The lies liberals tell to obscure Operation Z’s anti-fascist nature, & discourage anti-imperialist struggle

When almost two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck because of the inflation that the Ukraine war has accelerated, the U.S. empire can only continue its proxy war by carrying out an unprecedented amount of psyops. The war machine’s narrative managers have had to innovate, or else the social base for their Eurasian destabilization project and arms profit source would disappear.

This social base consists not just of the Americans who are specifically pro-Ukraine, but of the Americans who are simply apathetic towards the conflict. Mass opposition exists towards U.S. policies like militarized racist police brutality, but as long as the ruling class manages to prevent sustained mass movements, these policies can continue. The defeat of the empire’s violent machinations requires a massive, long-term resistance movement that isn’t co-opted by the Democratic Party, or broken up through COINTELPRO tactics. Presently, the weakest front within U.S. imperialism is Ukraine, because if the imperialists continue failing to destabilize Russia, their maneuver on the geopolitical chessboard will backfire on them. They’ll have accelerated the transition to multipolarity, while worsening the contradictions within the imperialist countries. Which will make revolution in the imperial center far more likely.

This scenario is inevitable. The sanctions have already failed to do as much damage as would be required to make the Russian Federation collapse, and as I’ve covered, the conditions of a place like Yugoslavia were far more befitting of an imperialist breakup scheme than are the conditions of Russia. Russia will come out of this with more international influence than it had a year ago, whereas the U.S. will come out of it with less. Yet this positive international development doesn’t translate to a guarantee of revolution in the core. Not unless we properly navigate our conditions, which requires identifying and combating the Ukraine psyop. Because the lies contained within this psyop, though ineffectual at reversing the multipolar trend, can bring success to our government’s internal counterinsurgency. Now for the first big lie:

“Operation Z is being waged foremost for the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie”

The foundation of the Ukraine psyop’s deceptions is the cultivation of an analytical framework which obfuscates the war’s anti-fascist nature. To understand why Russia’s Operation Z is anti-fascist in character, one must study the historical context behind Russia’s struggle against Ukraine’s Banderite fascist regime. The musician Marcel Cartier describes this context as follows:

27 million sacrificed,

27 million who gave their lives,

27 million who lost their breath,

so the world could live free after all of this death

27 million sacrificed,

27 million who gave their lives,

27 million who lost their breath,

So the world could live free after all of this death.

You wanna falsify history, skew and pervert it

Nullify, tame it, change and revert it

And put Joseph Stalin on par with Hitler

But nothing could really be more sinister

Than equating the fascist nazism

Which is really a desperate capitalism

Compared with the world's first workers state

That fought against racist and sexist hate

Russia won the war against fascism, but it still hasn’t recovered from the crime the Nazis committed, not in terms of historical trauma nor in terms of numbers. The Russian population is still declining because of those lost 27 million. That blow against the Russians—which was made possible by how U.S. capitalists backed the Third Reich’s rise while the imperialists covertly enabled Hitler in the hope this would defeat communism—is now being followed up by a repeat of imperialism’s previous attacks upon Russia. 

The U.S. has installed a regime in Ukraine that’s directly influenced by National Socialist ideas, particularly National Socialism’s goal of carrying out a genocide against Russians so that those considered the “superior” race can grab up the leftover land. The regime’s plan was to ethnically cleanse the Russian speakers in the Donbass, forcibly relocating them to make more room for the favored group. It doesn’t matter that the separation between the “true” Ukrainians and these new Russian “outsiders” is completely arbitrary, or that the Russian and Ukrainian cultural identities both originated in the Kievan Rus. The Banderites, the faction dedicated to advancing the legacy of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, seek nothing less than a genocidal land grab in eastern Ukraine.

