Tomás Ó Flatharta

Looking at Things from the Left

Archive for the ‘Poland’ Category

EMERGENCY SOCIAL MEDIA STORM August 14, 19.00-20.00 Irish Time – PARTICIPATE!

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PARTICIPATE!

EMERGENCY SOCIAL MEDIA STORM August 14, 2000-2100 Central European Time

2100-2200 Ukraine * 1900-2000 UK * 1500 Brazil * 1400 US/Canada East Coast * 1100 US/Canada West Coast * 2330 India * 0300 (Friday) Japan 0400 (Friday) Eastern Australia*

Suggested hashtags | Рекомендовані хештеги | Hashtags suggérés | Hashtags sugeridos

#NothingAboutUkraineWithoutUkraine #OccupationIsNotPeace #StopPutinStopTrump #SolidarityNotSurrender #StandWithUkraine
#НічогоПроУкраїнуБезУкраїни #ОкупаціяЦеНеМир #СтопПутінСтопТрамп #СолідарністьАНеКапітуляція #ПідтримайУкраїну
#RienSurL’UkraineSansL’Ukraine #L’OccupationN’EstPasLaPaix #StopPoutineStopTrump #SolidaritéPasCapitulation #SoutenezL’Ukraine
#NadaSobreUcraniaSinUcrania #LaOcupaciónNoEsPaz #StopPutinStopTrump #SolidaridadNoRendición #ApoyemosAUcrania

Please post on whatever social media platforms you’re on with statuses, photos, etc.

Statements and background

French Committee of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine * Ukrainian World Congress * Ukrainian government peace proposal

MEDIA RELEASE

TRUMP AND PUTIN: HANDS OFF UKRAINE! NO PEACE WITHOUT UKRAINE! NO PEACE AGAINST UKRAINE!

August 10, 2025

Putin and Trump want to reach an agreement at a summit meeting without the main party concerned, Ukraine, in defiance of international law and the right of peoples to self-determination.

Trump announced on Friday that he would meet his Russian counterpart in Alaska on August 15, without the Ukrainian president. The latter responded strongly and rightly: “Any decision that is made against us, any decision that is made without Ukraine, is a decision against peace.”

According to the US president, a settlement of the war will include territorial concessions.

“The Ukrainians will not give up their land to the occupiers,” Zelensky added, while Trump spoke of “exchanges of territory”.

Crimea and territories in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts that Putin has declared annexed are occupied by Russian troops in violation of international law.

Occupation is a crime, those who occupy are criminals, and those who support it are accomplices!

Trump is preparing to hand victory to the aggressor after claiming that he would issue an ultimatum to Putin.

No, the era of placing one country under the tutelage of another against its will by decision of the “great powers” is over.

Mobilisation against this imperialist banditry between Putin and Trump and in solidarity with Ukraine must be organised quickly.

French Committee of the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine (ENSU)


Thomas Weyts, Ghent, Belgium :

Not only in Anchorage, Alaska, but also in Munich, Bavaria, there will be protests tomorrow against the gangster conclave between Trump and Putin. Not by chance at the place where the infamous agreements between Chamberlain and Hitler were signed in 1938, while Czechoslovak Prime Minister Benes was allowed to wait in the hallway…

Thomas Weyts, Ghent, Belgium :

Protest at the American Embassy in Prague, 13th of August. The Czechs know what they are talking about

Against a peace imposed by Trump and Putin on Ukraine – Oleksandr Kyselov – plus an Irish update featuring a kick-boxer rapist ally of Russo-Yankee racist bosses

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This is the summary of interventions by Oleksandr Kyselov from Sotsialnyi Rukh in Ukraine to the 18th World Congress of the Fourth International in Belgium at the end of March.

Source :


Against a Peace Imposed by Trump and Putin on Ukraine – Oleksandr Kyselov

You can read the contribution made by Russian anti-war activist Felix here. You can also see the resolution agreed by the Congress on Ukraine reworked after these interventions here, as well as the position of the minority against which Oleksandr was arguing.

Comrades,

It is a great honor to participate in this World Congress of the Fourth International, a historic organization with global reach. I am grateful for this opportunity.

Listening to the discussions, I was struck by their theoretical depth and attention to nuance—something we often lack. Yet, when it comes to my country, I question the need for such an approach when it seems to be used to reconfirm once established truths. “The main enemy is at home”—so we must expose, confront, and fight. Otherwise, how are we different from the bourgeoisie or reformists?

But reality is not so simple. As much as we may despise Zelensky, for us he is not the same as Putin. And every word spoken here we apply to our lived reality. Ukraine is our home —the only place we unequivocally belong. Some call this a bias, methodological nationalism, or overvaluing one of the many organizing patterns. But don’t others here do the same when projecting their own colonial histories, frustrations with Western powers, and struggles – whether for refugee rights or against arms dealers  – onto our fight against occupation?

