Myths concocted by Putin shills, but widely believed even by well-intentioned peace activists, anti-imperialists and fence-sitters. This is a compilation of the various Myths in my Ukraine Myth series, all with their own links.

by Michael Karadjis

Below are a series of well-known assertions that have been spread about the situation in Ukraine since 2014. All of them are complete myths, as this review will demonstrate. Of course, this is not the only place these myths are demolished, but they are so widespread that the more they are shot down, the better. Because although they may have been invented by apologists for Putin’s war of neo-Tsarist conquest, unfortunately many of them are believed by a large number of western leftists, peace activists and fence-sitters, including many who are well-intentioned and who oppose Putin and simply want the war to end; believing myths that show that ‘both sides’ are at fault often provides some kind of psychological sustenance to these positions. While the Ukrainian government can certainly be criticised for many things, like any government can, there is simply no ‘two sides’ story in a blatant and horrifically brutal act of 19th century style imperialist conquest.

This list of myths is an ongoing project and new ones will be added as time permits. All suggestions welcome. To date, this is the list of myths that will be dealt with below, along with their specific links on this site:

Myth 1. The Maidan uprising of 2014 was a “US-orchestrated coup” https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/09/09/ukraine-myth-series-myth-1-the-maidan-uprising-of-2014-was-a-us-orchestrated-coup/

Myth 2 – The new government in 2014 “banned the Russian language” https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/09/09/ukraine-myth-series-myth-2-the-new-government-in-2014-banned-the-russian-language/

Myth 3 – The Crimean people voted in a referendum to join Russia, which was an act of national self-determination, and Crimea rightfully belonged to Russia historically https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/09/09/ukraine-myth-series-myth-3-the-crimean-people-voted-in-a-referendum-to-join-russia-which-was-an-act-of-self-determination-and-it-rightfully-belonged-to-russia-historically/

Myth 4: There were popular uprisings of the ethnic Russian population of the Donbas, who established their own republics in an act of national self-determination https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/09/13/ukraine-myth-series-myth-4-there-were-popular-uprisings-of-the-ethnic-russian-population-of-the-donbas-who-established-their-own-republics-in-an-act-of-national-self-determination/

Myth 5: “The Ukrainian army killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in Donbas between 2014 and 2022.” https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/09/13/ukraine-myth-series-myth-5-the-ukrainian-army-bombed-the-donbas-for-8-years-before-the-russian-invasion-killing-14000-ethnic-russians-between-2014-and-2022/

Myth 6: The Minsk Accords offered a just way out of the crisis, Russia wanted to implement them, but the Ukrainian government refused to implement them, encouraged by the US https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/09/13/ukraine-myth-series-myth-6-the-minsk-accords-offered-a-just-way-out-of-the-crisis-russia-wanted-to-implement-them-but-the-ukrainian-government-refused-to-implement-them-encouraged-by-the/

Myth 7: Russia and Ukraine were ready to sign a peace agreement in April 2022 whereby Ukraine would not join NATO, but then British prime minister Boris Johnston visited Kyiv and told Zelensky not to go ahead with it, after which Ukraine withdrew from the negotiations, scuttling this chance for peace https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2023/09/13/ukraine-myth-series-myth-7-russia-and-ukraine-were-ready-to-sign-a-peace-agreement-in-april-2022-whereby-ukraine-would-not-join-nato-but-then-british-prime-minister-boris-johnston-visited/

Myth 8: Ukrainians are forced by the US and ‘the West’ to continue the war; most Ukrainians would happily trade territory for peace if they had a say. https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2025/03/08/ukraine-myth-series-myth-8-ukrainians-are-forced-by-the-us-and-the-west-to-continue-the-war-most-ukrainians-would-happily-trade-territory-for-peace-if-they-had-a-say/

_{Hundreds of thousands of people peacefully protesting in the streets against a malignant government is described, incredibly, as a ‘coup’}

Myth 1: The Maidan uprising of 2014 was a “US-orchestrated coup.”

There was no “coup” in Ukraine in 2014, except in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. When hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians marched in the streets in a sustained mobilisation over many months from November 2013 through February 2014 – against the uber-corrupt ruler, Victor Yanukovych – this is not the conventional definition of a ‘coup’, which normally refers to a conspiratorial action of a small but powerful group (eg, a section of the armed forces or other state forces) carrying out a rapid and violent ousting of a government; there are dozens of examples to choose from, for example the US-backed coups that ushered in bloody dictators like Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in Zaire, the Shah in Iran and the list is virtually endless – none of which look remotely like the popular uprising that took place in Ukraine.

Incidentally, since I called Yanukovych’s regime ‘uber-corrupt’, let’s just make an aside to back this up; we read that after his overthrow, “Ukrainian citizens who stormed his Mezhyhirya mansion discovered a palace of cartoonish opulence with guilded bathrooms, a private zoo, and a floating restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship. A good illustration of this extravagance is the $11 million he allegedly paid for a chandelier and his seven tablecloths worth a staggering $13,000.” Interesting the kinds of thieving capitalist rulers that some ‘socialists’ have come to defend in this era of ‘geopolitical’ rather than class analysis.

Yanukovych, like many unpopular despots, reacted first by bashing protestors with iron bars, then with a raft of anti-democratic anti-protest laws, then with guns, and hundreds were shot – but of course each upturn in repression only made the popular movement more determined to get rid of him, despite attempts by some of the opposition leadership in January-February 2014 to do a deal to allow him to stay as president until December 2014. In the end he made their deals pointless anyway, when he fled to Russia with his stolen billions (some estimates as high as $37 billion), following which on February 22 the entire Ukrainian parliament – every member, including every member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – voted to oust him as president.

If such a profoundly democratic process involving mass popular uprising and unanimous votes by a democratically-elected parliament constitute a “coup,” then logically we should be in favour of more ‘coups’.

For an excellent blow by blow account of the Ukrainian popular uprising of 2013-14, ‘Ukraine Diaries’ by Andrey Kurkov is a must. Some of it can be accessed at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=fbuUAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false but buying the book would give you a fuller picture. Or better still, watch the amazing film, Winter on Fire at https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80031666,  which covers the full 3 months of the uprising, the enormity of the demonstrations, the ongoing brutal repression – if after watching it you still think the events were a ‘coup’ rather than truly massive genuine revolution, then we’re speaking a different language.

It is a sad moment when “leftists” decide that massive popular street protests against reactionary capitalist rulers are a bad thing; they thereby reject everything they have claimed to stand for throughout their lives. Unless they think that people have no agency (and no rights to agency) and that these kinds of numbers can all be manipulated the CIA, Victoria Nuland, Hunter Biden etc. Were all these hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and every member of parliament, personally bribed? That the US (or others) will always attempt to influence, to co-opt, a movement, is of course a given, but that is not a reason to oppose a popular uprising or mass mobilisation and hence essentially give support to a corrupt and repressive regime being overthrown.

‘Coup’ in this case seems to be just an updated version of the infamous term ‘colour revolution’, a nonsense concept invented by tankies who did not like watching the heroic Serbian working class overthrow bourgeois-nationalist butcher Milosevic in 2000, and so then extended its use to entirely different circumstances in Georgia in 2003 and different again in Ukraine in 2004. It is simply a term used for ‘popular uprising’ when it is one disapproved of by this sub-set of western lefties who assume they know what’s best for other peoples, and/or when the regime it is directed against is allied to Russian or Chinese (rather than US) imperialism or otherwise engages in some hollow “anti-imperialist” bluster.

The idea that the popular uprising was “US-orchestrated” stems from attempts by US rulers to co-opt it. One might say, ‘what business do US leaders have turning up to meet with protest leaders in another country?’ I agree – they should keep their noses out of it, just as should the Russians – but the point here is not the political morality of this – it is naïve to think powerful states don’t always try to coopt movements – but rather the fact that they had remarkably little to do with what eventuated, and simply did not have this power.

The main charge is that US advisors like Victoria Nuland played some role in choosing the caretaker who would temporarily become prime minister, after Yanukovych’s prime minister from his Party of Regions, Mykola Azarov, resigned on January 28 amidst the upsurge. Whether or not US advice was decisive in this choice of caretaker is hard to say; the idea is based on leaked correspondence involving Nuland and US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, where they did say they preferred the candidate (of three options), Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was indeed the one subsequently chosen by the Ukrainian parliament as interim prime minister. Is it not possible that the Ukrainian parliament made its own decision that they preferred him of the three options?

Just out of interest though, for those with short attention spans who think jumbling together “coup”, the US, “fascists” and “banning Russian language” explains anything, it is worthwhile briefly looking at the interim leaders chosen. It is clear from Nuland’s leaked correspondence that that candidate she preferred as prime minister, Yatsenyuk, was one of the more liberal ones, as opposed to Oleh Tyahnybok, from the far-right fringe; as Pyatt notes, “we want to keep the moderate democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok and his guys.” For some reason, they also prefer Yatsenyuk over the other “moderate democrat,” Vitaly Klitschko; Nuland says “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. … I don’t think it’s a good idea,” and “what he (Yatsenyuk) needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.” Clearly, they want to keep the far-right out, but as for ‘Yats’ over ‘Klitsch’, the only clue is that Yatsenyuk was probably seen as more of a compromise candidate by Moscow, because Yanukovych had offered Yatsenyuk the prime-ministership on January 25 (before his own pm resigned!).

Indeed, in the same leak, Nuland and Pyatt also speak of the need for “some kind of outreach to Yanukovych.” So, far from the Nuland chat being part of a far-right, anti-Moscow coup, it appears that they preferred as interim pm the candidate who could best build bridges with Moscow. The only way I can read all this is that the famous ‘Nuland leak’ is about Nuland and the US government preferring to hatch a deal with Yanukovych, some kind of compromise government. After all, what most left conspiracists miss in all this is that Ukraine has both a president and a prime minister: Yanukovych was the president; the Nuland discussion did not concern his position at all, but rather who was going to be HIS interim prime minister! Unfortunately for Nuland, the US and the ‘moderate democrats’, the deal stitched together to keep Yanukovych in power till December with a new prime minister was rejected by the Ukrainian masses. US interference! Nuland advocates same interim prime minister for Yanukovych as does Yanukovych to aid the deal to him in power!

As for the interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov was appointed by the Ukrainian parliament on February 23 after it ousted Yanukovych the previous day, and there is no ‘Nuland story’ about this appointment. But did the ‘coup’ leaders (ie, the entire elected parliament) choose some rabid Russophobe to heighten tension with Moscow and with Russian-speakers in Ukraine? Well, when the post-Maidan interim government attempted to overturn the language law which Yanukovych had introduced in 2012, which gave Russian equal status to Ukrainian, this was vetoed by none other than interim president Turchynov. So, very much the moderate, the bridge-builder, trying to hold back the more virulent strains of west Ukrainian nationalism raising their head. Really, these pieces are not falling together very well for tankie fiction stories.

After all, the brief interim period was followed by presidential elections in May in which Ukrainians freely elected Petro Poroshenko; and parliamentary elections in October, in which a government was freely elected by Ukrainians, and chose Yatsenyuk, once again, to continue as prime minister (his party, the Peoples Front Party, received the highest number of popular votes, so I don’t think Victoria Nuland had anything to do with that). Tankies thus can make up stories about the US choosing the Ukrainian government, but what they really mean is that these fine people living in faraway lands disapprove of the choices democratically made by Ukrainians, and believe they have a right to demand they choose otherwise.  

Regarding the parliamentary elections, the parties of Yatsenyuk and of Poroshenko received nearly half the votes between them and the majority of seats; the Opposition Bloc (ie, the renamed Party of Regions, which tankies will tell you was banned from standing) received 9.43 percent of the vote and 27 seats; while neither the fascist right (Svoboda and Right Sector, with 4.71 percent and 1.8 percent of votes respectively), nor the Communist Party of Ukraine (with 3.8 percent of votes) cleared the electoral threshold and thus got no seats. 

As for Yanukovych, MPs from his own Party of Regions released a statement asserting “Ukraine was betrayed and people were set against each other. Full responsibility for this rests with Yanukovych and his entourage;” as for the allegedly ‘pro-Yanukovych’ populations of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, on the question of whether they consider Yanukovych “to be a legitimate President of Ukraine,” in an April 2014 survey only 32% and 28% respectively in Donetsk and Luhansk respectively said “rather” or “certainly yes” (and these were by far the biggest numbers in Ukraine), compared to 57-58% who said “rather” or “certainly no.” Western tankies are well alone on this one, of defending the born-to-rule rights of a murderous, hyper-corrupt multi-billionaire oligarch.

Myth 2: The new government in 2014 banned the Russian language

This is quite an entrenched myth. Claiming that Ukraine changed its language law to downgrade Russian language in 2014, or more colourfully that it banned the language, is a common tankie claim used to justify the Russian quasi-annexation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. Of course, the Russian language was not banned in 2014 nor any time since, and further, there was zero change in the language law in 2014; that did not occur until 2019.

_{Maps showing that Ukrainian president Zelensky was elected by Russian-speakers, whose language, we are told, he wants to ban (if not commit genocide against them). Source: Zoltan Grossman, Counterpunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/02/ukraine-maps-tell-a-different-story-than-putins-claims}

As background, Ukrainian president Zekensky is a Russian-speaker, as are a significant proportion of Ukrainians, and indeed Zelensky was elected in 2019 largely on the votes of Russian-speakers. Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine have been the main victims of Russian mass-killing since February 2022, and have dominated the resistance to it. The famous/infamous Azov Regiment of the National Guard (often confused with the fascistic Azov Battalion which existed in 2014) is largely composed of Russian-speakers. According to a 2017 poll, 67.8% of Ukrainians “consider Ukrainian to be their native language, 13.8% claimed it to be Russian, whereas 17.4% declared that both languages are their native tongues.” However, while in western Ukraine, 92.8% are Ukrainian speakers and only 1.9% are Russian speakers, in eastern Ukraine 36.1% consider Ukrainian their language compared to 24.3% who declare Russian to be; in central regions, the figures are somewhat in between, but generally much closer to the western figures.

The 1996 constitution makes Ukrainian the only state language, indeed it says “state ensures the comprehensive development and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of social life throughout the entire territory of Ukraine.” However, there were strong protections for Russian and other minority languages, which can play an official role alongside Ukrainian in regions where these minorities are prominent. The constitution thus also states “the free development, use and defence of Russian and other languages of national minorities is guaranteed in Ukraine.”

All the language laws until 2012 were based on this well-balanced constitution. But in 2012, Yanukovych introduced a new language law which made Russian a ‘regional language’ with equal administrative status to Ukrainian wherever Russian was the language of at least 10 percent of the population, and other minority languages could have the same status. Since Russian is the language of over 10 percent in half the regions of Ukraine, this was quite wide-ranging. Many Ukrainians felt this tipped the balance too far.

So what did happen in 2014? Initially, after the fall of Yanukovych, the parliament attempted to rescind this new language law that Yanukovych had introduced just two years earlier, in 2012. The parliament’s aim in overturning this was to return to the previous law which had held sway ever since Ukrainian independence in the early 1990s, based on the 1996 constitution. As we saw, returning to the 1994-2012 linguistic framework was hardly a radical anti-Russian language step; it was merely the reversal of a recent radical change in the other direction. However, even this change did not take place, because it was vetoed by the caretaker president. Yanukovych’s radically pro-Russian 2012 law thus remained the law until 2019.

Therefore, leaving aside the blatant lie that Ukraine banned the Russian language and thus provoked a reaction from Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine, in fact nothing at all happened to the rights of Russian-speakers in 2014, making the lie even worse. Now, of course, it may well be that just the attempt to change the law back to the original could have been a factor promoting mistrust of the new government by many Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine; often it is not the actual content of a proposed change but the broader context, and this was the context of the newly assertive Ukrainian nationalism post-Maidan in reaction against Russian backing of Yanukovych and the immediate Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention into Donbas straight after his fall; this Ukrainian nationalism did include a virulent strain which was indeed alienating to many in the east. However, this point can be made without blatantly dishonest lies about what did happen.

It could well be argued that the Yanukovych law of 2012-14 was a better one, based on an abstract notion of complete equality of languages – even a broken clock can be right twice a day, and possibly for the wrong reasons. As a non-Ukrainian, I prefer not to get into that debate. The Ukrainian argument is based on the fact that Ukraine was a colony of Russia for hundreds of years, and the Ukrainian language was actively suppressed and discriminated against throughout that period (both under Tsarism and under Stalinism). There is also an important class aspect: Russian, the language of the colonial administration, came to dominate urban centres, even Kiev, while the villages were overwhelmingly Ukrainian-speaking; it was even considered shameful to speak Ukrainian in late Tsarist Russia, being a sign one was from the village, as rural-dwellers crowded into cities during industrialisation in the early 20^th century. Therefore, Ukraine now has a right to promote its language as the national language; Russian-speakers should have the right to use their language, but it is the language of the coloniser which became dominant via colonisation and suppression. Which argument is correct? Both arguments have validity, and much depends on context and manner in which such laws are introduced and implemented. What can be said for certain, however, is that the Ukrainian constitution, and the pre-2012 law, are hardly unusual by global standards; on the contrary, they are the norm. They are even less unusual for former colonies – what of the attempts over many decades in Ireland to promote the Irish language at the expense of English, for example?

The new Language Law of 2019 did partially downgrade Russian, at the time against Zelensky’s opposition (Zelensky was just elected in 2019 with votes of Russian-speakers). This new law was pushed by the outgoing Poroshenko government as it more and more turned opportunistically to the nationalist right (ironically in 2014 Poroshenko, elected then with the votes of Russian-speakers and appealing to unity, claimed the parliament’s attempt to rescind the 2012 law was a grave mistake). This new language law made Ukrainian the only language of state throughout Ukraine. While the law is consistent with the Ukraine constitution which makes Ukrainian the official language, the constitution also has strong protections for Russian and other minority languages, especially in areas where they are the majority. The new law arguably downgrades the status of some of those protections. In schools, for example, Ukrainian is the language of instruction throughout the country; Russian can be learned in school as a language subject. However, in pre-school and primary school, Russian or other minority children can study in their own language, as the language of instruction, in addition to Ukrainian, but they cannot in high school. From an internationalist standpoint, this change is certainly regressive, but it is hardly unique for most of the world.

The new law makes Ukrainian the language of all official communication, ie in government operations, including local government. In itself, this is hardly unusual by world standards. Regarding the media, however, the law is highly regressive and certainly can be seen to violate the Ukrainian constitution. The law stipulates that any publications in Russian or other languages must be accompanied by a Ukrainian version, equivalent in content and volume, a draconian and impractical regulation. There are exceptions for Crimean Tatar language, and for languages of the EU, but not for Russian. While a former colony certainly has the right to promote the national language, doing so in a way that makes everyday life more difficult for speakers of other languages at a practical level violates their rights and divides the working classes.

However, it is the very essence of hypocrisy for Putinite shills to try to use this argument, even after 2019. What they miss is that this law only came in after years of its implementation in reverse in Russian-annexed Crimea. In 2015, Crimea made only Russian the language of school instruction, while allowing students to learn Ukrainian or Tatar as elective languages; in pre-school and primary school, instruction could also be in Ukrainian or Tatar in addition to Russian, but not in high school. It is almost as if the Ukrainian government plagiarised the Russian occupation government of Crimea’s law four years later! But the reality in Crimea is much worse than even this official downgrading; in reality, Ukrainian has been comprehensively eliminated from all Crimean schools and from all official society. One of the first acts of Russian-owned rulers in both Crimea and the Donbas was to replace multilingual signs with Russian only ones.

Likewise, in the Russia-owned Donbas statelets, almost immediately following their quasi-annexation in 2014, “the curricula have been altered to exclude the teaching of Ukrainian language and history, which makes it problematic to obtain State school diplomas,” according to a November 2014 report by the UN High Commission on Human Rights; in 2015, the curriculum was overhauled, with Ukrainian language lessons decreased from eight hours to two hours a week, while Russian language and literature lessons increased. Russia’s five-point grading system replaced Ukraine’s 12-point scheme. School leavers from then received Russian certificates with the Russian emblem, the two-headed eagle. In 2020, Russian was declared the only state language.

That does not justify the Ukrainian law of 2019 (which current president Zelensky opposed), but it is important to recognise that the chronology is in reverse: no change in 2014 in Ukraine, regressive change in late 2014 and 2015 in Donbas and Crimea under Russian occupation, followed years later by copy-cat regressive change in Ukraine – which however in no way ‘bans’ the Russian language’.

Myth 3: The Crimean people voted in a referendum to join Russia, which was an act of self-determination, and it rightfully belonged to Russia historically

_{Indigenous Crimean Tatars – victims of centuries of Russian colonialism and genocide – protest annexation by Russia in 2014}

Russia’s flagrant annexation of the sovereign Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 was the first annexation inside Europe since the (globally unrecognised) Turkish quasi-annexation of northern Cyprus, and in a league with only very few outright annexations globally – Israel’s annexation of Palestinian Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan, Morocco’s annexation of the Western Sahara, Indonesia’s annexation of Irian Jaya and later east Timor (until 1999) spring to mind. Yet Putin apologists have attempted to justify this act of Russian imperial expansionism as an act of self-determination by the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea (which frankly reminds one of Hitler’s claim to Sudetenland), or claim it was ‘always Russia’ and so on. 

On February 27, 2014, just five days after the Ukraine parliament’s vote to oust Yanukovych, masked Russian troops invaded Crimea – sovereign Ukrainian territory – attacked government buildings, raised the Russian flag over them, forced out the democratically-elected Crimea autonomous state government, replaced it with stooges from the ultra-right ‘Russian Unity’ party, which had received 4 percent of the vote in the previous elections – surely all this is a coup, isn’t it? It is a textbook coup, combined with invasion. This foreign-installed junta in Crimea then carried out, under Russian military occupation, the illegal “referendum” to leave Ukraine and join Russia, within ten days after calling it. Only two options were presented in the fake “referendum,” neither of which included the status quo. Ukrainian media was closed down.

Of course, the junta declared that 97 percent had voted for joining Russia – the usual figure plucked out of the air by dictators who throw “election” circuses. Yet Putin’s own Human Rights Council claimed the real turnout was 30-50% of voters, and that only 50-60% of those voted to join Russia. Notably, in a February 8-18 2014 Ukraine-wide poll, only 41 percent of people in Crimea favoured joining Russia – and that was far higher than anywhere else in Ukraine; we are supposed to believe that this jumped from 41% to 97% in a month!

International observers – of course, the Russian-installed junta invited various far-right/fascist parties from Europe for this show, indeed the invitees list – the French National Front, Jobbik (Hungary), Attaka (Bulgaria), Austrian Freedom Party, Belgian Vlaams Belang, Italy’s Forza Italia and Lega Nord, and Poland’s Self-Defense – reads virtually like a roll-call of the European far-right. Fascist parties throughout Europe declared their support for Crimea being “reincorporated” into Russia, its rightful place in their view, believers in the restoration of empires after all.

In contrast, the Mejils (parliament) of the Crimean Tatar nation, internationally recognised as the Indigenous people of Crimea (and likewise recognised as such in Ukraine), and a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation, declared the referendum illegitimate and called for boycott, just in case anyone on the so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ left happens to think the views of Indigenous peoples should count for something. The Russian occupation regime of post-referendum Crimea then banned the Mejils, their representative body first set up by the Crimean Tatars after the Russian revolution, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has documented ongoing human rights violations, including detention and torture, against the Tatar population. Today, the Mejils, in exile, demands the return of Crimea to Ukraine as an essential condition in any peace talks with Russia.

_{From 100% of the population at Russian conquest in 1783, the Crimean Tatars became a minority 100 years later, but then were 100% deported by Stalin in 1944}

The Crimean Tatars were the majority population of Crimea since the 11^th century, and remained so long after Russian settler-colonialism began with Catherine the Great’s invasion in 1783. Not until around 1900 did these Russian settlers begin to outnumber the indigenous Tatar population, who also fled Russian oppression in their hundreds of thousands. However they remained some 40 percent of the population until 1944 when Stalin expelled every man, woman and child Tatar from Crimea – hundreds of thousands of people – into central Asia, a torturous journey during which one in three died along the way. While they have been allowed to return in recent decades, such mass displacement tends to have a semi-permanent effect, and numbers were only re-growing slowly,  but continually, before this process was halted by annexation. In other words, the “left” (and far-right) assertion that, since 58 percent of the population of Crimea are ethnic Russians, annexation by Russia is an act of self-determination, is a declaration of support for the results of centuries of Tsarist colonialism and the Stalinist genocide.

An interesting comparison could be made to the current debate in Australia about an Indigenous ‘Voice’ to parliament, which will be subject to referendum later this year. While the tepid and powerless ‘voice’ on offer can well be criticised for its limitations, and indeed many Indigenous leaders prefer a ‘treaty-first’ approach which would recognise their sovereignty and cede some actual power to the Indigenous nations, the main opposition is coming from the right who are vigorously opposed to any even symbolic increase in Indigenous representation. From being once the sovereign owners of the whole of Australia, Indigenous Australians have been reduced, through colonisation and genocide, to only a few percent of the population.

So, using the same simple ‘majoritarian’ principles that many Putin apologists are now using to justify the result of the staged Crimea ‘referendum’ (even if we pretend for a moment that it was legitimate and not staged under military occupation) – that 58 percent of the Crimean population are ethnic Russians and so, if that’s what they want, so it should be – what would we say if the large Anglo-Australian majority here one fine day voted to be re-annexed to ‘Great’ Britain, and the 3 percent Indigenous Australian population were opposed? Should we say, well, the (former colons) Anglo-Australians are the majority, so it should be, like the (former colons) Russians in Crimea? Or would we say that Indigenous Australians should have some special constitutional right to not have their lands returned to some foreign colonial power? I suggest that the kind of constitutionally empowered real Indigenous voice via treaty that most on the Australian left are in favour of would indeed empower the Indigenous minority to reject such a move, and rightly so.

And, more generally, when there exists more than one constituent nation in a mixed region – in this case Russians, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars – is ‘winner take all’ the democratic solution? Take Cyprus (a place I know something about …), with its 80 percent Greek Cypriot majority and 20 percent Turkish Cypriot minority. So if the majority of the majority Greek Cypriot community vote to be united with Greece, so that should be, right? Oh, wait a minute, they tried that, with the movement against British colonialism led by the right-wing and the Orthodox church, calling for ‘Enosis’ (union) with Greece (rather than an independent bi-national federation) … thereby alienating the Turkish minority, driving them into the hands of Turkey’s military regime which eventually invaded in 1974 and the rest is history. No solution in the divided island 50 years later. Or take Bosnia, with its 44 percent Bosniak (‘Muslim’), 30 percent Serb, 18 percent Croat and 8 percent ‘Yugoslav’ (ie too mixed to be anything else) population – no majority, but if the Serbs and Croats voted together for Bosnia to be divided between Serbia and Croatia and got a slight majority of votes, so that should happen despite the views of the other communities? Indeed, since Serb and Croat fascist leaders actually tried to do that militarily in 1992-95, they were in the right, were they? The Crimea ‘solution’, in other words, is the most utterly reactionary solution possible.   

On a minor point, one of the justifications often heard from Putin shills is that Russia had to seize Crimea because it has a naval base in Sevastopol (and heaven forbid that an imperialist power should lose a military base in another country, say many on the western ‘left’). Yet the Russian military’s lease on Sevastopol does not expire until 2042.

Myth 4: There were popular uprisings of the ethnic Russian population of the Donbas, who established their own republics in an act of national self-determination

_{Putin offering to save Russian-speakers in Ukraine from the barbaric assault he is carrying out against them}

In answering this, I just want to clarify where I’m coming from: I support the right of nations and peoples to self-determination, and see this as superior to any obsession with “sovereign borders,” which have always changed throughout history, both for good and bad reasons. For example, I support the struggle of the Chechen people for self-determination, including independence, from Russia if that is their choice; I don’t care about the “sovereign” borders of the inheritance of the Russian colonial empire. Ditto for Puerto Rico or Hawaii if they chose to break up the US empire’s “sovereign” borders. I supported the national liberation struggle of the Kosovar Albanians against Serbian oppression, of the Kurds against oppression in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, and so on: so why don’t I support the same self-determination of “the Russian people in Donbas”? Well, apart from the fact that even if there were such a struggle, it would currently be an irrelevant pawn for Russian imperial conquest, the more fundamental problem is that no such reality exists.

As we saw, almost immediately after Yanukovych fled to Russia (February 22, 2014), Russian forces invaded Crimea (February 27). Just as quickly after this, the first Russian forces, from the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity party, turned up in Donbas, alongside other far-right Russian paramilitary forces who had just helped conquer Crimea; the seizures of government buildings began almost immediately, launching coup d’etats against the very governments Donbas residents had recently elected, bringing to power Russian stooges and fascists in the two oblasts (provinces) Donetsk and Luhansk; indeed, the first coup was the six-day seizure of the Donetsk State Administration Building on March 1, when “a group of activists bestowed the titled of ‘People’s Governor of Donetsk’ on a local nationalist-socialist activist named Pavel Gubarev,” an RNU leader. Such a rapid march of events in itself belies the idea that Russia was only responding to grass-roots movements in these regions staging a popular movement against the new post-Maidan authorities in Ukraine; it looks much more like a planned Russian conquest.

_{The swastika of the Russian National Unity Party, the first fascist mob to seize power in the coup in Donetsk in March 2014}

Let’s look at the three connected myths that make up this grander myth narrative.

Sub-Myth 1: ‘Ethnic Russian Donbas’

First, it is difficult to establish exactly what an ‘ethnic Russian’ is, as opposed to a Ukrainian who speaks Russian as a first language. Think of Irish, Welsh and Scottish who speak English as their first language, and try calling them ‘English’. See what happens. This is what occurs after centuries of colonialism, in both cases. Which in terms of ruthless Russification and physical destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, was probably even worse under Stalin than under the Tsars, though there is not much to choose from between them.

If we go by people’s identity, according to the 2001 census, ethnic Ukrainians formed 58 percent of the population of Luhansk Oblast and 56.9 percent of Donetsk Oblast. Those identifying as ethnic Russians formed the largest minority, accounting for 39 percent and 38.2 percent of the two oblasts respectively. In other words, Ukrainians were the same size majority in Donbas as Russians were in Crimea – yet this (post-colonisation and genocide) Russian majority in Crimea is given as a reason by the same Putin apologists to justify Russian annexation there! Furthermore, much evidence suggests a marked decline in the population identifying as ethnic Russians rather than Russian-speaking Ukrainians: in a 2019 survey carried out by the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, only 12 percent and 7 percent of the residents of the Russia-owned and government-controlled parts of Donbas respectively identified as ‘ethnic Russians’, while 21 percent and 12 percent respectively declared themselves ‘mixed Ukrainian and Russian’. The impact of Russian aggression since 2014 is likely the cause of this declining identification as ‘Russian’ – how ironic given that this Russian intervention is falsely justified as protecting these ‘ethnic Russians’! Indeed, the impact of the current war seems to be even greater, with even use of Russian language among many Ukrainians markedly declining as a political choice due to revulsion against the aggression. 

Therefore, to claim that the setting up of ‘independent’ republics in 2014 in Donetsk and Luhansk, and their annexation by Russia in 2022 following fake ‘referenda’ under brutal military occupation, was “the right to self-determination of the ethnic Russian population of Donbas,” is a statement of extraordinary ignorance. The population of Donbas is divided between ethnic Russians, Ukrainians who speak Russian, and Ukrainians who speak Ukrainian.

Before moving on we should clarify: from 2014 to 2022 the Russian-owned forces only controlled some 40 percent of ‘Donbas’ (approximately the same in both Donetsk and Luhansk) while some 60 percent remained under Ukraine government control. So Russia has not just annexed the parts it formerly controlled, but the entire two oblasts, plus two others that it never had any control of (Kherson and Zaporizhzhya) and where there was never any support for Russia.

Sub-Myth 2: The population of Donbas, regardless of ethnicity, wanted self-determination for the region and were oriented more to Russia than to Ukraine

It is certainly true that neither ethnicity nor language tells us anything necessarily about the views of the Donbas residents; neither being an ethnic Russian nor Russian or Ukrainian speaking does not equal a particular political opinion; the opinions of people in all three groups, in both government-controlled and Russia-controlled parts of both oblasts, are mixed. But the data does not support the myth, but rather the opposite.

Two surveys carried out in April 2014 reveal very important information, by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and by the Pew Research Centre. In the KIIS survey, to the question ‘Do you support the idea, that your region should secede from Ukraine and join Russia?’, 27 percent in Donetsk and 30 percent in Luhansk answered either ‘rather’ or ‘certainly’ yes – while some 52 percent in both oblasts answered ‘rather’ or ‘certainly’ no. These minority ‘yes’ votes in Donetsk and Luhansk were the only of any significance in all of Ukraine. The Pew research showed similar results, with the question whether regions should be allowed to secede answered in the positive by only 18 percent in eastern Ukraine (and 4 percent in west Ukraine), and only 27 percent of Russian-speakers. The KIIS survey also asked if they were in favour of Russian troops entering the region, to which under 20 percent in both oblasts said yes while substantial majorities said no.

On the question ‘Do you consider Viktor Yanukovych to be a legitimate President of Ukraine?’, only 32% and 28% respectively in Donetsk and Luhansk respectively said rather or certainly yes (by far the biggest numbers in Ukraine), compared to 57-58% who said rather or certainly no. So much for the idea that the people of Donbas were angry that “their president” was deposed.

Larger numbers support some kind of autonomy or ‘special status’ within Ukraine, but with sharp differences in the two parts of Donbas. Surveys carried out in 2016 and 2019 by the Centre for East European and International Studies found that in the Russia-owned regions, some 45% of the population were in favour of joining Russia. Of the majority opposed, 30% supported some kind of autonomy and a quarter no special status. But in the government controlled two-thirds, while a similar 30% favoured some kind of autonomy within Ukraine, the two-thirds majority favoured just Ukraine with no special status; hardly any supported joining Russia. Therefore it is difficult to say whether the overall majority necessarily even favour autonomy. Even this does not necessarily mean that the chunks seized are the regions most in favour of autonomy or separation; given the dispossession of half the Donbas population (some 3.3 of the original 6.6 million people), it more likely means a degree of subsequent relocation between the two zones, while the millions in refuge simply don’t get a say in such surveys.

Therefore, both in Donetsk and Luhansk, in both government and Russian-controlled regions, and among the dispossessed, both ‘ethnicity’ and political opinion are very mixed, there is no ‘Russian’ region or specifically even ‘pro-Russia’ region; so the regions violently seized are entirely arbitrary and correspond to no movement for ‘self-determination’ or necessarily for anything.

Truth 1. There was a degree of alienation from the new government in parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014

This is not to deny that there was broadly a sense of alienation among many in eastern Ukraine from the direction taken by the new post-Yanukovych government, regardless of ‘ethnicity’ or language; there were also geographic and other factors, including more economic connection to Russia in the east. Specifically, the new Ukraine authorities, and even more so the empowered far-right minority, projected an assertive Ukrainian nationalism, and various largely symbolic actions drove this alienation. According to the Pew survey, while 60 percent in western Ukraine thought the new government had “a good influence on the way things are going in the country,” only 24 percent in eastern Ukraine agreed, and 67 percent there assessed this influence as “bad.” Similarly, 66 percent in western Ukraine thought only the Ukrainian language should have legal standing, while 73 percent in eastern Ukraine (and 86 percent of Russian-speakers) said both Russian and Ukrainian should be official languages, underlining the centrality of the language question – my Myth 2 details the comically false assertion that Russian language was downgraded or “banned” in 2014, but even the unsuccessful attempt to revise the language law in this context would have been a factor in this alienation.

But in itself, this is not remarkable: the dominance of certain political tendencies in different regions of a country due to complex combinations of history, culture, economics etc is not uncommon: think of northern and southern England, northern and southern Italy, regions of the US, Aegean Turkey and Anatolia etc. That does not mean that the peoples of such regions would welcome a foreign military intervention because a party perceived to favour a different region’s political proclivities were in power.

Sub-Myth 3: The Russian-backed seizure of power in parts of Donbas represented this alienation of the region’s population from the new government

There was certainly a valid political struggle that could have been waged by many people in the region against certain policies of the new government; the fact that the Maidan was initially confronted by an ‘anti-Maidan’ in the east was in itself a valid expression of popular dissent. What was not valid was the almost immediate militarisation of the anti-Maidan by Russian-backed, funded, trained and armed militia and direct intervention of Russian armed forces, mercenaries, tanks and other heavy weaponry, political operatives and fascists, arbitrarily seizing control of town halls and chunks of eastern Ukraine. Simon Pirani argues that while neither the Maidan nor the anti-Maidan should be stereotyped as reactionary, in fact the “social aspirations” of the two were similar, “it was right-wing militia from Russia, and the Russian army, that militarised the conflict and suppressed the anti-Maidan’s social content.”

The idea that this militarisation, seizing of buildings and coup d’etats were a natural reflection, extension, of the civil ‘anti-Maidan’ in the east is belied by the 2014 KIIS survey. On the question ‘Do you support actions of those, who with arms capture administrative buildings in your region?’, only 18 percent in Donetsk and 24 percent in Luhansk answered rather or certainly yes, while 72 percent and 68 percent respectively in those two allegedly ‘pro-Russian’ oblasts answered rather or certainly no!

I have heard it claimed that Donbas residents were alienated because the government they elected had been overthrown in Kyiv (as if the parliament, which deposed the president – one person – wasn’t also elected by them). But how does this sit with small armed groups launching coup d’etats in Donbas overthrowing the very regional government that Donbas residents had elected?

Nor can militarisation be justified as an act of self-defence against some violent wave of government repression of the anti-Maidan, as nothing of the sort had taken place: the coup d’detats, took place immediately after the deposing of Yanukovych; the armed conflict later. 

John Reiman, in his excellent review of the Ukraine Diaries, cites some passages describing this very early intervention (ie, months before the generalised war):

“On March 9 for the first time Kurkov reports on the entry of Russian agents in Ukraine. And not just any Russians – members of the fascist Russian Unity Party (RNE). ‘The members of RNE, swastikas tattooed on their necks and arms, have no qualms about negotiating with Ukraine’s regional governments and making ultimatums…’ … On April 4, Kurkov reports that 15 Russian citizens had been arrested in Donetsk with 300 Kalashnikov assault rifles, a grenade launcher, ammunition and other military equipment. … On April 7, Kurkov reports the arrest of a Russian GRU agent, Roman Bannykh. The Ukraine government seized his telephone records, which revealed that he had been coordinating the actions of the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk. … pro-Russian activists … walk around in combat uniform, with no badges or other signs of identification, carrying AK-100 assault rifles. The Ukrainian army does not possess those rifles but the Russian army does … Of the 117 Russian citizens arrested for having taken part in disturbances, at least ten are Russian secret service agents. … On April 21 … the separatists in Slovyansk attacked and pillaged the homes of gypsies in that city. Simultaneously, Nelya Shtepa was kidnapped. She was the former mayor of that city and had originally supported the separatists but broke with them because they were being manipulated by Russian secret service agents’.”

Indeed, Russian FSB colonel Igor Girkin, known as Strelkov, one of the leaders of the first gang of far-right Russian paramilitaries in Donbas, admitted that he pulled the first trigger that led to war, stating that “if our unit had not crossed the border, everything would have ended as it did in Kharkiv and in Odesa.”

Finally, regarding the so-called “referendums” that the coup authorities in Donetsk and Luhansk carried out in May 2014, Cathy Young writing in The Bulwark provides a useful anecdote which, as she says, by itself pretty much “tells the tale”:

“On May 7, Ukrainian intelligence released the audio of an intercepted phone call between Donetsk insurgent leader Dmytro Boitsov and far-right Russian nationalist Aleksandr Barkashov (the head, as it happens, of the aforementioned Russian National Unity). In the obscenity-laden exchange, Boitsov complains that the rebels are “not ready” to hold the referendum on May 11 as planned. Barkashov responds testily: “Just put in whatever you want. Write 99 percent. What, you’re going to fucking walk around collecting papers? Shit, are you fucked in the head or something?” “Ah. All right, I got it, I got it,” replies an audibly relieved Boitsov as it dawns on him that he and his pals are not expected to hold an actual referendum, just to produce results. Barkashov continues: “Just write that 99 percent—no, let’s say 89 percent, fuck it, voted for the Donetsk Republic. And that’s it, shit, we’re fucking done.”

I mean, it may as well have been a discussion between blood-drenched Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad and some ‘election’ henchman who thought the ‘election’ circus had to be taken at least partly seriously; hell, some western ‘lefties’ are so thick they even agree with their far-right allies that those ‘elections’ were genuine!

Young continues:

“By amazing coincidence, on May 11, the separatist “election commission” of Donetsk announced that 89 percent of the voters had chosen self-rule. As I have noted earlier, the first prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, “political consultant” Aleksandr Borodai, was not only a citizen of Russia but a reputed officer in the FSB (the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor) with a long history of involvement in far-right, ultranationalist circles.”

Conclusion

By intervening and militarising a movement, swamping it from the get-go, forcibly seizing territory, Russia completely changed the nature of Ukrainian politics. From a Ukrainian perspective, Russia, the former colonial power and neighbouring superpower had engineered a violent military conflict, slicing up Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas, thereby completely overwhelming whatever democratic voices could have arisen among Russians or Russian-speakers and supporters, while likewise hardening the right-wing nationalist views of many Ukrainians now seeing a fight for their country’s very existence. This militarisation also strengthened far-right forces in Ukraine at the time because the Ukrainian armed forces were in disarray, and the far-right took the initiative on the military front.

Whatever original support the civil anti-Maidan may have had, it is hard to know what survived the Russian-led military intervention and coups. We know that 3.3 million people of the original 6.6 million have fled Donbass since then, the majority into other areas of Ukraine. We also know that many of the irregular Ukrainian militia on the frontlines in the Ukraine-government controlled two-thirds of Donbas are residents uprooted as a result of the conflict and blame the Russian intervention. The more the far-right and fascist Russian-backed, or indeed actual Russian political figures and militia came to dominate these ‘republics’, imposing essentially totalitarian control and massively violating the human rights of the local population, the less this had anything to do with any expression of opposition to the Ukrainian government’s policies.   

Finally, one might rightly ask, does this even have any relevance now, with Russia heavily bombing and destroying Russian-speaking towns and cities in Donbas, including the complete decimation of Russian speaking Mariupol, and the massive rejection of Russian rule by these populations – has anyone seen a single welcoming party in eastern Ukraine for conquerors in the last year? It is almost certain that whatever lingering pro-Russia feeling that may have existed before 2022 has now largely collapsed. Indeed, the problem with this entire discussion, even as I write it, is the danger of implying that Russia’s monstrous war has anything to do with the rights of Russians or Russian-speakers in Donbas: if that were the case, there would have been no reason for Russia to advance an inch from the control it already exerted over 40 percent of Donbas where they perhaps had more support – what would have been the purpose of annexing the more anti-Russian parts of Donbas that had been in government control, let alone annexing the other two oblasts, let alone invading and savagely bombing the whole of Ukraine?

_{Before February 2022: Russian-backed forces only controlled about 40 percent of each of the two Donbas oblasts, Donetsk and Luhansk.}

_{What Russia controlled in Ukraine by October 2022}

Myth 5: The Ukrainian army bombed the Donbas for 8 years before the Russian invasion, killing 14,000 ethnic Russians between 2014 and 2022.”

As I have already fully dealt with this before, this will merely be a summary of main points; the article provides the detail.

The purpose of this claim is to argue that, while Putin may have overreacted by going all the way to invading, it was the Ukrainian army most at fault before the invasion. Even if it is admitted that Putin’s invasion is criminal and may have imperialist goals and is only using the plight of the Donbas Russians as an excuse, the claim is that this excuse is genuine.

Is any of this true?

Yes – the 14,000 figure. Yes, 14,000 were killed in the conflict in Donbas between 2014 and 2022. That’s a terrible figure, and of course many times that number were wounded, the entire region is a dead zone covered by landmines, and some 3.3 million people fled the region (ie before the millions who have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion). But what of the rest?

“The Ukrainian army killed.”

Wrong – two sides were involved in the armed conflict – the Ukrainian army, alongside various irregular Ukrainian militia (often composed of people uprooted from their homes) on one side, and the Russia-backed and armed separatist militia of the two self-proclaimed ‘republics’ in eastern Donbas on the other, backed by Russian troops and mercenaries. Both sides shoot; both sides kill.

