Nazis! The Fraught Politics of a Word and a People Besieged

[Pictured: Palestinian women cross an Israeli checkpoint, outside of the West Bank city of Ramallah, on April 15, 2022. (Flash90)]

By Gary Fields

Republished from Jadaliyya.

Like many highly-educated individuals in Palestine today, Mohammed Q. cannot find work in his field of computer engineering, despite a master’s degree in computer science from Birzeit University, and as a result, he relies on the tourist industry to earn a living, drawing on his fluent English and knowledge of the fraught politics of the region.  In the aftermath of October 7th he was working in Ramallah at the same hotel where, by fate, I found myself as the only guest on a sabbatical that began October 6th.  Over coffee, he recounted to me an experience leading a group of German tourists to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.  As a West Bank Palestinian, Mohammed would normally be barred from entry to the Israeli capital, but because of his role on this occasion in shepherding a German tour group through the Holy Land, he was able to obtain the mandatory permit from Israeli authorities to enter the Holy City.  While at Yad Vashem, the group had a tour from one of the Museum docents who explained in detail the suffering endured by Jews at the hands of the Nazis 

As Mohammed recalls the episode, the guide described how the Nazi regime forced Jews to wear a yellow badge as a mark of identification that enabled Nazi authorities not only to stigmatize them, but to monitor and control their movements.  Alongside this measure, Nazis eliminated the rights of Jews to German citizenship, insisting that only those with “pure” Aryan blood could be Germans.  Bolstered by mobs of fascist-supporting vigilantes, Nazi authorities orchestrated modern-day pogroms against Jews including the ransacking of Jewish businesses and the theft of Jewish property designed to force Jews out of Germany.  Those Jews who tried to remain, the guide explained, fell victim to the night raids of the Nazi SS in arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps.  In areas outside Germany under Nazi rule, Nazi policy ghettoized Jews as a prelude to a genocidal campaign of eliminating them as a people, and the guide spoke admiringly of the heroism of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto who resisted these measures.  “I did not know about all of this suffering,” Mohammed admitted to me, “and I felt sorry for these Jewish victims of Nazism.” At the same time, he could not help but reflect on the parallels with his own experience as a West Bank Palestinian living under Israeli military rule. 

Mohammed thanked the guide and admitted that he had not been fully aware of the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.  He then commented to the docent that many details in his story of the Jews resonated for him as a Palestinian living in the West Bank.  After Mohammed made this admission, however, the guide became angry and demanded to know how he was able to come to Jerusalem and gain entry to the Museum.  Mohammed explained that he had received the necessary permit from Israeli authorities to chaperone the German tour group at which point the guide became extremely irate and called Museum security.  “Security personnel from the Museum came,” he explains, “and took me to the exit of the Museum where they ousted me from the building.”  In this way, Yad Vashem evicted a Palestinian from its premises for sympathizing with Nazism’s Jewish victims while explaining how, in his own experience, Israeli rule over Palestinians resembled some of the same practices attributed by the Museum to those used by the Third Reich on European Jews.  Replete with irony, Mohammed’s eviction from Yad Vashem, in the context of the forced displacements and carnage unfolding in Gaza, recalls a traceable historical arc.

Nazis Among Us?

On December 4, 1948, the New York Times published an open letter penned by a group of Jewish luminaries including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein who were protesting a visit to the U.S. by Menachem Begin, founder of the Herut (Freedom) Party of Israel.  Herut would later emerge as the foundation of the ultra-nationalist Likud Party of current Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  Authors of the letter made note of “Fascist elements in Israel” and objected to Begin’s visit because, according to them, Herut was “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”  

In support of its claim, the letter referenced the massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin committed earlier in 1948 by the paramilitary predecessor to Herut, the Zionist Irgun, labeled even by many Zionists of the time a terrorist militia.  The Irgun had come into the village, which had harbored no animus toward its Jewish neighbors, and “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem,” revealing a practice of cruelty toward Palestinians eerily similar to what Nazis did to the Jews.  Arendt was already on record as warily critical of exclusionary tendencies in the Zionist project, writing in “Zionism Reconsidered” (1943) how the Zionist movement stood for a kind of ethno-state in which Palestinians would have only “the choice of voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.” In the end, Arendt, Einstein and co-signers of the 1948 open letter proffered a warning about Herut and its Fascist roots: “from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

Apart from the reference to Deir Yassin, the letter did not specify what this kinship might portend but Fascism’s past practices highlight three themes.  First, Fascism is a mass movement animated by an extreme nationalist ethos whose adherents share a sense of collective victimhood caused by “outsiders” who are considered to have illegitimate claims of belonging to the nation and who emerge as the cause of collective national suffering. Second, Fascism channels this shared outlook of victimhood into collective hostility toward these outsiders whom Fascists consider as enemies seeking the nation’s demise.  Finally, Fascism enlists its backers to support liquidation of these enemies which drives it to untold levels of brutality and toward territorial expansion to ensure the completeness of the liquidation process, while keeping outsiders safely distant from the bounded space of the nation and those who belong to it. 

In the case of the Nazis, some of the signature behaviors that emerged from these contours and resonated so profoundly with Mohammed at Yad Vashem included Nazism’s exclusionary citizenship laws; its pogroms against Jewish businesses and property; night raids by the Nazi SS of Jewish homes along with arrests and deportations of Jews to concentration camps; and the ghettoization of Jews and their liquidation in these confined spaces. Although Mohammed recounts these practices as part of his own experience, it has become anathema, and in some places illegal even to raise the question suggested by his story:  How could heirs of those claiming to be Nazism’s most hapless victims assume the role of those who brutalized them, or in the words of Edward Said, how did Palestinians become “the victims of the victims”? 

It turns out that insight into this vexing puzzle beckons to two contemporaries from the nineteenth century with vastly different political persuasions. In his celebrated work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville asked how the luminaries of the French Revolution, with their “love of equality and the urge to freedom” ultimately crafted a system of authoritarian rule little different from the absolutism they so passionately set out to overturn.  In seeking to explain this paradox, de Tocqueville signaled a beguiling truth about these revolutionaries who he insists, “were men shaped by the old order.”  These individuals may have wanted to distance themselves from the ancien regime they so fervently wished to destroy, but years of conditioning under French absolutism had influenced their outlook and behavior.  Try as they might, these revolutionaries, “remained essentially the same, and in fact…never changed out of recognition.” Four years before de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”  In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of “dead weight” did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel? 

Lords of the Landscape

As early as 1904, Zionists in Palestine associated with the Second Wave of Jewish immigration were already signaling the future character of the State of Israel when they promoted the idea of “Hebrew Land, Hebrew Labor.” Central to this slogan was an effort to build an exclusionary Jewish society by evicting Palestinian tenants from lands they purchased, and preventing Palestinian labor on Jewish-owned land. In this way, early Zionism was seeking to create a landscape of Jewish spaces free of Palestinians. What Zionism ultimately created to fulfill these exclusionary impulses, however, took shape after 1945 in the crucible of the long shadow cast upon world Jewry by the experience of the Holocaust when the State of Israel came into being. Its signature practices with respect to the Palestinians reveal a striking, if unsettling set of parallels with what was done to Jews by the Nazis. Two seminal moments in the evolution of the State of Israel are paramount in marking the development of these exclusionary behaviors.

The initial moment encompasses Israel’s early years, 1947-50 and focuses on three defining practices designed to create Jewish ascendancy on the land and render Palestinians a subjugated people. First, during this period, the “Jewish State”—a moniker that is something of a mischaracterization since that State contains a 20% Palestinian population—evicted 750,000 Palestinians from homes within its boundaries, and in a Cabinet decision of July 1948 declared that it would never allow these evictees to return. Second, was what the Israeli Government did to Bedouins from the Naqab desert who managed to remain in their ancestral homeland following the end of hostilities in 1949. The Israeli military rounded up the 13,000 remaining Bedouin and confined them in a prison-like encampment near Beersheva known as the Siyaj (Enclosure Zone) where they were without basic services, forced to obtain permits to enter and exit the Siyaj, and prevented from building permanent housing for themselves. Finally, in the early 1950s, the Israeli State passed a series of laws on property rights, notably, the Absentee Property Law (1950) that dispossessed refugees of their lands on the grounds that they were “absentees,” no longer living in their domains. This law, however, also confiscated the property of roughly 50% of Palestinians in the new state through a macabre legal designation for Palestinians temporarily displaced from their homes who were classified as “present absentees.” In effect, what the State of Israel did in its infancy in seeking to make the Jewish State free of Palestinians by evicting, dispossessing, and confining them, had an uncomfortable resonance with the aim of the Third Reich in making Germany and the Reich Judenrein, free of Jews.

The second historical moment focuses on the aftermath of the June War in 1967 in which the State of Israel sought to extend its domination over Palestinians into territories conquered in the 1967 campaign by settling those areas with Jewish Israelis – a clear violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Convention. This practice expanded Jewish presence within the conquered space while shrinking Palestinian presence by confiscating an ever-expanding inventory of Palestinian property for settlement-building and limiting the territorial spaces accessible to Palestinians in the occupied areas. In this way, the Jewish State created a constantly growing Hebrew landscape in the areas under its military control.

Not surprisingly, the State of Israel has taken draconian measures to fortify its project of land confiscation and settlement, and to this end has created a carceral-like regime for control over a population that it perceives as hostile to Jewish supremacy on the land. In pursuit of this aim, the Jewish State has not only intensified a system of actual incarceration in which thousands of Palestinians fill Israeli jails as political detainees. The State of Israel has created a massive prison-like environment on the Palestinian landscape dubbed a “Matrix of Control,” for the subjugation of Palestinians. This “Matrix” consists of an elaborate system of checkpoints, including several large checkpoint terminals, diffused throughout the West Bank to control Palestinian circulation; guard towers situated at major transport junctions to monitor Palestinians and their movements; and a massive Wall built along a 450-kilometer route across the West Bank where Palestinian circulation is pre-empted and the territory partitioned in much the same way that Michel Foucault has described the attributes of modern prisons. These features on the land have imbued the Palestinian landscape with the unenviable moniker of “The Biggest Prison on Earth.” More critically, as Palestinians encounter these elements in queues of regimented bodies under the gaze of armed soldiers, the echoes of Nazi landscapes seem inescapable.

Added to this carceral environment is the effort of the Jewish State to weaken Palestinian presence on the land by destroying one of the primary anchors affixing Palestinians to place, the Palestinian home. At any one moment, a Palestinian home is routinely demolished, usually on the pretext of being built “illegally,” without permission, but the State of Israel also destroys Palestinian homes as retribution against entire families of alleged perpetrators of “terror” against the Jewish State. Complementing this destruction is the longstanding practice of Israeli military “raids” into Palestinian homes, casting a pall of terror over the Palestinian landscape. These raids not only witness the arrests of Palestinians who disappear into Israeli jails as political prisoners, but also the ransacking and vandalism of the Palestinian home. Such destruction of Palestinian homes and property, along with the arrests of Palestinians in these actions find resonance in the way Jews were subjected to raids by the Nazi SS and sent to prison camps while their homes were ransacked and looted in Nazi versions of the pogrom. 

In February of last year, the world witnessed a particularly savage outbreak of this kind of violence in the Palestinian town of Huwara perpetrated by settlers from nearby Israeli settlements who set fire to cars, businesses, and homes of Huwara residents and killed one resident by gunfire as Israeli soldiers looked on and even assisted the perpetrators in this mayhem. So depraved was this rampage that the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs even used the word, “pogrom,” to label this carnage, a word choice by an Israeli official that was especially poignant. The implication was that the Jews who perpetrated this violence possessed the same kind of racist animus as perpetrators of Christian and Nazi pogroms against Jews, and enlisted similar types of brutality against Palestinian civilians. At the time of events in Huwara, however, the uprooting of Palestinian croplands and the destruction of rural homes, livestock pens, and farm equipment by Jewish settlers in an effort to evict and drive out Palestinians had already become commonplace on the Palestinian landscape—with nary a condemnation by Israeli officials, and virtually no effort by Israeli authorities to prevent and punish this criminality. As it turned out, Huwara was but a prelude to the much more sweeping campaign of carnage visited on Palestinians in the aftermath of October of the same year. 

Final Solution

In a riveting documentary, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe (2016), members of the Zionist Haganah militia interviewed in the film who were active in the military campaign of the period recounted their encounters with Palestinians during that critical time when the Jewish State came in to being. Hava Kellar, a Haganah veteran, spoke glowingly about her role in the expulsion of Palestinians from Bir-es Saba, seemingly oblivious to the expulsions of Jews during the Shoah. “I came to Beersheva, she recalls, and the commander said to me: ‘tomorrow we are going to throw out the Arabs from Beersheva.’ I said ‘wonderful, of course I’m going to help.’ Next day I got a gun, and we prepared 10-12 buses. We called all the Arabs from Beersheva to come to the buses and I was standing guard to make sure they went into the buses to go to Gaza—and they are still in Gaza today.” 

What we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death.

Another Haganah veteran, Josef Ben-Eliezer, is even more explicit in admitting to the parallels of what he did as a solider and what he experienced as a boy at the hands of the Nazis. “I saw masses of people going through the checkpoint that we were ordered to oversee,” he says, “and they were searched for valuables. It reminded me of when I was a child. We were doing the same thing that people have done to us as Jews.” 

A common belief among defenders of Israel is that Jews, and all things associated with the Jewish people—including the State of Israel—could not possibly do what Josef Ben-Eliezer described as Jews imitating the Nazis. To even imagine such a possibility is to transgress into forbidden terrain. Nazism is invariably associated with humanity’s worst-ever atrocity—the elimination of the Jews as a people—a crime given the name in 1944 of genocide, and codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Among the stated goals of Nazism, for which some of its leaders were prosecuted under this law, was the idea of making Germany and the areas it occupied Judenrein, free of Jews. That Jews could be a party to such an idea is for many, completely blasphemous if not worse. Events after October 7, however, reveal this longstanding Zionist conceit to be problematic.

