on trains and in the street. Death threats against trans people online have skyrocketed.

State and local protest actions and lawsuits are attempting to hold back the tide. But it’s clear that the ultra-right plans to continue riding their hate campaign into the mid-term Congressional elections this November. Democrats have shown no desire to take up the fight for trans rights, beyond the empty words “we are with you” uttered by President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address. 

In fact, Democratic politicians are rapidly moving to the right on every issue from police brutality to COVID prevention – all while leading the charge for war against Russia.

Big Lies, at home and abroad

On the other side of the planet, antifascists from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, the Ukrainian antifascist underground, and troops from the Russian Federation are fighting to stem the tide of a U.S.-NATO takeover of Eastern Europe. 

The location chosen by the West for this showdown is the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, ruled by a right-wing coup regime installed by Washington in 2014. The backbone of this regime is neo-Nazi groups that have terrorized leftists, trade unionists, journalists and minority nationalities and immigrants.

The reality of the situation has been turned on its head by the propagandists of U.S. Big Business and the Pentagon. 

People in the Donbass region – Donetsk and Lugansk – have been defending themselves from a war waged by Ukraine with U.S./NATO support for eight years. Washington pushed Ukraine to launch a new, massive attack on Donbass earlier this year, hoping to draw Russia into a war. 

The people of Donetsk and Lugansk appealed for Russia’s help to defend themselves when a Ukrainian attack became inevitable. Russia’s government also saw that a complete NATO takeover of Ukraine would endanger its own sovereignty, and felt no option but to act.

And yet, their joint military campaign to denazify and demilitarize NATO’s puppet regime in Ukraine is portrayed in the U.S. as the greatest crime against humanity since World War II. (The many, many crimes committed by the U.S. war machine around the world are of course omitted from the conversation.)

Blame the victim

Does this “blame the victim” approach sound familiar? It should. It’s the exact same strategy of divide-and-conquer being used to demonize trans people here at home.

Consider these parallels:

Families of trans children are being forced to flee states that have adopted laws banning gender-affirming care and persecuting supportive parents. It’s so grave that even the U.S. Air Force has announced it will help resettle affected service members’ families from these states!

In the same way, millions of people in Donbass and Ukraine have been forced to flee their homes because of the war crisis methodically set up by Washington and its allies.

Trans people and their supporters are slandered and dehumanized every day in print, broadcast and social media and by elected officials. This creates an atmosphere that makes violent attacks inevitable. 

In the same way, social-media monopolies, corporate media and Washington officials promote neo-Nazi-spawned claims of “Russian war crimes,” suppress and deplatform alternative sources of news and analysis, and support measures that dehumanize and belittle people who live in the Donbass region and people of Russian nationality.

How interesting that many organized sports bodies are banning trans people from competing while also banning Russian athletes!

Trans people, antifascists in Eastern Europe and anti-war activists have a common enemy: U.S. imperialism. 

It might seem that geographical distance, lack of mutual understanding and the intensity of the attacks make it impossible for these struggles (and others) to unite. That’s what the imperialists are counting on.

It is the job of communists to prove them wrong, by building bridges between diverse sections of the working class at home and abroad to fight back. We need to start today.

Havana, Cuba — Three days of solidarity will mark May Day 2022 in Havana. In Cuba, for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic forced cancellation in 2020 and 2021, the awesome May Day march will joyously take place Sunday, May 1. The march theme, Cuba Vive y Trabaja — Cuba Lives and Works —  expresses the firm and unconditional decision to continue consolidating “Our Economic-Social Socialist Development Model.” The events are dedicated to Cuba’s historical leader, Fidel Castro Ruz. 

On the eve of May Day, April 30, the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba [Cuban Workers Central Union] is welcoming workers from around the world to learn from Cuban workers and their neighborhoods the pain caused to Cuban families by the unilateral U.S. economic, commercial, and financial blockade — essentially an illegal economic war. After meetings with the hotel and tourism union, delegations will visit communities under reconstruction and partake in the community soup called caldosa with Committees for Defense of the Revolution. 

