Zelensky and NATO Plan to Transform Post-War Ukraine Into ‘a Big Israel’

By Alex Rubinstein Toward Freedom

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky (left) with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Background: Israeli flag / credit: Toward Freedom photo illustration

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in The Grayzone.

Just forty days after Russia’s military campaign began inside Ukraine, Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky told reporters that in the future, his country would be like “a big Israel.” The following day, one of Israel’s top promoters in the Democratic Party published an op-ed in NATO’s official think tank exploring how that could be executed.

Zelensky made his prediction while speaking to reporters on April 5, rejecting the idea that Kiev would remain neutral in future conflicts between NATO, the European Union, and Russia. According to Zelensky, his country would never be like Switzerland (which coincidentally abandoned its Napoleon-era tradition of nonalignment by sanctioning Russia in response to its February invasion).

“We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future,’” the president informed reporters. “But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”

For those wondering what a “big Israel” would actually look like, Zelensky quickly elaborated on his disturbing prophecy.

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Flickers of a Resurgent Labor Movement: Our Report from Labor Notes ’22

Black Rose / Rosa Negra

By Black Rose / Rosa Negra Labor Committee

Over the weekend of June 17-19, some 4,000 union members and affiliates congregated in Chicago for the 2022 Labor Notes Conference. Owing both to the fact that the biennial conference had been postponed in 2020 and to a modest (but nonetheless exciting) uptick in new union activity in recent months, most notably at Amazon and Starbucks, this year’s event set a new record for attendance.

Labor Notes began its life in 1979 as a monthly newsletter intending to challenge the sedate business and service models of AFL-CIO affiliated unions. The newsletter focused on spotlighting and linking together rank-and-file reform caucuses within these unions. Today, Labor Notes the periodical lives on, while Labor Notes the organization has dramatically expanded in scope to support year round “troublemaker” training schools and a publishing wing, in addition to its growing conference.

Labor Notes the organization acts on the social-political, or intermediate level, within the US (and Canadian)

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Red and Black Telly roundup.

Statement by our brother regarding the War in Ukraine.

From Etniko Bandido Infoshop. by e-mail.

Well my friend now that the war has begun I feel prepared to give you my thoughts on this both as a Ukrainian, an American, and a committed anarchist.

Today I am sad. I am sad because the seeds of this war, like the seeds of all wars, have been sown not by common people and free individuals but always through the exploitation of others’ which is ultimately amplified by the state.

This was the tragic outcome of the maidan 2014 revolution, which again demonstrates that the true path for anarchism is not through the violent overthrow of the state and massacres in the street but the peaceful building of alternative systems based upon mutual aid and cooperation, and through ever-expanding networks that ultimately peacefully lead to the ending of exploitation through courage and self/community/earth-defense, not aggression or the atrocity of war.

I am sad because the land where my family was formed is once again under attack by a colonizer who, like all colonizers seeks to control, manipulate, and exploit both people and resources. Ukraine lies as the anchor between two continents and has, historically, been considered a wild and untamed place because it is a “borderland”. That spirit existed long before someone thought to critically analyze capitalism, the state, or develop any sense of politics.

The situation for anarchists, as has been our struggle for centuries, is always always to defend each other, other working people, and those suffering from the state – which includes economic exploitation under state-sanctioned private capitalism or state communism. The moment now in Ukraine is not for theoretical discussion but for action and solidarity. Let states fight their wars against each other, our struggle is always to fight for the people!

In this moment the objective is clear: to identify our comrades in Ukraine and listen to them. But beyond that, our objective is to condemn aggression by any invader or colonizer. I condemn the invasion with the same force that I condemn America’s bloody wars, our disgusting racist society, and continued propping up of capitalists and dictators, including in your country. We must all stand together, always, and help wherever we can, always to defend ourselves and our communities from these forces.

We must also speak the truth, and we can all see what the truth is here: that an imperial, colonizing power Russia is attempting to retake their prize colonial possession. Now as an American, I am both frustrated and angry. I am feeling this way because in many ways, this country has laid the groundwork for Russian action here, and remains the main exporter of state violence in the world (even before we count this country’s long history of military conquests and capitalist interventions, just on the sales of weapons alone America is the biggest exporter and maker of implements of death in human history).

I do not believe we would be in the situation we are in now had this country not spent 20 years attempting to colonize large parts of the middle east but that may be another topic. Living through the last four years under the Trump regime has given every American a taste of what the slide toward fascism would look and feel like here.

