Convicted Rapist-President Donald Trump (USA) and wanted international war criminal President Vladimir Putin (Russia) are knifing Ukraine Palestine and Syria, hosted by the Saudi Arabia bloodbath kingdom.
Three sociopathic assassins (Putin, Trump, and Mohammed bin Salman) have form. Barcelona journalist Cristina Mas notes : “This format would have been unthinkable just five years ago, after the murder of journalist and opposition leader Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, a crime that prompted condemnation around the world and the cooling of relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia”
From the pro-Ukraine left, useful interpretations are circulating.
In a highly confrontational speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference opening on 14 February, US Vice President JD Vance declared that the “internal threat” facing Europe was more serious than that posed by Russia and China. He criticised the annulment of a recent election in Romania, the prosecution of an anti-abortion protester in the United Kingdom, and the exclusion of far-right and far-left German politicians from the event itself.
Key grassroots leaders of the recently triumphant MAGA movement went to war with Elon Musk on the question of immigration, in a spectacular argument that pointed to political divisions within their movement.
Tensions were already rising as Musk fanboys had started to promote their favourite capitalist as a co-president or ‘the real VP’ which angered the rampant egotism of Donald Trump who does not tolerate any competition. Musk made clear at a recent rally that Musk could never be president. Why? Because “He wasn’t born here”. Musk, a South African who is now naturalised as a US citizen would always ultimately be an outsider for the MAGA people.
This was the kindling for the wider explosion. Just before Christmas Day, Trump appointed US-Indian venture capitalist Siram Krishnan to be policy lead on AI. This was met with anger from some of the MAGA faithful – Krishnan had previously been a Democrat supporter so was seen as a suspect, but also crucially – not American. Well not fully ‘American’ in the way that they care about i.e. white.
The shadow fleet consists of poorly maintained, often uninsured ships with unclear ownership that export Russian oil and gas via the Baltic Sea, in violation of EU sanctions against Russia.
The proceeds from these exports fund the war in Ukraine. The shadow fleet threatens both the environment and the people of Ukraine.
With today’s resolution, which Hanna Gedin and Jonas Sjöstedt (pictured) skilfully succeeded in pushing through in the European Parliament, hard pressure is now being put on both the European Commission and the Member States to take the decisions needed to stop the shadow fleet. This is a great victory for all of us who want to stop the war in Ukraine.
Carola Rackete, a left-wing German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) with a high profile, supports Ukrainian resistance against Russian Imperialism.
Carola Rackete is a consistent anti-imperialist and is also an ecosocialist activist. Here is Carola’s Wikipedia entry :
Rackete participated in several research expeditions to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and is co-founder of the Antarctic Rights initiative. She also supported the Extinction Rebellion movement and took part in forest protests in Sweden, as well as the occupations of the Hambach Forest and the Dannenrod Forest in Germany. Between 2016 and 2019, she occasionally volunteered for non-governmental sea rescue organisations in the Mediterranean.[2] In June 2019, she was arrested for docking a migrant rescue vessel without authorization in the port of Lampedusa, Italy. The custodial judge considered Rackete’s actions as justified because she had a duty to save lives at sea and ruled that Rackete should not have been arrested. In 2021, the pending investigation was formally dismissed, since the state prosecutor didn‘t see reason to proceed to court.[3]
A newspaper acting as the mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Russian imperialism (Junge Welt) launched a vicious campaign against Carola Rackete, who, as a leftist member of the EU parliament, agreed to a resolution supporting the Ukrainian resistance.
Provisional results of the 2024 European Elections, as at June 19. Source: results.elections.europa.eu
At first glance it looks as if the parties to the left of the social democracy held their ground against the surge of the far right and mainstream right that marked the June 9 European Union (EU) parliamentary elections (see here for results in detail).
Although the smallest of the European parliament’s seven groups, The Left managed to maintain its EU-wide vote at 5.4% and increase its seat tally from 37 to 39 in the 720-seat assembly.
In addition, left green Members of the European Parliaments (MEPs) and those representing stateless nations (part of the Greens group as the European Free Alliance) at least maintained their numbers in the chamber.
Yet the Greens group as a whole shrank from 71 seats to 53 while that of the liberals (known as Renew) fell from 102 to 79. This drop reflected that the environmental issues that in part drove the big advance of these parties in the 2019 election were less important for many voters this time.
