Archive for the ‘Left Evasionism’ Category
Genocide in Gaza, Palestine; Genocide in Ukraine – Good Bad and Ugly Statements from the Left in Ireland
Hypocrisy is shared by many political actors on the left and the right. We witness genocide against the Palestine people and genocide against the Ukrainian people. It is the job of the left to practice critical solidarity in each case. Ukraine’s political leader (Zelenskyy) is not left-wing. Palestine’s political leadership in Gaza is anti-left (Hamas). Resistance has to be enabled. Many on the left have a blind spot on this issue. In the case of Ukraine we must prevent the creation of a Palestine/Gaza in Europe by backing armed resistance against Putin’s genocidal invasion.
We present a meme and a counter-meme.
Spot the Inconsistency No.1 :
Spot the Inconsistency Number 2 :
Holly Cairns TD (Social Democrats Leader, Cork South-West) spoke in the Dáil (the Irish parliament) on this issue on October 12 2023. She got it right.
John Meehan October 13 2023
A Palestinian View On Ukraine: Parallels Of Occupation And Solidarity – Versus People Before Profit Double Standards
Several public representatives and supporters of the Irish left-wing party People Before Profit (PBP) attack the Dublin Government’s Double Standards over two major 2023 genocidal wars : Israel’s Genocidal Assault on the Palestinian People and Russia’s Genocidal Invasion of Ukraine.
For example Paul Murphy TD (Dublin South-West) declares on his Facebook page :
“Since Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the right of an occupied nation to defend itself has been widely recognised.
Now as Israel begins to unleash hell on Gaza and governments prepare to excuse Israeli war crimes, it’s clear that right doesn’t apply to Palestinians. Why not?”
Big problem here : Paul and and others on the left are throwing a dangerous political boomerang : instead of using exactly the same principled framework for supporting Ukraine and Palestine, they operate double standards. When they add denunciation of mass media inconsistency, the government, the European Union, in supporting Ukraine while opposing Palestine, we witness inconsistency in reverse from the left, supporting Palestine while opposing Ukraine.
John Meehan October 10 2023
Aden Shaheen, a Palestinian living in Britain, offers a far better policy.
Article Source : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article68151
In this interview, Adeeb Shaheen shares his perspectives on the ongoing war in Ukraine. As someone who has experienced life under military occupation, he draws parallels between Israel’s actions in Palestine and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, speaking to the suffering of civilians under aggression from a more powerful military force. Interview by Fred Leplat.
Fred Leplat – Adeeb, you describe yourself as a Ukrainian Palestinian and you are now in Britain. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and why you are now in Britain today?
I was born in Palestine and lived there until the Israeli occupation administration expelled my father to Jordan in 1968 for his activities against the occupation. My mother took us, her children, and left for Jordan to join him. I finished school in 1976 and set off for the Soviet Union to study electrical engineering. After finishing my studies, I went back to Jordan, worked there for a couple of years, and then moved to live in Palestine with my wife and son. In Palestine, I took part in the first Intifada and the resistance movement. In 1990, I was arrested by the Israeli occupants and sent to prison for four years. After jail, I resumed my life in Palestine, where the Palestinian Authority began to operate the civilian life of the Palestinians on the occupied Palestinian land. After two years of the second Intifada, I left my home town of Nablus with my family and moved to live in Jordan. It was difficult there as well. In September 2003, I received a job offer from an international trading company to work in its branch in Ukraine. I moved there with my family to Ukraine, to Kharkiv, where I finished my studies when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. I worked there and had a normal life there until February 24, 2022. Putin’s war against Ukraine forced us to leave for Poland, then for the UK.