On October 13 of last year, the Israeli Intelligence Ministry, an opaque governmental body that produces policy research for other Israeli Government agencies, authored a document in which it outlined three options for the Jewish State in response to the breach of the barrier confining the Gazan people, and the killing by Hamas and other allied groups of Israeli military personnel, law enforcement officials and roughly 700 civilians. In this document, the Ministry recommends the third option—transfer of the entire Gaza population to the Egyptian Sinai – which document authors point out is “executable,” and will yield “the most positive long-term benefits” for the Jewish State. These authors understood how transfer of the 2.3 million Gazans into the Egyptian Sinai would entail an untold level of brutality against the people of Gaza triggering violations of the laws of war and even more serious charges, and would likely elicit broad global condemnation if not indictments. Nevertheless, the document urges policymakers in Israel to forge ahead with emptying Gaza, despite these challenges, and count on its alliance with the U.S. for backing while waging the necessary public relations campaign of incessantly portraying the Jewish State as victim. 

If there was any ambiguity about what this campaign of depopulation would entail, such doubts were put to rest almost from the start of the violence by the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. On October 9 at a meeting of Israeli military commanders at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheva, Gallant, acknowledged: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” An even more graphic specter of the motivation to eradicate the bare life of the Gazans came from Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu himself at the end of October after the Israeli Military had already killed 8000 Gazans and had evicted 1.2 million Gazans from their homes in the North of the Strip and instructed them to move South. Likening the campaign in Gaza to an ancient Biblical struggle by the Jews in the time of the Exodus to eradicate the Amalakites, Netanyahu exhorts his military and the people of Israel to “Remember what Amalek did to you” and he continues: “Our heroic soldiers have one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy.”

Two days after Netanyahu’s Biblical invocation, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, in a calculated performative spectacle, denounced the United Nations for supposedly failing to condemn Hamas and duly pinned a yellow star to his blazer, reenacting the Nazi practice of stigmatizing Jews with this disparaging emblem so that the Nazi regime could more easily monitor them and ordinary Germans could more easily harass them. But Erdan’s bizarre stunt, assuming the role of a Nazi himself in pinning the Yellow Star to his own clothing, had a more sinister propaganda aim. “Don’t forget, we are the victims”—was his unmistakable subtext. Such a message, however, is difficult to reconcile alongside images of some of the world’s most impoverished human beings, with no military, no planes, no navy, no tanks, no anti-aircraft batteries, being bombarded at will by one of the most powerful military forces in the world while trying to escape the carnage raining down on them in overcrowded wooden carts pulled by donkeys, or for those less fortunate simply walking disconsolately on bombed and destroyed roads in lines resembling Palestinian refugees of 1948. Indeed, the disconnect between what Israeli ambassador Erdan wants the world to believe, and what the world can see with its own eyes is starkly Orwellian.

In 1944, a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin coined the term, genocide to describe the campaign of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews, but he also intended the concept to be applicable to a range of other crimes against humanity committed prior to the Holocaust. Four years later Lemkin’s idea was codified in what is now known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Despite the European bias of the Convention, however, with its almost singular point of reference being the experience of the Nazis and European Jewry, and the absence in it of specific kinds of acts such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which adjucates the law with respect to countries, has repeatedly emphasized that the Convention embodies general principles. It is for this reason that the State of Israel, arguably born at least in part as reparations for the Nazi Genocide against European Jews, now finds itself on the opposite end not as victim but indeed as perpetrator. 

In January of this year, South Africa as a signatory to the Genocide Convention to prevent the commission of this crime, duly filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice charging the State of Israel with genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. In broad outline, genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention as “acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” and the Statute goes on to specify five scenarios in which the crime can be identified. Section C of South Africa’s 84-page document describes in detail the various campaigns of the Israel military in Gaza that conform to the definition of destroying in whole or in part Palestinian as a group. Among what is summarized in this section is the forced eviction of close to 2 million of the 2.3 Gazans from their homes; the destruction of 60% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip; the deliberate and almost complete destruction of the health care sector including most of the hospitals; the destruction of schools and universities; and the targeting of food-producing outlets including farms and bakeries. Part of what has made genocide so difficult to prosecute, especially with respect to sovereign states, is proving intent on the part of alleged state perperators. In its document, the South African legal team has diligently gathered the various statements of the Israeli Defense Minister, Prime Minister, and other high-ranking Israeli Government officials that admit in plain language, to the genocidal intent of the Israeli military campaign. Taken together, the deeds of the Israeli military, and the words of Israeli officials testify to the aim of eliminating the Gazans from Gaza, that is, rendering Gaza free of Palestinians.    

For the past 17 years, Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling the movement of people and goods that could enter and exit the territory, imbuing the Gaza Strip with the odious label of “the world’s largest open-air prison." Three years prior to the blockade, however, the State of Israel had sufficiently confined the people of Gaza in a walled and fenced enclosure to the point where former Israeli National Security Council Director, Giora Eiland conceded the territory to be “a huge concentration camp.” The choice of this descriptor by Eiland seems especially appropriate for a population blockaded and unable to circulate beyond the closed confines of the Strip and who are reliant on the whim of Israel for access to virtually all essentials for bare life. International law, however, suggests that a blockade imposed on a territorial space is an act of war. Even former Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban endorsed this view in reference to the June 1967 war. “The blockade is by definition an act of war,” Eban announced at the UN on June 19, 1967 in describing the actions of Egypt that supposedly provoked Israel into its surprise attack.  Israel is thus trying to argue to the world that it is defending itself in a war it did not want. In reality, the war did not begin October 7.  Israel has been waging war against Gaza with its blockade since 2007—not to mention four major military bombardments since 2006 killing thousands of Gazans—and the Jewish State presents itself as victim when the Gazans have attempted to break the siege and fight back. 

In December of last year, author Masha Gessen, in a courageous article for The New Yorker provided a different approach to framing the carceral spectacle in Gaza. For Gessen, the metaphor of the open-air prison was incomplete, if not inaccurate. In the context of the unmitigated carnage being visited upon the Gazans by Israeli military, what the Jewish State is undertaking, Gessen argued, is nothing less than a genocidal effort at “liquidating the ghetto” they have created in Gaza—much like the Nazis liquidating the Ghetto they had created in Warsaw. In this way, Gessen signaled an alternative way of seeing not only the savagery being visited on the 2.3 million Gazans, but also what Gaza had become under the Israeli blockade and bombardment—a ghetto that Israel is trying to eradicate as the Nazis did. How else is it possible to interpret a military campaign demanding Gazans evacuate their homes and move South where they have become more concentrated, and where they are still being incessantly bombed and killed?

At the moment of this writing, the Israeli military has delivered what is perhaps a final ultimatum to the Gazans. Concentrated now in the southernmost enclave in the Gaza Strip, the city of Rafah, where they have been ordered to move after a series of orders that has essentially cleared most of Gaza of its inhabitants since October, the Israeli military has now ordered the Gazans to leave—but there is no place left for them to go. Israel, in effect, appears poised on the precipice of implementing the aim of the Intelligence Ministry Report by forcing the Gazans into Egypt, or alternatively if Egypt continues to deny Israel’s request to let the Gazans into the Sinai, Israel will continue liquidating them. This is indeed an effort on the part of Israel to empty the ghetto!

What the world is witnessing in this effort to liquidate the ghetto of Gaza is shocking in the degree of violence that the State of Israel has unleashed on a defenseless group of people, but at the same time, it is explainable. Although the idea of the Jewish State committing genocide is blasphemy to those who hold that it was born as the supposed antithesis of genocide and the Holocaust, both Alexis de Tocqueville and Edward Said remind us that there is at times a cunning aspect in historical outcomes in which the oppressed somehow take on the attributes of their oppressors. In an interview of 2011, the celebrated physicist and Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer made this connection between Zionism and Nazism explicit when he said: “I saw in Auschwitz that if a dominant group wants to dehumanize others, as the Nazis wanted to dehumanize me, these dominant groups must first be dehumanized themselves…They [Zionists] have given up everything which has to do with humanity, for one thing: the state, the blood and the soil – just like the Nazis.” To those who naively proclaim the idea of “Never Again,” sadly what is upon us is that Palestinians have become the Jews, along with all of the other groups from the Namibians to the Rohingya that have suffered genocide. In this sense, what we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death. 

Resurrecting the Ghouls: On the West's History of Hating Russians and Rehabilitating Nazis

[Pictured: The Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary group that is part of Ukraine’s armed forces]

By Julien Charles

The immensely popular Swedish noir crime procedural novels by Lars Kepler are part of one of the more compelling series in Nordic crime fiction. In particular the Joona Lina series, in which police detectives track a Hannibal-esque serial killer who wreaks havoc on those he deems deserving. It only occurred to me late in the first novel that the killer is a Russian. Jurek Walter is an ex-soldier, remorselessly cynical, immune to pain, and a brutally efficient torturer and murderer of men and women alike. His feverishly demented goal is to ‘restore order’ by punishing those who have gotten away with a lot less criminal activity than murder. In short, an unimaginable psychopath of the kind that could only emerge from the ruins of the Soviet Union. The personification of evil.

The character in the novel embodied a version of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a process by which the West caricatures other regions, nations, and people in cartoonish and sophomoric ways. The better to understand them at a glance. Almost like a kind of intellectual shorthand by which to characterize and dismiss entire populations. Perform conceptual violence on them until they can be shunted into a shape that slides neatly into a western man’s conception of the world. Fits the Western cosmology, in which the U.S. and Europe shine as lodestars in a firmament of flickering blight. Everything in the heavens is of course in desperate need of guidance from the western polestar.

Examples of the dynamic of Orientalism are particularly rife in Hollywood. Countless series and movies have pitted pious Americans against a raft of crackpot Latinos, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, and Asians bent on genocide, world domination, and numberless other monomaniacal schemes. There’s of course no small amount of projection at work here in the fictional stylings of “the best minds of [our] generation”, as Ginsberg put it.

Not unlike the Kepler book, the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher films capitalize on the by now threadbare trope of a Soviet psychopath set loose in the naive and peaceable democracies of the West. The Zec is a man who escaped or survived the gulags in Siberia to wreak havoc on the West. In one scene, he describes how he once gnawed off a few fingers to avoid working in Siberian sulfur mines. A man of such exceptional capacities is no doubt useful to certain organizations, he muses. The Zec then encourages one of his low-level thugs to chew off his thumb as a show of fidelity, or some such deranged proof. The man—human, all too human—cannot do it and is summarily executed. The bloodless Zec then waxes psychopathic, wondering why westerners are so weak.

Observe the set pieces in the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle Red Sparrow. Scenes from the West are well-lit and overflowing with human emotion; scenes from behind the “iron curtain” are dimly lit, drab in color, stylistically old-world, barren of human empathy. In short, thoroughly depressing. Of course, as part of Lawrence’s character Dominika’s training in demolishing her human emotions (weaknesses all) and steeling herself in the arts of pitiless manipulation, she must appear naked before her class and satisfy the lust of a man who previously assaulted her.

Chronic Resentments

These are caricatures of Russians who evidently have been thoroughly dehumanized by life in the USSR. What has really dehumanized these characters is the propaganda which invented them.

Few events ignite this kind of Orientalism more than a war or proxy war with Russia, America’s bete noire. Despite the fact that the wall has been down for 30 years. Despite the fact that the West enjoyed an extended period of unrestrained looting in the Former Soviet Republics. During which time mortality rates skyrocketed for citizens of those fledgling states, thanks principally to the loss of the generous social supports that underpinned their Soviet economies. Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin is an avowed neoliberal who has repeatedly sought deeper integration with Europe and America, like a stepchild desperate to claim his birthright among a welter of siblings. Despite all this, Putin’s patriotic desire to reconstitute Russia as a viable economic and military power has damned him irreparably in the eyes of the West. He is like Kepler’s killer, the manifestation of undiluted evil. Except that Putin is real.

All this comes from a long lineage of Russophobia. It dates back to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which stirred fears of Russian plots to conquer Europe; to subsequent paranoia by British colonialists that Russia would steal the Indian subcontinent from its grasp; to the war to unseat the Bolsheviks and blistering responses to stories of mass slaughter under Soviet rule. In 1944, Hitler described Russians thusly, “These are not human beings: they are beasts from the Asiatic steppes, and the battle I am leading against them is the battle for the dignity of the people of Europe.” This view summarized the ideology behind Germany’s plan to murder 100 million Russians after the defeated the USSR. Likewise, we rarely hear that one of the small handful of groups energetically targeted for liquidation by the Nazis were communists. The Russians sacrificed 27 million people fighting off fascism. This loss is also infrequently highlighted.

The McCarthyite paranoia was a particularly acute instance of this chronic phobia. One can catch a whiff of the age-old bigotry in the propaganda of the present moment. The reflexive aggression toward Russia action in Ukraine (a recent article in The Times (UK) was entitled, “Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul”) This latest surge of bile seems in part an explosion of unresolved angst from the Russophobia of the Trump years, and perhaps a hundred years prior, though partially diffused by the fall of the wall. Yet it was still there even in the post-wall melees of capitalist looting under the doddering oversight of the Pushkin-quoting boozer Boris Yeltsin. Russians, Muscovites mostly, were freshly depicted as amoral, thieving mafiosi seduced by the flash of capital, the men brutal grotesques and the women biddable jades. Little was made of the valueless cosmos into which they’d been hurled by the blitzkrieg of capital on a society not remotely prepared for it.

(Much like the diagnosis of mental health in the West, problems of post-fall Russians were and are localized in the person, in the soul of a people, rarely traced to their societal causes. The New York Times just released a series on the “Inner Pandemic” of mental health issues, though it spends little time focusing on the circumstances that generated these crises, and which it enthusiastically supported.)

