Ukraine is on its way to losing. It’s likely that by the end of the year, Ukraine won’t have the resources to launch a counteroffensive against Russia, let alone continue its futile attempts to push back against Russia’s Operation Z. The liberation of Mariupol from Kiev’s brutal fascist militias, the capturing and execution of droves of neo-Nazi fighters, and the forcing of Zelensky to overwhelmingly rely on foreign weapons have made the operation’s success assured. The Donbass republics, after fighting for freedom from Kiev’s policies of ethnic cleansing, will remain independent, and Ukraine will lose a large part of its former territory.
Zelensky has preemptively responded to this reality by saying that he’ll make what remains of Ukraine a “big Israel,” where the National Guard has a greatly expanded role in daily life parallel to Israel’s police state. This has further revealed the Zionist influence upon Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist regime, which has received Israeli weapons for its partnered Azov Battalion and has this year had Israeli fighters join its war effort. When Ukraine’s defeat becomes impossible for the imperialist media to deny, Zionism will be dealt a blow along with it. This is because Zionism depends on a modern version of “manifest destiny,” where the favored people (who in Ukraine’s case are those who can be considered sufficiently “Ukrainian” despite Ukraine and Russia being one and the same) get their territorial expansion project vindicated by history. When the Donbass peoples prevail over Kiev, history will be shown to go in the direction of self-determination for oppressed nations. And ultimately in the direction of global communism.
Since Ukraine’s fascist 2014 coup, and the consequential effort by the Russian-speaking eastern peoples to gain independence, Kiev has rallied support for its war against self-determination by promising Ukrainians their own Lebensraum. Kiev’s officials have explicitly called for the ethnic Russians to be forcibly relocated should the Donbass separatists lose the war. Which would allow land for the neo-Nazis who’ve been committing war crimes on Kiev’s behalf throughout the conflict, and whose far-right ideological camp makes up this project’s social base. When Kiev loses, Zionism will be repudiated by extension, as Zionism depends on the same ethnic supremacist logic that Kiev uses.
Zionism is the tool that modern imperialism has created for expanding colonialism. It’s based upon the fraudulent “humanitarian” principles that the imperialists have used to justify their crimes since the second world war. The central argument used to justify it—that it’s supposedly crucial for protecting the Jewish people—has gone hand in hand with all the times the U.S. empire has waged war under the “responsibility to protect” rationale. The Zionists have ignored that prior to the founding of Israel, the USSR created a haven for the Jews in the form of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, the self-governing zone within Russia where nearly a fifth of a million people still reside. The vilification of Russia, obviously now apparent in the Ukrainian imperialist proxy war effort that Israel backs, has caused the Oblast to be overlooked in favor of Zionism’s racist vision. Using Biblical scripture as justification, the imperialist powers insisted that the only possible location for a Jewish self-determination project was on Arab land, then imposed a hierarchical ethno-state which violates Palestinian sovereignty while persecuting dark-skinned Jews.
This genocidal project has gained a social base the same way that the United States, Australia, and the other settler-colonial states did: through offering hierarchical benefits to the favored groups which immigrate to the country. The Israelis have narrowed the definition of what it means to be Jewish, both through their systemic marginalization of non-Ashkenazi Jews and through their rhetoric about anti-Zionism being antisemitism. By demonizing all who participate in BDS, including anti-Zionist Jews, they’ve sought to make the Jewish identity synonymous with participation in their settler project. This reactionary ideology, racist both against Arabs and against Jews by proxy, has been coated in the false virtue of U.S. imperialism’s “humanitarian” propaganda.
When Israel has put Palestinians into the open-air concentration camp of Gaza, committed innumerable war crimes, implemented dozens of discriminatory laws, and engaged in forced relocation to make way for settler living space expansions, it’s all been filtered by the imperialist media through a lens of paternalistic chauvinist narratives. Narratives which claim that the annexation of these territories, even when they blatantly violate international law, has been instrumental for protecting the Jews. And that the Palestinians are therefore unreasonable for demanding their sovereignty, and deserving of whatever consequences war brings upon them. In reality, this isn’t Jewish “protection,” and that’s apparent from the deportations that African Jewish migrants have been subjected to upon coming to Israel. It’s a project to make a select, European-tied part of the Jewish diaspora into oppressors. Zionism is only seen as “protection” because in the colonial ideology, oppressor and oppressed nations must exist, and the only way for a group to be safe is if they become part of an oppressor nation.
Such is the reasoning of the Ukrainian fascists, and those throughout the imperialist bloc who support Ukraine’s war crimes out of supposed love for “human rights.” Ukraine’s supporters haven’t heard of the atrocities committed by Ukraine’s National Guard, because this Ukrainian equivalent of Zionism has been made into a part of our cultural hegemony. Nor have they heard of the mass grave that Kiev created in 2014 when it carried out collective punishment against the population in the separatist areas. Nor of Kiev’s torture of prisoners of war, executions and detentions of political dissidents, statements that glorify Ukraine’s World War II Nazi collaborators, book bans, or support for the neo-Nazi militias as they’ve carried out pogroms.
All the media has shown us is a picture of a nation victim to Russian “imperialism,” aggressed against by Putin for wanting to take back the separatist territories. It’s Ukraine’s U.S.-orchestrated coup, fascist policies, and ethnic cleansing which provide context behind why the Donbass peoples have decided they no longer want to be part of Ukraine. And behind why Russia has intervened on behalf of the Donbass republics, which makes it live up to the “responsibility to protect doctrine” that Washington pretends to enforce. Like the Palestinians, the Russian speakers in the Donbass are portrayed as deserving whatever they get as a consequence for their refusal to bend to the oppressor nation’s will. Because the oppressor nation can’t even be acknowledged as such, it can only be portrayed through a “hear no evil, see no evil” lens.
The fake piousness used by both Zionists and Ukraine apologists, projecting an image of a nation fighting for its “self-determination” despite seeking to crush the sovereignty of the oppressed nations, cultivates an unshakable belief in the oppressor nation’s victory. It’s believed beyond a doubt that the Israelis will fulfill their destiny as “god’s chosen ones,” and that Ukraine will win this conflict. But when the latter claim is proven wrong, the former claim will further be called into question. Zionism is not an ideology with fundamental credibility. It depends on a social contract of giving stolen land to one relatively privileged part of the diverse Jewish diaspora, and its brazen disregard for every international human rights law puts it at odds with all societies outside the imperialist countries. As well as with the oppressed nations inside the U.S. empire’s borders, which seek to defeat colonialism and imperialism in solidarity with the Palestinians.
When Ukraine loses, the U.S. empire’s collapse will accelerate. The world will be brought closer to the dissolution of the United States, and the creation of a post-colonial socialist federation of nations where the “United States” used to be. The process towards global communist revolution will be sped up, and Israel’s colonial project will become less viable as its capital weakens. The imperialists, in tandem with their Zionist running dogs, can call the liberation of the Donbass peoples a Russian “imperialist” project all they like. But this won’t stop the transition to a multi-polar world, the weakening of U.S. capital, and the subsequent coming of the pan-American decolonial socialist revolution. Which will bring Zionism, and all other ideologies which justify violating national sovereignty, far closer to becoming historical relics.
—————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