Read the rest of this entry »Palestine, Ukraine, Neutrality and the right to defence
Des Derwin
(This is a repost of a post on the Irish Left With Ukraine Facebook page, 8th October 2023)
There is unlikely to be any supporter of Irish Left With Ukraine who will not also support the latest Palestinian uprising (though I for one by no means approve of attacks on civilians and non-combatants). Today supporters of the Palestinian cause are rightly incensed by the reportage of the Hamas offensive and of the savage Israeli retaliation. At the inconsistency and one-sided nature of that reportage, starting with the RTE radio news bulletins this morning which featured an Israeli spokesperson but no spoken word from Palestine. RTE’s flagship This Week programme had the Israeli Ambassador on. The double standards of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who mixes vociferous support for Ukrainian resistance with a crawling support for Israeli actions, sickens any decent humanitarian. And, yes, those in solidarity with Ukraine, including myself, have opposed Ukrainian President Zelensky’s bizarre obsequious salutes to the Israeli regime too. The Irish Left rightly blasts establishment inconsistency. But seems blissfully unaware of the beam in its own eye.
It really doesn’t feel at all like whataboutery, but more like disgust at dismal double standards to point out the lack of response, the silence, across the Irish organised left to the Russian attacks on civilians of recent days, of the past twenty months, and the contrast with the horror and condemnation being quite correctly displayed over the new Israeli attacks on civilians.
What can be the motivation here but blinkered and politically-guided theatre, without any real feeling for people wherever they are trampled on, without any actual cognition of aggression, invasion, occupation and imperialist colonialism?
What is happening to the Palestinians is monstrous. What is happening to the Ukrainians is monstrous. What does the organised socialist Left and its associated ‘peace’ groups do? It organises a national march on ‘neutrality’ that is really against supporting Ukraine. Just read the text of the leaflet copied here which was distributed at the Cost of Living march yesterday. While issuing statements on the same day offering “full solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people”, while posting on Facebook on the same day ‘End the occupation of Israel’, and then rushing to organise demonstrations for the Palestinians being assailed in exactly the same ways as the Ukrainians (without waiting for the solidarity groups who have campaigned for Palestine all along)!
A post for such a demo actually says, “If Ukraine has the right to defend themselves so do the Palestinians”! While the same people, wearing even the same logos, are actively organising a march for November 4th against the Ukrainians right to defend themselves! Defending the right of Hamas and the Palestinians to defend themselves against Israel while opposing the right of Ukrainians to defend themselves against Russia, and attacking as “a breach of neutrality” even the supply of “flak jackets to the Ukrainian Armed Forces”!
This Left rightly condemns Israel but doesn’t even mention Russia in its leaflet for the neutrality march distributed yesterday.
Yes, I’ll be attending the Palestinian protests. No, I won’t be attending the anti-Ukrainian, succour-for-Putin, march in Dublin on 4th November.
Making sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – Paul Le Blanc “I favour the defeat of Vladimir Putin’s invasion and victory for Ukrainian self-determination”
We wish to thank Dick Nichols, European Editor of the Australian Magazine Green Left Weekly, who drew our attention to an important article on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, written by the well-known Marxist scholar and historian Paul Le Blanc.
The author takes the side of Ukraine Against Russia :
- I favour the defeat of Vladimir Putin’s invasion and victory for Ukrainian self-determination.
- I oppose imperialism in all its forms – including Putin’s invasion and NATO.
- I oppose capitalism and favour its replacement with the genuine political and economic democracy of socialism everywhere: the United States, Ukraine, Russia etc.
More about the author here : “Paul Le Blanc (born 1947) is an American historian at La Roche University in Pittsburgh as well as labor and socialist activist who has written or edited more than 30 books on topics such as Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg.[1][2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Blanc_(historian)
Paul Le Blanc launches his new book, in person, on November 7 2023 in Dublin
Making sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
6 October, 2023
A momentous development has drawn my attention away from the unfolding climate catastrophe on which I have been riveted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major factor fragmenting the left-wing forces I hoped would become a major force in the revolutionary struggle for climate justice and human survival. Recently, I have met Russians and Ukrainians — and others from Brazil, Argentina and the United States — who have all made it clear to me that I cannot avoid dealing with this issue.1
In this article, I will attempt to do three things:
- Review what some on the left assert either in favour of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or against the Ukrainian response;
- Review Russian and Ukrainian realities and views on the war; and
- Touch on essential aspects of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion (including where the weapons come from).