For example, according to a January 2015 report by Human Rights Watch, “On January 24, unguided rockets, probably launched from rebel-controlled territory, killed 29 civilians and 1 soldier in Mariupol and wounded more than 90 civilians. One rocket struck the courtyard of a school. On January 13, unguided rockets, also probably launched from rebel-controlled territory, killed 12 civilians and wounded 18 at a checkpoint near Volnovakha.” Don’t these 41 civilian lives count? What of the fact that, following the first Minsk Accord in September 2014, the ‘separatist’ militia immediately violated it by launching a 6-month battle, with hundreds of deaths, to seize the Donetsk airport from the government? How was that the Ukrainian army’s fault? What of the 298 people killed when the ‘separatists’ shot down a civilian airline in July 2014?

“ethnic Russians”

Ethnic Russians are a minority of around 38-39 percent of the population in Donbas, so it is unlikely that all or most killed are “ethnic Russians,” but that is not the point of this part of the assertion. The reason this fiction is inserted is to imply that people were killed “by the Ukrainian army” simply for being ethnic Russians, in a war of targeted ethnic extermination, rather than being victims of the cross-fire between the two sides shooting at each other.

But the other problem with the assertion is the implication that these were 14,000 “ethnic Russian” civilians – after all, when you are fighting a military force, you don’t usually describe the ethnicity of the troops killed. For example, now, when the Russian and Ukrainian armies are in combat, no-one refers to the numbers of ‘ethnic Russians’ or ‘ethnic Ukrainians’ dying, when referring to military deaths. So it clearly means ‘ethnic Russian civilians’.

In reality, according to the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), the numbers killed in Donbas from 14 April 2014 to 31 December 2021were:

4,400 Ukrainian troops

6,500 Russia—owned separatist troops

3,404 civilians (of whatever ethnicity)

So, let’s be clear: we are talking about 3,404 civilians, killed by both sides, over 2014-2021. And these 3,404 civilians would have included ‘ethnic Russians’ and ‘ethnic Ukrainians’, who both live in Donbas.

However, what about the last part:

“between 2014 and 2022.”

Well, yes, if we make the small change to 2014-2021, then this is correct in the abstract.

But the implication here is that there was a continual, ongoing bloody conflict (allegedly all caused by the Ukrainian army incessantly “shelling ethnic Russians”) right up to the Russian invasion. The invasion, in a sense, is simply the continuation of the ongoing bloodshed, at a perhaps slightly higher level; a reaction to it, even if perhaps an overreaction.

In reality, almost all the 14,000 deaths, including almost all the 3,404 civilians, were killed when the open conflict was raging from 2014 till the ceasefire in mid-2015 – that is, during a time when no-one seriously denies the direct involvement (ie, invasion) by the Russian army. According to the OSCE Status Reports from 2016-2022, even taking into account that the Russian-owned armed forces shoot and shell as much as do the Ukrainians, and that perhaps half if not the majority of deaths were due to landmines and unexploded ordinance, laid by both sides, here are the numbers of deaths in the years before the Russian invasion:

2016 – 88 deaths

2017 – 87 deaths

2018 – 43 deaths

2019 – 19 deaths

2020 – 23 deaths

2021 – 16 deaths, including:

– 11 deaths (Jan-June)

– 4 deaths (June-Sep)

– 1 death (Sep-Dec)

2022 – 0 deaths (before Russian invasion).

As we can see, the rate of death continually declined until it reached zero. The Russian invasion, which resulted in thousands of deaths and untold injuries, destruction and dispossession, was “in response” (allegedly) to the zero deaths in Donbas in 2022.

The total number of civilian fatalities from 2016-2022 was therefore 276, about half due to landmines. Of course any number of deaths is far too many, and neither the Ukrainian side nor the Russia-owned side should be excused for violations and war crimes that resulted in civilian deaths.

But as there were 3,404 civilians killed from 2014 to 2022 before the Russian invasion, that means that 3128 of these (92%) occurred in 2014-15, when no serious observer denies the direct intervention of the Russian armed forces, mercenaries and heavy weapons in the conflict.

_{Up to half of civilian deaths in Donbas in 2014-22 were from landmines}

Myth 6: The Minsk Accords offered a just way out of the crisis, Russia wanted to implement them, but the Ukrainian government refused to implement them, encouraged by the US.

These assertions are entirely fictional as will be shown, but they also raise a number of sub-points; first, there were two Minsk agreements, so what happened to the first?; what is the actual content of the Minsk II agreement?; how was it imposed on Ukraine?; and what is the evidence that it was Ukraine that blocked its implementation?

Following the first few months of armed conflict between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-backed militia in Donbas in mid-2014, the first Minsk agreement was signed between Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), as well as by the Russian-backed junta leaders who had seized power in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces), on 5 September 2014.

The main provisions were for

• an immediate ceasefire to be monitored by OSCE,

• “decentralisation of power, including through the adoption of the Ukrainian law “On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts”,”

• the permanent monitoring of the Ukrainian-Russian border by OSCE,

• release of all hostages and illegally detained persons,

• a law preventing the prosecution and punishment of people in connection with the conflict,

• “early local elections in accordance with the Ukrainian law “On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts”,” and

• the withdrawal of “illegal armed groups and military equipment as well as fighters and mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian government immediately carried out its side of the bargain by adopting the “Law on the Special Order of Local Self-Government in Certain Districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions” on September 16. According to this law, this special status of self-government will be implemented in the districts of Donetsk and Lugansk controlled by the separatists at the time of the ceasefire. The law provides for the freedom of any language to be used and cross-border cooperation with Russia. Local elections were scheduled for the region in December.

However, the Minsk I Protocol was almost immediately violated in a massive way by the Russian-orchestrated ‘separatist’ militia, which launched an attack aimed at seizing the Donetsk airport, which was in the government-controlled part of Donetsk at the time of the ceasefire. This led to a 5-month battle in which the side launching the aggression was in open violation of the Protocol, and as it was a battle to control infrastructure, cannot in any way be excused as a battle to protect hypothetically endangered pro-Russian communities. They further violated the Minsk Protocol by holding their own “elections” in November outside the new Ukrainian special status law, under Russian military occupation, and without any of the other provisions of Minsk adhered to (eg, withdrawal of illegal armed groups, OSCE monitoring of the border etc). In January, the separatists took control of the airport, and also launched attacks on other government-controlled regions, including Mariupol, Debaltseve and Krematorsk, killing dozens of civilians.

So there is no ambiguity regarding Minsk I: Ukraine carried out the political requirements, but the Russia-owned militia massively violated both the political and above all the military agreements.

With large-scale support from direct intervention by Russian forces, the separatists and Russia were able to force a new Minsk agreement, Minsk II, on Ukraine. Minsk II, mediated by France and Germany, was signed on February 12 by Russia, Ukraine, OSCE and the separatist leaders.

Again, it was immediately violated by the Russian-orchestrated militia, who continued their attack on Debaltseve, unilaterally declaring it to be outside the agreement! Hundreds of Ukrainian troops had been holed up and besieged in the town for weeks. It fell to the separatists on February 18, a week after the agreement.

Was Minsk II a good agreement for Ukraine? Well, the first thing that must be noted is that it was imposed on Ukraine by military force, given the large scale and relatively open intervention of Russian forces (as opposed to just Russian-backed forces and Russian heavy weaponry) in the second phase of the Donbas war. Therefore, the way Ukraine “agreed” to it was an act of international injustice, imperialist imposition, so those blaming Ukraine for not implementing it are in effect siding with imperialist bullying.

That said, was Minsk II so much worse than Minsk I for Ukraine, and was it a fair and just agreement anyway, despite the way it was imposed?

Let’s again look at the main points of the Minsk II agreement:

1, 2, 3 ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons by both parties at equal distances, security zones for heavy weaponry, monitoring and verification by OSCE

4. On the first day after the withdrawal, to begin a dialogue on the procedures for holding local elections in accordance with Ukrainian law and the Law of Ukraine “On a temporary order of local government in individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” … no later than 30 days from the date of signing of this document, to adopt a resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine with the specification of a territory subject to the special regime in accordance with the Law of Ukraine “On temporary order of local government in some regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” based on the line set in a Minsk memorandum of September 19, 2014

5, 6 Pardons and amnesties, law prohibiting prosecution and punishment in connection with the conflict, release and exchange of hostages and illegally detained persons

9. Restoration of full control over the state border of Ukraine by Ukraine’s government throughout the whole conflict area, which should begin on the first day after the local elections and be completed after a comprehensive political settlement (local elections in individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on the basis of the Law of Ukraine, and a constitutional reform) by the end of 2015, on condition of implementation of paragraph 11.

10. The withdrawal of all foreign armed forces, military equipment, as well as mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under the supervision of the OSCE. Disarmament of all illegal groups.

11. Conducting constitutional reform in Ukraine, with the new constitution coming into force by the end of 2015, providing for decentralization as a key element (taking into account the characteristics of individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, agreed with representatives of these areas), as well as the adoption of the permanent legislation on the special status of individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions

12. On the basis of the Law of Ukraine “On temporary order of local government in individual areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions” the questions regarding local elections shall be discussed and agreed with the individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group. Elections will be held in compliance with the relevant standards of the OSCE with the monitoring by the OSCE ODIHR.

Minsk II appears more comprehensive than Minsk I, but in certain respects can be considered more disadvantageous to Ukraine; after all, Russia and its proxies did not continue the war for another 6 months for no gain. In addition, there is arguably confusion in the timeline, which allowed both sides to stall. It is generally thought that Ukraine stalled on the political aspects of Minsk, while Russia and proxies stalled on the military-security aspects.

For example, while Ukraine had already agreed to the special status provisions in Minsk I and had immediately passed the relevant legislation (and again, following Minsk II, the Rada (parliament) voted in the ‘special status’ laws for Donbas, Minsk II goes beyond in mandating Ukraine bring into force a “new constitution,” with “decentralisation as a key element.” Understandably, Ukrainians may well wonder why Russia, via military intervention inside Ukraine, has the right to impose a “new constitution” of a specific nature on Ukraine as a whole, as opposed to the provisions already agreed to regarding Donetsk and Luhansk.

If the United States had sent troops into Russian territory to “aid” the Chechens during Putin’s grizzly slaughter in Chechnya over 1999-2001, and then forced Russia to sign a ‘Minsk’ agreement according to which, not only would Chechnya have special status, but Russia had to write a whole new constitution based on the ‘decentralisation’ of the entire territory of Russia, I wonder how many of today’s ‘leftist’ Putin apologists would be demanding Russia ‘sign Minsk, the only road to peace’, and be praising the US for its desire for peace?

In addition, Minsk II says that Ukraine can only regain control over its sovereign border after the local elections have been held in Donbas, and can only be completed after this imposed “new constitution” comes into being. There is nothing remotely as sweeping as this in Minsk I.

However, Minsk II also says that all foreign armed forces, military equipment and mercenaries must leave Ukraine “under the supervision of the OSCE” and that all “illegal groups” must be disarmed. Yet this manifestly never happened. It definitely never happened “under the supervision of OSCE,” because OSCE continually reported over the years ahead evidence of Russian troops and military equipment entering Ukraine.

Indeed, at this point, we should probably demolish this particular sub-myth, because any reasonable person would have to admit that Ukraine could not carry out acts of ‘local self-governance’ in a region occupied by the army of a hostile neighbouring superpower; yet Russia denies its troops were there.

Sub-Myth: There were no Russian troops in Ukraine between the 2015 ceasefire and the 2022 invasion

OSCE had become quite open about its evidence of Russian troops and military equipment entering Ukraine by 2016. By the end of that year, the OSCE observer mission had observed “more than 30,000 individuals in military-style dress crossing just at the two checkpoints to which it has access. … Twenty uniformed persons crossed the border in a single bus with tinted windows in mid-October, according to Observer Mission reports. … On at least 27 different occasions, the Observer Mission has reported seeing funerary vehicles returning to Russia with a sign reading “Cargo 200” or “200,” a well-known code for Russian military casualties. … on June 10 [the Mission] observed the exhumation of a soldier in a Russian military uniform. … On October 17, at the Uspenka border crossing point, the SMM saw one black minivan with tinted windows and black military license plates enter separatist-held Ukraine from Russia, with two men in military-style dress on board.” In 2018 an OSCE drone even recorded footage of Russian military vehicles crossing into Ukraine.

Indeed, the evidence is simply overwhelming. For example, Paul Gregory writes that as of September 2016, the organization Cargo 200 had published “names, photos, addresses, and military records” of 167 troops “killed,” 187 “MIA,” 305 mercenaries “killed” and 796 “MIA.” But these are likely underestimates, as, for example, he continues, the Committee of [Russian] Soldiers’ Mothers “gather information from grieving families to arrive at casualty figures of up to 3,500 KIA [killed in action]” by 2016; the Committee was labelled a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian Justice Ministry.  Furthermore, “Young Russian soldiers in Ukraine routinely post pictures on vKontakte (a Russian version of Facebook) of themselves in Ukraine and identify their unit.”

Bellingcat further demolished the myth by demonstrating “that thousands of Russian soldiers have been awarded the highest honors of the Russian Federation for bravery/distinction in combat,” by gathering images of these medals that the soldiers posted on social media. “Bellingcat’s analysis shows 4,300 medals “For Distinction in Combat” awarded between July 11, 2014 and February 2016,” but this is only one of four kinds of medals awarded.

Unlike the issue of Ukraine regaining control of its border, there is no prior condition in Minsk II for the withdrawal of all foreign troops, mercenaries, equipment etc; therefore, Ukraine quite understandably interprets this refusal by Russia and its proxies to implement these provisions of Minsk as reason not to implement the local elections, despite having passed the legislation for it. Because no sovereign state would be prepared to hold local elections in a region of its country under the control of a hostile foreign military power, which also controls the local militia running the region.

_{Russian soldiers and their medals for fighting in Ukraine, from Inform Napalm (https://informnapalm.org/en/identified-servicemen-of-19th-mrb-awarded-for-fighting-in-ukraine/)}

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Furthermore, how do we define “illegal groups” as described in this same article of Minsk II? To the Ukrainian government, the Russian armed and financed and often staffed armed militia in control of the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk not in its control are “illegal groups,” but they obviously don’t consider themselves to be, which is a problem of the text. Not that Ukraine has used this as a pretext, however.

The text also says that the regions where this ‘special status’ and hence local elections would be held would correspond to the ceasefire lines of September 2014, ie, when Minsk I was signed. But now the Russian proxies were in control of more territory, including the airport, Debaltseve etc. So while Minsk II calls for immediate ceasefire (ie, on the lines of February 2015), these lines are beyond those of September 2014, on which special status is to be based. So how does Ukraine carry out local elections when the separatist militia control areas beyond the assigned region?

Furthermore, Minsk II says that the local elections are to be held “with the monitoring of OSCE,” but it is unclear how OSCE can monitor a situation in which OSCE itself says a key provision of Minsk, namely withdrawal of all foreign forces and weapons, has not been carried out. In addition, it is unclear how Ukraine can carry out these local elections under its new special status law, as required by Minsk II, when both Russia and its proxy leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk rejected this new law. Finally, just two months after Minsk II was signed, the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk under Russian control held their own local “elections” anyway, neither under Ukrainian government law nor with OSCE monitoring, in outright violation of Minsk II.

For all these reasons, Ukraine not proceeding with the political side of Minsk (local elections under its special status legislation) is arguably completely justified; local elections carried out in such conditions would result in Russia essentially having a permanent place inside the Ukrainian polity. Or, at the very least, even if one accuses Ukraine of not carrying out Minsk II, they must at the same time accuse Russia of also not carrying out Minsk II. For its part, Russia simply claims it is not a signatory to Minsk II and is therefore not bound to it, claiming only the separatist leaders were signatories, but this is simply a lie: the signature of Russian ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov, can be clearly seen on the Minsk agreement, indeed on the Russian version of it. Check the last page with the signatures.

So, while both sides arguably stalled, and, in my view, the Ukrainian side justifiably so for the reasons above, what of anti-Ukrainian or pro-Putin writers who claim either that Zelensky began with a peace platform to implement Minsk II when elected in 2019 but “backed down” due to intimidation from the Ukrainian far-right, or that, even more blandly, Ukraine ultimately “rejected” it (often with the very colourful addition that Russia “wanted to implement it”)?

According to the first charge, after being elected in 2019 on a peace platform, Zelensky signed an agreement for the mutual pull-back of armed forces in order to facilitate the conditions for proceeding with Minsk (based on the new Steinmeier formula which Zelensky had signed onto), but when confronted by the refusal of the far-right and the Azov Regiment to pull back, so the story goes, he “backed down.”

Yet actually, the opposite occurred. As Taras Billous explains:

“There had been an agreement [in late 2019] that there would be a troop disengagement at three points of what was then the line between Ukrainian forces and Russian/separatist forces in Donbas. Then people from around the Azov movement, and from the National Corps Party, staged a campaign there, at one of these points, presenting this disengagement as if it represented some kind of gain for the Kremlin, as if Ukrainian troops alone were called upon to withdraw and leave their positions. But this wasn’t what the disengagement required; it required both sides to pull back. But even in this case, which was so crucial for the right, where they tried to achieve their maximum mobilization for this activity, they didn’t succeed in achieving their point of view because Zelensky intervened personally. He traveled to that line of forces and engaged in heated discussions with some Azov members, and eventually Ukraine did carry out this disengagement, which was a prerequisite for resuming the meeting in the “Normandy Format” with France and Germany as mediators between Ukraine and Russia. So even in this case the right was unable to block governmental policy.”

Curiously, the pro-Putin voices often show a video of Zelensky being confronted by the far-rightists at the disengagement lines as evidence of him “backing down” and that the far-right call the shots in Ukraine despite their tiny size. In this video tweet, the pro-Putin clown Denis Rogatyuk writes “The fighter refuses [to lay down arms]. Zelensky is NOT running the show. The neo-nazis are.” I say curiously because the video shows the complete opposite: it shows Zelensky stood his ground. They backed down; as Billous explains, Zelensky did carry out the disengagement; and on December 19, the Ukrainian parliament yet again extended the Donbas special status legislation for another year.

Furthermore, if Zelensky had “backed down” to the far right, and instead decided on “NATO-backed” war to reclaim the Russian-controlled parts of Donbas as the tankie discourse goes, then wouldn’t we have seen an upturn in the fighting? Yet, as I demonstrated in my ‘Myth 5’, the numbers of people dying on the Donbas front quite sharply declined in 2019-2021 under Zelensky (and of course it was already well down in 2016-2018 compared to the hot war of 2014-15 when nearly all the 14,000 deaths (including 3404 civilian deaths) occurred. The total deaths in this conflict dropped to 19 in 2019 (from 43 in 2018) then 23 in 2020, 16 in 2021 (11 in the first half year and 5 in second half) and zero in 2022 before the invasion – and all this taking into account that the Russian-backed side are also responsible for these deaths, and that around half these figures are from landmines rather than shooting and shelling – the evidence suggests Zelensky did largely carry out his peace program. Sure doesn’t suggest much of a ‘NATO-backed offensive’.

On the final charge, that Ukraine actually “abandoned” or “rejected” the Minsk agreement, it is unclear if those making this common charge are simply saying the same, that Ukraine has yet to carry out certain provisions of it, for the reasons described above, but saying it in a more colourful and dishonest way; or if they really are claiming that at some point Ukraine formally renounced the agreement. Since I wouldn’t want to accuse Putin apologists of dishonesty, I will read it to mean what it does mean in English.

In which case, they should provide the source of the statement by the Ukrainian government. Anyone that watches or reads the news might remember that the ‘Normandy’ framework discussions between Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany had continued right up till the eve of Russia’s recognition of the “independence” of the two ‘republics’ it controlled just a few days before the invasion; these were discussions based on trying to negotiate Minsk II. Russia’s recognition and invasion buried the accords. So in its literal meaning, this continual charge is simply a lie.

In order to seem less of a liar, Jacques Baud, the former NATO military analyst turned Putin troll who was widely cited by the tankie left around the time of the invasion, put it this way: “But on February 11, in Berlin, after 9 hours of work, the meeting of the political advisers of the leaders of the “Normandy format” ends, without concrete result: the Ukrainians still and always refuse to apply the Accords of Minsk, apparently under pressure from the United States.” As “evidence” for this claim, he “cites” this article. But of course the article “cited” says no such thing; it reads “Reiterating Ukraine’s commitment to a political and diplomatic settlement of the ongoing tensions, Yermak said the country would continue to take measures to intensify the work of all existing negotiation formats in order to facilitate the peace process.”

Baud, in other words, just made it up. Those of us who are used to this are not surprised; those who are not, try to understand that pretty much all pro-Putin propaganda is of this level.

Finally, this simple description of the reality inside the Russia-owned parts of Donbas in the years before the 2022 invasion should suffice to demonstrate how comprehensively Minsk II was already fully violated in spirit and letter there:

“The “People’s Republics” also formally adopted constitutions which claimed sovereignty over areas under Kiev’s control – again, in breach of Minsk 2. Over 800,000 inhabitants of the “People’s Republics” have been issued with Russian passports, i.e. Russian citizenship. Higher education institutions have adopted the curricula used in Russia. The Ukrainian language has been banned in schools. In addition to the replacement of Ukrainian television broadcasting by state-controlled Russian television channels, the Kremlin version of current affairs (and world history, in the form of the “Russian world”) is promoted by outlets of the Russian Centre organisation (Russian-state-funded) and the Russia-Donbass Integration Committee (also Russian-state-funded). Russian political parties are now active in the “People’s Republics” and contest elections there, especially the Just Russia Party, the Russian Communist Party, and Putin’s United Russia Party. Those inhabitants of the “People’s Republics” who have Russian citizenship also take part in Russian elections. Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 are dead.”

Myth 7: Russia and Ukraine were ready to sign a peace agreement in April 2022 whereby Ukraine would not join NATO, but then British prime minister Boris Johnston visited Kyiv and told Zelensky not to go ahead with it, after which Ukraine withdrew from the negotiations, scuttling this chance for peace.

This myth has taken on such a life of its own it has probably been re-published in almost every conceivable left and alt-right publication, not only the anti-Ukrainian ones. The tankie and conspiracist etherworld has been full of it, for example Jacobin’s pro-Putin propagandist Branco Marcetic here. Yet there is not an ounce of truth to it.

Of course, the Ukrainians have no agency; they just jump to the alleged commands of some foreign leader that shows up. Yet we don’t even know for sure what Johnston said; it was just a claim by one Ukrainian newspaper, allegedly from some unnamed sources close to Zelensky. Hell, anyone can say anything.

It is certainly true that there was a peace proposal on the table that involved Ukraine scrapping its bid to join NATO. In fact, that proposal was already on the table before the war even began. Ukraine accepted the proposal, but Putin rejected it, because, after all, Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine and restore the Russian Empire, as he openly stated that Ukraine had no right to exist as a separate entity to Russia; the NATO stuff as just a smokescreen, so he saw Ukraine’s acceptance of no NATO as a threat rather than an opportunity.

It is also true that there was a more detailed peace proposal on the table in late March-early April 2022, about a month into the war. Importantly, this was Ukraine’s 10-point peace proposal to Russia on March 29 2022; it was not just some ‘proposal’ floating around in the atmosphere, that some are accusing Ukraine of rejecting (rejecting its own proposal).

The 10 points included that Ukraine would no longer seek to join NATO, would not join any military alliance, that instead it would get sovereignty guarantees from a number of nations instead (including Russia), the statement that there was no military solution to the question of Crimea and the 40 percent of Donbas already occupied by Russia before February 2022, and therefore Russia would withdraw to these pre-February lines, the sovereignty guarantees would not even cover these regions until a solution was eventually arrived at via negotiations, and in the case of Crimea, the negotiations could last 15 years!

For what happened next, I am going to cite US Greens Party leader Howie Hawkins who put together a very clear outline based on easily available sources; above all what this shows is that Russia had already rejected the proposals two days before Johnston’s visit, and that despite horrific Russian massacres in the meantime, Zelensky remained open for negotiations. These facts may not fit with lots of peoples’ favourite conspiracy theory, but they are clearly on the record, so please argue against the facts, not against me or Howie Hawkins. Here is Howie:

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“The peace settlement on the table at the end of March provided for Russia to return to the pre-February 24 lands it held in the Donbass and Crimea, for Ukraine to be a neutral non-NATO country without nuclear weapons or foreign troops (the latter two provisions are already in the Ukrainian constitution) in return for a security guarantee treaty signed by the big powers, and for the status of the Donbas and Crimea to be determined over a number of years diplomatically, not militarily.

“According to a Reuters report, that basic proposal was on the table in the days before and just after the invasion, but Putin rejected it because he wanted to annex Ukraine, not just make it militarily neutral.

“On April 7, two days before Johnson’s visit to Zelensky on April 9, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the proposed settlement was “unacceptable.”

“Whether Johnson’s April 9 no negotiations message, attributed to unnamed sources in the Zelensky administration only by a single Ukrainian news source, represented the Collective West, as the report said he claimed, has never been confirmed by the US or other Western countries.

“In any case, three days later on April 12, Putin said the negotiations were at a “dead end.” “On April 27, the Financial Times reported in a story entitled, “Vladimir Putin abandons hopes of Ukraine deal and shifts to land-grab strategy,” that Putin had “lost interest in diplomatic efforts to end his war,” citing sources briefed on conversations with Putin.

“Meanwhile, Zelensky remained open to peace talks. At an April 25 press conference, Zelensky had said he is ready to hold peace talks and wishes to do so face-to-face with Putin. “He followed up on May 12, again calling for negotiations. “And again on June 8: Asked about talks with Russia which have been suspended since late March, Zelensky said that Ukraine has not changed his position. He said he maintains the view that war should be ended at the negotiating table. The Ukrainian President also stated that he was ready for direct talks with Vladimir Putin, adding that there was “nobody else to talk to” but the Russian president, news agency AFP reported.
 

“I think these statements by Putin and Lavrov show it was Russia that didn’t want a peace agreement that would make them retreat to the pre-Feb 24 contact line in late March. Russia was at its peak of territory held, although it was being defeated and about to retreat from Kiev and other northern oblasts.”

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I would also add another aspect: even though it is clear from this that Zelensky didn’t abandon Ukraine’s own plan, but Lavrov and Putin rejected it, Ukraine would have been fully in its rights to reject it by mid-April, because Russia had given its own response to Ukraine’s generous offer in practice: by organising the Bucha massacre of some 400 Ukrainian civilians as it withdrew from the Kyiv region, and by continuing to besiege and level the city of Mariupol, from where it was then deporting tens of thousands of Ukrainians. Yet, amazingly enough, the sources here suggest it still remained open to a negotiated settlement.

It is also worth noting that in the months ahead, Zelensky continually insisted Ukraine would fight on until Russian forces were forced back to the pre-February 2022 (ie pre-invasion) lines, and then negotiate. For example, here in May he is still saying there can be negotiations, if Russia withdraws “from areas that it seized during the invasion,” as well as intends to negotiate on Crimea and Donbas, while noting that:

“With each new Bucha, with each new Mariupol, with each new city where there are dozens of dead people, cases of rape, with each new atrocity, the desire and the possibility to negotiate disappears, as well as the possibility of resolving this issue in a diplomatic manner.”

“To stop the war between Russia and Ukraine the step should be regaining the situation as of 23 February,” Zelensky told the BBC on May 7.  

If by later in 2022 Zelensky’s statements hardened – since then Ukraine has insisted that all of Ukraine, including Crimea, must be liberated before a ceasefire – then this seems to me to be a sensible negotiating position after continuous Russian rejection, both on paper and more importantly in practice, of all and every Ukrainian proposal before then, including the March-April 2022 peace process.

As for Russia, since illegally annexing four Ukrainian oblasts (as well as Crimea) later in 2022, including two where there was never any support for joining Russia, its ‘negotiating position’ has been that Ukraine must first recognise this theft of five oblasts, of a fifth of its territory!

A further Ukraine Myth to be dealt with next is the big NATO question, ie, the idea that Russia was ‘provoked’ into a genocidal invasion of its neighbour, a non-NATO member, due to its ‘provocative’ unrequited wish to join NATO. But for now, it is obvious from Russia’s rejection of both the pre-invasion proposal for Ukraine to quit its NATO ambitions, and Ukraine’s more developed proposals for the same and more one month into the war, that Russia invaded Ukraine not because of any fear of NATO but rather, as Putin tells us himself, because he believes Ukraine has no right to exist.

Besides, imperialism is a real thing; Russian imperialism wants strategic control of the Black Sea, its resources and its sea lanes; ‘NATO’ is just a good excuse (and useful to bullshit gullible western leftists with), while restoration of the Russian Empire is the ideology to bullshit the Russian masses and consolidate the ruling class with.  

Myth 8: Ukrainians are forced by the US and ‘the West’ to continue the war; most Ukrainians would happily trade territory for peace if they had a say

In Myth 7, I already dealt with the claim that Ukraine was “forced” by an alleged Boris Johnston statement to abandon peace talks, and demonstrated that Ukraine never abandoned the path of negotiations.

However, the more general idea that the war continues because the US (before Trump) and European leaders want it to, to grind down Russia, and they therefore use their sway over Ukraine to push it to take uncompromising positions which prolongs the war, remains widespread within a certain “left” discourse. According to this version, most Ukrainians would happily give up some or all of the Ukrainian territory that Russia has conquered in exchange for peace, but their leaders, puppets of the US, UK and EU, keep forcing them into the “meat grinder” over this little bit of borderland.

Before we get onto the main issues, it is worth just noting that if western powers were using Ukraine to grind down Russia by keeping the war going – ie continuing to fund Ukraine’s defence against illegal aggression and occupation – then surely Russia, if it did not want to be “ground down” like this, could withdraw from the illegally occupied territory, and end the war? But yes, simple logic like that is not as much fun as blaming the victim.

For the record, of course it is a legitimate argument that the war has gone on too long, that too many are getting killed, and that this can no longer be justified by the need to regain territory, and therefore Ukraine may be forced to make a compromise that is against its interests, due to Russia’s overwhelming military superiority. Liberation movements have many times been forced into such rotten compromises when the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them. And if and when they do, supporters in the West would be completely out of order to “condemn” the victim for “capitulating;” in our solidarity, we would continue to condemn the aggressor as the cause of the rotten compromise, the imperial theft, but recognise the right of the oppressed nation, in this case Ukraine, to make its own decision.

And yes, some of the people I might partly disagree with do simply advocate this; they believe there is no alternative; Ukraine’s case is hopeless; being forced to give up territory is unjust, but a necessary pragmatic decision because the number of Ukrainian troops dying cannot be justified by keeping the territory. They don’t necessarily put the blame on Ukraine, the condemn the Russan invasion, but they think if Ukraine does make the rotten compromise now, it will only have to do so later, after countless more have been killed. And this article does not argue against these comrades; that is a valid position.

But when Ukraine has not made such a decision, surely it is just as out of order for people in the West to be “condemning” Ukraine for not making a rotten compromise, for not capitulating, for not agreeing to trade away its occupied territory, and the Ukrainian populations who live or use to live there, while making every excuse under the sun for Russia’s right to aggression, occupation and annexation. When it is not simply a pragmatic argument, like in the previous paragraph, but one that puts the blame on the occupied nation for the war continuing. Yet that is the view of a substantial part of the western left.

Let’s be clear on what kind of compromise Ukraine is being asked to make: Russia has annexed five Ukrainian oblasts – Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kerson and Zaporizhzhia. Crimea was annexed in 2014, Donetsk and Luhansk were invaded in 2014 but less than half occupied by 2022, while Kerson and Zaporizhzhia were not invaded until after the 2022 war began. Only later in 2022 did Russia formally annex these four oblasts, despite still not controlling all of Donetsk, Kherson or Zaporizhzhia.

The question is whether Ukraine should give up these 5 oblasts in their entirety, or all the sections of them currently under Russian control, or whatever was under Russian control in February 2022, in exchange for an end to the war. The five oblasts constitute about 20 percent of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. Look at the map: it almost completely cuts Ukraine off from the Black Sea, which, after all, is precisely one of the strategic aims of Russia’s imperialist war of conquest.

We should also be clear that Russia demands formal recognition of all these annexations, made by brute, illegal, military conquest, not simply long-term ceasefire. Take for example the Syrian Golan. Israel conquered the Golan in 1967, Syria made an attempt to regain it in 1973, and then in 1974, recognising the overwhelming odds, signed a long-term demarcation of forces agreement, whereby Israel remains in occupation of the Golan – which it later illegally annexed – and Syrian and Israeli troops were separated by a UN force, and Syria never again attempted to recover its territory – but neither the Assad regime nor the current post-Assad government recognise the annexation; every year, a UN Resolution reaffirms Syrian sovereignty.

To be clear: this kind of pragmatic arrangement is not on offer to Ukraine. In fact, for all those saying Ukraine should just negotiate over territory, and blaming it for not doing so, remember that from Russia’s viewpoint, there is nothing to negotiate: Putin’s regime demands recognition of Russia’s annexation of all five oblasts as a prior condition for negotiations to even begin!

So what do Ukrainians think of territorial compromise?

What the is the truth about the opinions of Ukrainians? Are they being forced by a Zelensky government acting as western “proxy” to fight rather than surrender territory? The easiest way to check is to do 5 minutes of research.

In 2022-23, a full 87 percent of Ukrainians rejected any territorial compromise. But after years of war, surely the figure has gone down? Yes, it has, but not by as much as might be expected.

According to a Gallup poll conducted in late 2024, around 52% of Ukrainians “would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,” while only 38% “believe their country should keep fighting until victory.” Ten percent didn’t know or didn’t answer. This is a big change compared to previous years.

However, only 52% of this 52% agreed that “Ukraine should be open to making some territorial concessions as a part of a peace deal to end the war.” That is, only 27% of the population agree to even “some” territorial compromise.

Of the 38% who believe in “fighting till victory,” only 19% would agree to some territorial compromise (as the bar chart shows, 81% reject any territorial compromise); that is, only 7% of the population:

Add this to the 27% from the first group, and 34% of Ukrainians are now in favour of “some” territorial compromise. In contrast, around 51% of the population reject any territorial compromise.

These figures tie in well with another survey, by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), from mid-2024, which found that 32% of Ukrainians were in favour of some territorial concessions, while 55% reject any compromise.

Now, while both surveys show a majority rejecting all territorial concessions, the majority is razor thin, even if the pro-concession group is considerably smaller. However, the devil here is in the details.

In the Gallup poll, as can be seen in the chart above, while 81% of Ukrainians wanting to “fight till victory” believe all territory must be recovered for this “victory, a full 96% believe that Ukraine must regain a substantial amount of territory: 9% want to regain all territory lost since the Russian invasion of 2022 (ie, all of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and most of Luhansk), about half the occupied territory, while another 6% want to regain all four eastern oblasts but would be prepared to give up only Crimea.

If we were to add these people to those rejecting capitulation to Russia’s territorial demands, the number goes up to 56%, while those in favour drops to 29%.

But as the poll does not give similar breakdown data for the first group, ie the majority wanting a negotiated settlement, who agree to “some” territorial concessions, it is likely to also be the case that many of those who agree to “some” would reject ceding all territory. As such, the numbers rejecting the Russian demand to recognise all annexed territory as Russia’s is likely to rise to some two thirds; the number accepting to be a quarter at most.

Clearly, the vast majority are opposed to ceding all territory to Russia, so it is fiction that the Ukraine government does not represent the popular will. However, it is clear that the majority is declining, and the numbers supporting “some” territorial concession, while still a minority, are now substantial enough to suggest that some kind of compromise is possible for the sake of ending the war. But the problem remains that Russia’s starting point for beginning negotiations is Ukraine’s prior recognition of its annexation of all five oblasts, even the parts it does not control. This makes condemning the Ukrainian government or people for wanting endless war, seeing them as the party that needs to be pressured, is somewhat absurd.

NATO, security guarantees, and Trump

It is also important that Ukrainians in various polls (especially the KIIS poll) see security guarantees as just as an important an issue; if forced to make territorial concessions for peace, they do not want Russia to re-invade again in a few years. And most see NATO membership as the most certain form of security – it is rather obvious to them that Russia invaded a NATO non-member, while Sweden and Finland, the latter with a long border with Russia, have never been touched or threatened since joining NATO.

Yet for all this – and all the non-sequitirs from much of the left about prospective Ukrainian NATO membership being what “provoked” Russia’s invasion, the reality is that NATO membership was never on the cards for Ukraine, and Zelensky was always ready to trade that away – this was offered to Putin before his invasion, and he rejected it, since his aim was territorial conquest, not the NATO bogey; Ukraine again offered it in a formal peace plan a month into the war, to which Russia responded with the Bucha massacre and the complete obliteration of Mariupol (see Myth 7). If there is no NATO membership, Ukraine has been willing to accept other forms of tight security guarantees all along. But the NATO discussion will the topic of Myth 9.

A final note related to what Ukraine may have to compromise on: the problem with Trump’s blatant dealing with Putin over Ukraine’s head about Ukraine is not some pragmatic recognition that the war is a quagmire and requires negotiations and bad compromises; nor that the US wants to get out of Europe, focus elsewhere, and leave European problems to Europe. It is hilarious watching parts of the left cheer Trump – the guy who wants to expel two million Palestinians from Gaza – as a peacemaker!

Because if Trump simply wanted to launch a negotiation, he might have included Ukraine and Russia on equal terms rather than engaging in such blatant imperial carve-up; and he would not have given everything to Moscow in advance, he and his ministers declaring in advance of negotiations both that Ukraine will not recover its territory and that it will not join NATO and that the US will not be involved in any other security guarantees; Trump told Zelensky that he had “no cards,” as he had given all of Ukraine’s cards away to Russia before any negotiations begin. If that is not a blatantly pro-Putin action, I don’t know what is. And if he wanted the US out of Europe, it is strange that he invited Zelensky to the White House to get Ukraine to sign a colonial deal to hand over its mineral wealth to the US; Ukraine is in Europe.

It is no accident that Zelensky’s popularity in Ukraine shot up following the Trump-Vance ambush where he left without signing the colonial deal; because whatever else may be wrong with the Zelensky government – a neoliberal government that socialists would take issue with on many fronts – the stance of defending Ukraine’s self-determination against Russian imperialism remains one with significant majority support

To be continued.

By Michael Karadjis

This myth has taken on such a life of its own it has probably been re-published in almost every conceivable left and alt-right publication, not only the anti-Ukrainian ones. The tankie and conspiracist etherworld has been full of it, for example Jacobin’s pro-Putin propagandist Branco Marcetic here. Yet there is not an ounce of truth to it.

Of course, the Ukrainians have no agency; they just jump to the alleged commands of some foreign leader that shows up. Yet we don’t even know for sure what Johnston said; it was just a claim by one Ukrainian newspaper, allegedly from some unnamed sources close to Zelensky. Hell, anyone can say anything.

It is certainly true that there was a peace proposal on the table that involved Ukraine scrapping its bid to join NATO. In fact, that proposal was already on the table before the war even began. Ukraine accepted the proposal, but Putin rejected it, because, after all, Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine and restore the Russian Empire, as he openly stated that Ukraine had no right to exist as a separate entity to Russia; the NATO stuff as just a smokescreen, so he saw Ukraine’s acceptance of no NATO as a threat rather than an opportunity.

It is also true that there was a more detailed peace proposal on the table in late March-early April 2022, about a month into the war. Importantly, this was Ukraine’s 10-point peace proposal to Russia on March 29 2022; it was not just some ‘proposal’ floating around in the atmosphere, that some are accusing Ukraine of rejecting (rejecting its own proposal).

The 10 points included that Ukraine would no longer seek to join NATO, would not join any military alliance, that instead it would get sovereignty guarantees from a number of nations instead (including Russia), the statement that there was no military solution to the question of Crimea and the 40 percent of Donbas already occupied by Russia before February 2022, and therefore Russia would withdraw to these pre-February lines, the sovereignty guarantees would not even cover these regions until a solution was eventually arrived at via negotiations, and in the case of Crimea, the negotiations could last 15 years!

For what happened next, I am going to cite US Greens Party leader Howie Hawkins who put together a very clear outline based on easily available sources; above all what this shows is that Russia had already rejected the proposals two days before Johnston’s visit, and that despite horrific Russian massacres in the meantime, Zelensky remained open for negotiations. These facts may not fit with lots of peoples’ favourite conspiracy theory, but they are clearly on the record, so please argue against the facts, not against me or Howie Hawkins. Here is Howie:

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“The peace settlement on the table at the end of March provided for Russia to return to the pre-February 24 lands it held in the Donbass and Crimea, for Ukraine to be a neutral non-NATO country without nuclear weapons or foreign troops (the latter two provisions are already in the Ukrainian constitution) in return for a security guarantee treaty signed by the big powers, and for the status of the Donbas and Crimea to be determined over a number of years diplomatically, not militarily.

“According to a Reuters report, that basic proposal was on the table in the days before and just after the invasion, but Putin rejected it because he wanted to annex Ukraine, not just make it militarily neutral.

“On April 7, two days before Johnson’s visit to Zelensky on April 9, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the proposed settlement was “unacceptable.”

“Whether Johnson’s April 9 no negotiations message, attributed to unnamed sources in the Zelensky administration only by a single Ukrainian news source, represented the Collective West, as the report said he claimed, has never been confirmed by the US or other Western countries.

“In any case, three days later on April 12, Putin said the negotiations were at a “dead end.” “On April 27, the Financial Times reported in a story entitled, “Vladimir Putin abandons hopes of Ukraine deal and shifts to land-grab strategy,” that Putin had “lost interest in diplomatic efforts to end his war,” citing sources briefed on conversations with Putin.

“Meanwhile, Zelensky remained open to peace talks. At an April 25 press conference, Zelensky had said he is ready to hold peace talks and wishes to do so face-to-face with Putin. “He followed up on May 12, again calling for negotiations. “And again on June 8: Asked about talks with Russia which have been suspended since late March, Zelensky said that Ukraine has not changed his position. He said he maintains the view that war should be ended at the negotiating table. The Ukrainian President also stated that he was ready for direct talks with Vladimir Putin, adding that there was “nobody else to talk to” but the Russian president, news agency AFP reported.
 

“I think these statements by Putin and Lavrov show it was Russia that didn’t want a peace agreement that would make them retreat to the pre-Feb 24 contact line in late March. Russia was at its peak of territory held, although it was being defeated and about to retreat from Kiev and other northern oblasts.”

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I would also add another aspect: even though it is clear from this that Zelensky didn’t abandon Ukraine’s own plan, but Lavrov and Putin rejected it, Ukraine would have been fully in its rights to reject it by mid-April, because Russia had given its own response to Ukraine’s generous offer in practice: by organising the Bucha massacre of some 400 Ukrainian civilians as it withdrew from the Kyiv region, and by continuing to besiege and level the city of Mariupol, from where it was then deporting tens of thousands of Ukrainians. Yet, amazingly enough, the sources here suggest it still remained open to a negotiated settlement.

It is also worth noting that in the months ahead, Zelensky continually insisted Ukraine would fight on until Russian forces were forced back to the pre-February 2022 (ie pre-invasion) lines, and then negotiate. For example, here in May he is still saying there can be negotiations, if Russia withdraws “from areas that it seized during the invasion,” as well as intends to negotiate on Crimea and Donbas, while noting that:

“With each new Bucha, with each new Mariupol, with each new city where there are dozens of dead people, cases of rape, with each new atrocity, the desire and the possibility to negotiate disappears, as well as the possibility of resolving this issue in a diplomatic manner.”

“To stop the war between Russia and Ukraine the step should be regaining the situation as of 23 February,” Zelensky told the BBC on May 7.  

If by later in 2022 Zelensky’s statements hardened – since then Ukraine has insisted that all of Ukraine, including Crimea, must be liberated before a ceasefire – then this seems to me to be a sensible negotiating position after continuous Russian rejection, both on paper and more importantly in practice, of all and every Ukrainian proposal before then, including the March-April 2022 peace process.

As for Russia, since illegally annexing four Ukrainian oblasts (as well as Crimea) later in 2022, including two where there was never any support for joining Russia, its ‘negotiating position’ has been that Ukraine must first recognise this theft of five oblasts, of a fifth of its territory!

A further Ukraine Myth to be dealt with next is the big NATO question, ie, the idea that Russia was ‘provoked’ into a genocidal invasion of its neighbour, a non-NATO member, due to its ‘provocative’ unrequited wish to join NATO. But for now, it is obvious from Russia’s rejection of both the pre-invasion proposal for Ukraine to quit its NATO ambitions, and Ukraine’s more developed proposals for the same and more one month into the war, that Russia invaded Ukraine not because of any fear of NATO but rather, as Putin tells us himself, because he believes Ukraine has no right to exist.

Besides, imperialism is a real thing; Russian imperialism wants strategic control of the Black Sea, its resources and its sea lanes; ‘NATO’ is just a good excuse (and useful to bullshit gullible western leftists with), while restoration of the Russian Empire is the ideology to bullshit the Russian masses and consolidate the ruling class with.     

by Michael Karadjis

These assertions are entirely fictional as will be shown, but they also raise a number of sub-points; first, there were two Minsk agreements, so what happened to the first?; what is the actual content of the Minsk II agreement?; how was it imposed on Ukraine?; and what is the evidence that it was Ukraine that blocked its implementation?