Hundreds — most under 30 years of age — are coming from the United States in various Brigades, delegations and just coming as individuals to demonstrate their solidarity with revolutionary Cuba — real aid to the Cuban people. Their experiences will inform their work when they return to the U.S., be it in work places, mutual-aid projects, communities fighting for affordable housing and against evictions, to abolish the police abuse and murders and to stop the climate catastrophe and looming nuclear war that threatens human existence as the fight to end the intensified U.S. blockade continues.

May Day — International Workers’ Day — began in the U.S. in Chicago in 1886 where workers fought for the 8-hour work day, but until 2005/2006 it was most celebrated outside the U.S. and especially in countries that have freed themselves from imperialist domination, like Cuba. 

For a former colonial nation developing under a suffocating blockade ruthlessly imposed by the most powerful military and economic giant only 90 miles to the north, the significance of the march is expressed in the words of a now-80-year-old participant in Cuba’s victory over the U.S. invasion at Playa Girón (aka Bay of Pigs) who said he was returning to the Plaza of the Revolution on May 1 “because this is now our Girón.”

“The squares are, now, another good setting to support the efforts of the government, the party, the CTC, all the institutions and the people in the desire to build the prosperous and sustainable socialist society to which we aspire,” Abel Vázquez Caballero told Trabajadores.cu.

The three day solidarity gathering culminates on May 2, with a solidarity conference featuring CTC General Secretary Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento that will conclude with the approval of a Declaration of Solidarity with Cuba and the proposal to fight against imperialism and for the advancement of leftist organizations for a progressive change in the world.

On May 2, buses will depart from the solidarity conference headed to Guantanamo for the VII Seminar to Abolish Foreign Bases and NATO. 

 

As the Indigenous anti-pipeline resistance against the Coastal GasLink (CGL) continues in the Wet’suwet’en lands in Canada, the police have been intimidating the protesters and residents of the land and conducting surveillance. On Monday, April 18, the Royal Mounted Canadian Police (RCMP) arrested and later released a supporter of the Wet’suwet’en cause over mistaken identification.

According to the Gidimt’en Checkpoint, a group of Gidimt’en clan members of the Wet’suwet’en organizing the resistance, the arrest is an outcome of more than a month of intimidation and harassment by the police. “This tax-payer funded harassment and intimidation is an explicit attempt to make Wet’suwet’en people unsafe on our own lands,” the group said in a statement.

Gidimt’en Checkpoint stated that since March, the RCMP has been making nearly daily visits to village sites in the lands. The group claims that the federal police force made over 100 visits to residences and congregations in the Indigenous lands. The RCMP visits are made anywhere between four to eight times a day to intimidate and harass leaders, activists and supporters, said Gidimt’en Checkpoint.

Protesters have claimed that the lands have been under surveillance round the clock, since January, when protesters had to make a strategic retreat from a major occupation near Camp Coyote on the pipeline’s drill site to avoid further arrests and legal harassment.

The concerns of widespread state surveillance were only vindicated further when a recent report published on APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) on April 8 revealed that federal officials have been keeping an eye on possible coalition building among Wet’suwet’en activists and Mohawk groups protesting against logging in Fairy Creek in Vancouver.

The report based on de-classified internal memos showed that the crown-indigenous relations deputy minister, Daniel Quan-Watson, briefed the Privy Council Office (the bureaucratic arm of the Prime Minister’s Office) and its intelligence wing about the alliance-building and the possibility of such alliances causing a repeat of the nationwide protests of early 2020. Those protests were sparked by police repression against Wet’suwet’en activists.

Activists have also accused the police of interrupting Wet’suwet’en rituals due to these unwarranted visits, which the police say is to “check-in” on the activities in the lands. “It is not okay that this level of daily harassment is being normalized,” the group said. “We are not free on our own yintah (land).”