In the footnotes I offer sources that have influenced my analysis and that I believe may be useful for those seeking to make sense of these realities. But I owe it to readers to indicate my own position from the outset. This is my bottom-line:
Read the rest of this entry »Russia’s Genocidal Invasion of Ukraine – Discussion inside the DSA (USA) continues
The leadership of a USA organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) recently deleted an article about Ukraine from its website – generating many protests.
John Reimann reports :
DSA’s National Political Committee is claiming that they removed the article on Ukraine on the grounds that the author is not a DSA member. However, David Duhalde says he listened to their meeting on Zoom and the real issue was the subject matter of the article. In any case, three of us DSA members – Linda Mann, Cheryl Zuur, and myself submitted this article. We will see what excuse they come up with now.
As DSA members and members of the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign, we are writing to debunk several beliefs about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The first myth is that the 2014 Maidan uprising was a U.S. inspired right wing “coup”. Of course in any popular movement foreign powers will try to find an advantage. There were participants of the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square who were working with the (U.S. Republican Party’s) International Republican Institute. (One of the authors of this article, John Reimann, personally met them in Tahrir Square.) That does not mean that the Republican Party was manipulating and controlling the uprising.
Andrey Kurkov, a Ukrainian writer who was at Maidan
Read the rest of this entry »Irish troops to provide weapons training to Ukraine despite Government’s ‘non-lethal’ assistance pledge – Irish Times News Report, August 18 2023
“Department of Defence insists training does not impact neutrality and that there was no attempt to mislead public” – Irish Times
A copy of Conor Gallagher’s report is here :
Paul Murphy TD (Dublin South-West, People Before Profit) has issued a deeply mistaken public response, consistent with his party’s previously stated opposition to any military anti-imperialist solidarity action in support of the Ukrainian masses’ fight against a genocidal Russian invasion. Source :
This is a grim PBP Left-Evasionist chapter, part of the shocking story: failure to show anti-imperialist solidarity with the masses of Ukraine who are resisting a genocidal Russian invasion.
On July 29 2023 the PBP helped to organise a well-supported anti-racist rally in Dún Laoghaire, a town which proudly hosts a magnificent statue honouring the Irish anti-imperialist gun-runner and human rights activist Roger Casement.
PBP speakers drew attention to the many reasons we honour Casement today : but they overlooked a vital fact : this Easter 1916 rebel imported weapons from Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire in order to strike a blow against the then mighty British Empire.
John Meehan August 18 2023
Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace
This is a very good polemical article, written by the Canadian author David Gutnick, examining Professor David Mandel’s calls for Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and negotiate with Russia immediately.
The source is :
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
David Gutnick’s article was originally published in :
Canadian Dimension
Monday 14 August 2023, by GUTNICK David
Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace
“Pacifism has its place, but not here and not now,” writes David Gutnick
David Mandel and I share much more in common than our given name. We’re both French-speaking Anglophones who live in Montréal. Like professor Mandel, I worked for decades at a publicly funded institution: he taught at universities, while I produced documentaries for CBC Radio. We both consider ourselves humanists who want to help build a kinder, more democratic and socialist world.
But while reading Mandel’s August 2 piece in this publication, it became clear that we profoundly disagree on how to get there.
In a nutshell, Mandel calls for Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and negotiate with Russia immediately, while I—following the lead of Ukrainians—believe the country needs more arms: the deadlier the better, unfortunately.
Mandel—like Vladimir Putin—says his position is the humanist one, as it will save lives.
I think that is wrongheaded. A wealth of evidence proves Volodymyr Zelensky’s position is right: Russia’s present leadership is bloodthirsty, intent on building an untrustworthy imperialist power. Putin slaughtered Chechens and Georgians when they would not submit to Russian domination, and now he is slaughtering Ukrainians. He will not hesitate to slaughter whoever is next to get in his way.
Humanists think of peace-building in the long term, and that means standing up to aggression now, not turning the other cheek.
Pacifism has its place, but not here and not now.
Unless Putin pulls back his army, Ukrainians have no choice but to fight.
Mandel writes that over the decades he has been “opposed to the policies of the regimes of these states, which were and remain deeply hostile to workers’ interests.”
We share that view.