The campaign was dominated by insecurity about the future, the cost of living (particularly housing), the fear of war, the “immigration threat” and intolerance of difference.
In this grim atmosphere the biggest growth went to the mainstream right European People’s Party and the two far-right groups (Identity and Democracy and Conservatives and Reformists): taken together the right and far right won an extra 30 seats, bring it to 324.
Because it would take only 37 ungrouped MEPs to join them to from a reactionary majority, the June 9 result poses with new urgency two old questions about politics in the European parliament. How much, if at all, does the real balance of political forces in the chamber differ from that among its formal groupings? And how much does membership of a group represent disciplined commitment to its positions?
Left divisions over Ukraine
The questions are sharply relevant in the case of the Left group, where differences over what stance to take towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine were already pointing towards a split before June 9.
On May 31, Li Andersson, chairperson of the Finnish Left Alliance told the Helsinki Times that these differences could not be tolerated in the group in the new legislature. Referring to Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, Irish left independent opponents of military aid to Ukraine, Andersson said: “The Nordic Green Left as a whole [covering Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands] is of the opinion that if they manage to win re-election, they can’t join our group.”
For Andersson, the same went for the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance: For Reason and Justice (BSW), a split in Germany from leading Left group member Die Linke (The Left). BSW opposes military aid to Ukraine and supports resuming the gas trade with Russia, in common with most of Europe’s far-right parties.
My final piece of work before I turned on the ‘out of office’ for Christmas was to return to some sources I accessed in the Leon Trotsky papers, now stored in Harvard, and partly digitised.
Among the documents I looked through were postcards sent to Leon Trotsky from Paul Kirchoff, a German revolutionary and anthropologist who spent part of the early 1930s working with the Harvard-Irish study.
One of Kirchoff’s letters to Trotsky from Ireland stood out because it opened with the Irish-language greeting ‘A Chara’, meaning ‘Dear friend’ (more-or-less). It was sent in May 1933 and is otherwise written in German:
I don’t have any deep analysis of this document for you.
We thank Joan McKiernan for bringing this article to our attention. It is a very thorough analysis of the myths about the genocidal Russian invasion of Ukraine. The author, Paul Schäfer, astutely observes :
24 February 2022 mark(s) a historical turning point. It was a watershed moment that raised new questions and intellectual challenges, particularly for the traditional Left, which has not exactly covered itself in glory by declaring that US/NATO imperialism and Ukrainian nationalism are the driving forces behind the war and failing to mention the fact that Russia was the aggressor.
The Russian invasion must prompt the Left to re-think its geopolitical assumptions
There is good reason to doubt whether we have, in fact, entered a “new world” since the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Nonetheless, 24 February 2022 does mark a historical turning point. It was a watershed moment that raised new questions and intellectual challenges, particularly for the traditional Left, which has not exactly covered itself in glory by declaring that US/NATO imperialism and Ukrainian nationalism are the driving forces behind the war and failing to mention the fact that Russia was the aggressor. Current events should have prompted the Left to recognize its own blind spots and tackle the issues of Vladimir Putin, his regime, and the roots of the long-standing Ukrainian–Russian conflict. But no such reckoning has taken place.
Since the fact that Russia invaded is undeniable, parts of the Left and the peace movement have shifted their focus to the run-up to the war. But while any analysis must undoubtedly look at the run-up to the war, too many are relying on a one-dimensional view that falls back on old, familiar patterns of thinking and categories. A glance at the Russian president’s speeches is enough to reveal the motives and objectives behind the ruling Russian elite’s decision to start a war of aggression. It is astonishing how little-known those speeches are in the relevant circles. Moreover, too little attention is paid to the role of the Russian Federation’s military-industrial power complex and intelligence networks. Looking at these — in conjunction with an analysis of the collapse of the Soviet empire, its consequences, and Russia’s geopolitical decline to semi-peripheral status — would have provided an adequate basis for explaining the war.
If we examine the reasons for such a reductive analysis, it is not difficult to see that parts of the Left are reluctant to give up old ways of thinking.
However, other parts of the Left also took some time after 24 February 2022 to understand the history of the conflict, the reasons behind the establishment of the Putin regime, and the current configurations of international conflict. Peace researcher Klaus M. Schlichte from the University of Bremen recently made a creative and complex contribution to a sourced historical and sociological analysis of the war. In an important forthcoming manuscript, sociologist Klaus Dörre from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena addressed the circumstances and background of the war and identified several open questions. It is essential to build on this if we want to leave the superficial debate behind us.