Even today one finds strains of the old Hitlerian trope coursing through the western mainstream. Recently on Germany’s ZDF channel, a guest of the Markus Lanz Show reminded viewers, with a slim smile, that, “Even if Russians look European, they are not European.” She rambled on incoherently about the Slavic view of death and noted that, “They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life.” She may as well have said they were beasts from the Asiatic steppes and referred viewers to the Jack Reacher movie. After which, perhaps, they might donate to the latest national purity fund.

This seems to be part unhinged racism, but also a psychological necessity for enemies in nation-states. And one wonders if race isn’t utilized to that end. And whether this psychological need springs from a desire for national purpose, or more from an unrelenting need of capital for new markets—and the geospatial requirements that go with it. Surely the historical Lebensraum looms large behind modern geopolitical conflicts.

Addicted to Conflict

But it isn’t just the xenophobic fear of Slavic people. There’s another element at work here. One is reminded of Colin Powell, former leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and dissembler nonpareil—before the U.N. Security Council. He once told a reporter that he feared he was “running out of enemies” in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. He was unwittingly disclosing a clandestine principle of Washington foreign policy. Namely, that it must always have an enemy. It cannot conceive a world of peaceful inhabitants, engaged in serene market exchange, celebrating a peace dividend while occasionally reminding new generations of the perils of conflict. This is not a conceit in the mental universe of the planners of American hegemony, be they retired generals on media networks, cabinet lieutenants sketching hemispheric takeovers, or well-compensated scriveners in beltway think tanks. And certainly not among the lurid corridors of K Street defense lobbyists. If Putin did not exist, Washington would have invented him. Much as they invented, to a surprising degree, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen.

More often than not, the enemy must be cut from whole cloth. They do not ordinarily present themselves. Few countries are interested in going to war with the United States. At worst most nations are disinterested in submitting themselves to American rule, which manifests in numberless ways, a protean ogre extending its tentacles across the globe. Soft power, hard power, invisible power. Be it the petro dollar and the SWIFT system that places a subject nation under the perpetual threat of American sanctions. (A form of economic colonialism.) Be it bilateral security arrangements that infiltrate the country with U.S. military personnel and ensnare it in long-term weapons contracts with beltway defense contractors. (A form of military subjugation.) Be it onerous and odious loan agreements with Bretton Woods institutions that enslave generations of citizens to corrupt banks of the global North. (A form of vassalage.) From which those citizens’ meager avenues of escape include metastasizing debt service and consequent debt deflation, firesales of national patrimony, or the trauma of default, runaway inflation, and economic collapse. Choose wisely.

Rather than being enemies of the American state, such nations would really rather be left alone. To experiment with alternative economic models including socialism and its various hybrids. To trade in local currencies. To align in regional economic blocs. But this option–attempting to implement an economic structure other than western neoliberalism–is anathema to Washington. Just ask Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and any other nation that wishes to forge its own path.

The Real Enemy

Which brings us to the real enemy of the United States. Despite reports to the contrary, it is not fascism. Fascism is merely an end-point of capitalism, which will almost assuredly emerge wherever capitalism is practiced in unregulated and unrepentant fashion. As middle class wealth craters, however broadly, and extreme wealth and privilege expands, however narrowly, it will require force to generate compliance within a resentful and restive population. We are witnessing this transition in the West right now.

All this to say that, no, fascism was never the primary nemesis. The real enemy is communism. Western capital cannot abide the notion of a workers' state full of nationalized enterprises committed to the general welfare. One which deprioritizes the profit motive and tars it with the stigma of avarice and usury. This is and has always been Washington’s worst-case scenario, which it watched materialize in the Bolshevik Revolution, a knife in the side of capital that drew blood for 74 years, and which it tried hysterically to end all the while.

Not even the shameful scourge of Nazism rising up in the heart of civilized Europe was enough to lift fascism above communism as public enemy number one. As John Steppling notes in an excellent essay on the rehabilitation of fascism, Arthur Schweitzer, author of Big Business in the Third Reich, says that many German businessmen saw virulent anti-semitism as little more than a form of “economic policy reform.”

It is instructive to read works like The Splendid Blond Beast, which outlines the myriad deceptions of the postwar era of supposed deNazification in Western Europe. As it turns out, Washington was torn on the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Although Frederick Roosevelt and others supported harsh punishment, helped establish Nuremberg and sent principled judges like Robert Jackson, others like powerful Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his Secretary of State brother John Foster Dulles sought to shield German industrialists and military officers, all deeply complicit and enthusiastic collaborators in the Nazi extermination campaigns.

Then there was Operation Paperclip, a full program dedicated to repatriating Nazis in the United States and installing them in key posts in pivotal internationalist institutions like the UN. And Nato’s alleged role in Operation Gladio, code name for a series of stay behind secret armies committed to armed resistance, acts of subversion, and terror, that were to be activated in the event of an invasion of Western Europe by Warsaw Pact nations, something never on the books in Moscow, but alive in the feverish imagination of beltway anti-communists. These dispersed embedded and hastily assembled paramilitaries were actually left behind to agitate against and prevent the rise of leftist (see communist) political blocs. They operated in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Portugal and across Northern Europe. Nato, the CIA, and various European intelligence agencies were not about to watch Western Europe go communist regardless of what the democratized masses aberrantly desired.

Much of this history suggests that the underlying need of capitalism for new markets is primary, and perhaps that race is a tool leveraged to rationalize what is at bottom base exploitation. Hence our general acceptance of fascism in Ukraine and hysteria against Russia.

Selective Outrage

We might argue that this is different: Russia invaded another country. On investigation the argument falters, fractures amid a sea of sharp facts: a foreign backer, a coup d’etat, an ultranationalist takeover, a Nato infiltration, a legal apparatus mobilized against its own citizens, a massacre of ethnic Russians, preparations for a final assault. And finally, a full response from Moscow.

But even if an invasion were our threshold for outrage, none of this pathos has been evident in our response to the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen, or U.S. wars on Libya and Syria. Even though the western aggression is criminal and death tolls are staggering. Even though there were plenty of visuals and myths available to rouse the choler of the people: visions of rampaging soldiers on Viagra rape sprees; grotesquely thin and lifeless children in the dust of the KSA’s induced famine; the hurling of gays off rooftops in Raqqa by ‘moderate rebels’. No, our collective consciousness has definitely been conditioned to despise most of all the legatees of Soviet communism, punished for the sins of the father in the first instance and for the defense of their national autonomy in the second. War, and war propaganda, is often a kind of industrialized hatred, organized malice armed with the implements of death.

As Arthur Ponsonby says in his book Falsehoods in War Time, deceitfulness is extraordinarily useful because humanity is mendacious and credulous in near equal measure. It lies and refuses to believe it is being lied to. Ponsonby, a member of British Parliament writing after World War I, says that nations must “justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion for the continuance of the struggle.” Obviously little has changed since our initial experience of industrial warfare. We are constitutionally and economically committed to domineering aims, are inimical to anything that might impede our expansion, and we rationalize our behavior to these ends with a healthy dose of projection abetted by racist caricature. It is a frightful concoction of pitiless greed and base prejudice.

Yet every time we think we have put these cruel rancorous sides to our human selves to rest, they reappear, refashioned in new apparel, with fresh logic, ironclad rationales. We are sold a bill of goods. Perhaps this should come as no real surprise to citizens of a country that worships a single skill, salesmanship, and a single “virtue”, wealth, as its most sacred values. Everything is a commodity and everything that has been sold in the past will be sold again. Our entertainment culture is rife with reproductions of yesterday’s stories. Why not re-commoditize fascism? Wave the colors of a new flag and herald the insignia of a new battalion. Lionize a new leader, dress him in army green and pose him on the marble stairs of the halls of power, sandbags stacked to the roofs behind him. Honor under siege.

What has been sold before will be sold again; what we have hated before we will hate again. If it isn’t quite eternal return then it surely is history recurring as tragedy then farce. This soft embrace of fascism and rabid anti-communism goes all the way back to the Bolshevik uprising. As one of Kepler’s Nordic tales is subtitled, “Sometimes the past won’t stay buried.” Yes, the graves are always rather too near the surface.

Julien Charles is a concerned citizen hoping to call attention to the authoritarian drift of states across the Western world, and the disingenuous narratives promoted to gain consensus for such measures.

The U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine: How the Past Became the Present

By John Bellamy Foster

The following is the text of a presentation by John Bellamy Foster given on March 31, 2022 to the advisory board of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Thanks for inviting me to make this presentation. In talking about the Ukraine war, the essential thing to recognize at the outset is that this is a proxy war. In this regard, none other than Leon Panetta, who was CIA director and then secretary of defense under the Barack Obama administration, acknowledged recently that the war in Ukraine is a U.S. “proxy war,” though seldom admitted. To be explicit, the United States (backed by the whole of NATO) is in a long proxy war with Russia, with Ukraine as the battlefield. The U.S. role in this conception, as Panetta insisted, is to provide more and more weapons faster and faster with Ukraine doing the fighting, bolstered by foreign mercenaries.

So how did this proxy war come about? In order to understand that we have to look at the U.S. imperial grand strategy. Here we have to go back to 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved or even further to the 1980s. There are two prongs to this imperial grand strategy, one as geopolitical expansion and positioning, including the enlargement of NATO, the other as the U.S. drive for nuclear primacy. A third prong involves the economy but won’t be considered here.

The First Prong: Geopolitical Expansion

The first prong was enunciated in Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Policy Guideline for the United States in February 1992, just months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The grand imperial strategy adopted at the time and followed ever since had to do with the United States advancing geopolitically into the terrain of the former Soviet Union as well as what had been the Soviet sphere of influence. The idea was to prevent Russia from reemerging as a great power. This process of U.S./NATO geopolitical expansion commenced immediately, visible in all the U.S./NATO wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe that have taken place in the last three decades. NATO’s war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was particularly important in this respect. Even while the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was going on, the United States began the process of enlarging NATO by moving it further and further East to encompass all of the former Warsaw Pact countries as well as parts of the former USSR. Bill Clinton in his 1996 election campaign made the enlargement of NATO part of his platform. Washington started to implement that in 1997, eventually adding 15 additional countries to NATO doubling its size and creating a 30-nation Atlantic Alliance targeting Russia, while also giving NATO a more global interventionist role, as in Yugoslavia, Syria, and Libya.

But the goal was the Ukraine. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the most important strategist of all of this and had been Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor said in his 1997 Grand Chessboard that Ukraine was the “geopolitical pivot,” particularly in the West, which if it were brought into NATO and under Western control, would weaken Russia so much that it could be tethered, if not dismembered. This has been the goal all along and U.S. strategic planners and Washington officials, along with the NATO allies, have stated over and over that they wanted to bring the Ukraine into NATO. NATO made this goal official in 2008. Only a few months ago, in November 2021 in the new strategic charter between the Biden administration in Washington and Zelensky government in Kyiv, it was agreed that the immediate aim was bring Ukraine into NATO. But this has also been NATO’s policy for a long time now. The United States in the final months of 2021 and at the beginning of 2022 was moving very fast to militarize the Ukraine and accomplish that as a fait accompli.

The idea, articulated by Brzezinski and others, was that once the Ukraine was secured for NATO, Russia was finished, the proximity to Moscow with Ukraine as the thirty-first nation in the NATO alliance, would give NATO a 1200-mile border with Russia, the same path through which Hitler’s armies had invaded the Soviet Union, but in this case with Russia facing the world’s greatest nuclear alliance. This would change the entire geopolitical map giving the West control of Eurasia west of China.

How this actually played out is important. The proxy war started in 2014 when the Maidan coup, engineered by the United States, took place in Ukraine, removing the democratically elected president, and putting ultra-nationalists largely in control. The immediate result though was that Ukraine began to break apart. Crimea had been an independent, autonomous state from 1991 to 1995. In 1995 Ukraine illegally tore up the Crimean Constitution and annexed it against its will. The Crimean people didn’t consider themselves part of Ukraine, and were largely Russian speaking, with deep cultural connections to Russia. When the coup occurred, with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in control, the Crimean population wanted out. Russia gave them an opportunity with a referendum to stay in the Ukraine or join with Russia. They chose the latter. However, in the eastern Ukraine the primarily Russian population was subjected to repression by ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Kyiv forces. Russophobia and extreme repression of the Russian-speaking populations in the East set in—with the infamous case of the forty people blown up in a public building by neo-Nazis associated with the Azov Battalion. Originally there were a number of breakaway republics. Two survived in the Donbass region, with dominant Russian-speaking populations: the republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

A civil war thus emerged in Ukraine between Kyiv in the West and Donbass in the East. But it was also a proxy war with the U.S./NATO supporting Kyiv and Russia supporting Donbass. The civil war started right after the coup, when the Russian language was basically outlawed, so that individuals could get fined for speaking Russian in a store. It was an attack on the Russian language and culture and a violent repression of the populations in the eastern parts of the Ukraine.

Initially, there were about 14,000 lives lost in the civil war. And these casualties were in the eastern part of the country, with something like 2.5 million refugees pouring into Russia. The Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015 led to a ceasefire, mediated by France and Germany, and supported by the United Nations Security Council. In these agreements the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics were given autonomous status within Ukraine. But Kyiv broke the Minsk agreements again and again, continuing to attack the breakaway republics in Donbass, though on a reduced scale, and the US continued to provide stepped-up military training and weapons.

Washington provided an enormous amount of military support to Kyiv between 1991 and 2021. The direct military aid to Kiev from the United States was $3.8 billion from 1991 to 2014. From 2014 to 2021, it was $2.4 billion, increasing in rate, and then finally skyrocketing once Joe Biden came into office in Washington. The United States was militarizing the Ukraine very fast. The United Kingdom and the Canada trained around 50,000 Ukrainian troops, not counting those trained by the United States. The CIA actually trained the Azov Battalion and the rightwing paramilitaries. All of this was targeting Russia.

