What Do We Mean When We Say We Remember?

 

"These comments are sure to be welcomed by fifty or sixty people; a large number given the times in which we live and the gravity of the matters under discussion." [Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)]

On October 24, 2022, Melanie Joly, Liberal Minister for Foreign Affairs wrote that “we mark the 77th anniversary of the Charter of the United Nations, the document that created the UN.” The same day Canadian Ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae tweeted out "Happy UN Charter day. Worth fighting for!" [exclamation point!] Comrades, have you ever heard anything so nakedly cynical in your entire lives?

What are the very first words of the Preamble to the UN Charter? Does anyone know? Everyone should. These words should be branded on the hearts and minds of everyone who loves peace. It reads: "We the people of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind."

In his statement on so-called ‘Veterans Week,’ this past week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote, quote: "In times of war, in military conflicts, and in times of peace, we’ve counted on our women and men in uniform." Hashtag 'Canada Remembers.' What does this even mean? ‘Counted on them’ to what end?

What is it which Canada Remembers? Does Canada remember that the two world wars directly consumed one hundred and forty-five millions souls, and tens of millions more who died from the destabilization, displacements, degradations of conditions of life and rampant illnesses which the world wars gave rise to? What is being remembered when we remember on remembrance day? Is it blonde haired blue-eyed hometown boys dying in the trenches for freedom and democracy? Is it Paul Gross in Passchendale (2008) in a pornographic aestheticization of Sir Douglas Haig shoving 150,000 men into a mud coated meat-grinder? Why were the wars?

This past week Kentuky Fried Chicken apologized because its German chains had somehow sent out an app alert which read - and I quote - "It's memorial day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!" Incredible. Incredible! Akin to Robert Musil’s ‘A Racehorse of Genius.’ A phrase which immediately decontextualizes its referents beyond all recognition. It’s the anniversary of Kristallnacht, be sure to remember with fried chicken.

This is how ‘remembrance’ occurs for us today. As a totally recuperated pastiche, with the most heinous crime known to man, the foundation stone of the Holocaust, being casually juxtaposed into an advertizement for fried chicken. There is infinitely more truth in this than falsity. The truth is in the desensitization and decontextualization of the Holocaust which it is exemplary of. This ad is representative of the anaesthetic quality of the spectacle, how it inures and makes one numb to the horrors of the twentieth century by evacuating them of any meaning.

I remember that this past month, 52 nations – most pale as ghosts, or otherwise honorary whites – voted AGAINST a UN resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other forms of racial discrimination. More open ambivalence towards the glorification of historical fascism than at any point save for the 1930s. In. . . uh. . . I guess, solidarity with Ukraine?

What do we mean when we say we remember?

I remember that settler-colonialism inflicted tens of millions of deaths on the pre-Columbian indigenous populations of what are called North and South America. I remember that this was, and remains, the most heinous genocide known to human civilization, and that the Holocaust is merely a rationalized form of colonial depopulation, imbued with twentieth century technology. I remember that our state, Canada, continues its genocide against indigenous peoples to this day, and that this is reflected in indigenous populations’ overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, in poverty and desperation of First Nations communities, and the development of the Residential School System into the Ministry of child and family services.

I remember that Britain was an enthusiastic participant in the slave trade until 1807, and only abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1833. Between 1640 and 1807 more than three million Africans were trafficked to the colonies under the aegis and flag of the British Empire. The funds generated by this trade were used to found the Bank of England.

I remember that in the 1870s British rule starved five million people in India to death as its bountiful grain was was plundered and exported for profit. I remember that it was the British who first rationalized the use of concentration camps in the Boer War. I remember that tens of millions of Africans were exterminated by various colonial powers in the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’ between 1890 and 1914.

I remember that while Hitler exterminated six million Jews, three million Poles, and three million captured Soviet citizens, Winston Churchill concertedly starved four million Bengalis in 1943. I remember that he said of the famines, occurring under intense grain import sanctions imposed by Britain, that the famines were the Bengalis own fault for breeding too much.

