The Federation of American Scientists confirms in January the news given by Grandangolo in December 2022 based on a U.S. Air Force document: the C-17A Globemaster aircraft has been authorized to carry the U.S. B61-12 nuclear bomb to Italy and other European countries. Since Biden Administration officials had announced that the B61-12 shipment would be brought forward to December, we believe that the new US nuclear bombs are already arriving in Europe to be deployed against Russia.

The U.S. and NATO are pouring into Ukraine huge amounts of heavy artillery munitions supplied to the Kiev armed forces. The U.S.-according to official figures-has so far sent more than one million rounds of ammunition for 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine, plus tens of thousands of missiles. About 300,000 rounds of ammunition come from U.S. military depots in Israel. The arms shipment is managed by an international network, in which Camp Darby- the largest U.S. arsenal outside the motherland, connected to the port of Livorno and Pisa military airport – plays a central role. Britain, France, Poland and Finland are supplying Kiev with tanks, and Poland is purchasing Abrams tanks from the U.S. Some of which may be destined for Ukraine.

At the same time, the U.S. and NATO are enhancing the deployment of their forces in Europe, increasingly close to Russia. In Romania, NATO deployed AWACS aircraft, equipped with the most sophisticated electronic equipment, kept constantly in flight near Russian airspace. Also in Romania, the Pentagon deployed the 101st Airborne Division, which is being deployed to Europe for the first time since World War II.

NATO and the EU establish “a task force on resilience and critical infrastructure.”

“NATO,” declares the Council of the European Union, “remains the foundation of our collective defense. We recognize the value of a stronger European Defense that contributes to transatlantic security and is complementary and interoperable with NATO.”

Source: Voltairenet

Anti-war protests were held in more than 90 cities across the U.S. on the week of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday holiday, Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. “Stop the U.S. war on Donbass, Russia & China! Unite to fight racism, fascism & imperialist war,” declared the banner carried by the Socialist Unity Party in Times Square, New York City, on Jan. 14.

Hundreds joined the Times Square rally, which ended with a march down Seventh Ave. At the rally, John Parker of the SUP strongly condemned NATO as the most violent, belligerent, aggressive military alliance in history. “Russia is not our enemy. China is not our enemy. Our enemy is U.S. imperialism, and its attack dog — NATO.” (Watch the talk at https://youtu.be/DZp4sQeZzSc)

The rally was called by ANSWER and endorsed by more than 30 organizations. 

Talk given by John Parker at “People Speak Out to Stop Racism, Poverty and World War III” at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York, Jan. 13.

Almost a year ago, on Feb. 15, bombings by Ukraine were 70 bombs per day in the Donbass region. Then, to increase the provocation, it went up 20-fold to 1,400 a day by Feb. 22, with 150,000 Kiev troops at the border of the Donbass region ready to come in and commit genocide – that is undeniable. And the only thing that stopped that genocidal massacre was the Russian intervention that was requested by both Lugansk and Donetsk.

But, despite stopping a massacre — which is kind of important — we’re being told we should condemn Russia because perhaps it unified Europe. Regarding that, Thierry Meyssan – a political consultant for Syria and Libya, so an insider in geopolitics, and founder of the Voltaire Network, a very good news source out of France – wrote an interesting editorial titled The World Order Already Changed in 2022. He writes:

“Everyone is now beginning to think for themselves. We are not yet in the multipolar world that Russia and China are trying to bring about, but we are seeing it being built.

¨It all started with the Russian military operation to enforce Security Council Resolution 2202 and protect the entire Ukrainian population from its ‘integral nationalist’ government.”

Why is he saying that? He points to the unity being built, not destroyed.

Well, he goes on to mention the former European colonial African states that now want the Russian army to ensure their security. They reflect the view of much of the world that is fed up with the U.S. war on terrorism that is actually creating and supporting terrorists in their countries when it suits them. They are also concerned about the huge transfer of weapons destined for Ukraine but winding up on shopping sites for terrorists on the dark web, given the level of corruption in Kiev’s government.

And India and Iran are working hard with Russia to build a transport corridor that will allow them to trade despite the U.S. and Western European illegal economic sanctions. Already Mumbai is connected to Southern Russia and soon to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Beijing is building roads in Eurasia from East to West. None of these relationships are imperialist relationships – they are not exporting capital; they are helping developing countries build up their infrastructure for mutually beneficial economic interests, unlike the financial gangsters of the West – the IMF and World Bank.

