Archive for the ‘Anti War Movements’ Category
Good Election News from Cymru(Wales) – Caerffili – Victory For Plaid Cymru But Defeat for both Labour and Reform UK
Most recent election news from the British state has been very depressing. A labour party government led by Keir Starmer regularly responds to the electoral rise of the far-right Reform outfit led by Nigel Farage by attempting to be more racist and right-wing than the racists themselves.
This political instability is damaging ancient foundations of the British state – Scottish politics in the 21st century has been dominated by the rise of political separatism – and now Cymru/Wales is following that trend.
This will have, and is having, important side-effects in Ireland.
How do we explain an extremely welcome Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) electoral triumph in Caerffili?
Geoff Ryan’s interesting report is below – one of the factors he highlights is
The women of the small Ukrainian community played an important role in combatting the lies of Reform.
Link :
Caerffili victory for Plaid Cymru but defeat for both Labour and Reform UK
Caerffili – Victory For Plaid Cymru But Defeat for both Labour and Reform UK.
Geoff Ryan reports from Wales/Cymru on the Caerffili byelection result
Read the rest of this entry »From Ukraine, Galina Rymbu’s Open Letter to Westminster MP Zarah Sultana – a feminist, anarchist and poet delivers a personal and political address to a leader of the British “Your party”
A feminist, anarchist, and poet living in Ukraine delivers a personal and political address to the leader of Your Party, inviting reflection on what contemporary anti-fascism and genuine strategies of solidarity with the oppressed might look like.
Link :
About Galina Rymbu :
Galina Rymbu’s poems employ history as a discursive tool to understand the present—stories of revolution, movement in time and space, life, and livelihood emerge. Rymbu seeks a radical feminist and leftist poetics that does not condescend to the oppressed, but rather embraces the complexity of every emotion and political position, and of language itself. She opens her poetry to the violence of propaganda, biopolitical manipulation, ideological pressures, as well as the violence of personal intimacy. Life in Space is Rymbu’s first full-length collection in English translation and includes poems selected from her three books as well as more recent work.
Dear Zarah,
Recently, several journalists and left-wing activists reached out to me asking for a comment on your position regarding the suspension of political and military support for the Ukrainian people. Whilst reflecting on how to respond, I decided to write you a personal letter instead. As a leftist and feminist activist from Russia who has been living in Ukraine for the past eight years, this seemed more appropriate than offering a dry neutral comment.
I am addressing you personally also because I see how people like you — those who appear on the global political stage — become a source of hope for many of the oppressed, whose voices and cries are still being drowned out by the speeches of dictators and the “pragmatic” calculations of capitalists who prefer to continue doing their dirty, bloody business with them.
For many younger generations of leftist activists, your name is associated with a promise of future and progress, as so many are tired of politics being made behind the closed doors of elite “men’s clubs,” to which we will never be invited. I know how important this is for my comrades in the UK, and during my visit to London on the eve of the pandemic, we spoke a lot about it —reading political poetry in squats and arguing in small bars about the future of our planet.
From birth until the age of 27, I lived in Russia. I grew up in Western Siberia, in the workers’ settlement of Chkalovsky in the city of Omsk, in a poor working-class family of mixed Moldovan, Romanian, and Ukrainian descent. We lived below the poverty line; we didn’t even have money to pay for electricity, so our home was often dark and without food. My parents still live in Chkalovsky, in a place that successful Europeans would probably call “the social bottom.” My friends, classmates, and lovers still live there. I am now 35, and I am still poor. I remain connected to my class and to the people who are losing their minds in this “prison of nations.” Since childhood, I have faced multiple forms of discrimination and persecution based on my ethnicity—simply because of my name, surname, and appearance. Later, I lived in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where I studied literature and then turned to research in the “philosophy of war,” seeking to understand the foundations of the idea of transforming an “imperialist war into a civil one” (a development best traced in Lenin’s Clausewitz Notebook). [1]
Read the rest of this entry »Political Nonsense Expressed by British MP Zarah Sultana of the new British left organisation “Your Party” – she attacks Volodymyr Zelensky to justify scabbing on the Ukrainian workers – Critics say : “it is perfectly possible to support a people’s struggle for national freedom while opposing the govt or political leadership currently at the head of that struggle”
The British Ukraine Solidarity Campaign is a growing force.