The Russians were concerned particularly about the nuclear aspect, since NATO is a nuclear alliance, and if Ukraine was brought into NATO and missiles were placed in Ukraine, a nuclear strike could occur before the Kremlin had time to respond. Already there are anti-ballistic missile defense facilities in Poland and Romania, crucial as counterforce weapons in a NATO first strike. Yet, it is important to understand that the Aegis missile defense systems placed there are also capable of launching nuclear offensive missiles. All of this factored into Russia’s entry into the Ukrainian civil war. In February 2022 Kyiv was preparing a major offensive, with 130,000 troops on the borders of Donbass in the East and South, with U.S./NATO, firing into Donbass, with continuing U.S./NATO support. This crossed Moscow’s clearly articulated red lines. In response, Russia first declared that the Minsk Agreements had failed and that the Donbass republics had to be regarded as independent and autonomous states. It then intervened in the Ukrainian civil war on the side of Donbass, and in line with what it considered its own national defense.

The result is a proxy war between the U.S./NATO and Russia being fought in Ukraine, developing out of a civil war in Ukraine itself, which had its inception in a U.S.-engineered coup. But unlike other proxy wars between capitalist states this one is occurring on the borders of one of the great nuclear powers and is brought on by the long-articulated grand imperial strategy in Washington aimed at capturing the Ukraine for NATO in order to destroy Russia as a great power, and establish, as Brzezinski stated, U.S. supremacy over the globe. Obviously, this particular proxy war carries grave dangers on a level not seen since the Cuban missile crisis. Following the Russian offensive, France declared that NATO was a nuclear power and immediately afterwards, on February 27, the Russians put their nuclear forces on high alert.

Another thing to understand about the proxy war is that the Russians have been trying to with considerable success to avoid civilian casualties. The populations of Russia and Ukraine are interwoven, and Moscow has attempted to keep civilian casualties down. Figures in the US military and in the European militaries have been indicating that the civilian casualties are remarkably low, when compared to the standard of U.S. warfare. One indication of this is that the military casualties to the Russian troops are greater than the civilian casualties of Ukrainians, which is the reverse of the way it works in U.S. warfare. If you look at how the United States fights a war, as in Iraq, it attacks the electrical and water facilities and the entire civilian infrastructure on the grounds that this will create dissension in the population and a revolt against the government. But targeting civilian infrastructure naturally increases civilian casualties, as in Iraq where the civilian casualties from the U.S. invasion were in the hundreds of thousands. Russia, in contrast, has not sought to destroy the civilian infrastructure, which it would be easy for them to do. Even in the midst of the war they are still selling natural gas to the Kyiv, fulfilling their contracts. They have not destroyed Ukraine’s Internet.

Russia intervened mainly with the object of freeing up Donbass, much of which was occupied by Kyiv forces. A priority has been gaining control of Mariupol, the main port, which would make Donbass viable. Mariupol has been occupied by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. The Azov battalion now controls less than 20% of the city. They are hiding out in the old Soviet bunkers in part of the city. The Donetsk People’s Militia and the Russians control the rest of it. There are about 100,000 paramilitary forces in Ukraine. Most of the paramilitaries within the Ukrainian forces that constituted the larger part of the 130,000 troops that were surrounding Donbass, have now been cut off by the Russian military. Besides gaining control of Donbass together with the people’s militias, Moscow seeks to compel the Ukraine to demilitarize and to accept a neutral status, remaining outside of NATO.

If you look at the situation from the standpoint of the peace agreements—and the Global Times had a good report on it on March 31—you can see what the war is all about. Kyiv has provisionally agreed to neutrality, to be overseen by certain guarantors from the West, such as Canada. But the sticking point in the negotiations is what Kyiv calls “sovereignty.” That is all about Donbass and the civil war. Ukraine insists that Donbass is part of its sovereign territory, irrespective of the wishes of the population in the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The people in the Donbass republics and the Russians can’t accept that. In fact, the peoples’ militias and the Russians are still working at liberating parts of Donbass that are occupied by these paramilitary forces. It is there that the main sticking point in the negotiations lies, and this goes back to the reality of the civil war in Ukraine. The U.S. role in this has been to operate as a spoiler in the negotiations.

The Second Prong: The Drive to Nuclear Primacy

Here it is necessary to turn to the second prong of the U.S. Imperial Strategy. So far, I have discussed the grand imperial strategy in terms of geopolitics, the expansion into the territory of the former Soviet Union and the Soviet sphere of influence, which was articulated most effectively by Brzezinski. But there’s another prong to the U.S. grand imperial strategy that needs to be discussed in this context, and that is the drive to new nuclear primacy. If you read Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, his book on U.S. geopolitical strategy, you won’t find a word on nuclear weapons. The word nuclear doesn’t appear at all in his book, I believe. Yet this is of course crucial to the overall U.S. strategy with respect to Russia. In 1979, under Jimmy Carter, while Brzezinski was his national security advisor, it was decided to move beyond Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and for the United States to pursue a counterforce strategy of nuclear primacy. This involved placing nuclear missiles in Europe. In his “A Letter to America,” which appears in Protest and Survive published by Monthly Review Press in 1981, Marxist historian and anti-nuclear activist E.P. Thompson actually quotes Brzezinski admitting that the U.S. strategy had shifted to a counterforce war.

To explain this, it is necessary to go back a little bit further. By the 1960s, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States. There was a big debate within the Pentagon and security establishment about this, because nuclear parity meant MAD. It meant Mutually Assured Destruction. And whichever nation, it didn’t matter which, attacked the other, both would be utterly destroyed. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, started promoting the notion of counterforce to get around MAD. Essentially, there are two types of nuclear attacks. One is a countervalue which targets the cities, the population, and the economy of the adversary. That’s what MAD is based on. The other kind of attack is a counterforce war aimed at destroying the enemy’s nuclear forces before they can be launched. And, of course, a counterforce strategy is the same thing as a first strike strategy. The United States under McNamara, started to explore counterforce. McNamara then decided was such an approach was insane, and he decided to make MAD the deterrence policy of the United States. That lasted through most of the 1960s and seventies. But in 1979, in the Carter administration, when Brzezinski was the national security adviser, they decided to implement a counterforce strategy. The United States at that time decided to locate Pershing II missiles and nuclear-armed cruise missiles in Europe. That led to the rise of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement, the great European peace movement.

Washington initially put Pershing II intermediate nuclear missiles, as well as cruise missiles, in Europe. This became a huge issue for the peace movement in both Europe and the United States. The dangers of a nuclear war were enormously enhanced. The Ronald Reagan administration heavily promoted the counterforce strategy and added their sci-fi Strategic Defense Initiative (better known by its nickname of Star Wars), which envisioned a system that would shoot down all of the enemy missiles altogether. This was largely a fantasy. Eventually, the nuclear arms race in this period was stopped as a result of the massive peace movements in Europe on both sides of the Berlin Wall and the nuclear freeze movement in the United States, as well as the rise of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. But after the dissolution of the USSR, Washington decided to go forward with the counterforce strategy, its drive towards nuclear primacy.

Over the next three decades, Washington kept on developing counterforce weapons and strategies, enhancing US abilities in that respect, to the point that in 2006 it was declared that the United States was near nuclear primacy, as explained at the time in Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the main center for U.S. grand strategy. The Foreign Affairs article declared that China didn’t have a nuclear deterrent against a U.S. first strike, given the improvements in U.S. targeting and sensing technology, and that even the Russians couldn’t count on the survivability their nuclear deterrent anymore. Washington was pushing forward to achieve complete nuclear primacy. This went hand in hand with the enlargement of NATO in Europe because part of the counterforce strategy was to get counterforce weapons closer and closer to Russia to decrease the time with which Moscow could respond.

Russia was the primary target in the strategy. While China was clearly intended to be the later target.  But Trump coming in decided to pursue detente with Russia and concentrate on China. That threw things off for a while, destabilizing the U.S./NATO grand strategy since the enlargement of NATO was an essential part of the nuclear primacy strategy. Once the Biden administration came into office, attempts were made to make up for lost time in tightening the Ukraine noose in Russia.

In all of this, the Russians, now a capitalist state and regaining great power status, were not fooled. They saw this coming. In 2007 Vladimir Putin declared that the unipolar world was impossible, that the United States wouldn’t be able to achieve nuclear primacy. Both Russia and China started to develop weapons that would get around the counterforce, strategy of the United States. The idea of a first strike is that the attacker—and only the United States has anything near this capability—strikes the land-based missiles, whether in hardened silos or mobile, and by tracking the submarines is in a position to eliminate them as well. The role of anti-ballistic missile systems is then to pick off whatever retaliatory strike remains. Naturally, the other side, namely Russia and China among the great nuclear powers, know all of this, so they do everything they can to protect their nuclear deterrent or retaliatory strike capability. In the last few years Russia and China developed hypersonic missiles. These missiles move extraordinarily fast, above Mach 5 and at the same time are maneuverable, so they cannot be stopped by anti-ballistic missile systems, weakening the U.S. counterforce capability. The United States itself has not yet developed hypersonic missile technologies of this kind. This type of weapon is what China calls an “assassin’s mace,” meaning that it can be used by a lesser power to counter an overwhelming advantage in the military power of the opponent. This then increases the basic deterrent of Russia and China by protecting their retaliatory capabilities in the event of a first strike against them. It is one of the major factors that that is countering U.S. first strike capabilities.

Another aspect in this game of nuclear chicken is the U.S./NATO dominance in satellites. It is largely because of this that Pentagon targeting is now so accurate that they can conceive of the possibility of destroying the hardened missile silos with smaller warheads because of the absolute accuracy of their targeting, while also targeting submarines. All of this has to do with the satellite systems. This gives the United States, it is widely believed, the capability of destroying hardened missile silos or at least command and control centers with weapons that aren’t nuclear, or with smaller nuclear warheads, because of the increased accuracy. The Russian and Chinese militaries have been focusing therefore a lot on anti-satellite weapons in order to take this advantage away.

Nuclear Winter and Omnicide

All of this may sound bad enough, but it is necessary to say something about nuclear winter. The U.S. military—and I imagine it’s true of the Russian military as well—have, if you read their declassified documents, completely walked away from the science on nuclear war. In the declassified document on nuclear armaments and nuclear war there is no mention of firestorms anywhere in the discussion of nuclear war. But firestorms are actually what result in the largest number of deaths in a nuclear attack. The firestorms can spread out in a thermonuclear attack on a city to as much as 150 square miles. The military establishments, which are all about fighting and prevailing in a nuclear war, leave the firestorms out of account in their analyses even in calculations of MAD. But there is another reason for this as well since the firestorms are what generate nuclear winter.

In 1983, when counterforce weapons were being placed in Europe, Soviet and American atmospheric scientists, working together, created the first models of nuclear winter. A number of the key scientists, in both the Soviet Union and the United States, were involved in climate change research, which is essentially the inverse of nuclear winter, though not nearly as abrupt. These scientists discovered that in a nuclear war with firestorms in 100 cities, the effect would be a drop in an average global temperature by what Carl Sagan said at the time was up to “several tens of degrees” Celsius. They later backed off from that with further studies and said it was that the drop would be up to twenty degrees Celsius. But you can imagine what that means. The firestorms would loft the soot and the smoke into the stratosphere. This would block to 70% of the solar energy reaching the earth, which would mean all harvests on Earth would end. This would destroy nearly all vegetative life, so that the direct nuclear effects in the northern hemisphere would be accompanied by the death of almost everyone in the southern hemisphere as well. Only a few people would survive on the planet.

The nuclear winter studies were criticized by the military and by the establishment in the United States, as exaggerated. But in the 21st century, beginning in 2007, the nuclear winter studies were expanded, replicated, and validated numerous times. They showed that even in a war between India and Pakistan using Hiroshima-level atomic bombs, the result would a nuclear winter not as severe, but with the effect of reducing the solar energy reaching the planet enough to kill billions of people. In contrast, in a global thermonuclear war, as the news studies have shown, nuclear winter would be even would be as bad or worse as what the original studies in 1980s had determined. And this is the science. It’s accepted in the top peer-reviewed scientific publications and the findings have been repeatedly validated. It is very clear in terms of the science that if we have a global thermonuclear exchange, it will kill off the entire population of the earth with maybe a few remnants of the human species surviving somewhere in the southern hemisphere. The result will be planetary omnicide

At first McNamara thought that counterforce was a good idea, because it was seen as a No Cities strategy. The United States could just destroy the nuclear weapons on the other side and leave the cities untouched. But that quickly dissolved, and nobody believes that anymore because most the command-and-control centers are in or near the cities. There’s no way that these can all be destroyed in a first strike without attacking the cities. Moreover, there’s no way that the nuclear deterrent on the other side can be completely destroyed, where the major nuclear powers are concerned, and only a relatively small part of the nuclear arsenals of the major powers can destroy all the major cities on the other side. To think otherwise is to pursue a dangerous fantasy that increases the chance of a global thermonuclear war that will destroy humanity. This means that the major nuclear analysts, who are deeply engaged in counterforce doctrines, are promoting total madness. The nuclear war planners pretend that they can prevail in a nuclear war. Yet, we now know that MAD, mutually assured destruction, as it was originally envisioned, is less extreme than what a global thermonuclear war means today. Mutually assured destruction meant both sides were destroyed in their hundreds of millions. But nuclear winter means virtually the entire population of the planet is eliminated.

Counterforce strategy, the drive towards first strike capability or nuclear primacy means that the nuclear arms race keeps on increasing in the hope of eluding MAD, while actually threatening human extinction. Even if the numbers of nuclear weapons are limited, the so-called “modernization” of the nuclear arsenal, particularly on the U.S. side, is designed to make counterforce and thus a first strike thinkable. That’s why Washington withdrew from the nuclear treaties like the ABM Treaty and the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty. These were seen as blocking counterforce weapons, interfering with the Pentagon’s drive to nuclear primacy. Washington walked out of all of those treaties and then while it was willing to accept a limit on the total number of nuclear weapons because the game was then being played in a different way. The U.S. strategy is focused on counterforce not countervalue now.