See, if the glasses you wear only direct the light into your eyes from Europe, giving a Eurocentric view of the world, you don’t see the Global South. You don’t see that countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia have a different view and collectively can have more of an impact on the world than Europe.

But I don’t want to give the impression that Europe is united either. Back in August, veteran journalist and TV host Saeed Naqvi wrote in the Indian Observer about French President Macron’s leaked conversation displaying anything but unity, but, for once, honesty: He said basically that Western hegemony might be coming to an end to senior French diplomats.

Macron said France, Britain, and the USA contributed to the world in this way: France is culture, England is industry, and the U.S. is war. He then criticized the wrong choices made by a series of U.S. Presidents from Clinton on. He also said China and Russia had achieved great success over the years under different leadership styles, then mentioned how China lifted 700 million people out of poverty. But, in France, Macron said, the market economy is increasing income inequality at an unprecedented rate. Ouch.

Macron is no anti-imperialist; he refused to take down statues of colonialists and brags about France’s possession of French Guiana. So, he’s not cheering on an end of hegemony; he’s crying about its end and blaming the U.S. administrations, from Clinton to Biden, for ruining the party.

And did you hear what Biden said when Zelensky was in Washington​? In response to a Ukrainian reporter’s question about why the U.S. isn’t arming Ukraine with even more advanced weaponry, he said: “The idea that we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there would have a prospect of breaking up NATO and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world.” And, Biden said, “I’ve spent several hundred hours face-to-face with our European allies and the heads of state of those countries, and making the case as to why it was overwhelmingly in their interest that they continue to support Ukraine.” Yikes.

He also said, “They’re not looking to go to war with Russia. They’re not looking for a third World War.” 

Biden ended the questions with this: “There’s more to say, but I’ve probably already said too much.” Yep, he did.

Now, when you dig even deeper in Europe, you see the tens and maybe now hundreds of thousands demonstrating in Europe against their resources being squandered for a U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and upset about their gas prices and general inflation going up.

See, when we talk about unity, we also can’t give the impression that it’s just the ruling class dynamics that matter – more importantly, it’s what’s going on with the working class, which, like the non-European majority countries on the globe, is potentially much more impactful on our future.

But, perhaps instead of focusing on Russia, folks should look at the planners of this war.

The 2022 National Defense Strategy document from the U.S. Secretary of Defense is worth a look. This document was blessed by President Biden, who is quoted in the introduction.

Right out of the gate, it calls China, Russia, Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea threats to U.S. national security. And this threat must be met by making NATO even more powerful and nuclear-capable, especially surrounding Russia.

But in terms of priorities, China is the number one target. The document even goes so far as to say that the U.S. should begin training and arming Taiwan in asymmetrical warfare (or guerrilla war) against China.

What should we learn from this document and the Pentagon think tank, the Rand Corporation’s strategy published four years ago, planning the provocations that started this war? First, it didn’t matter what Russia did – the imperialists had a plan of action that was determined to cause war by any means.

But, it’s understandable that there is confusion because censorship by the Pentagon and social media platforms controlled by the State Department keep vital information out.

Sometimes you just have to go there. In the city of Rubizhne in the Donbass region, I arrived at a shelter to interview folks who were housed there to escape the shelling of their apartments by tanks.

In fact, there was a story in one of the only media outlets allowed to exist in Ukraine today – the Euromaidan Press about the shelter in Rubizne I visited.

The Euromaidan Press is an NGO partly funded by the U.S. intelligence National Democratic Institute and the British Embassy in Kiev and indirectly by the Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which funded regime change efforts in Ukraine.

They had a heart-wrenching story about a person’s parents killed by Russian soldiers simply for bringing food and water to a shelter where people had escaped attacks by Russian soldiers. So Ukraine created this shelter in Rubizhne to keep people safe.

Well, I visited the shelter in Rubizne about three weeks after this supposed incident. But, the people there told me they were there because their apartment buildings were being bombed by Ukrainian tanks, not Russian tanks, and while the Ukrainians were bombing them, there were no Russian soldiers on site. And, they said it wasn’t the Ukrainian soldiers that provided them shelter; it was the Russian soldiers and the Lugansk Peoples Militia transporting them there and protecting them from the Ukrainian military.