The RCMP has in the past employed heavy-handed tactics to break apart sit-ins and demonstrations near the CGL pipeline drillsite. According to reports, the RCMP spent close to CAD 943,234 (over USD 750,000) between November 1 and December 23, 2021, at the height of violent confrontations with Indigenous protesters.

The harassment comes at a time when pipeline resistors have taken to expand their movement outside the Wet’suwet’en lands and pressure investors of the controversial pipeline project. Last week, on April 7, a delegation of hereditary chiefs of Wet’suwet’en were scheduled to attend the shareholders’ meet of the Royal Bank of Canada, one of the main investors in the pipeline project.

The RBC had canceled the in-person meeting due to a COVID outbreak, which activists argued was an excuse to avoid uncomfortable questions from the Indigenous group. RBC had earlier scuttled a major proposal on financing of fossil fuel projects from being considered in the shareholders’ meeting, prior to the meeting.

“RBC has a track record of ignoring our concerns, and the criticism of shareholders and customers,” said Molly Wickham or Sleydo’, spokesperson for the Gidimt’en Checkpoint. “It seems like they don’t want to answer for their financing of the rights-violating Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline and to face us in person.”

Wet’suwet’en activists have nevertheless refused to back down and continued to attract solidarity and attention, both nationally and internationally.

In March, a group of 65 Hollywood personalities, including the likes Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Jane Fonda, and Robert Downey Jr. wrote a joint letter to the RBC, demanding that it pull out of CGL.

“Despite claiming to be a leader in climate conscious banking, since acquiring CNB (City National Bank, a subsidiary of RBC) in 2015, RBC has spent over $160 billion to become one of the world’s largest and most aggressive financiers of tar sands, fossil fuel extraction, and transport,” the letter reads. CNB is often called the “bank of the stars” for holding bank accounts of major personalities in the entertainment industry.

Wet’suwet’en activists and traditional chiefs have long resisted the construction of the pipeline on their traditional lands. While TC Energy’s project has been backed by an injunction by the British Columbia Supreme Court which permitted the work to continue, Indigenous groups have argued that the lands were never ceded and any construction on it requires the consent of the traditional tribal chiefs.

They have also countered TC Energy’s argument of having secured consent from band council chiefs elected under the provisions of the controversial Indian Act, and instead cited a 1997 Canadian Supreme Court judgment that the aboriginal title for Wet’suwet’en lands have never been extinguished.

Source: Peoples Dispatch

On Feb. 24, the anti-fascist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, together with the Russian Federation, launched a military action with the goal of “demilitarization and denazification” of the U.S./NATO coup regime in Kiev. Following are links to reports and analysis that give an understanding of the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

Victory to the anti-fascist forces of Donbass and their allies! U.S./NATO hands off Russia!

Socialist Unity Party / Partido de Socialismo Unido statement on the military conflict in Ukraine

¡Victoria a las fuerzas antifascistas del Donbas y sus aliados! ¡EUA / OTAN, saquen sus manos de Rusia!

Comunicado del Partido de Socialismo Unido sobre el conflicto militar en Ucrania

Looking behind the headlines

Why Russia recognized the Donbass republics

In order to have a clear anti-war, anti-imperialist position today, class-conscious workers need to understand the significance of the Russian Federation’s Feb. 21 decision to recognize the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent, sovereign countries, nearly eight years after they first declared independence from Ukraine.

‘Cut through wall of imperialist propaganda’ on Ukraine

The situation in Eastern Europe today was created by the U.S. and NATO, which bear full responsibility for the military conflict unfolding in Ukraine. Ukraine and its Western sponsors spent the last seven years sabotaging the 2015 Minsk II agreements meant to end Kiev’s attacks on the people of the Donbass region. Washington and Kiev spent the last three months preparing an invasion of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as a means to draw Russia into a war.

Former NATO military analyst exposes West’s Ukraine invasion narrative

In his speech on Feb. 24, Vladimir Putin stated the two objectives of his operation: to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine. It is therefore not a question of seizing Ukraine, nor even, in all likelihood, of occupying it and certainly not of destroying it.

