Presentation by Struggle-La Lucha co-editor Greg Butterfield on behalf of the Socialist Unity Party at the international online forum “Marxists Speak Out on the Conflict Between Russia and Imperialism” on March 26. The event featured representatives of communist and socialist organizations based in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Greece, South Korea, Turkey, the U.S. and more.

I want to thank the organizers for inviting us to participate in this important event. 

There are turning points in history where the principles of organizations and individuals are tested and clarified. This is one of those moments. In the past month we have seen so many anti-war and left formations bow to the intense pressure of imperialist propaganda at the expense of anti-imperialism and the interests of the workers and oppressed.

The other side is that the war crisis is separating the wheat from the chaff. Leaders and organizations that have coasted through recent years on past accomplishments are now forced to show where they really stand. At the same time, groups separated by historical differences and secondary issues may now find a new basis to work together and learn from each other.

The Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha newspaper call for the victory of the Donbass republics and Russia in their defensive joint military operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine. What this really means is: to end the eight-year genocidal war against the people of Donbass; to remove the neo-Nazi bootheel from the neck of the Ukrainian people; to reverse Ukraine’s transformation into a NATO war base that poses a threat to Russia; and return it to the formally neutral status before the U.S.-backed coup of 2014.

We call for the defeat of U.S. imperialism, which instigated this war and is a combatant as surely as it is in Yemen or anywhere else Washington’s proxy wars are carried out. After this week’s NATO summit, the imperialists are moving closer to direct intervention, which could precipitate an unprecedented global war.

We believe it is very important to elevate the struggle of the people of the Donbass region, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Too often their struggle is ignored by the left or, following the lead of the corporate media, written off merely as “Russian separatists” or “Putin’s proxies.” Such a view can only be argued by people who are completely ignorant of the Donbass and the anti-fascist struggle of the people there for the last eight years, or by those who know better but are adapting their views to the needs of imperialism. 

The people of Donbass have resisted through eight years of constant terror by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and neo-Nazi battalions, and a blockade that has deprived the people of food, medicine and the essentials needed for the maintenance of basic industry. This resistance draws upon the deep traditions of internationalism and anti-fascism of the Soviet people and it found an echo among people in Russia. 

Marxist view of Russia’s contradictions

Revolutionary Marxists look below the surface to understand the class forces and contradictions at work. Those who focus on President Vladimir Putin’s and Russian capitalists’ reactionary ideology ignore the dialectical relationship between Russia’s struggle to maintain its sovereignty against the U.S. and NATO, and the anti-fascist struggle in Donbass and Ukraine. 

The same dynamic exists on a global scale. Looking at it purely on the surface level of Putin’s domestic pronouncements, you could come to the conclusion that there’s little difference from Bolsanro in Brazil or Modi in India, whose ruling classes are fundamentally subservient to the U.S. But the life-and-death struggle of Russia to not be dissected and swallowed by Western imperialism has pushed it into the camp of countries and movements resisting U.S. imperialism, including Venezuela, Cuba, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

With our modest forces and resources, we are doing what we can to clarify the issues and bring a genuine anti-war position to the working class. We have launched a campaign called “Stop the War Lies,” aimed at exposing the U.S.-NATO role in Ukraine and imperialism’s cozy relationship with Ukrainian fascists, educating about the cause of Donbass, and explaining how Wall Street, Big Oil and the military industry profit from the war at the expense of people here.

We and allied groups have been getting out into communities with fact sheets, holding picket lines and speak-outs. Last night, our comrades in Baltimore held a rush hour banner drop and leafleting action. Today folks in New Orleans and San Diego are doing community outreach. Next weekend, on April 2, we are building protests in New York and Los Angeles. 

On March 27, we will hold a webinar featuring speakers from the Donbass republics, to help inform the anti-war movement and the left about the reality of the U.S.-Ukraine war. 

We invite the organizations here to join this effort. We are open to collaborating with groups here in the U.S. and internationally. This is the moment to overcome secondary differences and build a united front against imperialism and war that can lay the foundation for future revolutionary struggles.

Victory to the Donbass republics and their allies! U.S.-NATO out of Ukraine!

29 March 2022
Translated by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.

Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine began on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated an image of a small brave army facing the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukraine’s military mettle, Kyiv has produced a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring up public and official support from Western countries.

The campaign includes language guides, key messages and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist images and even praise neo-Nazi leaders.

Behind Ukraine’s public relations efforts is an army of foreign policy strategists, Washington, D.C., lobbyists and a network of intelligence-linked news outlets.

Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post: “They are really excellent at strategic communication: media, information operations and also psychological operations.” The Post finally admitted that “Western authorities say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv publishes about the evolving situation on the battlefield, including casualty figures on both sides, it nonetheless represents a strategy very effective communication.

The key to the propaganda work is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to wage an information war.

According to industry news site PRWeek, the initiative was launched by an anonymous figure who allegedly founded a public relations firm based in Ukraine.

“From the first moment of the war, we decided to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them distribute the official sources to show the truth,” the unnamed character told PRWeek. “This is a hybrid war: the mixture of bloody fighting with a huge campaign of disinformation and falsification led by Russia [sic].”

According to the anonymous, more than 150 public relations companies have joined the propaganda blitz (bombing).

The international initiative is spearheaded by the co-founder of the public relations company PR Network, Nicky Regazzoni, and Francis Ingham, a leading public relations consultant with close ties to the UK government. Ingham previously worked with the British Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government’s Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is the chief executive of the International Organization for Communication Consulting, and heads the body of communicators affiliated with local governments. of the UK, LG Comms.

“We have had the privilege of helping to coordinate support efforts for the Ukrainian government in recent days,” Ingham told PRovoke Media. “The agencies have offered entire teams to support Kyiv in the communication war. Our support for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry is unwavering and will continue as long as necessary.”

With an anonymous Ukrainian figure joining two major PR figures in the Kyiv government’s propaganda blitz, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry distributed an (archived) dossier of materials instructing PR agencies on “key messages,” language approved, the content of discredited propaganda constructs, far-right and neo-Nazi propaganda.

The portfolio is managed by Yaroslav Turbil, described on his LinkedIn page as “Director of Ukraine.ua, Ukraine’s digital ecosystem for global communications. Strategic communication and promotion of the country brand. Turbil has worked in multiple “civil society” organizations closely linked to the US government and was an intern at Internews, an organization linked to US intelligence that operates under the guise of promoting press freedom.

Among the propaganda constructs distributed in the dossier is a video of the Snake Island incident, which was quickly proven to be false, in which it was reported that border guards stationed on a small island had been killed after telling a ship Russian warfighter “F***se” as he approached and asked them to surrender. President Zelensky held a press conference announcing that he would award the men the Hero of Ukraine medal as the story spread through the mainstream media. However, the supposedly dead soldiers quickly turned up alive and well, proving their heroic stance to be a farce.

Although the story was proven false, the dossier contains a propaganda video promoting it.

Another folder in the dossier is by Ukrainian graphic artist Dasha Podoltseva, with an MFA, and contains hundreds of propaganda graphics submitted by artists in Europe and the United States.

Some contain generic “no war” messages, while dozens of other images celebrate the “Ghost of kyiv,” a heroic Ukrainian pilot who turned out to be non-existent, and the fake “Snake Island 13” incident.