When I first got to Lugansk, I participated in a conference of religious leaders, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian. The topic of discussion was how to defeat the Nazi ideology that was growing exponentially in Ukraine. Why is it growing so fast – well…

Let’s suppose that Biden tomorrow erects statues of Hitler’s collaborators all over the country, then loans buildings for free to a white supremacist organization to indoctrinate the youth into fascist politics, with libraries filled with books like Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a gift shop downstairs with cute little keychains with Nazi insignias on them. Then to add icing on the cake he abolishes every police department in the country and replaces them with the Klan or some other fascist-white supremacist organization.

In that analogy, I am exaggerating not by one iota regarding what is happening in Ukraine today.

I should mention that when I was in Krymskye, also in Donbass, we visited a tuberculosis hospital that had been retrofitted for war by the Ukrainian military. On the wall was a giant swastika painted on it, and next to it, the sonnenrad, a symbol appropriated by the Nazis in World War II and used today by the Ukrainian Azov Battalion.

When some people say that Ukraine’s Nazi problem is “minor,” they callously ignore the 10 Black people killed at the Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, by an 18-year-old white supremacist. He was wearing the emblem of the Azov Battalion – the same sonnenrad I saw on the wall in Krymskoye. 

This youth said he was inspired by New Zealander Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 Muslims in a mosque. In his manifesto, Tarrant wrote that he was in direct contact with the Azov Battalion and was planning to go to Ukraine for military training.

In 2019, Time Magazine interviewed a former FBI agent who admitted that 17,000 white supremacists worldwide had traveled to Ukraine for military training. Azov and its partners have used some of the billions of dollars Ukraine has received in funding and training from the U.S. since 2014 to build a very successful social media presence aimed at alienated youth. 

Things are changing, and we must realize that we can no longer allow the U.S. ruling class the luxury of pushing us over the cliff of poverty, climate disaster, and World War III.

Dr. King said the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – is my own government. He was certainly talking about the most aggressive, violent military alliance in history – NATO. We have the power to end this war and stop the tens of billions stolen from us to fund a war that does nothing but create death, inflation, and misery. We just need to be clear on who the real enemy is – it’s not Russia, and it’s not China – it’s U.S. imperialism, and imperialism’s attack dog – NATO. It’s time to put that rabid dog down. Abolish NATO Now!

Talk given by Melinda Butterfield at “People Speak Out to Stop Racism, Poverty and World War III” at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York, Jan. 13.

Good evening friends, siblings and comrades.

Tonight I’d like you to join me for a little thought experiment. First, I want you to imagine there’s been a far-right takeover of the U.S. government supported by violent white supremacists. Sadly, that’s pretty easy to imagine these days. 

Next, imagine that people all over the country rose up to protest against this coup – Black and white, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous, LGBTQ+, immigrants, prisoners. But just as this anti-fascist movement seems to be gaining strength, a terrible massacre of activists takes place in Philadelphia. The resistance is brutally repressed in most of the U.S. Some people are killed, many are imprisoned, thousands have to flee abroad or risk death.

However, in two states, the anti-fascist movement successfully seizes control and holds it. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that these states are New York and Connecticut. The new U.S. government sends in troops and tanks, but the community organizes itself and manages to push them back.  

A long-term standoff ensues. Many threatened activists from all over the U.S. wind up coming to New York City and Hartford to help strengthen the resistance.

Now imagine this state of affairs continues for nine years. Trade and supplies from the rest of the continental U.S. and Canada are cut off. Hartford, due to its location, is relatively sheltered from attack. But New York City is shelled with artillery from across the Hudson on a daily basis, targeting apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. 

Death squads and armed drones are regularly sent in to infiltrate and carry out attacks on residents. Overseas allies of the regime in Washington send it more and more weapons. Over time, the number of federal troops surrounding this anti-fascist enclave grows.

The regime in Washington hates Mexico and is constantly trying to provoke a military conflict with our neighbors to the south (also not a far-fetched scenario). Mexico is the only country that offers support to the anti-fascists in New York and Connecticut. The Mexican government even tries to broker a peace agreement. But despite its promises, Washington keeps bombing New York City, week after week, year after year. According to them, we’re nothing but pawns of the evil Mexican government.

This imaginary scenario is one that I hope will never come to pass. But I asked you to consider it because I want everyone, just for a few minutes, to put yourselves in the shoes of people living in the Donbass, the former eastern regions of Ukraine called Donetsk and Lugansk. 