All of this is a lot to be absorbed in a short time. But I think it’s important to understand the two prongs of the U.S./NATO imperial grand strategy in order to understand why the Kremlin considers itself threatened, and why it acted as it did, and why this proxy war is so dangerous for the world as a whole. What we should keep in mind right now is that all of this maneuvering for absolute world supremacy has brought to us to the brink of a global thermonuclear war and global omnicide. The only answer is to create a massive world movement for peace, ecology, and socialism.

John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly in New York City. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. He has published numerous articles and books focusing on the political economy of capitalism and the economic crisis, ecology and the ecological crisis, and Marxist theory: (with Brett Clark) The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift; The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology; (with Paul Burkett) Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (2016); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014); (with Robert W. McChesney) The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (2012); (with Fred Magdoff) What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2009); (with Fred Magdoff) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009); The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (2008); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000); (with Frederick H. Buttel and Fred Magdoff) Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000); The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (1999); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert W. McChesney) Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (1998); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood) In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (1997); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (1986); (with Henryk Szlajfer) The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (1984). His work is published in at least twenty-five languages. Visit johnbellamyfoster.org for a collection of most of Foster's works currently available online.

Revolution in an Age of Resurgent Fascism

By Atlee McFellin

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright used the phrase “ruptural transformation” as stand-in for revolution, inaccurately summarizing this as “Smash first, build second.” [1]  His immensely popular and useful work also unfortunately erased historical European anti-fascist strategy whose approach to revolution differed from the caricature he presented.  To move beyond Wright’s important, yet misleading framework, one can even turn to DSA-founder Michael Harrington’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future.

Published in 1989, Harrington expanded upon his own earlier critique of the German social democratic party, specifically the electoral path to socialism as strategy against Hitler and the Nazis. [2] Harrington would ultimately look to a leading member of that same party at the end of this book as the basis for what he referred to as a “new middle class” on the march of “visionary gradualism.”  That “new middle class” is not the “irreversible feature of the system” he thought it would be though.  Despite his misplaced optimism, rather than an electoral path to socialism, Harrington argued for the proliferation of “little republics” across the so-called USA, looking to Antonio Gramsci on a cross-class “historic bloc” and the Paris Commune of 1871. [3]

This Paris Commune was catalyzed in defense against an outside force invading the city to restore the power of a monarch, a dictator supposedly appointed by god.  The commune in Paris sprung from socialist clubs that had formed throughout the city, and where feminists had been building internal systems of mutual aid for decades. [4] They learned from a similar experience during the decline and fall of the republic twenty years earlier.  Marx referred to those socialist clubs in 1851 as “constituent assemblies” constituting a “proletarian commune” to sustain general strikes as a systemic alternative during that republic’s fall to dictatorship. [5] Back then though, the left remained dependent on electoral approaches until it was too late.  Twenty years would pass before that dictator was overthrown and the Paris Commune of 1871 was born.

When it came to the German left against Hitler and the Nazis, Harrington criticized socialist strategy that solely relied on the republic and its supposed capacity for managed capitalist development.  Throughout Germany there were also autonomous councils in communities and workplaces, formed by people in both the socialist and communist parties who rejected orthodoxy in recognition of the threat posed by fascism.  Though these councils were identical to the socialist clubs in France, they also looked to the successful 1917 revolution in Russia, similarly catalyzed in defense against violent forces who sought to restore the power of a monarch. 

 Against the Nazis and using the Russian word for council, this approach was best described as a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany,” socialist clubs as dual power with inherent mutual aid to sustain general strikes as another republic declined and fell. [6] Harrington never wrote on this particular commune against Nazi fascism, but whether it is a little republic, soviet, assembly, council, or socialist club, they were all meant as systemic alternative, dual power in the midst of crisis.  

But this is just European history.  No matter how important it is to learn from these past struggles, our fight against resurgent fascism is taking place in the settler colony known as the USA.  However, we can relate these European movements to historical forms of Black abolitionist mutual aid, communes, and the solidarity economy along with contemporary queer, feminist, Indigenous perspectives on communal resistance.  

Going back to at least 1780, Black communities in both the north and south pooled resources, financial and otherwise, democratically deciding how to sustain the movement for abolition, most often led by women.  In some cases, this resulted in the formation of rural communes for raids on slave plantations.  Over time and up to the first decades of the twentieth century, “mutual aid societies” spread across the country.  These democratic organizations operated their own internal solidarity funds so members could support one another and from which the nation’s first Black church, first Black labor union, and first movement for Black reparations were born. [7]  They were like European socialist clubs, but far more sophisticated.

This important yet still largely hidden history informed Ella Baker’s work running the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League from 1930-1933.  As a chapter-based organization, each would first form a council made up of young Black leaders.  These councils sought to identify what critical infrastructure was needed in the community to then learn enough about cooperative development and solidarity economics to turn those ideas into reality. [8] Importantly, many of these chapters were located in the Jim Crow south.  The YNCL practiced a socialist strategy meant to help communities survive conditions of racial segregation and white supremacist violence, conditions that inspired Hitler himself. [9]

Hitler was also inspired by the genocidal origins of the USA, the “cult of the covenant” at the core of our settler colonialism. [10]  As such, Nazi fascism sought Lebensraum or “living space” in pursuit of their own version of the American Dream as “summons to empire” for war and holocaust. [11]  Though fighting for bread and butter issues is imperative, especially in these times of profound crisis, the dream of universal middle classes masks a genocidal settler nightmare.  The actual alternative to resurgent fascism is not a more inclusive settler colony, but the proliferation of communal societies like what has repeatedly emerged from within sites of Indigenous resistance like Standing Rock, i.e. “caretaking relations, not American dreaming.” [12]

Constant warnings of constitutional crisis means that defeating fascism at the ballot box is essential, but also fundamentally insufficient for the cause of multi-racial democracy and socialism.  The elections of 2022 and 2024 could lead us down the path of a possible quasi-constitutional fascist coup.  Without our own systemic alternative as dual power rooted in mutual aid and the solidarity economy, including to sustain an uprising, we could again be dependent upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military to supposedly save democracy in a “color revolution” inspired by the CIA. [13]  Instead of repeating the mistakes made as other republics declined and fell, we have the chance to build an alternative as communes of resistance in process of formation from the midst of crisis. 

References

Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, (New York: Verso Press, 2010). P. 303 ; Ibid, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Verso Press, 2019).

Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism, (New York: Macmillan Press LTD, 1976). P. 208-215 ; Ibid, Socialism: Past and Future, (New York: Arcade Publishing, Inc., 1989). P. 53-59.

 Ibid, 275-277.

Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004). 24-26 and 130.

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, (New York: International Publishers, 2018). P. 83 and 98-99.

Clara Zetkin, “Fascism Must be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, (New York: International Publishers, 1984). P. 175.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). P. 27-47.

Ibid, 112-125.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). P. 86-88.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). P. 45-51.

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). P. 13-14, 28, and 325.

Marcella Gilbert, “A Lesson in Natural Law,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). P. 281-289. ; Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2019). P. 24-38.

Frances Fox Piven, Deepak Bhargava, “What If Trump Won’t Leave?” The Intercept, August 11th, 2020. https://theintercept.com/2020/08/11/trump-november-2020-election/

Militant Anti-Imperialism and Liberal Anti-Imperialism: A Demarcation

By Will Griffin

The term “anti-imperialist” gets thrown around so much today that the very definition of it is muddled up. Does opposing the wars abroad make you anti-imperialist? What about the wars here at home? Are there different kinds of anti-imperialists? Can we oppose military/political interventions while supporting economic interventions? How would they be different and how can we draw lines of demarcation between these differences?

First, let’s make clear what demarcation means. J. Moufawad-Paul describes drawing clear and decisive lines of demarcation as a militant philosophical approach to distinguish between competing interpretations within “the zones of praxis through which it cuts (Demarcation and Demystification, 2019).” In a nutshell, to be as precise as possible in our understanding of our own praxis and theory, it behooves of us to draw clear and distinct lines of differences between particular strategies and interpretations. 

In the book, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (2020), Devin Zane Shaw draws a clear line of demarcation of militant antifascism and liberal antifascism. This book provided a clear framework for me to apply the same to the anti-imperialist movement. 

The term “militant” is another word which has been thrown around a lot. Today, it often gets associated with some kind of unnecessary violence, an incorrect usage of the term due to liberal propaganda. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. practiced militant nonviolence. We can confidently say that a militant is someone who is willing to face antagonistic contradictions head on. Whether a militant uses the tactic of nonviolence or armed struggle to face an antagonistic enemy is not the question as both are militant. A labor strike can be militant. A sit-down protest can be militant. Anything can be militant as long as they are willing to face their oppressors. 

In order to understand anti-imperialism more clearly, we must demarcate a split within anti-imperialism itself. The two main trends within any anti-imperialist movement are militant anti-imperialism and liberal anti-imperialism. Both types of anti-imperialisms stand against imperialism, undoubtedly. Yes, I believe liberal anti-imperialists genuinely want to end imperialism; it is just their framework of understanding imperialism is incorrect and therefore their strategy to end imperialism is most certainly wonky. This wonky framework and strategy used by the liberal anti-imperialist could potentially lead down the road of capitulation to the imperialists, which is one reason we need to draw a distinct line of demarcation between liberal and militant anti-imperialism. Wherever liberal anti-imperialists fail, militant anti-imperialists can pick up the ball and continue pushing forward. 

Liberal anti-imperialism tends to funnel resistance back towards the institutions which are practicing imperialism, mainly the capitalist State. Essentially, they believe this State is neutral and can be won over to an anti-imperialist line. For those of us familiar with Marxist history, especially V.I. Lenin’s work in State and Revolution, understand the capitalism-imperialist state can never be won over as it is ultimately tied by a thousand threads to the capitalists and imperialists. So, liberal anti-imperialists are essentially begging a body of parasites to stop being parasitic. This is akin to requesting a human to stop drinking water or for the Earth to stop revolving around the Sun. 

The liberal anti-imperialists tend to denounce nearly all militant forms of resistance to imperialism, such as People's Wars in the Global South, when black and brown people destroy property or march with weapons or anything that they construe as "too far" or "too militant.". In the end, liberal anti-imperialists adhere to a faith in the institutions of government. Much of their faith relies on voting imperialism out of existence. The typical pattern for them is to not only denounce imperialism, but also stigmatize the militant anti-imperialists. How can one say no to the oppressor but also say no to the oppressed? Anyone who opposes liberal ways must be opposed against themselves; this is the liberal mentality.

A fundamental and detrimental mistake made by liberal anti-imperialist is taking the tactic of nonviolence and upholding it as a principle. This is the reason why liberals sit on the sideline as people are murdered in the street and bombed by drones from the sky. Kwame Ture taught us a valuable lesson in a speech where he said, 

“We must not confuse tactics with principles. This is an error that Dr. MLK made, and it also helps to confound the error. Dr. King took nonviolence, which is a tactic, and made it a principle. Being an honest man he came to compound his error because being an honest man he couldn’t compromise this principle, so he was forced to say ‘at all times, under all conditions, we must use nonviolence’. Malcolm X was correct. Malcolm said ‘nonviolence can only be a principle in a nonviolent world’, as MLK’s death came to prove.” (Kwame Ture speech at Florida International University, 1992)

Militant anti-imperialism uses direct action and does not rely on the capitalist State for any kind of policy change. We support movements who practice revolutionary militancy. We understand the necessity of fighting back physically in order to defend oneself from the horrors of imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists tend to realize that imperialism cannot be voted out of existence, it must be stepped on, forced out and overthrown. Militant anti-imperialists place their faith in the people, not the imperialist state; a huge fundamental difference from liberal anti-imperialists. 

The purpose of demarcation here is to force open the terrain of a radical, even revolutionary, militant left that goes beyond a parliamentary struggle. Also in doing so, we can mark the terrain for effective movement building. Despite having some gains in exposing the brutality of imperialism, liberal anti-imperialism will ultimately fail. When it does fail, a militant anti-imperialist movement will offer a new option for people to compete against this failure. 

We should not transform this non-antagonistic relationship between militant anti-imperialist and liberal anti-imperialists into an antagonistic contradiction. Many of the liberal anti-imperialists can, and should, be won over. We must oppose dogmatically applying this demarcation but hold true to it. Liberal anti-imperialists, at least some of them, can be shown the failures of their framework and strategy eventually winning them over to supporting militant anti-imperialist struggles. After all, were any of us born a militant anti-imperialist? No, we had to work our way up to this level of consciousness. 

I want to stress the importance in one of the differences in these trends. Liberal anti-imperialists deny the existence of militant struggles against imperialism, here and abroad. This fundamental outlook leads to the whitewashing of history and current movements around the world. It explains the limitations and failures of the mainstream “anti-imperialist” movement. They disconnect from the militant struggles and, therefore, are demarcating themselves from actual and effective anti-imperialist movements. In my experience, it’s often the pacifists who are the first to censure, and even condemn, movements which choose to pick up the gun, burn a facility down or even dress up in military fatigues. This is intrinsically tied to the idea of holding nonviolence as a principle. 

Is it really anti-imperialist? Anti-imperialism is just as much about opposing the Coca-Cola factory in Iraq as it is in opposing the bombs being dropped. Economic intervention is just as important as a military/political intervention. Imperialism is primarily an economic system, where the more powerful nations exploit, or super-exploit, the less powerful nations. Often, it is about stealing resources but also other reasons like geopolitics. Nonetheless, imperialism maintains an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationships between nations and capitalist enterprises, often in the form of empire, based on domination and subordination. 

In our universities, the bourgeois academics develop the ideology for the imperialists. One method involves disassociating politics from economics. To understand more precisely and in a more holistic manner of our world, we require the more accurate term, political economy. Politics and economics are intrinsically tied to each other. The military intervention invades in order to protect the economic system of exploitation and super-exploitation. In our era, the Global North exploits the Global South for its resources and to play on the grand chessboard of hegemony. This is only made possible with a powerful capitalist state. 