Pentagon mania 1992: Bush disowns but won’t denounce plan for world domination

On March 8, 1992, the New York Times published excerpts from a 46-page secret Pentagon draft document that it said was leaked by Pentagon officials. This document is truly extraordinary. It asserts complete U.S. world domination in both political and military terms. In other words, the U.S. is to be the sole and exclusive superpower on the face of the planet. It is to exercise its power not only in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, but also on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Ukraine: It was all written in the Rand Corp plan

The strategic plan of the United States against Russia was elaborated three years ago by the Rand Corporation.

Why Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is legal under international law

One must begin this discussion by accepting the fact that there was already a war happening in Ukraine for the eight years preceding the Russian military incursion in February 2022. And, this war by the government in Kiev against the Russian-speaking peoples of the Donbass – a war which claimed the lives of around 14,000 people, many of them children, and displaced around 1.5 million more even before Russia’s military operation – has been arguably genocidal. That is, the government in Kiev, and especially its neo-Nazi battalions, carried out attacks against these peoples with the intention of destroying, at least in part, the ethnic Russians precisely because of their ethnicity.

On Ukraine

Fact-finding trip to Donbass: A front-line shelter in Rubizhne

Struggle-La Lucha’s John Parker reports from the Lugansk People’s Republic, on the front line of the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Parker interviewed Donbass residents who’ve lived under eight years of Ukrainian bombing and occupation, bearing witness to war crimes committed by Ukraine in the name of NATO expansion. Parker traveling alongside Ukrainian activists forced into exile after the U.S.-backed Maidan coup in 2014.

Voices from Donbass speak to U.S. anti-war movement

On March 27, the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha newspaper hosted a webinar called “Stop the War Lies: Voices from Donbass.” This was a unique opportunity for the U.S. anti-war movement to hear directly from people in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), whose voices are silenced by the Western mass media’s pro-Ukraine war propaganda.

Mariupol and Donetsk: a tale of two cities

The U.S. and other Western media mostly ignored Mariupol for the eight years it was under fascist occupation. They couldn’t have cared less for the workers and political activists who had to live under the thumb of the Azov Battalion and Ukrainian security forces.

Imperialist propaganda and Ukrainian Jews

The history of Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Nazi Germany and the present alliance between the Kiev government and neo-Nazis.

Ukrainian security services arrest young communist leaders

The March 6 arrest of Aleksandr Kononovich and Mikhail Kononovich, leaders of the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine, has been condemned by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and other progressive organizations.

Ukrainian authorities unleash witch hunt

The Ukrainian authorities, being in a state of shock and fearing for their fate, organized a widespread witch hunt. Every day in the territories controlled by Kiev, there are detentions, abductions and torture of political activists and civilians who disagree with the policies of the central government.

Ukrainian secret service and neo-nazis abduct left-wing activist in Dnipro

Around noon on March 3, five persons forced their way into the apartment of 31-year-old hotel clerk Alexander Matyushenko and his partner Maria M. in Dnipro (Dnipropetrovsk). Matyushenko is an anti-fascist and a member of Livitsya (Left), an alliance founded by activists from various social movements in Dnipro two years ago.

Ukrainian leftist criticizes Western war drive with Russia: U.S. is using Ukraine as ‘cannon fodder’

Yuliy Dubovyk: I am a Ukrainian-American. I grew up and spent over half of my life in Ukraine, although now I live in the United States. I wanted to explain my thoughts on the ongoing crisis with Russia, because mainstream corporate media outlets don’t ever share perspectives like mine.

The Ukrainians that aren’t mentioned

The corporate media claim that all Ukrainians support President Zelensky, who has banned most political parties except his own and the far-right. These news outlets also whitewash the fascist gangs―integrated into the Ukrainian army―that engage in torture.