Many use xenophobic and racist language, and others are explicit in their praise of prominent Ukrainian neo-Nazi figures, including C14 leader Yevhen Karas, the fascist Right Sector paramilitary, and the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Several images call for “flag shakes”, a reference to the Molotov cocktails named after the late commander of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Stepán Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany in the mass slaughter of ethnic Jews and Poles during World War II. . Another image shows a book titled Encyclopedia of Incurable Diseases, mentioning Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea.

It says: “Ritual services.”

It says: “Flag shake for Putin’s friends.”

Foreign extremists flock to Ukraine

The dossier also contains a link to a Foreign Ministry page called “Fight for Ukraine,” which provides instructions to foreigners who want to join Ukraine’s neo-Nazi-infested armed forces, dubbed the “Ukrainian International Defense Legion.”

Following Zelensky’s call for foreign fighters to form a brigade, fighters from around the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, among others, have traveled to confront Russian forces. . Others with no combat training or experience have come for “war tourism,” referred to by one British soldier as “bullet hunters.”

Recruitment charts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine extracted from the dossier.

Recruitment graph of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine extracted from the dossier.

While the Ukrainian government says tens of thousands have responded to the call, some analysts have cast doubt on those numbers, calling them a “public relations exercise.”

However, foreigners who have traveled to Ukraine have found a much more serious reality than anticipated.

The Russian air force bombs military installations are adjacent to where foreign fighters sleep. Having fled to neighboring Poland, a Spanish fighter described the bombardment as a “message” that may have killed thousands.

Similarly, an American fighter who hid in an ambulance to escape from the front line warned that Ukrainian authorities were killing foreigners who chose not to fight, calling it a trap.

Correct terms

A document within the dossier defines the accepted language on the conflict with Russia determined by the Ukrainian government.

“Such Russian clichés as ‘Crimean referendum’ or ‘the will of the Crimean people’ are absolutely unacceptable,” the document states, referring to the overwhelmingly successful 2014 referendum to secede from Ukraine.

The document considers unacceptable the terms “civil war in Donbas”, “internal conflict”, “conflict in Ukraine” and “Ukrainian crisis” to describe the war of the Ukrainian army with the secessionist republics of the Donbas region. This is despite the fact that the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 14,200 people, including 3,404 civilians, have been killed in combat in Ukraine since 2014.

Instead of these phrases, the document asks to use the terms “armed aggression of the Russian Federation in Donbas, international armed conflict, Russian war against Ukraine, Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict”.

Key messages

Another document titled “Key Messages” contains specific propaganda claims that were widely reported in the mainstream Western media, but have since been debunked. One section states that “The whole of Europe was on the verge of nuclear disaster, when Russian troops began to bomb the largest nuclear plant in Zaporizhia.”

However, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said that the building hit by a Russian “projectile” at the Zaporizhia plant “was not part of the reactor” but was a training center. Russian troops also let Ukrainian workers continue to operate the plant.

Another section thanks Turkey for the decision to “block the access of Russian warships to the Black Sea.”

However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan closed the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to all military vessels, preventing NATO and Russian ships from accessing the Black Sea.

Among the document’s key messages is a statement of appreciation for the “anti-war demonstrations held by citizens of many nations throughout the world who show strong support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia.”

He is referring to large pro-Ukrainian demonstrations in Europe that have exposed calls for no-fly zones over Ukraine and shooting down Russian military aircraft, potentially transforming the conflict into a global war between nuclear powers.

“Despite Russia’s propaganda, there is no discrimination based on race or nationality, even when it comes to crossing the state border by foreign citizens,” the document states.

However, numerous videos and news reports have documented the Ukrainian authorities preventing Africans from escaping the conflict. Even the New York Times, hardly a bastion of Kremlin propaganda, ran a report documenting these racist practices.

One message says that “on March 16, Russian forces dropped a bomb on a theater where 1,300 civilians were sheltered. The number of victims is still unknown.”

But, as Max Blumenthal denounced, the explosion appears to be the result of a false flag operation engineered by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion that sought to trigger a NATO intervention.

NATO-backed troll farms

Another anonymous investigation shows how Ukrainian PR firms have used ads to astroturf Russian internet and social media with messages calling to economically isolate Moscow and “stop the war.”

This work is led by Bezlepkin Evgeny Vitalievich, who uses the alias Evgeny Korolev, together with Pavel Antonov from the Targetorium organization. Under the pseudonym of him Korolev, the Ukrainian information warrior wrote a post on his (now private) Facebook page boasting that his company’s Facebook ads reached 30 million views in three days.

At the same time, Facebook has blocked efforts by Russian state media channels to run ads and monetize their content. Several fake media accounts like Russia 24 have sprung up, burying the real accounts under a series of imposters. Facebook has also called statements by Russian officials, including the Defense Ministry, “false.”

This campaign has been denounced as being carried out under the recommendation of StopFake, a self-described “fact-checking” outlet that is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Atlantic Council, government ministries. UK and Czech Foreign Ministry and the International Renaissance Foundation, which is funded by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

StopFake was hired by Facebook in March 2020 to “stop the flow of Russian propaganda” but was founded to employ multiple characters closely linked to violent neo-Nazis. The journalist who co-wrote his exposé received death threats and eventually fled Ukraine.

These revelations have apparently not prevented Facebook from weaning itself from the organization’s censorship guidance.

Meanwhile, Russian hackers located a public Google document (since private, uploaded here) detailing the propaganda operation, which has been distributed on Telegram “creative farms” channels.

“Here you can find links to Ukrainian media outlets that need promotion, bot accounts with logins and passwords from which they sent users anti-war messages and messages with fakes about the Ministry of Defense, theses, and specific instructions on which posts and audiences embroider”, reads the investigation.

Another campaign is run by Nataliya Popovych, the founder of the One Philosophy public relations agency, in kyiv. Popovych’s LinkedIn profile shows that she has worked with the US State Department and was an adviser to former President Petro Poroshenko. She is also a co-founder and board member of the Ukraine Media Crisis Center, a propaganda arm funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the NED, the US Embassy and NATO. among many others.

A Campaign Asia article describes several public relations firms involved in the work. Among them is Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR. Edelman is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Council and the World Economic Forum (or Davos Forum).

“Geopolitics has become the new test of trust. We saw it with the allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the war between Ukraine and Russia has only reinforced it,” he said, linking the US propaganda campaign around China’s campaign for the deradicalization of Uyghur Muslims. .

Public relations approved media

An article in PRWeek describes several personalities involved in what they describe as a “public relations army” that is “fighting on the frontlines” against Russia’s “savage genocide of Ukrainians.”

“Propaganda is the same as actual lethal weapons,” says Marta Dzhumaha, a public relations manager at the BetterMe healthcare company.

Julia Petryk, head of public relations for MacPaw, offers a list of approved outlets, written by her colleague Tetiana Bronistka, a former employee of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office. The list includes Russian and English language sources, as well as Telegram channels. However, these “verified sources objectively covering what is happening in Ukraine” are anything but independent. Most of them are connected to the US government, European governments and billionaire foundations.