But since the first Russian tanks illegally crossed Ukraine’s border into Crimea on February 20, 2014, then again into Kyiv on February 24, 2022, it is not just “workers’ interests” which have suffered: tens of thousands of Ukrainian trade unionists, kindergarten monitors, university students, mothers and fathers and innocent children have been killed by Russian invaders.
Read the rest of this entry »Russia’s war on Ukraine and the European lefts – Murray Smith casts a harsh light on the radical left in Europe
Murray Smith is a member of the leadership of déi Lénk (“The Left”) in Luxembourg and is one of its representatives on the Executive Board of the Party of the European Left. Article Source : http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article67205
The war in Ukraine has cast a harsh light on the radical left in Europe, revealing the best and the worst. On the one hand, an internationalist response of solidarity with Ukraine. On the other, a “peace camp” where you find pacifists, but especially sectarians, for whom the main enemy is always US imperialism. Rather than a movement for peace, it is above all a movement of non-solidarity with Ukraine. We will come back to that.
Let’s start with some thoughts on war. We can be against war in general. We can consider that we must overcome this barbaric way of settling conflicts. We can think that it is possible to do it in the existing capitalist society, or that to put an end to war it is necessary to finish with capitalism. But historically, and again today, the left is never confronted with war in general, but with real existing wars, specific wars, which succeed each other and do not always have the same nature. So, each war must be analyzed in its specificity. There are no slogans outside of time and space, which are valid for all wars. It is not because Lenin or Luxemburg or Liebknecht spoke of revolutionary defeatism or said that the enemy was in one’s own country, that we can trot out these slogans for any war, independently of the context.
World War I was an inter-imperialist conflict over the distribution of territories, resources and markets. Those who refused to support their own imperialism were right. And history proved them right. The activity of the small minority of internationalist circles of 1914 led to strikes, mutinies, mass parties and revolutions. Yet since 1914 no war has been a simple repetition of World War I, and a simple repetition of the slogans of 1914 has not been enough. In all the wars of national liberation against the colonial empires, it was clear that it was necessary to support the insurgents who fought for the independence of their countries. The same applies to attacks on independent countries by imperialist powers. So, in the 1930s, the left supported China against Japan and Ethiopia against Italy. And, closer to the present day, Iraq against the United States. This despite the fact that these countries were ruled by regimes that the left could not support.
Read the rest of this entry »Cluster bombs in Ukraine – hypocrisy in the Morning Star (a British Tankie publication) and the Irish organization People Before Profit
Jim Denham writes a useful article about cluster bombs controversy and Russia’s genocidal imperialist invasion of Ukraine.
Jim’s text (reprinted in full below) is recommended reading, especially for unfortunate, misled, and baffled readers who saw a slogan circulated by the Irish radical left organization, People Before Profit (PBP) : “Cluster Bombs Shouldn’t Exist – Never Mind Be Used”. Did these people raise the issue of cluster bombs when the Russian military was using them to kill Ukrainians? We have been over this PBP ground already, and a key point needs repetition here and in the future :
The only mentions of what might be the wishes and intentions of the people of Ukraine, in an article devoid of any reference to Russian war crimes are, “In Ukraine, there are even demands for cluster bombs and phosphorus weapons”and “We stand in solidarity with all those protesting, and with those in Ukraine and Russia who are bravely raising their voices against war.” Who in Ukraine is bravely raising their voices against the heroic resistance of the mass of the Ukrainian people? There is not a word of solidarity for those in Ukraine raising their bodies and weapons against Russia’s war upon their lives, their homes and their freedoms.
https://tomasoflatharta.com/2023/06/16/neutrality-yes-solidarity-yes/
Above: a cluster bomb capsule on the ground amid the Russia-Ukraine war in Avdiivka, Ukraine, on March 23, 2023 [GETTY IMAGES]
Cluster munitions are horrible weapons that can be delivered by rockets, missiles, and aircraft. They open in mid-air and disperse dozens and even hundreds of smaller submunitions, also called capsules or bomblets, over an area the size of a city block. Many submunitions fail to explode on impact, leaving duds that act like landmines, posing a deadly threat to civilians for years and even decades.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 