What I just described is reality for people living there since a U.S.-backed coup overthrew Ukraine’s elected government nine years ago, in 2014.

Life in Donetsk

Let me tell you about a dear friend of mine in Donetsk named Sveta. She’s one of the most courageous people I’ve ever known. Sveta is a socialist, a feminist, and a labor activist who grew up in Donbass, but later moved west to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. 

In 2014, after the coup, she had to flee Kiev under threat of arrest or death. Her husband Denis is a Jewish union organizer from Western Ukraine, and if anything, he was in even greater danger. Sveta and Denis settled back in Donetsk and have lived there through years and years of Ukraine’s bombing war. 

Today, Denis is enlisted in the Donetsk People’s Militia to protect the people of Donbass. While some people have fled the bombing by going eastward into Russia, Sveta has stayed in the city to care for her elderly father. 

Almost every day, she posts updates on the situation there. Over the past year, they’ve grown increasingly heartbreaking. Even her incredible inner strength has been ground down to the bone by the unrelenting Ukrainian attacks on civilians, on her neighbors, on the streets she has to travel for food, medicine, and water. Yes, water, because people have to severely ration water since Ukraine cut off the city’s main source. 

Every time it seems like there might be an end to this nightmare, a new, more powerful weapons system supplied by the United States and NATO gets into the hands of the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade and other Ukrainian forces north and west of the city. Just yesterday, a grocery warehouse in Donetsk was attacked with NATO-issued weapons, killing a worker and wounding four more.

One of the Ukrainian regime’s worst crimes started this past summer. Their army began scattering small landmines called “petals” all over the city. They’re about the size of the palm of your hand. They’re colored and shaped to look like leaves. If you step on one, you may die, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to be left maimed and disabled. The majority of those who have fallen victim have been seniors or emergency workers, and some children too. As of Dec. 21, there were 87 victims of the petals.

Solidarity is essential

The countdown to World War III started long before Russia intervened to protect Donbass last February. People in Donetsk and Lugansk, like the people of Yemen and Palestine, and North Africa, are guinea pigs for testing U.S. weapons. In the event of a nuclear exchange, they will be the first to die. The avowed policy of the Ukrainian government since 2014 has been to “take back” the region and “cleanse” it of the majority Russian-speaking population. The guiding hand behind all of this has been the U.S. government – under both Democrats and Republicans.

Building a true anti-war movement here starts with poor and working people recognizing that it is not in our interests – that the $113 billion spent on the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine last year alone is money stolen from our pockets, money that’s desperately needed to address the crises of inflation, homelessness, poverty, lack of health care and climate catastrophe. 

We have our own battles to fight right here, against poverty, against racist police killings, which were the highest ever recorded last year, against the terrible attacks on voting rights, women’s reproductive freedom, and the right of transgender people like me just to exist. 

But to be effective, the anti-war movement must be built on a foundation of solidarity with the people directly affected. And those residents of Donbass and exiled Ukrainians have been completely written out of the U.S. narrative about the war and sadly, also by many existing anti-war groups.

Solidarity isn’t a one-way street. Earlier generations learned so much from the struggles of people in Vietnam, Central America, and Iraq. Today, when organized fascist groups are growing more threatening in this country, we need to learn from the people of Donbass and their nearly-decade-long resistance to fascism. 

Because, to paraphrase the powerful words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the bombs dropped abroad also explode here at home – they destroy the dream and possibility of a decent life.

Thank you.

Message to “People Speak Out to Stop Racism, Poverty and World War III” at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York, on Jan. 13. Albu is a coordinator of the Ukrainian Marxist movement Borotba (Struggle) and a survivor of the Odessa massacre on May 2, 2014, when neo-Nazis killed 48 people. He was forced into exile and currently lives in Lugansk.

Thank you for the rally against the war with Russia and China, against imperialism and NATO. I am very grateful to you for continuing to tell the truth about what is happening in the Donbass. It is very important for us that the world will know what is happening here.

In the last two months, the shelling of Donetsk, in comparison with the summer, has intensified. The neo-Nazis want us to move our artillery. They want to force us to remove it from those areas where their defense became weak. Therefore, the neo-Nazis deliberately bomb civilians. The military actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are bordering on genocide.

But I am sure that everything will change soon. Good news is already coming that in some areas the defenses of the Ukrainian army have been breached. Our comrades are waiting for good news in the coming months.