Following the first few months of armed conflict between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-backed militia in Donbas in mid-2014, the first Minsk agreement was signed between Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), as well as by the Russian-backed junta leaders who had seized power in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces), on 5 September 2014.

The main provisions were for

• an immediate ceasefire to be monitored by OSCE,

• “decentralisation of power, including through the adoption of the Ukrainian law “On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts”,”

• the permanent monitoring of the Ukrainian-Russian border by OSCE,

• release of all hostages and illegally detained persons,

• a law preventing the prosecution and punishment of people in connection with the conflict,

• “early local elections in accordance with the Ukrainian law “On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts”,” and

• the withdrawal of “illegal armed groups and military equipment as well as fighters and mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian government immediately carried out its side of the bargain by adopting the “Law on the Special Order of Local Self-Government in Certain Districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions” on September 16. According to this law, this special status of self-government will be implemented in the districts of Donetsk and Lugansk controlled by the separatists at the time of the ceasefire. The law provides for the freedom of any language to be used and cross-border cooperation with Russia. Local elections were scheduled for the region in December.

However, the Minsk I Protocol was almost immediately violated in a massive way by the Russian-orchestrated ‘separatist’ militia, which launched an attack aimed at seizing the Donetsk airport, which was in the government-controlled part of Donetsk at the time of the ceasefire. This led to a 5-month battle in which the side launching the aggression was in open violation of the Protocol, and as it was a battle to control infrastructure, cannot in any way be excused as a battle to protect hypothetically endangered pro-Russian communities. They further violated the Minsk Protocol by holding their own “elections” in November outside the new Ukrainian special status law, under Russian military occupation, and without any of the other provisions of Minsk adhered to (eg, withdrawal of illegal armed groups, OSCE monitoring of the border etc). In January, the separatists took control of the airport, and also launched attacks on other government-controlled regions, including Mariupol, Debaltseve and Krematorsk, killing dozens of civilians.

So there is no ambiguity regarding Minsk I: Ukraine carried out the political requirements, but the Russia-owned militia massively violated both the political and above all the military agreements.

With large-scale support from direct intervention by Russian forces, the separatists and Russia were able to force a new Minsk agreement, Minsk II, on Ukraine. Minsk II, mediated by France and Germany, was signed on February 12 by Russia, Ukraine, OSCE and the separatist leaders.

Again, it was immediately violated by the Russian-orchestrated militia, who continued their attack on Debaltseve, unilaterally declaring it to be outside the agreement! Hundreds of Ukrainian troops had been holed up and besieged in the town for weeks. It fell to the separatists on February 18, a week after the agreement.

Was Minsk II a good agreement for Ukraine? Well, the first thing that must be noted is that it was imposed on Ukraine by military force, given the large scale and relatively open intervention of Russian forces (as opposed to just Russian-backed forces and Russian heavy weaponry) in the second phase of the Donbas war. Therefore, the way Ukraine “agreed” to it was an act of international injustice, imperialist imposition, so those blaming Ukraine for not implementing it are in effect siding with imperialist bullying.

That said, was Minsk II so much worse than Minsk I for Ukraine, and was it a fair and just agreement anyway, despite the way it was imposed?

Let’s again look at the main points of the Minsk II agreement:

1, 2, 3 ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons by both parties at equal distances, security zones for heavy weaponry, monitoring and verification by OSCE

4. On the first day after the withdrawal, to begin a dialogue on the procedures for holding local elections in accordance with Ukrainian law and the Law of Ukraine “On a temporary order of local government in individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” … no later than 30 days from the date of signing of this document, to adopt a resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine with the specification of a territory subject to the special regime in accordance with the Law of Ukraine “On temporary order of local government in some regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” based on the line set in a Minsk memorandum of September 19, 2014

5, 6 Pardons and amnesties, law prohibiting prosecution and punishment in connection with the conflict, release and exchange of hostages and illegally detained persons

9. Restoration of full control over the state border of Ukraine by Ukraine’s government throughout the whole conflict area, which should begin on the first day after the local elections and be completed after a comprehensive political settlement (local elections in individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on the basis of the Law of Ukraine, and a constitutional reform) by the end of 2015, on condition of implementation of paragraph 11.

10. The withdrawal of all foreign armed forces, military equipment, as well as mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under the supervision of the OSCE. Disarmament of all illegal groups.

11. Conducting constitutional reform in Ukraine, with the new constitution coming into force by the end of 2015, providing for decentralization as a key element (taking into account the characteristics of individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, agreed with representatives of these areas), as well as the adoption of the permanent legislation on the special status of individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions

12. On the basis of the Law of Ukraine “On temporary order of local government in individual areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions” the questions regarding local elections shall be discussed and agreed with the individual areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group. Elections will be held in compliance with the relevant standards of the OSCE with the monitoring by the OSCE ODIHR.

Minsk II appears more comprehensive than Minsk I, but in certain respects can be considered more disadvantageous to Ukraine; after all, Russia and its proxies did not continue the war for another 6 months for no gain. In addition, there is arguably confusion in the timeline, which allowed both sides to stall. It is generally thought that Ukraine stalled on the political aspects of Minsk, while Russia and proxies stalled on the military-security aspects.

For example, while Ukraine had already agreed to the special status provisions in Minsk I and had immediately passed the relevant legislation (and again, following Minsk II, the Rada (parliament) voted in the ‘special status’ laws for Donbas, Minsk II goes beyond in mandating Ukraine bring into force a “new constitution,” with “decentralisation as a key element.” Understandably, Ukrainians may well wonder why Russia, via military intervention inside Ukraine, has the right to impose a “new constitution” of a specific nature on Ukraine as a whole, as opposed to the provisions already agreed to regarding Donetsk and Luhansk.

If the United States had sent troops into Russian territory to “aid” the Chechens during Putin’s grizzly slaughter in Chechnya over 1999-2001, and then forced Russia to sign a ‘Minsk’ agreement according to which, not only would Chechnya have special status, but Russia had to write a whole new constitution based on the ‘decentralisation’ of the entire territory of Russia, I wonder how many of today’s ‘leftist’ Putin apologists would be demanding Russia ‘sign Minsk, the only road to peace’, and be praising the US for its desire for peace?

In addition, Minsk II says that Ukraine can only regain control over its sovereign border after the local elections have been held in Donbas, and can only be completed after this imposed “new constitution” comes into being. There is nothing remotely as sweeping as this in Minsk I.

However, Minsk II also says that all foreign armed forces, military equipment and mercenaries must leave Ukraine “under the supervision of the OSCE” and that all “illegal groups” must be disarmed. Yet this manifestly never happened. It definitely never happened “under the supervision of OSCE,” because OSCE continually reported over the years ahead evidence of Russian troops and military equipment entering Ukraine.

Indeed, at this point, we should probably demolish this particular sub-myth, because any reasonable person would have to admit that Ukraine could not carry out acts of ‘local self-governance’ in a region occupied by the army of a hostile neighbouring superpower; yet Russia denies its troops were there.

Sub-Myth: There were no Russian troops in Ukraine between the 2015 ceasefire and the 2022 invasion

OSCE had become quite open about its evidence of Russian troops and military equipment entering Ukraine by 2016. By the end of that year, the OSCE observer mission had observed “more than 30,000 individuals in military-style dress crossing just at the two checkpoints to which it has access. … Twenty uniformed persons crossed the border in a single bus with tinted windows in mid-October, according to Observer Mission reports. … On at least 27 different occasions, the Observer Mission has reported seeing funerary vehicles returning to Russia with a sign reading “Cargo 200” or “200,” a well-known code for Russian military casualties. … on June 10 [the Mission] observed the exhumation of a soldier in a Russian military uniform. … On October 17, at the Uspenka border crossing point, the SMM saw one black minivan with tinted windows and black military license plates enter separatist-held Ukraine from Russia, with two men in military-style dress on board.” In 2018 an OSCE drone even recorded footage of Russian military vehicles crossing into Ukraine.

Indeed, the evidence is simply overwhelming. For example, Paul Gregory writes that as of September 2016, the organization Cargo 200 had published “names, photos, addresses, and military records” of 167 troops “killed,” 187 “MIA,” 305 mercenaries “killed” and 796 “MIA.” But these are likely underestimates, as, for example, he continues, the Committee of [Russian] Soldiers’ Mothers “gather information from grieving families to arrive at casualty figures of up to 3,500 KIA [killed in action]” by 2016; the Committee was labelled a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian Justice Ministry.  Furthermore, “Young Russian soldiers in Ukraine routinely post pictures on vKontakte (a Russian version of Facebook) of themselves in Ukraine and identify their unit.”

Bellingcat further demolished the myth by demonstrating “that thousands of Russian soldiers have been awarded the highest honors of the Russian Federation for bravery/distinction in combat,” by gathering images of these medals that the soldiers posted on social media. “Bellingcat’s analysis shows 4,300 medals “For Distinction in Combat” awarded between July 11, 2014 and February 2016,” but this is only one of four kinds of medals awarded.

Unlike the issue of Ukraine regaining control of its border, there is no prior condition in Minsk II for the withdrawal of all foreign troops, mercenaries, equipment etc; therefore, Ukraine quite understandably interprets this refusal by Russia and its proxies to implement these provisions of Minsk as reason not to implement the local elections, despite having passed the legislation for it. Because no sovereign state would be prepared to hold local elections in a region of its country under the control of a hostile foreign military power, which also controls the local militia running the region.

_{Russian soldiers and their medals for fighting in Ukraine, from Inform Napalm (https://informnapalm.org/en/identified-servicemen-of-19th-mrb-awarded-for-fighting-in-ukraine/)}

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Furthermore, how do we define “illegal groups” as described in this same article of Minsk II? To the Ukrainian government, the Russian armed and financed and often staffed armed militia in control of the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk not in its control are “illegal groups,” but they obviously don’t consider themselves to be, which is a problem of the text. Not that Ukraine has used this as a pretext, however.

The text also says that the regions where this ‘special status’ and hence local elections would be held would correspond to the ceasefire lines of September 2014, ie, when Minsk I was signed. But now the Russian proxies were in control of more territory, including the airport, Debaltseve etc. So while Minsk II calls for immediate ceasefire (ie, on the lines of February 2015), these lines are beyond those of September 2014, on which special status is to be based. So how does Ukraine carry out local elections when the separatist militia control areas beyond the assigned region?

Furthermore, Minsk II says that the local elections are to be held “with the monitoring of OSCE,” but it is unclear how OSCE can monitor a situation in which OSCE itself says a key provision of Minsk, namely withdrawal of all foreign forces and weapons, has not been carried out. In addition, it is unclear how Ukraine can carry out these local elections under its new special status law, as required by Minsk II, when both Russia and its proxy leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk rejected this new law. Finally, just two months after Minsk II was signed, the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk under Russian control held their own local “elections” anyway, neither under Ukrainian government law nor with OSCE monitoring, in outright violation of Minsk II.

For all these reasons, Ukraine not proceeding with the political side of Minsk (local elections under its special status legislation) is arguably completely justified; local elections carried out in such conditions would result in Russia essentially having a permanent place inside the Ukrainian polity. Or, at the very least, even if one accuses Ukraine of not carrying out Minsk II, they must at the same time accuse Russia of also not carrying out Minsk II. For its part, Russia simply claims it is not a signatory to Minsk II and is therefore not bound to it, claiming only the separatist leaders were signatories, but this is simply a lie: the signature of Russian ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov, can be clearly seen on the Minsk agreement, indeed on the Russian version of it. Check the last page with the signatures.

So, while both sides arguably stalled, and, in my view, the Ukrainian side justifiably so for the reasons above, what of anti-Ukrainian or pro-Putin writers who claim either that Zelensky began with a peace platform to implement Minsk II when elected in 2019 but “backed down” due to intimidation from the Ukrainian far-right, or that, even more blandly, Ukraine ultimately “rejected” it (often with the very colourful addition that Russia “wanted to implement it”)?

According to the first charge, after being elected in 2019 on a peace platform, Zelensky signed an agreement for the mutual pull-back of armed forces in order to facilitate the conditions for proceeding with Minsk (based on the new Steinmeier formula which Zelensky had signed onto), but when confronted by the refusal of the far-right and the Azov Regiment to pull back, so the story goes, he “backed down.”

Yet actually, the opposite occurred. As Taras Billous explains:

“There had been an agreement [in late 2019] that there would be a troop disengagement at three points of what was then the line between Ukrainian forces and Russian/separatist forces in Donbas. Then people from around the Azov movement, and from the National Corps Party, staged a campaign there, at one of these points, presenting this disengagement as if it represented some kind of gain for the Kremlin, as if Ukrainian troops alone were called upon to withdraw and leave their positions. But this wasn’t what the disengagement required; it required both sides to pull back. But even in this case, which was so crucial for the right, where they tried to achieve their maximum mobilization for this activity, they didn’t succeed in achieving their point of view because Zelensky intervened personally. He traveled to that line of forces and engaged in heated discussions with some Azov members, and eventually Ukraine did carry out this disengagement, which was a prerequisite for resuming the meeting in the “Normandy Format” with France and Germany as mediators between Ukraine and Russia. So even in this case the right was unable to block governmental policy.”

Curiously, the pro-Putin voices often show a video of Zelensky being confronted by the far-rightists at the disengagement lines as evidence of him “backing down” and that the far-right call the shots in Ukraine despite their tiny size. In this video tweet, the pro-Putin clown Denis Rogatyuk writes “The fighter refuses [to lay down arms]. Zelensky is NOT running the show. The neo-nazis are.” I say curiously because the video shows the complete opposite: it shows Zelensky stood his ground. They backed down; as Billous explains, Zelensky did carry out the disengagement; and on December 19, the Ukrainian parliament yet again extended the Donbas special status legislation for another year.

Furthermore, if Zelensky had “backed down” to the far right, and instead decided on “NATO-backed” war to reclaim the Russian-controlled parts of Donbas as the tankie discourse goes, then wouldn’t we have seen an upturn in the fighting? Yet, as I demonstrated in my ‘Myth 5’, the numbers of people dying on the Donbas front quite sharply declined in 2019-2021 under Zelensky (and of course it was already well down in 2016-2018 compared to the hot war of 2014-15 when nearly all the 14,000 deaths (including 3404 civilian deaths) occurred. The total deaths in this conflict dropped to 19 in 2019 (from 43 in 2018) then 23 in 2020, 16 in 2021 (11 in the first half year and 5 in second half) and zero in 2022 before the invasion – and all this taking into account that the Russian-backed side are also responsible for these deaths, and that around half these figures are from landmines rather than shooting and shelling – the evidence suggests Zelensky did largely carry out his peace program. Sure doesn’t suggest much of a ‘NATO-backed offensive’.

On the final charge, that Ukraine actually “abandoned” or “rejected” the Minsk agreement, it is unclear if those making this common charge are simply saying the same, that Ukraine has yet to carry out certain provisions of it, for the reasons described above, but saying it in a more colourful and dishonest way; or if they really are claiming that at some point Ukraine formally renounced the agreement. Since I wouldn’t want to accuse Putin apologists of dishonesty, I will read it to mean what it does mean in English.

In which case, they should provide the source of the statement by the Ukrainian government. Anyone that watches or reads the news might remember that the ‘Normandy’ framework discussions between Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany had continued right up till the eve of Russia’s recognition of the “independence” of the two ‘republics’ it controlled just a few days before the invasion; these were discussions based on trying to negotiate Minsk II. Russia’s recognition and invasion buried the accords. So in its literal meaning, this continual charge is simply a lie.

In order to seem less of a liar, Jacques Baud, the former NATO military analyst turned Putin troll who was widely cited by the tankie left around the time of the invasion, put it this way: “But on February 11, in Berlin, after 9 hours of work, the meeting of the political advisers of the leaders of the “Normandy format” ends, without concrete result: the Ukrainians still and always refuse to apply the Accords of Minsk, apparently under pressure from the United States.” As “evidence” for this claim, he “cites” this article. But of course the article “cited” says no such thing; it reads “Reiterating Ukraine’s commitment to a political and diplomatic settlement of the ongoing tensions, Yermak said the country would continue to take measures to intensify the work of all existing negotiation formats in order to facilitate the peace process.”

Baud, in other words, just made it up. Those of us who are used to this are not surprised; those who are not, try to understand that pretty much all pro-Putin propaganda is of this level.

Finally, this simple description of the reality inside the Russia-owned parts of Donbas in the years before the 2022 invasion should suffice to demonstrate how comprehensively Minsk II was already fully violated in spirit and letter there:

“The “People’s Republics” also formally adopted constitutions which claimed sovereignty over areas under Kiev’s control – again, in breach of Minsk 2. Over 800,000 inhabitants of the “People’s Republics” have been issued with Russian passports, i.e. Russian citizenship. Higher education institutions have adopted the curricula used in Russia. The Ukrainian language has been banned in schools. In addition to the replacement of Ukrainian television broadcasting by state-controlled Russian television channels, the Kremlin version of current affairs (and world history, in the form of the “Russian world”) is promoted by outlets of the Russian Centre organisation (Russian-state-funded) and the Russia-Donbass Integration Committee (also Russian-state-funded). Russian political parties are now active in the “People’s Republics” and contest elections there, especially the Just Russia Party, the Russian Communist Party, and Putin’s United Russia Party. Those inhabitants of the “People’s Republics” who have Russian citizenship also take part in Russian elections. Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 are dead.”

by Michael Karadjis

We’ve all heard it time and time again. Whether it is an argument in support of Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, or just as often, opposed to it but claiming both sides are equally at fault, we hear that that “the Ukrainian army killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in Donbas between 2014 and 2022.”

Here’s just one example among thousands of examples regurgitated, with never a simple fact-check, all over the left and right media: According to pro-Putin writer Max Parry, “For what the late Edward S. Herman called the ‘cruise missile Left,’ the 14,000 ethnic Russians killed in Donbass by the Ukrainian army since 2014 are ‘unworthy victims,’ as Herman and Noam Chomsky defined the notion in Manufacturing Consent.”

The purpose of this claim is to argue that, while Putin may have over-reacted by going all the way to invading, it was the Ukrainian army most at fault before the invasion. Even if it is admitted that Putin’s invasion is criminal and may have imperialist goals and is only using the plight of the Donbas Russians as an excuse, the claim is that this excuse is genuine.  

Therefore, even many of those who oppose the Russian invasion equally oppose the Ukrainian resistance, and in particular its receipt of arms, because if Ukraine gets the upper hand, it will just continue to do to the “ethnic Russians” what it was previously doing, the same as what Russia is now doing to “the Ukrainians.”

While not quite as colourful as Putin’s claim that Ukraine was committing “genocide” against the ethnic Russians in Donbas, these claims are nevertheless serious and merit clear examination.

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Let’s look at the claim again:

“The Ukrainian army killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in Donbas between 2014 and 2022.”

Is any of this true?

Yes – the 14,000 figure. Yes, 14,000 were killed in the conflict in Donbas between 2014 and 2022. That’s a terrible figure, and of course many times that number were wounded, the entire region is a dead zone covered by landmines, and some 3.3 million people fled the region (ie before the millions who have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion). But what of the rest?

“The Ukrainian army killed.”

Wrong – two sides were involved in the armed conflict – the Ukrainian army, alongside various irregular Ukrainian militia (often composed of people uprooted from their homes) on one side, and the Russia-backed and armed separatist militia of the two self-proclaimed ‘republics’ in eastern Donbas on the other, backed by Russian troops and mercenaries. Both sides shoot; both sides kill.

For example, according to a January 2015 report by Human Rights Watch, “On January 24, unguided rockets, probably launched from rebel-controlled territory, killed 29 civilians and 1 soldier in Mariupol and wounded more than 90 civilians. One rocket struck the courtyard of a school. On January 13, unguided rockets, also probably launched from rebel-controlled territory, killed 12 civilians and wounded 18 at a checkpoint near Volnovakha.” Don’t these 41 civilian lives count? What of the fact that, following the first Minsk Accord in September 2014, the ‘separatist’ militia immediately violated it by launching a 6-month battle, with hundreds of deaths, to seize the Donetsk airport from the government? How was that the Ukrainian army’s fault? What of the 298 people killed when the ‘separatists’ shot down a civilian airline in July 2014?

“ethnic Russians”

Ethnic Russians are a minority of around 38-39 percent of the population in Donbas, so it is unlikely that all or most killed are “ethnic Russians,” but that is not the point of this part of the assertion. The reason this fiction is inserted is to imply that people were killed “by the Ukrainian army” simply for being ethnic Russians, in a war of targeted ethnic extermination, rather than being victims of the cross-fire between the two sides shooting at each other.

But the other problem with the assertion is the implication that these were 14,000 “ethnic Russian” civilians. In reality, according to the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), the numbers killed in Donbas from 14 April 2014 to 31 December 2021were:

4,400 Ukrainian troops

6,500 Russia—owned separatist troops

3,404 civilians

So, let’s be clear: we are talking about 3,404 civilians, killed by both sides, over 2014-2021.

However, what about the last part:

“between 2014 and 2022.”

Well, yes, if we make the small change to 2014-2021, then this is correct in the abstract.

But the implication here is that there was a continual, ongoing bloody conflict (allegedly all caused by the Ukrainian army incessantly “shelling ethnic Russians”) right up to the Russian invasion. The invasion, in a sense, is simply the continuation of the ongoing bloodshed, at a perhaps slightly higher level; a reaction to it, even if perhaps an overreaction.

In reality, almost all the 14,000 deaths, including almost all the 3,404 civilians, were killed when the open conflict was raging from 2014 till the ceasefire in mid-2015 – that is, during a time when no-one seriously denies the direct involvement (ie, invasion) by the Russian army. Let’s just look at the OSCE Status Reports from 2016-2022.

The OSCE report ‘Civilian casualties in eastern Ukraine 2016’ shows there were 88 fatalities in 2016, including 37 from landmines, unexploded ordinance etc.

The OSCE report on civilian casualties covering 2017 to September 2020 shows 161 fatalities over those almost 4 years, of which the majority (81) were from landmines, unexploded ordinance etc. Note that both sides lay landmines; indeed, the UN has characterised the Donbas as one of the most mine-contaminated areas in the world.

The year by year figures were 87 fatalities in 2017, 43 in 2018, 19 in 2019, and 12 to September 2020.

The OSCE report as of 11 January 2021 reports “The total number of civilian casualties in 2020 stands at 128: 23 fatalities and 105 injuries.”

The OSCE Status Report as of 13 December 2021 reports “since the beginning of 2021, the SMM has confirmed 88 civilian casualties (16 fatalities and 72 injured)” in 2021.

Of these 16 fatalities in 2021, 11 were from the first half of 2021: according to the OSCE Status Report as of 14 June 2021, “Over the past two weeks, the SMM corroborated four civilian casualties, all injuries due to explosive objects. This brings the total number of civilian casualties that occurred since the beginning of 2021 to 37 (11 fatalities and 26 injuries). Again, the majority of the casualties (27) were due to mines, unexploded ordnance and other explosive objects.”

Meanwhile, the weekly OSCE Status Report as of 6 September 2021 reported “a fatality, bringing the total number of confirmed civilian casualties since the beginning of 2021 to 62 (15 fatalities and 47 injuries).” Hence, of the 5 fatalities in the second half of the year, 4 were before September.

From these three 2021 reports, we see a continual decline in fatalities in Donbas: 11 in January-June, 4 in June-September, 1 in September-December.

This trend continued into 2022. The OSCE Status Report as of 7 February 2022 reports “The Mission corroborated reports of a civilian casualty: a 56-year-old man suffering a leg injury as a result of small-arms fire on 29 January 2022 in the western part of non-government-controlled Oleksandrivka, Donetsk region. This is the first civilian casualty corroborated by the Mission in 2022.” In other words, to 7 February 2022, 2 weeks before the Russian invasion, there had been zero fatalities in Donbas in 2022.

Therefore, this is the trend in what Putin calls the “genocide” of the ethnic Russians in Donbas, even taking into account that the Russian-owned armed forces shoot and shell as much as do the Ukrainians, and that perhaps half if not the majority of deaths were due to landmines and unexploded ordinance, laid by both sides:

2016 – 88 deaths

2017 – 87 deaths

2018 – 43 deaths

2019 – 19 deaths

2020 – 23 deaths

2021 – 16 deaths, including:

– 11 deaths (Jan-June)

– 4 deaths (June-Sep)

– 1 death (Sep-Dec)

2022 – 0 deaths (before Russian invasion).

As we can see, the rate of death has continually declined until it reached zero. The Russian invasion, which resulted in thousands of deaths and untold injuries, destruction and dispossession, was “in response” (allegedly) to the zero deaths in Donbas in 2022.

The total number of civilian fatalities from 2016-2022 was therefore 276, about half due to landmines. Of course any number of deaths is far too many, and neither the Ukrainian side nor the Russia-owned side should be excused for violations and war crimes that resulted in civilian deaths.

But as there were 3,404 civilians killed from 2014 to 2022 before the Russian invasion, that means that 3128 of these (92%) occurred in 2014-15, when no serious observer denies the direct intervention of the Russian armed forces, mercenaries and heavy weapons in the conflict.

…………………………………………………………….

The aim of this is not to let the Ukrainian government and army off the hook. Both the Ukrainian army and the Russian-backed separatist militia have committed war crimes (mostly in 2014-15), all of which should be condemned.

There is also room for criticism of the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s virulent Ukrainian nationalism, as a major factor leading to opposition among parts of the Russian-speaking population in the east; the fact that the Maidan was confronted by an anti-Maidan in the east was in itself an entirely valid expression of democratic protest. What was not valid was the almost immediate militarisation of the anti-Maidan by Russian-backed militia, armed by Russia, involving the direct intervention of Russian armed forces, mercenaries and heavy weaponry, arbitrarily seizing control of town halls and chunks of eastern Ukraine.

Indeed, Russian FSB colonel Igor Girkin, known as Strelkov, one of the leaders of the first gang of far-right Russian paramilitaries in Donbas, has admitted that it was he who pulled the first trigger that led to war, stating that “if our unit had not crossed the border, everything would have ended as it did in Kharkiv and in Odesa.”

Simon Pirani argues that neither the Maidan nor the anti-Maidan should be stereotyped as reactionary as they often are by different people, and in fact the “social aspirations” of the two “were very close,” but “it was right-wing militia from Russia, and the Russian army, that militarised the conflict and suppressed the anti-Maidan’s social content.”

It is important to understand that the Donbas is ethnically mixed; according to the 2001 census, ethnic Ukrainians form 58% of the population of Luhansk and 56.9% of Donetsk; the ethnic Russian minority accounts for 39% and 38.2% of the two regions respectively. How ironic that Putin supporters justify the flagrant Russian annexation of Crimea by pointing to the 58% ethnic Russian majority there, when Ukrainians are the same size majority in Donbas! The ethnic Ukrainian population is then evenly divided between primary Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, but language does not equal ethnicity, and neither language nor ethnicity equal political opinion.

Surveys carried out in 2016 and 2019 by the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin found that in the Russian-controlled parts of Donbas, some 45% of the population were in favour of joining Russia, the majority against. Of the majority against, some 30% supported some kind of autonomy, while a quarter wanted no special status. But in the Ukraine government controlled two-thirds of Donbas, while the same percentage (around 30%) favoured some kind of autonomy within Ukraine, the two-thirds majority favoured just being in Ukraine with no special status (almost none supported joining Russia). Even this should not be read to mean that, therefore, the chunks seized by the separatists are the regions most in favour of autonomy or separation – given the dispossession of literally half the Donbas population, it more likely means a degree of subsequent relocation between the two zones.

Hence neither ethnic composition nor opinion shows the two Donbas provinces are “Russian” regions that favour separation or even necessarily autonomy; they are very mixed in all aspects. The borders of the bits that have been seized therefore (the fake ‘republics’) are entirely arbitrary – there was no basis for these seizures in terms of any “act of self-determination;” and since the armed conflict took off after these seizures, neither can the seizures and the militarisation be justified as necessary armed defence against some violent wave of government repression of the anti-Maidan which had not taken place.

The foreign-backed militarisation of the anti-Maidan on the one hand polarised views on the edges, while on the other driving away the middle, including a large part of the original anti-Maidan civilian population; and the more the far-right and fascist Russian-backed, or indeed actual Russian, political figures and militia came to dominate these ‘republics’, imposing essentially totalitarian control and massively violating the human rights of the local population, the less this had anything to do with any genuine expression of valid opposition to the Ukrainian government’s policies. Alienation from this reality, combined with the war itself, led to literally half the population fleeing Donbas – 3.3 million of the original population of 6.6 million – either to other parts of Ukraine (the majority), or to Russia or Belarus.  

In this context, it was entirely expected that the Ukrainian armed forces would attempt to regain these regions conquered by separatist militia backed by a foreign power; and ‘valid’ in terms of international law, regardless of one’s views on how Ukraine conducted it. Of course, one may well criticise Ukraine’s reliance on purely military means to regain these regions with complex ethnic/regional issues, almost inevitable given that its virulent Ukrainian nationalist stance precluded a more political approach. But to lay the majority of blame on this military response rather than the foreign-backed military aggression it was responding to is hardly logical.

Whatever the case, and whatever one’s views on the relative responsibility of the two sides over these years, the continual and decisive reduction of fatalities, injuries and ceasefire violations between 2015 and 2022 – from 3128 civilian fatalities in 2014-2015 to 0 in early 2022 – puts the lie to not only Putin’s claim that his bloody invasion, with its countless thousands of deaths, millions uprooted and cataclysmic destruction, was in response to “genocide” of “ethnic Russians,” but also to the more subtle plague on both your houses case that the Ukrainian army was waging a relentless war against “ethnic Russians” in Donbas

_{Up to half of civilian deaths in Donbas in 2014-22 were from landmines}

by Michael Karadjis

_{Putin offering to save Russian-speakers in Ukraine from the barbaric assault he is carrying out against them}

In answering this, I just want to clarify where I’m coming from: I support the right of nations and peoples to self-determination, and see this as superior to any obsession with “sovereign borders,” which have always changed throughout history, both for good and bad reasons. For example, I support the struggle of the Chechen people for self-determination, including independence, from Russia if that is their choice; I don’t care about the “sovereign” borders of the inheritance of the Russian colonial empire. Ditto for Puerto Rico or Hawaii if they chose to break up the US empire’s “sovereign” borders. I supported the national liberation struggle of the Kosovar Albanians against Serbian oppression, of the Kurds against oppression in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, and so on: so why don’t I support the same self-determination of “the Russian people in Donbas”? Well, apart from the fact that even if there were such a struggle, it would currently be an irrelevant pawn for Russian imperial conquest, the more fundamental problem is that no such reality exists.

As we saw, almost immediately after Yanukovych fled to Russia (February 22, 2014), Russian forces invaded Crimea (February 27). Just as quickly after this, the first Russian forces, from the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity party, turned up in Donbas, alongside other far-right Russian paramilitary forces who had just helped conquer Crimea; the seizures of government buildings began almost immediately, launching coup d’etats against the very governments Donbas residents had recently elected, bringing to power Russian stooges and fascists in the two oblasts (provinces) Donetsk and Luhansk; indeed, the first coup was the six-day seizure of the Donetsk State Administration Building on March 1, when “a group of activists bestowed the titled of ‘People’s Governor of Donetsk’ on a local nationalist-socialist activist named Pavel Gubarev,” an RNU leader. Such a rapid march of events in itself belies the idea that Russia was only responding to grass-roots movements in these regions staging a popular movement against the new post-Maidan authorities in Ukraine; it looks much more like a planned Russian conquest.

_{The swastika of the Russian National Unity Party, the first fascist mob to seize power in the coup in Donetsk in March 2014}

Let’s look at the three connected myths that make up this grander myth narrative.

Sub-Myth 1: ‘Ethnic Russian Donbas’

First, it is difficult to establish exactly what an ‘ethnic Russian’ is, as opposed to a Ukrainian who speaks Russian as a first language. Think of Irish, Welsh and Scottish who speak English as their first language, and try calling them ‘English’. See what happens. This is what occurs after centuries of colonialism, in both cases. Which in terms of ruthless Russification and physical destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, was probably even worse under Stalin than under the Tsars, though there is not much to choose from between them.

If we go by people’s identity, according to the 2001 census, ethnic Ukrainians formed 58 percent of the population of Luhansk Oblast and 56.9 percent of Donetsk Oblast. Those identifying as ethnic Russians formed the largest minority, accounting for 39 percent and 38.2 percent of the two oblasts respectively. In other words, Ukrainians were the same size majority in Donbas as Russians were in Crimea – yet this (post-colonisation and genocide) Russian majority in Crimea is given as a reason by the same Putin supporters to justify Russian annexation there! Furthermore, much evidence suggests a marked decline in the population identifying as ethnic Russians rather than Russian-speaking Ukrainians: in a 2019 survey carried out by the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, only 12 percent and 7 percent of the residents of the Russia-owned and government-controlled parts of Donbas respectively identified as ‘ethnic Russians’, while 21 percent and 12 percent respectively declared themselves ‘mixed Ukrainian and Russian’. The impact of Russian aggression since 2014 is likely the cause of this declining identification as ‘Russian’ – how ironic given that this Russian intervention is falsely justified as protecting these ‘ethnic Russians’! Indeed, the impact of the current war seems to be even greater, with even use of Russian language among many Ukrainians markedly declining as a political choice due to revulsion against the aggression. 

Therefore, to claim that the setting up of ‘independent’ republics in 2014 in Donetsk and Luhansk, and their annexation by Russia in 2022 following fake ‘referenda’ under brutal military occupation, was “the right to self-determination of the ethnic Russian population of Donbas,” is a statement of extraordinary ignorance. The population of Donbas is divided between ethnic Russians, Ukrainians who speak Russian, and Ukrainians who speak Ukrainian.

Before moving on we should clarify: from 2014 to 2022 the Russian-owned forces only controlled some 40 percent of ‘Donbas’ (approximately the same in both Donetsk and Luhansk) while some 60 percent remained under Ukraine government control. So Russia has not just annexed the parts it formerly controlled, but the entire two oblasts, plus two others that it never had any control of (Kherson and Zaporizhzhya) and where there was never any support for Russia.

Sub-Myth 2: The population of Donbas, regardless of ethnicity, wanted self-determination for the region and were oriented more to Russia than to Ukraine

It is certainly true that neither ethnicity nor language tells us anything necessarily about the views of the Donbas residents; neither being an ethnic Russian nor Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking equals a particular political opinion; the opinions of people in all three groups, in both government-controlled and Russia-controlled parts of both oblasts, are mixed. But whatever the case, the data does not support the myth, but rather the opposite.

Two surveys carried out in April 2014 reveal very important information, by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and by the Pew Research Centre. In the KIIS survey, to the question ‘Do you support the idea, that your region should secede from Ukraine and join Russia?’, 27 percent in Donetsk and 30 percent in Luhansk answered either ‘rather’ or ‘certainly’ yes – while some 52 percent in both oblasts answered ‘rather’ or ‘certainly’ no. These minority ‘yes’ votes in Donetsk and Luhansk were the only of any significance in all of Ukraine. The Pew research showed similar results, with the question whether regions should be allowed to secede answered in the positive by only 18 percent in eastern Ukraine (and 4 percent in west Ukraine), and only 27 percent of Russian-speakers. The KIIS survey also asked if they were in favour of Russian troops entering the region, to which under 20 percent in both oblasts said yes while substantial majorities said no.

On the question ‘Do you consider Viktor Yanukovych to be a legitimate President of Ukraine?’, only 32% and 28% respectively in Donetsk and Luhansk respectively said rather or certainly yes (by far the biggest numbers in Ukraine), compared to 57-58% who said rather or certainly no. So much for the idea that the people of Donbas were angry that “their president” was deposed.

Larger numbers support some kind of autonomy or ‘special status’ within Ukraine, but with sharp differences in the two parts of Donbas. Surveys carried out in 2016 and 2019 by the Centre for East European and International Studies found that in the Russia-owned regions, some 45% of the population were in favour of joining Russia. Of the majority opposed, 30% supported some kind of autonomy and a quarter no special status. But in the government controlled two-thirds, while a similar 30% favoured some kind of autonomy within Ukraine, the two-thirds majority favoured just Ukraine with no special status; hardly any supported joining Russia. Therefore it is difficult to say whether the overall majority necessarily even favour autonomy. Even this does not necessarily mean that the chunks seized are the regions most in favour of autonomy or separation; given the dispossession of half the Donbas population (some 3.3 of the original 6.6 million people), it more likely means a degree of subsequent relocation between the two zones, while the millions in refuge simply don’t get a say in such surveys.

Therefore, both in Donetsk and Luhansk, in both government and Russian-controlled regions, and among the dispossessed, both ‘ethnicity’ and political opinion are very mixed, there is no ‘Russian’ region or specifically even ‘pro-Russia’ region; so the regions violently seized are entirely arbitrary and correspond to no movement for ‘self-determination’ or necessarily for anything.

Truth 1. There was a degree of alienation from the new government in parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014

This is not to deny that there was broadly a sense of alienation among many in eastern Ukraine from the direction taken by the new post-Yanukovych government, regardless of ‘ethnicity’ or language; there were also geographic and other factors, including more economic connection to Russia in the east. Specifically, the new Ukraine authorities, and even more so the empowered far-right minority, projected an assertive Ukrainian nationalism, and various largely symbolic actions drove this alienation. According to the Pew survey, while 60 percent in western Ukraine thought the new government had “a good influence on the way things are going in the country,” only 24 percent in eastern Ukraine agreed, and 67 percent there assessed this influence as “bad.” Similarly, 66 percent in western Ukraine thought only the Ukrainian language should have legal standing, while 73 percent in eastern Ukraine (and 86 percent of Russian-speakers) said both Russian and Ukrainian should be official languages, underlining the centrality of the language question – my Myth 2 details the comically false assertion that Russian language was downgraded or “banned” in 2014, but even the unsuccessful attempt to revise the language law in this context would have been a factor in this alienation.

But in itself, this is not remarkable: the dominance of certain political tendencies in different regions of a country due to complex combinations of history, culture, economics etc is not uncommon: think of northern and southern England, northern and southern Italy, regions of the US, Aegean Turkey and Anatolia etc. That does not mean that the peoples of such regions would welcome a foreign military intervention because a party perceived to favour a different region’s political proclivities were in power.

Sub-Myth 3: The Russian-backed seizure of power in parts of Donbas represented this alienation of the region’s population from the new government

There was certainly a valid political struggle that could have been waged by many people in the region against certain policies of the new government; the fact that the Maidan was initially confronted by an ‘anti-Maidan’ in the east could in itself be seen as a valid expression of popular dissent. What was not valid was the almost immediate militarisation of the anti-Maidan by Russian-backed, funded, trained and armed militia and direct intervention of Russian armed forces, mercenaries, tanks and other heavy weaponry, political operatives and fascists, arbitrarily seizing control of town halls and chunks of eastern Ukraine. Simon Pirani argues that while neither the Maidan nor the anti-Maidan should be stereotyped as reactionary, in fact the “social aspirations” of the two were similar, “it was right-wing militia from Russia, and the Russian army, that militarised the conflict and suppressed the anti-Maidan’s social content.”

The idea that this militarisation, seizing of buildings and coup d’etats were a natural reflection, extension, of the civil ‘anti-Maidan’ in the east is belied by the 2014 KIIS survey. On the question ‘Do you support actions of those, who with arms capture administrative buildings in your region?’, only 18 percent in Donetsk and 24 percent in Luhansk answered rather or certainly yes, while 72 percent and 68 percent respectively in those two allegedly ‘pro-Russian’ oblasts answered rather or certainly no!

I have heard it claimed that Donbas residents were alienated because the government they elected had been overthrown in Kyiv (as if the parliament, which deposed the president – one person – wasn’t also elected by them). But how does this sit with small armed groups launching coup d’etats in Donbas overthrowing the very regional government that Donbas residents had elected?

Nor can militarisation be justified as an act of self-defence against some violent wave of government repression of the anti-Maidan, as nothing of the sort had taken place: the coup d’detats, took place immediately after the deposing of Yanukovych; the armed conflict later. 

John Reiman, in his excellent review of the Ukraine Diaries, cites some passages describing this very early intervention (ie, months before the generalised war):

“On March 9 for the first time Kurkov reports on the entry of Russian agents in Ukraine. And not just any Russians – members of the fascist Russian Unity Party (RNE). ‘The members of RNE, swastikas tattooed on their necks and arms, have no qualms about negotiating with Ukraine’s regional governments and making ultimatums…’ … On April 4, Kurkov reports that 15 Russian citizens had been arrested in Donetsk with 300 Kalashnikov assault rifles, a grenade launcher, ammunition and other military equipment. … On April 7, Kurkov reports the arrest of a Russian GRU agent, Roman Bannykh. The Ukraine government seized his telephone records, which revealed that he had been coordinating the actions of the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk. … pro-Russian activists … walk around in combat uniform, with no badges or other signs of identification, carrying AK-100 assault rifles. The Ukrainian army does not possess those rifles but the Russian army does … Of the 117 Russian citizens arrested for having taken part in disturbances, at least ten are Russian secret service agents. … On April 21 … the separatists in Slovyansk attacked and pillaged the homes of gypsies in that city. Simultaneously, Nelya Shtepa was kidnapped. She was the former mayor of that city and had originally supported the separatists but broke with them because they were being manipulated by Russian secret service agents’.”

Indeed, Russian FSB colonel Igor Girkin, known as Strelkov, one of the leaders of the first gang of far-right Russian paramilitaries in Donbas, admitted that he pulled the first trigger that led to war, stating that “if our unit had not crossed the border, everything would have ended as it did in Kharkiv and in Odesa.”

Finally, regarding the so-called “referendums” that the coup authorities in Donetsk and Luhansk carried out in May 2014, Cathy Young writing in The Bulwark provides a useful anecdote which, as she says, by itself pretty much “tells the tale”:

“On May 7, Ukrainian intelligence released the audio of an intercepted phone call between Donetsk insurgent leader Dmytro Boitsov and far-right Russian nationalist Aleksandr Barkashov (the head, as it happens, of the aforementioned Russian National Unity). In the obscenity-laden exchange, Boitsov complains that the rebels are “not ready” to hold the referendum on May 11 as planned. Barkashov responds testily: “Just put in whatever you want. Write 99 percent. What, you’re going to fucking walk around collecting papers? Shit, are you fucked in the head or something?” “Ah. All right, I got it, I got it,” replies an audibly relieved Boitsov as it dawns on him that he and his pals are not expected to hold an actual referendum, just to produce results. Barkashov continues: “Just write that 99 percent—no, let’s say 89 percent, fuck it, voted for the Donetsk Republic. And that’s it, shit, we’re fucking done.”

[I mean, it may as well have been a discussion between blood-drenched Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad and some ‘election’ henchman who thought the ‘election’ circus had to be taken at least partly seriously; hell, some western ‘lefties’ are so thick they even agree with their far-right allies that those ‘elections’ were genuine!]

Young continues:

“By amazing coincidence, on May 11, the separatist “election commission” of Donetsk announced that 89 percent of the voters had chosen self-rule. As I have noted earlier, the first prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, “political consultant” Aleksandr Borodai, was not only a citizen of Russia but a reputed officer in the FSB (the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor) with a long history of involvement in far-right, ultranationalist circles.”

Conclusion

By intervening and militarising a movement, swamping it from the get-go, forcibly seizing territory, Russia completely changed the nature of Ukrainian politics. From a Ukrainian perspective, Russia, the former colonial power and neighbouring superpower had engineered a violent military conflict, slicing up Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas, thereby completely overwhelming whatever democratic voices could have arisen among Russians or Russian-speakers and supporters, while likewise hardening the right-wing nationalist views of many Ukrainians now seeing a fight for their country’s very existence. This militarisation also strengthened far-right forces in Ukraine at the time because the Ukrainian armed forces were in disarray, and the far-right took the initiative on the military front.

Whatever original support the civil anti-Maidan may have had, it is hard to know what survived the Russian-led military intervention and coups. We know that 3.3 million people of the original 6.6 million have fled Donbass since then, the majority into other areas of Ukraine. We also know that many of the irregular Ukrainian militia on the frontlines in the Ukraine-government controlled two-thirds of Donbas are residents uprooted as a result of the conflict and blame the Russian intervention. The more the far-right and fascist Russian-backed, or indeed actual Russian political figures and militia came to dominate these ‘republics’, imposing essentially totalitarian control and massively violating the human rights of the local population, the less this had anything to do with any expression of opposition to the Ukrainian government’s policies.   