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Antisemitism in the Oval Office (The Trump-Vance Assault on Volodymyr Zelensky) – Timothy Snyder

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Antisemitism in the Oval Office

A confrontation seen with a historian’s eye

There are many ways to analyse the Donald Trump / JD Vance ignorant thuggish assault on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House’s Oval Office on Friday February 28 2025.

The historian Timothy Snyder carefully shows us that the presidential rapist from New York orchestrated an antisemitic assault


Link :
Antisemitism in the Oval Office

The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.

I am historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. He talked to me about antisemitism for decades, from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union until his death in 2018. The way that I reacted to the scene in the Oval Office, and how I have pondered and considered it since, have to do with my research, but also with him.

Jerzy survived the Holocaust because his mother Wanda, a literary translator, refused to go with her children to the Warsaw ghetto. Thanks to her courage and ingenuity, and to others who helped her, he and his brother survived. Jerzy’s father was murdered, like more than three million other Jews in Poland. The family history emerged bit by bit, as we became friends, as some of his own colleagues wrote memoirs of childhood survival, as my own interests turned towards the war. During my research, I found a recollection, by his mother, of their time in hiding in Warsaw. It turned out that he had helped her to write it.

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“Horror and Disgust” over Donald Trump (convicted rapist) bullying Ukraine President Zelensky in White House – former Polish President Lech Wałesa speaks out – Paul LeBlanc responds

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Former Polish President and Labour Leader Lech Wałesa has denounced a thuggish attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Washington DC White House on Friday February 28. The perpetrators were a convicted rapist – the US President Donald Trump – and the rapist’s sidekick, the US Vice President JD Vance. TV viewers all over the world were shocked by these scenes. One day afterwards, Vance was forced to abandon a skiing holiday by many pro-Ukraine protesters in the New England state of Vermont.

This makes me so happy. Thank you Vermont. This is so deserving to the POS human being vance is. He was beyond rude to a world leader and showed that he had no breadth of the ongoing war in Ukraine. http://www.politicususa.com/p/jd-vance-f…

SlavaUkraini033 (@slavaukraini033.bsky.social) 2025-03-02T03:23:30.548Z

We thank Joan McKiernan for bringing us the Wałesa story, contained in a New York Times article (see below).

First, the historian Paul LeBlanc assesses the Wałesa statement.

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European Parliament adopts Nordic Left MEPs resolution against Russian ‘shadow fleet’ – Doing Everything We Can to Support Ukraine

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Source: Left Party (Sweden)

(November 14, 2024) In the EU election campaign, we promised to do everything we can to support Ukraine. We have now adopted (!) a resolution to stop the Russian shadow fleet.

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.

Further information:

Text of resolution adopted

Briefing on Russian shadow fleet

Why are Russian ‘shadow’ oil tankers still sailing the Baltic Sea?

by Li Andersson, Jussi Saramo, Jonas Sjöstedt, Merja Kyllönen, Per Clausen, Hanna Gedin, Jan van Aken, Maciej Konieczny, and Zofia Malisz

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Interview with Ilya Yashin – Russian anti-war activist released as part of a prisoner exchange – plus an Irish Clare Daly (ex MEP) connection

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Cristina Mas interviews Released Russian Political Prisoner Ilya Yashin (Web Link)

During the interview Cristina asks Ilya about Pablo Gonzalez (real name Pavel Rubtsov ) who was accused of espionage in Poland. See postscript about an Irish connection at the end of this fascinating interview.

Cristina Mas writes for the Spanish language journal Ara
Cristina Mas articles in the magazine Ara

Ilya Yashin
Cristina Mas

Ilya Yashin—Interview with Cristina Mas, Ara, September 30, 2024

Ilya Yashin is a Russian opposition politician who was released from prison on August 1, in the prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States. Since his exile in Germany, he has been touring several European cities to reach out to the Russian diaspora, which has taken him to Barcelona. Yashin, now 41, was jailed in 2022 for criticizing the invasion of Ukraine on his YouTube show. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing the Butxa massacre. He is now free thanks to the largest prisoner exchange of the Cold War, in which sixteen Russian political prisoners and U.S. citizens Evan Gershkovitx and Paul Whelan were exchanged for prisoners in the West claimed by Russia, including Spain’s Pablo Gonzalez, accused of espionage, and Vadim Krasikov, who shot a man in the head to death in a Berlin park on Moscow’s orders.

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Palestine, Ukraine and the crisis of empires – Simon Pirani

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Simon Pirani’s article is recommended. Unfortunately many Irish left-wing organizations and activists, such as People Before Profit and Clare Daly MEP, have adopted the policy advocated by the British Stop the War Coalition. In the conclusions section of this essay Pirani observes :

In May [2021], you wrote that Stop the War is “supporting the people of Palestine, who have a right to resist occupation”. I agree with that. But why no such statement about Ukraine?