Please thank all the participants of the rally from the people of Donbass, from all the anti-fascists of Ukraine, and from Borotba.

No pasarán!

“Your money is not charity, it’s an investment.” That’s what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his address to the U.S. Congress while visiting Washington on Dec. 21.

He came asking for more billions to add to the more than $68 billion in war funding in 2022 alone. Two days later, Congress approved $45 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, bringing the total for 2022 to $113 billion.

Washington’s spigot has been pumping U.S. dollars into Ukraine since before 2004 to fund imperialist regime change. This plan accelerated, with increasing violence and tens of billions in U.S. dollars, culminating with the coup in 2014. 

The coup was orchestrated by Washington and used to select the future leadership of Ukraine; from that moment on, destroying a once-sovereign country and replacing it with consecutive regimes of anti-Russian, pro-U.S. governments that were more than willing to honor the wishes of their U.S. masters: provoking war with Russia.

Zelensky’s statement about “an investment” must be seen in the context of the foreign investments that got a green light to sideline and impoverish the Ukrainian population after the coup in 2014. Some of those foreign investors were active shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union as well. 

BlackRock steps in

The trajectory of the latest vampiric deals of the foreign investors was set in November when Zelensky signed over even more of his country’s sovereignty to a U.S. firm that will help broker the deals of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and independent foreign investors.

BlackRock Financial Markets Advisory and the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy signed a memorandum of understanding in November. According to President Zelensky’s official website: “In accordance with the preliminary agreements struck earlier this year between the Head of State and Larry Fink, the BlackRock team has been working for several months on a project to advise the Ukrainian government on how to structure the country’s reconstruction funds. 

“Volodymyr Zelensky and Larry Fink agreed to focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channeling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy.”

The stage was set for BlackRock by the IMF back in 2013 with a deal to “integrate” Ukraine into the European Union, to facilitate greater control and ownership over Ukraine’s resources. In fact, this desire led to the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych during the 2014 coup.

In December 2014, the Oakland Institute issued a report titled “The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture,” showing how Yanukovych’s rejection of this proposal led to the coup which ousted him: 

“A major factor in the crisis,” the report states, “that led to deadly protests and eventually President Yanukovych’s removal from office, was his rejection of an EU Association agreement that would have further opened trade and integrated Ukraine with the EU. The agreement was tied to a $17 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. Instead of the EU and IMF deal, Yanukovych chose a Russian aid package worth $15 billion plus a 33% discount on Russian natural gas …  This deal has since gone off the table with the pro-EU interim government accepting the new multimillion dollar IMF package in May 2014.”

The report exposed the austerity clauses in the rejected EU trade deal, facilitating not only control over Ukraine’s resources, but also opening Ukraine up to the cultivation of genetically modified crops.

The report continues: “In ‘Walking on the West Side: The World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict,’ a report released in July 2014, the Oakland Institute exposed how international financial institutions swooped in on the heels of the political upheaval in Ukraine to deregulate and throw open the nation’s vast agricultural sector to foreign corporations. 

“This fact sheet provides details on the transnational agribusinesses that are increasingly investing in Ukraine, including Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont, and how corporations are taking over all aspects of Ukraine’s agricultural system. This includes circumventing land moratoriums, investing in seed and input production facilities, and acquiring commodity production, processing, and transportation facilities.”

Selling off land to agribusiness

After the 2014 coup, cabinet positions were literally assigned by the U.S. State Department. Any legislation protecting the sovereignty of Ukraine economically from foreign takeover was set for destruction, replaced by proposed laws that would allow greater foreign ownership of land. 

However, even before the moratorium on land sales could be changed, various loopholes were exploited by foreign agricultural entities. Since the sales prohibition only applied to the land, investors could build foreign-owned factories on leased land and hold it until the moratorium expired.

For example, in March 2014 – just weeks after President Yanukovych was deposed – agribusiness giant Monsanto invested $140 million in building a new seed plant. DuPont, in September 2014, completed the extension of its seed facility.

Ukraine is a big prize for the imperialists. It was once known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” with over 74 million acres of uncharacteristically fertile earth known as “black soil.”

So in March 2020, as a condition for a $5 billion IMF loan supported by Zelensky, Washington, the EU, and Western corporations, an economically desperate Ukraine enacted law 552-IX, which amended the country’s laws on conditions of turnover of agricultural land.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager and a company that has big interests in Raytheon, Lockheed, Dupont, and Haliburton, companies responsible for destroying Indigenous lands, climate change, supplying weapons of mass destruction for U.S. endless wars, and helping to push World War III. 