Finally, one might rightly ask, does this even have any relevance now, with Russia heavily bombing and destroying Russian-speaking towns and cities in Donbas, including the complete decimation of Russian speaking Mariupol, and the massive rejection of Russian rule by these populations – has anyone seen a single welcoming party in eastern Ukraine for conquerors in the last year? It is almost certain that whatever lingering pro-Russia feeling that may have existed before 2022 has now largely collapsed. Indeed, the problem with this entire discussion, even as I write it, is the danger of implying that Russia’s monstrous war has anything to do with the rights of Russians or Russian-speakers in Donbas: if that were the case, there would have been no reason for Russia to advance an inch from the control it already exerted over 40 percent of Donbas where they perhaps had more support – what would have been the purpose of annexing the more anti-Russian parts of Donbas that had been in government control, let alone annexing the other two oblasts, let alone invading and savagely bombing the whole of Ukraine?

_{Before February 2022: Russian-backed forces only controlled about 40 percent of each of the two Donbas oblasts, Donetsk and Luhansk.}

_{What Russia controlled in Ukraine by October 2022}

by Michael Karadjis

This is the third in an ongoing series of well-known assertions that have been spread about the situation in Ukraine since 2014, all of which are complete myths. Of course, this is not the only place these myths are demolished, but they are so widespread that the more they are shot down, the better; and I just felt I needed my own so that I can easily grab one as an easy whenever I see each piece of nonsense once again repeated on social media.

_{Indigenous Crimean Tatars – victims of centuries of Russian colonialism and genocide – protest annexation by Russia in 2014}

Russia’s flagrant annexation of the sovereign Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 was the first annexation inside Europe since the (globally unrecognised) Turkish quasi-annexation of northern Cyprus, and in a league with only very few outright annexations globally – Israel’s annexation of Palestinian Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan, Morocco’s annexation of the Western Sahara, Indonesia’s annexation of Irian Jaya and later east Timor (until 1999) spring to mind. Yet Putin apologists have attempted to justify this act of Russian imperial expansionism as an act of self-determination by the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea (which frankly reminds one of Hitler’s claim to Sudetenland), or claim it was ‘always Russia’ and so on. 

On February 27, 2014, just five days after the Ukraine parliament’s vote to oust Yanukovych, masked Russian troops invaded Crimea – sovereign Ukrainian territory – attacked government buildings, raised the Russian flag over them, forced out the democratically-elected Crimea autonomous state government, replaced it with stooges from the ultra-right ‘Russian Unity’ party, which had received 4 percent of the vote in the previous elections – surely all this is a coup, isn’t it? It is a textbook coup, combined with invasion. This foreign-installed junta in Crimea then carried out, under Russian military occupation, the illegal “referendum” to leave Ukraine and join Russia, within ten days after calling it. Only two options were presented in the fake “referendum,” neither of which included the status quo. Ukrainian media was closed down.

Of course, the junta declared that 97 percent had voted for joining Russia – the usual figure plucked out of the air by dictators who throw “election” circuses. Yet Putin’s own Human Rights Council claimed the real turnout was 30-50% of voters, and that only 50-60% of those voted to join Russia. Notably, in a February 8-18 2014 Ukraine-wide poll, only 41 percent of people in Crimea favoured joining Russia – and that was far higher than anywhere else in Ukraine; we are supposed to believe that this jumped from 41% to 97% in a month!

International observers – of course, the Russian-installed junta invited various far-right/fascist parties from Europe for this show, indeed the invitees list – the French National Front, Jobbik (Hungary), Attaka (Bulgaria), Austrian Freedom Party, Belgian Vlaams Belang, Italy’s Forza Italia and Lega Nord, and Poland’s Self-Defense – reads virtually like a roll-call of the European far-right. Fascist parties throughout Europe declared their support for Crimea being “reincorporated” into Russia, its rightful place in their view, believers in the restoration of empires after all.

In contrast, the Mejils (parliament) of the Crimean Tatar nation, internationally recognised as the Indigenous people of Crimea (and likewise recognised as such in Ukraine), and a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation, declared the referendum illegitimate and called for boycott, just in case anyone on the so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ left happens to think the views of Indigenous peoples should count for something. The Russian occupation regime of post-referendum Crimea then banned the Mejils, their representative body first set up by the Crimean Tatars after the Russian revolution, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has documented ongoing human rights violations, including detention and torture, against the Tatar population. Today, the Mejils, in exile, demands the return of Crimea to Ukraine as an essential condition in any peace talks with Russia.

_{From 100% of the population at Russian conquest in 1783, the Crimean Tatars became a minority 100 years later, but then were 100% deported by Stalin in 1944}

The Crimean Tatars were the majority population of Crimea since the 11^th century, and remained so long after Russian settler-colonialism began with Catherine the Great’s invasion in 1783. Not until around 1900 did these Russian settlers begin to outnumber the indigenous Tatar population, who also fled Russian oppression in their hundreds of thousands. However they remained some 40 percent of the population until 1944 when Stalin expelled every man, woman and child Tatar from Crimea – hundreds of thousands of people – into central Asia, a torturous journey during which one in three died along the way. While they have been allowed to return in recent decades, such mass displacement tends to have a semi-permanent effect, and numbers were only re-growing slowly,  but continually, before this process was halted by annexation. In other words, the “left” (and far-right) assertion that, since 58 percent of the population of Crimea are ethnic Russians, annexation by Russia is an act of self-determination, is a declaration of support for the results of centuries of Tsarist colonialism and the Stalinist genocide.

An interesting comparison could be made to the current debate in Australia about an Indigenous ‘Voice’ to parliament, which will be subject to referendum later this year. While the tepid and powerless ‘voice’ on offer can well be criticised for its limitations, and indeed many Indigenous leaders prefer a ‘treaty-first’ approach which would recognise their sovereignty and cede some actual power to the Indigenous nations, the main opposition is coming from the right who are vigorously opposed to any even symbolic increase in Indigenous representation. From being once the sovereign owners of the whole of Australia, Indigenous Australians have been reduced, through colonisation and genocide, to only a few percent of the population.

So, using the same simple ‘majoritarian’ principles that many Putin apologists are now using to justify the result of the staged Crimea ‘referendum’ (even if we pretend for a moment that it was legitimate and not staged under military occupation) – that 58 percent of the Crimean population are ethnic Russians and so, if that’s what they want, so it should be – what would we say if the large Anglo-Australian majority here one fine day voted to be re-annexed to ‘Great’ Britain, and the 3 percent Indigenous Australian population were opposed? Should we say, well, the (former colons) Anglo-Australians are the majority, so it should be, like the (former colons) Russians in Crimea? Or would we say that Indigenous Australians should have some special constitutional right to not have their lands returned to some foreign colonial power? I suggest that the kind of constitutionally empowered real Indigenous voice via treaty that most on the Australian left are in favour of would indeed empower the Indigenous minority to reject such a move, and rightly so.

And, more generally, when there exists more than one constituent nation in a mixed region – in this case Russians, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars – is ‘winner take all’ the democratic solution? Take Cyprus (a place I know something about …), with its 80 percent Greek Cypriot majority and 20 percent Turkish Cypriot minority. So if the majority of the majority Greek Cypriot community vote to be united with Greece, so that should be, right? Oh, wait a minute, they tried that, with the movement against British colonialism led by the right-wing and the Orthodox church, calling for ‘Enosis’ (union) with Greece (rather than an independent bi-national federation) … thereby alienating the Turkish minority, driving them into the hands of Turkey’s military regime which eventually invaded in 1974 and the rest is history. No solution in the divided island 50 years later. Or take Bosnia, with its 44 percent Bosniak (‘Muslim’), 30 percent Serb, 18 percent Croat and 8 percent ‘Yugoslav’ (ie too mixed to be anything else) population – no majority, but if the Serbs and Croats voted together for Bosnia to be divided between Serbia and Croatia and got a slight majority of votes, so that should happen despite the views of the other communities? Indeed, since Serb and Croat fascist leaders actually tried to do that militarily in 1992-95, they were in the right, were they? The Crimea ‘solution’, in other words, is the most utterly reactionary solution possible.   

On a minor point, one of the justifications often heard from Putin shills is that Russia had to seize Crimea because it has a naval base in Sevastopol (and heaven forbid that an imperialist power should lose a military base in another country, say many on the western ‘left’). Yet the Russian military’s lease on Sevastopol does not expire until 2042.

by Michael Karadjis

This is the second in an ongoing series of well-known assertions that have been spread about the situation in Ukraine since 2014, all of which are complete myths. Of course, this is not the only place these myths are demolished, but they are so widespread that the more they are shot down, the better; and I just felt I needed my own so that I can easily grab one as an easy whenever I see each piece of nonsense once again repeated on social media.

_{Maps showing that Ukrainian president Zelensky was elected by Russian-speakers, whose language, we are told, he wants to ban (if not commit genocide against them). Source: Zoltan Grossman, Counterpunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/02/ukraine-maps-tell-a-different-story-than-putins-claims}

This is quite an entrenched myth. Claiming that Ukraine changed its language law to downgrade Russian language in 2014, or more colourfully that it banned the language, is a common tankie claim used to justify the Russian quasi-annexation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. Of course, the Russian language was not banned in 2014 nor any time since, and further, there was zero change in the language law in 2014; that did not occur until 2019.

As background, Ukrainian president Zekensky is a Russian-speaker, as are a significant proportion of Ukrainians, and indeed Zelensky was elected in 2019 largely on the votes of Russian-speakers. Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine have been the main victims of Russian mass-killing since February 2022, and have dominated the resistance to it. The famous/infamous Azov Regiment of the National Guard (often confused with the fascistic Azov Battalion which existed in 2014) is largely composed of Russian-speakers. According to a 2017 poll, 67.8% of Ukrainians “consider Ukrainian to be their native language, 13.8% claimed it to be Russian, whereas 17.4% declared that both languages are their native tongues.” However, while in western Ukraine, 92.8% are Ukrainian speakers and only 1.9% are Russian speakers, in eastern Ukraine 36.1% consider Ukrainian their language compared to 24.3% who declare Russian to be; in central regions, the figures are somewhat in between, but generally much closer to the western figures.

The 1996 constitution makes Ukrainian the only state language, indeed it says “state ensures the comprehensive development and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of social life throughout the entire territory of Ukraine.” However, there were strong protections for Russian and other minority languages, which can play an official role alongside Ukrainian in regions where these minorities are prominent. The constitution thus also states “the free development, use and defence of Russian and other languages of national minorities is guaranteed in Ukraine.”

All the language laws until 2012 were based on this well-balanced constitution. But in 2012, Yanukovych introduced a new language law which made Russian a ‘regional language’ with equal administrative status to Ukrainian wherever Russian was the language of at least 10 percent of the population, and other minority languages could have the same status. Since Russian is the language of over 10 percent in half the regions of Ukraine, this was quite wide-ranging. Many Ukrainians felt this tipped the balance too far.

So what did happen in 2014? Initially, after the fall of Yanukovych, the parliament attempted to rescind this new language law that Yanukovych had introduced just two years earlier, in 2012. The parliament’s aim in overturning this was to return to the previous law which had held sway ever since Ukrainian independence in the early 1990s, based on the 1996 constitution. As we saw, returning to the 1994-2012 linguistic framework was hardly a radical anti-Russian language step; it was merely the reversal of a recent radical change in the other direction. However, even this change did not take place, because it was vetoed by the caretaker president. Yanukovych’s radically pro-Russian 2012 law thus remained the law until 2019.

Therefore, leaving aside the blatant lie that Ukraine banned the Russian language and thus provoked a reaction from Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine, in fact nothing at all happened to the rights of Russian-speakers in 2014, making the lie even worse. Now, of course, it may well be that just the attempt to change the law back to the original could have been a factor promoting mistrust of the new government by many Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine; often it is not the actual content of a proposed change but the broader context, and this was the context of the newly assertive Ukrainian nationalism post-Maidan in reaction against Russian backing of Yanukovych and the immediate Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention into Donbas straight after his fall; this Ukrainian nationalism did include a virulent strain which was indeed alienating to many in the east. However, this point can be made without blatantly dishonest lies about what did happen.

It could well be argued that the Yanukovych law of 2012-14 was a better one, based on an abstract notion of complete equality of languages – even a broken clock can be right twice a day, and possibly for the wrong reasons. As a non-Ukrainian, I prefer not to get into that debate. The Ukrainian argument is based on the fact that Ukraine was a colony of Russia for hundreds of years, and the Ukrainian language was actively suppressed and discriminated against throughout that period (both under Tsarism and under Stalinism). There is also an important class aspect: Russian, the language of the colonial administration, came to dominate urban centres, even Kiev, while the villages were overwhelmingly Ukrainian-speaking; it was even considered shameful to speak Ukrainian in late Tsarist Russia, being a sign one was from the village, as rural-dwellers crowded into cities during industrialisation in the early 20^th century. Therefore, Ukraine now has a right to promote its language as the national language; Russian-speakers should have the right to use their language, but it is the language of the coloniser which became dominant via colonisation and suppression. Which argument is correct? Both arguments have validity, and much depends on context and manner in which such laws are introduced and implemented. What can be said for certain, however, is that the Ukrainian constitution, and the pre-2012 law, are hardly unusual by global standards; on the contrary, they are the norm. They are even less unusual for former colonies – what of the attempts over many decades in Ireland to promote the Irish language at the expense of English, for example?

The new Language Law of 2019 did partially downgrade Russian, at the time against Zelensky’s opposition (Zelensky was just elected in 2019 with votes of Russian-speakers). This new law was pushed by the outgoing Poroshenko government as it more and more turned opportunistically to the nationalist right (ironically in 2014 Poroshenko, elected then with the votes of Russian-speakers and appealing to unity, claimed the parliament’s attempt to rescind the 2012 law was a grave mistake). This new language law made Ukrainian the only language of state throughout Ukraine. While the law is consistent with the Ukraine constitution which makes Ukrainian the official language, the constitution also has strong protections for Russian and other minority languages, especially in areas where they are the majority. The new law arguably downgrades the status of some of those protections. In schools, for example, Ukrainian is the language of instruction throughout the country; Russian can be learned in school as a language subject. However, in pre-school and primary school, Russian or other minority children can study in their own language, as the language of instruction, in addition to Ukrainian, but they cannot in high school. From an internationalist standpoint, this change is certainly regressive, but it is hardly unique for most of the world.

The new law makes Ukrainian the language of all official communication, ie in government operations, including local government. In itself, this is hardly unusual by world standards. Regarding the media, however, the law is highly regressive and certainly can be seen to violate the Ukrainian constitution. The law stipulates that any publications in Russian or other languages must be accompanied by a Ukrainian version, equivalent in content and volume, a draconian and impractical regulation. There are exceptions for Crimean Tatar language, and for languages of the EU, but not for Russian. While a former colony certainly has the right to promote the national language, doing so in a way that makes everyday life more difficult for speakers of other languages at a practical level violates their rights and divides the working classes.

However, it is the very essence of hypocrisy for Putinite shills to try to use this argument, even after 2019. What they miss is that this law only came in after years of its implementation in reverse in Russian-annexed Crimea. In 2015, Crimea made only Russian the language of school instruction, while allowing students to learn Ukrainian or Tatar as elective languages; in pre-school and primary school, instruction could also be in Ukrainian or Tatar in addition to Russian, but not in high school. It is almost as if the Ukrainian government plagiarised the Russian occupation government of Crimea’s law four years later! But the reality in Crimea is much worse than even this official downgrading; in reality, Ukrainian has been comprehensively eliminated from all Crimean schools and from all official society. One of the first acts of Russian-owned rulers in both Crimea and the Donbas was to replace multilingual signs with Russian only ones.

Likewise, in the Russia-owned Donbas statelets, almost immediately following their quasi-annexation in 2014, “the curricula have been altered to exclude the teaching of Ukrainian language and history, which makes it problematic to obtain State school diplomas,” according to a November 2014 report by the UN High Commission on Human Rights; in 2015, the curriculum was overhauled, with Ukrainian language lessons decreased from eight hours to two hours a week, while Russian language and literature lessons increased. Russia’s five-point grading system replaced Ukraine’s 12-point scheme. School leavers from then received Russian certificates with the Russian emblem, the two-headed eagle. In 2020, Russian was declared the only state language.

That does not justify the Ukrainian law of 2019 (which current president Zelensky opposed), but it is important to recognise that the chronology is in reverse: no change in 2014 in Ukraine, regressive change in late 2014 and 2015 in Donbas and Crimea under Russian occupation, followed years later by copy-cat regressive change in Ukraine – which however in no way ‘bans’ the Russian language’.

by Michael Karadjis

This is the first in an ongoing series of well-known assertions that have been spread about the situation in Ukraine since 2014, all of which are complete myths. Of course, this is not the only place these myths are demolished, but they are so widespread that the more they are shot down, the better; and I just felt I needed my own so that I can easily grab one as an easy whenever I see each piece of nonsense once again repeated on social media.

Hundreds of thousands of people peacefully protesting in the streets against a malignant government is described, incredibly, as a ‘coup’

There was no “coup” in Ukraine in 2014, except in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. When hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians marched in the streets in a sustained mobilisation over many months from November 2013 through February 2014 – against the uber-corrupt ruler, Victor Yanukovych – this is not the conventional definition of a ‘coup’, which normally refers to a conspiratorial action of a small but powerful group (eg, a section of the armed forces or other state forces) carrying out a rapid and violent ousting of a government; there are dozens of examples to choose from, for example the US-backed coups that ushered in bloody dictators like Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in Zaire, the Shah in Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua and the list is virtually endless – none of which look remotely like the popular uprising that took place in Ukraine.

Incidentally, since I called Yanukovych’s regime ‘uber-corrupt’, let’s just make an aside to back this up; we read that after his overthrow, “Ukrainian citizens who stormed his Mezhyhirya mansion discovered a palace of cartoonish opulence with guilded bathrooms, a private zoo, and a floating restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship. A good illustration of this extravagance is the $11 million he allegedly paid for a chandelier and his seven tablecloths worth a staggering $13,000.” Interesting the kinds of thieving capitalist rulers that some ‘socialists’ have come to defend in this era of ‘geopolitical’ rather than class analysis.

Yanukovych, like many unpopular despots, reacted first by bashing protestors with iron bars, then with a raft of anti-democratic anti-protest laws, then with guns, and hundreds were shot – but of course each upturn in repression only made the popular movement more determined to get rid of him, despite attempts by some of the opposition leadership in January-February 2014 to do a deal to allow him to stay as president until December 2014. In the end he made their deals pointless anyway, when he fled to Russia with his stolen billions (some estimates as high as $37 billion), following which on February 22 the entire Ukrainian parliament – every member, including every member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – voted to oust him as president.

If such a profoundly democratic process involving mass popular uprising and unanimous votes by a democratically-elected parliament constitute a “coup,” then logically we should be in favour of more ‘coups’.

For an excellent blow by blow account of the Ukrainian popular uprising of 2013-14, ‘Ukraine Diaries’ by Andrey Kurkov is a must. Some of it can be accessed at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=fbuUAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false but buying the book would give you a fuller picture. Or better still, watch the amazing film, Winter on Fire at https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80031666,  which covers the full 3 months of the uprising, the enormity of the demonstrations, the ongoing brutal repression – if after watching it you still think the events were a ‘coup’ rather than truly massive genuine revolution, then we’re speaking a different language.

It is a sad moment when “leftists” decide that massive popular street protests against reactionary capitalist rulers are a bad thing; they thereby reject everything they have claimed to stand for throughout their lives. Unless they think that people have no agency (and no rights to agency) and that these kinds of numbers can all be manipulated the CIA, Victoria Nuland, Hunter Biden etc. Were all these hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and every member of parliament, personally bribed? That the US (or others) will always attempt to influence, to co-opt, a movement, is of course a given, but that is not a reason to oppose a popular uprising or mass mobilisation and hence essentially give support to a corrupt and repressive regime being overthrown.

‘Coup’ in this case seems to be just an updated version of the infamous term ‘colour revolution’, a nonsense concept invented by tankies who did not like watching the heroic Serbian working class overthrow bourgeois-nationalist butcher Milosevic in 2000, and so then extended its use to entirely different circumstances in Georgia in 2003 and different again in Ukraine in 2004. It is simply a term used for ‘popular uprising’ when it is one disapproved of by this sub-set of western lefties who assume they know what’s best for other peoples, and/or when the regime it is directed against is allied to Russian or Chinese (rather than US) imperialism or otherwise engages in some hollow “anti-imperialist” bluster.

The idea that the popular uprising was “US-orchestrated” stems from attempts by US rulers to co-opt it. One might say, ‘what business do US leaders have turning up to meet with protest leaders in another country?’ I agree – they should keep their noses out of it, just as should the Russians – but the point here is not the political morality of this – it is naïve to think powerful states don’t always try to coopt movements – but rather the fact that they had remarkably little to do with what eventuated, and simply did not have this power.

The main charge is that US advisors like Victoria Nuland played some role in choosing the caretaker who would temporarily become prime minister, after Yanukovych’s prime minister from his Party of Regions, Mykola Azarov, resigned on January 28 amidst the upsurge. Whether or not US advice was decisive in this choice of caretaker is hard to say; the idea is based on leaked correspondence involving Nuland and US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, where they did say they preferred the candidate (of three options), Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was indeed the one subsequently chosen by the Ukrainian parliament as interim prime minister. Is it not possible that the Ukrainian parliament made its own decision that they preferred him of the three options?

Just out of interest though, for those with short attention spans who think jumbling together “coup”, the US, “fascists” and “banning Russian language” explains anything, it is worthwhile briefly looking at the interim leaders chosen. It is clear from Nuland’s leaked correspondence that that candidate she preferred as prime minister, Yatsenyuk, was one of the more liberal ones, as opposed to Oleh Tyahnybok, from the far-right fringe; as Pyatt notes, “we want to keep the moderate democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok and his guys.” For some reason, they also prefer Yatsenyuk over the other “moderate democrat,” Vitaly Klitschko; Nuland says “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. … I don’t think it’s a good idea,” and “what he (Yatsenyuk) needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.” Clearly, they want to keep the far-right out, but as for ‘Yats’ over ‘Klitsch’, the only clue is that Yatsenyuk was probably seen as more of a compromise candidate by Moscow, because Yanukovych had offered Yatsenyuk the prime-ministership on January 25 (before his own pm resigned!).

Indeed, in the same leak, Nuland and Pyatt also speak of the need for “some kind of outreach to Yanukovych.” So, far from the Nuland chat being part of a far-right, anti-Moscow coup, it appears that they preferred as interim pm the candidate who could best build bridges with Moscow. The only way I can read all this is that the famous ‘Nuland leak’ is about Nuland and the US government preferring to hatch a deal with Yanukovych, some kind of compromise government. After all, what most left conspiracists miss in all this is that Ukraine has both a president and a prime minister: Yanukovych was the president; the Nuland discussion did not concern his position at all, but rather who was going to be HIS interim prime minister! Unfortunately for Nuland, the US and the ‘moderate democrats’, the deal stitched together to keep Yanukovych in power till December with a new prime minister was rejected by the Ukrainian masses. US interference! Nuland advocates same interim prime minister for Yanukovych as does Yanukovych to aid the deal to him in power!

As for the interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov was appointed by the Ukrainian parliament on February 23 after it ousted Yanukovych the previous day, and there is no ‘Nuland story’ about this appointment. But did the ‘coup’ leaders (ie, the entire elected parliament) choose some rabid Russophobe to heighten tension with Moscow and with Russian-speakers in Ukraine? Well, when the post-Maidan interim government attempted to overturn the language law which Yanukovych had introduced in 2012, which gave Russian equal status to Ukrainian, this was vetoed by none other than interim president Turchynov. So, very much the moderate, the bridge-builder, trying to hold back the more virulent strains of west Ukrainian nationalism raising their head. Really, these pieces are not falling together very well for tankie fiction stories.

After all, the brief interim period was followed by presidential elections in May in which Ukrainians freely elected Petro Poroshenko; and parliamentary elections in October, in which a government was freely elected by Ukrainians, and chose Yatsenyuk, once again, to continue as prime minister (his party, the Peoples Front Party, received the highest number of popular votes, so I don’t think Victoria Nuland had anything to do with that). Tankies thus can make up stories about the US choosing the Ukrainian government, but what they really mean is that these fine people living in faraway lands disapprove of the choices democratically made by Ukrainians, and believe they have a right to demand they choose otherwise.  

Regarding the parliamentary elections, the parties of Yatsenyuk and of Poroshenko received nearly half the votes between them and the majority of seats; the Opposition Bloc (ie, the renamed Party of Regions, which tankies will tell you was banned from standing) received 9.43 percent of the vote and 27 seats; while neither the fascist right (Svoboda and Right Sector, with 4.71 percent and 1.8 percent of votes respectively), nor the Communist Party of Ukraine (with 3.8 percent of votes) cleared the electoral threshold and thus got no seats. 

As for Yanukovych, MPs from his own Party of Regions released a statement asserting “Ukraine was betrayed and people were set against each other. Full responsibility for this rests with Yanukovych and his entourage;” as for the allegedly ‘pro-Yanukovych’ populations of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, on the question of whether they consider Yanukovych “to be a legitimate President of Ukraine,” in an April 2014 survey only 32% and 28% respectively in Donetsk and Luhansk respectively said “rather” or “certainly yes” (and these were by far the biggest numbers in Ukraine), compared to 57-58% who said “rather” or “certainly no.” Western tankies are well alone on this one, of defending the born-to-rule rights of a murderous, hyper-corrupt multi-billionaire oligarch.

By: Michael Karadjis

Summer 2022 (New Politics Vol. XIX No. 1, Whole Number 73)

Is China Socialist Because It Reduced Poverty?

Amid China’s emergence as a major economic power and an increasingly tense U.S.-China rivalry, the debate over whether China is now a full-fledged capitalist state, some kind of socialist state, or something in-between has become a major issue within the global left, with important theoretical and political implications. Opinions, unsurprisingly, vary on this question, given the difficulty of establishing clear criteria on what constitutes a socialist or non-capitalist state. 

In this essay, I engage with and critique the argument that China’s momentous social and economic achievements can be adequately explained by viewing it is a partially socialist or non-capitalist country. I do so by challenging the key assumptions underlying this argument both on empirical and theoretical grounds, and placing China in historical and comparative perspectives to better understand both its real achievements and many shortfalls.

The Economic Success and Poverty Reduction Argument

Headlines in recent years that report China’s achievement in lifting hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty seem to serve as evidence that China has a different, superior economic system. A relatively sophisticated argument along this line was recently advanced by Marxist economist Michael Roberts: 

If China were just another capitalist economy, how do we explain its phenomenal success in economic growth, taking 850m Chinese off the poverty line?; and avoiding any economic slumps that the major capitalist economies have suffered on a regular basis?¹ 

While the current Evergrande crisis calls into question the idea that China can avoid capitalist crisis,² Roberts is correct that it has largely done so for decades. But the implication that China must be socialist because capitalism simply cannot deliver massive economic growth and poverty reduction is a reversal of materialist method. 

To be fair to Roberts, his view is less crude than this. However, the conclusions he thinks we need to draw are highly exaggerated: 

If it has achieved this with a population of 1.4bn and yet it is capitalist, then it suggests that there can be a new stage in capitalist expansion based on some state-form of capitalism that is way more successful than previous capitalisms and certainly more than its peers in India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia or South Africa. China would then be a refutation of Marxist crisis theory and a justification for capitalism.³

There is a kind of “clutching at straws” hopefulness about many leftist pro-China arguments: given few good stories about socialism in today’s world, at least we can have one fifth of the world ruled by a kind of socialism, whatever its faults, with more economic and social dynamism than Western-led capitalism.

If China is capitalist, and if it is this capitalism that has produced these levels of economic growth and poverty reduction, then we should acknowledge that fact and use it to inform our analysis of the dynamics of global capitalism. However, this can be done without needing to draw Roberts’ wildly exaggerated conclusions. There are better ways to understand China’s impressive achievements than arguing they prove that it is socialist, a view which mirrors the pro-capitalist response that China’s achievements stem from adopting the “market economy.”

It is questionable how unique China’s achievements actually are, particularly when one takes a hard look at World Bank-led concepts of economic growth and poverty reduction, combined with the tendency to ignore inequality. This does not mean China’s achievements are either unimportant or not highly impressive. They are. However, since many capitalist countries in the Global South have also achieved massive economic growth and poverty reduction, some dissection of these concepts, and of some of the claims about China’s uniqueness, aids a more nuanced understanding.

Problematizing Poverty Reduction

“Economic growth” and “poverty reduction” have been the twin ideological slogans of the World Bank for decades. Many leftist critics of IMF-World Bank programs in the Global South criticize the monomaniacal focus on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, for their disregard of how this wealth is distributed, whether or not it leads to human development, how it is created, and its environmental impacts. Yet when China does it, some 10 percent per year for decades, it becomes a plus.

Despite this lopsided obsession with growth at all costs, growth is not necessarily bad, and poorer countries in particular need growth to at least reach a certain level of industry and technology; socialism cannot be based on sharing underdevelopment. And despite the World Bank obsession with growth, its programs have often led to slow or even negative growth in many parts of the developing world. China’s sustained growth for decades remains unique—even if it is not all good—something few capitalist developing countries have achieved, and its uniqueness must be explained.

But it is problematic to argue that being highly successful at what capitalism and its global agencies push for is evidence of non-capitalism. Doesn’t this growth include pumping record amounts of coal into the atmosphere, helping destroy the planet and workers’ lungs? Doesn’t it include the proceeds from the super-exploitation of workers in massive numbers of sweatshops? This is without even touching the vexed question of the internal colony of Xinjiang and its exploitation by global capital in collaboration with the forced assimilation policy of the regime. All of this is part of China’s “growth.” 

Pointing out that poverty reduction is a key World Bank ideological slogan, alongside economic growth, does not make it a bad thing. China is among the group of countries that has been by far the most successful in the Global South. Let us look at the raw data.

Between 1981 and 2008, China lifted 622 million people out of extreme poverty of under $1.25 a day. However, the global net reduction in $1.25 a day poverty was only 606 million, meaning that if we omit China from the calculations, there was a net increase in extreme poverty of 56 million. Even this does not tell the full story because a great many of those escaping $1.25 poverty remained in under $2-a-day poverty. So, while over the 1981-2008 period China lifted 577 million people above $2-a-day poverty, the global net reduction was only 68 million—meaning that leaving out the China figures here results in a net increase in global $2 poverty of 509 million people!⁴

We need to be careful, however. China accounts for one-fifth of the world’s population, so its figures overwhelm; these “net” increases in poverty when omitting China do not mean that only China experienced poverty reduction. Many countries experienced significant poverty reduction, others little or none, and some went into reverse. The countries that have experienced rapid poverty reduction include⁵:

It is clear that China’s poverty reduction stands out, especially when compared to other large populous countries like India and Indonesia, which, despite massive poverty reduction, still show very high levels of poverty—India contains about one third of the world’s extreme poor within its borders.⁶ 

Vietnam’s achievement is even more impressive than China’s. While the scale of poverty reduction is similar, Vietnam in 1990 underwent full-scale systemic collapse, following decades of war and blockade and the collapse of its East bloc subsidy-based trading partners, whereas China had already experienced a decade of high economic growth. Given that Vietnam also boasts a China-style “market economy with a socialist orientation,” this tends to back up claims about China and socialism.

At the same time, however, the table shows that income poverty reduction, often on a large scale, does take place under capitalism. Some of these figures seem hardly believable, for example the zero figures in Malaysia and Thailand, given what we know about the realities; likewise, Mexico’s appear unrealistic given well-documented harsh realities. Nevertheless, these discrepancies point to the fact that measuring income poverty cannot tell us everything. 

This official “poverty reduction” is based on the World Bank’s income poverty lines ($1.90-a-day for extreme poverty, $3.20-a-day for moderate poverty), the emphasis on which obscures the massive inequality that have risen everywhere, including China.

These lines were only recently updated from $1.25 and $2-a-day where they had remained almost unchanged since the World Bank adopted its $1-a-day line in 1985, based on the then national poverty lines in thirty-three of the least developed countries,⁷ indicating the absurdity of applying them to the entire South for decades. Earning over $1.90 or $3.20-a-day tells us little about what needs to be spent on housing, health, education, power, and other necessities.

According to Prof. Peter Edwards, an “ethical poverty line,” based on the income required to raise a country’s average life expectancy to seventy should be set at $7.40-a-day.⁸ Even the World Bank has come to see that its measures are absurdly low and has added a $5.50-a-day category for comparison.

Based on $5.50-a-day, in India, Botswana, and Indonesia, the numbers living under this figure in 2018 were a very high 77 percent, 59 percent, and 53 percent respectively; for China, Mexico, Vietnam, and Brazil, a middling 17 percent, 23 percent, 23 percent, and 20 percent respectively; in Thailand and Malaysia, a low 7 percent and 3 percent.⁹

While this gives us a more realistic picture of poverty, it is unclear what it tells us about China. It certainly shows that China (and Vietnam) have done far better than India and Indonesia; but it is unclear what being on a par with highly unequal capitalist states like Brazil and Mexico tells us, or why capitalist Malaysia and Thailand are far out in front.

As with economic growth, leftists have constantly criticized official “poverty reduction,” yet when China excels in these measures, the criticisms are forgotten by pro-China leftists. Certainly, the fact that China has been phenomenally successful by global standards on the World Bank’s own measures is an important contrast to most of the capitalist South. Guarded celebration is understandable, but it is hardly evidence of non-capitalism.

To be fair, China’s success against poverty is not only about income poverty. According to the World Bank, only 3.9 percent of China’s population are living in “multidimensional poverty,” a measure covering ten health, education and living standard indicators, an excellent figure.¹⁰ 

However, looking around the world again at the social indicators of some of the more successful countries reveals surprises if we assume the entire capitalist Global South has not changed in half a century¹¹ (see table below).

Of course, many other capitalist countries in the Global South have much lower indicators, so China is in the league of the better off. However, we are still left with the reality that a range of capitalist countries outside the imperialist core boast relatively high social indicators, making this an insufficient reason to claim China could not possibly be a capitalist country.

In fact, even many of the poorer countries not listed here have seen steady progress over time on life expectancy, infant mortality and literacy rates under late imperialism. Virtually every country in the world has seen a sharp fall in infant and child mortality since 1990.¹² For the Least Developed Countries as a whole, child mortality (i.e., the number of children who die before their fifth birthday) has dropped from an average of 174.3 in 1990 to 62.7 today.¹³ This is still very high, but dramatic progress is undeniable.

Does this mean “capitalism” is responsible for this? The neo-liberal world order? Hardly. Overwhelmingly, this has resulted from UN-led programs, i.e., global state intervention. Above all, mass childhood vaccination campaigns have dramatically cut infant and child mortality. This is easy for capitalism: it can continue hideously exploiting hundreds of millions in the South, but help fund this extremely cheap and effective campaign and demonstrate progress. In turn, reductions in infant and child mortality raise average life expectancy.

Indeed, 45 percent of child deaths have historically been caused by infectious diseases, so “the success of vaccination campaigns and antibiotic availability has done a great deal to reduce mortality.” For example, the number of measles cases “has shrunk by 86 percent since 1990.” WHO estimates that measles vaccination “prevented 21.1 million deaths across Africa” from 2000 to 2017.¹⁴

We also need to take into account simple capitalist “development” involving industrialization and urbanization. In 1960, two-thirds of the world lived in rural areas; following the cross-over point about a decade ago, the world’s urban population is now 20 percent higher than the rural. Nearly all the increase has been in developing countries. While living conditions are often cramped and unsanitary and the industries are sweatshops where workers work in Victorian conditions, just living in urban areas means easier access to health clinics, schools, clean water, and so on, compared to the spartan situation in rural areas in the Global South. 

Against Chinese Exceptionalism

The fact that capitalist countries have made significant achievements challenges the dogma that capitalism can only create absolute poverty and underdevelopment. Of course, it is widely understood that capitalism created the sharpest economic growth in history following the industrial revolution, and that the working classes in the West were later lifted out of the Dickensian stage of poverty. However, Western Marxists concluded that imperialism had decided who would and would not prosper in its world-system about one century ago. 

Capitalism creates winners and losers, so the “developing world” of mostly former colonies would remain the super-exploited quarry for hegemonic Western capitalism, denied development under capitalism. There is much truth in this as a general contention; the map of highly developed versus poor and “developing” countries has barely changed over the last century. However, to see it as an iron rule defies materialism and implies that the law of uneven development under capitalism has ceased to apply.

While China’s economic growth is significant, countless other countries in the Global South have experienced long periods of high economic growth; the depiction of the South as three continents of chronic underdevelopment is extraordinarily outdated. This imaginary stems from a left-binary view of the world as composed of the imperialist countries of developed capitalism, and the rest of the world, the underdeveloped capitalist countries that the former exploit and keep poor and backward. 

This picture only remains valid in the most simplistic and general sense, and ignores the fundamental Marxist law of uneven development of capitalism. Lenin’s assertion in 1920 that the world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations¹⁵ is mistakenly understood to mean that these oppressed nations remain forever underdeveloped under imperialist rule, and that the countries at top and bottom never change, whereas in reality he continually stressed the opposite. 

For example, in Imperialism, Lenin writes that “the export of capital influences and greatly accelerates the development of capitalism in those countries to which it is exported,” indeed “capitalism is growing with the greatest rapidity in the colonies and in overseas countries,” and “is growing far more rapidly than before.” However, under imperialism this growth is “becoming more and more uneven,” to the point that some powerful imperialist countries, such as Britain, go into decline, while entirely new ones, such as Japan, arise. Lenin gave data showing that “the development of railways has been most rapid in the colonies and in the independent (and semi-independent) states of Asia and America.”¹⁶ Of course, these railways served the colonial master rather than the colony, but it would be absurd to deny that this constituted “economic growth.”

While this uneven growth had brought about relatively little change by the 1960s, when the dependency theorists could claim, with some empirical support, that imperialism was actively “underdeveloping” the neo-colonial world, change in the fortunes of different developing countries has been far more dramatic in the half-century since. 

From this perspective, China has been the biggest “winner” in this uneven and combined development of world capitalism. But let’s consider some other experiences of rapid economic growth over the last few decades¹⁷:

We can exclude South Korea (and Taiwan), due to the gigantic level of U.S. support throughout the Cold War, as well as Singapore. These advantages cannot tell us everything, however; for example, the extremely high level of state regulation of the economy, and significant state-owned enterprises, in South Korea and Taiwan, mirrors the heavily state-led form of capitalism in China.

The others on this list have had both periods of extremely rapid growth and periods of slower growth; those chosen have achieved either close to 5 percent (or greater) growth during any one of these periods, or overall. 

We can make a number of observations. First, none of these countries come near China in terms of either the sheer level or consistency of growth over so many decades; China’s growth has been outstanding. Second, this short list is about it—almost no other country in the South meets the criteria of this list, an indictment of the “winners and losers” character of global capitalism. Third, however, we do need to recognize that significant periods of high economic growth are a feature of this uneven development of capitalism. It is problematic to argue that China’s greater level and consistency of doing what capitalism aims to do is evidence of non-capitalism. Now, let us turn to the impacts of growth, principally “poverty reduction,” held up as a major achievement of the Chinese system.

Deepening Inequality

If China were a socialist country, how do we explain its phenomenal success in producing 698 billionaires,¹⁸ second in the world after the 724 the United States boasts? (In fact, according to China’s Hurun Report, China already had 598 billionaires in 2016, surpassing the United States’ 535;¹⁹ and the 2021 report claims 1,185 Chinese billionaires, the first country to pass 1,000.²⁰) If it has achieved this and yet it is socialist, China would then be a refutation of Marxist theory, because it means socialism creates billionaires among paupers.

Unlike capitalism, socialism is not a current reality, but a vision we strive for, of a system which abolishes capitalists. Marx did not call on workers in the Communist Manifesto to struggle to remain exploited, make their exploiters richer, and create record numbers of capitalists.²¹ By contrast, there is no iron law that says capitalism cannot create economic growth and reduce income poverty. It did this, after all, in the imperialist West. 

In other words, the Chinese social formation, whatever one calls it, has both produced 698 (or 1,185) billionaire capitalists and lifted 850 million people above the income poverty line.

If China is neither capitalist nor socialist, then what is it? One argument is that China is not yet socialist, and the “elements of capitalism” in China are the compromises it must make on the road to future socialism; to co-exist in a capitalist world. As a country rising out of underdevelopment, the productive forces are not yet at a level to create socialism; there remains a role for market mechanisms and elements of capitalism within a semi-socialist system to boost the productive forces. Hence, progress towards socialism requires a significant period analogous to the Soviet “New Economic Policy” (NEP) introduced by Lenin in 1921.

If that is the argument, I agree completely. Yes, China needed some kind of NEP when it embarked on market reform in 1978 (especially following decades of Maoist bureaucratic adventurist economic policy); and Vietnam needed it even more when it did likewise in 1986, in conditions more similar to the USSR in 1921 than to China. Nevertheless, there is an inevitable question of where the line is drawn. 

There will be disagreements about where we draw this line and declare “at this point the NEP has gone over to outright capitalism.” However, we must be able to assess direction in the meantime: has China been taking anti-capitalist steps within this framework, empowering workers, reducing inequality and so on? What makes it a “socialist-oriented” mixed-market economy? Or has the capitalist class grown stronger? Is producing the second largest number of billionaires in the world a feature of a socialist-oriented NEP, or a product of the relentless march of capitalism, of the NEP going in the wrong direction? 

Presumably, a socialist-oriented NEP would aim to see reduced levels of inequality compared to “normal” capitalism. China’s Gini inequality score at 38.5 is relatively high, better than the United States (41.1) and much better than Brazil, South Africa, Philippines, Columbia, and Mexico; but higher than famously unequal countries like Russia, Indonesia, Thailand, and India (all 35-37) and much higher than anywhere in Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the like.²²

Gini cannot tell us everything though. In fact, one key reason that it is often higher in rapidly developing countries is that it measures the sharp differences between urban areas, where the development is taking place, and rural areas, which gets left behind. While the starkness of this urban-rural gap, caused by capitalism’s lopsided allocation of resources to where profit can be made, is a bad thing, the gap itself is not all bad; to some extent a gap demonstrates that industrialization and urbanization are actually taking place.

There has been some decline in inequality in China over the last decade. The Gini score of 38.5 is down from 43.7 in 2010 (after having risen from 32.2 in 1990). Before we go celebrating a victory for socialism, however, we should note that Mexico’s score fell to 45.4 in 2018 from 50.1 in 2005 (and 53.6 in 1996), and that of Thailand as of 2019 is down to 34.9 from 42.5 in 2004 (and 47.9 in 1992). India’s, by contrast, has risen from 31.7 to 35.7 since the 1990s, but is still below China’s.²³ It is therefore difficult to place too much significance on relatively small declines in Gini.

According to The Economist, this alleged decline in inequality is not apparent to many Chinese. The reason, quoting scholars Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen, is that “the decline in Chinese inequality since 2008 does not reflect softer divisions within cities” but “results instead from a narrower gap between urban and rural China.”²⁴ 

Thus, while the decline in Chinese inequality in the last decade may have some positive aspects, on the whole it reflects a shift from the inevitable inequality of the “modernization process” to the straight-out inequality of capitalism, between worker and capitalist “within cities.” 

According to the China-based Hurun Report, “the net worth of the 153 members of China’s Parliament and its advisory body that it deems ‘super rich’ amounts to $650 billion,” which is “up by nearly a third from a year ago.”²⁵ Indeed, the list of people with wealth of $310 million and over grew by 520 (22 percent) to 2,918, triple a decade ago, and 100 times more than 20 years ago, while their wealth rose 24 percent to $5.3 trillion, six times that of a decade ago.²⁶ In 2018, “China added 210 billionaires—about four a week—40 percent more than the United States.”²⁷ This tells us more about real capitalist inequality than a slight decline in the Gini index.

Therefore, the Chinese social formation has produced a level of inequality similar to many highly unequal capitalist countries, the largest or second largest number of billionaires, and an explosive growth of the capitalist class. This looks a lot like capitalism. So let’s now examine the claims and realities of economic growth and poverty reduction.

The Reality of Capitalist Exploitation

Playing up poverty reduction while ignoring increased inequality, whether in China by hopeful leftists or by World Bank influenced development agencies elsewhere, essentially equates to being apologists for capitalism.

Quite simply, it is not that difficult for monetary incomes to show improvement under capitalism; and it is incredibly difficult to really establish what people can buy with these rising wages. It tells little about the atrocious conditions hundreds of millions of the “non-poor” live and work in. Sweatshop wages may be just over the income poverty line, and their children may survive childhood due to mass vaccination. The living conditions of these “non-poor,” however, are like night-and-day when compared to the gigantic middle-class in China,²⁸ not to mention the multi-million strong capitalist class, whose wealth is rising at a much faster rate than poverty incomes as demonstrated by rising inequality indicators. They live in entirely different worlds: decent social indicators do not indicate socialism.