With such vile creatures in charge of Ukraine, is it any wonder why the Russian people have overwhelmingly supported the intervention? The Russians have a disparity to address with the Nazis. To get justice for the evils that the Nazis perpetrated against them, they need to continue the Great Patriotic War. That’s why Russia has taken action: to fulfill its people’s mandate for the rescue of their kin in the Donbass, and the holding to account of those who seek to complete Hitler’s plans for Russian extermination.

What this means is that in an honest analysis, this can not be called Putin’s war. To call it his war is to make the mistake of focusing on one personality, when the conflict’s context shows this situation to be a product of a far deeper history. NATO’s big lie about Z is that it’s being waged purely for the interests of Putin and the rest of Russia’s ruling class. Z is foremost the Russian people’s war, an anti-fascist campaign that the people pressured Putin into carrying out. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t in the interests of the Russian people as a whole, who collectively have a vendetta against fascism. Putin is nothing more than the one who happened to be in charge when this action became necessary. Z’s strategic success can’t be attributed to him, because he didn’t want to undertake the operation in the first place. He declined to take action for eight years after the humanitarian threat to the Donbass first appeared in 2014, and waited until he could delay the operation no longer. That success is attributable to the revolutionary forces within Russia, who recognized from the start of the Ukraine crisis that fascism and imperialism urgently needed to be combated.

From the premise that Z is an “imperialist war,” or at least a war whose motives are reducible to advancing the Russian bourgeoise’s interests, comes the liberal argument that Z was undertaken without strategic soundness. That it was reckless due to supposedly having been started without adequate measures by Russia to get international support for intervention in Ukraine. This idea comes from the softer type of liberal stance that knows U.S. hegemony as bad, and recognizes how NATO provoked Russia, but still seeks to distance oneself from “supporting Putin” by disavowing Z. In addition to treating the urgent need for humanitarian action as an abstract or even irrelevant factor, as if letting Kiev continue its genocidal invasion of the Donbass would have been the correct decision, it’s a notion that’s predicated on the liberal worship of “international law.” 

International law as we conceive of it was created to uphold imperialism. It was designed to make it so that no matter how clear the need is for military action to protect a population from imperialist violence, a country which takes this action can be accused of “violating international law.” The system of international law was rigged against Russia. And if Z has unintentionally strengthened imperialism, why has the transition to multipolarity accelerated directly because of Z? Why has most of the globe revealed itself to not fundamentally be on Washington’s side by refraining from sanctions participation? Why have the sanctions backfired on the imperial powers both economically and geopolitically, leaving the American and European economies crippled while the sanctions have failed to achieve their goal of destabilizing Russia and China? 

The increased censorship of dissent, unification and expansion of NATO, and anti-Russian demonization that the imperialist countries have seen during the last year do not amount to an overall strengthening of imperialism. They’re simply the consolidation of control within the internal imperial sphere, while this sphere’s external reach is diminished. And they’re leading towards unprecedented internal losses for imperialism, from new European divisions amid economic pressures, to social unrest brought on by declining living standards, to a victory for the anti-imperialist movement (should anti-imperialists choose to sufficiently challenge the empire). 

Z is not a project for military adventurism that’s only helped the Russian ruling class. It’s an instance of U.S. imperialism’s provocations backfiring on the imperialist bloc, to potentially fatal consequences for this bloc. Russia didn’t fall into a trap by the imperialists, it combated imperialism in the most effective way possible short of intervening in 2014. That’s actually a valid criticism of Z: that it was carried out years later than it should have been. But that’s not the criticism these liberals have of it. Their criticism is that Russia ever decided to challenge imperialism to a serious degree.

What this means is that backing Z is entirely compatible both with opposing U.S. imperialism, and with opposing Russia’s existence as a bourgeois state. There’s a reason why even among younger Russians, who lack the older generation’s direct Soviet era nostalgia and who are the most intensely alienated by Russian capitalism’s contradictions, support for Z is at 60 percent. There are young Russians whose skepticism towards their government has brought them towards opposing Z based on liberal pacifist impulses, like the Trotskyist youths within the communist movement. But the majority of them recognize that supporting Z isn’t supporting the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; it’s supporting a just project by the Russian people to set right a massive historical wrong.