Across the globe left-wing forces over-influenced by conspiracy analysis methods have created propaganda smokescreens about the sabotage of the Nordstream Russian Gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The left-wing 21st century conspiracists use research methods which are not based on painstaking hard-grind work. Journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought the world’s attention to the 1972 Watergate with evidence based research. Today’s conspiracists begin with their own fantasy theories – and never mind the facts which get in the way. They create a circus 🤡 – it is the method of the bumbling Irish police who attempted to frame Joanne Hayes in the infamous “Kerry Babies” case.
Christian Zeller is an activist in the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU). https://ukraine-solidarity.eu/
Germany’s Sozialistische Zeitung gets it wrong on energy and geopolitics
Angela Klein’s commentary “Blowing up NordStream 2. An act of Ukrainian warfare” is bizarre. A long-time SoZ editor, Klein takes the revelation story as a confirmed finding and inserts it in her own account of the war in such a way that she even insinuates that the Ukrainian defence is waging an economic war against the German population.
On 6 June, the Washington Post again triggered all kinds of speculation with the publication of an exposé story on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. The journalists “revealed” without providing substantial evidence that a Ukrainian commando destroyed the pipelines on 26 September 2022. Since then, this speculation has been doing the rounds. A few months ago, Seymour Hersh “revealed” that the US had blown up the pipelines. Significantly, the same circles that followed Hersh’s US hypothesis are now following the Ukraine hypothesis….
Left-evasionist and tankie political activists everywhere are promoting a Seymour Hersh post claiming that the USA ruling class blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline which is designed to allow Russia to supply Germany with Natural Gas, by-passing Ukraine.
In Ireland, Paul Murphy TD (People Before Profit [PBP], Dublin South-West) highlighted this story on the grounds that Seymour Hersh is “one of the world’s best journalists”. In December 2022 a pro-PBP publication, the Irish Marxist Review (a well-produced and often interesting journal published by the Socialist Workers’ Network) carried a Maurice Coakley article which stated “the US Navy were the only force likely to have carried out the attacks on the gas pipeline”. (Maurice Coakley’s article is here : https://irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/479/464)
Seymour Hersh, decades ago, was a credible journalist. Today he is a conspiracy nut. One correspondent on Paul Murphy’s facebook page, James Doyle, observes “This is all nonsense. For example, Why would the US use a Norwegian aircraft rather than a fake fishing boat in a supposedly covert operation. For those who refer to Hersh as a “respected journalist”, you should know that he thinks the Osama Bin Laden operation was fake and Assad never used chemical weapons in Syria. A good journalist in his day, but sadly has gone off the rails into a rabbit warren of attention seeking conspiracy theories.”
Is this dispute important? It is. In the activist Revolutionary Marxist tradition, theory is needed as a guide to action.
John Meehan February 16 2023
“Left” organisations and personalities retail Hersh’s Nord Stream story uncritically, because it is what they want to hear. Dogma beats inquiry. Innuendo and false claims beat solidarity with the victims of Russia’s scorched-earth war on populations, in Syria in 2014 and 2017, and Ukraine in 2022-23.
Re-forming critical public spaces means challenging the “great men” of the “left” when they offer blinkered, one-sided and untruthful explanations for the dangerous, uncertain realities we face.
Simon Pirani, The Nord Stream Pipeline Explosions – Challenging False Narratives.
The claim that the Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up by U.S. special forces, made last week by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, is being used to reinforce false narratives about Russia’s culpability for the war in Ukraine.
On 26 September last year, explosions damaged three of Nord Stream’s four pipelines, which run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, and sent a large cloud of methane into the atmosphere. Russia has blamed the United States; western media suspected Russia itself of sabotage.
Bob Myers examines the decision of South Africa’s African National Congress Congress (ANC) government to conduct joint naval exercises with Russia and China.
An extract from a Financial Times report (January 28) shows that Pretoria is using Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine to trade profitably with both Moscow and European Union powerhouse Germany.
South African Capitalists play the game of “splendid isolation” – imitating the British imperialist 19th Century policy of playing one European power against the other – London had no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
The full Financial Times report is below, complete with a picture of smiling politicians, the Foreign Ministers of Russia and South Africa, Sergei Lavrov and Naledi Pandor.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 