She also lists several Russian-language websites:

• Novaya Gazeta: Linked to and reportedly funded by the NED.
• Meduza: Funded by Latvia, the OAK Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorovsky, and Sweden.
• Dozhd: the SREDA foundation, the European Commission.
• Holod Media: Meduza affiliate and lauded on PBS and CNN as “independent media.”
• He argued that Leningrad should have been handed over to the Nazis in World War II and has complained that they are called “fifth columns” because they were financed by Western powers.
• BBC Russia: British government outlet.
• Current Time TV: Created by the CIA-funded propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in collaboration with Voice of America.
• Censor: Financed by its editor-in-chief Yuri Butusov, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
• 200RF – A Ukrainian Foreign Ministry website that claims to publish photos and documents released from Russian soldiers captured and killed in action.

Among the Telegram channels included:

• Radio Svoboda: propaganda organ founded by the CIA Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
• Espresso TV – Largely owned by the wife of former Ukrainian parliament member Mykola Knyazhytsky.
• Censor.net: Formerly the largest media site in Ukraine, whose motto is “Bring down Russia” and whose owner runs an “international troll parade”.

Intelligence operations

While PR firms distribute content, CIA cutouts and billionaire foundations run the media outlets from which they are derived. At the center of this operation is a project called Russian Language News Exchange which was a product of a network of opposition media outlets founded in 2016 operating in post-Soviet countries, as revealed by an investigation by the Russian media agency RIA FAN.

In July 2021, a group of journalists flew to Warsaw for media training after being exempted from coronavirus-related restrictions and quarantine orders by Poland’s top medical authorities.

Among the six journalists were Andrey Lipsky, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Novaya Gazeta, and Yuliia Fediv, CEO of Hromadske TV Media, one of the most-watched networks in Ukraine.

Hromadske’s financial reports show that it is funded by numerous governments and foundations, including the US Embassy in Ukraine, the Danish Foreign Ministry, the Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency, the European Fund for Democracy, and Free Press Unlimited. . Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidary was also involved in the creation of the medium.

Hromadske recently featured a commentator calling for the genocide of ethnic Russians in the Donbass, saying it was populated by 1.5 million “superfluous” people who “must be exterminated.”

The training, held behind closed doors from July 19-21, was titled “Media Network 2021+” and was closely linked to Mediaset, also known as the Russian Language News Exchange, a network founded in 2015. The Russian Language News website Exchange is miserable, with little information available on its activities, apparently carried out in private since the publication of the RIA FAN investigation.

While claiming to be independent, Russian Language News Exchange is a project of Free Press Unlimited, funded by the Dutch government and the European Commission.

It currently includes 14 media outlets that act as “nodes”, republishing each other’s articles on their platforms in various countries.

The website’s introductory video is hosted by Maxim Eristavi, a former Radio Free Europe reporter and founder of Hromadske. He today directs the Millennium Leadership Program at the NATO think tank and is supported by the arms industry, the Atlantic Council.

Since its creation, Mediaset has coordinated between media outlets in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine. In March 2021, Mediaset expanded with the Colab Media Project, created through Free Press Unlimited’s Viable Media for Empowered Societies (VIMES) program. This program created a training program for journalists and sought articles from the Salvadoran outlet El Faro published in Euroradio (Belarus), Coda (Georgia) and Ziarul de Garda (Moldova).

On March 4, several days after Russia launched its military offensive, a new project called Media Lifeline Ukraine was created.

The next day, Free Press Unlimited held an emergency conference for Ukraine hosted by co-founders Maxim Eristavi and Nataliya Gumenyuk. The meeting asked to raise 2 million euros for the project. “Only with continued external support, local media entities will be able to continue doing their job,” states its introductory page.

Days later, Free Press Unlimited announced a partnership to support a new joint project by Reporters Without Borders and its Ukrainian partner, the Institute for Mass Information, called The Lviv Press Freedom Center. ). The Institute for Mass Information is headed by USAID Communications Officer Oksana Romaniuk and funded by USAID and the UK government.

Washington, D.C., lobbyists distract attention

While public relations firms and intelligence-related propaganda operations target society, Washington DC lobbyists are agitating in Congress to prolong the war in Ukraine.

Daniel Vajdich, a registered foreign agent and lobbyist for the Ukrainian Federation of Oil and Gas Industry Entrepreneurs, the largest in Ukraine, is working on behalf of Volodymyr Zelensky to lobby members of Congress to approve sending more weapons to Ukraine. He is now the director of Yorktown Solutions, previously advised the Ted Cruz and Scott Walker campaigns, and is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“Stingers, Javelins [U.S.-made missiles], and we solve the issue of fighter jets,” he told Politico, alleging that Russia is trying to carry out “genocide” and “depopulate certain areas of Ukraine.”

Vajdich also wrote Zelensky’s March 16 speech to the US Congress, in which he quoted Martin Luther King Jr.’s expression “I Have a Dream” to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Ukrainian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya’s February 23 speech at the UN General Assembly was written by the general director of the capital’s lobbying company SKDKnickerbocker, Stephen Krupin, a prominent former speechwriter of the President Barack Obama who worked hard on the 2020 Biden campaign.

Foremost among registered lobbyists promoting Ukrainian government and business interests is Andrew Mac, who also helped write Zelensky’s speech to Congress. Mac registered as a lobbyist for Zelensky in 2019 and runs the Washington DC office of the Ukrainian law firm Asters Law.

The lobbying firm Your Global Strategy, founded by Shai Franklin, which has been affiliated with numerous Zionist organizations including the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League, is also using its influence with local officials in the United States. Franklin has arranged meetings between Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov and US mayors, including Eric Adams in New York, Michelle Wu in Boston and Lori Lightfoot in Chicago. She is also trying to organize a meeting between US officials and the mayors of Odessa and Kyiv. A media outlet owned by the wife of the mayor of kyiv recently linked a presenter calling for genocide against Russians, starting with children.

Franklin said he is working with the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help organize virtual meetings between the mayors of Odessa and Kyiv and their American counterparts.

Maryland-based attorney Lukas Jan Kaczmarek is also working on behalf of the Ukrainian Defense Minister to increase US arms shipments, specifically trying to arrange arms shipments from Cocoa, Florida-based Kel-Tec CNC Industries to the city of Odessa, Ukraine.

Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul described the network of PR professionals and lobbyists surrounding Zelensky. “These are people who surround Mr. Zelensky, who are like intermediaries and interlocutors. They have been interacting with American elites and media for a long time,” he said.

McFaul and John E. Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine and director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, act as informal advisers to Zelensky. McFaul told Politico that he speaks with Ukrainian government officials “probably every day” and that he “has helped them establish contacts with producers on NBC or MSNBC.”

McFaul recently told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that “Hitler did not kill German-speaking people,” facing accusations of being a Holocaust denier.

Zelensky also had a “strategic video call” with McFaul before speaking to House Democrats.

With a powerful Russian army fighting alongside forces from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, defeat for the Ukrainian military appears imminent unless the US and NATO confront Russian forces directly, a scenario President Biden has already ruled out. . Still, lobbyists persist in their campaign to portray the Ukrainian military as helpless, dealing blow after blow against the Russian hordes. By doing so, they help prolong the war and continue the carnage.