Liberals see those contradictions within Russia, and portray them as the factors which have the foremost importance when analyzing the conflict. They’re not the primary contradictions in this context, they’re the secondary contradictions. The fact that Russia’s capitalist class has money to make off of the war, and the fact that Putin is a bourgeois leader who initially wanted to cooperate with the west, do not negate the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist nature of what Russia is doing. Nor will they reverse Russia’s transition into being an anti-imperialist country, as Russia has thoroughly alienated the imperialists and therefore now has no choice but to keep partnering with China.

The primary contradiction is U.S. imperialism, which has restarted its project to utilize fascism for a genocidal campaign against the Russian people. Even though fascist Kiev hadn’t attacked within Russia’s borders a year ago, it had attacked the communities in the Donbass that make up the broader population which can be called culturally Russian. It had been shelling the Russian-speaking neighborhoods for eight years, had imposed discriminatory laws against those who don’t speak Ukrainian, and was now actively moving to invade the Donbass. The Russians were within their rights for defending their own people, who only lived on the other side of a border at the time because a century ago Ukraine’s eastern boundaries had been drawn outside the Russian socialist republic. With how strongly those in these territories identify with Russia, it’s no wonder they’ve since voted to become part of the country.

“Russia is a fascist state”

In addition to this humanitarian component of the Russians saving their fellows from ethnic cleansing, there’s the progressive impact that Z is having on the global class struggle. Because it’s the communists who’ve influenced Putin into taking action, the fascists within Russia’s government have become relatively marginalized due to the conflict, while the communists have gained a prominence that’s brought them out of their former status as a threatened political faction which fears the government’s retribution. It’s this detail that’s crucial for debunking the other lies that liberals tell in order to discourage anti-imperialist action.

The chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has been meeting with the Belarusian Ambassador to Russia, discussing the foreign and domestic policies of the two countries. The Party’s officials have in the past met with leaders like those of Vietnam, but Z has increased the Party’s diplomatic reach within Belarus, a country that’s pivotal for advancing both the region’s class struggle and the defeat of U.S. imperialism. With the communists holding great sway over the bourgeois government of Belarus as well, this means that Russia and Belarus are being driven closer both towards socialist restoration and towards closer partnership. The great influencing factor behind this is Z.

Should Russia and Belarus go socialist, and merge to start a new Soviet Union, it will accelerate the process of intensifying global class conflict that this war has brought. The war’s economic destruction has heightened capitalist contradictions worldwide, including within Russia itself. The globe’s proletarians are seeing how their bourgeois dictatorships disregard their wellbeing amid intertwining capitalist crises, from a pandemic to a new economic unraveling to a climatic crisis. As the international polarization that the war has created speeds up the multipolar trend, these workers are gaining unprecedented opportunities to combat their capitalist states. In Russia, where there’s a strong memory of Marxism-Leninism’s advantages and a visible Marxist-Leninist presence that’s guiding the country, this could easily lead to workers revolution. In the imperial center, however, the prospect of revolution is made more difficult to realize by the prevalence of the war’s psyops.

To defeat the bourgeois state, it’s essential for the workers movement to combat NATO. This is as true in the U.S. as it is in Russia. The path to Soviet restoration is being disrupted by the Trotskyists, who are rallying their youth wing towards creating cleavages within the CPRF’s anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle. They’re raising the complaint that the military action in Ukraine shouldn’t be taking on an offensive nature, and purely focus on defending the Donbass. As if it would be the most strategically sound decision to keep trying to beat back Kiev’s relentless attacks on the Donbass, without destroying the military that Kiev uses to perpetuate these attacks. Such sentiments come from the liberal phobia of ever dealing the aggressive blows against the reactionaries that are absolutely necessary for defeating the reactionaries. Of embracing the costs that come with advancing the class struggle.