Ignoring China’s gigantic “floating population” of semi-rural, semi-urban migrant workers, estimated to number some 285 million people²⁹ or one-fifth of China’s 1.4 billion population, demonstrates this graphically. It is on the backs of these poor rural workers who have little or no security and migrate to the cities to work as laborers in the informal sector or as factory workers in sweatshops, that China’s “miracle” has been built.

Their lives remain fundamentally insecure; the household registration (hukou) system assigns them to their hometown for whatever social and welfare rights they are entitled to, meaning that many work for years or decades without even the minimum of social protection and access to health care and education that other workers get.³⁰ According to China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, in 2017 “only 22 percent of migrant workers had a basic pension or medical insurance, 27 percent had work-related injury insurance, and just 17 percent had unemployment insurance,” while only 14.3 percent had joined trade unions. On average, migrant workers in cities work eleven hours-a-day.³¹ Their permanent insecurity was highlighted in 2017, when the government began uprooting tens of thousands of migrant workers from their homes on the outskirts of Beijing, destroying their “illegal” shanties with little notice.³²

While the hukou system may have played an organizing role when China was still largely agricultural and the health and education infrastructure was being developed in the 1950s and 1960s, maintaining it decades into the market economy and following massive urbanisation simply makes the migrant workforce highly exploitable by Chinese capital, with little bargaining power, resulting in a kind of social apartheid. 

There are some 100 million children of the migrant labor workforce, one third of whom live with their parents and hence suffer the lack of social security enshrined in the hukou system, with the other two-thirds remaining in the villages, suffering from greatly reduced quality of and access to educational and health facilities that characterize rural China, but without one or both parents.³³ Some 27 percent of rural children suffer from anemia and other health problems.³⁴ While China has expanded various kinds of medical insurance schemes in recent years, they are incomplete, patchy, often include some kind of payment, and do not cover the full cost. Only 22 percent of migrant workers had employee medical insurance in 2017, and cost of treatment can be prohibitive.³⁵ Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported in 2016 that only 48.6 percent of toilets in rural areas were sanitary.³⁶ 

Most rural children who graduate middle-school do not proceed to high school, while 90 percent of urban children do, and the school drop-out rate is 24 percent, compared to only 2 percent in urban China³⁷ (only in 2005 did China again make primary and junior high tuition free as it had been before “market reform,” but still not high school³⁸). A 2007 survey showed that middle-school drop-outs were the major source of child labor.³⁹ While the strong health and education network had been an inheritance of the 1949-1980 “socialist” period, between 2001 and 2009 300,000 village primary and middle schools were closed down, and “students were forced to either go to boarding schools or endure long, arduous journeys every day to attend school in the nearest town.”⁴⁰ As of 2010, some 10 million primary school students, and half the rural secondary school students, were attending boarding schools far from home.⁴¹

Yet by migrating all over China for insecure, exploiting work and leaving behind children, migrant workers often earn enough to rise above the World Bank poverty lines. While not irrelevant in a developing country, these facts need to be taken into account when all focus is on reduction of “poverty” at the expense of inequality. 

Despite all this, China’s gains remain impressive for a developing country rising out of poverty by global standards; we cannot judge by Global North standards, as the inheritance of colonialism remains a dominant factor in world development. And this means that China, alongside a number of other developing countries, has either been doing something different, or has been on the lucky side of uneven global capitalist development, or both. And it is a useful point to make when apologists for capitalism point only at China’s positives while managing to ignore the horrific health, educational, and social situation in most of the capitalist Global South, under governments carrying out neo-liberal advice from Western governments and financial institutions. 

However, a system that relies on this highly exploited, informal, and insecure migrant workforce of one fifth of the population, and that leaves rural areas behind, with high costs for health care, while billionaires sprout like mushrooms, is called capitalism, not socialism. 

This is not only about China; rather, this is a general point about the economic growth, “poverty reduction,” and even rising social indicators in many parts of the South. 

For example, Thailand’s impressive poverty, health, and education indicators do not show us the significant role played by sex work over decades in that country’s “development” strategy; sex work produces income. While estimates vary greatly, in 1999, “a study by a Thai university estimated the sex sector at around $25 billion, or 12% of the country’s gross domestic product.”⁴² While this has declined, it underlines how significant its role was from the Vietnam War era. While extreme poverty was 0.03 percent in 2017, this is based on an income equivalent to 26 baht/person per day, “which is inconceivable for many Thais to be sufficient for an acceptable life.”⁴³ Using $5.50-a-day (75.7 baht), the poverty rate rises to 8 percent. Likewise, Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, reported that even highly successful Malaysia’s zero poverty level was the result of massive undercounting and did not represent that country’s reality.⁴⁴ 

The Fallacy of State Ownership

We need to ask, What are the socialist elements of the mixed-market economy in today’s China? It is clear enough what the capitalist elements are: the multimillion strong, rapidly growing, Chinese national capitalist class, a great many of whom are members of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC).⁴⁵ This fact, and the nexus between economic and political power, militates against the idea that the “Communist” name of the ruling party ensures some socialist element in the country’s direction.

For Roberts, he does not need to claim capitalism can be enormously successful, thereby refuting Marxism because, “fortunately, we can put China’s success down to its dominant state sector for investment and planning, not to capitalist production for profit and the market.” 

This is a valid argument; the state-owned economic sector is enormous and prominent—though whether or not it is “dominant” is debatable—and is an important instrument through which the state regulates the economy.

What, however, makes a state-owned economic sector socialist? After all, since Roberts rejects the idea that “some state-form of capitalism” can make these achievements, he is distinguishing between prominent state enterprises under capitalism, and state enterprises leading a mixed economy marching towards socialism. 

Some forms of socialism require control of the state, the economy, and its surpluses by the working-class and greater community. The workers and community do not democratically control the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China. They are run by the CPC regime, which regularly carries out police repression against striking workers and other forms of popular protest,⁴⁶ complicating claims of “socialism.” 

Others call this a form of “state-capitalism” (which may well be superior to private capitalism, to the extent that such a thing exists). While the state can use SOEs for state and social goals—as do capitalist governments elsewhere to a lesser extent—these SOEs also strive to make profit in the market. What kind of anti-social activities do they engage in to make this profit? What kinds of market-driven salaries do its CEOs boast? To what extent do these trends effectively “privatize” the SOEs from within, both at a legal and an illegal level?

China is not the only country that has had a dominant state sector for a prolonged period. Despite neoliberal myths, the state has always played a prominent role in the development of capitalism. And in many post-colonial states in the Global South, from the 1950s onwards, there have been varying degrees of state regulation and intervention, and also state ownership of large parts of the economy, in capitalist countries. 

Whether such prominent “state sectors” in market economies are a feature of non-capitalism or “socialism” are issues that can be debated. However, leftists extolling China’s state sector as evidence of socialism tend not to see the same in the dominant state sectors in Ataturk’s Turkey, Nasser’s Egypt, Ne Win’s Burma, the PRI regime in Mexico, Brazil from the 1960s (including under the military dictatorship), the mullah regime in Iran, or countless other examples. In most cases, the primarily “modernizing” role of these state sectors gave way over time to a role as breeding ground for the new capitalist class, a reasonable description of what has been happening in China.⁴⁷ 

Taiwan offers a particular challenge, given its image as the capitalist alternative to “socialist” China: SOEs dominated its economy for decades, as late as 1986 controlling some 60 percent of economic assets.⁴⁸ That is, state enterprises dominated during virtually its entire transition from poverty to Global North status. 

This question of the state sector and “socialistic” elements connects to a further question: is it correct to see the entire post-1978 period as much the same? We need a position on when “NEP-reform” within non-capitalism became capitalism, because this relates to the question of whether most of China’s heralded progress occurred before or after capitalism. Arguing that capitalist restoration took place around the mid-1990s, it will be shown that most of China’s achievements took place before full-scale capitalism, which therefore eliminates labeling China today “socialist,” even for those who believe that these achievements are impossible under capitalism.

In fact, many of China’s achievements go back to before market reform began in 1978, to the “bureaucratic state-socialist” decades,⁴⁹ which are often written off as a period of stagnation. While the negatives of this period—particularly the catastrophic adventurist campaigns of the Mao regime—are also huge, the achievements can be attributed to the depth of the Chinese Revolution that culminated in 1949; the fact that capitalist China today was built on the inheritance of this immense social revolutionary process better explains its ongoing social achievements than imagining Chinese capitalism remains somehow socialist.

The Forgotten Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth Before Market Reforms

There is a more fundamental problem with the “China lifted 850 million people out of poverty since 1980” discourse. According to economist Martin Ravallion, in 1980, some 90 percent of China’s population lived in absolute poverty of under $1.90-a-day.⁵⁰ The claim that China lifted 850 million out of poverty since 1980 is based on accepting that 30 years after the Chinese Revolution, 90 percent of the population still lived in absolute poverty, a higher proportion than in most countries in the Global South today. The Revolution, apparently, achieved little. 

How true is this?

Before the onset of Deng’s market reforms of 1978-81, while people were, generally speaking, poor, they did not pay for housing, health care, education, and social security, and prices of goods, including agricultural inputs for the peasantry, were highly subsidized. Cash incomes were less of a useful indicator of their quality of life. Can we compare its “poverty” to capitalist countries of the South based purely on income?

In one sense, the market reforms—including the introduction of small fees for health and education—began by making Chinese workers and peasants poorer, and those low incomes now began to mean something. However, because the agricultural reforms did boost the productivity of the small peasants who now had more control over the product of their labor, they made up much of the difference. Moreover, significant subsidies remained throughout the system, health and education costs remained low, much of the protective infrastructure of the socialist period remained and allowed these early market reforms to prosper within that protective shell.

Therefore, even after this limited “reform” began it still seems problematic to compare Chinese workers or peasants on low monetary incomes to millions on similar incomes around the capitalist world. Yet, by accepting the claim that China has lifted more people out of poverty than the rest of the world combined since 1980, we are accepting the unlikely idea that 30 years of the Chinese Revolution and bureaucratic “state-socialism” bequeathed a country with the greatest number of poor in the world. 

In fact, China’s human development indicators in 1980 further militate against the idea that 90 percent of Chinese lived in extreme poverty by Global South standards. Life expectancy stood at 66, adult literacy at 65 percent (79 percent male), primary school enrolment at 93 percent and infant mortality at 44 per thousand live births. These were outstanding figures for the South at the time; consider, for example, that life expectancy in India todayis only 69.

This raises the question of when these social advances, so crucial to understanding poverty, began; which in turn points to further questions: when did China’s economic take-off begin? When did most of the post-1980 poverty reduction take place? And related to all this: when did China’s NEP turn to capitalism? The answers lead to a more nuanced analysis than either that which says China’s achievements are due to capitalism, or alternatively that its achievements mean it must be socialist. 

Life expectancy in China today is a healthy 77, high by South standards. But most of the rise took place before “reform”: it rose from 43 in 1950 to 68 by 1980,⁵¹ i.e., it grew during the “socialist” period, “one of the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history.”⁵² It took only 50 years for China to raise its life expectancy from 40 years to 70 years, in comparison to a century in Western countries, almost all of it before 1980.⁵³ In the 40 years since “reform” began, it has risen only an extra 9 years. 

Similarly, the infant mortality rate fell from 195 in 1950 to 55 in 1980;⁵⁴ since then it has dropped to 6.8, an impressively low level, but three quarters of this reduction took place before reform. In fact, China’s 1980 figure of 55 is rather common throughout the South today (and lower than in many countries). 

The literacy rate has surged from 65 percent in 1980 to 97 percent today,⁵⁵ certainly impressive; while 65 percent is not as high as other 1980 indicators (having been set back by the Maoists’ “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” chaos of the 1960s), nevertheless, as literacy stood at some 20 percent in 1949, the majority of the rise again took place before “reform.” Net primary school enrolment today stands at 99 percent, but was already 93 percent in 1980,⁵⁶ far higher than almost anywhere in the South, having risen from a mere 20 percent in 1950⁵⁷: 90 percent of the rise took place pre-reform.

In other words, the bulk of China’s impressive gains in social indicators took place as a result of the 1949 Revolution during the “socialist” period before the onset on “market reform” (and despite catastrophic Maoist campaigns). The more modest subsequent gains over the last 40 years have been built on that established base.

It is ironic that those arguing that the billionaire-producing regime is “socialist” because of the amount of human progress it presides over can only really make this argument if they ignore the fact that most of the human development gains were made before 1980 under state-socialism.

While most would understand that at least some social progress took place before 1980, it is almost a given that economic take-off only began after “market reforms,” previous to which China was “stagnant.” However, a closer look reveals a less marked demarcation. The standard view imagines there was nothing between the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GCPR) disaster and growth following market reforms, managing to omit the entire 1970s.

China’s average annual GDP per capita growth rate in the 1970s was 4.29 percent,⁵⁸ which, while well below growth rates in the 1980s and beyond, was already high by world standards.

According to professors Ben Kerkvliet and Mark Selden,

The gains may be traced back a decade to the 1970 North China Conference, which initiated a process of “conservative modernization” associated with Zhou Enlai. This led to accelerated rural industrialization and state investment in irrigation, and a comprehensive green revolution package that was implemented under collective auspices.⁵⁹

In sharp contrast to Vietnam when it began its market reforms, facing systemic collapse, China “had a rate of accumulation as a share of total output of around 33-35 percent in 1978-79, compared with Vietnam’s 12-13 percent … the Chinese economy was already generating large investible surpluses before the transition started.”⁶⁰ 

Some China experts, such as Susan Shirk, claim “it was by no means obvious that market reforms were the only solution. Economic performance and living standards could have been improved by upgrading the technical capacity of Chinese planning, raising agricultural prices and improving material incentives.”⁶¹

We then come to the question of when the greatest post-reform gains were made. World Bank data,⁶² shows the numbers living under $1.25-a-day between 1981 and 2011 dropped from 850 million to 150 million people, some 700 million people over 30 years. But more than one third of this drop, of some 250 million people, occurred in just the first 5 years, between 1981 and 1986. It took another 25 years for another 450 million to escape extreme poverty. 

Indeed, the rise in agricultural incomes and productivity peaked between 1978 and 1984; per capita rural incomes rose two-and-a-half times within those six years, after which incomes and productivity levelled off or rose much more gradually.⁶³ 

The point here is that the reforms of the 1978-84 period were very mild; other than those who already classified Maoist China as “state-capitalist,” no-one suggests that China was plunged into capitalism at this stage. The initial reforms consisted of better state purchasing prices for peasant produce, allowing peasants to sell their above state-quota produce on the market, and the beginnings of de-collectivization, making the household the primary unit. According to Kerkvliet and Selden, “in most areas, decollectivization and a return to family farming were not widely implemented until 1982-83, suggesting that the prior gains in agricultural productivity and rural incomes were the product of a complex package of which household farming was only one component.”⁶⁴ 

This was largely tampering with the state-socialist model. As Joseph Fewsmith explains, when China’s state price for compulsory deliveries in this period is combined with the higher price the state paid for above-quota produce (to compete with the market), the overall state price was higher than the market price. Thus the success of early Chinese reforms involved a six-fold rise in state subsidies to peasants from 1978 to 1984, indeed, “while agricultural subsidies had only been 4.5 percent of state revenues in 1978, they were a whopping 20 percent of state revenues in 1984.”⁶⁵ Hardly the capitalist free market! 

So, following this 1978-84 mild NEP stage, we can broadly divide China’s “market reform” into two further stages:

From around 1984-85 foreign companies were invited into joint ventures with state companies, but only in Special Economic Zones; SOEs elsewhere gained more autonomy to partially operate on the market; and private capital was allowed to set up small enterprises. Therefore, the structure of the economy did not change fundamentally; while we should not underestimate the impacts the rising market economy had in practice, it would be a bold statement to declare China “capitalist” in the 1980s. 

The establishment of the stock exchange in 1991 heralds the third stage, followed by the rapid conversion (“equitization”) of thousands of small and medium SOEs into share companies, open to private investors while keeping a “controlling” state share (which may be less than 50 percent). In 1997, massive “equitization” or sale of large and strategic SOEs began, and tens of millions of workers were retrenched. Size restrictions were removed on private enterprises and the national capitalist class began growing at a dizzying speed. Only at this stage can we begin talking of the restoration of capitalism in China.

This final stage relates to the above discussion on the nature of the dominant state enterprises; regardless of one’s answer before equitization, how does a significant state share within a shareholding company still equal a socialist state enterprise? 

To conclude, not only had the bulk of the increases in social indicators taken place before any market reform, but even record post-reform poverty reduction made its biggest gains in the first half of the 1980s, under the least radical economic changes, still within a bureaucratic state-socialist framework. Since the mid-1990s, capitalism has led to even higher economic growth, but the rate of poverty reduction and improvement of social indicators tended to slow down. 

Therefore, regardless of what we call the system in 1949-78, or from 1978 to the 1990s, since the bulk of China’s poverty reduction and social achievements took place before anyone would argue China became capitalist, then why the pressure to label the post-1990s China “socialist” to account for advances largely made before that era? 

Capitalism with Revolutionary Inheritance 

While I have argued against exaggerated views regarding China’s economic growth, poverty reduction, and social indicators, they are nevertheless highly significant and do somewhat stand out. And though I have shown that vast social gains were made before the advent of capitalism in the 1990s, and even before the market reforms in 1978, major economic and social achievements have continued to be made since the 1990s. 

One may argue, therefore, that if not socialist, China’s capitalism is not a “normal” capitalism. However, few countries have “normal” capitalism, a system that takes different forms. 

Today’s capitalist China arose on top of the mighty social revolution of 1949, in which millions upon millions of peasants overthrew the ancient regime and shattered the centuries-old ruling classes. China’s (and Vietnam’s) impressive achievements are better understood as partially due to the inheritance of such dynamic revolutions, rather than trying to argue that a country with the largest number of capitalists in the world, with very high levels of inequality, and where workers struggles are confronted by state repression, is somehow socialist.

A major aspect of the Chinese Revolution was the thoroughness of land distribution to hundreds of millions of peasants. Much can be said about the tremendous and often irrational violence as brutalized peasants turned the tables after centuries of oppression and decades of catastrophic war; even more can be said of the grossly opportunist manipulation of small-peasant grievance by the Maoist cadres, where absurd classifications led to violent politically-directed “class struggle” within the peasantry; real revolutions are raw and messy, especially following decades of war. Regardless, the end result was one of the most radical land distributions in history, something that has only rarely occurred in modernizing capitalist countries, ironically, key exceptions being South Korea and Taiwan.

The thoroughness of land reform has been a key factor in development success, or lack thereof, in the Global South, hence it is unsurprising that these two capitalist countries have been the most successful, and that China made great strides following the Revolution. The subsequent adventurist form of collectivization led both to great gains and massive setbacks, but whatever the balance sheet, the break-up of these collectives after 1978 returned land to the peasants on the basis of these earlier radical land reforms and this was a powerhouse of subsequent growth and poverty reduction.

The gigantic gains before 1980 also reflect the huge expansion of the basic health and education infrastructure (e.g., primary schools, communal health clinics) in villages all over China from the 1950s onwards,⁶⁶ and this state socialist-era infrastructure was bequeathed to the “reform” era in China, providing a solid basis for further development. 

Development theorist Amartya Sen discussed this in relation to preparedness for market reform:

While pre-reform China was deeply skeptical of markets, it was not skeptical of basic education and widely shared health care. When China turned to marketization in 1979, it already had a highly literate people, especially the young, with good schooling facilities across the bulk of the country. … In contrast, India had a half-illiterate adult population when it turned to marketization in 1991, and the situation is not much improved today. The health conditions in China were also much better than in India because of the social commitment of the pre-reform regime to health care as well as education. Oddly enough, that commitment, while totally unrelated to its helpful role in market-oriented economic growth, created social opportunities that could be brought into dynamic use after the country moved toward marketization. The social backwardness of India, with its elitist concentration on higher education and massive negligence of school education and its substantial neglect of basic health care, left that country poorly prepared for a widely shared economic expansion.⁶⁷

While our focus here is not on “preparedness for the market economy,” Sen’s points are relevant, because these socialist-era gains did not just mean that China could “do market economy better” than India, but also that it could do it with far more social cushioning and less “market” impact on social indicators.

On a slightly different note, Jake Warner, writing in Dissent, makes the point that

… the developmental achievements of the Revolution—levels of literacy, education, health, industry, and infrastructure highly unusual for such a poor country—combined with the Mao era’s extreme urban—rural inequality, perfectly positioned China to dominate low-wage exports starting in the 1990s. Incomes in the former Soviet bloc, though ravaged by shock therapy, were still too high to be competitive with the enormous numbers of impoverished rural migrants in China, while most other poor countries could not match China on the quality of infrastructure or the capacity of the state to suppress workers’ demands.⁶⁸

The point here is less flattering from a socialist point of view. The fact that the developmental achievements made China infrastructurally more attractive to foreign investors chasing “low-wage exports” is not what pro-China Western socialists want to write about; China is a “winner” within the uneven development of global capitalism.

Attributing much of China’s success to the Chinese Revolution and the state-socialist period, should not be read as romanticizing this era and its Maoist leadership. Massive bureaucratic-led projects like the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution unleased enormous disaster on China; it was not these deeds that led to development success, it was despite them, highlighting how dynamic the underlying process of social revolution was. 

Rather than a strange “socialism,” the secret to China’s success has been a peculiarly dynamic cocktail of three key elements: the inheritance of the Chinese Revolution and the gains of the state-socialist era; the particular way China was able to leverage its advantages within the uneven development of world capitalism; and the significant role for state-owned enterprises in the state’s regulation of its economy, which however effective remains capitalist. 

None of these elements are evidence of socialism. Being clear about this point is not only important for understanding the nature of the Chinese system and capitalism, but also for envisioning what kind of future the global left would like to build.

Notes

1. Michael Roberts, “IIPPE 2021: imperialism, China and finance,” Sept. 30, 2021, The Next Recession.

2. Daniel Morley and Dao Feixiang, “Evergrande crisis: capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” International Marxist Tendency, (Nov. 1, 2021).

3. Roberts.

4. John Ross, “China accounts for 100% of the reduction in the number of the world’s people living in poverty,” Key Trends in Globalisation (2013).

5. World Bank Open Data, “Poverty headcount ratio at $1.90-a-day (2011)” (Purchasing Power Parity, PPP); China Power Team. “Is China Succeeding at Eradicating Poverty?” China Power. Oct. 23, 2020.

6. Max Roser & Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our World In Data (2013).

7. Peter Edward, “The ethical poverty line as a tool to measure global absolute poverty,” Radical Statistics, No. 89 (2005), 53-66.

8. Edward, 53-66.

9. Roser & Ortiz-Ospina.

10. United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2020, Statistical Annex, p.365.

11. United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2020, 343-344, 365-366

12. Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie & Bernadet Dadonaite, “Child and Infant Mortality,” Our World In Data (2013).

13.Roser, Ritchie, Dadonaite.

14.Roser, Ritchie, Dadonaite.

15. V. I. Lenin, “The Second Congress of the Communist International,” Collected Works (1920),4th English Ed., (Moscow,Progress Publishers, 1965), Vol. 31, 213-263.

16. V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Selected Works (1916), (Progress Publishers, 1963), Vol. 1, 667-766 [Sections IV, VII, X].

17. World Bank Open Data, GDP per capita (constant 2015 US$).

18. “Forbes World Billionaires List, The Richest in 2022.”

19. Hurun Research Institute, “Hurun China Rich List 2016,”
Oct. 14, 2016.

20. Hurun China Rich List 2021, Oct. 27, 2021.

21. Sui-Lee Wee, “China’s Parliament Is a Growing Billionaires’ Club,” New York Times, Mar. 1, 2018.

22. World Population Review 2022, Gini Coefficient by Country 2022. The Gini coefficient ranges from zero (perfect equality) to 100, the maximum possible inequality. 

23. World Bank Open Data, The Gini Index (by country).

24. “Just how Dickensian is China?” The Economist, Oct. 2, 2021.

25. Sui-Lee Wee.

26. Hurun China Rich List 2021.

27. Sui-Lee Wee.

28. China Power Team, “How Well-off is China’s Middle Class?” China Power (Apr. 26, 2017).

29. “Migrant Workers and Their Children,” China Labour Bulletin (2002). 

30. Yunting Zheng,Ying Ji, Chun Chang, Marco Liverani, “The evolution of health policy in China and internal migrants: Continuity, change, and current implementation challenges,” Asia & The Pacific Policy Studies, Vol. 7: 1 (2020), 81-94.

31. Yunting Zheng,Ying Ji,,Chun Chang, Marco Liverani.

32. Chris Buckley, “Why Parts of Beijing Look Like a Devastated War Zone,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 2017.

33. China Labour Bulletin (2002).

34. Chengchao Zhou, Sean Sylvia, Linxiu Zhang, Renfu Luo, Hongmei Yi, Chengfang Liu, Yaojiang Shi, Prashant Loyalka, James Chu, Alexis Medina & Scott Rozelle, “China’s Left-Behind Children: Impact Of Parental Migration On Health, Nutrition, And Educational Outcomes,” Health Affairs, Vol. 34: 11 (2015), 1964-1971.

35. China Labour Bulletin (2002).

36. Li Huang, Meijun Qiu & Mi Zhou, “Correlation between general health knowledge and sanitation improvements: evidence from rural China,” npj Clean Water, Vol.4:21 (2021).

37. China Labour Bulletin (2002).

38. Martin Chorzempa and Tianlei Huang, “China Will Run Out of Growth if It Doesn’t Fix Its Rural Crisis,” Foreign Policy, Feb. 8, 2021.

39. “Small Hands: A Survey Report on Child Labour in China,” China Labour Bulletin (2007), Research Report No. 3.

40. China Labour Bulletin (2002).

41. “China’s grim rural boarding schools,” The Economist, Apr. 12, 2017.

42. “GDP: The sex sector,” Forbes, June 14, 1999.

43. Judy Yang, “Reducing poverty and improving equity in Thailand: Why it still matters,” World Bank Blogs, Oct. 17, 2019.

44. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Malaysia vastly undercounting poverty, says UN rights expert,”United Nations,Aug. 23, 2019.

45. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights .

46. Stefan Schmalz, Brandon Sommer & Hui Xu, “The Yue Yuen Strike: Industrial Transformation and Labour Unrest in the Pearl River Delta,” Globalizations (2017), 14:2, 285-297.

47. Chris Slee, “Green Left Wealth, Power and Corruption in China,” Green Left, Nov. 11, 2021.

48. Ming-sho Ho, “Manufacturing Loyalty: The Political Mobilization of Labor in Taiwan, 1950–1986,” Modern China (2010), 36:6, 559–588. 

49. In this piece I will use the highly unsatisfactory term ‘bureaucratic state-socialist’ to refer to the system that existed in China from 1949 through to around 1978-80, shorthand for a mostly nationalized economy centrally controlled by a bureaucratic and repressive state rather than by the working-class and broader community. This is in order to avoid buying into the disputes between whether it should be called state-capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, a bureaucratically-deformed workers’ state etc, which is beside the point of the essay. My own view is closest to the third term here, but I find the terminology of ‘workers’ state’ even with the modifiers, even less satisfactory than use of the term ‘socialist’ as part of the label.

50. Martin Ravallion, “A historical perspective on China’s success against poverty,” VoxEU, Feb. 4, 2021.

51. Macrotrends, “China Life Expectancy 1950-2022.”

52. Kimberly Singer Babiarz, Karen Eggleston, Grant Miller, and Qiong Zhang “An exploration of China’s mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950-80,” Popular Studies (2015), Vol. 69:1, 39-56.

53. Yanhua Xu, Weifang Zhang, Rulai Yang, Chaochun Zou & Zhengyan Zhao, “Infant mortality and life expectancy in China,” Medical Science Monitor (2014) 20: 379–385.

54. Aaron O’Neill “Infant mortality in China 1950-2020,” Statista, June 21, 2022.

55. C. Textor “Adult literacy in China 1982-2018,” Statista, May 10, 2022.

56. UNICEF “Net enrolment rate in primary education, 1980–2017.”

57. Babiarz, Eggleston, Miller and Zhang.

58. World Bank Open Data, GDP per capita (constant 2015 US$).

59. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet and Mark Selden, “Agrarian Transformations in China and Vietnam,” in Anita Chan, Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet and Jonathon Unger (eds.), Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam Compared, (MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 110.

60. Adam Fforde “From Plan to Market: The Economic Transitions in Vietnam and China Compared,” in Chan, Kerkvliet and Unger (eds.), 51.

61. Susan Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform, (Berkeley: U. of California Press 1993), 23, 34.

62. Ross.

63. Joseph Fewsmith, Dilemmas of Reform in China, (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 153.

64. Kerkvliet and Selden, 110.

65. Fewsmith, 153-154.

66. Babiarz, Eggleston, Miller and Zhang.

67. Amartya Sen, Development as freedom (Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 2.

68. Jake Werner, “China’s Market Reformers,” Dissent, (Fall, 2021).

Posted China, Political Economy, Socialism, Understanding China

About Author

Michael Karadjis teaches social sciences and international development at Western Sydney University. He has been involved in solidarity organizing, including the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, Syria Solidarity Australia, and Agent Orange Justice. He blogs on Syria at mkaradjis.wordpress.com

by Michael Karadjis

Tuesday, June 12, 2018 – (originally from June 2014; posted now due to similar disturbances four years later)

A number of key points need to be understood about recent Sino-Vietnamese clashes in the East Sea (also known as the “South China Sea”) and the mass reactions of Vietnamese workers.

First, the “disputed ” islands that China has placed its oil rig near – the Paracels – were not “disputed” before being seized by China from Vietnam in an act of armed aggression in 1974. At the time, China carried out this action in agreement with Kissinger. In 1988, in further naked armed aggression, China seized about a quarter of the Spratly Islands, which are much further south (and thus much further from China), which had also, till then, been simply Vietnamese sovereign territory.

I certainly don’t support war, ie, I don’t think any Vietnamese worker in uniform should have to get killed just to defend uninhabited islands. However, that is different to being “neutral” in low-level conflict that inevitably does occur. If leftists want to call the Paracel Islands “disputed”, then they should call the Golan Heights, which Israel similarly seized from Syria via armed aggression during that era, “disputed.” If they want to call the Paracels “Chinese” because after all, Americans/Australians etc speaking on behalf of the Vietnamese don’t want to be “nationalists”, then kindly be consistent and declare the Golan “Israeli.”

The bigger picture, of course, is that China has claimed the entire East Sea as its own, with the famous “dotted line” going right up to the borders of neighbouring countries, including Vietnam, the new Monroe Doctrine of the new imperial colossus.

Second, regardless of the Paracels – for argument’s sake let’s call them (and the Golan) “disputed” – the oil rig has been placed in what is indisputably Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), based on what is indisputably Vietnamese territory on the mainland.

Third, the mass reaction against Chinese aggression by thousands of Vietnamese workers cannot be written off either as a chauvinist outburst (though it certainly has elements of that), as a government-orchestrated provocation, or as an act of mass ignorance (since so many attacked factories were Taiwanese rather than from the PRC). Rather we need to look at it in all its complexity.

Mass revulsion against the Chinese regime in Vietnam is widespread (and an obvious problem for “anti-imperialist” analysts). It has a historical aspect (not just 1000 years of Chinese rule, but the 1988 attack which seized much of the Spratleys, 1979 invasion, and being knifed by Mao in late Vietnam war, including the seizure of the Paracels); it has economic aspects, with Chinese companies operating a gigantic environmentally destructive bauxite-aluminium operation in VN’s Central Highlands, and seizing the lion’s share of contracts for projects of similar size and of similar strategic importance; it has an aspect of moral revulsion and solidarity, as the Chinese navy regularly kidnaps large numbers of Vietnamese dirt-poor fisher-folk from around the two “disputed” island archipelagos, and holds them for massive ransoms for months at a time.

To blame the VCP government for “provoking nationalism” is a statement of ideology (whether Trotskyist or otherwise), based on the idea that as a Stalinist-turned capitalist regime it “must be” doing so. It is also a statement of breathtaking ignorance about the actual facts. The VCP government of course vigorously defends its own view of the islands. However, it also holds the view that only diplomatic means can be used, that war is out of the question. However, most of the Vietnamese dissident opposition (whether genuinely democratic, right-wing, Buddhist, Catholic etc) have found the idea of anti-China nationalism a good horse to ride on, *precisely because the VCP government is seen to have a “too moderate” strategy and opinion*. So they denounce the VCP government as being “communists betraying the nation to China” (which, while they don’t often say so openly, can mean little more than advocating war, since the VCP does everything but this). In fact, anti-China, defend the islands, actions have become the most prominent issue in anti-VCP regime dissidence for some 5 years now.

The way the dissident movement pushes the issue is wrong, of course; but it cannot be denied that there is justice to the side overall which is resisting a new mega-capitalist superpower (whether one wants to call it imperialist or not at this stage is frankly besides the point in this instance).

Does this mean the nationalistic dissidents have secretly orchestrated the workers? Again, I think that is unlikely. Most of these dissidents are rabid supporters of foreign capital (curiously, they think there isn’t enough in Vietnam!), and are horrified by the effects these riots will have on investors’ confidence; but more generally, workers are quite capable of leading themselves, both in good class struggle activities and also in making bad chauvinistic errors – no need to romanticise raw class struggle by having to explain its negative aspects by orchestration by the government, the opposition, or China itself (another theory floating around).

The simple facts of the matter are:

Workers have acted due to a mixture of mass revulsion against China’s bullying actions and raw class hatred of bosses – Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean and even Vietnamese factories have been attacked and burnt.

More have been Taiwanese than Chinese, because more Taiwanese investors invest in these sweatshops than Chinese. The Taiwanese, Chinese (often Hong Kongese) and Korean bosses are famous, not only in Vietnam, for running brutal capitalist regimes in their factories, which openly violate Vietnam’s labour laws, and are generally much harsher than what is tolerated by workers from Vietnamese bosses (let alone Vietnamese state industries, where workers’ conditions are far superior). Unleashing their class hatred against all these bosses, due to a pretext, is not difficult to understand at all.

But to understand the particular revulsion against the Taiwanese bosses, two things need to be considered.

First, China’s claims to the Paracels and Spratleys were only made by the Kuomintang regime that ruled China in the late 1940s before the 1949 revolution (at the time both island groups were part of France’s Vietnam colony and were thus handed over to Vietnam at the 1954 Geneva Accords, where *China* and the USSR betrayed Vietnam by agreeing to partition). The CCP simply inherited these chauvinistic claims against its smaller and weaker “brother” nation from the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang still rules in Taiwan, still supports these claims to the islands (like China, it claims all of them), and in practice has been supporting the PRC in the island issues (so far has the capitalist integration of Taiwan and the PRC gone).

Second, even more surprising (for “anti-imperialists”, and those who see China as some kind of “socialist” state): As explained by Taiwanese researcher Wang Hongzen: “Almost all Taiwanese factories hire PRC people as “cadres” [Yes, that is also how Taiwanese call their supervisors: “cadres”]; inside the factories, there is a glass ceiling that blocks Vietnamese from being promoted. There is also everyday confrontation between Chinese supervisors with Vietnamese workers under the so-called suppressive management style with “Chinese characteristics” (Hongzen’s article, “Beating up Taiwanese is not a Misunderstanding,” for anyone who reads Chinese, is at http://www.appledaily.com.tw/realtimenews/article/new/20140516/398528/).

One needs to take this into account when we read reports of Vietnamese workers beating up Chinese workers, in some cases killing them. From where I am, I cannot tell how targeted these attacks are: are they specifically targeting these repressive Chinese supervisors and “cadres”, or are these simply ugly chauvinist attacks on Chinese workers as a whole? I don’t know, but I suspect there is probably a bit of both. However, to explain it as simply some kind of latent mindless chauvinism in Vietnamese workers coming out, rather than in the class terms as explained by Hongzen, is just plain wrong. That of course should not be read to mean any justification to the real chauvinist acts that may be occurring.

Of course, more generally, regarding labour, some have written that workers all around the world often attack foreign workers for “taking their jobs” etc. In my opinion, this again is too narrow. This usually refers to immigrants from poorer countries trying to get jobs in richer countries, being opposed by more privileged local workers. But here it is reversed, and I don’t only mean the “joint-venture” CCP/KMT “cadres”; more generally, China tends to bring in masses of Chinese workers with its investments in Vietnam, as in Cambodia, Papua-NG, African countries etc. Bringing your workforce is not “immigration”; what it normally means is 2 things.

First, since the capitalist regime inside the factory is significantly harsher in China than in Vietnam, Chinese investors bring a workforce so as to not have to put up with too much “trouble;” they are well-known to see Vietnamese workers as more strike-prone and “lazy,” ie, refusing to take as much shit. In any case, the Chinese workers often have no work visas; their jobs there are completely tied to their bosses.

Second, the Chinese investors use Chinese workers for better-skilled and higher paid positions (ie not only the supervisors), leaving Vietnamese with the least skilled and lowest paid positions. Just how different this is from the position of immigrant workers vis-a-vis locals in imperialist countries is rather obvious.

So all this also adds to the antipathy to Chinese workers.

Naturally, that does not mean that the attacks on Chinese workers are in any way justified, except perhaps in cases when there is an issue of clear class revulsion against slave-driving “cadres”; even in these cases, mob violence, up to and including lynching, will have the tendency to spread an atmosphere of terror among ordinary Chinese workers, even if they are not the target. Clearly, masses of Chinese workers see themselves as in danger, and have fled; the VCP has been able to use the outbreaks as a cover to crack down on other peaceful forms of protest and has made hundreds of arrests; the riots have allowed the opposition to claim that the chaos is an inevitable result of the VCP not being hard enough on China, of “abandoning the nation”; China has scored some propaganda points by pointing these events as Vietnamese anti-China aggression. Vietnamese and Chinese workers need to see each other as allies against intensified capitalism in both countries.

However, when Marxists analyse what causes events like this, it is also important to understand who is the oppressor, both the national oppressor in the big picture, and the class oppressor – including its “cadre” agents and screws – in the factories.

By Michael Karadjis

Friday, July 29, 2011 – Below is an extraordinary document initiated by some 20 prominent Vietnamese academics, former military, former officials, writers etc, who express great unease about the current situation for Vietnam, faced on the one hand by increasingly aggressive Chinese actions in the East Sea (also known as the South China Sea), and on the other by an economic situation characterized over the last few years by mounting crisis and severe inflation, which is hammering people’s living standards.

None of the people who launched this petition or have subsequently signed it (the list currently stands at 1088 people) can be characterized as in any way “anti-Party” people or even people with any history of stirring the pot. On contrary, they are of the kind referred to in the Vietnamese media as “patriotic personalities,” that is, people with a life-long pedigree of either involvement in the country’s historic struggle against US imperialism and/or involvement in the country’s reconstruction and development since then, strongly associated with, or members of, the ruling Communist Party (CPV), including former military leaders involved in the country’s liberation.

I am not posting this because I necessarily agree or disagree with the contents of their petition, but because, firstly, the document itself is quite extraordinary, and in today’s conditions in the country, brave, and secondly, because I believe the views expressed in it are currently widespread in Vietnam.

The petition protests, rightly in my view, against the aggressive actions of neighbouring China, which claims the entire East Sea as its own property, and whose actions aim to deliberately humiliate Vietnam so that it understands that the neighbouring rising imperial power is boss. These actions, mainly several years of brutal kidnaps of large numbers of impoverished Vietnamese fishermen, who are then held for ransom for weeks or months before being released for heists of many thousands of dollars, and more recently the cutting of cables of Vietnamese ships inside Vietnamese ships, twice, inside Vietnamese waters (not even near the disputed islands), have led to revulsion among ordinary Vietnamese, not so much out of misplaced “nationalism” as out of solidarity with the fishermen and their families.

However, the petitioners here discuss this issue in a very different way to the anti-communist (or at least anti-government) dissidents and foreign Vietnamese organisations, who in recent years have seized on Chinese aggression, and the Vietnamese government’s preference for dialogue and diplomacy, to launch a blatantly nationalistic campaign (which mirrors China’s own rhetoric, leaving aside the immense power difference etc). Their campaign centres on the idea that the CPV is a puppet of China and is therefore deliberately selling the country out. The problem being that the Vietnamese government has never given an inch on the question of its sovereignty over the islands, and continually protests China’s actions, through various fora, including via multilateral channels in ASEAN etc. The only thing the Vietnamese government says it will not do is allow the conflict over uninhabited islands to lead to war. Which leads to the conclusion that the right-wing protest, in demanding “tougher” action, can in effect only be advocating that – without actually saying so. The way they campaign is thoroughly opportunist.

By contrast, the petitioners here continually stress that they want to have good peaceful relations with China. For example, they call on the government, among other things, to “Affirm consistently our goodwill regarding building and preserving friendly and cooperative relations with China” and they stress “We must make a distinction between a power group within the Chinese government that harbors unethical and illegal plans and actions against Vietnam, and the friendly attitude of the majority of Chinese people toward the Vietnamese people.”
What then are they demanding from the government? When it is read carefully, there are two main aspects to this. The first, and overriding aspect to the whole document, is the demand for more transparency, for more information to the Vietnamese public. The unfortunate reality is that the CPV’s long history of “war communism” due to decades of imperialist siege still has a massive effect on its everyday behaviour, and so this ends up clouding issues and creating misunderstandings, even when issues are straight forward. They demand the public be informed openly about the nature of the ongoing diplomacy with China over these issues, that more information be made available to the public about the facts about the dispute, and that people be allowed to peacefully protest. This last point is one of its own: on many days, the regime allows people to publicly protest China’s actions, then on other days it breaks up demonstrations and arrests people.

There is simply no justification for such action. The government does this not because it is a “puppet” of China, but because it sees public protest as embarrassing while it persists with diplomacy, it wants to limit any nationalistic inflammation of the situation. It also fears exploitation of such rallies by anti-government groups, including foreign Vietnamese organisations. However, legitimate protest against violent actions against Vietnamese fisherfolk and Vietnamese boats and ships is not in and of itself nationalistic inflammation; on the contrary, the latter may become a threat precisely when legitimate protest is crushed for no reason, as people suspect the government is “covering up,” or “trying to protect China” when it arrests people. This is combined with the lack of overall transparency noted above: if people feel the whole truth is not coming out, if issues and clouded, precisely this gives space to those on the right who want to exploit the situation and raise nationalistic slogans.

An example of the difference is where the petitioners here demand the government “Explain the background, content, and legal validity of the message that Premier Pham Van Dong sent to China’s Premier Chu An Lai in 1958 regarding the East Sea, in order to conclusively do away with intentional misinterpretation by China.” This refers to a letter in which Dong supported China’s then decision to extend its territorial waters to 12 miles, in the context of US aggressiveness against China at that time; the letter makes no mention of the disputed Paracel and Spratley island chains, yet not only has China deliberately misinterpreted this to suggest Dong was submitting to China’s claims to the islands, but so have the foreign Vietnamese organisations and their supporters in Vietnam claimed for many years that this was the ultimate “communist sell-out” of the nation to China. This claim is sheer demagoguery, and the way the petitioners here handle it is quite the opposite to this.

However, the second aspect to this is their view – and that of increasing numbers of Vietnamese people – that the massive economic penetration of Vietnam by Chinese business is having many negative impacts on Vietnam, and threatens to entangle Vietnam in a neo-colonial relationship under the new Chinese superpower. Of particular concern is where they note that:

“China has won as much as 90% of all engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts in Vietnam in areas such as electric power plants, metal and nonmetallic refining facilities, chemical plants, and bauxite and titanium mining facilities. In contrast, China has imported from Vietnam agricultural products and raw minerals the extraction of which leaves behind environmental problems with long-term consequences.”

Moreover, they place this reality – which does indeed mirror classic relations between an imperialist power and a neo-colony – within a context of what they describe as China essentially morphing into a new imperialist power, without using this exact word:

“China, in the role of being “the manufacturing factory of the world” and the biggest money lender, aspires to become a world superpower. Under the cloak of “peaceful rise,” China is projecting its power in multiple forms to infiltrate and dominate other countries on all continents. A number of world analysts are of the opinion that China has surpassed all accomplishments of neo-colonialists after World War II.”

While most of the western left remain unconvinced that China is becoming a fully imperialist power (regardless of their other views on China and its actions), in my view this is something open to interpretation, and it may be that many are simply refusing to see the bleeding obvious due to a certain rigid view of what constitutes an “imperialist” power. That does not mean I am necessarily convinced either; sometimes what looks like the bleeding obvious may be quite different to what it seems. However, I am open to the idea, and I do not think these Vietnamese veterans are being “nationalistic” for simply expressing this opinion, which may well be correct.