Now BlackRock is in a close partnership with Kiev, managing billions of dollars in investments to tear away any last shred of Ukraine’s economic sovereignty, while it pretends to be acting in defense of the Ukrainian people’s interests.

As 2023 begins, it’s undeniable that a dangerous, virulent fascist movement is spreading through U.S. society.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said in 1967, “The bombs dropped on Vietnam explode at home.” Malcolm X expressed something similar when he said, “Chickens come home to roost.”

Feeding the U.S. war machine boomerangs by increasing repression, decreasing rights, and robbing people of desperately needed resources here at home. Promoting fascism abroad facilitates its growth here.

It’s seen in the spread of hate-ridden protests against drag story hours, sometimes attended by armed neo-Nazis, who threaten children, parents, and LGBTQ+ communities, and in the bomb threats targeting medical facilities that provide gender-affirming care to trans children and abortion services to people who can become pregnant. 

It takes the form of mass shootings, like the massacre of 10 Black people at Tops grocery in Buffalo, New York, five queer people at Club Q in Colorado Springs, and 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. We recognize it in the targeting of electrical grids from North Carolina to Washington state to sow fear.  

At the local level, the fascist influence is evident in the rash of attempts by astroturfed “parents’ groups” to ban books that expose the racist history of the U.S. or validate the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ people.

At the state level, we see it in the efforts by officials in Texas, Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere to eradicate trans health care, criminalize parents who support trans children, and create a lynch-mob atmosphere against women and others who choose to get an abortion.

At the national level, there is the far-right-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, which gutted voting rights, struck down the constitutional right to abortion, and seems poised to do the same to same-sex marriage. 

Looming over it all is the shadow of Jan. 6, 2021, when an organized fascist mob attempted a coup d’etat at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to keep Donald Trump in power – aided and abetted by a faction of the Pentagon.

Fascist tendencies have existed in the U.S. since it began its rise as an imperialist power in the late 19th century – from the Ku Klux Klan to the John Birch Society to today’s Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Sometimes the ruling class of bosses, bankers, and landlords keep them on a tight leash.

But when times are tough, when they fear the masses of poor and working people could unite and fight back against their unjust capitalist system, the fascists are let off their leash to spread division and, if necessary, physically exterminate those the rich and powerful fear most.

U.S. spread fascism in Ukraine

As top dog of the world imperialist powers – including Britain, Japan, and the European Union – the U.S. has long upheld fascists in its efforts to wring the maximum profits out of the world’s people.

Washington has abetted fascist dictatorships or those with strong fascist aspects, from the Shah of Iran to Suharto in Indonesia, from Pinochet in Chile to Áñez in Bolivia.

During the Cold War against the USSR, the U.S. encouraged the growth of violent fascist movements like the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its post-World War II successors. The U.S. and Canada harbored its leaders, gave them money and weapons, and encouraged their hate propaganda against multinational Soviet socialism.

The many neo-Nazi movements in Ukraine today, like Right Sector and Azov Brigade, are descendants of this lineage.

But that’s not all. The destruction of the USSR and European socialist camp 30 years ago brought economic devastation and plummeting life expectancies. Washington stepped into the ideological vacuum to spread division and prevent a revolutionary response to the cataclysm. 

One way it did this was by spreading U.S.-style white supremacy through the capitalist media. Another was to encourage far-right U.S. evangelical movements to spread anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman hate. 

This happened under both Democratic and Republican administrations and prepared the ground for the growth of fascist movements and reactionary government policies in Eastern Europe that plague the region today.

Donbass resists fascism

I’ve been writing about Ukraine since the U.S.-backed Maidan coup toppled the elected government in early 2014. Fascist groups were at the heart of this “revolution of dignity.” They hobnobbed with the likes of the late Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Victoria Nuland, who today is Joe Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

I’ve interviewed, spoken to, and visited courageous Ukrainian anti-fascists who resisted. Many were forced to flee east to avoid death. Others were imprisoned and later traded in exchanges for captured Ukrainian soldiers. Today many of them are fighting on the side of the Donbass and Russia.

The neo-Nazis who provided the backbone of Maidan went on to massacre 48 unarmed activists at the Odessa House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014. None of the perpetrators have been punished. Many survivors, however, were jailed or driven into exile.