Graphic calling Tsar Nicholas, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin incarnations of the same “Moskovian Mental Dragon”

“The Encyclopedia of Incurable Diseases”: Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea

It says: “Democracy is a weapon”

“I love NLAW” – Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapon, provided by Western governments to the Ukrainian military.

(Taken from Mission Verdad)

Source: CubaDebate 

 

The largest national defense budget in the world just got larger. Earlier this month, the United States Congress passed $728.5 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Defense for the 2022 fiscal year, a sharp 5% increase from the previous year. The budget contains a plan for $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine for the Russia–Ukraine war.

On March 16, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the U.S. Congress, invoking everything from the September 11th attacks to Martin Luther King to plead for more U.S. military intervention. Following the address, President Biden announced an additional $800 million in Ukraine aid to come from the new defense budget.

Ukraine aid has received widespread bipartisan support among U.S. legislators in a Congress that is incapable of uniting around any domestic policy in a similar way. The House of Representatives passed the defense budget with a vote of 361-69, and the Senate passed the bill with a vote of 68-31. This decision comes from a Congress that is split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats, with Republicans in lockstep blocking Biden’s domestic relief and civil rights bills. Infamously, conservative Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have played the role of the swing vote between the two parties, decidedly shooting down virtually all of Biden’s key progressive legislation.

“They got money for war, but can’t feed the poor”

Out of the $13.6 billion allocated for Ukraine aid, about half will go to replenishing the stocks of military supplies that the U.S. has already sent to Ukraine. The United States has been sending billions in military aid to Ukraine since the 2014 Euromaidan coup, taking the form of weapons, training, and intelligence. Some of those military resources have very possibly been used to attack the people of the Donbass region, even before the Russian military action.

$3.1 billion will cover “deployment, operational, and intelligence costs” for U.S. troops deployed to Europe. The United States now has around 12,000 troops deployed to bolster Ukraine’s borders. The U.S. president is considering the option of permanently maintaining this increase in troops, further militarizing Europe, which is already home to at least 60,000 U.S. troops and hundreds of U.S. military bases.

The bill also provides $300 million of funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, to help train and equip the military of Ukraine, and $650 million for military support. Those seeking desperately-needed funding for nationwide social programs will be jealous to hear that the Army won about $300 million more for tank and armored vehicle upgrades and $500 million more for aircraft than they had requested.

Biden also recently announced that $800 million more of this new defense budget will go towards Ukraine aid, specifically for weapons. Before this, Biden had authorized a $350 million package that was already the “largest single authorized transfer of arms from U.S. military warehouses to another country.”  Some Congress members want to go further, such as Senator Jim Risch, who said, “I want to see more Javelins…I want to see more Stingers.”

Meanwhile, for the people of the U.S., the coveted social programs of the past year, particularly the massive relief package Build Back Better, were shot down by conservatives of both parties on grounds of “high costs”.

Notably, Risch, a Republican, said in a statement: “Senators had two choices: this $550 billion package with no tax increases, or allow Democrats to pass the Biden proposal of $2.5 trillion, raise taxes, and pile it on top of their impending $3.5 trillion social spending spree. On behalf of Idaho, I chose to support the lower $550 billion investment in hard infrastructure like roads, bridges, and broadband. I believe it to be the substantially more reasonable and conservative solution to the necessary infrastructure spending. I intend to vigorously oppose Democrats’ reckless $3.5 trillion social spending bill, which is coming next.”

There were many similar arguments against Build Back Better. Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat whose vote became instrumental in the downfall of the plan last year, claimed that he could not support a bill of over $1.5 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that if the programs outlined within Build Back Better were to run for ten years, the cost would add up to $3 trillion dollars. The legislation package itself does not include such extensions in its provisions. Even so, with the ten year estimate, the cost breakdown could be up to $300 billion per year—far less than the current defense budget, which was passed quietly and uncontroversially.

Meanwhile, a national battle was played out among members of Congress and the media about the costs of Build Back Better. But is domestic relief just as controversial among the people of the U.S., who Build Back Better stands to benefit? Decidedly, no: The much needed relief plan for working people, elders, disabled people, families, and children remained consistently popular, even among Manchin’s own constituents.

Build Back Better has been abandoned since the effort to pass the legislation through the Senate failed when Joe Manchin effectively killed the bill last December. Now, with a nation that has already sunk billions into aid for Ukraine, people in the U.S. and around the world are suffering. Gas prices are higher than they’ve ever been in the United States and globally. It is the millions of working people who need to commute to work or rely on affordable access to food and other goods who suffer, while rich celebrities like Steven Colbert and George Takei encourage workers to consider high costs “a patriotic donation”. A headline from Bloomberg on March 13 reads “Inflation Stings Most If You Earn Less Than $300K. [the vast majority in the U.S.] Here’s How to Deal”, urging people in the U.S., who struggle with basic access to food, to skip out on purchasing a pet or a second car. There is thus far no proposed legislation to provide aid to workers who are struggling under the twin burdens of gas prices and inflation in the wake of this war.

—

Clearly the massive defense spending is not “trickling down” to benefit the people of the U.S.. Who does the $728 billion actually benefit? One answer would be the booming U.S. defense industry. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have seen stock prices skyrocket since the war began. Defense industry lobbyists are powerful in Washington, spending billions to make sure that their influence reaches those in power. The lobbying works—the U.S. military budget is larger than the next nine other defense budgets combined of China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea.

Yet it appears that upwards of $700 billion is not enough for some members of Congress. Forty Republican Congress members have urged Biden to increase defense spending even more, writing, “The security of the free world depends on a credible American military”. Bloomberg recently reported that the White House has plans to increase national security spending to a mind-blowing $813.3 billion for the next fiscal year.

What exactly is the “free world” that politicians claim depends on the U.S. military? The people of the U.S. continue to struggle with food insecurity and lack proper medical care, calling the “freedom” of U.S. society into question.

Source: Peoples Dispatch

Exactly 23 years ago, NATO countries, without UN Security Council authorization, ordered their troops to bomb the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as part of an offensive operation named Allied Force, under the pretext of a supposed humanitarian intervention to “prevent genocide” of Kosovar Albanians.

The air strikes lasted 78 days, beginning on March 24 and ending on June 10, 1999. During that time, more than 1,000 aircraft were used to drop more than 3,000 cruise missiles and about 80,000 tons of bombs on the territory of the Balkan country (which at that time consisted of Serbia and Montenegro). The number of dead, most of them civilians, ranges between 2,500 and 3,500 people. 89 were children, which means that, on average, NATO killed one child every day during the bombing. Some 10,000 people were seriously wounded. Most of the victims were Serbs.

Both military and civilian installations were hit. Hospitals, bridges, oil refineries, power plants, political party headquarters, railways, schools and even the Chinese embassy in Belgrade were bombed.

In total, NATO’s military intervention resulted in the destruction of 25,000 residential buildings, 450 kilometers of roads, almost 600 kilometers of railroads, nearly 40 bridges, 100 schools and kindergartens, 30 hospitals and 14 airfields. The material damage is quantified at about 100 billion dollars.

NATO’s cynicism is such that it decided to hold an emergency summit on the anniversary of the start of the bombings. At the meeting, Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky and US President Joe Biden will discuss the provision of assistance to Ukraine and the response to Russia’s actions. It should be recalled that, as a senator, Biden was one of the most active supporters of the bombing in 1999.