Liberal anti-imperialists lack a clear idea of imperialism by limiting it to military/political interventions only, leaving out the possibility of economic interventions. When transnational corporations intervene in a poor and oppressed nation in order to plunder its resources, is this not a form of imperialism? The military/political intervention is dependent upon the economic intervention. In fact, the State intervenes in order to protect the economic interests of the ruthless and exploitative corporations. This fractured framework of the liberal anti-imperialists weakened their resolve in opposing imperialism. The clarity around the nature of imperialism can only strengthen the anti-imperialist movement. Drawing this line can help to offer clarity on where each one of us may stand. It helps us to develop a more effective strategy in order to defeat imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists hold true to the power of the people, to combat imperialism in an assertive yet principled manner, and to overcome the weaknesses in our strategies and tactics. 

Will Griffin is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who is now an anti-imperialist and a content creator at The Peace Report, a militant anti-imperialist media collective. 

False Flags Fail to Derail National Uprising

By Werner Lange

The use of false flag operations designed to crush democracy and create tyranny has a long and sordid history. Arguably the most notorious and effective one took place in Berlin with the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler was named Chancellor by an anxious capitalist elite threatened with a workers’ revolution. The very next day President von Hindenburg stripped the German people of core freedoms protected under the Weimar Constitution and thereby opened the legal door for the Nazi reign of terror. The empowered Nazis, who were the actual arsonists, successfully laid blame on anti-fascists, particularly Communists, and began a bloody campaign of persecution and extermination of all opponents of Hitler’s Third Reich. Within weeks some 10,000 German anti-fascists were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Yet anti-fascist resistance continued both inside the Third Reich and in exile. Among the most effective of the early anti-fascist organizations was the Paris-based “International Struggle Against War and Fascism” and its widely distributed publication “ANTIFAschisticheFRONT”, which demanded the downfall of the brown-shirt arsonists in its September 1933 edition. That did not happen, and internal Nazi terror systematically degenerated into total war by 1939 when a series of false flag operations along the German-Polish border were used to justify the invasion of Poland.

Since its use in the 1930s as the title for an anti-fascist publication, ANTIFA has gained new notoriety in 2020. So have false flag operations. On May 31, St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square (one block from the White House), also known as “The Church of Presidents,” was damaged by arsonists. It was Pentecost Sunday, a day when the scripture reading for churches everywhere came from the account of the first Pentecost recorded in the Book of Acts which, interestingly enough, makes explicit reference to “tongues of fire.” No reference to Pentecost or anything else was made by President Trump holding a bible during his brief visit to the damaged church the very next day. A path through Lafayette Park was cleared for Trump and his entourage (Attorney General Barr, Secretary of Defense Esper, and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley) by violently driving out anti-racist protestors with clouds of tear gas and swarms of baton-wielding officers decked out in riot gear. Immediately before this awkwardly staged photo op at the church, Trump issued a short but ominous threat in the Rose Garden to protestors, singling out Anitifa twice by name. Similarly, right-wing media outlets, like Christianpost.com were quick to post tweets blaming the church arson on Antifa and claiming that “earlier in the night, rioters ripped down a U.S. flag displayed outside the church as people chanted, ‘burn that shit.’”

This has all the markings of a false flag operation, but an unsuccessful one. The same holds true for a series of violent attacks, arson fires, organized looting, and wanton property damage perpetrated by a host of agent provocateurs throughout the country who infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. Members of scores of violent right-wing groups, some recently minted, emerged from their chambers of hate onto the streets of America to damage the legitimacy of anti-racist protests as much as possible. Though carrying various group identities, several agent provocateurs also carried various assault weapons to demonstrations, and all carried the common goal of inciting violence to such extent that it would ignite a “fascist counterrevolution through accelerationism.” The intent is to accelerate societal collapse, foment civil disorder, foster polarization, and, as one of their leading neo-Nazi ideologues put it, “to fan the flames” against “The System.” That may have literally been the plan in Minneapolis, epicenter for the mass protests, where some 87 fires broke out in a span of five days following the police murder of George Floyd. On the night of May 30 alone, over 40 persons were arrested in Minneapolis and, according to its Safety Commissioner, “some were people linked to white-supremacist groups.”

Among the most vicious and violent of the white-supremacist groups is The Base (in Arabic, al-Qaeda), founded in 2018 and hell-bent on fomenting a race war to create white ethnostates. Its recruiting motto is “save your race, join the base.” In January 2020, three of its members were arrested in Georgia for plotting to murder a married couple affiliated with Antifa.  An older racist group, Alexandria-based Identity Evropa, whose members habitually show up to assault and harass protesters at Trump rallies, recently ran a fake ANTIFA twitter account calling upon members to loot “white hoods.” Rumors about busloads of ANTIFA rioters coming to “fuck up the white hoods” sufficed to get scores of heavy-armed residents onto neighborhood streets in several rural counties. Even the elderly protester who was forcefully shoved to the pavement by Buffalo police officers and left bleeding from his head was called a possible “ANTIFA provocateur” by Trump. ANTIFA was also explicitly identified as a “threat to national security” and its members as “domestic terrorists” in a video recently posted by Three-Percenters, a pro-gun right-wing militia taking its name from the dubious belief that only 3% of American colonists actively fought against the British (one of their members, the leader of the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia, was arrested for bombing a mosque in Minnesota). The very name of another extreme right-wing outfit, Boogaloo, is a code word for another civil war. Three of its members, all with extensive military experience, were arrested in Nevada for manufacturing explosives to be used at protests in Las Vegas and for urging participants to resort to violence. Another “Boogaloo Boi” was arrested in Texas in April after declaring his intent to kill police officers. Some have a habit of displaying Nazi symbols and all carry assault weapons wherever they appear, as they have at protests in at least six states.

Related in ideology and identify are the Proud Boys, a virulent pro-Trump gang of thugs who plan to hold a “Resist Marxism” rally in Providence in 2020 and pride themselves in their stated desire to “smash commies.” Their affiliate on the West Coast, Patriot Prayer, engaged in violent actions in Los Angeles and Portland. Heavily-armed members of another vigilante gang, New Mexico Civil Guard, showed up at a BLM protest on June 1 to harass and intimidate participants. On the same day, three heavily-armed white men from southern Ohio who identified themselves as “Ohio patriots” menaced peaceful protesters in Warren, in NE Ohio. At least one Boogaloo member, armed with assault weapons, traveled from North Carolina to infiltrate protests in Minneapolis. Two young anti-government agitators who traveled from Pennsylvania to protests in Cleveland were arrested for conspiring to incite violence after police found commercial fire gel, a Glock firearm, ammunition, spray paint, and a hammer in their car; five others carrying fire starters were arrested for trying to break into Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians. At a June 5 news conference, the U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio affirmed the hijacking of peaceful protests: “So let me get out in front of any questions as to whether there were out-of-state agitators who hijacked last weekend’s peaceful protest for their own purposes. The answer is undoubtedly yes, as seen with today’s arrests.” The same can be said for nearly all other protests.

Despite some attempts to show support, unprovoked police violence against protestors remains the norm, often with fatal consequences, as in Columbus and Louisville where protestors were killed by police action; two other protesters were killed in Indianapolis by unknown assailants. Also increasingly common is outright affiliation of law enforcement officers with white supremacist groups. A former Officer of the Month in the Philadelphia Police Department proudly wears a Nazi tattoo on his arm. A current Chicago police officer actively engaged with Proud Boys in a “Fuck Antifa” telegram chat channel. Among the New Mexico Civil Guard harassing protesters was an officer from the ICE prison in Torrance County.  A former sheriff’s deputy in Illinois is an active member of a Three Percenters militia.  A heavily disguised white man who wantonly smashed windows with a hammer at a Minneapolis AutoZone store and sprayed-painted “Free Shit for Everyone Zone” on its wall is alleged to have been a St. Paul police officer.  To facilitate destruction of property, piles of bricks have been strategically placed and left unattended in several U.S. cities hit by major protests. And as happened with the murder of a young woman protesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, cars are increasingly being used as weapons against BLM protestors who are commonly labeled “speed bumps” by militias. A black protestor was killed by a white driver in Bakersfield; and, in Seattle, a white man who drove his car menacingly into a BLM crowd shot and wounded a black man upon exiting his car on June 6. On the same day, the president of the state’s KKK plowed his truck into a BLM protest in Virginia. At least 17 such incidents have occurred since Memorial Day, resulting in serious injury to protesters and a few attempted murder charges against their assailants.

A nationwide call from “Team Trump” for direct action against protesters was posted on FaceBook in early June by the “Trump Make America Great Again Committee”: “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting - it’s absolute madness. It’s important that EVERY American comes together at a time like this to send a united message that we will not stand for their radical actions any longer. We’re calling on YOU to make a public statement and add your name to stand with President Trump against ANTIFA. Please add your name IMMEDIATELY to stand with your President and his decision to declare ANTIFA a terrorist organization.” That message, essentially a call to arms, will resonate with millions of pro-Trump Americans, ones who have foolishly forgotten that not so long ago hundreds of thousands of Americans, along with millions of others, gave their lives in an existential struggle against fascism. “Either the United States will destroy ignorance,” prophetically proclaimed W.E.B. Du Bois during another dark period in our history, “or ignorance will destroy the United States.” Team Trump is making sure ignorance wins.

While the full extent and nature of ties between white-supremacist groups inciting the violence and the Trump regime is unknown, it is clear that both share a virulent racist ideology and praxis. The self-identified “President of Law and Order” has no reservations about explicitly calling for looters to be shot; threatening to unleash “vicious dogs and most ominous weapons” against protesters; identifying elected officials who reject violent suppression of protests as “weak liberals”; labeling protesters themselves, such as the ones he terrorized in Lafayette Park, as terrorists; and surrounding himself with avowed racists like Stephen Miller, a senior Trump advisor and ally of a white-supremacist “nativist empire.” White supremacy, a defining feature of fascism, is the tie that binds Trump’s regime to his racist foot soldiers in the streets attempting to accelerate the trajectory toward civil war in America.

Demonization of anti-fascists in particular, and anti-racist protesters in general, as “terrorists” has its consequences, both intended and unintended. For we treat people and situations as we define them. As a classic sociological dictum has it: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Whether or not the definition is true or accurate is immaterial; false definitions, like false flags, have real consequences. And in this case, to be defined as terrorist is an open invitation for pre-emptive violence, even murder. Also at work here are the dynamics of the self-fulfilling prophecy as articulated by sociologist Robert Merton: “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true’. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error.” Reign of terror more accurately approaches our current reality. As of today, the 76th anniversary of D-day which marked the beginning of the end of the fascist Third Reich, US military forces are at a near-wartime alert level (Force Protection Condition Charlie) in and around the nation’s capital to stop projected acts of violence by anti-fascists. As proclaimed by Trump on June 1, “I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail. This includes Antifa and others who are leading instigators of this violence.” However, an internal FBI report found no evidence of Antifa involvement in this violence but did warn of calls by “far-right provocateurs to attack federal agents” and “use automatic weapons against protesters.”

Masters of deceit are not interested in facts, and the Trump regime has repeatedly demonstrated its utter disdain for truth. Given the dismal track record of this thoroughly racist regime, it is not beyond imagination that a major false flag operation is in the works and will explode in the near future or come as an October surprise. If and when that happens, it will be conducted covertly by criminal fascist gangs in the suites emboldened and empowered by a Trump regime threatened with disempowerment.

Attempted manipulation of anti-racist protests by an assortment of far-right groups to ignite a new civil war through a series of coordinated false flag operations has, so far, failed. By contrast, unlike its largely marginalized status for years, the Black Lives Matter movement has caught fire and carries with it the potential for change – radical, systemic change. For as Marx clearly realized in another historical context pregnant with potential for revolutionary change: “The weapons of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” Black Lives Matter is not only an idea whose time has come, but an idea that has clearly gripped the masses of all colors, especially America’s youth. a luta continua vitória é certa.

Violence, Counter-Violence, and the Question of the Gun

By Devon Bowers and Colin Jenkins

In June 2016, the Democrats had a sit-in on the House floor to push for gun legislation that had been blocked. It has been noted by numerous writers the myriad of problems with this bill[1][2] [3] as well as the hypocrisy of the sit-in itself.[4] However, this article is to talk about something deeper: the question of violence, so-called "gun control," and how these issues relate to politics and the working-class majority in its place within the socio-capitalist hierarchy.

There are arguably three main types of violence which will be premised in this analysis: state violence, group violence, and revolutionary violence. The first two forms of violence, coming from the state and groups empowered by the status quo, are designed to oppress. The third form, coming from revolutionaries and the systematically oppressed, is designed to strike back at this oppression for the purpose of liberation. The first two types (state and group) are violent, or offensive, by nature. The last type (revolutionary) is counter-violent, or defensive, by nature.

State Violence

Violence and politics are historically intertwined, so much so that the definition of the state is "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." [5] Due to this monopoly of violence, the state is able to put restrictions on what kinds of weapons people can have, and if they can have any at all. Because of the state's monopoly on the use of violence, which is directed at citizens of that state whenever deemed necessary, the issue of "gun control" is rather peculiar. It is also fairly unique to the United States, a country that was born at the hands of the gun, and a country that has been largely shaped by the degrees of "liberty" reflected in gun ownership among the populace. In modern society, gun control seems like a common-sense measure as it is quite obvious to many that people shouldn't have the right to possess tanks, Javelins, Scuds, nuclear weapons, and other military-grade weaponry. However, as technology in weaponry increases, so too does the power of the state in its monopoly of violence. Because of this natural progression of state power based solely in military hardware, a side effect of gun control is that it creates a polarization of power between the state and its citizenry. In other words, the state continues to build its arsenal with more powerful and effective weaponry, while the citizenry continues to face restrictions on access to weaponry. While this scenario may seem reserved for the Alex-Jones-watching, prepper-obsessed fringes, the reality is that, within an economic system (capitalism) that naturally creates extreme hierarchies and masses of dispossessed people, it is (and has been) a serious problem in the context of domestic political and social movements.