Blackwater is in the Donbass with the Azov Battalion

Understanding Ukrainian Nazism

Pentagon + NATO = war

NATO military expansion to target Russia and China, says top official

NATO formally launched a 40,000-strong rapid response force targeting Russia in February. This was in addition to the 175,000 NATO troops already on Russia’s border. NATO has expanded from 16 countries to 30. NATO expansion technically means that the member-nation’s armed forces are “integrated” into the NATO military command. NATO takes command, with the U.S. dominating. No NATO member-state can act without U.S. approval.

Graphic: 31-year history of NATO absorbing, arming Ukraine

Ukraine: NATO launched its attack eight years ago

A short history of NATO eastward expansion and the current tensions in Europe

NATO expansionism in Europe

The danger of a world ruled by NATO: Interview with Ángeles Maestro

NATO is not a defensive international organization but was founded to threaten the USSR

U.S./NATO real culprits in Ukraine crisis

War propaganda

Who’s the war criminal?

Refuting lies about “Bucha atrocities” by Russian military

A century of lies for war, about Russia

The vast international network in charge of Ukrainian war propaganda

Fact sheet

No to U.S./NATO war: Here are the facts!

Expongamos las mentiras

Statements

John Parker (Socialist Unity Party/Partido de Socialismo Unido): Stop NATO! No war on Russia and Donbass

John Parker (Socialist Unity Party/Partido de Socialismo Unido): ‘We must remain on the correct side of history’

Ukraine, war crimes and white power: The Black Alliance for Peace calls for the dismantling of NATO, AFRICOM and all imperialist structures

Lenin and imperialism

Is Russia imperialist?

For socialists, the fundamental understanding of imperialism goes back to World War I and is found in the pamphlet written by V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”

Lenin: How to oppose an unjust war

The Leninist view of how to fight against imperialist war remains one of the most controversial and defining characteristics of the communist movement, because it means standing up to the capitalist class at the moment its fangs are bared.

Ukraine and the Bolshevik Revolution

Gay communist on Russia, fascism and USSR’s legacy

War economy

Washington’s economic war on Russia (and Germany)

The U.S./NATO proxy war isn’t about Ukraine. The U.S. aims to sever the deepening economic integration between the EU (particularly Germany) and Russia, restoring U.S. dominance over Europe.

Biden gives Big Oil a win, gas prices going up

U.S. spends billions on war in Ukraine and working class pays the price

Who benefits from the crisis in Ukraine?

Ukraine ‘aid’: Congress pays off military-industrial capitalists

Struggle ★ La Lucha articles on the U.S./NATO war.

As the U.S. and its NATO satellites flood weapons into Ukraine, NATO is being “transformed” into a fighting force capable of direct wars on Russia and China, says NATO General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.

NATO formally launched a 40,000-strong rapid response force targeting Russia in February. This was in addition to the 175,000 NATO troops already on Russia’s border. 

Also to be noted is President Joe Biden’s shift away from the “no first use” of nuclear weapons, with the Pentagon announcing March 29 that the U.S. would consider first use of nuclear weapons.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Stoltenberg said NATO is in the process of making a “fundamental” shift from engaging in what he called “tripwire deterrence” to “be transformed into a major force capable of” direct warfare.

Stoltenberg made clear that China is as much a target as Russia. “We are finalizing the work on the new strategic concept that will be agreed at the NATO summit in June. … And there, I expect China to be an important part.”

Stoltenberg adds: “It is also of concern that we see that Russia and China are working more and more closely together.”

Since 2014, Stoltenberg said, “We have implemented the biggest reinforcement of NATO since the end of the Cold War.”

Following the overturn of the Soviet Union, NATO has expanded from 16 countries to 30. NATO expansion technically means that the member-nation’s armed forces are “integrated” into the NATO military command. NATO takes command, with the U.S. dominating. No NATO member-state can act without U.S. approval.

NATO expansion into Eastern Europe

For the last two decades, NATO has been expanding into Eastern Europe. In 1999, NATO took in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia were incorporated. In 2009, Albania and Croatia. In 2017, Montenegro. In 2020, North Macedonia.