America is currently in a state of cold civil war. Political violence in the country is scattered but increasing. The outright fascist elements who remain largely in control of the Republican party have implemented certain voting laws that will set them up for gains in our Congress when we have elections next year. We see that there is a new alliance emerging between Russian and American far right during the last four years, and that one of the effects of that has been the implementation of Russian-style media propaganda by right wing news outlets in America.

However, because there is also protections for press freedom, inevitably these propaganda displays are countered and ridiculed, which of course only serves to reinforce the cold civil war. If the goal of Russia was to ensure that America would destroy itself from within, or at least become incapable of offering an international deterrent to well-defined authoritarian regimes, they have succeeded.

Living in America is living in a country full of anxieties, where every person is filled with worry they are one step away from losing either their position in society or economic security. It is in the final stages of capitalism. However, we are also seeing some seeds of true peoples movements emerge. Unionization and worker control is up for the first time in 70 years. There seems to be more radical interest among the youth. There is still time.

The bottom line is, the situation in Ukraine is another tragic example of how war, which is the ultimate expression of state power, destroys life and the natural world, which itself is the ultimate expression of the union between individual and community and earth.

Yes, Colonialism Caused Climate Change, IPCC Reports

Atmos

A woman dressed with traditional clothes wearing a face mask with the word “decolonize” in Spanish. (Photograph by Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

04.04.2022 WORDS BY YESSENIA FUNES

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its final report Monday. The Frontline explores the significance of the sixth report finally naming “colonialism” as a historical and ongoing driver of the climate crisis.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its first report in 1990. Over 30 years later, the word “colonialism” finally made its way into the IPCC’s sixth assessment report. The panel’s working group two report, which looks at the impacts of climate change on people, listed colonialism not only as a driver of the climate crisis but also as an ongoing issue that is exacerbating communities’ vulnerability to it.

The addition of one word may not seem like

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Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre

PopularResistance.org

The West has made a snap judgment about who is responsible for the massacre at the Ukrainian town of Bucha with calls for more stringent sanctions on Russia.

But the question of guilt is far from decided.

Within hours of news Sunday that there had been a massacre at Bucha, a town 63 kms north of the Ukrainian capital, the verdict was in: Russian troops had

The Authority of the Boot-Maker. By Mal Content.

Here’s the whole thing.
You can all now pick holes in it, not that Mal would give a shit.

Fascism and Antifascism. Part three. Populist fascism: perpetual counter-revolution.

From ‘The Authority of the Boot-maker’ by Mal Content.

“What is this liberal rubbish?
Are you some kind of mug?
Don’t talk to me of ‘free speech’
For murdering fascist thugs

We remember Mosley
And how Cable Street folk fought him
When we see the fash
We let the boots do the talking”

– Oi Polloi

Now I started writing this chapter in 2012, then I paused it to see what would happen, and quite a lot has happened since. Ten years on, Britain has the most explicitly right-wing authoritarian government in its history, suppressing dissent by any means at its disposal. It is supported by computerised surveillance and detection, a police force as brutal, sexist and racist as ever, tamed media and a judiciary who mostly went to the same schools as the executive. The entire island is in counter-insurgency mode.

We’ve seen the rise and fall of the English Defence League and the United Kingdom Independence Party, the election of far-right governments around the world. The United States elected a reactionary-comic television presenter as its 45^th President, who clowned around for five years making his office even more of a laughing stock while we wondered if anyone had the sense to disconnect the nuclear button.

In 1945, after six years of war against Nazism, a British labour government permitted the fascists detained under Regulation 18b to resume their activities, and gave them a police escort wherever they went, as unsurprisingly they had no popular constituency whatsoever. They were joined by Axis prisoners of war who were supposedly being rehabilitated. Some of those returned to Germany and maintaining their British contacts, plotted a fourth Reich, under cover of a crank spiritualist group called Ostara. Recently demobbed British Jews reacted with disbelief:

“I had been in the merchant navy, survived two torpedo attacks on the Atlantic convoys, and I came back home to Amhurst Road, Hackney to hugs and kisses. My mother went out to make some tea and my dad said, The bastards are back – Mosley and his Blackshirts”

– Morris Beckman, antifascist: to ‘The Guardian’ 2009.

Apart from Spain and Portugal, which retained fascist governments, the only country in Europe where it was legal to glorify Hitler and the holocaust was Britain. Mosley took advantage of this to publish a German-language paper and antisemitic propaganda for distribution by right-wing British service personnel in the occupation zone. After three years of that, Mosley again combined the splinters into the Union Movement, and embarked on an electoral campaign.

“Going from a cinema showing newsreel of piles of Jewish men, women and children being bulldozed into lime pits in the concentration camps, and then passing an outdoor fascist meeting or seeing swastikas whitewashed on the walls of Jewish homes and synagogues affected these ex-servicemen with emotion ranging from choleric anger to a cold hard desire to kill the perpetrators.”

