Tomás Ó Flatharta

We wish to thank Ashley Smith for drawing our attention to this article by Tony McKenna, Counterpunch, March 11 2025.

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Conspiracy Proxy War and the Ghost of Stalinism

In the conflict between Soviet Russia with Joseph Stalin at its head and Nazi Germany, I would have supported Soviet Russia. I suppose you could argue that might make me some kind of Stalinist. After all, I would have been supporting the Stalinist government. Not only that, I may even have hoped the US might provide it with funding to continue to organise its military effort, so you could probably label me an American stooge too. (in fact, the US did supply Soviet Russia with millions of tonnes of food, weapons and equipment during the Second World War).

But a distinction should be made.  What one is supporting most fundamentally in this case is not Stalinism but rather the struggles of the Russian people themselves,[1] their imperilled freedoms at the hands of a brutal, barbaric foreign invasion.   People fighting and dying – not because they had some great love for Stalin – but because they didn’t want to be bombed and maimed and killed at the hands of a foreign power.  Because they didn’t want to live their day-to-day lives under the shadow of foreign occupation.

Of course, one could ignore all this. One could assert, for instance, that the Russian population were simply being manipulated in the interests of the Stalinist government (and vicariously the US itself) and, therefore, it was Stalinism and the US government who were the true objects of international support.  Certainly, the defeat of Germany did bolster the imperial power of the US and Russia.  But were the millions of Russians who fought and died against fascism – were those lives merely the ‘proxies’ of the interests of Stalin and the United States government who supported him?

Such an assertion most would find obscene.  It is obscene because it involves the annihilation of a living content – the struggles and sacrifice of millions of people fighting for their concrete freedoms – in favour of the interests and relationships of a set of given states and governments considered in empty and schematic isolation.

For similar reasons, I support the right of the Ukrainian people to resist foreign occupation. As a necessary corollary, I also support the means by which they might do so – even if that means receiving funding and ammunition from the US and NATO (though if you can suggest some other alternative beyond capitulation at the point of a Russian gun, I really am all ears).

But none of this is the same as saying I support Zelensky, or that I support the US and NATO.  At the most basic philosophical level, it simply means to recognise that freedom – as Kant put it – is ‘an end in itself’.    It has an objective and social reality whether or not the arms the freedom fighters take up are provided by this particular imperial power or that one.  Likewise, freedom has an objective reality whether or not it is being menaced by Russian bombs or Israeli bombs or Nazi bombs.