Despite the obviously genuine concerns of these Vietnamese petitioners, however, are they unwittingly allowing themselves to become the vanguard of a new Vietnamese nationalist movement, which may at some point replace the official socialist ideology as the new ideology of capitalist Vietnam? As I have written elsewhere (http://links.org.au/node/2145), I believe that precisely this is occurring in China, where capitalist relations have developed more rapidly than in Vietnam; and that is also what I think of the openly nationalist ideology of the more right-wing Vietnamese oppositionists described above.

I don’t think this is a correct way to describe this current development at this stage. It is not out of the question that such a movement could evolve that way, but at this stage, we need to distinguish between the development of a narrow and confrontational nationalism, centred around exploiting traditional and historical anti-China sentiments, on the one hand, and the entirely legitimate protests of Vietnamese people against the brutal and shabby treatment of their impoverished fisherfolk by the naval forces of a mighty superpower, against the increasingly aggressive actions of the Chinese navy against Vietnamese ships in Vietnam’s territorial waters as part of its entirely illegitimate claim on the entire East Sea, and against mercenary Chinese business interests in Vietnam which have tended to be exploitative, corrupt and environmentally destructive. While some western leftists react in a concerned way to the very idea of any conflict between what they view as “two socialist countries” (and thus view the Vietnamese reaction as equally dangerous to the Chinese aggression), many of these same people would have an entirely different view if the country kidnapping hundreds of Vietnamese fisherfolk over many years and ramming Vietnamese ships while grabbing most contracts in strategic areas of the economy was a western imperialist power (especially given that many of those who fought western imperialism in the past are the same people as those now protesting China’s aggressiveness). Clearly, reaction by a small and poor country against national oppression by a mighty superpower cannot simply be brushed aside as “nationalism.”

The entire issue of the massive Chinese investment in the bauxite-aluminium venture in the Central Highlands is only the most extreme case regarding Chinese business interests. Whether true or not, the perception that many of these ventures mainly exist due to large-scale bribery of officials by Chinese big business is very widespread; certainly, the fact that Chinese companies are developing the kind of monopoly of contracts in so many crucial areas as described above can not be explained either as mere coincidence or by “traditional friendship” or by geographic proximity. Chinese foreign investment is in general no better or worse than that from other capitalist and imperialist countries (though many argue that it is in some respects, especially regarding issues such as the environment, food safety and labour), but the growth of this kind of monopoly in such important areas does threaten a neo-colonial relationship with one power, leaving Vietnam less bargaining room among investors from a variety of countries.

There is a difference however between a threat and a reality. Vietnam is far from being a neo-colony of China or of anyone, yet. The level of independence achieved by the revolution is not something that can easily be given away for cash, no matter how much corruption and dealing goes on between Vietnamese elites and Chinese big business. While the petitioners are also not saying it is a neo-colony, in my view the danger lies in exaggerating the current relationship to the extent of starting to blame all the rot in the country on the foreign power. While the concerns about Chinese aggression and economic penetration are legitimate, the entanglement of a democratic movement with a “national” issue against a foreign power (when that foreign power is not directly colonizing or invading you) does pose difficult problems from the outset, which does give it the potential to develop in a negative nationalistic way. Even in the case of bauxite, it must be remembered that the Chinese company is in a joint venture with the Vietnamese state minerals corporation. Are they just engaging in this environmentally disastrous venture due to being “bought out by the Chinese,” or are they not doing it themselves to make money?

The final thing I want to say here is that there are clearly a wide variety of people with a range of views on other issues involved here. This accounts for the fact that while they describe a drastic economic situation, the rising rich-poor gap and so on, and call for action on this, they do not put forward any specific demands in relation to the economic system. While I noticed two names in the extended list (one of which was in the original list of 20) who are known to be in favour of a greater development of capitalism, many others are life-long communists who hold no such views, and likely the opposite in many cases. Indeed their description of the situation:

“The disparity between rich and poor is widening, and the distribution of income has become more and more unjust. Injustices in the distribution and accumulation of assets, land lease and use, implementation of laws, and formation of new power groups and monopolies are major issues that run contrary to the nation’s goal of building “a well-to-do citizenry, a strong country, and a society that is democratic, just, and civilized.”

is a description of none other than capitalism, and the slogan at the end which they say is being eluded is precisely the CPV’s current euphemism for a socialist country.

Thus there are no clear economic demands in either a more capitalist or more socialist direction. What they are agreed on, however, is once again, more openness, more transparency, more democracy. Whether their views bend left or right on economic policy, they all agree that such increased transparency can only help the economy, can only help root out the cancer of corruption. Whatever the reasons for decades of war-communism, caused by being occupied, invaded and bombed for decades by the world’s mightiest imperialist powers, this era is long over. Now as capitalism rapidly develops in Vietnam – including within the ruling CPV which officially invited capitalist membership at its 11th Congress earlier this year (a decade later than the Chinese CP did) – the continuation of an undemocratic status quo where the state can use all kinds of arbitrary powers can now increasingly become little more than a repressive cover for those among the ruling elite who use their power to amass fortunes.

Now more than ever, if there is any chance of holding back the onslaught of open capitalism and retaining some elements of the socialist orientation which generations of Vietnamese shed their blood for, it can only come via greater openness, genuine involvement of the ordinary people in decision making, advancing socialist democracy. Such open discussion is also the only way that the genuine grievances many Vietnamese people today have with the aggressive and destructive actions of the neighbouring imperial giant to their north can be disentangled from the rabid nationalism being pushed by an array of anti-regime dissidents and overseas Vietnamese anti-communists.

Therefore, whatever my reservations with some of the formulations and some of the potential of this movement, on the whole I think the initiative of these “patriotic personalities” is not only very brave and very praiseworthy in its forthrightness, but also generally a welcome development. I hope the Party leadership finds the wisdom to respond with dialogue rather than more arrests.

Michael Karadjis

Long time friend of Vietnam

Petition to The National Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
and The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Vietnam

On the Defense and Development of the Country In the Current Situation

http://boxitvn.blogspot.com/2011/07/toan-van-ban-kien-nghi-ve-bao-ve-va.html

We, the undersigned, respectfully send to your Excellencies this petition regarding the defense and development of the country in the current situation.

I. The independence, self-determination, and territorial integrity of the country are under serious threat

1. China claims 80% of the East Sea (Southeast Asia Sea) to be its property
China, in the role of being “the manufacturing factory of the world” and the biggest money lender, aspires to become a world superpower. Under the cloak of “peaceful rise,” China is projecting its power in multiple forms to infiltrate and dominate other countries on all continents. A number of world analysts are of the opinion that China has surpassed all accomplishments of neo-colonialists after World War II.
More recently, China has seriously intensified its ambition to control and own the East Sea (the Southeast Asian Sea) through actions that violate international laws and the sovereign rights of the countries bordering it. China has unilaterally drawn a nine-line and dot, U-shaped border on the East Sea, also known as the “cow-tongue line,” that encompasses 80% of the East Sea surface area. China has repeatedly declared that it has indisputable sovereignty over everything within that cow-tongue line and has carried out illegal activities there within to affirm this claim in violation of international laws.

China is actively strengthening its naval forces, preparing to move in large oil extraction platforms, and carrying out military and non-military incursions into areas that are within the maritime territory of Southeast Asian countries. At the same time, China pursues actions aiming to create disunity among countries within ASEAN.

2. China has used military forces to occupy Vietnam’s territories in the East Sea and is prepared to do that again regarding the remaining Vietnam’s territories in the Spratly Islands.

In the maritime area on which Vietnam has sovereignty and sovereign rights, China occupied by military actions in 1974 the Paracels that were at that time under the control of South Vietnam. In 1988, China took by force seven islets and rocks in the Spratlys that were also under the control of our country. Since then, China has regularly carried out actions to threaten and violate our maritime sovereign rights. For example, China has unilaterally imposed an annual fishing ban on the East Sea during which it chased away our fishing boats, arrested them, detained them, and/or confiscated their catches and properties for ransom. China has pressured foreign oil companies to not sign or to nullify contracts for oil exploration on the maritime economic zone of Vietnam. China has repeatedly sent Chinese Naval Surveillance Force vessels to carry out surveillances in the East Sea as if the sea belongs to its own. Only last month, Chinese ships deliberately cut the oil exploration cables of two Vietnamese ships—the BinhMinh02 and Viking II—while these ships were in operation within the Vietnamese exclusive economic zone. These are among a series of escalating actions by China that are designed to threaten and seriously encroach on Vietnamese maritime territory.

Vietnam’s geography, geo-political, and economic position vis-a-vis the world today appears to be an obstacle to the Chinese ambition to expand southward on the way to become a world superpower. China has applied all covert and overt means, including military actions, to seduce, infiltrate, manipulate, threaten, and interfere with Vietnam’s internal affairs in its design to weaken Vietnam and ultimately make us China’s subordinate.

Vietnam has appeased and tried in multiple attempts to accommodate China in order to establish cooperative bilateral relations. However, to date, the more Vietnam tries to cooperate, the more aggressively China behaves.

3. China has accomplished important steps in its plan to dominate Vietnam
Reviewing the China-Vietnam bilateral situation, we clearly observe that China has accomplished important steps in its strategic plan to dominate Vietnam. Below are some main observations:

Economically, Vietnam’s import from China has increased dramatically, by 280% from 2006 to 2010. Since 2009, Vietnam’s trade deficit with China has equaled the deficit with the rest of the world. Currently, we have to import from China 80% to 90% of the needed materials for our processing and service industries. This includes a significant volume of petroleum, electricity, and industrial inputs. One fifth of imports from China are consumer goods, and this does not include an equivalent amount that enters the country clandestinely from China. Of particular concern is the fact that recently China has won as much as 90% of all engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts in Vietnam in areas such as electric power plants, metal and nonmetallic refining facilities, chemical plants, and bauxite and titanium mining facilities. In contrast, China has imported from Vietnam agricultural products and raw minerals the extraction of which leaves behind environmental problems with long-term consequences. In addition, we have allowed China to rent industrial and forest land near the common border, and have been unable to control counterfeit money entering the country from China. Our weak economy has been a fertile ground for China to infiltrate, control, and disrupt. And China has constructed huge dams upstream of our two largest rivers, causing consequences that we are not yet able to assess. Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that China has similarly infiltrated and controlled the economy and policies of our neighboring countries.

If China succeeds in its strategy to own the East Sea, Vietnam’s routes to the world will be blocked.

Politically, given the fact that Chinese infiltration and control of our economy has taken place over a number of years and is being continued, we should wonder what has China done to Vietnam, and to what extent has Chinese soft power influenced Vietnamese leaders? And to what extent has China been involved in the rampant corruption and social degradation in our society?

Our leaders have been too timid to make transparent the factual relationship between Vietnam and China for the Vietnamese people to be informed and to participate in seeking solutions. We, the people, are discontented and unable to comprehend our leaders’ behavior. The Party and the Government seem to be confused and alienated from the populace. International friends are worried and hesitant to support Vietnam’s just cause.

The Vietnamese leadership’s conduct regarding Vietnam–China bilateral relations is reflected in the joint press release following the meeting between the Deputy Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the two countries. This press release, made public by the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry on 26 June 2011, contains vagueness that is unfathomable and gives rise to worries for many Vietnamese inside and outside of Vietnam. For example:

• The press release completely ignored the aggressive actions on the East Sea taken by China in violation of Vietnam’s sovereignty and sovereign rights. Instead, it stated: “The two sides held that the relationship between Vietnam and China has developed in a healthy and stable manner, meeting the common aspirations and fundamental interests of the Vietnamese and Chinese people, and benefiting peace, stability and development in the region.” If this sentence is aimed at describing the current bilateral relationship between the two countries, then it is not correct, contrary to reality, and therefore dangerous to Vietnam. What has happened is the opposite of the statement. The Vietnamese leaders should demand that the Chinese leaders honor the guidelines coined by themselves; namely the “16 Golden Words” (i.e., friendly neighborliness, comprehensive cooperation, long-lasting stability, and future-looking) and “Four Goods” (i.e., good neighbors, good friends, good comrades, and good partners). We should not irresponsibly join in the refrain of “the two sides underlined the need to persist on directing the Vietnam-China comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership to develop exactly in line with the motto of “16 Golden Words” and the spirit of “Four Goods.”

• The press release further stated: “The two sides emphasized the necessity to actively implement the common perception of the two countries’ leaders, peacefully solving the disputes at sea through negotiation and friendly economic activities”. What is “common perception,” which in Vietnamese should be correctly understood as “common agreement”? To date, the Vietnamese leaders have not made it clear. However, the Chinese side has interpreted the “common perception” to its favor. The Spokesman of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated on 29 June 2011, that “The Vietnam side should implement the common perception of the leaders of the two countries to solve the dispute at sea,” and that “Both countries oppose the intervention regarding the South China Sea by countries outside the region.” Chinese politicians and press have repeatedly stated the reason for the dangerous flare-ups in the East Sea is the provocative actions of Vietnam and other countries in the region. These statements sometimes added that Chinese public has been prepared and ready for a war to occupy the “series of pearls,” the term China uses to refer to the islets and rocks in the Spratlys that are more than 1000 kilometers from the southernmost land point of China. The vagueness in the joint press release is favorable to China and detrimental to our country, including our relations with the third parties.

• The press release also stated: “[The two sides] stress the need to steer public opinions along the correct direction, avoiding comments and deeds that harm the friendship and trust among the people of the two countries.” China has used this statement to pressure Vietnam to restrain public opinion in our country, while allowing the Chinese press to publish slanderous and anti-Vietnam articles. We need to affirm that public opinion is needed to interprete Chinese actions and public statements that slander Vietnam and its people. Public opinion should play a support role to government political and diplomatic activities and should not be seen as “undermining the friendship and trust between the peoples of the two countries.” The Vietnamese people have the tradition and historic will, at all times, to sacrifice to maintain independence and to actively seek ways to build friendly relations with China. Vietnam has never attacked China, but has risen in arms to repulse China from its incursions and occupation in the past.

II. In the meantime, the nation is faced with multiple difficulties and risks

1. Our economy is in a state of under-development, with low quality, little effectiveness, and prolonged crises:

Most of economic efforts during the past few years were focused on “putting out fires,” e.g., trying to getting the economy out of immediate difficulties such as inflation. Since 2007, inflation has been ongoing at two digits (except in 2009), and estimates for 2011 are also at the high two digits. While internal and external resources have been mobilized at a high level that is heretofore unseen, their economic effectiveness is low. Our ICOR index, which has an inverse relationship with investment effectiveness, has been highest ever, and is also the highest in the region. The import-export imbalance is high. Our budget deficit has crossed the alarm threshold (5% of GDP in accordance with international standards). Our economy continues to rely on poor infrastructures, resulting in low effectiveness and competitiveness. Our growth has been based mostly on investment and low-skill, inexpensive labor, as well as exploitation of natural resources to the point of exhaustion. Our natural environment has been gravely damaged. The disparity between rich and poor is widening, and the distribution of income has become more and more unjust. Injustices in the distribution and accumulation of assets, land lease and use, implementation of laws, and formation of new power groups and monopolies are major issues that run contrary to the nation’s goal of building “a well-to-do citizenry, a strong country, and a society that is democratic, just, and civilized.” The ultimate result is a situation where the nominal income per capita has increased but the quality of life has decreased in multiple facets, including increased human insecurity and worsened quality of life for peasants and the majority of workers and salary earners.

2. Vietnam is experiencing worsened cultural and social conditions

New values and progressive values cannot keep up with national development needs nor can they overcome unbecoming conditions and antiquated social behavior. Social justice is seriously compromised. People, the most valuable national asset, are not truly liberated.

Of the many areas of concern that need to be addressed is the state of national education. Our educational system is backwards in many aspects compared to other nations in the region, in spite of the fact that we have one of the region’s highest share of income expensed on education (from both the viewpoint of the nation and of the individual).

Our educational curricula, management, teaching and learning processes are quite backwards, sometimes even erroneous. We have a relatively high percentage of population with a general education, and the percentage of academic diplomas at every level attained by the citizenry is relatively high compared to countries at an equivalent level of income. However, in reality, the quality of human resources and the effectiveness of our labor are lower than those of many other countries—far lower than what is needed to lift the nation to modern time. The fundamental reason is that the national educational system in the existing socio-political system does not aim at developing free and creative citizens who are empowered to be leaders. It is an education system that aims at developing people who race for trophies and quantities irrespective of value.

Our people recognize and condemn the tolerance of falsehood and degradation in the national cultural and spiritual life. These poor social conditions, coupled with rampant corruption, create new types of injustices that eat into our traditional values. The absence of transparency in all aspects of life is fertile ground for corruption and negative values. This reality has become a serious barrier to the development of a healthy and civilized society, and has created an environment of lawlessness that is conducive to mediocrity in the political system.

3. The political system is rampant with contradictions and is a barrier to the national development

The current national economic, cultural, and social conditions clearly reflect increased contradictions within and degradation of our socio-political system and government. Faced with urgent needs, it is necessary to transform the structure of our national economy and to implement an economic model that focuses on quality rather quantity.

Modern times require changes in the political system that erases barriers to renovation and economic development and promote the full and effective use of all resources. While the need for political changes has been raised by the leadership, goals, plans, and methods have not been devised for implementation. We are particularly concerned with increasing corruption in the administrative and political system; and with the dubious behavior and unethical conduct of government personnel and party cadres. This system has been increasing in size, thus aggravating further the scale of contradiction and corruption, causing ever increasing losses for the nation. This situation, coupled with errors in organization and personnel deployment, renders ineffective efforts to renovate the political system in spite of much cost and effort. Many projects are for show, with falsities in both format and content. Democracy continues to be seriously violated. Running for and election to offices of power have not been accorded true democracy. Many citizens’ rights that are spelled out in the Constitution are not allowed nor protected in daily life; of these, are the rights to free speech, free access to information, freedom to establish groups, and freedom to demonstrate.

We can state that our nation is faced with the contradiction between the people’s desire to live in a country that is “peaceful, unified, independent, democratic, and prosperous” on the one hand, and a political system that is more and more degraded and ineffective, on the other hand. This contradiction becomes more and more dangerous to the future of the nation as we face the threat from China in its design to infiltrate Vietnam.

Geographically we cannot move our country to another location far from China. Realities force us to take a turn that is decisive to our nation’s future. Being a neighbor to ambitious China that is on the way to become a world superpower, Vietnam needs to sustainably protect our independence and sovereignty; to command respect from China; and to develop a bilateral relationship that is truly for peace, friendship, cooperation and development. This objective is very critical on numerous fronts, including the protection of our islands, special economic zones, and sea and sky in the East Sea in the face of Chinese claims that have become more and more ominous. China has conducted direct military attacks and is preparing more attacks. The most dangerous front in which China has concentrated power and influence is the infiltration and/or disruption of our economic, political, and cultural life. On this front, China carries out threats and inducements at the same time, in the name of the mutual safeguard of socialism, in order to sow division between our people and our political system. It infiltrates our leadership, weakens our national unity, and lessens our capability to maintain our national security and defense. If it defeats us on this front, China will defeat us on all fronts.

We are now in a new situation in international relations as China rises to become a superpower with plans and actions that sometimes ignore international laws, conventions, and stability. Most countries in the world, with perhaps the exception of China, want Vietnam to be independent, self-governing, prosperous, and developed, with the ability to contribute to peace and stability in the region. They want Vietnam to have friendly and cooperative relations with its neighbors and the world, and to pursue mutual peace and prosperity. This new world attitude towards Vietnam is a tremendous opportunity for our country to deploy resources that have heretofore been neglected, in order to lift the nation to a position it deserves in the community of nations. To seize this opportunity and avoid the risk of isolation, the Vietnamese people and its leaders need to become involved in the struggle to preserve values that constitute the foundation of a progressive world; that is peace, democracy, freedom, protection of human rights, and protection of the environment.

III. Our petition

With the above, we earnestly present the following petition to the Congress and the Politbureau of the Vietnamese Communist Party:

1. Make transparent before the Vietnamese people and the world community the real relationship between China and Vietnam:

Provide facts and reasons to support Vietnam’s sovereignty over the islands and exclusive economic zones in the East Sea in a manner that is convincing and compliant with international laws. Affirm consistently our goodwill regarding building and preserving friendly and cooperative relations with China. State unequivocally our resolve to protect our independence, sovereignty, and integrity of our land and water. Explain the background, content, and legal validity of the message that North Vietnam’s Premier Pham Van Dong sent to China’s Premier Chu An Lai in 1958 regarding the East Sea, in order to conclusively do away with intentional misinterpretation by China.

We must make a distinction between a power group within the Chinese government that harbors unethical and illegal plans and actions against Vietnam, and the friendly attitude of the majority of Chinese people toward the Vietnamese people. We should be ever ready to be friends and trusted partners of all nations. We should have particular respect for friendly and cooperative relations with nations in Southeast Asia, major nations, and all nations who are concerned with the peaceful resolution of the competing claims in the East Sea.

2. Inform the Vietnamese people of today’s national reality

Inform the people of risks to the future of the nation. Seek unity. Assemble spiritual, mental, and physical resources to develop and protect the country. Renovate comprehensively the education and economic systems. Raise the people’s levels of consciousness, unity, and well being that are required for the protection and development of the country.

In order to do so, we need to overcome the misdirection of the national educational and economic systems caused by ideological fundamentalism. Political reforms, therefore, are a precondition for all other reforms.

3. Implement by all means citizen’s rights regarding freedom and democracy that have been defined by the Constitution:

Liberate and promote people’s desire and efforts to build and protect the nation. Take advantage of new opportunities. Respond to the challenges and needs of today’s world.

In the process of implementing the rights to freedom and democracy that are spelled out in the Constitution, it is necessary to seriously implement the rights to free speech, free publication, free expression of political views by peaceful demonstrations, free association, and transparency in all national activities.

4. Call upon all citizens, Vietnamese inside and outside of Vietnam, to support the task of collaboration, cooperation, conflict resolution, and unity:

This is to be done in the spirit of reconciliation and compassion, without any distinction as to political belief, religion, ethnicity, and social positions. All citizens shall close the page on our past differences in the interest of the national good. All citizens shall have the common goal of building and protecting the nation with all of our hearts, minds, and creativity.

5. Leaders of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the only power that exists in Vietnam, shall be totally responsible for today’s national condition

They shall commit to the national interest above all others. They shall carry the flag of democracy to push for political reforms and the liberation of the people’s potential for the task of nation building and protection. They shall push back on corruption and social degradation. They shall bring the country out of today’s weaknesses and dependencies. They shall lead the nation to sustainable development. They shall lead the nation to walk side by side with the progressive world in the interest of peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, and environmental protection.

Finally, we earnestly invite our compatriots, inside and outside of Vietnam, to support and sign this petition. By doing so with factual deeds, we Vietnamese will have demonstrated our iron will to arrest and push back plans and actions that infringe on Vietnam’s independence, self-determination, and sovereignty. By doing so, we are resolved to eradicate injustice, poverty, and backwardness in our country. By doing so, we are building and preserving the nation, and we are upholding the Vietnamese tradition of standing up for our independence. By doing so, we will be proud to stand before the people of the world and our children and grandchildren.

Seizing the opportunity to lead our nation out of danger and to build a sustainable society in peace is the sacred responsibility of all of us, the Vietnamese.
Made in Hanoi, July 10, 2011
Signature blocks are attached

By Michael Karadjis

February 2, 2011 — Over the last year or so, tensions have been heightened in the dispute over two island groups in the South China Sea (also known as the East Sea in Vietnam), involving rival claims to some or all of the islands by Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and even Brunei. The first three of these countries claim all of both island groups.

The islands in question are known in English as the Paracels and the Spratlys, in Vietnamese as the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa, and in Chinese as the Xisha and the Nansha. Both island groups are uninhabited rocky islands and reefs; there is neither a Vietnamese population oppressed by the current Chinese occupation of the Hoang Sa nor a Chinese population oppressed by Vietnamese rule over most of the Truong Sa. Thus there are no questions of self-determination of actual peoples. Therefore, international law would seem to be the best way to judge the status question, unless further negotiations settle things differently.

Since international law is on the side of Vietnamese sovereignty, as will be shown below, this article will use the Vietnamese terms Hoang Sa and Truong Sa for the sake of simplicity. The Hoang Sa are the more northerly group, approximately equidistant from the central coast of Vietnam to their west and the far south Chinese island of Hai Nam to their north (hundreds of kilometres from both); the Truong Sa are far south of this, nowhere near China, off the south central coast of Vietnam but also a similar distance to the closest points in Malaysia in the south and the Philippines in the east.

At the outset, however, I wish to stress that the actual question of sovereignty is less important than the differing ways that China and Vietnam have treated the issue. Indeed, if someone were to say to me, “What does it matter who legally owns a bunch of rocky, uninhabited islands? Surely the dispute is about potential oil deposits underneath. The surrounding countries should jointly exploit them and share the potential wealth if it is shown to exist, or perhaps leave the regional environment alone”, I would say, “I agree completely.”

But I believe the Vietnamese government has a better stance, separate to my own sympathies, and its correctness is based on international law. Because the Vietnamese government is opposed to the militarisation of the conflict, believes that the defence of uninhabited islands can only be carried out diplomatically and that it is not worth a single soldier’s life. Vietnam clearly lacks the military power to enforce its rights anyway.

By contrast, the Chinese government does have the means to militarily enforce its imperial designs and is doing so aggressively. Its policy has consisted of military aggression, in 1956, 1974 and 1988, to seize the islands, and in recent years its growing militarisation of the dispute and aggressive actions towards Vietnamese people, mostly poor fisherfolk, on these seas, is pushing a confrontation regardless of what one thinks of the worth of fighting over the islands’ status. In the last few years, China has:

• moved its war fleet into both groups of islands as a permanent fixture, with activities that include mass kidnapping of Vietnamese fisherfolk for ransom
• declared that the two island groups now occupy the same strategic position in China’s international affairs as do Taiwan and Tibet, that is, something close to a declaration of war on Vietnam
• created a new province in southern China incorporating the two island groups.

To make this clear, it is well worth examining the gravity of this situation. In 2010, Chinese society was mobilised in a nationalistic paroxysm against Japan when just one Chinese captain was detained by the Japanese navy in another island group that is disputed between China and Japan. The nature of China’s aggression in the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa – and the extraordinary level of double standards shown by Beijing – was captured vividly in this piece by Greg Torode in the South China Morning Post (http://www.viet-studies.info/kinhte/DoubleStandards.htm) in reference to this other issue with Japan:

“With apologies to John Lennon, imagine that the Chinese fishing trawler captain now in detention in Japan was not a lone individual, but one of several hundred fishermen captured and held over the past 18 months or so. Imagine, too, that some of their boats had been rammed and sunk by Japanese patrols; others, meanwhile, had their catches seized.

“Or that once in detention, at times for months, Japan had offered their release only after the payment of thousands of dollars per head. Their government objected to the payment of ransoms, but some families were so desperate to see their fathers, sons and husbands that they quietly paid up. Rumours spread that some had been shot.

“I put such a scenario to a mainland student friend. He was shocked. ‘I cannot even imagine the outcome’, he said. ‘There would be such anger against the Japanese government that I cannot believe that ordinary Japanese would be safe in China.’ Certainly it does not bear thinking about, given the feverish pitch to the diplomatic and social pressure now building on Tokyo over the continued detention of the captain.

“Yet this scenario has happened, but not involving Japanese patrols against Chinese fishing boats over the disputed islets of the East China Sea. Instead, it represents the actions taken by Chinese vessels in the disputed South China Sea against Vietnamese fishermen. Instead of the Diaoyu Islands, most of the detentions have taken place in waters surrounding the Paracel archipelago – claimed by both countries but occupied by China since 1974.

“Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry has lodged formal protests while its state press, a less sophisticated but equally unsubtle variant of the mainland model, has churned out tales of woe from grieving relatives waiting for news. Under pressure from annoyed Chinese diplomats, Vietnamese government officials have tried to keep nationalistic tensions from spilling over into street protests.”

This description is accurate in all respects – indeed, the ransoms demanded can be US$10,000 for one person. It goes without saying that the Chinese war fleet does not really feel so threatened by dirt-poor Vietnamese fisherfolk that such military action would be required, even if the islands in question were indisputably Chinese; it further goes without question that the mighty Chinese navy does not need these ransoms as a fundraiser. There is one reason for these actions: to humiliate, to show who is boss. And that is the kind of action that becomes necessary when a large capitalist power, such as China, begins to develop into a new imperial power in its own right. While that is another more complex issue, it is clearly related and ultimately is a question that will need to be confronted.

In any case, there is clearly going to be no “sharing” of any resources as long as China has its way, because that is a socialist concept, utterly foreign to the current Chinese leadership.

Now all that does not mean – to knock out a red herring – that socialists in the West should start launching public campaigns against “Chinese imperialism”, that we should be putting “Down with China!” on the front pages of our newspapers and campaigning in the streets. Our main enemy is at home, and in as much as Australia is connected to US imperialism, our key focus will always be – as it always has been – denouncing and exposing US imperialism. Note, of course, that in Australia’s case, our ruling class is somewhat more equidistant between the US and China, so it’s not that simple, but still is basically with the US. And all this also assumes some great clash between the US and China, which in my opinion is also overstated – there is clearly rivalry, but also a great deal of cooperation.

Nevertheless, the main point remains – denouncing China is hardly our main public concern. And for the record, though China may be morphing into an emerging imperial power in its own right, I would still strongly defend China from any direct attack by US imperialism.

‘Sinophobia’?

However, socialists are allowed to discuss our views on things that do not go on the front covers of our campaign material, in order to understand the world. Yet there has been a certain reaction from some quarters of the left to even discussing the issue; simply to do so can be greeted with accusations of “Sinophobia” (in the same way that any criticism of Israel is labelled by Zionists “anti-Semitism”) or of being unwitting servants of US imperialism. This way of thinking is often referred to as “Manichean”, that is, a biblical view whereby the world is divided into Good and Bad, so if it happens that some tyrannical capitalist regime falls out of favour with US imperialism for reasons having nothing to do with anything progressive, then such a regime is seen as having a silver lining, and criticism of it is henceforth banned. Such views are an embarrassment to those spouting them and an affront to socialism, and reflect an inability to cope with “complex” ideas such as Marxist analysis.

However, Manicheans can often get away with it by posing as thus being “anti-imperialist holier-than-thou” in an attempt to shut up their critics (e.g., “How dare you criticise Milosevic or Mugabe or the Burmese junta when US imperialism is also against them” etc., and other such arguments). But the problem for them in this case is that, since they have now decided that China’s current rivalry with the US makes everything China does Good, they find themselves in a most uncomfortable situation of being in direct opposition to the martyr socialist nation Vietnam, which waged the longest anti-imperialist war in history; a nation that they would also prefer not to criticise. Because it is none other than Vietnam – not capitalist Indonesia, Malaysia or elsewhere – that is in the front of the firing line of the implications of capitalist China’s growing emergence as an imperial power.

It must be a rather uncomfortable position to be in to feel forced to choose between two countries that many of these people consider to be socialist, let alone siding with the position of the one that is far richer, far more powerful on a world scale, and the one that has violated Vietnam’s sovereignty numerous times in the past, usually in open collaboration with imperialism. Indeed, China invaded Vietnam in the recent past with the direct support of US imperialism. China is currently moving its capital all over the developing world and replicating typically exploitative patterns well-worn by the imperialist powers before it. It must also be a rather uncomfortable position to be to stand with China against the position of a weak, bombed-back-to-the-stone-age, developing socialist country, even though Beijing is the first to militarise the conflict and push greater-power nationalism, while Vietnam is opposed to such militarisation and is trying to contain the partially justified local nationalism rising over the issue.

So keep this context in mind as we now analyse the actual issue in dispute.

Debate

One way of dealing with this problem is to pretend it does not exist and hope it goes away. A more unique way was recently presented on the Green Left discussion list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/). This was to openly take China’s position in the dispute, but in order to avoid the Vietnam elephant in the room, to also pretend that the Vietnamese government agrees with China’s view! While one particular post to a discussion list may be of little consequence, it is useful to quote it as an example of the problem while introducing some of the propaganda put out by the Chinese regime. The post read in part:

“As for all your smoke and mirrors and pretend concern for the ‘poor Vietnamese fishermen’ it would be more useful if you had looked for the views of the Vietnamese government itself on the subject of the Xisha and Nansha Islands.
“Nhan Dan of Viet Nam reported in great detail on September 6, 1958, the Chinese Government’s Declaration of September 4, 1958, that the breadth of the territorial sea of the People’s Republic of China should be 12 nautical miles and that this provision should apply to all territories of the People’s Republic of China, including all islands on the South China Sea. On September 14 the same year, Premier Pham Van Dong of the Vietnamese Government solemnly stated in his note to Premier Zhou Enlai that Viet Nam ‘recognizes and supports the Declaration of the Government of the People’s Republic of China on China’s territorial sea’.”

It is somewhat extraordinary that in order to “prove” such an absurd proposition, someone would quote what they think a Vietnamese prime minister said in 1958, 52 years ago, as evidence of the Vietnamese government’s view. But it is not so absurd when we consider that the poster got this quote from a Chinese propaganda site, and the reason the Chinese site needs to go back to 1958 is that there is simply nothing else in the intervening years to quote.

I will spare readers even a single quote from any Vietnamese government or Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) declaration from 2010, or 2000, or 1990, or 1980, or 1970 or any other time, because anyone who wants to know Vietnam’s view on the two island groups only has to Google for a minute or so to understand why the poster in question had to go back as far as 1958 to find a quote he thought justified his assertion.

But anyway, let’s now look at the propaganda itself, as an introduction to the development of the issue in the modern era.

Yes, China did make that declaration on September 4, 1958. Yes, Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong did make that diplomatic reply 10 days later. I have the whole text of the reply. Yes, it supports China extending its territorial waters to 12 miles. But the reply studiously avoids saying anything about that part of the contents of the Chinese declaration which defines China’s territory as including the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa. For the sake of clarity, the islands are hundreds of miles away from China, so are not covered by China’s 12-mile territorial water boundaries, that is a separate issue; it just happens that the Chinese government used this declaration to push both issues. The non-mention of this part of China’s declaration in Pham Van Dong’s letter is very significant.

Nevertheless, why would Pham Van Dong write this diplomatic letter in such a way that has enabled both Chinese, and as we will see below, Vietnamese chauvinists and reactionaries to use it against Vietnam and the CPV? First we need to understand the context.

Context

In 1954, under massive Soviet and Chinese pressure, the CPV government in Hanoi signed the Geneva Accords, temporarily dividing Vietnam into north and south, with the proviso that elections would be held in 1956 to reunify the country. If the division had been drawn at where the actual forces on the ground had stopped fighting, the CPV-led (Vietminh) forces would have had about three-quarters of the country, not half. By 1956, the US and the puppet Diem regime installed in the south had cancelled the elections because it knew it would have resulted in an overwhelming vote for the CPV across both north and south.

These Geneva Accords defined Vietnamese territory as including both the Hoang Sa and the Truong Sa island groups. These accords were signed by China. Thus the last actual international treaty signed by both Vietnam and China on this issue clearly defined these island groups as Vietnamese. This is thus the standing international law. The reason both island groups were declared part of Vietnam’s territory was because they were part of the Vietnam colony of French imperialism, which had just been defeated by the Vietminh in 1954. The reason they were part of the French colony of Vietnam was not because France had conquered them from some mythical Chinese rule in the 19th century but, on the contrary, because the two island groups were a well-established part of Vietnam’s Nguyen Dynasty long before the arrival of the French, and the islands’ resources had been exploited by Vietnam’s Hoang Sa company since the 18th century. So France naturally got them by invading Vietnam. This is the modern history of the islands. As for whether Chinese maritime expeditions in the islands from the time of the “Song Dynasty” some 1000 years ago can be said to constitute some mythical prior Chinese “sovereignty” will be touched on in the section below on nationalism.

Getting back to the 20th century, the two archipelagos were put under the temporary control of “south Vietnam” in 1954. Once the US/Saigon cancelled the elections and launched barbarous attacks on the CPV-led Vietminh forces in the south, forcing the latter to re-launch the struggle some years later, the new CPV-led formations (in the south), the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) and National Liberation Front (NLF), declared their aim to be the liberation of the whole territory of “south Vietnam” as defined in Geneva. They never said anything about giving part of their territory to China.

However, in the late 1950s, just as the US/Diem regime was resuming its aggression in the south, backed by US arms and “advisors”, China sent its navy to seize the eastern part of the Hoang Sa, despite its signature at Geneva. Incidentally, at the same time Taiwan also laid claim to the islands and moved in and seized one of the larger islands in the Truong Sa – China and Taiwan may have been enemies, but preying on a weakened Vietnam was something they had in common.

Under this two-pronged pressure, Vietnam, seeing imperialism as its main enemy, wanted to soften things with China by not openly confronting it over its seizure of these islands; thus Dong’s letter simply avoided the issue.

But since US imperialism was also confronting China in this period, the Vietnamese government was completely sincere in agreeing with China’s extension of its territorial waters to 12 miles as a protective measure – thus Dong’s letter was not just diplomatic, but an act of solidarity, despite China’s clear lack of solidarity in seizing the islands while Vietnam was at war with imperialism and putting its renewed claim to the islands into this same declaration. Vietnam refused to play by the rules of anti-solidaristic Maoist tradition.

US-China anti-Vietnam alliance

China’s military conquest of the western part of the Hoang Sa in 1974 was even worse. Just as the most barbarous war against any country in history was coming to a close, and following US President Richard Nixon’s famous trip to Beijing at the height of the US genocide against Vietnam to announce the Maoist regime’s cynical betrayal, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with China’s leaders. Given that by late 1974 it was clear to the US that Saigon would fall, and socialist Vietnam would thus inherit the islands, Kissinger gave the green light to “socialist” China to launch a full-scale military attack on the positions of his capitalist Saigon allies in the western Hoang Sa. So Chinese and Vietnamese troops were killed as part of a Machiavellian plan to prevent the coming unified socialist Vietnam from controlling the islands, and to kick sand in Hanoi’s face.

This US-China anti-Vietnam alliance stepped up in the second half of the 1970s and 1980s (including China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam and joint US-Chinese backing of the genocidal Khmer Rouge’s war against Vietnam and the Cambodian people), and it incorporated all the US-backed capitalist military dictatorships of South-East Asia in an effort to strangle the Vietnamese revolution. In this context, first the Philippines in the late 1970s and early 1980s, then Malaysia in the mid-1980s, also militarily seized eight islands and three islands respectively of the Truong Sa (Spratleys) from Vietnam, while Taiwan also re-stated its claims. Then, in 1988, China again launched a full-scale naval attack against socialist Vietnam and seized six islands of the Truong Sa.

At present, the whole of the Hoang Sa is under Chinese occupation, while Vietnam controls most of the Truong Sa (21 islands), China controls six islands, the Philippines eight, Malaysia three and Taiwan one.

Vietnam’s reaction: Stand firm, but avoid nationalism

What then of Vietnam’s reaction to all this? Is Vietnam similarly just beating nationalist drums over a bunch of rocks? In fact, if we go back to the last paragraph quoted above from the Greg Torode article on the Chinese navy’s kidnapping of Vietnamese fisherfolk, we read:

“Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry has lodged formal protests while its state press, a less sophisticated but equally unsubtle variant of the mainland model, has churned out tales of woe from grieving relatives waiting for news. Under pressure from annoyed Chinese diplomats, Vietnamese government officials have tried to keep nationalistic tensions from spilling over into street protests.”

The indicates how differently Vietnam reacts – trying to keep down the nationalistic reaction – despite the massively greater provocation compared with the detention of a single Chinese captain by Japan, which produced a highly nationalistic response from the Chinese government. This difference regarding nationalism is a class difference.

And that is why I also oppose the “dissident” Vietnamese opposition. Indeed, going back to the famous Pham Van Dong letter of 1958, the distortion of this letter by Chinese propaganda mirrors the exact same distortion of it by right-wing Vietnamese “dissidents” and overseas reactionaries, who for years now have been campaigning for Vietnam to take a “tougher line” with China over the islands, and claim that the CPV is a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and a betrayer of Vietnam (wow, they should talk). They also seize on this letter to justify their views on alleged CPV treachery.

But since the CPV in fact continually and unambiguously claims the islands are Vietnamese, the only thing the right wing can really be objecting to is the Vietnamese government’s other view, that there is no military solution. The “dissidents” have thus turned themselves into the national chauvinist camp and are essentially advocating war with China. The difference between China and Vietnam on this issue is not so much who is right or wrong on the legal issues, but rather the fact that the equivalent of these Vietnamese chauvinists are already in power in Beijing.

They are playing the nationalist card because it is now available. Some sections of the “dissidents” are even ridiculously calling for a boycott of Chinese goods! However, this nationalist sentiment is being made available to the “dissidents” by China’s actions, as well as many of its exploitative investment practices inside Vietnam and other issues. It is not only the islands. China has become a major investor in Vietnam, and like other foreign capitalist investors, many investments show little regard for any social or environmental concerns. Like other investors, Chinese businesses develop special financial relations with certain politicians and sections of the state and government to push their business interests. That makes them no different to any other, but the fact that China is a giant neighbour with a history of aggression against Vietnam and a current bad policy on the islands tends to make Vietnamese more leery of the Chinese variety, however “unfair” that may seem to some well-meaning Western anti-imperialists.

In terms of labour, Chinese investors, like elsewhere in the Third World, import an army of skilled Chinese workers, leaving only jobs like sweepers for the Vietnamese, thus even the usual “employment gains” or skills development associated with foreign investment are largely missing. Chinese bosses in Vietnam openly say they prefer their own workers – who they can keep barrack-style away from Vietnamese labour laws – to “lazy” and “undisciplined” Vietnamese workers, i.e., workers who are more likely to strike and less likely to take shit from the boss than the imported workers, who are totally dependent on the bosses.

Also China’s massive damming of the upper reaches of the Mekong River in China itself, and also in Laos, Burma and Cambodia, is having a dramatic effect on downstream agriculture, and the most downstream is Vietnam’s Mekong rice bowl.

In a recent conversation with a friend who has a relative in the border police, a marked change of attitude of Chinese police in recent years was reported. A big problem in Vietnam is the smuggling of women and children to China. The guard reports a markedly reduced level of cooperation – Vietnam tells the Chinese police exactly which village a girl has been taken to, but the Chinese side at best brings back the girl but does nothing about the criminals responsible, who are sometimes found trying to re-enter Vietnam; at worst Chinese police do not even rescue the girl. Exaggerations? Perhaps? Anecdotal? Perhaps? But we need to recognise in such stories real feelings and beliefs among Vietnamese that are not entirely baseless. My friend’s point was not that Chinese police are evil and approve of this horrible trade. It was that this marked change of attitude to any honest and equal cooperation with Vietnamese police – like the deliberate and pointless humiliation at sea – was an attitude that reflects the rise of an imperial power that needs to demonstrate who is boss.

Ecological destruction fuels hostility

A major issue now is the massive bauxite-aluminium development in Vietnam’s central highlands, which is set to destroy the ecology of this region and wreck the lives of the ethnic minorities who live there. There is massive opposition in Vietnam to this development, including from many prominent scientists, from many in the National Assembly, from sections of the army and CPV, and from people more generally. No less than General Vo Nguyen Giap has written three open letters to the Vietnamese government protesting this development. Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, of 1972 Paris negotiations fame, has also signed one of the many petitions against it.

The foreign investor responsible is a huge Chinese company. In my opinion, that in itself should be irrelevant. The objection is environmental; it matters not which foreign investors are involved, and the Vietnamese state mining company is the local partner in any case. However, the nature of Chinese company labour practices described above has given an extra “security” angle to all this – the central highlands have vast strategic significance, being the region where the US-backed southern regime was decisively defeated in 1974-75. With China’s generally aggressive stance, having thousands of Chinese skilled workers barracked in the region under Chinese bosses with little or no reference to Vietnamese authorities has raised alarm bells.

Now I have something of a problem with this; it bends a little in the nationalist direction I am opposed to; and the “dissident” right wing is exploiting the issue. However, General Giap is not someone who can easily be classified as a simple-minded anti-China nationalist – his main objection is environmental, having been a strong partisan of the environment since the 1980s – but he has also spoken out on the “security” aspect, reflecting a widespread apprehension among war veterans, and the fact of his opinion is reason enough to at least take it seriously.

It is the Vietnamese government that is trying to contain all the popular nationalism associated with all these issues, which has some justice as its basis due to China’s actions, but which also has an ugly and reactionary potential of its own, like the kind now ruling China. Far from using the islands to promote an opposing nationalism, the Vietnamese government has, if anything, tended to overreact against this current, arresting countless bloggers and the like who peacefully spread their anti-China views, rather than confronting them politically. The government has also prevented anti-China demonstrations (in contrast to the weeks of anti-US demonstrations at the outset of the invasion of Iraq), and is still going out of its way to cultivate close political, economic, military and ideological relations with its powerful northern neighbour despite China’s open cynicism in these relations.