And if Ukrainians, or Palestinians, have a right to resist, what does it mean? Does it only mean standing up to tanks with your bare hands, as Ukrainians have had to do? Does it mean throwing stones, often the only weapons that young Palestinians have? What about proper weapons? Do you think Palestinians have a right to those? And Ukrainians?


About the Author :

Simon Pirani is a British writer, historian and researcher of energy. He is honorary professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham.[1] From 2007 to 2021 he was senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (with a period as senior visiting research fellow in 2017-19).[2]

In 2018 Pirani published Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption, in which he portrays consumption growth as a result of world capitalist economic expansion.[3] He argues that the relationship between technological systems that account for most fossil fuel use, and the social and economic systems in which they are embedded, is paramount. His articles and presentations on this theme are collected on his website.[4] He also writes about these themes on a blog, People & Nature Link : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Pirani


Palestine, Ukraine and the crisis of empires

On the Easter weekend, on the latest gigantic march in London against UK complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza, a group of us took a banner that said “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime”. We were welcomed by marchers around us, and people took up our slogan.

But beyond a slogan, what can we, in the labour movement and social movements in the UK, do about these conflicts that are transforming the world we live in, and heightening fears of bigger, bloodier wars?

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Rosa Luxemburg – “one of the most brilliant minds ever drawn to the socialist movement” – Plus Leninist Days – 100 Years Without Him, 100 Years With Him CIEN AÑOS SIN LENIN – CIEN AÑOS CON ÉL

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We thank Paul Le Blanc for advertising this series of valuable online meetings.

More about Paul Le Blanc : Paul Le Blanc has for many years been a teacher and activist in Pittsburgh. His writings include “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party” and “A Short History of the US Working Class”. Source ; https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?auteur181

Socialism or Barbarism – Why Rosa Luxemburg Matters Today

With Paul Le Blanc & Helen Scott, co-editors of the acclaimed Rosa Luxemburg: Socialism or Barbarism collection of writings. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most brilliant minds ever drawn to the socialist movement – an outstanding theorist & a political activist. This forum will look at the relevance of her ideas for transforming a world in crisis today – & how her work was broad in scope tackling capitalism and socialism; globalisation & imperialism; war and peace; social struggles, unions & parties; class, gender, race; the interconnection of humanity with the environment & more. Part of the Socialist Ideas Series – presented by Arise – a Festival of Left Ideas & Labour Outlook.

Why Rosa Luxemburg Matters Today

LENINIST DAYS / JORNADAS LENINISTAS

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Britain: The Lecturers’ Union and the Betrayal of the Intellectuals – The anti-imperialism of amoral idiots

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Many certainties about global politics were transformed on February 24 2022 when the Russian Federation began a genocidal imperialist invasion of Ukraine, a country in the heart of Europe with a population of 44 million people. The imperialist invaders have forced at least seven million people out of their homeland. This was a seismic shock to many parts of the existing international anti-war movement, which failed to see this catastrophe on the horizon. In itself, that is not a problem. The future cannot be foretold with perfect accuracy, we only have 20-20 vision about the past.

But, what to do?

Readers of this blog will be aware of activities sponsored by Irish Left With Ukraine (ILWU) and the heroic work of Ukrainian activist and academic Yuliya Yurchenko.

This is her take on the behaviour of the British “Stop the War Coalition”, which has parallels in Ireland and other parts of the globe :

Yuliya Yurchenko, a Ukrainian senior lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Greenwich, described the attitude of the ‘anti-war’ left, “who somehow manage to simultaneously recognise Russia’s right to ‘defend its interests’ while denying the right of Ukrainians to defend their very lives or assert their national self-determination”, summing this up memorably as “the anti-imperialism of amoral idiots”.

These issues have erupted inside a British trade union, the University and College Union (UCU) which has a reported membership of about 120,000 people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_and_College_Union . The report below makes for often ghastly reading. All the same, effective left-wing solidarity with Ukraine is essential – we urge readers to engage.

Article Source : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article66925


Many academics in both Ukraine and the UK are horrified by the Putin-enabling posturing of far-left factions within the UCU

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International Women’s Day 2023 in Ireland – Show Solidarity With the Women of Ukraine – Wednesday March 8, The Spire, O’Connell Street, Dublin

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On 8 March, Wednesday, #IWD an International Women’s Day march assembles 17.30 at The Spire, Dublin.

The Irish Left with Ukraine, part of the European Network with Ukraine will attend will attend to show our solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and the Ukrainian feminist resistance.

. #IWD2023March

Links : https://www.facebook.com/groups/irishleftwithukraine @EuropeanWith https://ukraine-solidarity.eu/

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