Ukraine is the sequel to the NATO intervention against Yugoslavia.

The West pretends to have forgotten the Serbian case in order to turn against President Putin and accuse him of provoking the first military conflict on the borders of Europe after World War II. In addition to omitting the 1999 bombing, it is trying to erase the links it has with the current events in Ukraine.

Speaking to RT, celebrated Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica underscored the continuity between the two events, arguing that the latter is a sequel to the former in that they are conflicts driven by the Atlanticist side with U.S. imperial interest as its prerogative.

“This war did not come out of nowhere. This is a continuation of something sown long before,” the director said. “You can see the continuity of Russophobia in the West, which rejected Russia’s offer of partnership after the Cold War,” he added.

Kusturica explained that, as an excuse for war, international law was transformed into “humanitarian law” and later became a doctrine called Responsibility To Protect (R2P).

On the other hand, he pointed out that the triumph of NATO’s military intervention was followed by the implementation of the first models of color revolution that led to the overthrow of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The soft coup strategy was then used in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, Kusturica said.

Moreover, it should be noted that NATO’s objective was the disintegration of the Yugoslav state, which was successful in the end. The same is happening now against Russia, in a regime change approach which the Kremlin took note of and carried out actions to undermine it.

“In a unipolar world, no one is paying a price for [their] moves (…) Now we are faced with deconstructing [Western] power around the world, and I think what matters in the end is what kind of weapons you have,” the director said.

Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was the last resort used after exhausting all diplomatic channels to demand that the West stop further eastward expansion of NATO.

The U.S., U.K. and other NATO members had already built more than 30 military facilities in Ukraine, including Pentagon laboratories for the development of biological weapons. Kiev publicly declared its intention to use its nuclear facilities and military-scientific potential to develop nuclear weapons. It became known that 150,000 Ukrainian military and Nazi battalions were concentrated in the Dombash region. The Zelensky government, with Washington’s backing, was preparing for an all-out offensive against the Dombash through war in March.

In January 2022, Russia warned that it would be forced to take additional measures to protect its security. On February 22, President Putin announced recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. On February 25, the operation of the Russian Armed Forces began.

Moscow is working with modern, high-precision weapons, targeting only facilities of infrastructure and military interest, as a Pentagon source confesses to Newsweek. The goal is not to occupy Ukraine, but to demilitarize and denazify the country and bring to justice all actors responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity against civilians in the eight-year war against the Dombash. At the same time, the Russian operation seeks to achieve Kiev’s neutrality (refusal to join NATO).

Efforts to minimize civilian casualties are sabotaged by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. They install artillery and tanks in residential areas and civilian infrastructure, prohibit citizens from leaving the war zones, abduct them from civilian assistance and work facilities (schools, hospitals, factories, residential buildings) and turn them into human shields. The United States and other European countries assist them with arms supplies and cover up their crimes through information warfare in mass media and social networks.

It was the countries of the West who began to shake up the situation that led to the conflict in Ukraine, just as it happened 23 years ago in the former Yugoslavia, specifically in the present Serbian region, and it is the Anglo-European Atlanticists who have the greatest interest in the war to try, through chaos, to maintain the unipolar world as we knew it until recently.

Source: Mision Verdad, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

In December 2014, a young Russian communist named Andrey Sokolov was visiting the newly formed Donetsk People’s Republic. He went to meet a friend who’d been driven into exile from Ukraine after the U.S.-backed far-right coup d’etat in Kiev earlier that year. 

Sokolov took a wrong turn and wound up at a checkpoint controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He was arrested and “disappeared” for nearly two years in the occupied city of Mariupol. 

Sokolov was held for a long time in a bare cell in a secret prison. He was denied contact with the outside world, given little food, was tortured, and witnessed Ukrainian militants using cutouts of leaders from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics for target practice.

Eventually supporters were able to track Sokolov down with help from locals. As reports seeped out about his case, and those of others “disappeared” by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Sokolov was offered a plea deal, which he accepted, and a court ordered him released with time served. 

Upon his release, though, he was kidnapped by goons in plainclothes and held captive in another location.

Ukraine’s government eventually felt obliged to allow a visit to Mariupol by human-rights investigators from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Sokolov’s captors debated what to do with him. He was probably closer to death at that moment than he had ever been during his ordeal.

Eventually the order came down from above: There was too much attention to Sokolov’s case to dispose of him permanently. Instead he was put in a taxi headed to the Russian border and given bus fare to Moscow. That was in the autumn of 2016 – almost two years after his fateful wrong turn.

Mariupol and the Big Lie

Mariupol has been in the news a lot recently. It’s been a major hotspot in the joint military operation by the Donbass People’s Republics and Russia to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.

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 like Sokolov who had to live under the thumb of the Azov Battalion and Ukrainian security forces.

Now that the Azov nazis are being routed by the Donetsk People’s Militia and Russian Armed Forces, newspapers, TV networks and social media are full of stories claiming “Russian war crimes” in Mariupol.

First there was a story about Russia attacking a maternity hospital. But as Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky said at a UN Security Council meeting, there were no patients in the hospital; it was being used as an Azov base. Local residents had reported that days before.

Then it was the city’s theater that Russia had allegedly attacked, killing many civilians sheltering inside. Photos of the blown-out theater were plastered across screens worldwide. But later, the quisling Mariupol City Council quietly admitted that nobody died. According to Russian and DPR sources, the theater explosion was actually carried out by Azov. (The Grayzone has published an extensive investigation around the theater claims.)

A Turkish mosque in the city was said to have been attacked by Russian troops. But no. “Our mosque remained undamaged,” Ismail Haciogl told Andalou Agency March 12.

More recently, the claim was made about a school being attacked. Many children supposedly dead or wounded as a result. But again, it was a case of Azov using civilian facilities to hide its paramilitaries and storehouses of weapons.

The Biden administration, NATO and the corporate media don’t believe the claims they make, and they don’t really care if they are later exposed as untrue. The impact comes from piling lie upon lie, confident that the original outrage is what will be remembered. So many people “know” it happened, it must be true.

U.S. imperialism is the best student of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ strategy of the “Big Lie.” 

Mariupol belongs to DPR

Mariupol is not part of Ukraine, as the media claim. It’s part of the Donetsk People’s Republic. It’s the DPR’s only major seaport. 

Mariupol’s occupation by Ukraine since mid-2014 has caused enormous harm to the people of Donbass, because it prevents them from being able to move goods through the Sea of Azov. 

More than that: it’s been a seething wound in the republic’s side. The Azov nazis, armed and trained by NATO, have launched many attacks on civilians in free Donetsk from their stronghold. And it posed a constant threat near the border with Russia.

Washington and Kiev stockpiled weapons and troops in Mariupol for the planned Ukrainian invasion of Donbass earlier this year – an invasion cut short only by the defensive military operation by Donetsk, Lugansk and Russia.

Now, block by block, building by building, Mariupol is being liberated at last as DPR and Russian troops advance, driving the Azov rats into a shrinking zone. On March 23, the Donetsk government reported that 70% of residential buildings had been cleared of occupiers. 