– Morris Beckman: ‘The 43 Group’

The conflict in the British Working Class was inflamed on the one hand, by newsreels of the holocaust, and on the other, by the civil war in Palestine that preceded the establishment of the state of Israel.

“Above all, it was the unfolding extent of the concentration camp horrors that really unhinged us all. It imbued every ex servicemen with a sick sense of shame that no action had ever been taken to try to save the camp inmates. Air crews had no doubt that specialised attacks could have taken out gas chambers, furnaces and SS barracks. Ex-paratroopers and Special Forces veterans argued that drops into and around the camps could have saved many, but nothing was ever attempted, …”

                (ibid.)

You have to keep in mind that Churchill had been an anti-Semite when Hitler was still in short trousers, and so was post-war foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. Bevin was an enthusiast of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ against Soviet influence, so the pre-war squabble between socialist and Communist internationals was still playing into fascist hands. A dedicated imperialist, Bevin opposed Indian independence and set about re-establishing Dutch control in Indonesia, using British, Indian and even Japanese troops to wrest the islands from the indigenous people who had recently liberated them. He was also concerned to limit Jewish emigration to Palestine, declaring to the press on 1^st March 1946: “Jews must not try to get to the head of the queue”, sparking riots in Tel Aviv that left six civilians dead, shot by British troops. Some Jewish soldiers refused to clash with their co-religionists and were quietly posted elsewhere.

“Watching the Royal Navy stop Greek and Turkish bucket ships crammed with the sick and broken survivors of the camps and the Pathé Gazette and Movietone films of these same derelicts being incarcerated behind barbed wire in Cyprus, seemed to plumb the very depths of inhumanity.”

(ibid.)

Just as they had been before the war, the fascists were driven off the streets by autonomous direct action. The ‘43 Group’,

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South Korean Dictator Dies, Western Media Resurrects a Myth. By K. J. Noh

Hampton Think.

Chun Doo Hwan with Ronald Reagan, 1981

General Chun Doo Hwan was the corrupt military dictator that ruled Korea from 1979-1988, before handing off the presidency to his co-conspirator General Roh Tae Woo. Chun took power in a coup in 1979, and during his presidency he perpetrated the largest massacre of Korean civilians since the Korean war. He died on November 23rd, in pampered, sybaritic luxury, impenitent and arrogant to the very last breath.

Many western media outlets have written censorious, chest-beating accounts of his despotic governance and the massacres he perpetrated (here, here, here, and here)– something they rarely bothered to do when he was actively perpetrating them in broad daylight before their eyes.  Like the light from a distant galaxy–or some strange journalistic time capsule–only after death, decades later, do “human rights violations” in South Korea burst out of radio silence and become newsworthy.

Better late than never, better faint than silent, better partial than absent, one could argue.  Still all of them miss out on key facts, spread lies through omission.  A key dimension of Korean history and politics looks to be buried with his death. A little background history is necessary to elucidate this.

The Sorrows of the Emperor-Dictator

Park Chung Hee as Japanese Military Officer

Chun’s predecessor and patron, the aging South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, had ruled the country as an absolute totalitarian despot for 18 years, but he knew in his bones that his days were numbered. He had survived two violent assassination attempts, mass civil protests, and even opprobrium from his American puppet masters, despite serving them loyally by sending 320,000 South Korean troops to Vietnam. Even Park’s closest advisors were worried about the fragility of his rule.

Park Chung Hee had been a former Japanese military collaborator during Japan’s colonization of Korea. A US-installed puppet Syngman Rhee had smashed socialism in the South through genocide–a method later to be replicated in Indonesia’s “Jakarta method”.

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Racism and the Working Class.

Chapter Seventeen of The Authority of the Boot-Maker by Mal Content.

Racism is another ideological hegemony closely woven into the fabric of modern (capitalist) society. It is a species of mythology, and like religion, requires certain assumptions to be taken on trust, not subjected to rational analysis. So I’d like to examine who racism serves, what racists actually believe, and how these ideas gained currency in the first place. Racism holds that mankind can be divided into separate branches identified by physical characteristics, and that these can be ‘ranked’ in terms of ability, intelligence or morality. I well remember school books in my youth that presented this as fact.

Race is a political construct with no scientific basis, it does not follow from any of the major religious traditions, nor is it particularly old. Nevertheless, apologists for racism often contend that there have always been antagonisms between races and this is rooted in some feature of human nature – that old cobblers. By extrapolation, they imply that racism can never be eliminated entirely, which absolves them from the bother of having to do anything about it, or even

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