It recently won the support of the UNITE trade union, which also organises in Ireland.
UNITE the Union votes overwhelmingly for strong solidarity with Ukraine
But some parts of the British left offer policies which pretend to be anti-imperialist, but they stink.
It reminds this writer of bad old days in the 1960’s and 1970’s when many left organisations – from the Labour party to Official Sinn Féin and the Communist party – refused to practice solidarity with comrades in the six-county part of Ireland because they disagreed with the policies of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the main republican organisations which had a mass following.
We can not do anything about political mistakes made in the past – but we can learn from them and do better in the future. One big positive example from those days was the formation of the National H-Block-Armagh.
Readers interested. who like to burrow into useful political history, are invited to read this book review :
Smashing H Block:The Rise and Fall of the Popular Campaign Against Criminalization
In the meantime, congratulations to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in Britain.
John Meehan October 28 2025
From Ukraine Solidarity Campaign
We take no joy criticising a young left-wing UK political figure who has often spoken up for workers’ rights and progressive causes. But these barely coherent comments from Zarah Sultana on Ukraine sum up much of what is wrong with her wing of the left: www.instagram.com/reel/DQT62ysjFKK
First up – yes, Zelensky is no friend of Ukraine’s working class in the sense that his government pursues right-wing, neoliberal, anti-worker economic policies.
Unlike Zarah Sultana, we actually know something about this, since we are connected to Ukraine’s unions and have been actively involved in helping them fight these policies.
Read the rest of this entry »What is the problem with Yanis Varoufakis’ appearance in Moscow?
Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis is listed as a speaker at the BRICS Urban Future Forum 2025 to be held in Moscow, Russia, from September 17-18. Jeffrey Sachs was well recieved at last year’s event. Ilya Mateev wonders what Varoufakis hopes to achieve.
1. Education for Russians is good and right. I have no idea of “cancelling those living in Russia” – my approach is precisely the opposite. I do a great deal for education, discussion and bridge-building in Russia, though for obvious reasons I won’t write about this in detail. Overall, I am OBVIOUSLY in favour of any constructive activity involving those in Russia, and I consider this very important.
2. There are no problems with Varoufakis’s book being published in Russian. The book is rubbish and not worth the time spent on it, but that’s another conversation. The very fact of translation can only be welcomed.
3. Varoufakis is a public intellectual and even an activist (well, sort of). He had various options for engaging with Russians. He could have organised a closed Zoom event for Russian readers of his book and spoken with them candidly. After all, his DiEM25 [1] could have taken an interest in Russian opposition and left politics, Russian political prisoners, and so forth. Solidarity at the level of society and grassroots initiatives is both possible and valuable.
4. Varoufakis and his organisation did nothing of the sort. Instead, he went to the Moscow government’s urban planning forum. Such events are dubious in any country – they are thoroughly business establishment affairs, no place for leftists. In Russia there’s an additional factor – war, censorship, the impossibility of even asking a question without risk of criminal prosecution [2]. In such a situation, joining with bankers, developers, Chinese and Saudi surveillance companies is really beyond the pale.
5. Of course, Varoufakis does all this consciously. I think this is how he represents anti-imperialist struggle against the damned West and evil NATO (plus money, attention, first-class flights, etc.). This behaviour (whilst completely ignoring Russian grassroots initiatives) is precisely campism [3] – I’ll hang out with the Kremlin against the White House and Brussels. A dead end in political evolution.
6. The fact that I can’t even call on readers in Russia to ask Varoufakis some pointed question (because I have common sense) precisely demonstrates that he’s wrong to go and is engaging in nonsense. It’s shameful to speak at an event where the audience could get a two-year prison sentence [4] for their questions.
Ilya Mateev is one of the tens of thousands of anti-war Russians living in exile.