For example, when another poster on the Green Left discussion list tried to paint the recent visit by a US warship to Vietnam as the beginning of a US-Vietnam anti-China alliance, I was able to point to the absurdity of this by showing that, despite China’s aggressiveness, Vietnam has carried out nine full-scale sets of military naval manoeuvres with the Chinese navy in the region in recent years, all much more fully military exercises than the symbolic search and rescue exercise (and bi-cultural cooking lessons) on the US ship. Vietnam certainly has the right to manoeuvre, but the US ship visit was but one minor aspect of this; its far greater relations with China itself are also a necessary manoeuvre in its own way; and buying advanced military submarines from Russia, giving Russia the contract to build Vietnam’s first nuclear plant, and choosing Russian consultants and Russian technology to develop the former US base of Cam Ranh Bay into a service centre to repair submarines and civil and military vessels, represent another angle, that are likewise inconsistent with becoming a US ally.

There is plenty to criticise the Vietnamese government for, but its stance on this issue is not one of them.

Nationalism and class: National chauvinism of a rising imperial power

Which leads to me to a point about nationalism and class. Nationalism, in my admittedly harsh opinion, is the ideology of the bourgeoisie, and is essentially anti-working class and anti-internationalist, except when there is a genuine national struggle against oppression and only in as much as such “nationalism of the oppressed” temporarily aids that struggle and no further.
Internationalism is the ideology compatible with socialism. We have seen time and again that when nations have thrown off their failed bureaucratic state socialist projects, the emergent bourgeoisie has tended to adopt nationalism as its ideology, feeling the need for an ideology to preserve some kind of cross-class “national unity” when the old socialist and internationalist ideology is no longer relevant, and their class interests can no longer be contained even with the pretense of official socialist ideology. As 20 years of market socialism were coming to an end in the Yugoslav federation in the mid-1980s, we saw first the rise of a primitive, aggressive bourgeois national chauvinism in the dominant nation, Serbia, and soon after in the second most dominant nation, Croatia, both being expressions of the capitalist class that had arisen out of market socialism.

The fact that China is more advanced along the capitalist path than Vietnam is, in my opinion, reflected in this more aggressive nationalist position of the Chinese leadership, in sharp contrast to the Vietnamese CP’s attempt to battle this nationalism in Vietnam.

In 2006, this need to build a reactionary nationalism to replace socialism as a unifying ideology – when socialism has become irrelevant – was explained in unusually stark terms in an official Chinese journal, China and World Affairs, by Lin Zhibo, a deputy director of the commentary department of the official People’s Daily. This is from the WSWS site (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/cha2-m10_prn.shtml), which I wouldn’t usually quote, but as this is direct from the Chinese journal, it speaks for itself. First, regarding the paroxysm of chauvinism in both China and Japan in 2005, when Chinese mobs attacked Japanese civilian property in China in response to Japan’s fascistic revisionism about WWII in its textbooks, he wrote:

Our one-sided efforts at friendship [with Japan] have been totally useless. Chinese-Japanese relations will be better handled only if China’s stance is tougher than now. It’s not a totally bad thing to have an enemy country. Mencius [the ancient Chinese philosopher] said, “Without foes and external threats, a state will surely perish”. Having an enemy country and external peril forces us to strengthen ourselves.

But if that wasn’t bad enough, Lin Zhibo got even more theoretical about it, noting that, in the context of growing social inequality and the fact that the Communist Party can no longer claim to be socialist:

“Today in China an ideological vacuum is emerging. What can China rely on for cohesion? I believe that apart from nationalism, there is no other recourse.”

This rising bourgeois nationalism was evident not only in that conflict with Japan, but also, several months ago, in a similar mass event, over — ironically enough — the Japanese capture of one Chinese national in other islands disputed between Japan and China discussed above, and especially in the anti-Tibetan hysteria over the issue of the Olympic torch, when the whole of the bourgeois Chinese “dissident” blogosphere, which would normally be anti-CCP, swung into full “national” mood right behind the CCP.

Before concluding, I just want to extend the discussion of nationalism a little. The Chinese propaganda quoted above, apart from referring to the famous Pham Van Dong letter of 1958, also made the following claim:

“Vice Foreign Minister Dung Van Khiem of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam received Mr. Li Zhimin, charge d’affaires ad interim of the Chinese Embassy in Viet Nam and told him that “according to Vietnamese data, the Xisha and Nansha Islands are historically part of Chinese territory.” Mr. Le Doc, Acting Director of the Asian Department of the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry, who was present then, added that “judging from history, these islands were already part of China at the time of the Song Dynasty.”

Now I can find no references to judge whether this is even true, and nor is there any reference to which decade these alleged statements were made. However, the reference to the “Democratic Republic if Vietnam” suggests this was during the war years, when Vietnamese diplomats may have felt the need to be over-diplomatic to China at times. So let’s just assume the statements did in fact happen.

First, being “historically” part of Chinese territory has no meaning. Southern Vietnam was “historically” part of Cambodia, the empire of Angkor, in the 13th century. Vietnam itself was “historically” part of China, for a cool 1000 years up to around 1000 AD. Thus that diplomatic nicety was in fact saying nothing. Moreover, the second statement further stresses this point; by referring to the Song Dynasty, of some 1000 years ago, Le Doc was able to trivialise the Chinese claim while appearing to be diplomatic about it.

Let’s be clear: even in the Song Dynasty, the main evidence is Chinese maritime expeditions in the islands. That tells us nothing about any “sovereignty” of the Chinese empire at the time. Clearly, Chinese people never settled the islands. In any case, there are many Chinese maps over the last 1000 years which show the southern end of China’s border to be the large Chinese island of Hai Nam, and not including either island archipelago. Even the vague Chinese references that could be interpreted as showing a Chinese claim cease in the second half of the last millennium.

But in the end, so what? If Chinese maritime expeditions, or even maps, from the Song Dynasty of 1000 years ago make the islands part of China today, and if Chinese rule over Tibet for several hundred years over the last millennium mean Tibet must be subjugated forever, does not this also mean that 1000 years of Chinese rule over Vietnam gives China a claim to sovereignty over Vietnam? And that is precisely the problem with “historical” nonsense being dredged up to justify territorial claims, aggression and occupation today: they are irrational and obscurantist, and are generally only used by right-wing nationalist regimes to justify rule in regions where they have no business.

Thus references to the “Song Dynasty” remind one of Mussolini’s references to the Roman Empire to justify fascist aggression around the Mediterranean, of the Zionist movement’s references to the Kingdom of David and Solomon to justify the occupation of Palestine, of the Greek nationalist obsession with the empire of Alexander the Great to deny the rights of Macedonians today, of the Serbian nationalists’ obsession with a battle waged by a brief Serbian empire in the 1300s against the Ottomans to justify the occupation of Kosovo, of the Khmer Rouge’s raising of the ghost of Angkor to justify its claims and aggression against Vietnam’s Mekong region, of Hindu fanatics’ obsession with some temple that was turned into a mosque hundreds of years ago, which they destroyed in the 1990s with catastrophic consequences for all. The list is only short. So much for the “Song Dynasty” argument.

The big picture

There is of course a bigger picture to all this, which includes the fact that there is likely to be oil in the region of these islands; and US-China rivalry in the Asian region, which includes the question of who dominates the seaways of the region, though at this stage it is important to understand that no one is actually blocking anyone else in what are mostly international waters. Even if China’s claim to both island groups as a whole were acted upon, it would not block any ship beyond the 12 miles of territorial waters around them. US imperialism undoubtedly has an interest in trying to contain China’s rise, and as such is maneuvering with the ASEAN states, including Vietnam. Socialists and anti-imperialists oppose any US intervention into this conflict, which can only heighten tensions, and which is only motivated by its own imperialist interests. Indeed, it would tend to heighten tensions precisely by inflaming Chinese nationalism, whose first victim would be Vietnam.

However, there is a big difference between opposing US intervention in the conflict and taking a reflexive “pro-China” position on the issues that divide China from other countries in South-East Asia, especially Vietnam. This is where Manichean “anti-imperialism” has ended up: as China is now seen as a balance to US imperialism, even if its main conflict is not with pro-US regimes in the region but with socialist martyr Vietnam, a tendency emerges to “support China”, whatever that means, in this conflict.

This is a very wrong and anti-internationalist way of viewing the issue. However, beyond this, if there really is such significant rivalry between the US and China, as many now describe – and while real, I tend to find it exaggerated – then that begs the question of the nature of this rivalry: is this just the US trying to contain a large capitalist power, to keep it in its place, as we see elsewhere (e.g., Iran), or is it incipient inter-imperialist rivalry? It is well to remember how rapidly imperialist states rose in the past: it would have been inconceivable in 1870, when Germany and Italy had only just been unified, when Japan had only just emerged from a long sleep with the Meiji restoration, when feudal Russia had only just freed the serfs, that by 1900 these would all be major imperialist powers (and in Russia’s case, with a peasant population bigger than that still existing in China today). I have no firm opinion on this, but I believe signs exist that suggest such a scenario is not out of the question and should not be out of bounds of left discussion.

Here are a few articles worth considering in this context of my final remarks:

“Made in China”, http://www.newint.org/features/2009/06/01/keynote-china/, about what appears to be exploitation in Papua New Guinea of a typically imperialist nature.
“China and Rio Tinto in Guinea: A Wild Courtship”,
http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2010/03/china-and-rio-tinto-in-guinea-wild.html.
“Dam building equates to neo colonialism”,
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2010/12/21/opinion/Dam-building-equates-to-neo-colonialism-30144817.html.
“Chinas billions reap rewards in Cambodia”,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/20/AR2010112003850_pf.html.
“Zambia Uneasily Balances Chinese Investment and Workers Resentment”,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/world/africa/21zambia.html.
“China Squeezes Foreigners for Share of Global Riches”,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203731004576045684068308042.html.

By Michael Karadjis

The unconditional and mostly uncritical support that the United States has provided Israel over many decades has been more pronounced than US attitudes even to some of its most favoured Third World puppet regimes. While the US may from time to time give half-hearted official support to criticisms by human rights bodies of other pro-American governments, in virtually every case it will use its veto in the United Nations to block even the mildest criticism of even the most blatant violations of human rights or international law by Israel.

This comes alongside Israel, though a First World economy, being the largest recipient of US aid in the world, averaging some $US 3 billion a year. Since 1949, the US has provided Israel some $84 billion; but when the interest costs born by US taxpayers on behalf of Israel, another $49 billion, I added, the total amounts to more than $134 billion.[1]

This has long led to controversy over the nature of this relationship. A sizeable body of opinion claims that, in contrast to the US relationship with various puppet tyrants in the Third World, its relationship with Israel is the reverse: a powerful Israel, acting through a US-based ‘Jewish’ or ‘Israeli’ lobby dictates US policy in the Middle East, bludgeoning Congress into making decisions which are in conflict with real American interests.

Far from being an asset to US interests, support for Israel is a liability, they argue, as it alienates the US from both the peoples and even the right-wing Arab and Muslim governments of the oil-rich region, and inflames anti-American sentiment. The only reason the US continues on this course is due to the power of this well-funded domestic lobby. The US empire, responsible for Hiroshima and Vietnam, is not so powerful: it allows itself to be dominated by a small state of six million people and the voices of well-organised domestic lobbyists representing a mere 2.7 percent of the US population.

The main schools of ‘Israeli Lobby’ theory

The most blatant version of this explanation is that US policy is dictated by a ‘Jewish Lobby’, consisting of the large diaspora of Jews throughout the world, who are described as relatively wealthy, as owning a large part of the western media, and heavily involved in areas such as finance. They are said to act as a fifth column for Israel by using their wealth and media control to push the US and other governments to carry out pro-Israel policies despite their own interests.

This view is associated with many far-right critiques, which think that the US would play a much better role in the world if it were not run by “Jews” who manipulate the great country into acting against its own interests. However, less blatant forms of this analysis are sometimes found among some left activists and analysts. Here we will not concentrate on this kind of ‘Jewish’ lobby theory with its racist connotations.

Far more commonly we hear of an ‘Israeli Lobby’ dominating US foreign policy. This is a lobby with special interests connected to the state of Israel. This avoids the more racist connotations of the ‘Jewish Lobby’, because it does not necessarily have to involve the majority of Jews in the US, and it can involve non-Jewish Americans who have special interests in Israel, which may include economic interests, election interests (ie those in electorates where a large Jewish population is well-organised by right-wing Zionist leaders), or ideological interests, for example the powerful Christian-Zionist Lobby.

At the outset, there is no argument that such a lobby exists. There are many lobbies in the US, and the pro-Israel lobby is a particularly powerful one. The pro-Israel lobby is often successful at silencing sections of the media which may attempt to slightly criticise Israel, and in denigrating the reputations of academics and intimidating universities to get people sacked, to name some of its better-known activities.

Even many analysts who argue against the view that the Israeli lobby is the driver of US foreign policy have themselves been victims of its very active lobbying. For example, as Joseph Massad points out:

Is the pro- Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for US policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not.[2]

However, the argument is not about the relative power of this lobby, but whether it is so powerful that it, and Israel itself, is the driver of US foreign policy in the Middle East, that is, whether it is “the tail waving the dog” rather than “the dog waving the tail.” This argument still sees a powerful, primarily Jewish, group of Americans acting on behalf of a foreign government to push policies on the US government which are at odds with the latter’s interests.

The issue was recently brought to the fore by the publication of an extensive critique of the influence of the Israeli lobby on US foreign policy by John Mearsheimer, a Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.[3] This was new because these were very much figures of the US foreign policy establishment, whose views represent the thinking of one wing of the right-wing ‘realist’ school in the US.[4] They write for example:

The overall thrust of U.S. policy in the [Middle East] region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.” … No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what he American national interest would otherwise suggest.

Along with the right-wing argument, there is also a left version of the Israeli lobby theory. Unlike the right, they do not believe natural US foreign policy, without the lobby’s influence, would be any less imperialist. For example, referring to the former US administration of George Bush in 1988-92 (from here on called ‘Bush I’), Jeffrey Blankfort notes that “while an overall evaluation of Bush’s career would have him standing in the dock as a war criminal, his confrontation with the lobby was one of the bright spots for opponents of the US-Israel alliance.”[5]

This is in reference to the Bush I’s opposition to an expansion of settlements by Israel’s right-wing Likud government of Yitzak Shamir, at a time when the US was trying to negotiate one of the many fake “peace” agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, which would have resulted in a different form of subjugation of the Palestinians, but which required some concessions by Israel.

These left-wing ‘Israeli lobby theorists’ see George Bush I was a war criminal when he implemented policies such as the 1991 destruction of Iraq. But it is simply not in US interests to support Israel – a natural US policy in the Middle East would still be imperialist, but would not require the oppression of the Palestinians. Bush understood that, and was trying to get a better deal for the Palestinians, not out of concern for their oppression, but because US interests demand good relations with the reactionary Arab oil monarchies, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Relations with these repressive dictatorships, which control much of the world’s oil, are undermined by US support for Israel, where there is no oil.

Blankfort’s article describes the extraordinarily well-organised work of the lobby, particularly the aggressive and often successful canvassing and intimidation of members of Congress. A large section deals with the lobby’s mobilization to get Congress support to vote against Bush I’s attempt to merely delay for 120 days some $10 billion in US-guaranteed loans to Israel. Reading this, we are left with the impression that its threats to unseat members of Congress really is what drives US policy in the Middle East. Yet this raises another problem: it gives the purely legislative branch of the state too much power. If a warped and pressurized “democratic” process really is responsible for an overall foreign policy orientation for many decades that is in conflict with US imperialist interests, we might expect to find an active undermining of this policy in practice by other sections of the US state, as in other cases where imperialist interests clash with the “democratic” process. For example when Congress voted against arming the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, people from the top levels of the US state and government organised the Iran-Contra affair. Yet we see none of this in relation to Israel.

The most ambitious attempt to deal with these contradictions of “lobby theory,” and use a more Marxist approach while still within the framework of talking about a lobby, has been made by Gabriel Ash. He emphasises that the people in the Israeli lobby are not some foreign Jewish, or even foreign Israeli, body, but are a part of the US and “transnational” ruling class. It is only natural that there are divisions among the ruling class, and that some sections may have closer interests with Israel, while other sections may favour more opening to reactionary Arab states via a less extreme pro-Israel position. And this Israeli lobby within the US ruling class are not necessarily only its Jewish members.[6]

Ash criticises Noam Chomsky’s simplistic rejection of “lobby theory” in which Chomsky counterposes “strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage” to “the Israeli lobby” as factors in US Middle East policy. Naturally Chomsky claims the first factor – ie the interests of the ruling class – is primary.[7] However, Ash points out that this is a false distinction, which accepts the right-wing theoretical framework of Mearsheimer and Walt while rejecting their conclusions:

The way out of this mess is to translate M&W’s concept into our own analytical framework. That would mean collapsing the false distinction between the Lobby and “strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage” … we should look at Washington as a complex web of interlocking and overlapping alliances of (transnational) capital and (domestic) state institutions. The Israel Lobby will then reappear as one such alliance among many. While U.S. capital emerges domestically, and while White Americans predominate in its circles, capital is global and many of the interests represented in Washington lost their “nationality” long ago. There is as little that is “American” in the interests of Citibank and Wal-Mart as in the interests represented by the Israel Lobby.[8]

However, once we get as far as this version, it renders the term ‘lobby’ meaningless: if we are talking about a section of the US ruling class, then a study of what its interests are, and why those interests are very pro-Israel, is still necessary. A section of the US ruling class which is not only Jewish is a section of the US ruling class, not a mere lobby.

Yet elsewhere Ash appears to describe the lobby as much like other lobbies in the way it acts and in the nature of its pressure in formulating state policy, rather than a section of the ruling class. He compares the Israel lobby to lobbies such as the gun lobby and the religious right, but neither gun laws nor creationism command the same kind of virtually absolute support among the US ruling class as does support for Israel. Is this simply because the Israel lobby is more powerful or better funded, or is there something more fundamental about US support for Israel? Elsewhere he writes as if the Israel lobby were similar to a more well-heeled version of movements such as the environment movement or the anti-war movement. For example, he writes:

… the truth of this conclusion (that “the White House and Congress would have made different choices but for the existence of the Lobby”) should be obvious — and to the left above all. You cannot believe that money buys influence and simultaneously maintain that the millions of dollars spent in Washington every year by the Israel Lobby are insignificant. Nor can one be an activist while believing that activism makes no difference. If the well-heeled Israel Lobby effort to promote war doesn’t make much of a difference, what chance do thousands of cash strapped antiwar activists have?[9]

Furthermore:

… if you take the Israel Lobby out of Washington, you will not find beneath it the untarnished “national interest” M&W expect. You will find other lobbies all the way down. The Lobby only “diverts U.S. foreign policy” from where other lobbies would have left it.[10]

So despite it being part of the ruling class, it appears it still has to use the traditional lobbying tactics of other social movements to get its way; moreover, if it wasn’t there, the US ruling class may well have a different Middle East policy, depending on the strength of other “lobbies.” Yet the Israeli lobby, unlike others, nearly always gets its way. This is a strange way for a section of the ruling class to act – for it to need to continually lobby, it must be a minority among the ruling class; yet these lobbying activities ensure its policies always dominate over those of the alleged ruling class majority.

The problem is that while Ash is correct that there are divisions over Middle East policy among the ruling class, these divisions are not so fundamental. One key reason the lobby has been so successful is that its Zionism is in accord with the overall views of all wings of the US ruling class. What the main right-wing Israeli lobby – the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – does is push the boundaries as far as it can in a more extreme direction. No doubt its activities, like those of other lobbies, do influence policy, but that does not prove that it is responsible for the support by the US ruling class for Zionism as a whole. Joseph Massad, a key critic of lobby theories, puts it most correctly:

What then would have been different in US policy in the Middle East absent Israel and its powerful lobby? The answer in short is: the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies.[11]

The ‘lobby theorists’ critique of the traditional left analysis

Nevertheless, we need to answer some of the points raised by lobbyist theorists, which cast doubt on the traditional left-wing view of those arguing against the Israeli lobby explanation of the US-Israel connection. This traditional view has gone something like the following.

Israel is a colonial-settler state whose existence in a hostile region, where it has displaced indigenous Arabs, makes it a permanently dependent ally of imperialism. It is precisely its permanent conflict with its neighbours that makes it most useful to imperialism: as Henry Kissinger put it, “Israel’s obstinacy … serves the purposes of both our countries best.” The whole first world population of Israel have some stake in maintaining their position of privilege in the region, and this requires being a willing tool of imperialism. The Israeli bourgeoisie is therefore both completely dependent on imperialism, while at the same time being a tiny section of the imperialist bourgeoisie itself.

This is a far more stable prop for imperialism in this vital oil-rich region than the reactionary Arab/Muslim capitalist states, where only a thin crust of the bourgeois elite can be reliable allies of imperialism – and they can be removed by revolution. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran showed this – all the years of imperialist investment in this regime as a regional policeman fell apart in 1979. This could not happen to Israel, where the whole population is tied to imperialism. Israel thus plays the role of, in the words of former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, “the largest and only unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier in the world.” In this role, Israel has helped knock down regimes hostile to imperialist interests, such as its defeat of Nasser in 1967, which dealt a crippling blow to the Arab nationalist wave.

However, the lobby theorists claim that support for Israel is detrimental to US imperialist interests. Its very existence, and particularly US support to its most uncompromising policies, is precisely what creates hostility to the US and to imperialism in the region. The Palestinians themselves do not have oil, so there is no special US interest in Israel’s oppression of Palestine. But US control of this vital oil-rich region beyond Palestine is threatened by anti-imperialist movements which have as their starting points precisely hostility to Israel. Otherwise, many of these fundamentally bourgeois-led movements and states would be more likely US allies. Due to Israel, even many right-wing capitalist regimes in the region often have to take their distance from Washington. While supporting oppression and opposing national liberation movements is the same policy that US imperialism pursues elsewhere in the Third World, it is not true to say, as Chomsky does, that “US policies in the Middle East are quite similar to those pursued elsewhere in the world,” because elsewhere these reactionary policies do not include a colonial settler state that produces such local hostility to the US.

Few would deny that the early Zionist movement was promoted by imperialism, but this was in the age of colonialism, when Britain and France directly controlled parts of the region. A colonial-settler Zionist state would be a natural ally in such a set-up: as Sir Ronald Storrs, British governor of Jerusalem, thought, Israel would be “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”[12] However, it has a completely different effect today when imperialism maintains control via indirect neo-colonial arrangements with the local compradore ruling classes.

Some would concede also that there was some utility of Israel for the US during the Cold War, as it could act as a US surrogate against pro-Soviet regimes in the region, but this is fundamentally different after the Cold War. According to Blankfort, “if during the Cold War the US regarded Israel as a reliable ally against Soviet-backed regimes in some Arab states, this argument vanished as quickly as did the USSR.” Now with no Communist threat, the only real threat is political Islam, and it is precisely US support for Israel that facilitates the growth of this movement.

Despite the talk of Israel being a most reliable US cop in the region, there are few cases in which Israel has been used in that role, other than 1956 (by UK and French imperialism, but opposed by US imperialism), and in 1967 (supported by US imperialism). In fact, when the US directly intervenes, such as Bush I’s war against Iraq in 1991, an effort was made to ensure Israel did not attack Iraq, even when Iraq launched Scuds at Israel, because an Israeli attack on the side of the US would have destroyed the Arab coalition the US had built to attack Iraq. Thus while it may be the “most reliable” ally of imperialism, this is irrelevant if it cannot be used in this role.

Surely then if the US were to broker a genuine peace agreement which forced an Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and allowed a viable Palestinian state, this would boost the standing of US imperialism in the region among millions of Arabs and Muslims, strengthen the relationship between the US and the reactionary Arab states which control most of the oilfields, and defuse anti-imperialist sentiments.

The only reason the US continues to act against its own imperialist interests is the pressure of the Israeli lobby. Bush I knew that, and when he tried to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace process going with the Madrid conference, Israel reacted by demanding $10 billion in US-guaranteed loans, Bush asked Israel to delay it for 120 days and made it conditional on Israel freezing its settlement binge, and Israel refused. This led to a furious offensive by the Israeli lobby to get the numbers in Congress to vote against Bush, and this may have cost him the election a few months later.[13]

Anti-imperialism in the Middle East is not only a reaction to Israel

At the outset, part of this thesis is based on a fallacy: the idea that anti-imperialism in the Middle East is fundamentally a reaction to Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians and US support for this. According to Jean Bricmont:

In the Middle East, the main charge against the United States is that it is pro-Israel, because it lets itself be “manipulated by the Jews”. Therefore, if Washington switched sides, there would be no more basis for hostility to U.S. presence, including its control over oil[14] (my emphasis).

Anti-imperialist movements, whether leading to bourgeois nationalist, religious radical or socialist governments, are not unique to the Middle East. They exist throughout the neo-colonial world, because of the nature of imperialism. The mass uprising against British imperialism in Iraq in the early 1920s had nothing to do with the future Zionist state; likewise the revolutionary developments in Iran from 1944 to 1953, including Mossadeq’s nationalization of imperialist oil interests, which led to the CIA’s bloody 1953 coup. The rise of Nasserism – the most radical version of the bourgeois nationalist wave – was first directed against imperialism, not Zionism: the nationalization of the Suez Canal was a huge anti-imperialist act, and UK and French imperialism utilised Israel for their joint attack on Nasser. 

The revolution against British imperialism in Yemen was followed by a civil war in the 1960s which pitted a Nasser-backed anti-imperialist left against a Saudi-backed royalist right. The unique thing about the way US imperialism aims to rule the oil-rich region is not only via Israel, but also via the Saudi Arabian monarchy and the other princes, sheiks and emirs on the Gulf, rather than even the normal right-wing bourgeois regimes it uses elsewhere. When Israel knocked out Nasser in 1967, it was not only doing itself a favour (by seizing territory), but also knocking out a nationalist regime which was upsetting imperialism’s other key prop: the semi-feudal oil monarchies. In fact, the strategic nature of the US-Israel alliance derives precisely from this knock-out of Nasserism: US aid to Israel increased 450 percent after 1967,[15] and some 99 percent of US aid to Israel has been given after 1967.[16]

Of course, lobby theorists could argue that Israel may have done the US a service because the Nasser regime was pro-Soviet, but the collapse of the USSR and end of the Cold War made Israel no longer useful in this way. Yet while the USSR could provide an alternative pole for bourgeois nationalist regimes, it was never simply the Soviet alliance that was the problem to imperialism, but any challenge to undiluted imperialist control represented by various anti-imperialist movements. Such anti-imperialist movements continue to exist throughout the Third World, including the Middle East, in the post-Soviet era. US support to Israel may intensify anti-US sentiment in the region, but is by no means primarily responsible for it. It would exist without Israel.

Israel as regional cop?

However, even if it only intensifies anti-US feeling, what is it about Israel that makes this intensification worth it? Is it the role it can play as regional cop for imperialism?

It may be true that the US has been less willing to directly use Israel to attack as in the manner of 1956 and 1967, and the holding back of Israel from attacking Iraq in 1991 is a good example. However, Stephen Zunes provides much information on how the US continues to use Israel even in such operations, in secondary but very important ways:

Rather than being a liability … the 1991 Gulf War once again proved Israel to be a strategic asset: Israeli developments in air-to-ground warfare were integrated into allied bombing raids against Iraqi missile sites and other targets; Israeli-designed conformal fuel tanks for F-15 fighter-bombers greatly enhanced their range; Israeli-provided mine plows were utilized during the final assaults on Iraqi positions; Israeli mobile bridges were used by U.S. Marines; Israeli targeting systems and low-altitude warning devices were employed by U.S. helicopters; and Israel developed key components for the widely-used Tomahawk missiles.

This has continued during the current Iraq invasion:

Israel has also been supportive of U.S. military operations in Iraq by helping to train U.S. Special Forces in aggressive counterinsurgency techniques and sending urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg to instruct assassination squads targeting suspected Iraqi guerrilla leaders. The U.S. civil administration in Iraq, established following the 2003 invasion, was modeled after Israel’s civil administration in the occupied Arab territories following the 1967 Israeli invasion … Israelis have helped arm and train pro-American Kurdish militias and have assisted U.S. officials in interrogation centers for suspected insurgents under detention near Baghdad. Israeli advisers have shared helpful tips on erecting and operating roadblocks and checkpoints, have provided training in mine-clearing and wall-breaching methods, and have suggested techniques for tracking suspected insurgents using drone aircraft. Israel has also provided aerial surveillance equipment, decoy drones, and armored construction equipment.

Israel has also been useful in providing services to imperialism elsewhere in the Third World, using its extensive experience in repression to aid the US in places from Central America to Sri Lanka. It has served as an indirect link for the US to regimes, such as apartheid South Africa, which have been so internationally isolated that even the US Congress is forced to cut off open cooperation due to alleged “human rights’ concerns; similarly it played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, both facilitating links to the Iranian leaders and in channeling arms to the contras.

All these examples make it clear that Israel performs a great deal of work that would be valuable to US imperialism without any Israeli lobby existing. Nevertheless, the argument remains whether all these secondary uses of Israel to imperialism really can make up for the intensification of anti-US hostility in the region. While Israel can be seen as a ‘cop of last resort’, the lobby theorists have a point that the “aircraft carrier” analogy is stretching it, or at least outmoded, given what the US considers would be the counterproductive effect of any direct US use of Israel against its neighbours.

US support for the most extreme Israeli policies of Likud governments make hostility to the US even worse, and thus the risk of using Israel in the region even greater. It would seem therefore to be in US interests to at least push a compromise “peace” agreement rather than the more extreme Likud versions of Zionism. This would reduce hostility and thus make it easier to use Israel when needed. Therefore, lobby theorists argue, policies like those of the current Bush II/Neo-con US regime with its rabid support for Likud must surely be against US interests and thus dictated by the Israel lobby.

Growing convergence of US and Israeli ruling classes

However, these secondary military services Israel provides the US are not the only reasons for imperialist support for Israel. There is debate over whether Israel should be termed a mini-imperialist country in its own right – due to its nature as a colonial settler state – or if the fact that it is even more dependent on imperialism than average Third World countries for its survival makes this term meaningless. However, what is not in dispute is that its ruling class largely originates in imperialist countries in recent decades, along with most of the Israeli population, and that the economic and technological level of the country is First World.[17]

Given the origins of the Israeli ruling class and its decades of connection with the US ruling class, their destinies are now so linked as to be difficult to separate them. This is why pro-Israel forces in the US are well beyond what can usefully be called a “lobby.”

It is no surprise that these links are strongest in the military industry, a very large section of the US ruling class. Lobby theorists often point to the $3 billion dollars provided by the US annually to Israel as evidence of the power of the lobby, rather than of Israel’s strategic worth to the US. But there is an even more direct connection: most of this money can only be spent on US-made weapons. Such well-known names in the US ruling class as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, United Technologies, Boeing, Textron and General Dynamics profit handsomely from this money provided by US taxpayers, with Israel’s armed forces full of their products.[18]

Due to Israel’s militarized existence, the military/high tech industries have come to play a dominant role there only seen elsewhere in the US itself, and so its large-scale, symbiotic relationship with the US military-industrial complex, in research and development as well as weapons’ sales, is hardly surprising. Israel is the fifth-largest supplier of high-tech military hardware to the United States.[19] Israel produces 10 percent of the world’s arms and is involved in many joint ventures with US defense and high-tech companies.

One good example is that the Israeli defense/electronics company Elbit Systems has been chosen by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), along with Boeing, as a member of the winning consortium for the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) on the US-Mexican border, “to supply technology to identify threats, to deter and prevent crossings, and to apprehend intruders.” Elbit was selected “because of its ability to bring together global resources with decades of technological experience and capabilities securing borders in extreme cold, mountainous regions, as well as hot, desert terrains,”[20] ie, its experience in protecting the ill-gotten “borders” of Israel. Elbit is the largest private defense company in Israel, and also has facilities in in the United States, in Talladega, Alabama, Merrimack, New Hampshire, and Fort Worth, Texas.

One of the key links between the US and Israeli arms industries is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and its cousin, the Center for Security Policy (CSP). These were among the leading organisations which, along with the Project for the New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute, formed the core of the neoconservative project. And certainly they include the same number of Jewish defense intellectuals with Likud connections as the other “think tanks” do, but their boards of directors are also stacked with various generals and admirals, heads of defense industries, for example from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Israeli Aircraft Industries, and Northrop Grumman (which builds ships for the Israeli Navy, sells F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes to the Israeli Air Force, and the Longbow radar system to the Israeli army), plus weapons brokers and military consultancies like Cypress International and SY Technology, whose main clients include the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, which oversees joint projects with Israel.[21]

With links like these, major sections of the US ruling class would hardly need to be convinced by an electoral lobby to be supporting Israel, and an aggressive one at that.
 

Israeli mini-imperialist state: Key ideological prop of US imperialism

Beyond these direct connections between the ruling classes, what needs to be understood is the special nature of the Israeli state which makes it central to imperialist strategy and makes it highly unlikely that imperialism would simply drop it, short of truly enormous challenges that might make it counterproductive.

The First World (and arguably mini-imperialist) nature of Israel may not result in imperialist backing forever – there came a time when the West understood that imperialist domination in South Africa was better served by scrapping apartheid, once the international mass movement had raised the price of continuing support. However, until such a point is reached – and there is no evidence that it has – it is the ideological uses of a western prop in the region that is often underestimated by lobby theorists.

Imperialism does not rule by “free” economic expansion on its own. Those who argue that without Israel, US capital could spread more unencumbered in the region, are making a similar mistake to those who argue that chauvinist campaigns against immigrants in western countries are against the interests of big capital which profits from the “free” movement of highly exploitable labour. It is the whip of the anti-immigrant movement, alongside the racism which tells immigrants where their right place is in the hierarchy, that ensure their labour remains highly exploitable.

Therefore, in supporting Israel, imperialism is supporting a country which it projects as a replica of advanced western ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization in the region, bluntly telling millions of Arabs who they must look up to if they want the cash, the technology, the arms, and supposedly the standard of living.

Those not looking at this ideological aspect and instead concentrating on the hostility it creates miss a number of further points related to this. Firstly, the presence of Israel actually helps reactionary Arab regimes justify their own repressive rule, and in practice has facilitated rather than compromised their connections to the US; secondly, the presence of a colonial-settler state, along with the Saudi monarchy, entrenches a conservative politics in the region: even anti-imperialist movements are thereby stuck at the ‘national’ stage and rarely go over the anti-capitalist stage; a democratic solution to the Palestine problem would threaten the repressive regimes that imperialism relies on in the oilfields; and pushing an aggressive Israel coincides with an increasingly aggressive US imperialism threatened by competitors, serves the US interest of promoting its lead in providing “security cover” in the region for other imperialists, and enforces an ideological message about who the boss is – an approach which is often relied upon by imperialism despite the potential increase in hostility among local populations.

Does US support for Israel damage or bolster relations with reactionary Arab states?

Despite the claims that US support for Israel creates hostility in the region, the very existence of a theocratic and racist regime in the heart of the Arab world actually helps the reactionary monarchies of the Gulf justify their repressive regimes and massive security apparatuses armed to the teeth by the same US that arms Israel. Ironically enough, the Saudi rulers justify their need for massive quantities of arms by pointing to the aggressive anti-Arab actions of heavily armed Israel.

Thus apart from keeping these regimes in power, this relationship is also a bonanza for the US armaments industry, arming both sides. The big rise in weaponry used in the region with the current US regime’s support for Likud’s terroristic policies along with the invasion of Iraq have pushed US arms sales abroad to $21 billion in 2005-6, double the previous year.[22]

These enormous arms sales call into question the idea that US support for Israel has affected its relationship with the reactionary Arab states. Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest recipients of US arms in the world. Saudi Arabia recently announced plans to buy $5.8 billion worth of American weapons to modernize its National Guard, along with $3 billion “in orders for Black Hawk helicopters, Abrams and Bradley armored land vehicles, new radio systems and other weapons.” Meanwhile, Bahrain, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates “have filed plans to buy Black Hawk helicopters for a total of $1 billion. Oman plans to buy a $48 million anti-tank missile system. The Emirates plans to buy rocket artillery equipment and military trucks for $752 million and Bahrain will purchase Javelin missiles for $42 million.”[23]

If anything, the collapse of the USSR has meant that local capitalist states, even when in partial conflict with imperialism or forced to speak out about Palestine, have to rely even more on the US for weaponry and “security” cover, where the latent threat from Israel intensifies this need. Zunes has a story which highlights how incorrect is the idea that US support for Israel jeopardizes its relations with Arab oil monarchies:

In 1993, seventy-eight senators wrote President Bill Clinton insisting that the United States send even more military aid to Israel. The lawmakers justified their request by citing massive weapons procurement by Arabs states, neglecting to note that 80% of this military hardware was of U.S. origin. If they were really concerned about Israeli security, they would have voted to block these arms transfers. Yet this was clearly not their purpose. Even AIPAC did not actively oppose the sale of 72 highly sophisticated F-15E jet fighters to Saudi Arabia in 1992, since the Bush administration offered yet another boost in U.S. weapons transfers to Israel in return for Israeli acquiescence.

An increasingly aggressive US-Israeli alliance since the 1990s did not prevent Gaddafi’s Libya transforming itself from the most radical bourgeois-nationalist regime in the region to a US ally during this period, despite Libya maintaining an anti-Zionist stand. Likewise, back in the 1980s, the Reagan regime’s aggressive support for Israel did not prevent the radical bourgeois-nationalist and anti-Zionist regime of Saddam Hussein of Iraq from collaborating with imperialism in its invasion of Iran. Even when Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor, with barely a peep from the US, Hussein stepped up his new alliance with imperialism. Israel meantime sent arms to the similarly radical bourgeois nationalist regime in Iran, and facilitated US contact with the mullahs, enabling the US to play one off against another.

When the Iraqi regime entered its long period of conflict with imperialism in 1990, resulting in two US wars against it, this did not result mainly from mass pressure on the regime to react against US support for Israel; on the contrary, it resulted from the conflict between Iraq, a real country, and Kuwait, one of the oil sheikdoms of the Gulf. The borders of this piece of private property in sand and oil, when drawn up by British imperialism, had almost cut Iraq off from the sea. Thus it could be argued that US support for these anachronistic monarchies also creates anti-US hostility in the region.

Moreover, Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians also allows these repressive “anti-imperialist” regimes to use anti-Zionist demagoguery in the same way as the openly reactionary regimes do, to justify a repressive state. Hussein’s regime for example could hang Communists from lamp-posts, providing an indirect service to imperialism, while slandering his victims as “Zionist spies.”

Israeli settler-state: Maintaining anti-imperialism within ‘national’ bounds

The existence of a colonial-settler state, keeping alive a burning immediate national question, tends to restrict the struggle to the national stage in the region. The existence of the Saudi and Gulf monarchies has a similar effect. Thus, while lobby theorists argue that US support for Israel intensifies anti-imperialism in the region, we could equally argue that it politically limits the anti-imperialism that would be there anyway, and maintains conservative political hegemony throughout the region.

While Latin America and the Middle East are regions of a similar level of economic development, in the former the anti-imperialist struggle has tended to cross over from the national stage to socialist revolution at many times; we have Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, and we had Nicaragua, El Salvador and a continent of national liberation struggles led by left-revolutionary forces. By contrast, in the Middle East, anti-imperialism has meant Khomeiniite Iran, Baathist Iraq and Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya, etc – regimes which are a headache for imperialism, but which are unmistakenly bourgeois – and now we have Bin Ladenism. This is not to criticize the masses of the region for their focus on the national question – the focus reflects the reality of both the gross national oppression of the Palestinians, and the medievalism of the Saudi monarchy.

None of this means that US support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians does not intensify hostility. If continued Israeli intransigence did create a situation where it was fuelling such anti-imperialist feeling that the US felt its interests were under serious threat, then it is likely the US would force Israel to some kind of compromise.

Yet the ‘lobby theorists’ may well point out that there appears now an intensification of anti-US hostility of the ‘Islamist’ type, arguably driven in particular by hostility to Zionism and Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, but this has not led to any US pressure on Israel to compromise – on the contrary, the current US regime has strengthened its alliance with the most reactionary forces in Israel.

However, while some of the ‘Islamist’ type of opposition appears ferociously and uncompromisingly anti-imperialist, it is important to understand why the US does not yet see this kind of anti-imperialism as any more fundamental a threat than the national struggle that has long existed in the region, with or without Israel; ‘political Islam’ is just as bourgeois as other forms of bourgeois nationalism.

Moreover, in the past, many ‘Islamist’ forces were promoted by imperialism as a counterweight to Communist, left-wing and Nasserite movements. Such imperialist support is in itself evidence that western governments understand that their “anti-imperialism” is not as fundamental as their rhetoric would suggest, and that in different circumstances many of these movements would be prone to manipulation by imperialism. Indeed, the most fundamentalist regime on Earth is none other than the Saudi monarchy – the key US ally outside of Israel.

Furthermore, while hostility to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is one driver of this Islamic radicalism, it is far from being the only cause of its spectacular rise in recent years. Al Qaida evolved out of a wing of the Islamic reactionaries which had been sent by Saudi Arabia, with US support, to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. US support for Israel and the plight of the Palestinians were not apparently bothering Bin Laden much in 1980s. He turned against the US when the latter used the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 to occupy Saudi Arabia with thousands of troops. The occupation of his native land, the land of Islamic holy sites Mecca and Medina, was as potent as the long-term occupation of Jerusalem.

This coincided with the growing alienation of the Saudi bourgeoisie, of which Bin Laden is a prominent member, from the Saudi monarchy, which monopolises power. Thus the anti-US hostility of the ‘fundamentalist’ Bin Laden is as much due to US support for the ‘fundamentalist’ Saudi monarchy, which he seeks to overthrow for his own class purposes, as to US support for Israel.

This Islamist radicalization was also further fuelled by the US-led decade-long strangulation of Iraq. The biggest boost to Islamist radicalization has come from the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. If US support for Israel is alleged to be against US interests because its fuels anti-US hostility, then presumably the US is also acting against US interests by occupying Saudi Arabia and then Iraq – yet who could argue that direct imperialist occupation of the oilfields, when feasible, is not in US interests?

One other point on the more reactionary forms of ‘Islamism’ is that its deeply religious language, its use of large-scale terrorist actions (such as 9/11), and the “clash of civilizations” kind of ideology it espouses all play directly into the hands of imperialist militarism. Those arguing that US support for Israel is inflaming ‘militant Islam’ miss the point that the more the ‘Islamic’ coloration of local anti-imperialism as a reaction to Zionism, the more this provides imperialism with its much needed new all-encompassing “enemy,” after the collapse of the USSR robbed it of the “threat” of international communism. There is no better example than the US and Israeli occupations of Mecca/Medina and Jerusalem inflaming ‘al Qaida’, leading to the attack in the WTC, giving the US the propaganda pretext to take over the Iraqi oilfields.

However, it is important not to conflate all the various kinds of movements often jumbled together as ‘political Islam’ as being the same, or all medieval in their politics. Some movements originating in political Islam, such as the Lebanese Shiite group Hizbullah and the Palestinian Hamas, have evolved substantially from more sectarian and ‘fundamentalist’ roots into genuine national liberation movements, casting off in the process much of the baggage that would have prevented their struggles moving forward in unity with other forces [note that this article was written around the time of the last Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, not long after the completion of Lebanon’s national liberation from Israeli occupation in 2000, a movement largely led by Hezbollah, being based among the Shia of southern Lebanon where Israel was occupying; and hence long before Hezbollah transformed itself into a death squad for the Assad regime’s war against its people beginning in 2011 – MK]. However, the very fact that Hamas is, and Hezbollah till recently was, involved in life and death national struggles against Israeli occupation still restricts further evolution among their mass base towards linking national and social revolution: one step forward, when greeted by another Israeli rocket attack, maintains the struggle at the level of pure survival.

Democratic Palestine: Against imperialist interests

This is also true of the secular nationalist Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). At its height in the 1980s, the PLO’s long term struggle, together with support from the world socialist movement, had led the PLO to becoming the most politically progressive force in the Arab world. Any victories for the PLO were likely to undermine regional Arab capitalist regimes, so the US had all the more reason to support Israel’s repression of it. The radicalized Palestinian masses stood on the side of progressive forces in Jordan and Lebanon, and Israel performed a good service to imperialism in helping the forces of reaction in both countries (Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon during the civil war) against the PLO-backed progressive forces.