What are the wars? What do we mean when we say we remember the wars?

In the meeting of the Reichstag of December 2, 1914, Karl Leibknecht was the only member to vote against the provision of war credits. It is often misunderstood to be the case that Liebknecht spoke at this meeting, he didn't. He was forbidden to do so by the President of the Reichstag. Instead, the text of his reasons for voting against the provision of war credits was circulated to the German Press, all of whom declined to print it. We receive Liebknect's remarks, historically, from their printing in foreign presses.

Liebknecht wrote that "this War, desired by none of the people concerned, has not broken out in behalf of the welfare of the German people or any other. It is an Imperialist War, a war over important territories of exploitation for capitalists and financiers."

Liebknecht wrote of the social chauvninists of the day, who rationalized their calls for belligerence under the banner 'Against Czarism!,' that such slogans had been quote "invented for the occasion. . . to exploit the noblest inclinations and the revolutionary traditions and ideals of the people in stirring up hatred of other peoples."

The same is true of Social Democrats and the American Empire today. Those who marshal together lofty phrases and high-minded ideals in the service of the model of reaction, the United States.

I remember that the United States stands before us today dripping from head to foot in the blood of over a million Iraqis, and several decade or longer occupations, just in the past twenty years. I remember that the United States lied us into these wars by claiming that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which never materialized.

I remember that it was the US who gave rise to Al Qaeda, the force that perpetrated 9/11, by arming, training and facilitating extremist groups as a cudgel against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and that the response to even the slightest blowback from doing this – a tiny sampling of what the US habitually inflicts on other countries, over decades and decades – was unimaginable carnage. In the first month of the Iraq War the US directly killed 15 thousand Iraqi civilians.

I remember that it was the United States which engineered and inaugurated the now eight year long civil war in the Donbas. I remember that the US doesn’t care about the societal catastrophe they inflict, so long as it secures more territory for accumulation.

I remember the regime in Kiev openly celebrating perpetrators of the Holocaust in the street for the past eight years. I remember that the figures lauded as the ‘Heroes of Ukraine’ in ‘Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes’ killed - by the conservative figures of Raul Hilberg, in the volumes of The Destruction of the European Jews - between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews, Poles, and other ethnic minorities over the course of the Second World War.

I remember the mad chocolate baron, Poroshenko, speaking of the Donbas, saying “We will have jobs, they will not. We will have pensions, they will not. We will have support of children and pensioners, they will not. Our children will go to kindergartens and schools, theirs will be sitting in cellars." I remember their failure, or refusal, to implement the peace agreements which they agreed to.

I remember that the international working class has no stake in this present war. I remember that this war, like the First World War, is an imperialist war, a war fought by monopolist blocs for territories of extraction. I remember that the pious banners flown in support of the present war are as cynical as they were at the outset of the twentieth century!

There is no profit to the international working class in the prolongation or exacerbation of this war, in subsidizing and escalating a war of aggression to conquer and subdue the eastern regions! The watchword of the international proletariat must be peace! Peace now! Peace without pre-conditions, peace without the prosecution of further war as some kind of prerequisite!

One year after the outbreak of hostilities in the First World War, Leibkneckt wrote that "The masses in the warring countries have begun to free themselves from the official webs of lies. . ." and that "The mad delusions about the ‘holy aims’ of the war have given way more and more, the enthusiasm for the war has dwindled, the will for a rapid peace has grown powerfully all over. . . The enemies of the people are counting on the forgetfulness of the masses – we counter this with the solution: Learn everything, don’t forget anything!"

If it is to pierce through the spectacle which surrounds us and numbs us, anesthetizes us to the reality of history, this is what I believe remembering has to mean: Learn everything, don’t forget anything!