Finland and Sweden are reported to be “within weeks” of deciding to join NATO.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is expanding its proxy war in Ukraine, as Leon Panetta, who was CIA director and then secretary of defense in the Barack Obama administration, so clearly put it. The United States and its NATO military operation is in a proxy war against Russia, with Ukraine as the battlefield. The U.S. role, Panetta said, is to provide more and more weapons faster and faster with Ukraine doing the fighting, bolstered by foreign mercenaries.

It’s a matter of military fact that in the Ukrainian proxy war, more military-technical assistance has been dispatched by the U.S. and its NATO satellites, in a larger amount and in a shorter time, than in any previous military conflict in history.

Stop arming Ukraine

“Russia warns U.S. to stop arming Ukraine,” the Washington Post reported April 14.

The Post says: “Russia this week sent a formal diplomatic note to the United States warning that U.S. and NATO shipments of the ‘most sensitive’ weapons systems to Ukraine were ‘adding fuel’ to the conflict there and could bring ‘unpredictable consequences.’”

The diplomatic note, titled “On Russia’s concerns in the context of massive supplies of weapons and military equipment to the Kiev regime,” was forwarded to the State Department by the Russian Embassy in Washington. In it, Russia accuses NATO of trying to “pressure Ukraine to abandon peace negotiations with Russia in order to continue the bloodshed.”

The U.S. has sent more than $2.6 billion worth of arms and other military aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its military action in February. The Pentagon explained, “The United States has now committed more than $3.2 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration.”

NATO’s military budget accounts for the majority of military spending worldwide. NATO military spending in 2021 was $1.2 trillion ($1,200,000,000,000), up 24.9% since 2014.

U.S. commands NATO

As noted by the Pentagon, NATO is the primary force for U.S. dominance and control in Europe.

All NATO countries are under the effective military domination of the United States. While the governments of the imperialist countries in NATO are not puppet governments, they are unable to take major decisions involving peace and war without the approval of the government of the United States. The civilian governments of the NATO countries lack full control over their own armed forces.

NATO was founded as a U.S.-led military alliance against the Soviet Union and the socialist countries in Eastern Europe. But it was more than that. After World War II, the United States was determined to bring all the imperialist countries under its military control — first the defeated Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy and then increasingly its “victorious allies,” Britain and France, through the NATO alliance.

At the end of the Cold War, the newly capitalist oppressed countries of Eastern Europe were signed up as formal NATO members. NATO has been in the process of unofficially taking in Ukraine — minus Crimea and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, socialist industry was dismantled in Ukraine. Once the second-largest economy in the USSR, “independent” Ukraine is now the poorest country in Europe.

In 2013, the European Union demanded that Kiev impose Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) controls, neoliberal structural adjustments, over all aspects of state spending and operations as the conditions required for membership in the European Union. Even more government assets were to be sold off. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych rejected this for a more favorable offer from Russia.

The Euromaidan coup quickly followed in 2014, openly supported and financed by NATO, to put in a government that bowed to the IMF demands and made NATO membership a policy mandate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly talked of Ukraine’s entrance into NATO. On Feb. 19, Zelensky demanded, once again, entry to NATO, saying, “Eight years ago, Ukrainians made their choice [the Euromaidan coup].”

The resistance to the Euromaidan coup and to NATO in Ukraine has been bigger and more widespread than reported in the U.S. corporate-controlled media. The resistance has been strongest in the eastern part of Ukraine, particularly the Donbass region. The autonomous Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic were created when the people there voted overwhelmingly (89% and 96%) against a NATO-controlled regime and to secede from the Kiev regime.

In Crimea a 2014 referendum rejected the Euromaidan coup. The result was a 97% vote in favor of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea seceding, with an 83% voter turnout.

This is exercising the right of self-determination. A NATO takeover of Ukraine is the opposite.

 

 

Global Times
April 18, 2022