Such is the lack of commitment to anti-fascism and anti-imperialism that characterizes the anti-Z facet of the U.S. left. This is essentially to say all of the U.S. left, because in America it’s only certain communist parties that support the operation and Marxism is ultimately separate from “the left” as an ideological force. A crucial distinction between the two which Lenin identified is that whereas the communists who cling to the “left” impulses refuse to work with reactionary trade unions, the serious communists make strategic alliances. Which as I’ll explain applies to our present situation.

The solidly anti-NATO communist parties, and the principled anti-imperialist ideas they represent, play a unique and crucial role in defeating U.S. imperialism. Because though many conservative-leaning Americans dislike the Ukraine aid project for being wasteful, they are not Z supporters. Tucker Carlson, the biggest ideological leader of the right-wing opposition towards aid to Ukraine, has said he simply doesn’t care what Russia does. This isn’t anti-imperialism, this is apathy for the sake of advancing partisan interests. It’s among the communists where the progressive nature of Z is understood, and therefore where the most effective type of opposition towards imperialism can be found. The communists say “I do care what Russia is doing, because what it’s doing is important.”

In the imperial center, what are the consequences of taking a soft stance on NATO? Of capitulating to the Ukrainization of our public discourse, and normalizing any parts of the lies that make up the Ukraine psyop? The consequences are for all the movements which intersect with the anti-imperialist movement to be compromised in their effectiveness. It’s intuitive knowledge among serious activists that when one neglects to sufficiently address one type of injustice, it hurts the ability to address all other types of injustice. This is because a liberation struggle can’t survive without solidarity between all who have an interest in bringing down the existing power structure.

Solidarity with the Donbass people’s resistance against Banderite fascism helps complete a synthesis of liberation theory, as much as solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle against Israeli colonialism or the Syrian people’s struggle against U.S. sanctions. Every evil that U.S. imperialism is perpetrating must be combated, to be selective in which evils one fights against would be surrendering the struggle to the opportunists. The Democratic Party wants us to act blind towards the need for the Donbass people’s rescue, and wants us to ignore geopolitics while exclusively focusing on our own conditions. Because when you don’t narratively combat the schemes of the U.S. empire, its war machine will be enabled to continue running. And the war machine, with its perpetuation of global market reach by U.S. capital, is what keeps the power structure as strong as it is.

With there being such a clear progression of events in this phenomenon, where forsaking anti-imperialism out of convenience leads to the defeat of the domestic liberation struggles, the mandate for combating empire is apparent. The obstacle to our unifying behind a consistently anti-imperialist program is that because we live in the center of imperialism, where our media, educational, and political institutions are devoted to reinforcing imperialist narratives, the pressure to compromise on imperialism appears overwhelming. The Democratic Party, and the reformist “left” organizations that it’s adjacent to, make up the vast majority of the activist presence, and can therefore subject any group that deviates from imperialism’s orthodoxy to what are effectively sanctions. They can cut off access to platforms and partnerships that feel indispensable. At least they feel indispensable so long as one has been led to believe they should be treated as such.

One should never refuse to work with a potentially compatible group of one’s own accord. Yet it’s also important to recognize when softening a stance in order to stop an organization from refusing to work with you would do more harm than good to the proletarian revolutionary cause. Another lie that’s preventing unity between the imperial center’s liberation movements, and the anti-fascist movement of the Donbass, is the notion that breaking from the liberal foreign policy stances would be guaranteed political suicide for the U.S. workers movement. The liberals don’t hold as much power as it appears they do, and when the proletarian movement sufficiently stands up to them, this limitation on their power will become apparent.

The liberals are able to justify their anti-Russia stance (which is an extension of their deeper pro-imperialist stance) by perpetuating a series of narratives. What these narratives do is inflate the degree to which Russia has contradictions, so that to the leftist or Marxist who hasn’t been sufficiently trained in how to recognize imperialist psyops, it looks reasonable to conclude that “there are no good sides in this war.” The left coming to this apathetic conclusion leaves room, both rhetorically and in the actual activism spaces, for the Democrats to promote their outright pro-imperialist stance of “Ukraine is the good side.”