Spectacle, Simulation and Sycophancy in the Liberal Imperialist West

Uncritical sycophancy towards the United States and its geopolitical interests is not journalism. If this is what you do, reproduce the narrative and world perspective of America, and call it ‘journalism,’ you are a fraud. At the best of times, Canadian media is a sleaze-den of nihilist cretins, stepping over one another to grovel before existing power in society and more acutely tap into the precise kind of stupid which gets them paid to express it. The conflict in Ukraine, however, has driven this gibbering heap into the most absurd and incredible frenzy. The fearsome eastern man has come to take their homes and brutalize their families, or what amounts to the same, the barbarian slav threatens and menaces a kind of affluent white herrenvolk polity which, in that respect, resembles their own settler-state. This is what Ukraine stands for right now, and it is why it is both the apex of international white supremacist militant organization, and the cause celebre of the Western chattering classes. This cacophonous melange of idiots and bumpkins is convulsed and howling for blood.

The worst of the freaks, bobbleheads and dummies who populate Canada’s mediasphere is Justin Ling, a shambling opportunist lich, a sniveling, grovelling apologist and propagandist for existing state power in Canada as an imperialist vassal state. A grown up Randall J. Weems from the show Recess tattletale. A NARC bottom-feeder having floated up from the depths of the ghouls and cretins at the Halifax Security Forum. Every form of liberal imperialism and chauvinist opportunism which has presented itself in the past decade, that slithering Iago, Ling, has thrown himself into it. He cheerled for Al Qaeda in Syria, he endorsed the US-orchestrated coup against Evo Morales and its comprador fascist ringleader Jean Áñez, and, most importantly, he has made a career out of deflecting and running interference against legitimate criticism of Canadian Liberal Deputy Prime-Minister Chystia Freeland and her Nazi-collaborationist heritage and orientation.

It is important, especially for the present context, to emphasize the power which Chrystia Freeland exercises over the Government and its foreign policy. The Liberal’s foreign policy is effectively decided by Freeland by fiat, and exercised, right now, by Melanie Joly. This is important because the extent to which the Liberal Government has endorsed extremely reactionary historical narratives promoted by a far right wing Ukrainian diaspora in Canada has been a matter of intense domestic controversy for years. While there are many parts to this story, it is perhaps best captured by a 2017 story from the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, “Chrystia Freeland’s granddadwas indeed a Nazi collaborator – so much for Russiandisinformation.” As Pugliese noted, Freeland's grandfather Michael Chomiak "fled with his Nazi colleages as the Russians advanced into Poland." For description of the content of Chomiak’s publication, Pugliese cites the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum: "soliciting Ukrainian support for the German cause," "silencing the mass killing of Jews in Galicia" and "official Nazi propaganda." This story was journalism. It challenged power and asserted truth. That is journalism.

Well, of course Ling reviled from it immediately, and has vociferously ever since. It told inconvenient truths about one of the most prominent boots on Ling’s licking roster. Exposure of such truths is anathema to the function of journalism as Ling understand it: to reproduce the approved and official view of state power, as inviolable truth, and never to subject even a single utterance of extant political power to even the slightest breeze of scrutiny. To Ling, highlighting the family history of Freeland is ‘Russian disinformation.’ Entirely true, relevant to the circumstances, so how is it possibly ‘disinformation’? Simple. This information has not been approved by the official and approved approval agencies of the imperialist states – the Atlantic Council, DFRLab, Bellingcat, a whole universe of liberal imperialist NGOs whose sole purpose is to police fidelity to the geostrategic objectives of the United States and NATO. To ‘journalists’ like Ling, the thing asserted as truth by this panoply of agencies is truth, irrespective of its objective, empirical validity, or lack thereof. Ling cheerled for Al-Qaeda because these bodies told him to, he held the US-orchestrated coup against Evo Morales legitimate because these bodies instructed him this to be the case, and he calls things like pointing out observable facts about the world situation and its players and characters ‘disinformation,’ even when they are true, if they offend the state-sanctioned narrative of truth he subscribes to.