Washington preferred its new puppet regime in Kiev to be fronted by more media-friendly faces like oligarch Petro Poroshenko or TV comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. But it made sure the fascists became integral to the repressive bodies of the state, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine, providing them extensive training in the use of Western-supplied weapons.

These neo-Nazis, under various names, also set the tone for the new regime’s virulently anti-Russia and anti-communist ideology. One of the government’s first acts was to ban the use of the Russian language – the daily language of those living in eastern Ukraine. They spoke of working-class residents of the east – especially in the Donbass mining region – as “insects” and “subhumans” to be cleansed.

The writing was on the wall. People in the east – and antifascists throughout the whole of Ukraine – rose up. In most places, they were violently suppressed. But in the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, the people seized power and declared themselves independent anti-fascist republics.

Ukraine – with the backing of the U.S. and the NATO military alliance – then waged war on the people of Donbass for eight years, killing more than 14,000 people and setting the stage for the escalation of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in early 2022.

Fascism must be fought

For a few years in the late 2010s, articles sometimes appeared in the U.S. corporate media highlighting Ukraine’s “Nazi problem.” Some even exposed links between the Ukrainian far right and white supremacist groups in the U.S., like the Rise Against Movement, which participated in the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, where anti-racist protester Heather Heyer was murdered in 2017.

This is not surprising. It’s common practice for U.S. media to be used to keep dependent regimes in line, to remind them that “we made you, and we can break you.”

But when Washington, Wall Street, and Big Oil decided in 2021 that it was time to go full-speed ahead with a proxy war against Russia, those kinds of exposés vanished. Once Russia was backed into a corner and forced to intervene militarily to prevent a genocidal slaughter in Donbass, any discussion of Ukraine’s “Nazi problem” became an unspeakable heresy for the media and liberal mouthpieces on social media.

Today it is common to see Ukrainian soldiers in the media sporting fascist symbols. But the media ignore the symbols, and anyone who dares to point them out is labeled an agent of Vladimir Putin.

The people of Donbass don’t have that luxury. They had to fight, arms in hand, to protect themselves from the fascist threat, and today they must continue to do so as Ukraine rains bombs, mines, and artillery on civilian targets in Donetsk and other cities.

Unite against fascism and imperialism

It’s a tragedy of history that those fighting the rise of fascism in the U.S. and Ukraine are mostly unable to recognize one another. 

Just as imperialism spread hate propaganda in the former Soviet countries to sow division, so has it co-opted the language of protest movements, the tactics of anarchism and social democracy, and used nonprofits to confuse people in the West and turn natural allies against each other.

A growing grassroots movement in the U.S. is resisting fascist threats on the lives of the most marginalized communities. This is a great reason for hope. 

However, if this movement cannot recognize other genuine anti-fascist struggles and learn from them, if it does not learn about the class nature of imperialist war, it will remain isolated and unable to respond to the underlying causes of fascism.

What’s lacking is not only a basic, class-conscious understanding of what fascism is and how to fight it. The fundamental Marxist understanding of imperialism and war, as explained by Lenin, has been lost to many movements that have emerged in the 21st century. 

Opposition to imperialist war and support for its military defeat is not based on political agreement with the non-imperialist countries under attack but an understanding that imperialism’s defeat is a fundamental prerequisite to liberation. 

Those who claim to want liberation for LGBTQ+ people in Russia and women in Iran, freedom for Palestine, or a socialist future for Ukraine and Venezuela but who do not do everything in their power to facilitate the defeat of U.S. imperialism internally and externally are misguided at best.

There’s a fundamental commonality between the anti-fascists who fight arms in hand in Donetsk and Lugansk and the armed anti-fascists who defend queer spaces in Texas. 

Those who held mass protests in Ukraine against the Maidan coup and those who came out in the streets to defend drag story hour in Queens, New York, are part of the same fight – even if those on both sides cannot see it at the moment.

It’s the job of communist revolutionaries to build bridges of understanding and mutual struggle.

Marxists have revolutionary optimism because we know history never presents people with a task without the means to carry it out. The knowledge, tactics, and forces to defeat imperialism and fascism exist. The numbers who understand them are small for now. 

But circumstances demand that knowledge be shared, studied, and put into practice. We must prepare to do so, even if we have to fight to get a hearing.