In the U.S. (as with many countries), there are underlying class and racial issues related to the state's monopoly of violence and its restriction of access to guns for its citizens. Looking from a historical perspective, when it comes to violence at the hands of the state, it is regularly used on the side of capital. One only need look at the history of the American labor movement during the first half of the twentieth century, which was an extremely violent time. Within the context of class relations under capitalism, whereas the state represents moneyed interests and a powerful minority, the working-class majority has faced an uphill battle not only in its struggle to gain basic necessities, but also in its residual struggle against an increasingly-armed state apparatus that is inherently designed to maintain high levels of dispossession, poverty, and income inequality. A primary example of the state using violence to aid capital is the Ludlow Massacre.

In the year 1913, in the southern Colorado counties of Las Animas and Huerfano, miners (with the help of the United Mine Workers of America) decided to strike. They argued for union recognition by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, an increase in wages, and an eight-hour work day, among other things. In response, the company kicked a number of miners off of the company land, and brought in the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency which specialized in breaking coal strikes. The Agency initiated a campaign of harassment against the strikers, which "took the form of high-powered searchlights playing over the colonies at night, murders, beatings, and the use of the 'death special,' an improvised armored car that would periodically spray selected colonies with machine-gun fire." The purpose of this harassment "was to goad the strikers"[6] into violent action so the National Guard could be called out to suppress the labor strike. It worked.

In October 1913, Governor Elias A. Ammos summoned the National Guard, under the command of General John Chase, who declared martial law in the striking area. Under control of the National Guard, a state-controlled militia, a number of atrocities took place against the striking workers, such as the "mass jailing of strikers, a cavalry charge on a demonstration by miners' wives and children, the torture and beating of 'prisoners,' and the demolition of one of the [workers'] tent colonies."[7]

The situation came to a gruesome ending when on April 20, 1914 gunfire broke out between the striking miners and National Guard troops. When miners who had taken up arms to protect themselves and their families went to a railroad cut and prepared foxholes in an attempt to draw the National Guard away from the colony, Guard troops sprayed the colony with machine gun and rifle fire and eventually burned the tent colony to the ground. An estimated 25 people died that day, "including three militiamen, one uninvolved passerby, and 12 children."[8] Unfortunately, this example of the state using its monopoly of violence to represent the minority interests of capital against the majority interests of workers. The state had previously come down hard on the side of union-busting with violence in the 1892 Homestead Massacre in Pennsylvania, and in 1894 when President Cleveland sent out over 16,000 U.S. Army soldiers to handle the railroad strikers in Pullman, Chicago.[9]

In 1932, state violence targeted a large group of war veterans who had assembled in Washington, D.C. demanding payment from the federal government for their service in World War I. The Bonus Army, an assemblage of roughly 43,000 people consisting primarily of veterans, their families, and affiliated activists, marched on D.C. to demand payment of previously received service certificates only to be met with violent repression. First, two veterans were shot and killed by Washington, D.C. police, and then, after orders from Herbert Hoover, Douglas Macarthur moved in on the veterans with infantry, cavalry, and six tanks, forcing the Bonus Army, their wives, and children out of their makeshift encampment and burning all of their belongings and shelter. "Although no weapons were fired, cavalry advanced with swords drawn, and some blood was shed. By nightfall, hundreds had been injured by gas (including a baby who died), bricks, clubs, bayonets, and sabers."[10]

Later in the 20th century, state violence continued, yet it had switched targets from union members and striking workers to political activists. An example is the Kent State shootings, where on May 4, 1970 "members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University [antiwar] demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine."[11] Kent Mayor Leroy Satrom had requested Ohio Governor James Rhodes to summon the Guard due to "threats had been made to downtown businesses and city officials as well as rumors that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and the university."[12]

The rhetoric of Governor Rhodes escalated the situation as he called the protesters "the worst type of people in America and [stated] that every force of law would be used to deal with them," which created a perception among both soldiers and university officials that "a state of martial law was being declared in which control of the campus resided with the Guard rather than University leaders,"[13] and on top of this, all rallies were banned. This helped to foster an increase of tension in an atmosphere that was already extremely tense.

On the day of May 4th, around 3,000 students gathered to protest the Guard's presence on the campus. At noon, it was announced the General Robert Cantbury, the leader of the Ohio National Guard, had made the decision that the rally was to disperse; this message was delivered to the students via the police. When this was met with shouting and some rock throwing, the Guard was sent in to break up the protest and, due to the students retreating up a hill and on to a portion of the football field, the soldiers who followed them ended up somewhat trapped between the football field's fence and the protesters. The shouting and rock throwing continued as the soldiers began to extract themselves from the football field and up a hill, and when they reached the top, the soldiers fired their weapons back toward the crowd, with a small amount firing directly into the crowd.

No matter how one looks at it, the entire point of the National Guard being deployed to Kent State University was to squash the protesters who had gathered under their perceived constitutional rights to express their collective displeasure with the Vietnam War. The state chose to deploy its monopoly of violence as a tool to end these public protests.

Assassination campaigns by the state, directed by the FBI or CIA, and often times carried out by local police departments, have also been deployed under this monopoly of violence. There is the notably disturbing case of Chicago Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by Chicago police due to his political views and membership in the Black Panther organization.[14] There is also speculation and credible evidence that the U.S. government was involved in both the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. [15] and Malcolm X.[16]

Today, state violence has manifested itself in daily public displays of police brutality and violence against citizens. This endemic use of state force has become so bad that a recent report from the UN Human Rights Council noted concerns "for police violence and racial discrimination" in the U.S. [17] Yet, despite this widespread recognition of state terror being directed at citizens, we see that the federal government (the highest level of state) is protecting its enforcers, with President Obama signing into law what is effectively an Amber Alert for the police[18], and states such as Louisiana passing 'Blue Lives Matter' bills which designates "public safety workers" (a clever euphemism for police) as a specially protected class of citizens, opening the door for possible "hate crime" legislation that further protects those who carry out state repression.[19]

This rampant use of state violence against U.S. citizens has also gone international. In the age of the Global War on Terror, the U.S. government has gone so far as to decide it has the power to use its monopoly of violence on its citizens abroad. The case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was killed via drone strike in Yemen in 2011, provides a notable example of this.[20] The significance of this extension to the parameters of "international warfare" or the often vague "fight against terror" is that any U.S. citizen deemed to be under suspicion of associating with "terrorists" may be immediately executed without due process. Since al-Awlaki, the U.S. government has officially acknowledged that it has killed four American citizens abroad, while claiming that three of those deaths were by accident.[21]

In looking at the state's (in this case, the U.S. state at multiple levels) monopoly of violence and its continued use against its own citizens, we see that this deployment of violence is always done in the favor of capital (a small minority) in order to expand and strengthen capital's influence, through its state surrogate, over the working-class majority with no regard for life.

Group Violence and Its Enablers

Group violence manifests itself in numerous citizens joining together in a common cause to perpetrate violence against other citizens who in some way fit the intended target of that cause. When discussing group violence, it should be noted that the subjects are non-state actors. While these groups may be directly or indirectly supported by the state, they essentially carry out their acts of violence as groups autonomous from the state apparatus.

The Ku Klux Klan (which is currently attempting to make a comeback[22]) has for decades engaged in numerous acts of group violence, from public lynchings to terrorism and coercion to bombing churches.[23] The purpose of this group violence has been to maintain a social order in which Anglo-Saxon, Protestant white men are able to keep their hands on the reins of power in the U.S., if not systematically, then culturally and socially.

In many cases, because they may share interests, group violence intertwines with and complements state violence. During Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War, the KKK had well-known ties to the more official southern state apparatus of power. In the modern era, white supremacists who adhere to notions of group violence have purposely and strategically infiltrated formal arms of state violence, including both the U.S. military and many local police departments around the country.[24][25] A similar group that is making major headway today is the Neo-Fascists, who can be seen in Europe being legitimized and assimilating into mainstream political parties such as Greece's Golden Dawn, the UK's UK Independence Party, Austria's Freedom Party, and France's National Front. Like the Klan, these groups seek to maintain a race-based, social status quo that benefits their own group. In the polls, they seek to gain some influence on the use of state violence, whereas on the streets they adhere to group violence and domestic terrorism.

A difference worth noting between the old-school group violence of the Klan and the new-school group violence (or at least contributing to an atmosphere of violence) that neo-fascists encourage and enact is that the new-school violence has been legitimized in many ways by both the media and the public at-large. In other words, we now have large segments of the population who are openly defending the neo-fascists through legitimizing means.

Back in the heyday of the Klan, there was violence, yet no one defended it under the banner of free speech or attempted to legitimize it through mainstream channels. It was certainly supported by mainstream power structures, and even gained steam through the insidious white supremacy which characterized American culture, but it wasn't openly defended. The KKK often carried out its operations in a clandestine manner, attacking and terrorizing at night, and wearing hoods to maintain anonymity. And many black people actively took up arms to defend themselves against it. [26][27] Today, the situation has been turned on its head, with many people arguing that fascists have the right to free speech and that they should be protected.

An example of this changing paradigm regarding right-wing extremism and group violence could be seen after a recent fight between Neo-Nazis and antifascists in Sacramento, California in late June 2016.[28] The incident brought out many defenders. Sacramento police chief Sam Somers stated that "Regardless of the message, it's the skinheads' First Amendment right to free speech." [29] Debra J. Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in an article that "the bullies who were protesting against fascists seemed to have a lot in common with fascists - they're also thuggish and simpleminded" and that "An informal army of anarchists uses violence to muzzle unwanted speech."[30] The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that they agreed with Antifa Sacramento that racism shouldn't be tolerated, but "What we disagree with is the idea that skinheads and neo-Nazis, or anyone else with a wrongheaded view, shouldn't have a 1st Amendment right to free speech." [31]

There are a number of problems with these statements. First, by defending fascists through arguments couched in free speech, such commentators are not only ignoring the underlying group-violence historically perpetrated by these groups, but also misusing the First Amendment itself. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." [32] Note, the Amendment says nothing about how other citizens may respond to free speech, nor does it say that groups of citizens can't abridge free speech; rather, it specifically applies to Congress and its prospective legislation. In other words, the Constitution of the United States applies strictly to the government and how it relates to its citizens, whereas the laws created by the government apply to the individuals and how they relate to the government.

Then there is the matter of ignoring power dynamics and creating a false equivalence. These responses create the illusion that each side is doing something negative and so neither side should be supported. This ignores the fact that one side (the neo-nazis and fascists) are assembling with the purpose of oppressing others, while the other side (the anti-fa and anarchists) are assembling to stop (violently, if necessary) the one side from oppressing. While the former adheres to violent means to oppress people based on the color of their skin, or their sexuality, or their Jewish heritage, the latter adheres to violent means to resist this oppression, or essentially oppress the oppressor. To equate their motivations is irresponsible and dangerous. This false equivalence that has been deployed by much of the media, both liberal and conservative, amounts to placing a murderous and whip-lashing slave owner in the same light as a rebelling slave who murders the slave owner to gain freedom. By using this hypothetical, it is easy to see that there is a fundamental difference between violence and counter-violence.

Another side effect of this public defense of the oppressor, and subsequent legitimization of group violence, is that it is used to increase state violence. Marcos Brenton, a writer at The Sacramento Bee, argued that "I would bet that future demonstrations will see a shared command center between the CHP and Sac PD instead of what we saw Sunday: CHP officers overwhelmed by warring factions. […]Law enforcement wasn't ready this time, but they have to be next time. In a climate where life isn't valued, life will be lost."[33] This is an argument that is implicitly in favor of an increase in state violence from an already hyper-militarized police force. And, when used in this context, the deployment of state violence will almost always be directed at those who assemble to stop oppressive group violence, because arguments housed in free speech and false equivalencies erase any and all distinctions between violence and counter-violence.

This is where the connection between state and group violence often manifests itself. As mentioned before, there is a rather long history of the police and the KKK being connected: On April 2, 1947, seven black people in Hooker, GA were turned over "to a Klan flogging party for a proper sobering up" by Dade County Sheriff John M. Lynch. In Soperton, GA in 1948, "the sheriff did not bother to investigate when four men where flogged, while the sheriff of nearby Dodge County couldn't look into the incident"[34] due to his being busy baby-sitting.

There is also the famous case of the Freedom Riders, three Civil Rights activists who were killed by the Klan, which amounted to three individuals being "arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders." [35]

This connection has yet to end. In 2014, in Florida, two police officers in the town of Fruitland Park were linked to the Klan [36] and in 2015 in Lake Arthur, LA, a detective was a found to be a Klan member and even attended one of the group's rallies.[37]

These connections allow for the state, and all the power and resources it wields, to be used directly to further the ends of white supremacy and empower fascistic, racist group violence in the streets. It also puts racial minorities from within the working class at greater risks since many of these bigoted individuals who carry out group violence on their own time are also allowed to carry out state violence while on the job. As agents of the state, they can kill, terrorize, harass, and imprison racial minorities with impunity vis-à-vis their roles as state enforcers and are further empowered by the public's and media's reverence of oppressive forms of assembly and "free speech," as well as the police officers who defend this.

Revolutionary Violence

Revolutionary violence is realized in two distinct forms: self-defense and/or counter-violence. It is a type of violence in which the goal is either self-defense for an oppressed people and/or full liberation for a people, whether that liberation take the form of autonomous communities, a nation state, or something else. It is also resistance to encroachment on the land by oppressive forces, such as in the case of indigenous resistance to expansionist Americans. Revolutionary violence may come in different forms and be carried out through various means. It includes everything from individual acts of "propaganda by the deed" to large-scale revolutions against a state.

Examples of revolutionary violence are abound throughout history, and include the slave revolts of Spartacus and Nat Turner, the Reign of Terror against the French monarchy, the Spanish revolt against the fascist Franco regime, Alexander Berkman's attempted murder of Carnegie Steel manager Henry Clay Frick, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Reconstruction-era blacks taking up arms against the KKK, the Mau Maus in Kenya [38], the Cuban revolution[39], and a number of national liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century that occurred around the world.