This story is well worth remembering today, as the Liberal Government is in a desperate, otherwise inscrutable frenzy to provoke and exacerbate war in Eastern Europe. In these circumstances, the erroneous deployment of ‘disinformation’ is itself driven out of all proportion, and applied to any constellation of facts which does not directly serve the war effort of NATO. To bobble-heads like Ling, ensconced in their platform bunkers, every single thing asserted by the US and its immediate vassal states is de facto truth, and everything and anything which contradicts such assertions is de facto false. The most wild and unbelievable of assertions are made concerning the conflict in Ukraine, and barely any of such assertions are subject to any criticism or scrutiny whatsoever, so long as it accords with NATO dictates. It is not merely that this view, call it ‘Ling-brain-on-war,’ I guess, merely censors competing accounts, but it moreover mass produces untruth, a vast geyser of demonstrably false horseshit which is permitted to spew on the largest communications mouthpieces, going unchecked solely in virtue of it being convenient in the moment of a jingoistic push for war.

On February 26, on CBC News, host Natasha Fatah conducted a lengthy interview with a Ukrainian partisan in Canada collecting money to send weapons to Western Ukraine. This ‘interview’ was incredible for both its length and the extent to which it merely provided a platform for this Ukrainian partisan to extol the virtues of Ukrainian militarism and implore NATO to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. Each question from Fatah was a soft-ball ‘yes, aren’t they brave,’ ‘so you say you would like boots on the ground?’ This is a fundamental failure of journalism, an abject failure. A nightmare of non-journalism, for which Ms. Fatah should be profoundly ashamed.

The CBC has been the object of ridicule for its pro-war, pro-militarist bias for years. Habitually, over and over, paid advocates for weapons companies like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and right wing ghouls like John Bolton, are platformed for their ‘expertise’ on foreign affairs. This bias is a consequence of the rabid liberal imperialism of the affluent white management-editorial caste which has monopolized the CBC – primary Brodie Fenlon, Paul Hambleton and Chuck Thompson – to the exclusion of all other perspectives. It is sad, and wild, however, to see someone like Fatah so compliantly and cheaply used as a backdrop for open and unvarnished pro-war and pro-NATO propaganda. And that is the point with this farcical circus in Canadian media, are they not ashamed of being so pliant and malleable? Are they not mortified at being stenographers and mouthpieces for whatever orientation is handed down to them?

Canada’s elder statesman pundit Andrew Coyne has thrown himself behind the Ukrainian cause with enthusiasm. On Saturday, Coyne retweeted the SNL cold-opening singing jingo songs in Ukrainian peasant garb. How can they not itch slathered in their own absurdity? Coyne presents himself as the kind of wisened and considered commentator whose leatherbound tomes would occupy the bookshelves of the Laurentian literati for a decade or two. But there could be no more corrosive force to this presentation than the jingoistic oaf fervour he presently seized by.

Let us review what is really significant in this instance. In 2014 the US orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected leader of Ukraine, the intentions of which were to economically integrate the territory of Ukraine into the US sphere. This was a profoundly hostile and belligerent act. One of the consequences of this act was to strand and maroon an overwhelmingly culturally, ethnically and linguistically Russian people in the east in a country they no longer understood or felt wanted in. The deposed President, indeed, was from Donetsk. Independence in these regions was, in fact, immediately subject to a referendum. In the aftermath of the pro-US 2014 coup, the Donbas region, just as Crimea did, voted overwhelmingly for independence, with an overwhelming turnout. But whereas Russia was, at the time, content to suffer the blowback for recognizing the results of Crimea’s referendum, it urged the Donbas region to work towards its implementation. Over the past eight years, the US and its local proxies in first the Poroshenko Government, then the Zelensky Government, have allowed Neo-Nazi battalions in the east to harass, shell, menace and ethnically persecute these regions. Fifteen thousand people have died in the Donbas region between 2014 and 2022. The US, and Canada, have consistently provided military aid to these Ukrainian paramilitaries, including the explicitly Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. The so-called Minsk Agreements called upon Ukraine to recognize the particularities of these eastern regions, allow for their self-government, to withdraw its paramilitaries from around these regions, and to implement a program of economic recovery. None of this was done. The opposite was done. In January and February of 2021, Ukrainian paramilitaries ramped up their persecution of these regions, in concert with the United States, as a pretext for war.

