U.S. imperialism sees every person on the planet as expendable, including the people within the U.S. itself. It’s willing to sacrifice any amount of human life to advance the interests of capital. It’s carried out dozens of coups, invasions, and proxy wars since Washington began its global aggressions over a century ago, and it’s been waging a continuous genocide against its internal colonies since the country’s founding. Since capital entered its current stage of decay over a century ago, the empire has been destroying the livelihoods of a growing amount of its own population, dismantling workers rights and social services through neoliberal shock policies. A country like this never acts with genuine humanitarian intent. Its only goal is to increase profits.
Washington claims it’s sending military aid to Ukraine to “protect” the Ukrainian people, but in truth, it’s willing to let Ukrainians suffer and die to the extent that Yemenis are suffering and dying should this serve the proxy war’s purpose. This purpose is to weaken Russia so that it can be destabilized, then broken up into a number of U.S.-subservient states like happened in Yugoslavia. Then, with China lacking its most important strategic ally, the war’s ultimate objective of providing leverage for subduing China can be fulfilled. Washington views the Ukrainian people as nothing more than tools to be used for throwing all of Eurasia into chaos. The 12 million people who’ve fled their homes since the conflict began are collateral damage in the geopolitical chess game that Washington is playing.
U.S. imperialism’s propagandists claim the sanctions and perpetual funneling of military equipment to Kiev are merely responses to unprovoked aggression by Russia. Yet simply by emphasizing the word “unprovoked,” they betray that they seek to hide the full context behind the situation in Ukraine. All the evidence shows that it was provoked, and that Washington and its puppet Kiev regime are concerned not with humanitarianism but with carrying out their common interests. Those interests are staked in the destruction of Russia, and the fulfillment of a Hitlerian colonization project for Eurasia.
This context being that Washington has been going back on its word to Russia after the Cold War, expanding NATO into more and more countries despite supposedly wanting peace. That in 2014, Washington orchestrated a coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected government, with two of the coup’s key figures Victoria Nuland and Joe Biden currently leading the proxy war effort. That since the coup, the illegitimate new Kiev governments have been perpetrating ethnic cleansing against Russian speakers within the Donbass, and have collaborated with Nazi militias to try to take back the land from the region’s national liberation forces. That Zelensky’s regime, in reflection of its anti-democratic nature, has effectively been treating its own people as human shields, backing Nazi battalions at the cost of endangering the public at large. That the imperialist leaders have long been hoping to impose sanctions significant enough to oust Putin, and that a Russian intervention within Ukraine has always been seen by them as the perfect excuse for such sanctions. They’ve been trying to make this happen for a long time, since they pivoted their strategy towards great-power competition with the goal of taking down China.
This is not to say Russia is playing into Washington’s hands by intervening in Ukraine, because his actions have overall done more to harm U.S. schemes than to advance them. The sanctions have backfired on the imperialist bloc, wrecking the economies of the U.S. and its allies while proving ultimately unable to break Russia’s economy. Militarily, Russia has essentially already been proven the victor, taking far too much territory for Ukraine to realistically be able to regain it. This has finally fulfilled the wishes of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which inferred eight years ago that the coup called for a military solution to the ensuing fascist terror campaign:
The aim of political and social terror against the majority of the people is to prevent the revival of the centuries-long union of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and other countries that used to be part of a single state. There are plans to install a pro-Western president amid the chaos reigning in the country. There is no doubt that in the context of growing moral and physical terror any early elections will be rigged….In the face of blatant Western interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine Russia cannot dispassionately watch a neo-Nazi, Russophobic and anti-Semitic regime being formed on its borders. The Russian leadership has everything that is necessary to stop Ukraine sliding into a civil war and anti-people dictatorship. Unless these opportunities are used the responsibility for the tragedy in Ukraine will rest with the Russian authorities….Russia must support popular resistance and self-organization of the masses in protecting their personal and social security in some south-eastern regions, especially in the Crimea and Sebastopol. If the popular movement there is allowed to be crushed, that would inflict irreparable damage on Russia’s interests and reputation.
In this horrific context that the Donbass people faced, where Nazi-aligned ultra-nationalists who outwardly called for forcibly relocating them had just come to power in Kiev, a Russian intervention within Ukraine was the best option from the start. Putin should have done this eight years ago. International law gave him the right to intervene the moment that Euromaidan, the violent event where the ultra-nationalists took power, was engineered by the imperialists. Responsibility to protect applies to a situation where a government is threatening genocide against a population, which the Kiev regime did by calling for the peoples of Crimea and beyond to be moved into “filtration” camps for the sake of a Ukrainian nationalist Lebensraum.
Journalist Patrick Cockburn has observed in regards to Washington’s recent wars that “cynical calculations about denying the other side an outright victory kept the other wars going, regardless of the human cost.” Because of this dynamic where the imperialists refuse to stop perpetuating conflict out of a never-ending desire for destabilizing imperialism’s enemies, this description would be more accurate if it referred to these conflicts in the present tense. Washington hasn’t stopped its war against Syria, imposing sanctions to sabotage the country’s rebuilding effort. It’s kept its cycle of intervention and occupation going in Iraq, having recommitted to its troop presence there after the Soleimani assassination two years ago. It’s not ceased its war against Afghanistan since the troop pullout from a year ago, imposing sanctions which are driving the country into famine while fomenting Uyghur Islamist terrorist attacks within Afghan borders. When you look far back enough, none of Washington’s wars have truly ended. For example, it’s still waging war against north Korea by crushing the country’s people with sanctions, using south Korea as a proxy for threatening the North with missiles, and creating disinformation to demonize the country’s socialist project.
The wars are always expanding into new fronts, while never ceasing. And at this stage of U.S. imperialism’s decline, where China has come to be the epicenter of a rising anti-imperialist new order, they all tie back to attacking China. Everything the U.S. does these days in some way has to do with trying to weaken China, whether this involves meddling in the horn of Africa to deprive China of Belt and Road Initiative partners, waging war against Syria to try to cut off a functioning Chinese trade route across the continent, or trying to dismember Russia so that China can be made more vulnerable. As long as the people within the core of the empire remain demobilized and fooled by imperialist propaganda, unable to assert their class interests by overthrowing their capitalist state, imperialism will continue to be able to create this destruction. And the proletariat in every country imperialism controls, including the imperialist countries themselves, will keep seeing their conditions deteriorate.—————————————————————————
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