One of these narratives is that both Ukraine and Russia are fascist states. This claim takes a piece of the truth, and exploits it in order to equate a government that’s heavily influenced by Banderites with a state that’s now heavily influenced by communists. The little bit of truth in the narrative is that there are indeed fascists in Russia’s government. The context is that because of the conflict, these fascists have been sidelined. The liberal view of Russia’s political situation in relation to Z is that the fascists have been empowered, because according to liberals, any kind of national pride that the war has been nurturing in Russia is by definition “fascist.” But the Russian fascists, and adjacent reactionaries like the czarists, are a minority who’ve only been able to rally or convert a certain number of people because of the war. 

Most Russians aren’t fascists or monarchists, two-thirds of them view Stalin favorably. So the patriotism that they’ve embraced in response to the war is overwhelmingly not a reactionary one, but a revolutionary one. They’re proud not of some racial concept or romanticized monarchical past, but of their collective effort to defeat fascism and get justice for their 27 million murdered ancestors. This is a kind of pride that’s intertwined with pro-communist sentiments, as the present anti-fascist conflict is an extension of Stalin’s Great Patriotic War. And as the class conflict accelerates, it gets likelier that the end outcome of this surge in anti-fascist solidarity will be a return to socialism. Because Putin is a bourgeois politician, and therefore by definition an opportunist, he and the ruling class he represents have cynical interests. Yet these interests in this instance align with the interests of the communists, who are being brought closer to victory by the disruptions the war is causing to the body politik. Waging this war is in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie for the moment, but in the long term, they’re speeding up their own demise.

This trend towards the extinction of fascism within Russia, and the return of proletarian democracy to the country, appears to be contradicted by Russia’s use of the fascist Wagner group. Or at least that’s what the liberals want us to believe. The truth is that what the imperialist media calls the “Wagner group” is neither fascist, nor does it even exist. The “Wagner fascists” who liberals refer to are fictional characters, written to play villains in U.S. imperialism’s narrative on the conflict. An honest look at the empirical evidence surrounding it shows that Wagner is in essence a conspiracy theory, only accepted to be true because it’s a conspiracy theory that the media promotes.

There’s no mercenary company called the “Wagner group.” It’s an umbrella term used by the imperialist media to refer to every Russian who participates in mercenary activities. We know this because Bellingcat, the outlet that’s being paid by UK intelligence contractors to promote imperialist propaganda about western Eurasia, has admitted on Page 12 of its Wagner report that there’s no evidence of a connection between the Rus Fed military and an entity called Wagner. If “Wagner” were real, it would be shown to be connected to the military, just like the U.S. mercenary company Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) is connected to America’s military. The story the liberals tell is not supported by the facts.

To use the Wagner psyop to make it look like there are “fascists on both sides,” imperialism’s narrative managers have flatly fabricated a Nazi tie to Russia’s network of mercenaries. They’ve spread a photograph of Dmitry Utkin, a Russian neo-Nazi, and claimed that he’s the same person as a different Dmitry Utkin, one who truly can be linked to the Russian government. The Nazi Utkin has no ties to the government at all. In instances of media lies like this, the only thing perpetuating mass belief in what the media says is the psychological principle identified by one NATO-funded neuroscience study, in which it was found that human minds will accept an assertion if presented with “evidence” for it even when that evidence is itself based in assertions. All the liberals need to believe Wagner is real is for the media to tell them that Wagner is real, because they’re operating off of motivated reasoning.

When the empire’s own hired liars are being forced to debunk the narratives that demonize Russia, there’s a fundamental weakness within the foreign policy argument that liberals make. The facts aren’t aligned with the case they’re presenting, and that creates the potential for an anti-imperialist consciousness shift.