So when the Western media now cries crocodile tears and portrays the Ukrainians as innocent lambs, or noble warriors, unblemished by moral taint, you should spit it at their feet. A band of robber barons and their American patrons stole Ukraine in the dead of night, and now want the world to forget it and beat the war drums with them. The post-coup Governments could have committed to the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, and could have pursued a path of peace with and development for the eastern regions, and they did not. Rather they kept them locked up in the closet, shelled every day, beaten like dogs, for eight long years, and something, unfortunately, was going to break.

This conflict is obscured, not illuminated, by the pious jingoism of the liberal imperialist dummies draped from head to foot in blue and yellow. The massive and enduring deficit of historical knowledge which their shabby sabre-rattling requires is a bumbling and pathetic insult to what this situation requires in terms of explication and articulation towards de-escalation and peace.

Canada is set up to fail in this instance. Our foreign policy is essentially determined, in the last instance, by a virulent Ukrainian fascist, Chrystia Freeland. And, make no mistake, Chrystia Freeland is a fascist, and has acted as one throughout the world during her tenure. And our media is so anemic, stupid and cultivated to produce even a modicum of critical analysis. As Jay Watts has noted, the only possible outcome is for Canada’s undersized influence on the world stage to be severely apparent and ridiculous. Nobody wants this war more than Canada, not even America. We are the yipping, rabid attack dog at America’s heel under Trudeau and Freeland, no less than we would have been under any of the various pasty white gentlemen who vie for the Conservative leadership. But that makes it even more important to highlight how and why it is that Canada, of all places, is baying for blood and desperate to inaugurate World War Three.

Nobody wants war and conflict, but permitting for only the monological expression of a farcical, one-sided and absurd pro-Ukrainian narrative, rather than doing anything to alleviate the conflict, in fact profoundly exacerbates and pours fuel on the fire. No, Western Ukrainians are not deserving of Russian occupation, and their legitimate interests in self-determination ought to be respected. So, too, should the legitimate interests of the eastern regions of the People’s Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk in self-determination be respected. And, yes, the entirely legitimate and reasonable interests which Russia possesses in its own security and development, which the US has ever sought to trench on, ought to be respected. The one-sidedness of the debate right now is incredible. To suggest that the US and NATO are not benign, still less benevolent, entities gets one accused of being a Putin-lover. And yet the liberal imperialist bobble-heads, baying for blood, consider it totally normal and sane to cosplay as Ukrainian peasants and rehearse the Ukrainian blood and soil myth on primetime!

This entire situation is an excuse for the most affluent liberal shitheads to beat their emaciated little chests and feel pious for cheering for Nazi battalions. Don’t fear offence in rejecting this monological NATO narrative and its pious bobblehead policemen, because that is what actual journalism is, presenting facts which unsettle the powerful where and when you are. If there is to be any chance at a peaceful resolution of the conflict, it will come from ravenously and mercilessly attacking this kind of sycophancy for officialdom.

Specific Imperialism and Social-Chauvinist Forgetting in Ukraine and Canada

The events in Eastern Europe over the past days and weeks have shocked and concerned the world, and everyone’s focus and attention is rightly on efforts to de-escalate the situation and resolve even strong differences peacefully. But the discussion invariably turns acrimonious once one attempts to analyze whose actions are really impeding peace and development. The dominant view promulgated in the West, most prominently in its privately owned means of communication, like MSNBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, the WSJ, etc holds that the barbarian hun simply struck, out of the blue, with no reason or cause whatsoever, as an expression of their backwardsness and unenlightenment.

Liberals, of course, have thrown themselves into this farce with aplomb. Adorned with their Je Suis Ukraine facebook banners and yellow and blue twitter handles, they e-transfer their pennies to the Roman Shukhevych memorial foundation. It is sickening, really. What is a hundred and fifty casualties in comparison with the fifteen thousand who have died in the Donbas over the past eight years? These people don’t know and don’t care, they’ve been told by their favourite liberal plutocrat celebutantes to be outraged, and shake their little fists with indignation. Many of them would not have been able to locate Ukraine on a map a month ago, but now it is their cause célèbre.