For the first month of the armed conflict, Azov held the residents of Mariupol hostage. They repeatedly sabotaged the humanitarian corridors Russian and DPR troops provided for civilians to safely leave the city, even shooting people trying to leave. Only when the assault on the city had begun and the neo-Nazis began to lose ground were people able to begin fleeing in large numbers.

Refugees from Mariupol are being welcomed in areas of the DPR away from the front lines, and in Western Russia. As they leave the city, the armies of liberation provide them with water, food and first aid. Many tell journalists harrowing stories of their ordeal under Azov rule.

Regular Ukrainian soldiers who put down their weapons are also free to evacuate. But first DPR Militia troops check all men leaving the city for tattoos that would mark them as fascist combatants trying to sneak out. 

By the way: When DPR and Russian troops liberated the Mariupol airport, they uncovered an abandoned secret prison run by the Azov Battalion. Perhaps this is where Andrey Sokolov was held.

Donetsk under fire

In contrast, Donetsk, the capital city of the DPR, is a place you don’t hear about much. Its inhabitants are only referred to in the corporate media as “separatists” and “Putin’s proxies.” To Azov and the other Ukrainian nazi groups, they are “roaches” and “cattle” fit only for slaughter.

But the residents of Donetsk are multinational workers. Miners and metalworkers. Teachers and students. Activists and political refugees. Mothers and fathers, grandparents, children. Notice that Joe Biden and Lindsay Graham have no disagreement on this: You shouldn’t know they exist, or care when they are killed.

As the People’s Militia has pushed forward to liberate the occupied portions of their region, like Mariupol, the increasingly desperate Ukrainian troops dug in on the outskirts of Donetsk have been lashing out, deliberately targeting civilians (as they have throughout their eight-year war on Donbass) with increasingly deadly weapons. 

These aren’t fabricated or exaggerated stories like those in Mariupol and other areas of Ukraine, reported by CNN and the New York Times through crocodile tears. These are the lives of working-class people who have been subject to nearly a decade of endless war and blockade, but have stayed strong and resisted the U.S.-orchestrated attacks on them.

On March 14, a Tochka-U missile was fired by Ukrainian forces at downtown Donetsk. There are no military installations in the area; the only purpose was to terrorize the population.

DPR air defense shot down the missile, saving untold lives. Unfortunately, one of the cluster bombs in the missile’s payload survived, and hit the ground on a busy street. At least 20 people were killed, including a child and senior citizens on a bus. Dozens were wounded.

Cluster munitions are banned under international law. Their use is a war crime.

The next day, another missile was launched at Makeyevka on the outskirts of Donetsk – an area that has been pummeled nearly daily for years by Ukrainian artillery. This time, luckily, no one died, but six people were wounded, including two children.

Another attack came March 18 on a shopping area in Donetsk. Four women were killed.

Since then, Ukraine’s military fired Tochka-U missiles on the Proletarskiy and Zelyonyi districts of Makeyevka March 21 and Karla Marksa township in Enakiyevo on March 22.

Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations called out Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo, who repeated unsubstantiated claims about Russia’s conduct but “did not find a single word to say about today’s strike by a Ukrainian Tochka-U missile with a cluster bomb at central Donetsk.”

In 2014, the people of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions voted for independence and their right to live free of a Ukraine dominated by fascists and U.S.-NATO imperialism. They have resisted untold horrors for eight years – horrors which continue today. Their struggle is a righteous one, and they will win. 

On March 16, President Joe Biden called Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. How is this different from the white-supremacist Sen. Lindsey Graham demanding Putin’s assassination?

One week later, Biden ordered flags lowered to half-mast across the United States upon the death of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright has been called an unindicted war criminal. Albright was known as the Butcher of Serbia.

In the former Yugoslavia, the 1998-1999 conflict there is called by some “Madeleine’s War.” Albright, a key member of the Clinton administration, championed the 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia by NATO — which started exactly 23 years ago this month.

Before that in Iraq. Here’s what Albright, then Clinton’s Secretary of State, said in 1996 on the CBS show “60 Minutes” in an interview with Lesley Stahl:

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it”.

The actual figure given by a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report in 1995 was that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the U.S. sanctions. But to war criminal Albright, “the price is worth it.”

Children died because Iraq was forbidden by sanctions to import so-called dual-use items like chlorine, which is used to purify water and treat sewage. As a result typhoid and other water-borne diseases soared.

The notorious interview is known around the world for its defense of mass murder. But you won’t find any mention of it in the New York Times’ obituary of Albright. 

This is the great, liberal New York Times, that claims to include “all the news that’s fit to print.” Nobody should trust its coverage of the war drive against Russia.

The 81 million people who voted against Trump and racism shouldn’t trust Joe Biden, either. Racist Lindsey Graham is trying to stop Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson from becoming the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But when it comes to Russia, Biden and Graham see eye-to-eye.

Why aren’t Kissinger, Cheney & Bush arrested?

If Biden is so concerned about war criminals, why hasn’t he had Henry Kissinger arrested? The former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor committed war crimes on three continents.

Millions more people were killed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam because Kissinger and Nixon refused to sign a peace treaty until 1973. If they had signed the same treaty in 1969 ― as Vietnam asked them to ― 20,000 less GIs would have come home in a box.

Kissinger gave the go ahead for the original 9/11, the bloody overthrow of the elected socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” said Kissinger. “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” 

That’s self-determination according to the U.S. State Department and Wall Street.

“You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger told the dictator Pinochet, who had thousands tortured to death. 

Kissinger also gave a green light for the Indonesian dictator Suharto to invade East Timor. One out of three people in East Timor were killed.

Kissinger wanted to invade Cuba for its military support of the People’s Republic of Angola in defeating the Nazi army of then-apartheid South Africa.

Angola saved thousands of African lives by sending the CIA mercenary Costas Georgiou to the firing squad and thus intimidating other killers for hire.

U.S. and NATO-paid mercenaries have flocked to Ukraine. Alongside fascist gangs like the Azov Battalion, they are propping up Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has banned every political party except his own.

Let’s not forget the war crimes of Dick Cheney and the Bush family. Former Vice President Cheney called the torture of thousands of Muslims to be “enhanced interrogation.” Cheney’s sidekick ― befuddled White House occupant George W. Bush ― presided over a million people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

George’s daddy ― President George H.W. Bush ― invaded Panama. The Pentagon never revealed the number of people killed there.

Earlier as CIA director, Daddy Bush had Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 bombed on Oct. 6, 1976. All 73 people on board were killed; it was a revenge murder for Cuba’s support of African liberation.

Capitalism built on war crimes

War crimes made America “great.” Over a hundred Indigenous nations were invaded.

Massacres started with the Pilgrims and extended beyond Wounded Knee. Keeping the political prisoner-of-war Leonard Peltier in jail for 46 years is a war crime.

The African Holocaust never stopped either. U.S. and world capitalism was built upon it.

Wall Street became the country’s financial center by being the banking house for Southern slave owners. While today New York City has municipal green markets, it once operated a slave market on Wall Street.