“Only reactionaries support Russia”

As the new cold war has developed, the imperialist psyop machine has worked to cultivate a new dichotomy within the American political spectrum. A dichotomy that works to neutralize opposition towards imperialism by assimilating the left into neoconservative ideology. The narrative managers have done this by normalizing the perception that the Republicans are now the “party of Putin,” and that therefore if you oppose the Republicans, you’d be undermining your own cause by challenging anti-Russian propaganda.

This narrative is nothing more than the logical conclusion of the polarization which the new cold warriors have manufactured, where any statement that deviates from what the DC think tanks say about Russia is now seen as “right wing.” The liberal view is that the Republicans have “sold out” to Putin, and are working to undermine U.S. interests. When you actually look at the things right-wingers have been saying about Russia, it’s clear that idea gives them too much credit. Their opposition towards Ukraine aid comes not from an anti-imperialist stance, but from an amalgamation of conspiracies about Ukraine representing “woke” and “globalist” agendas, or from the glorification of Putin as a “strong leader.” Like the liberals, the reactionaries make the mistake of viewing Z as Putin’s war, because both of these factions lack a materialist analysis of the situation. The rightists are fools who simply happen to be right in this one instance, and that’s why they haven’t been able to mount any serious opposition towards Biden’s Ukraine policy.

The publication of the Mueller report in 2019, which revealed the lack of evidence behind claims that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia to win the election, proved this absence of strategic ties between the American right and the Russian government. The Republicans are only superficially posturing a sense of support for Russia, because their party doesn’t overall oppose the Ukraine aid project and they would no doubt be the ones leading it if they were in the White House. 

The social base of support for Russia’s anti-fascist war does not lie in the fascists, the minority of committed reactionaries who support the present GOP stochastic terror campaign. It lies in a broad coalition, a coalition that we can build between the more left-compatible libertarians who’ve adopted an anti-imperialist stance, the communists who back Z, and the many working class people who as of yet have little to no opinion on foreign affairs. With educational help, those among the latter category can be brought towards anti-imperialism, because they’re neither materially nor emotionally invested in the empire’s attempt to destabilize Eurasia. They have no class incentive to be pro-imperialist, and every class incentive to be anti-imperialist.

These educational projects depend on a campaign to gain the attention and participation of those who aren’t already involved in the antiwar activism scene. Which requires embracing antiwar practice that’s robust in its work, uncompromising in its opposition towards NATO’s narratives, and lacking in the opportunistic habit of only trying to appeal to Democrats. When you want to only reach liberals, you take the “neither NATO nor Russia” stance, or the “NATO is the good side” stance. When you want to reach a wider range of people, you take the “Russia is fighting an anti-fascist war” stance. Which will cost you support from liberals, yet provide you with a caliber of potential for mass mobilization that wouldn’t be possible if you treated liberals like the only ones you need to try to appeal to.

This is what Rage Against the War Machine is doing. Its events are being sponsored by organizations and individuals from a broad range of ideological tendencies, including both libertarian and communist ones. That these people mostly wouldn’t be optimal for membership in a Bolshevik party doesn’t take away from the ways in which RAWM is advancing the revolutionary cause. Because this context is equivalent to the one which prompted Lenin to say that communists must work with reactionary trade unions, should this be necessary for bringing proletarian revolution closer. In both cases, the decision by communists to make strategic alliances has aided, not hindered, the progression towards socialism.

It’s helping the class struggle because when you do the alternative, and embrace a practice designed exclusively to appeal to liberals, you’ll end up weakening yourself. When the communists in the American Student Union have joined with RAWM in building an antiwar coalition which extends beyond liberals—and in this case excludes liberals, since liberals by definition aren’t anti-NATO—they’ve established a practice in which they take revolution seriously. In which they act like they’re working towards a future without the Democratic Party. When you compromise your anti-imperialism to appease liberals, and perpetuate the narrative that Russia was wrong to intervene, you fail not just in anti-imperialism and anti-fascism, but in the project to bring our own conditions towards revolution. Tailing the Democrats by capitulating to their foreign policy narratives can’t produce the Democratic Party’s demise, and therefore can’t produce the demise of the bourgeois state. It can only reinforce the existing political order.