It would be bad enough for this view to be held by the owning class and their self-identified mouthpieces and idiots, but what is worse is when self-professed ‘socialists’ do the owner’s work and promote such imperialist canards. In Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin reproaches Kautsky for his narrowly political understanding of imperialism, his having contained it to narrowly national question. Kautsky’s understanding of imperialism, Lenin writes, amounts to merely a thirst for annexations. Lenin says that Kautsky's definition is wrong because it elides that contemporary imperialist interests reflect a preference for annexations of highly industrialized areas, as well as the role of the development of productive forces in securing such annexations, and thus misses whose specific interests that preference reflects, ie financiers. Lenin charges that Kautsky concertedly elides this because he is representative of a kind of onlooker whose real interests are in obscuring, rather that illuminating, the real implications of the ubiquity of the monopoly form. This, Lenin finds, is social-chauvinism, the effort to reconcile the interests of the working class to those of their own monopoly imperialist formation.

Lenin charges that Kautsky believed in the possibility of a benevolent and pacific superimperialism, meant in the sense of a harmonious and perpetual division of the world along capitalist lines. Lenin charges that the intention of the social chauvinist 'socialists,' like Kautsky, is to obscure the reality that, as long as society is still stratified along the lines of a class division between those who possess the means of production and exchange, and those who merely sell their labour to obtain the means of subsistence, "are inevitably nothing more than a 'truce' in periods between wars." [V I Lenin "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)" Collected Works Vol XXII (New York: Progress, 1963), 295] Kautsky's analysis of imperialism is "permeated through and through with a spirit, absolutely irreconcilable wit Marxism, of obscuring and glossing over the fundamental contradictions of imperialism." [V I Lenin "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)" Collected Works Vol XXII (New York: Progress, 1963), 298]

In promoting the notion of a perpetual and stable super-imperialist alliance of the monopoly capitalist states and their associations for the purposes of the exploitation of the world, Kautsky obscures the actual development of imperialism. "Instead of showing the living connection between periods of imperialist peace and periods of imperialist war, Kautsky presents the workers with a lifeless abstraction in order to reconcile them to their lifeless leaders." [V I Lenin "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)" Collected Works Vol XXII (New York: Progress, 1963), 296]

"We ask, is it 'conceivable,' assuming that the capitalist system remains intact - and this is precisely the assumption Kautsky does make - that such alliances would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?

The question has only to be presented clearly for other than a negative answer to be impossible. This is because the only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc., is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of history, or countries is impossible under capitalism. Half a century ago Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, if her capitalist strength is compared with Britain of that time; Japan is compared with Russia in the same way. Is it 'conceivable' that in ten or twenty years' time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? It is out of the question."

V I Lenin "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)" Collected Works Vol XXII (New York: Progress, 1963), 295.

The conflict in the Donbas today reflects the impossibility of lasting peace under conditions of capitalism, as articulated by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. It reflects the falsity and unreality of the contention of the End of History made by American NeoConservatives like Francis Fukuyama thirty years ago, and its corollary in the metaphysical nihilism of Lyotard’s purported transcendence of meta-narratives. Society is still wracked by contradiction, a result of class stratification and its implication on the world stage, competition between monopoly capitalist blocs. So long as the development of the means of production and exchange in the world remains alienated by the monopoly capitalist form, conditions of peace will be irregular and punctuated by war.

A previously settled division of the world among great powers and their respective trusts and associations, under the aegis of the United States, is today coming undone, and the efforts of the United States to preserve and extend its sphere of accumulation in the face of a shifting balance of power among those powers is provoking war. The US orchestrated Maidan coup of 2014, as well as the exploitation of Ukraine’s natural resources, and the ethnic persecution of Russian-speaking regions in the east, are hostile acts of war by the United States against Russia.

