Why is Russia determined to demilitarize Ukraine? Because since Obama’s team forced through the installation of an extreme right government in Kiev eight years ago, the country’s armed forces have been controlled by a ruling clique that’s driven by the most destructive ideology in existence. An ideology that rationalizes the persecution, murder, and forced displacement of much of the globe’s population, all in order to fulfill the goal of gaining land for the master race. When Adolf Hitler formulated this ideology, he took direct inspiration from the project by the American settlers to wipe out 90% of the Native population. His aim was to replicate what the U.S. settlers did across Eurasia, with the Jews, the Slavs, and the other threats to the “Aryans” needing to be exterminated to make way for the superior “nation.” Eliminating the Jews was how the Nazis aimed to get rid of the nation’s supposed internal threats, and eliminating the Slavs was how they aimed to acquire a continent’s worth of newly available land.
These facts are basic parts of Holocaust history, but apparently not even the Holocaust’s memory is safe from being damaged by the corrosive effects of imperialist propaganda. The liberals who whitewash Ukrainian fascism want us to forget the most important lessons from the Holocaust, during the most crucial moment ever for humanity to remember those lessons. We’re in a time when the United States government and its allies are doing everything they can to support a new version of the Third Reich within Ukraine, while fascist parties are speedily gaining power across the globe. We’re in a time where our media and academic institutions are taking every opportunity to censor those who tell the truth about the nature of Kiev’s government: that it’s an entity which has facilitated celebration of Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators, and that’s naturally seeking to replicate a Ukrainian equivalent of the Third Reich’s colonization project. This version of the Nazi “Lebensraum” land grab ideology looks like the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass Russian speakers, and the settling of the leftover land by those deemed to be the real “Ukrainians.”
The ideas behind this plan are medieval, if not neolithic. They’re informed by the perception that human history can only ever be different groups vying for control over territory, and that therefore the Jews, the Romas, and the Russian speakers must be trampled on lest these groups inevitably conspire to destroy the Ukrainians. (Whatever “Ukrainian” means according to Kiev’s exclusive and discriminatory definition.) This is why the U.S.-puppeted, ultra-nationalist security state that truly controls the country has pressured Zelensky into going along with a project to bring back the Holocaust, despite Zelensky himself being Jewish. This is why the government has effectively brought back the Nuremberg laws by criminalizing the speaking of Russian. This is why the CIA has been able to aid neo-Nazi terrorist organizations with the government’s complicity. The neo-Nazis and the imperialists share the goal of destroying Russia. If the neo-Nazis fulfill Hitler’s vision for a depopulated Russia, the imperialists won’t care less, because that would be perfectly aligned with imperialism’s desire to win on the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard.
The lesson socialists must learn from this is that when fascists show themselves to be fascists, you should treat them like fascists. You should equip yourself to defend yourself and those you care about from the violence that they’ll try to exact. Russia is doing this by working to disable Ukraine’s military, at the request of the Donbass separatists who’ve freed themselves from Kiev’s rule. Ukraine would have invaded the liberated regions if not for Russia’s intervention. Which, thanks to the recent referendum within these regions for joining the Russian Federation, has succeeded in terms of its goal to protect the bulk of the threatened populations. In reaction to Russia’s taking 20% of Ukraine, and then making this into Russian territory, Ukraine has requested to join NATO. NATO has been forced to reject this request, on the rational grounds that if Ukraine were to become a NATO country, the balance would be tipped towards nuclear war. The imperialists have had to make the same compromise in regards to the question of giving Ukraine long range nuclear missiles, which Washington has refused to do.
Russia has outmaneuvered the imperialists using the power of the question “are you sure you want to take it that far,” like how the DPRK did. Now all the imperialists can do is continue their proxy war in the futile hope that Russia will still be destabilized.
To try to get this payoff, the imperialists are igniting chaos wherever they can. They’ve instigated a new conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, carried out a false flag in which a Russian pipeline has been exploded, and created a psyop where Putin’s words have been taken out of context to make it appear as if he’s threatened nuclear war. In reality, he’s merely made the Donbass into a part of Russia, which the imperialists have viewed as a provocation in itself. Washington is getting so desperate that it’s acting the way the Nazis likely would have acted during the runup to World War II if they had had the atom bomb.