Revolutionary violence is different from state and group violence in that it manifests itself as a response to violence often stemming from one of these two opposing sources. For this reason, it is strictly counter-violent (or defensive) in nature, designed to break the violent oppression that its adherents find themselves under. The benefit of being able to deploy revolutionary violence is obvious in that it allows the oppressed to strike back at their oppressors. It is in this beneficial scenario where the question of guns and "gun control" come back into the mix. How are people supposed to free themselves, or even defend themselves from state and group violence, if they are unable to have guns? How are people able to protect themselves from oppressive violence if they do not have access to the same weaponry used by their oppressor?

When faced with systemic violence that is rooted in either a direct extension of the state (police, military) or an indirect extension of the power structure (the KKK, the Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists), written laws constructed by the same state and power structure aren't typically useful. And when doubled-down on by media and liberal establishment cries of free speech and false equivalencies, oppressed sectors of the population become even more vulnerable to state and group violence. Often times, armed self-defense becomes the only option to protect oneself, one's family, and one's community from these deeply embedded, existential threats.

Formulating revolutionary counter-violence and self-defense measures became a staple of the American Civil Rights movement. From Malcolm X's calls to defend the black community "by any means necessary" to the original Black Panther Party's organizational emphasis on armed self-defense, the Civil Rights movement as a whole gained strength due to these more militant strains centered around revolutionary violence. In 1956, after a "relentless backlash from the Ku Klux Klan," Robert F. Williams, a Marine Corps vet, took over the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and strengthened it with militancy by "filing for a charter with the National Rifle Association (NRA)," forming the Black Guard, "an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe's black population," and delivering weapons and physical training to its members.[40] In 1959, following the acquittal of a white man who was accused of attempting to rape a black woman, Williams summed up the need for oppressed people to take up arms in their own self-defense. "If the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence," responded Williams. "That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill." [41]

Revolutionary violence often finds itself up against difficult odds, being deployed by marginalized peoples with limited resources against powerful state and group entities with seemingly unlimited resources, professional military training, and advantageous positioning within the given power structure. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reflected this exact scenario, as a Jewish resistance in the hundreds, armed with handguns, grenades, and Molotov cocktails faced off against the powerful Nazi paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS). When reflecting on the uprising over two decades later, one of the Jewish survivors, Yitzhak Zuckerman, encapsulated the need for an oppressed and degraded people to strike back:

"I don't think there's any real need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn't a subject for study in military school. (...) If there's a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising."[42]

This human spirit referred to by Zuckerman is the same that compelled Nat Turner to take up arms against slave-owning whites, the same that led to the formation of the original Black Panther Party, and the same that motivated Robert F. Williams in 1950s North Carolina. Without access to weapons, this human spirit would result in nothing more than gruesome massacres at the hands of state and group violence. With weapons in hand, this spirit is presented with a chance to stunt pending attacks of physical oppression and terrorism, if not repel them.

Conclusion

The modern gun control debate has taken on two, stereotypical, opposing sides. The first side is representative in the Congressional sit-ins on the House floor this past June. They represent a common liberal viewpoint that gun-control measures should be taken to restrict or, at the very least, delay the acquisition of guns by citizens. Popular demands coming from this side include the banning of all automatic or semi-automatic weapons, the blacklisting of certain people (including those suspected of "associating with terrorists," the mentally ill, and felons), and the implementation of more stringent forms of clearances. The other side is represented by a reactionary right, mostly white, that is backed by both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its surrogate, the Republican Party. These who oppose the liberal attempt to stifle the Second Amendment historically come from privileged strata of the status quo, including whites of all classes and those occupying advantageous positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy.

Both sides of the modern gun-control debate cling to very problematic positions and ideologies that are tantamount to their respective arguments. Both sides, in their own ways, reinforce the embedded racial and class privileges that repress much of the working class, the poor, and people of color - in other words, those sectors of the population that are most likely faced with extremely dire economic situations, occupying police forces that resemble foreign armies, and (literally) daily, life-or-death interactions with both police (state violence) and vigilantes (group violence). The liberal or Democrat argument for gun control, like those represented by the Congressional sit-in, almost always target extremely marginalized groups, like felons who have been victimized by the draconian "drug wars" of the '80s and '90s, as well as those who have been victimized by the "war on terror" and find themselves on terrorist watch lists for little more than their chosen religion or Islamic-sounding name. The reactionary opposition to gun control, represented by the NRA and Republicans, remains embedded in white supremacy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and classism, and thus also ends up targeting these same marginalized populations. This latter group's motivation is evident in the overlap between fringe groups that historically adhere to group violence, like the KKK and Oath Keepers, and the more "mainstream" operations of the NRA.

Both sides of the gun-control debate, whether consciously or subconsciously, are motivated by what Noam Chomsky (paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson) recently referred to as a fear of "the liberation of slaves, who have 'ten thousand recollections' of the crimes to which they were subjected." These "fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture" (in racialized institutions of slavery and white supremacy) with reverberations to the present."[43] The liberal insistence on preaching strictly non-violent and pacifist tactics to poor, working-class, people of color exposes their privileged, white-supremacist leanings. The fact that they do this while also passing draconian legislation that has led to the virtual genocide of an entire generation of blacks (through drug laws and mass incarceration), and in the face of brutal, daily murders of black citizens by police, further exposes them. The recent silence from the NRA regarding the police killing of Philando Castile [44], who was licensed to carry a gun in Minnesota and properly identified his status to officers before being shot for no reason, has exposed the NRA's white supremacist leanings. Also, the split that occurred within the Oath Keepers when one of their members in the St. Louis chapter, Sam Andrews, encouraged black residents in Ferguson and Black Lives Matters protestors to practice their Second-Amendment rights [45] has exposed their own white supremacist leanings which they regularly disguise as "constitutionalism."

While white supremacy has an intense and insidious hold on every aspect of American culture - social, economic, political, etc. - it is especially strong within the gun-control debate. So much so that it drove then-California governor, Ronald Reagan, in 1967, to sign extensive gun control legislation under the Mulford Act[46] in response to armed patrols by members of the Black Panther Party. The classist nature of gun control can be found in the targeting of the most marginalized of the working class, along with the historically brutal state repression against workers collectively striking or standing up for their rights against bosses. The most common argument from the authentic, anti-capitalist left (not liberals or Democrats) against the idea of workers collectively exercising their constitutional right to bear arms has been housed in the insurmountable strength and technology owned by the government's military. Left-wing skeptics claim that an armed working-class will simply have no chance against an overpowering military. The problem with this is that it is preoccupied with a large-scale, pie-in-the-sky revolutionary situation. It ignores the reality faced by many working-class people who find themselves in small-scale, daily interactions with police and vigilantes, both of whom are heavily armed and not afraid to use their weapons to kill. It is in these very interactions, whether it's a black citizen being racially profiled and harassed by police or an activist being terrorized by reactionary groups, where the access to a gun may become vitally important and life-saving.

Advocating for disarming those who need protection the most simply doesn't make sense, especially in an environment such as the modern U.S. - a heavily racialized, classist landscape with over 300 million guns in circulation. Nobody wants to be drawn into a violent situation that may result in the loss of life, but our current reality does not allow us that choice. Unfortunately, we live a society where police oppress rather than protect; where violent reactionary groups are allowed freedom to carry out their terrorizing of marginalized people; and where politicians readily use their monopoly of violence to enforce capital's minority interests against masses of workers. Because of this, modern gun control can only be viewed as anti-black, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-poor, and anti-working class because it leaves these most marginalized and vulnerable of groups powerless in the face of a violent, patriarchal, white-supremacist power structure that continues to thrive off of mass working-class dispossession. The conclusion is simple: If the oppressor cannot be disarmed, the only sane option is to arm the oppressed. In the U.S., the Constitution makes this a practical and legal option.

"Sometimes, if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up."

-Huey P. Newton

Notes

[1] Philip Bump, "The Problem With Banning Guns For People On The No-Fly List," Washington Post, June 13, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/07/the-no-fly-list-is-a-terrible-tool-for-gun-control-in-part-because-it-is-a-terrible-tool/ )

[2] Alex Pareene, The Democrats Are Boldly Fighting For A Bad, Stupid Bill, Gawker, http://gawker.com/the-democrats-are-boldly-fighting-for-a-bad-stupid-bil-1782449026 (June 22, 2016)

[3] Zaid Jilani, "Dramatic House Sit-In on Guns Is Undercut by Focus on Secret, Racist Watchlist," The Intercept, June 22, 2016 ( https://theintercept.com/2016/06/22/dramatic-house-sit-in-on-guns-is-undercut-by-focus-on-secret-racist-watchlist/ )

[4] Tom Hall, "Congressional Democrats stage 'sit-in' stunt on gun control," World Socialist Website, June 25, 2016 ( https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/06/25/dems-j25.html)

[5] Fact Index, Monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, http://www.fact-index.com/m/mo/monopoly_on_the_legitimate_use_of_physical_force.html

[6] Mark Walker, "The Ludlow Massacre: Class Warfare and Historical Memory in Southern Colorado," Historical Archaeology 37:3 (2003), pg 68

[7] Walker, pgs 68-69

[8] Walker, pg 69

[9] Ronald J. Barr, The Progressive Army: U.S. Army Command and Administration, 1870-1914 (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1998), pg 7

[10] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX89.html

[11] Thomas R. Hensley, Jerry M, Lewis, "The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The search for historical accuracy," The Ohio Council of Social Studies Review 34"1 (1998), pg 9

[12] Hensley, Lewis, pg 11

[13] Ibid

[14] Ted Gregory, "The Black Panther Raid and the death of Fred Hampton," Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2016 ( http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story-story.html )

[15] The King Center, Assassination Conspiracy Trial, http://www.thekingcenter.org/assassination-conspiracy-trial

[16] Garrett Felber, "Malcolm X Assassination: 50 years on, mystery still clouds details of the case," The Guardian, February 21, 2015 ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/21/malcolm-x-assassination-records-nypd-investigation )

[17] Natasja Sheriff, "US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights," Al Jazeera, May 11, 2015 ( http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/11/us-faces-scathing-un-review-on-human-rights-record.html )

[18] Gregory Korte, "Obama signs 'Blue Alert' law to protect police," USA Today, May 19, 2016 ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/19/obama-blue-alert-law-bill-signing/27578911/ )

[19] Elahe Izadi, "Louisiana's 'Blue Lives Matter' bill just became law," Washington Post, May 26, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/05/26/louisianas-blue-lives-matter-bill-just-became-law/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.6d262fdb3218 )

[20] Joshua Keating, "Was Anwar Al-Awlaki Still A US Citizen?" Foreign Policy, September 30, 2011 ( http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/30/was_anwar_al_awlaki_still_a_us_citizen )

[21] Adam Taylor, "The U.S. keeps killing Americans in drone strikes, mostly by accident," Washington Post, April 23, 2015 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-u-s-keeps-killing-americans-in-drone-strikes-mostly-by-accident/ )

[22] John Bazemore, "Ku Klux Klan dreams of making a comeback," The Columbus Dispatch, June 30, 2016 ( http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2016/06/30/0630-is-klan-making-a-comeback.html )

[23] Southern Poverty Law Center, Ku Klux Klan, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan

[24] Hampton Institute, Rising Nazism and Racial Intolerance in the US. A report gathered and submitted to the United Nations, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/Rising-Nazism-and-Racial-Intolerance-in-the-US.pdf (April 30, 2015)

[25] FBI report on white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement agencies in the US. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf

[26] Rebecca Onion, "Red Summer," Slate, March 4, 2015 ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/03/civil_rights_movement_history_the_long_tradition_of_black_americans_taking.html )

[27] Akinyele K. Umoja, "1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement," Radical History Review 85:1 (2003)

[28] Ellen Garrison, Stephen Magagnini, Sam Stanton, "At least 10 hurt at chaotic, bloody neo-Nazi rally at Capitol," The Sacramento Bee, June 26, 2016 (http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article86099332.html)

[29] Ibid

[30] Debra J. Saunders, "Saunders: Freedom of speech stifled by Capitol rally fracas," San Francisco Chronicle, July 2, 2016 ( http://www.recordnet.com/article/20160702/OPINION/160709984)

[31] Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, "How anti-racists play into the skinheads' hands," Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2016 ( http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-neo-nazi-rally-20160627-snap-story.html )

[32] Legal Information Institute, First Amendment, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment

[33] Marcos Brenton, "Madness came to Sacramento, and the cops weren't ready," The Sacramento Bee, June 29, 2016 ( http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/marcos-breton/article86556112.html )

[34] David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), pg 336

[35] Civil Rights Movement Veterans, Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs, http://www.crmvet.org/mem/msmartyr.htm

[36] Michael Winter, "KKK membership sinks 2 Florida cops," USA Today, July 14, 2014 ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/14/florid-police-kkk/12645555/ )

[37] Bill Morlin, Police Chief Demands Resignation of KKK Cop, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-demands-resignation-kkk-cop (September 1, 2015)

[38] "Mau Mau Uprising: Bloody history of Kenyan conflict," BBC, April 7, 2011 ( http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-12997138)

[39] Andres Suarez, "The Cuban Revolution: The Road to Power," Latin American Research Review 7:3 (1972)

[40] PBS Independent Lens, A synopsis on the film, "Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power," http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/rob.html

[41] Ibid

[42] A. Polonsky, (2012), The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III, 1914 to 2008, p.537

[43] Hampton Institute, On the Roots of American Racism: An Interview with Noam Chomsky, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/chomsky-on-racism.html (April 22, 2015)

[44] Brian Fung, "The NRA's internal split over Philando Castile," Washington Post, July 9, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/09/the-nras-internal-revolt-over-philando-castile/?utm_term=.b0f673e3221c )

[45] Alan Feur, "The Oath Keeper Who Wants To Arm Black Lives Matter," Rolling Stone, January 3, 2016 ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-oath-keeper-who-wants-to-arm-black-lives-matter-20160103 )

[46] Wikipedia, Mulford Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act