No better endorsement of RAWM’s practice can be imagined than the recent editorial denouncing RAWM published by The Militant, the Trotskyist paper that’s been seeking to sow sectarianism within the communist movement for nearly a century. The Militant writes:

Bourgeois politicians here, especially in the left wing of the Democrats and right wing of the Republicans, seek to pressure the capitalist government in Kyiv to cede territory occupied by Moscow in return for “peace talks.” A bogus “new peace movement,” a coalition of Stalinist and middle-class radicals, is trying to gather forces to act as shills for Putin’s war, calling rallies and “teach-ins.” Some of these forces, such as Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, are also joining a “Rage against the War Machine” rally in Washington, D.C., Feb. 19 organized by currents both right and left, including the Libertarian Party and People’s Party. Demands center on calling for Washington to cut off funding and arms shipments to Ukraine and press Kyiv to make concessions to end the war. Behind the slogans, “NATO Expansion, No! Peace in Ukraine, Yes!” a Jan. 14 rally in New York drew over 100 people, organized by the ANSWER coalition, People’s Forum and others. This self-proclaimed “new peace movement” is determined to give aid and succor to Putin’s war.

There’s the proof that RAWM’s model is the correct one for revolutionaries to follow: an attack against it from one of the original publications that led to the formation of neoconservatism, Trotskyism’s direct ideological descendant. 

In a statement that makes it apparent how The Militant and the other facets of Trotskyism gave rise to neoconservatism, the editorial directly repeats NATO’s core piece of propaganda about the origin of the Ukraine crisis: “All these forces peddle the slanderous canard pushed by Putin that the massive, popular Maidan uprising in 2014 that overthrew the dictatorial pro-Moscow regime of Victor Yanukovych was in reality a fascist coup engineered by Washington. The idea that the millions of Ukrainian working people who fought to take control of the destiny of their nation were nothing but a band of neo-Nazis is absurd.” Here, The Militant reveals its class allegiance with the bourgeoisie, and with the Democratic Party neocons who The Militant aligns with in this power struggle. Because the Maidan uprising’s defining social base was not the working class of Ukraine, but rather the big capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie, who were upset that Ukraine’s pre-Maidan government had refused to accept an EU deal for intensified neoliberal free market measures.

The imperialists nurtured this reactionary outrage, and harnessed it to install a new regime, one which was picked by Obama’s team to assist in Washington’s great-power competition with Russia. Almost a decade later, Washington’s subsequent militarization of Ukraine and backing of regime-aligned Nazi terrorist organizations has produced a conflict, one so tense that it’s made the threat of nuclear war unprecedented. And as RAWM’s demands page says, this war has become so perilous also because of the U.S. empire: “The US instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup on its democratically-elected government in 2014, and then sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in March. Pursue an immediate ceasefire and diplomacy to end the war.” 

The lackeys for U.S. imperialism in the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the neocon-aligned “socialist” publications don’t want that peaceful outcome, because their interests fundamentally align with those of the Banderites. They want to complete the project to destroy Russia that Hitler started, because this project advances U.S. imperialism’s strategic goals. And the left opportunists will always side with U.S. imperialism.

Such is the great dividing barrier that’s emerged between the revolutionaries and the reformists. One side wants peace and an end to imperialist-backed fascist terror, while the other side wants to perpetuate the terror because this aids their own class interests and opportunistic political projects. Those who know the truth about Ukraine’s fascist 2014 fascist coup have a responsibility to reject the lies which these opportunists use to obfuscate Z’s anti-fascist character, to portray Russia as fascist, and to discredit the project for a serious anti-imperialist movement.

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