This year, the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review omitted the idea of a no use first policy, in contrast to Russia’s ongoing stance that it won’t use nukes unless someone else nukes it. And despite NATO still having one last shred of rationality on nuclear issues (for now) by not letting Ukraine join, it’s backing Ukraine’s attempts to take territory away from regions that are now part of the Russian Federation, ignoring the nuclear risk that this poses. Throughout U.S. imperialism’s decline since the start of the War on Terror and the new cold war, the State Department has shed the old diplomatic norms, which nurtured the idea of detente. It’s increasingly abandoned the idea of diplomacy more broadly. Washington is a mad dog, more willing to do something reckless as it gets more isolated.
The U.S. and its Ukrainian proxies aren’t acting like this because they’re confident they’ll win. They’re lashing out due to how apparent it’s become that they’ll never achieve their destabilization goals. Ukraine’s recent efforts to take back territory have come at strategic costs, costs that will ultimately prove to be fatal. The imperialist media talks about a Russian “brain drain,” but Ukraine has undergone a depletion of its troops that’s rendered unrealistic its goal of restoring the old border arrangement. These exertions are rash actions by a regime that lost hope for fulfilling its Lebensraum ambitions long ago, and is trying to momentarily gain jurisdiction over as many territories as it can before Russia completes its goals.
These goals never included gaining as much territory as possible; territory is not necessarily vital to winning a war. These goals are the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine so that Kiev is rendered impotent, and can no longer menace the Donbass peoples. Taking back plenty of the Ukrainian-controlled territory will no doubt be a byproduct of that, but land is not Russia’s vital concern.
With this referendum, that vision for a permanently liberated Donbass has already been fulfilled, aside from the remaining work Russia still needs to do in regards to picking off Ukraine’s armed forces. By making the Donbass part of Russia, Russia has established a literal boundary of demarcation that the imperialists won’t cross. The imperialists won’t do anything more substantial than continue to aid Ukraine’s self-defeating land grab attempts. Because if they were to seriously try to wrest back the Donbass region, they would turn the core imperialist countries into one big nuclear wasteland.
A few years ago, President Trump promised that he would bring “fire and fury” upon the DPRK. Then he capitulated to Kim Jong Un, because the DPRK had won the negotiations years prior. Recently, one British Prime Minister infamously made a similar promise, getting applause from the other imperialists in the room for declaring a commitment to pushing the button if it comes to that. In reality, what Britain and the other decaying imperial powers will do is keep stirring up trouble wherever they can, while not daring to do something that they know will create blowback they can’t manage. Russia, China, or north Korea are never going to start a nuclear war, the imperialist powers would have to initiate the process. Which they won’t intentionally do.
The dark reality is that though imperialism isn’t suicidal, it’s cultivated the unstable conditions that make nuclear war more of a danger than it’s ever been. All it would take to start World War III is one mistake. For as long as the imperialists have the tools to perpetuate these conditions, our paradigm of unprecedented danger will continue. Our great source of hope is that the transition towards multipolarity can’t be stopped, meaning imperialism’s hand can only keep getting weaker.
The imperialist media is insisting the winter will make the big difference in finally bringing the Russian economic collapse Washington hopes for. But that would be in spite of a thus-far ineffectiveness in the sanctions that U.S. officials have been admitting frustration over. Russia is winning the war by an honest strategic analysis. China continues to establish credibility for its Belt and Road Initiative, while working to strengthen U.S.-targeted countries in their security mechanisms to prevent color revolutions. The balance continues to tip away from Washington’s favor.
The “might makes right” ideology that the U.S. empire exported to Ukraine has been proven not to speak to some unavoidable facet of human nature, because “human nature” is determined by the given conditions and the conditions are changing. Ukrainian fascism, and ultimately the imperialist force behind it, will be wiped from existence by the unstoppable progression into a new historical epoch. An epoch where a cooperative new global order has been constructed, and where another wave of revolutions can sweep away a decaying monopoly capital.
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