The pro-war liberal imperialist position requires forgetting and obliviousness, well delineated and concerted stupidity. It requires forgetting the cynical efforts of the United States in weaponizing radicalized jihadi variants of Islam against the former Soviet Union, and the decades of horrors that this gave rise to across the middle east. It requires forgetting the aggressive eastern movement of the US-led military alliance, NATO, right up to and along Russia’s borders. It requires forgetting that the illegal US-orchestrated coup of 2014 was against a governor from those eastern regions. It requires forgetting that it was Ukraine which violated the Minsk agreements, which required acknowledgement of the particularities of the eastern regions of Donestsk and Luhansk, acceptance of their self-government, withdrawal of paramilitaries from those territories, and a program of economic recovery implemented for these regions. It requires forgetting that Ukraine did the opposite, and that the last eight years have been marked by constant shelling, harassment, ethnic persecution against these regions.

The mistake made by those who disclaim the conflict as merely differing orientations of statecraft is in misperceiving imperialism as disconnected from calculated accumulation, just as Kautsky did. The efforts to integrate Ukraine into the Western sphere of accumulation – the political battle between, on the one hand, a pro-Western Ukrainian comprador elite, who favoured disconnection with Russia, and the ideological rehabilitation of Ukraine’s legacy of Nazi collaboration, and, on the other, the institutional public sphere which was, much as Belarus still is today, basically a relatively autonomous adjunct of the Russian state, and culminating in the Maidan coup of 2014 – has everything to do with the division of territories among the competing great powers, specifically in terms of their relative accumulation. The Maidan coup of 2014 reflects, in effect, the economic theft of Ukraine by the West against Russia, it was a revolution of petty Ukrainian capitalists, in concert with their big money accomplices in the West, against the Ukrainian people. Draped in the finery of mostly mythological blood and soil myth, the Maidan of 2014 was in fact an act of war by the United States against Russia, having very little, if anything, to do with ‘freedom’ for Ukrainians themselves.

Chrystia Freeland is having a field day, of course, and has ostensibly flung open the border to Ukrainians who wish to immigrate to Canada. Canada, a settler-colonial imperialist state, fosters and encourages reaction abroad, and then provides greater freedom of movement to the reactionaries, of course. The requirements of actively produced propaganda for belligerence against Russia in this instance, however, produce the most absurd of consequences, where the Russian is identified with the caricature of a barbaric slav, but the Ukrainian, apparently inexplicably, is not. The contention that the overwhelming majority of Russian people are either stupid, or oppressed, or that Putin is acting without their endorsement, is an orientalist trope. It supplants an actual analysis of the situation with a comforting liberal-imperialist mythology of subduing the unenlightened peripheral upstart.

The social chauvinist must necessary gloss over the repeated failures to even attempt to implement the Minsk agreements on the part of Ukraine, they must avoid confronting the reality of fear and persecution visited upon the people’s of Donetsk and Luhansk over the past eight years, they must necessarily be indifferent to their alienation and misery. Such social chauvinists must necessarily avert their eyes from right-wing fascist and terrorist influences in Ukraine, and ignore that the Ukrainian state has joined in the promotion of an official state blood and soil mythology, and the ideological rehabilitation of perpetrators of the holocaust. The social chauvinist must necessary elide, ignore, or block out acknowledgement of the human rights violations perpetrated by officially integrated Neo-Nazi regiments in the Ukrainian armed forces, as well as the fact that these regiments have become a nexus of support for white supremacist elements in the West.

The Russian intervention in Ukraine is already over, for all intents and purposes. It lasted approximately an hour and a half for Russia to demonstrate its overwhelming military superiority over Ukraine, with targeted eliminations of its major military infrastructure, and a relative minimum of casualties. The effort to televisually amplify or contort its extent for demagogic purposes in the West is overwhelming. Elements in the imperialist state most under the sway of financier interests are baying for blood in retaliation. Weapons companies in the West are already salivating.