By recognizing Belgian King Leopold’s “Congo Free State,” U.S. President Chester Arthur provided political cover for murdering 8-to-15 million Africans for rubber profits. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

Locking up 2.2 million people is a war crime. As a U.S. Senator, Joe Biden pushed through the 1994 “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” that guaranteed imprisoning hundreds of thousands more Black, Indigenous and Latinx people.

Stealing half of Mexico was a war crime. In the so-called Mexican-American War of 1846-48, a slave-holders’ army invaded Mexico, which was an abolitionist nation. General Zachary Taylor’s artillery pounded the city of Matamoros, killing hundreds of civilians. Villages were pillaged and plundered. In the end the U.S. occupied and took all or parts of the current states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. Millions of acres of Mexican land were stolen from the Indigenous Peoples and Mexican farmers who lived there; more than a hundred thousand died. South Carolina’s John Calhoun, speaking in praise of the seizure of Mexican land, declared, “Ours is the government of the white man!”

A rerun of Yugoslavia?

President Biden was directed to call President Putin a war criminal because the Pentagon wants a rerun of the Yugoslavia tragedy.

NATO planes bombed Yugoslavia, the last socialist country in Europe, for 78 days in 1999. Yugoslavia’s elected President Slobodan Milošević was kidnapped and framed on war crimes charges because he resisted NATO.

Milošević died suddenly just as it looked like he could win an appeal. For some observers this was reminiscent of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby dying suddenly after he was granted a new trial.

The Pentagon wants to give President Putin the same treatment or just be assassinated. To the banksters that run the United States, it’s intolerable that the six million square miles of the Russian Federation isn’t occupied by U.S. and NATO troops.

Neither Joe Biden nor the New York Times has ever denounced the deaths of over 14,000 people in the Donbass. This real war crime was committed at the hands of a Ukrainian regime supported by the U.S. and NATO.

The Russian Federation is giving indispensable help to anti-fascists in Ukraine. Don’t be fooled by the capitalist media. Hands off Russia and the Donbass!

 

Some using the “Russia is an imperialist power” line are also weaponizing the fact of homophobia in Russia, as they do when referring to the Stalin period in the Soviet Union. This is one way that they stigmatize opponents as “tankies” and “Stalinists.”

Yes, I’m gay. And yes, I uphold the Soviet Union’s role as the bulwark that supported socialist and liberation movements throughout the world for the majority of the 20th century.

This was true even with a relatively conservative (socially and economically) leadership at the head of the first lasting workers’ state. The Soviet leadership did retreat from the most progressive gender and sexuality advances made in the early days of the revolution, just as they retreated from international revolutionary commitments. 

But when push came to shove, the Soviet Union beat back fascism and especially its most virulent form, Nazism. Fascism was arguably the biggest organized threat to LGBTQ2S people in history, after classical colonialism. And the Soviet Union provided critical support throughout the world to national liberation movements, thereby being essential to the overthrow of direct colonialism almost everywhere.

The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact ensured that there was no war in Europe from the late 1940s until well into the 1990s. The vibrant queer cultures in West Germany, not to mention the German Democratic Republic and elsewhere, were possible in part because war and far-right movements were no longer ravaging the continent.

All of this — the gains made by socialism undermining the basis of various oppressions, including abolishing the root causes of imperialist war; defeating fascism and colonialism — were essential to every aspect of LGBTQ2S liberation, and we are all the beneficiaries.

The main threat in the world today is the U.S. imperialist-led camp. Everywhere they have supported right-wing death squads, Islamists against progressive movements and governments, austerity that hurts and even kills the most vulnerable, including LGBTQ2S people. 

Everything that the U.S. imperialists have supported worldwide has turned the tide against movements for liberation. They’ve bombed the infrastructure of countries into non-existence and allowed for the return of warlordism and slave markets.

The supposedly “good” countries of Eastern Europe (i.e., not Belarus) are a playground for neo-Nazi forces. In these countries, there has been an erosion of LGBTQ2S rights, through the period of alliance with Washington.

If capitalist Russia today has its internal problems with homophobia and transphobia, this in no way negates the fact that U.S. imperialism is the biggest danger in the world and that it is crucial to defeat the NATO/fascist advance in Eastern Europe.

Calling anyone who upholds the revolutionary legacy of the Soviet Union an anti-LGBTQ2S “Stalinist” is also completely disingenuous. There are some of these homophobic elements in our midst. But plenty of LGBTQ2S people understand the importance of defending the various 20th century revolutions and that these revolutions are the backdrop to every contemporary advance in gender and sexuality politics.

So I really do not take seriously the superficial dismissals in the form of, “Don’t you know that Stalin was socially conservative? That’s what you support whether you know it or not.”

The Dontesk People’s Republic (DPR) militia claimed on Tuesday to have found a neonazi torture dungeon after capturing Mariupol airport, as battle continues to rage in the besieged Ukrainian city.

According to the DPR press service, the prison was discovered by its people’s militia after it had defeated gunmen from the far-right Azov Battalion at the airport.

Large quantities of weapons, ammunition and food were found and airport terminals had been turned into makeshift barracks, the militia said.

“A prison was found where they had kept and tortured people; supposedly it was the notorious secret prison ‘Biblioteka,’ the agency said.

“Iron doors with slots for passing food and conversations; there were several such rooms and an area for walks in the end of the windowless corridor, with barbed wire at high ceilings,” the DPR militia said.

“Ukrainian nationalists set up a veritable prison on the airport premises where they had tortured to death innocent people.”

Investigations into alleged war crimes are ongoing, the militia said, although no details were given and it is not thought that any prisoners were found.

Mariupol has been under siege for weeks, amid growing reports of starvation and civilians being denied access to water and medicine.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky has described the Russian encirclement of the Black Sea port city as a war crime, alleging that some 90 per cent of the city has been reduced to rubble.

Reports from those who have managed to escape the city, however, claim that members of the Ukrainian armed forces have threatened to shoot anyone that leaves.

They accused the Azov Battalion of using them as human shields, placing military equipment in their homes and other civilian areas.

Footage circulating online showing Roma people in Lviv with their faces painted green and tied to lampposts has caused outrage.

In the disturbing images, families are seen tied up, with individuals being beaten for alleged crimes of pickpocketing and looting.

Some groups have sought to play down the incidents, suggesting that Russia is using them as propaganda to portray Ukraine as under the control of far-right forces.

Source: Morning Star

 

En el 19° aniversario de la Guerra de Irak:
El gobierno de EUA mintió sobre Irak y miente sobre Rusia y Ucrania

EXPONGAMOS LAS MENTIRAS

El 20 de marzo se cumplen 19 años desde la invasión estadounidense de Irak, basada en una mentira sobre “armas de destrucción masiva”. Estados Unidos siempre miente sobre sus guerras. Aquí se muestra cómo Washington y la OTAN provocaron el conflicto entre Ucrania y Rusia.

Mentira #1: Rusia es el agresor contra Ucrania

Rusia no empezó la guerra. Ucrania ha estado en guerra durante ocho años contra las repúblicas del Donbass, Donetsk y Lugansk. La guerra de Ucrania ha costado más de 14.000 vidas en Donbass. Al igual que en Yemen, los medios estadounidenses ignoraron el costo humano y el papel de EUA en el conflicto. Durante meses, Washington presionó a Ucrania para que volviera a invadir Donbass. Rusia solo intervino para detener un baño de sangre y poner fin a la guerra, así como para garantizar la neutralidad de su vecino. Ucrania continúa cometiendo crímenes de guerra diarios en Donbass, incluyendo un ataque con misiles el 14 de marzo que mató a más de 20 personas en Donetsk.