P.S.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/ilia.matveev
Translated for ESSF by Adam Novak
Footnotes
[1] DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) is a pan-European political movement founded by Varoufakis in 2016, advocating for democratic reform of EU institutions and progressive economic policies
[2] Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country has implemented increasingly harsh censorship laws, including criminalising “discrediting” the armed forces or spreading “fake news” about the war, with penalties of up to 15 years in prison
[3] Campism refers to the political tendency to reflexively support one geopolitical “camp” against another, often leading to uncritical backing of authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose Western powers
[4] Under current Russian law, individuals can face up to two years imprisonment for various speech-related offences, including “discrediting” the military or spreading information deemed “extremist”
Global call: Ukraine must receive all it needs to win a just peace! – Consider Signing A Petition
Link :
Global Call – Ukraine Must receive all it needs to win a just peace
To: The European Commission, the governments of European Union Member States and the United Kingdom
After US president Trump’s “summits” with Putin (August 15) and European leaders (August 18) Ukraine confronts the appalling prospect of an unjust “peace” settlement that rewards the Russian aggressor.
If forced on Ukraine, it will legitimise:
- The violent Russian occupation of a fifth of Ukrainian territory and the swap to Russia of territory and people presently under Ukrainian administration
- The destruction of Ukraine’s towns, schools, hospitals, infrastructure, environment and heritage
- The murder of tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens and the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children, and
- The genocidal Russification of the occupied territories, and a host of other war crimes.
It will also place the burden of ending the war not on aggressor Russia but on Ukraine, its victim–even as the Putin regime steps up its bombardments of Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure.
Read the rest of this entry »Mapping the Conservative Left: Why Some Socialists Sound Like the Right – “Soul-Searching on the Left”
Duncan Chapel, a revolutionary socialist based in Scotland, hosts a blog which explores big political and social changes in the world we live in.
The article below addresses many troubling developments on the left which have erupted in the 21st century. These trends exist everywhere – Duncan is very familiar with awful examples from the British state.
Readers on the left in in Ireland may be familiar with the example of “Counterfire” which is degenerating rapidly :
The red-brown disease can spread further without inoculation. Organizations at risk like Counterfire in Britain, while maintaining left-wing rhetoric, have consistently aligned with authoritarian positions internationally, acting as surrogates for Assad, Putin and Trump. Their opposition to supporting Ukrainian resistance and their hostility to transgender struggles reveals the logical endpoint of politics that prioritize “anti-Western” positioning over genuine solidarity with the oppressed.
| Mapping the Conservative Left: Why Some Socialists Sound Like the Right | Four conservative left tendencies: each represents a different form of capitulation |
The rise of the far-right across Europe and North America has prompted urgent soul-searching on the left. From Trump’s return to power to the growth of Alternative for Germany (AfD), from Giorgia Meloni’s ascendancy in Italy to the surge of Reform UK, reactionary forces are capitalizing on widespread social discontent. Yet a troubling phenomenon has emerged alongside this rightward shift: sections of the left itself have begun adopting positions that sound suspiciously similar to those of their supposed political opponents.
Source :
Mapping the Conservative Left – Why Some Socialists Sound Like the Right
This “conservative left” represents a fundamental betrayal of socialist principles. Rather than offering a genuine alternative to capitalist crisis, these currents have absorbed key elements of right-wing discourse—from economic nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment to cultural traditionalism and geopolitical authoritarianism. Understanding this phenomenon is crucial for any socialist strategy that seeks to build genuine working-class unity against our real enemies: the capitalist class and their political representatives.
Denys Pilash – A socialist in Ukraine – Versus Trump-Putin “realist” commentator Prof John Mearsheimer – concerning the Alaska fascist-fascist plan to carve up Ukraine
In weeks months and years to come, people all over the globe will look back at the Russian imperialist invasion of Ukraine and wonder why more people of the left failed to agree with Denys Pilash. Denys is a Ukrainian political scientist, historian, a member of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh, and an editor at Commons: Journal of Social Criticism. Mearsheimer is a right-wing Professor who works in Chicago.
Denys Pilash (Sotsialnyi Rukh V John Mearsheimer on Democracy Now
President Trump says he is working on a “deal” to end the Russia-Ukraine war by hosting a series of meetings between the U.S., European Union, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin is insisting Russia keep areas of Ukraine that it has seized, including the long-contested Donbas region, while Zelensky is asking the U.S. for security guarantees to prevent future invasion by its powerful neighbor. We host a conversation with two political scientists, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Ukrainian democratic socialist Denys Pilash, about the likely outcome of the talks and the roots of the conflict. Mearsheimer says “the sides remain so far apart” when it comes to the possibility of a ceasefire during peace negotiations that “the best outcome would be to settle this war now.” Pilash, on the other hand, says there are still measures that can be taken to pressure Russia to agree to a ceasefire and to secure more favorable postwar terms for Ukraine.