As tempting as it may be for self-professed ‘socialists’ to be disclaiming Vladimir Putin, and participating in the pious demonization of the irrational slavic despot, this would be a profound betrayal of truth and the working class of all nations, to whom the obligation is to oppose the mystifications of the owning class. Now, instead, is the time to forcefully advance what the outbreak of hostilities really reflects: the effects of the United States efforts to assert hegemony over more and more territory, and more and more economically developed territory, and to integrate these territories into its own sphere of accumulation. However much you may dislike war and conflict, the war and conflict neither started, nor will end, with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. In many respects the conflict began with the 2014 coup, and any efforts at de-escalation now must needs centre that truth in its discussion of the reasonable expectations of most average everyday Ukrainians, alike with the reasonable expectations of those in the east who have a radically different orientation to the events of 2014. The liberal imperialist press likes to portray what occurred in Crimea in 2014 as an annexation, but this contention elides that the population of Crimea, with an over 80 per cent turnout, voted to leave Ukraine in 2014 in the aftermath of the pro-US coup. Censoring this point is exemplary of the kind of social chauvinist forgetting which aim at papering over the real nature of monopoly capitalist imperialism and its irreconcilable contradictions. Participating in cynical liberal imperialist jingoism against Russia today, especially by means of social chauvinist myopia and forgetting, is objectively siding with the monopoly interests of the United States and its immediate sub-imperial vassal states.

The 2014 Maidan coup was an act of martial economic theft by the United States against Russia. It dramatically impacted the national security calculations of Russia, with a pro-Western vassal suddenly immediately on its doorstep, being armed and trained by NATO functionaries, and it carved up and privatized the energy resources of Ukraine. Worst of all, it marooned several overwhelmingly Russian speaking peoples in the east feeling out of place, persecuted, and militarily threatened by far right wing paramilitary thugs sanctioned by the newly minted pro-Western Ukrainian government.

The last eight years have been hell on earth for these peoples, who have proclaimed independence and been recognized by Russia these past weeks, the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. These people were perpetually let down and immiserated by Ukraine’s refusal to take the steps agreed to in the Minsk agreements. Ukraine did not take steps to ensure that these peoples’ would not be menaced by Neo-Nazi thugs along racial and ethnic lines. Ukraine did not implement a program of economic recovery for these regions. Rather, Ukraine allowed these regions to descend down into omnipresent low-grade civil war for eight years, with enormous casualties and degradation of quality of life. The Russian intervention is the direct consequence of this failure on the part of Ukraine and its Western patrons to even decently ameliorate the consequences of their political and economic annexation of Ukraine.

As we think about the events of the past week, we should keep in mind not only the interests of Western Ukrainians to be free from military aggression, certainly, but we should keep it in mind no degree less than the right of Eastern Ukrainians to be free from military aggression, too. The Russian assault on Ukraine has been immediate and overwhelming, the Western Ukrainian assault on the eastern regions has been a slow and grinding siege, but neither are to the benefit of the people involved, and both are reflective of the changed geopolitical situation. The United States can expend resources to destabilize states on the frontier of NATO and integrate them into its sphere of accumulation, just as it has been able to do for many decades. However Russia, far moreso than in the past, can expend resources to militarily oppose this attempted expansion and economic integration by the US and its immediate vassal-states. Both reflect the intractability of conflict and contradiction under conditions of monopoly imperialism, the changing balance of power, contingent on both political and economic factors each in their own development.

As the United States attempts to destabilize states on the periphery of NATO and integrate them into the US’s own sphere of accumulation, this will be, increasingly, met with military pushback from states which are increasingly able to marshal this pushback as a result of their own economic growth, and the relative decline of the United States. In order to put an end to these kinds of conflicts, akin to those in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, it is imperative to expose the real interests which mobilize such conflicts, namely, the interest which the owning class has in capitalist accumulation and the extension of the monopoly capitalist form. Explicit financial, military and propaganda support for the most reactionary elements on the periphery of the sphere of accumulation of the United States is illustrative of how durable and sustainable peace is ultimately not possible under conditions of monopoly imperialist capitalism.