Mentira #2: Ucrania es una democracia que debe ser defendida

En 2014, un violento golpe de Estado derrocó al gobierno elegido legalmente de Ucrania, que intentaba mantener relaciones amistosas tanto con Occidente como con Rusia. El golpe fue apoyado por funcionarios estadounidenses y políticos republicanos y demócratas. El nuevo gobierno prohibió los partidos políticos, impidió que las minorías nacionales usaran sus idiomas y emprendió la represión contra periodistas y opositores. Los grupos neonazis jugaron un papel importante en el golpe, y hoy infestan el estado ucraniano de arriba abajo. Estos grupos trabajan con supremacistas blancos en EUA y Europa y representan un peligro para las personas en todas partes.

Mentira #3: Estados Unidos es un espectador inocente

Estados Unidos echó gasolina, encendió el fósforo y avivó las llamas de la guerra. Biden envió cientos de toneladas de armas a Ucrania y arrinconó a Rusia. ¿Por qué? Para justificar una mayor expansión de la OTAN, socavar la soberanía de Rusia y aumentar las ganancias sancionando las exportaciones rusas. Washington ignoró las serias preocupaciones de Rusia sobre la neutralidad de Ucrania y la expansión de la OTAN durante décadas. Estados Unidos saboteó los acuerdos de Minsk destinados a mantener la paz en la región. Presionó a sus “socios” de la UE para destruir un acuerdo de oleoducto con Rusia y así beneficiar las grandes petroleras estadounidenses y los bancos de Wall Street.

Mentira #4: Las/os pobres y las/os trabajadores deberían sacrificarse

La presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes Nancy Pelosi, justificó cortar dinero del presupuesto para luchar contra COVID porque “Tenemos una guerra en Ucrania”. El Congreso coincide: hay mucho dinero para la guerra. Mientras tanto, los precios de la gasolina, la comida y los alquileres se están disparando. Las escuelas públicas están en crisis. Millones se enfrentan al desalojo por el fin de las protecciones contra la pandemia, mientras que el dinero continúa financiando la supremacía blanca patrocinada por el estado. La brutalidad policial y la represión contra las/os inmigrantes continúan sin cesar, mientras que el presidente Biden impulsa la violencia racista con llamados a “financiar a la policía”, al mismo tiempo que financia las fuerzas armadas dirigidas por los nazis en Ucrania. Rechazamos la política bipartidista de guerra contra las personas en este país y en el exterior.

Ayudemos a exponer las mentiras. ¡Construyamos un movimiento para las necesidades de las personas, no para la guerra!

[pdf-embedder url=”https://struggle-la-lucha.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Factos_2.pdf”]

Reading U.S. reports on the deadly Russian rocket attack on the so-called International Peacekeeping and Security Center in western Ukraine, one could be excused for thinking that the Russians might have been destroying some UN peacekeeping base.

In fact, the deceptively named target, as a few U.S. news reports on the attack did note, is actually a joint NATO/Ukrainian military base near the border of NATO member Poland that has specifically long been where U.S. and NATO military trainers have worked with Ukrainian troops, teaching them the finer points of handling the lethal equipment being supplied to them by the U.S. and some NATO nations like France, Germany, Britain and Turkey.  (400 Florida National Guard troops were doing just that before being hustled back to Florida as Russia began threatening an invasion into Ukraine a few weeks ago.)

A day before the rocket attack, and just after the Biden administration announced approval of another tranche of $200 million worth of weapons for Ukraine, Russia warned that any arms shipments coming into Ukraine would (of course!) be considered fair targets for attack. This warning was typically described by the jingoistic corporate-owned media in the U.S. as increasing  the risk of a wider war, though the actual supplying of more lethal weapons to Ukraine by the U.S. and its NATO allies was not so labeled.

NATO meanwhile is typically described as a defensive treaty organization of countries that have a mutual assistance pact to come to each other’s aid with military force if any member is attacked.

But NATO is hardly a “defensive organization.”

Indeed, from its founding NATO has been an aggressive alliance designed to hem in the then Soviet Union, and to to threaten it with destruction by U.S. nuclear weapons which were and still are stored in member countries, sometimes actually mounted on missiles and available for rapid loading onto U.S. and NATO bombers parked on air bases all over Europe. That hemming-in process today, following decades of further expansion of NATO following the Soviet Union’s collapse,  includes adding members located right up on the Russian border in countries like Poland, Estonia and Latvia (where U.S. rockets and nuclear-capable planes are minutes away from critical Russian targets like army and air bases, as well as major navy ports.

NATO was founded in early April, 1949 when the Soviet Union didn’t even have a single  nuclear weapon and was not expected by U.S. scientists and security people to get  one for another 5-10 years. Yet the organization was also founded at a time that the U.S., which was working round the clock to industrialize production of its new, initially hand-made atomic bombs, had already assembled and stockpiled over 200 of these city-destroying weapons. That is a pretty awesome arsenal for a country that at that time had no rival in destructive capability.

Add to that reality the fact that the U.S. was also already well on the way to producing a vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb (a project that Los Alamos scientists  began almost immediately working on right after the August 1945 surrender of Japan). Significantly, in the late 1940s the Pentagon, on President Truman’s orders,  had re-activated the assembly-line for producing B-29 bombers — the only plane at the time able to deliver its atomic weapons — while also developing more powerful heavy bombers like the B-36 and B-52. Why the rush? Because there were plans to launch a preemptive nuclear blitz on the Soviet Union. These plans, updated as the U.S. arsenal of atom bombs expanded towards the 300-400 number that Pentagon strategists advised Truman would be needed to destroy the U.S.SR as an industrial society. The succession of operational plans for that attack had such cringe-inducing names as Operation Sizzler, Scorch, Broiler and Dropshot. (The only reason such a genocidal first-strike on the Soviet Union never happened in the early ’50s when the U.S. stockpile finally reached that attack goal of over 300 ombs bombs, was that on Aug. 29, 1949, the  U.S.SR successfully exploded its first atom bomb, shocking the U.S. war department and leading to cancellation of any Washington plans for an early attack.)

Three years later, on Nov. 1, 1952, the U.S. successfully exploded its first thermonuclear bomb, a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

NATO’;s creation has to be viewed in the historical context of America’s astonishing power at that time.  Knowing it had the only atom bombs in the world, making it unopposable, the treaty with western European nations was clearly set up to allow the U.S. to keep troops in Europe indefinitely and more important, to stockpile and prepare to launch nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union from locations a short distance from the Soviet capital and industrial heartland.

Any American political figure who claims NATO is or ever was  a “defensive” alliance and :”not an offensive threat” to Russia is either ignorant or a liar. And calling he military base that was just hit with Russian missiles, killing 34 and injuring another  135 people, a  “peacekeeping” center is as laughable as naming the incredibly deadly MX missile with its ten 300-kiloton independently targetable nuclear warheads, the “Peacekeeper,” as that professional huckster President Reagan did.

Source: This Can’t Be Happening