Read the rest of this entry »No Deals with War Criminals on Alaska Soil
This outstanding post comes from the Native Movement of Alaska,
ENSU – No Deals with War Criminals on Alaska Soil – Native Movement of Alaska
which gives readers interested in the dirty history of capitalist genocide in many parts of our globe – Palestine, Ukraine, Ireland, Australia, the United States of America – tells us why all people who identify with the left must oppose today’s “Nauseating charade as Putin comes out of international purgatory on Trump’s red carpet” (Keith Duggan, Irish Times, August 16 2025).
No Deals with War Criminals on Alaska Soil
Aug 14
Anchorage, Alaska – As President Donald Trump prepares to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 to discuss the Ukrainian crisis, Native Movement stands with Alaskans and those across the country who condemn any attempt to legitimize Russia’s war crimes on Alaskan lands.
Alaska knows the cost of Russian imperialism. For over a century, Russian colonizers stole and exploited land, decimated Alaska Native populations through violence, disease, and enslavement, and erased cultures with religious supremacy. Today, we see the same imperial playbook in Ukraine: annexation of territory, targeting of civilians, and the forcible deportation of over 20,000 Ukrainian children—a war crime under international law.
Alaska’s history with Russian rule doesn’t make us neutral — it makes us witnesses.
The decision to host Putin, a war criminal, on Alaskan soil is a betrayal of our history and the moral clarity demanded by the suffering of Ukraine and other occupied peoples.
Native Movement voices opposition to any deals that force Ukraine to cede territory, reward aggression, or silence the voices of those whose lives are at stake. We stand against the rise of fascism and violent occupation everywhere—whether in Ukraine, Palestine, or here in Alaska. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Alaska’s own experience with resource-driven governance shows how oil wealth erodes democracy and empowers authoritarianism, just as we see in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Hosting war criminals in Alaska is a betrayal of our communities and our future.
Read the rest of this entry »Trump-Putin Anti-Ukraine Summit in Anchorage Alaska – Large People-Power Protests
This report sets the scene :
Ukrainian refugees in Alaska have mixed feelings about US and Russian leaders’ meeting
Amy MacKinnon, Anchorage Alaska, Financial Times, August 15 2025
“On Thursday afternoon, hundreds of local residents rallied in support of Ukraine at an intersection of Anchorage’s East Northern Lights Boulevard, waving the country’s blue and yellow flag. A small brass band played Bella Ciao, the Italian folk song adopted by the anti-fascist resistance during the second world war. Passing cars honked their horns. “They are trying to make decisions, agreements, without Ukraine being involved,” said Anna Koraa, who moved to the US from Ukraine in 2019. Her mother, Olena Lazar, left Zaporizhzhia — one of the four Ukrainian regions Moscow claims, but does not fully occupy — and came to Alaska shortly after the war began. Lazar is deeply sceptical about Friday’s talks. “He won’t stop until he takes all of Ukraine,” she said of the Russian leader.”
A number of short reports are linked below :
Protesters Against Trump-Putin Ukraine Betrayal in Anchorage Alaska
Largest Ukraine Flag in the world on the way to Anchorage Alaska
Read the rest of this entry »Caucusus Colonels’ Fable in Dublin’s Phoenix magazine – real journalism versus pro-Putin deliberate misinformation
“Down the rabbit hole” is an English-language idiom or trope which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange. Lewis Carroll introduced the phrase as the title for chapter one of his 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, after which the term slowly entered the English vernacular. The term is usually used as a metaphor for distraction.[1] In the 21st century, the term has come to describe a person who gets lost in research or loses track of time while using the internet.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Fact check: Fake claim British Colonels were ‘captured’ in Ukraine
The fable spread among all usual tankie publications – that is, organs which uncritically peddle pro-Putin propaganda – and influencers (for example the former British Westminster MP George Galloway). It fitted in with The Phoenix magazine’s pro-Putin takes on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The magazine has form :
The story surfaced in the first week of August 2025. It is a media disinformation classic – 2.78 million views, spread in 53 countries, 17,800 posts, spread in 16 different languages.
A quick internet check revealed the story was not appearing on reputable news sites, and that it was spreading like wildfire on pro-Putin conspiracy organs.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 