However, lobby theorists can point out a key weakness in this argument: that the PLO would not exist in the first place if Israel were not there, and the only reason there is a radicalized Palestinian mass which could join progressive forces in other countries is due to their dispossession. As Camille Mansour puts it:

These struggles for influence, occurring in a region so close to Israel, are often linked (an in the case of the Jordanian crisis, were definitely linked) to the Arab-Israeli conflict itself: for the Americans, Israel was in the paradoxical position of being an asset by alleviating threats to its own and American interests – threats, however, that it may have itself originally provoked through its situation of conflict with the Arabs.[24] 

But this argument takes us back as far as 1948 – when few would argue that an ‘Israeli lobby’ ran Washington – not to 1967, 1982 or 2006. Since both Israel and the Palestinian dispossession do exist, and Israel has been useful to imperialism for a prolonged period of time, even if it were of less use now, the question would arise of what to replace it with. And then clear-sighted imperialist planners would understand that if Israel were replaced by a democratic-secular state, this may well spell doom for the reactionary Saudi and Gulf monarchies, and other repressive Arab states. Despite the rhetoric of the neo-conservatives about a ‘democratic revolution” across the Middle East, in reality the last thing the US wants are popular democratic regimes overthrowing the oil monarchies on which imperialism has long relied.

Therefore, if the Palestinians cannot be crushed outright, then co-opting the national movement within unjust Zionist bounds – such as the various US-backed ‘peace plans’ – ensures the struggle of the Palestinians remains necessarily focused on not only national issues, but on pure survival.

Conflict within US and Israeli ruling classes over different versions of Zionism

This is why every time a US government has advocated a compromise by Israel on the occupied territories to assuage its reactionary Arab clients it is always completely within the bounds of Zionism and of an undemocratic solution. No wing of the US government has ever advocated a fully independent viable Palestinian state in all of West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem (not to mention the return of Palestinian refugees). Usually what is advocated is a partial withdrawal, handing over parts of the occupied territories to some kind of Oslo-style “autonomy”, or a “state” of cantons, with greatly restricted rights, never including East Jerusalem. When the Israel lobby fights a US government on this, it is a dispute among rival concepts of an undemocratic Zionist solution. Thus even those US governments which are said to “stand up to the lobby” also see the usefulness of Israel to imperialism, if not the extreme Likud program.

For example, the Ford administration clashed with Israel in 1975 over its support for Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with Arab neighbours.[25] Yet this resolution said nothing about a Palestinian state in those territories. For decades, the pro-imperialist Jordanian monarchy expected to get the West Bank if Israel withdrew, and US policy supported this. While Jordan, along with Egypt and Syria, which both had territory seized by Israel in 1967, voted for Resolution 242, the al Fatah leadership of the PLO long rejected it.[26]

Blankfort describes the extraordinary mobilization by AIPAC of 76 Senators who signed a letter objecting to Ford’s delay of delivery of certain weapons to Israel and suspension of negotiations for pending financial and military aid, and quotes a report which claimed that this “virtually forced the executive branch to abandon the option of imposing a Mideast settlement which Israel considered to be potentially detrimental to its security.” Yet the idea that Ford was about to “impose” Resolution 242 is entirely fanciful: as Blankfort explains elsewhere, Ford and Kissinger raised the idea of “reassessing” Middle East policy, and supporting 242, as a reaction to their inability to get Israel to agree to a second Sinai disengagement, which they saw a necessary for getting Egypt on board for the Camp David accord. Yet Camp David became reality within a couple of years, a massive coup for US imperialism in bringing about the defection of Egypt, the principal Arab power, to the US camp, and also getting Egypt to recognise Israel. Neither before nor after has the US ever shown any real interest in “imposing” 242, despite it being well within the confines of a Zionist solution.[27]

In the epic confrontation between George Bush I and Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud regime in Israel in 1991, Bush was not calling for a Palestinian state, and not necessarily even a complete Israeli withdrawal. The issue was the launching of the ‘peace process’ with the Madrid Conference. At this conference, the Palestinians were not even allowed to have their own delegation, let alone a PLO delegation – a number of officially non-PLO Palestinians had to form a joint team with Jordan.

The exact contours of what would emerge from this process were left deliberately vague. Here was how Bush I described the process:

Negotiations will be conducted in phases, beginning with talks on interim self-government arrangements … Beginning the 3rd year, negotiations will commence on permanent status. No one can say with any precision what the end result will be. In our view, something must be developed, something acceptable to Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan, that gives the Palestinian people meaningful control over their own lives and fate and provides for the acceptance and security of Israel.[28]

The Madrid process was thus the first step towards the Oslo accord of 1993, under Bush’s successor Clinton, which was accepted by the new Israeli Labour government of Yitzhak Rabin, which defeated Shamir’s Likud regime. Oslo also left all the important issues for the future while ceding control of some Palestinian population centers to an autonomous but powerless Palestinian authority, allegedly giving Palestinians “control over their own lives and fate.”

Ironically, the lobby theorists see Bush I’s election defeat and Clinton’s ascendancy as a victory of the lobby, and castigate the Zionist nature of Oslo. Blankfort claims that Clinton “turned his Middle East diplomacy over to pro-Israel Jewish lobbyists with ties to Israel’s Labor party.” This ignores not only the essential continuity between Madrid and Oslo, but also the fact that the US and Israeli right-wing, including the US-based Israel lobby, began an immediate campaign against Clinton, Rabin and Oslo, declaring it an unacceptable concession to PLO “terrorists.”

In any case, seeing all this as a US-Israeli split is at most only half-true: these examples put the US governments of the ‘Republican Realist’ Bush I and the Democrat Clinton in full agreement with the Israeli Labour Party, ie, the main traditional party of Zionism. Clinton may have turned heavily to those “with ties to Israel’s Labor party,” but these Zionists had supported Madrid. It was with Likud’s more fanatically right-wing program that they had a conflict.

Yet in other cases, it is the other way around. For example, in 1987, then Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres reached the London Agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein for resolving the status of the Palestinian territories. The agreement called for an international conference hosted by the UN, to find a solution based on resolution 242, and for the Palestinians to be represented by the Jordanian delegation, with no PLO participation. There was no suggestion of a Palestinian state; on the contrary, Jordan would gain sovereignty over the West Bank. This was fundamentally similar to the Reagan Plan (1982) and was the basis for the later Madrid plan.

Peres was the Labour Party deputy in the Likud-Labour National Unity government (1984-1990). The Likud prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, opposed this agreement from the right. “Peres beseeched then Secretary of State (to President Reagan) George Schultz to take the initiative in pursuing the plan. Schultz declined.”[29] Reacting to the sabotage by the Reagan regime of an Israeli Labour initiative, Yassir Arafat declared this disproves ideas about a Jewish lobby running Washington, rather, “the US tells Israel what to do.”

Current alliance of US and Israeli right-wing: Pushing US world dominance

The current energetic alliance between the US neoconservatives, AIPAC, the Christian fundamentalist right, the Bush II regime and the Likud regimes of Netanyahu and Sharon began taking effect while the Republicans and Likudniks were still out of power in the mid-1990s, in reaction against Oslo. Moves such as the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act[30] were aimed at undermining Clinton and Rabin at the moment when sensitive “peace process” negotiations were taking place and both governments were up for re-election.

When Netanyahu brought Likud back to power in Israel in 1996, he was immediately greeted by leading US neo-conservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith with the ‘Clean Break’ plan. This advocated scrapping Oslo, undermining Arafat, crushing the Palestinians, and for Israel to spearhead a US-led undermining of Syria and Iran and overthrow of the Iraqi regime, giving Iraq to the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan – along with the scrapping of all remnants of ‘Labour Zionism’ in the economic field.[31]

Much is often made of the fact that some of these neoconservatives – in particular Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz – were Jewish Americans (though many others are not), as if to suggest that they were American agents of Israel who wanted to overthrow these governments because they are anti-Israel.[32] However, these US neoconservatives were disappointed in Netanyahu because even an Israeli leader as reactionary as he thought this program was too extreme – it was still the dog attempting to wag the tail.[33]

In fact divisions exist in both the US and Israeli ruling classes over whether it is a good idea to overthrow governments like those of Iran, Iraq and Syria. On the one hand, these governments are capitalist, repressive and anti-working class, and many in the US and Israeli ruling classes fear that forced overthrows could lead to even more hostile forces taking power. However, other sections of the ruling classes believe they must be dealt with to establish unlimited US and/or Israeli power in the region, not only because these regimes are anti-Israel, but also because they have their origins in national revolutions, however distant in the past, and have a history of trying cut out more space for their own national bourgeoisie, particularly over their oil wealth, and are thus unreliable, however much they may be willing to do deals if imperialism would recognise their regional interests. 

The “Clean Break’ people weren’t too shy about how much the military needs of US imperialism were at the centre of their attempt to goad Netnyahu even further to the right. The document helpfully notes:

Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state. Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense.

Moreover, the basis of this aggressive approach had already been laid out by Wolfowitz when he was US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the regime of Bush I, in the ‘Defence Planning Guidance’ white paper of 1992. It is clear from this paper that Wolfowitz’s prime concerns were about US world domination, not Israel; for him and his allies, an extremist Israeli regime is the best ally in such an ongoing struggle.

Among other things, the document says the US must deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” While such “potential competitors” could include a re-strengthened capitalist Russia or China or a bloc of nationalist-minded oil-producing states, the document made clear the US rulers also had their European imperialist “allies” in mind: “A substantial American presence in Europe and continued cohesion within the western alliance remain vital…we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO.”[34]

This underlines another aspect of post-Cold War world: the sharpening of the struggle between major imperialist blocs, particularly the US and the European Union, as well as other large capitalist countries such as Russia. The alliance between the most aggressive wing of the US ruling class and the most extremist forces in Israel should also be seen within this context. The various Middle Eastern capitalist classes have some bargaining power between these various blocs. Meanwhile, since the 1990s, the main EU imperialist powers, particularly France and Germany, have made a number of feeble attempts to shake off the domination of US military-security cover represented by US control of NATO, while their competition with US imperialism increases in various parts of the world.

Iraq switched its oil trading from the dollar to the euro in 2000, and Iran announced the setting up of an oil bourse in 2006 which would also deal in euro. Some analysts have seen these moves as key to understanding the US invasion of Iraq (opposed by Paris and Berlin) and its threats to invade Iran, given the central importance the “petro-dollar” has long played in ensuring US world dominance.[35] This further underlines how US hostility to these regimes can be connected to this inter-imperialist rivalry, how national bourgeois regimes can cause trouble for the US regardless of Israel, and how the end of the USSR does not give the US unquestioned control – thus meaning Israel remains a useful asset.

By pushing the most aggressive and confrontational wing of the Israeli ruling class to maintain high tension in the region – within the ideological coat of the “war on terror” – the US neo-conservatives and their allies seek to maintain the necessity of the US “security” cover in the region, to “protect” the investments of other imperialists as well, which would be undermined by a genuine peace agreement. At the same time, this also is of direct material interest to the gigantic US armaments industry – a much more major part of the US ruling class than in any of its imperialist competitors.

Showing who is boss

While such an approach may be considered counterproductive if pushed too far, an approach based on intimidation and “showing who is boss” is not that uncommon an imperialist policy. The US may choose to not use Israel regularly, but its presence maintains the threat should anyone step too far out of line. The fact that the US still economically dominates the region, especially in the all-important fields of oil, dollars and weapons, suggests this strategy of intimidation has to date been working.

There are many historical precedents for what might appear ‘irrationally’ aggressive approaches. All the same points could be made about the continuing British colonial presence in northern Ireland, for example: does it not alienate the southern Irish, and deepen ant-British sentiment in the much larger area of the Irish republic, in exchange for direct control over a small region with few important resources to exploit? Yet this again underlines the fact that imperialism does not only rule via the free flow of capital, but also ideologically: the British presence is a reminder of who is boss.[36]

If the US backs Israel only due to an Israeli lobby, then does Britain maintain its Malvinas (“Falklands”) colony in the south Atlantic – territory claimed by Argentina – due to the lobby of a couple of thousand English sheep herders? It could be claimed that this turns popular sentiment against Britain – yet Britain is a major imperialist power in Argentina. Thatcher’s war against Argentina in 1982 had far more to do with using the ideological hammer of demonstrating imperialist superiority than with the idea that Argentina may deny British investors a major place in any oil wealth discovered under the sea – an idea as unlikely as Saudi Arabia kicking out the US oil majors. And in both cases, US support for Israel and British support for Malvinas was aimed at warning any future Argentine or Arab regimes which may have different ideas of the consequences.

Moreover, while Argentina at the time was ruled by a right-wing military dictatorship that was helping US imperialism against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the US stood solidly on the side of its imperialist British partner against its satrap – unity in showing who is boss was more important than any anti-US sentiment this may have created in Latin America.

Is intransigent Zionism in the interests of the Israeli ruling class?

Moreover, if by the “Israeli lobby” we mean the right-wing organisation AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), which pushes extreme Likudnik positions and is allied with the most warmongering faction of the US ruling class, then it is difficult to describe it either as ‘the Jewish lobby’ or even ‘the Israel lobby’. It is far from being the Jewish lobby because the majority of US Jews have more progressive politics on a range of issues, including Israel, than AIPAC. Even calling it ‘the Israel lobby’ is misleading, as the majority of US Jews that do support Israel tend towards the ‘peace-process’/two-states politics, and tend to support the Israeli Labour Party and of the US Democrats, rather than the extremist positions of Likud and the current US regime.

For example, one survey showed that while a large majority of American Jews (85 percent) generally support Israel, including 64 percent who “strongly support” it, 63 percent support the establishment of a Palestinian state, and 18 percent want to the US government to “pressure Israel to negotiate for peace.”[37] Mearsheimer and Walt themselves claim even less support for Israel, writing that “in a 2004 survey roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.” As Daniel Levy says: “Polls repeatedly show that American Jews, unsurprisingly, are liberal on Israel-Palestine, just as they are across a range of issues. Paradoxically then, it could be argued that there is too little Jewish influence in Washington.”[38] Given that Jews only constitute 2.3 percent of the US population, it is difficult to see how such a contradictory outlook among such a small group could really translate into such an aggressively permanent pro-Israel US policy.

Moreover, in US 2006 exit polls, 87 percent of Jews supported the Democrats and only 12 percent the Republicans, as has long been the case. This compares with a Democrat-Republican split of 44 to 54 among Protestants and 55 to 44 among Catholics. To be sure, the Democrats have historically been just as pro-Zionist as the Republicans, and many just as aggressively so; however, in the years since Oslo the Republicans – particularly the current regime – have clearly emerged as the more aggressively hard-line pro-Israel party, with no apparent change to voting patterns. One of the groups most solidly supporting the Republicans were “white evangelical born-agains,” at 70 percent.[39] This non-Jewish “lobby” has in recent years been fanatical in its support for the most extreme Likud positions, far more so than the average among American Jews.

Just how useless the question of Jewish votes is to US policy towards Israel can also be discerned from the recent brawl within the Democratic Party in Connecticut, between liberal Democrat Ned Lamont and Lieberman, the darling of AIPAC. Protestants gave LaMont 38% of their vote, Catholics 32%, and Jews 34% – not markedly different. LaMont won majorities only from those professing “other” (68%) or “no religion” (67%), a large proportion of whom are likely to be Jewish. Another internal Democratic poll showed Lamont leading by 50 percent to 41 percent among Jews, and explained that “Lieberman’s backers attribute the shift to opposition to the Iraq war. Jewish opposition to the war has always outpaced general opposition.”[40] As Mearsheimer and Walt admit,

“although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not … a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.”

Thus even if it were true that AIPAC decides policy for the US rulers, it is not necessarily the case that this would be the policy advocated by American Jews, American supporters of Israel, or by many Israelis themselves.

Which leads to the question of whether the most right-wing positions on Israel-Palestine are necessarily in the interests of the Israeli bourgeoisie any more than in the interests of the US bourgeoisie. If it is assumed that a softer version of Zionism would better facilitate the penetration of US capital in the Middle East, then surely the same would be true of Israeli capital. The more right-wing, ideologically-driven sections of both the US and Israeli ruling classes could be said to be blocking the freer expansion of both ruling classes in the region.

That is not to suggest that there are no special interests of the Israeli ruling class which may sometimes clash with those of the US ruling class; obviously there are. For example, the lavishing of money on settlers in the West Bank could be said to be in the interests of some Israeli capitalists, but not necessarily be in the interests of wider US expansion in the region. However, while some Israeli capitalists might benefit, these settlements could also be said to not be in the wider interests of the expansion of Israeli capital in the region. In fact, that is actually more true for Israeli capital than for US capital: Israeli capital is far more restricted in its own natural region of dominance than US capital. So the right-wing US-based ‘lobby’ – and successive US governments, and aggressive US ‘neo-conservatives’, both Jewish and non-Jewish – by continually blocking a genuine peace process and even sabotaging Oslo-style ‘peace’, is doing a much greater disservice to Israeli than to US capital in the region.

Moreover, even if Israeli capital benefits by the use of cheap Palestinian labour in a way that does not necessarily interest US capital, this is not at all threatened by attempts by one wing of the US ruling class, supported by Israeli Labour, for an undemocratic compromise. On the contrary, such a compromise, a rationalization and legalisation of the occupation via the creation of “independent” Bantustans, would facilitate the exploitation of cheap Palestinian labour. In fact the more hard-line approach tends to advocate the expulsion of the Palestinians, or permanently walling them off from the Israeli economy. Thus it is difficult to see this more hard-line approach as being in the interests of Israel any more than US capital if a purely economistic approach is taken to the issue of imperialist control, without taking into account the ideological aspects of imperialist world and regional dominance.

Who decides when there is a difference?

Finally it is important to note, in reference to the idea that Israel or its lobby decides US policy, that whenever there has been a clash between the a US ruler or section of the US ruling class and a particular policy of the Israeli lobby which appears at odds with US interests, the lobby has tended to lose, casting some doubt on its effectiveness. For example, when US president Carter had decided that Israel had to withdraw from some (by no means all) of southern Lebanon when it invaded in 1978, he got his way by threatening a suspension of some aid.

As lobby theorists show, the lobby has its greatest impact on Congress when members are up for reelection. However, the president has often used his powers to overrule Congress in such cases. For all the noise about the lobby versus George Bush I noted above, the fact is that Bush faced down AIPAC and won. Bush did hold up the loan guarantees to Israel. The lobby had thought it had the numbers in Congress, but when Bush, feeling the US national interest in an Oslo-style deal was very important, pressed his view forcefully, including with a televised message to the American people, then as Blankfort explains, “both Israel and AIPAC had agreed, given the poll numbers that it would be unwise to challenge the president in Congress, but to wait for the 120 days.”

What he means by “the poll numbers” was as Blankfort explains:

Polls taken afterward indicated that Americans supported Bush by a 3-1 margin and half of those responding opposed providing any economic aid to Israel. Two weeks later, a NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey showed that while voters favored aid to the Soviet Union by a margin of 58% to 32%, and aid to Poland by a margin of 55% to 29%, voters opposed economic support to Israel by 46% to 44%. Moreover, 34% saw Israel as the greatest impediment to peace in the region while only 33% saw the Arab nations in that role. 

Yet lobby theorists constantly tell us that the lobby’s strength is in threatening members of Congress with electoral defeat. But if one strong presidential speech can produce such results in public opinion, then the lobby clearly is a paper tiger, despite Blankfort ridiculing the notion. The reason the lobby can usually successfully threaten members of Congress is that in the vast majority of cases, a slight scrap between two tactical versions of a Zionist solution is not something any wing of the ruling class feels is fundamental enough to need to challenge the lobby. If the true US imperialist “national interest” really were threatened by AIPAC’s or Israel’s policies, it is really odd that US leaders do not more often make “televised speeches” since that appears to be all that Bush needed.

What the lobby theorists also miss here is that in standing up to the lobby and to Likud, it may well be argued that Bush I helped bring about the election defeat of Shamir’s Likud regime and its replacement by Labour, which was in agreement with Bush’s initiatives. Following this victory, Bush then “agreed to the loan guarantees with the proviso that the amount of money that Israel was spending in the Occupied Territories be deducted from the total.” Blankfort does not realize he has written a piece which demonstrates that the theory he thinks he is promoting is wrong.

Lobby theorists like Blankfort can then only claim that such actions lost Ford, Carter and Bush I the subsequent elections. However, he provides no evidence for such assertions. Ford headed a caretaker post-Watergate, post-Vietnam Republican government that would have required a miracle to win an election; the ‘Reagan revolution’ which defeated Carter came atop a groundswell of right-wing revanchism, and it is unlikely Lebanon played that big a role. Bush’s replacement by Clinton followed three terms of Republican rule and it really was time for a change.

All Blankfort can tell us in the last case is that there was allegedly an “increase in the media of articles critical of Bush’s handling of the presidency and, particularly, the economy,” as if that were by definition the doing of Jews, and that “the vast majority of the Jewish community of America … could not bring themselves to vote for George Bush.” Problem being that, as shown above, the vast majority of the Jewish community in the US have historically always voted Democrat.

US-Israeli differences do not only occur over the Middle East. At times, Israel is less loyal to US aims in other parts of the world. In 2000, the US pressured Israel to scrap a multimillion dollar deal to sell PHALCON reconnaissance aircraft to China, and in 2004, the very pro-Israel Bush II regime forced Israel to scrap a deal to upgrade China’s Harpy drone surveillance aircraft, leading to the ouster of Amos Yaron, director general of the Defense Ministry. In 2005, Israel was even prepared to ignore US hostility to the Chavez government in Venezuela, despite Chavez’s strong support to the Palestinians. The US forced Israel to call off a lucrative deal to install its own systems in US-made F-16 fighters for the Venezuelan air force upgrade its warplanes.[41]

The Iraq war: US or ‘lobby’ interests?

Since the neoconservative cabal in the Bush II regime was largely responsible for the invasion of Iraq, and since some of them are Jewish and many connected to Likud, the idea that this was also an exercise of the lobby’s power, against the better US interest, is also common. Blankfort thinks that Bush “allowed a gaggle of right-wing pro-Israel Jewish neocons to write his Middle East script which gave us the war on Iraq.”

However, the fact that some 15 percent of the world’s known oil reserves are in Iraq, and were under a regime that the US considers unreliable – for among other reasons, its attempt to knock of Kuwait’s oil as well – gives credence to the more traditional idea that US imperialism launched a war to control Mideast oil reserves.

Of course it true that the Iraqi regime was anti-Israel and had given aid to the Palestinians. It was well-known that Israel considered Iraq a major enemy and was in favour of removing Hussein. And there is no doubt that this was also one of the reasons the US went to war. But there is no contradiction: for the US, removing an unreliable, easily demonized ruler, who was an enemy of both its Israeli ally and of its Gulf oil-state allies, from control over a large part of Mideast oil, was clearly in US interests (the actual methods of doing so are another thing).

More sensible lobby theorists such as Gabriel Ash at least see the lobby as only one of the forces behind the invasion. Ash lists the lobby (by which he means a “small elite of military, business and political figures” with interests in the US and Israel), the US defense industry and Big Oil as the three sections of the ruling class most directly involved in the war. And he shows that all three have profited handsomely from the war, with Big Oil the big winner, its stocks gaining 127 percent in the last three years, the 100 largest companies on the Israeli stock exchange a close runner up, and the defense industry also seeing a good 50 percent increase in total returns on investments.[42]

Meanwhile, Iraq’s entire economic structure has been re-written, and not surprisingly massive privatisation, extraordinary tariff cuts, a tax ceiling for the rich and similar measures abound, making even clearer the fundamentally imperialist aims of the invasion. However, one area that did cause some conflict among the occupiers was oil.

A neo-liberal economic program of this sort would include privatisation of Iraqi oil. However, if this occurred, and private companies began furiously selling off Iraq’s oil, it would lead to a collapse in world oil prices – which both the big US oil companies and Saudi Arabia would fight tooth and nail to prevent. It is hardly an accident that the world oil price, and thus the profits of US oil majors, have gone through the roof since the invasion.

But some of the more removed neo-con intellectuals wanted to push a quirkier scheme of the Israeli and Israel lobby right – the collapse of the Saudi monarchy, something clearly against US interests. If Iraqi oil privatisation led to a flood of oil on the world market, they figured, it would bring down the Saudis. But, as Greg Palast shows in the most extraordinary article on this issue, this plan was squashed by Bush-Cheney and Big Oil, who replaced it with their arrangement for “locking up Iraq’s oil with agreements between a new state oil company under “profit-sharing agreements” with “IOCs” (International Oil Companies). The combine could “enhance the [Iraq’s] government’s relationship with OPEC,” it read, by holding the line on quotas and thereby upholding high prices,” in the process rescuing the Saudis.[43]

While Likud-connected neo-cons may have provided ideological ammunition for the war, when it came to a question of real interests – Iraq’s oil, the world oil price and the Saudi monarchy – Big Oil won hands down.

This surge in oil prices not only boosted US oil companies’ profits, but also those of US defense companies: the huge rise in Saudi and Gulf state military purchases described above flowed from this rise in oil prices, explained William Hartung, director of the arms trade project at the World Policy Institute of the New School in New York.[44]

Lebanon: Did Israel “disappoint”?

Israel’s brutal destruction of Lebanon this year also received uncritical US blessing. Yet far from this being an exercise in ‘lobby power’, a number of factors suggest this was a US war using a willing Israeli proxy. According to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah:

Israel did not get a green light from the United States. Instead, Israel was given a decision by the United States to go and finish this issue in Lebanon … The world community gave a decision to Israel to destroy the resistance in Lebanon. Some Arabs then came to provide a cover and encourage Israel to continue the battle, and to tell Israel that this is the golden and historic opportunity to destroy the resistance in Lebanon … They want to destroy any spirit of resistance in Lebanon, whether inside Hezbollah or any other party … This is what Israel is doing, and this is what the United States, which wants to re-arrange the entire region anew, needs.

Israel obviously had its own reasons for wanting to crush Hezbollah, but the timing – when it was already engaged in a massive crackdown in Gaza, and when the US was ratcheting up the propaganda battle against Iran in preparation for an attack – strongly indicated a US agenda. The US wanted an Israeli attack on Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, as a testing ground, and a morale boost, for its own planned attack on Iran. In addition, US leaders feared that when they attacked Iran with Israeli backing, Hezbollah may respond with rocket attacks on Israel. Therefore they wanted an Israeli attack to wipe out Hezbollah’s arsenal – or at least to get Hezbollah to waste it on Israel – before a US attack.

According to the right-wing, pro-war Israeli Debka-file, “America is willing to fight in Lebanon to the last Israeli soldier, just as Iran is ready to fight to the last Hizballah combatant. Israel must beware of being hustled into taking imprudent steps by the proxy contest between the Washington and Tehran.”[45] With the serious defeat which Hezbollah handed to Israel, many Israeli officials began blaming Bush for encouraging Israeli leader Olmert to undertake this ill-conceived adventure.[46]

The US plan also involved an Israeli attack on Syria, which Israeli leaders considered to be “nuts”:

As part of Bush’s determination to create a “new Middle East” – one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires – Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far. One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush’s attack-Syria idea was “nuts” since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post referred to Bush’s interest in a wider war involving Syria … With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the inclusion of Israeli forces as crucial for advancing a strategy that would punish Syria for supporting Iraqi insurgents, advance the confrontation with Iran and isolate Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.[47]

It was logical for Israel to reject such “nuts.” Israel is in the region; it knows that regardless of its views on the Assad regime, if it is overthrown it will most likely be replaced by an Islamist regime. For all its rhetoric, the Syrian regime has never militarily challenged Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, and has kept a tight lid on Palestinian fighters in Lebanon. But lobby theorists might well argue that the only reason for the US to be opposed to such a regime is in deference to Israel, which occupies Syrian territory; and if the US pressured Israel to return the Golan, Assad would have no further reason to pose as anti-imperialist. However, this does not take into account the current US view, that anyone who has said ‘no’ in the past – by opposing US surrogates in Lebanon, by allegedly turning a blind eye to Iraqi resistance forces passing through its territory, by allying with Iran and Hezbollah, even for pragmatic reasons – must be wiped away for complete US domination of a restructure new Middle East.

Even more significant were voices from the US regime which expressed disappointment with Israel – not for its wanton brutality, but for not being brutal enough, for its failure to crush Hezbollah and to continue to prove its worth to the US. Leading neo-con fanatic Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post put it this way in the midst of the war:

Israel’s leaders do not seem to understand how ruinous a military failure in Lebanon would be to its relationship with America, Israel’s most vital lifeline.

For decades there has been a debate in the United States over Israel’s strategic value. At critical moments in the past, Israel has indeed shown its value. In 1970 Israeli military moves against Syria saved King Hussein and the moderate pro-American Hashemite monarchy of Jordan. In 1982 American-made Israeli fighters engaged the Syrian air force, shooting down 86 MiGs in one week without a single loss, revealing a shocking Soviet technological backwardness.

But that was decades ago. The question, as always, is: What have you done for me lately? Hezbollah’s unprovoked attack on July 12 provided Israel the extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate its utility by making a major contribution to America’s war on terrorism.

America’s green light for Israel to defend itself is seen as a favor to Israel. But that is a tendentious, misleadingly partial analysis. The green light – indeed, the encouragement – is also an act of clear self-interest. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat. Unlike many of the other terrorist groups in the Middle East, Hezbollah is a serious enemy of the United States. In 1983 it massacred 241 American servicemen. Except for al-Qaeda, it has killed more Americans than any other terror organization.

Hence Israel’s rare opportunity to demonstrate what it can do for its great American patron. The defeat of Hezbollah would be a huge loss for Iran, both psychologically and strategically. Iran would lose its foothold in Lebanon. It would lose its major means to destabilize and inject itself into the heart of the Middle East.

The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel’s ability to do the job. It has been disappointed.[48]

Two other US right-wingers, writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, claimed that Israel had been “cautious” in Lebanon, allegedly “fearing that an overly aggressive military campaign will alienate world opinion.” However, they stress, “Israeli leaders ought to worry more about a different scenario, one in which American policymakers, analyzing the Israel Defense Forces’ failure to defeat Hezbollah after 30 days effort, lose their faith in Israel’s ability to “get the job done” on issues of shared strategic interest. Should the IDF lose its aura of invincibility in American eyes, Israel’s perceived value as an ally could decline sharply.” They warn that “the hard truth is that Israel must appear to be, and be, a winner in order to remain a valuable strategic partner for the United States.
Any conclusion of the current conflict on terms that leave Hezbollah unbowed would further undercut the West’s credibility, and would squander much of the deterrent effect of Israel’s past military successes from 1948 to the present.”[49]

Conclusion

These opinions lay out clearly the real basis of the US-Israel relationship. This is neither to argue for complete Israeli subservience, nor for Israeli innocence. Nor is this intended to downplay the destructive work that right-wing Zionist activists do carry out in western countries, particularly the US. Their campaigns of pressure and intimidation dishonestly harness issues such as the Holocaust and “anti-Semitism” in such a way as to apply maximum “moral” pressure: anyone daring to mildly criticize the most brazen Israeli violations of human rights are routinely cast as incurable Jew-haters. And precisely this kind of argument, that any criticism of Zionism is anti-Semitism, that a state on account of it being a “Jewish” one should have carte blanche to carry out any level of repression, encourages theories about Jews running the world, on which the more extreme, essentially anti-Semitic, forms of lobby theory are based.

However, even the more rational lobby theorists – while they should be defended against scurrilous and McCarthyite accusations of “anti-Semitism” – fall down in the end. It is simply irrational to believe that the most powerful imperialist state in history, which has used the most horrific displays of violence to maintain and extend its power – is likely to act against its own interests for many decades simply because of the pressures of a domestic lobby. Even if looking at the lobby’s activities as one factor, it is still necessary to explore what real imperialist interests are in relation to Israel. It is the imperialist interest in the maintenance of Israel that facilitates the extraordinary level of effectiveness of the lobby influencing policy further in this same direction.

While the last section above quoted US leaders stating that Israel may outlive its usefulness to the US if it cannot continue to demonstrate its military superiority in the region, it is unlikely that Israel will be cast aside by the US any time soon. However, if a socialist Israeli leadership were to seek a genuine peace with the Palestinians based on justice and equality, it may be precisely at that point that it would cease being of use to the US. As Norman Finklestein wrote, in what seems to be an appropriate conclusion:

Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann once asked a British official why the British continued to support Zionism despite Arab opposition: Didn’t it make more sense for them to keep Palestine but drop support for Zionism?  “Although such an attitude may afford a temporary relief and may quiet Arabs for a short time,” the official replied, “it will certainly not settle the question as the Arabs don’t want the British in Palestine, and after having their way with the Jews, they would attack the British position, as the Moslems are doing in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India.” Another British official judged retrospectively that, however much Arab resentment it provoked, British support for Zionism was prudent policy, for it established in the midst of an “uncertain Arab world . . . a well-to-do educated, modern community, ultimately bound to be dependent on the British Empire.” Were it even possible the British had little interest in promoting real Jewish-Arab cooperation because it would inevitably lessen this dependence.  Similarly the U.S. doesn’t want an Israel truly at peace with the Arabs, for such an Israel could loosen its bonds of dependence on the U.S., making it a less reliable proxy.  This is one reason why the claim that Jewish elites are “pro”-Israel makes little sense. They are “pro” an Israel that is useful to the U.S. and therefore useful to them. What use would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S.’s bidding?[50]

In this light, it is also interesting to note what Wolfowitz’s friends proposed to Netanyahu in the ‘Clean Break’ in 1996, apart from pushing for more Israeli aggression across the region and Israeli support for “missile defense.” In proposing to rip up “Labour Zionism” which had created a “shackled economy,” they demanded this be done “in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, re-legislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises,” stressing that these moves “will electrify and find support from a broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders.” However, what this course has meant for Israeli workers is a 20 percent poverty rate and the very rapid development of a rich-poor divide as wide as only the US within the developed world – alongside permanent war and insecurity. A break with Zionism by Israeli workers, joining hands with the oppressed Palestinians, would be the decisive change necessary for them to confront their own exploiters. US imperialist leaders certainly do not want that – lobby or no lobby.

Links, No. 30,September-December 2006. Sydney: Links Publishing Association.

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[1] ‘United States Aid to Israel: Funding the Occupation’, The Palestine Monitor, http://www.palestinemonitor.org/factsheet/US_Aid_to_Israel.htm

[2] Joseph Massad, ‘Blaming the Israeli lobby’, Znet, March 29, 2006, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10010

[3] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘The Israeli Lobby’, London Review of Books, Volume 28, No. 6, March 23, 2005, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html.

[4] For example, as Stephen Zunes points out, “Mearsheimer and Walt have been largely supportive of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and subsequently. For example, during the 1980s, Mearsheimer—a graduate of West Point —opposed both a nuclear weapons freeze and a no-first-use nuclear policy. A critic of nonproliferation efforts, Mearsheimer has defended India’s atomic weapons arsenal and has even called for the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states such as Germany and Ukraine. He was also an outspoken supporter of the 1991 U.S.-led Gulf War,” Stephen Zunes, ‘The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?’, Foreign Policy in Focus, May 16, 2006, http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3270

[5] Jeffrey Blankfort, ‘Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict’, Dissident Voice, May 25, 2005, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Blankfort0525.htm

[6] Articles by Gabriel Ash include ‘The Israel Lobby and Chomsky’s Reply’, Dissident Voice, April 20, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash20.htm , News of Neoconservative Demise are Somewhat Premature, Dissident Voice, April 4 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash04.htm, and ‘Why Oppose the Israel Lobby? Comments on Mearsheimer and Walt’, Dissident Voice, April 18, 2006,

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash18.htm

[7] Noam Chomsky’s view is in ‘The Israel Lobby?’, Znet, March 28, 2006, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=9999

[8] Gabriel Ash, ‘The Israel Lobby and Chomsky’s Reply’, Dissident Voice, April 20, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash20.htm

[9] Gabriel Ash, ‘Why Oppose the Israel Lobby? Comments on Mearsheimer and Walt’, Dissident Voice, April 18, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash18.htm

[10] ibid.

[11] Massad, op cit.

[12] Quoted from M. Shahid Alam, ‘Two White Sisters in Asia: Israel and Australia’, Dissident Voice, November 10, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov06/Alam10.htm

[13] This story is central to the thesis of Blankfort, op cit.

[14] Jean Bricmont, ‘How to deal with the lobby: The de-Zionisation of the American mind’, Counterpunch, August 12-13, 2006, http://www.counterpunch.org/bricmont08122006.html

[15] Zunes, op cit.

[16] ‘Should we blame the `Israel lobby’?’, Socialist Worker, http://www.socialistworker.org/2002-2/414/414_07_IsraelLobby.shtml.

[17] Israel’s GDP per capita in 2005 was $US25,000 (the same as Spain, and a little less than Italy), compared with Egypt ($3,900), Jordan ($4,700), Syria ($3,900), Lebanon ($6000), Iraq ($1,800), West Bank ($1,100) and Gaza ($600),CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

[18] For a chart of these companies’ weapons supplies to Israel, see Josh Harkinson and Daniel Schulman, ‘Boom time in Beiruit’, Mother Jones, November-December 2006, http://www.mojones.com/news/outfront/2006/11/boom_time_in_beirut.html

[19] Zunes, op cit.

[20] Laura Goldman, ‘Israeli technology to keep US borders safe’, World War IV Report, October 15, 2006, http://ww4report.com/node/2743

[21] Jason A. Vest, ‘The Men From JINSA and CSP’, The Nation, September 2, 2002

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest

[22] Leslie Wayne, ‘Foreign Sales by US Arms Makers Doubled in a Year’, New York Times,
November 11, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/business/11military.html

[23] ibid.

[24] Blankfort quoting Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel and US Foreign Policy, Columbia University, New York, 1994, p. 103-104.

[25] Blankfort discusses this clash as an example of where the Israeli lobby allegedly rolled a US president who wanted a settlement. It is clear however that the settlement Ford wanted was also completely Zionist.

[26] Later, the PLO leadership would take to saying they accepted Resolution 242 – ie Israeli withdrawal – along with “all other UN resolutions on Palestine,” which thus included General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974) on the right of Palestinians to self-determination and to set up their own state in these territories, and Resolution 194 (1948) on the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel from where they were driven in 1948.

[27] Here Blankfort sets up a straw dummy when criticizing Chomsky for calling the US “rejectionist” because “it has not called for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. This enables him to ignore the US goal: getting Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders as a way of improving regional US relations and the stability of it sources of oil.” Therefore, Blankfort concludes that the US really must be acting against its interests to satisfy the lobby, since it has never forced Israel to simply carry out 242 (withdrawal), regardless of it not supporting a Palestinian state. Yet we have to believe Blankfort that the US really wants to carry out 242, but has never pushed it because it bows to the lobby, rather than because it has no real interest in pushing even 242.

[28] George Bush, speech at the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid, Spain, October 30, 1991, The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/Bush_Peace.html. Another good description of how tepid was the Bush I initiative that lobby theorists have lionized is ‘What was the Madrid peace conference in 1991?’, http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=204

[29] Daniel Levy, ‘Is It Good for the Jews?’, The American Prospect, May 7, 2006, http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11647

[30] This act required the U.S. Embassy in Israel to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, pushed by a number of AIPAC and Republican leaders, and moved by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole at the 1995 AIPAC Annual Conference

[31] The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ ‘Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000’, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

[32] Jewish neoconservatives include Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Irving and William Kristoll, I. Lewis Libby, Robert Kagan, David Wurmser and Charles Krauthammer. Non-Jewish neocons include US vice-resident Dick Cheney, Defence secretary Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Stephen Cambone, Zalmay Khalilzad, R. James Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney, not to mention Rupert Murdoch.

[33] It was widely reported that Netanyahu rejected the strategy as too extreme, see for example, John F. Mahoney, ‘Timeline for war’, The Link, Vol. 37, Issue 4, September-October 2004, http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=258&aid=434&pg=1

[34] The Pentagon, Defence Planning Guidance for the Fiscal years 1994-99, March 7, 1992, in New York Times, March 8, 1992.

[35] Cóilín Nunan, ‘Petrodollar or petroeuro? A new source of global conflict’, http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/nunan.htm 

[36] Throughout most of the 20^th century, Britain remained the dominant imperialist power in the Irish economy, though this has since changed with Irish membership of the EU. The rise of the Irish struggle from the late 1960s onwards also contributed towards that change, and this demonstrates the importance of the Palestinian struggle in upping the price the US has to pay for its support for Israel. In a similar case, in the first half of the 1990s, a newly emergent imperialist Greek state embargoed the newly independent (former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia, making absurd demands on Macedonia to change its name as its name was allegedly an ancient Greek copyright. Many critics argued about how such obscurantism could help Greek capital invest there. Wouldn’t it aid Greece’s competitors? Yet since ending the embargo in 1995, Greek capital has been the dominant foreign capital in Macedonia.

[37] Kenneth Bandler, ‘American Jewish Support for Israel Increases Dramatically’, Science Blog, August 6, 2002, http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/archives/K/5/pub5096.html

[38] Daniel Levy, op cit.

[39] US House of Representatives National Exit Poll, CNN, 2006, http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.0.html

[40] David J. Silverman, ‘Lieberman’s Support for Iraq War Creates Dilemma for Jewish Backers’, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, July 5, 2006, http://www.cjp.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=187442 . The different claims of Jewish support for Lamont probably reflect the difficulties in determining who is a Jew.

[41] ‘US presses Israel to halt Venezuelan plane upgrade’, Haaretz, October 20, 2005, http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/636557.html

[42] Gabriel Ash, News of Neoconservative Demise are Somewhat Premature, Dissident Voice, April 4 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash04.htm. In choosing the Israeli stock exchange as a measure of the gains of the US ‘Israel lobby’, Ash explains that “the financial relations the Lobby is enmeshed in are more complicated and are not transparently tracked by commonly available financial data. Nevertheless, the U.S. Israel Lobby usually defines its policy goals in deference to the wishes of the ruling class of Israel. We can therefore ask how the latter group has fared.”

[43] Greg Palast, ‘Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?’, Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2006, http://www.gregpalast.com/was-the-invasion-of-iraq-a-jewish-conspiracy. If nothing else is read on the subject, Palast’s article should be.

[44] Leslie Wayne, ‘Foreign Sales by US Arms Makers Doubled in a Year’, New York Times,
November 11, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/business/11military.html

[45] ‘Washington Expected an IDF Grand Slam to Dispose of Hizballah’, DEBKAfile Special Report, July 23, 2006,

http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=1188

[46] Robert Parry, ‘Israeli Leaders Fault Bush on War’, August 13, 2006, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/081206.html

[47] ibid; Also, Tom Regan, ‘US neocons hoped Israel would attack Syria’, Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0809/dailyUpdate.html

[48] Charles Krauthammer, ‘Israel’s Lost Moment’, Washington Post, Friday, August 4, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/03/AR2006080301258.html

[49] David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, ‘Israel must win’, Haaretz, 13 August, 2006, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/749293.html. Articles with similar messages included Ralph Peters, ‘Hezbollah 3, Israel 0’, New York Post, http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/hezbollah_3__israel_0_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm, who argues that Israel’s shambolic performance was because “Israel tried to fight humanely” but “You can’t win if you won’t fight,” ie, Israel needed to do much more killing, but “The IDF’s been living on fumes since 1967. Hezbollah cleared the air.” And Gary Pickholz, ‘Uncle Sam to Olmert Drop Dead’, Haaretz, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleContent.jhtml?itemNo=753074, which warned that Israeli failure could mean that “Israel is the new Taiwan –a poor military ally, incapable of fulfilling its regional role irrespective of a bottomless credit, no longer worth the significant investment.”

[50] Norman G. Finkelstein, ‘The Lobby: It’s Not Either-Or’, Monthly Review Zine, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/finkelstein010506.html    

_{Top: Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs 5-7 August 2022. Bottom: Iranian children killed by regime from 20 September to 30 September 2022}

By Michael Karadjis

On October 13, I read two news items next to each other:

“Iran’s resilient protest movement. Nearly a month after Mahsa Amini died while in the custody of Iran’s morality police, demonstrations have continued to shake nearly 20 cities, even as the government cracks down on protesters and stifles internet access. Human rights organizations estimate that the crackdowns have left nearly 190 people dead—28 of whom were children—while thousands more have been detained or wounded.” 

“Palestinian strikes. Israeli forces killed an 18-year-old Palestinian teenager named Osama Adawi in the West Bank on Wednesday. Adawi’s death is the latest in a spate of clashes between Israeli forces executing raids and Palestinian protesters; so far, over 100 Palestinians living in the West Bank have been killed this year. On Wednesday, Palestinian businesses in east Jerusalem went on strike to protest against the raids.” 

This was October 13, but it could have been literally any other day.

We read every day that Israel and Iran are arch-enemies, and, sure enough, they aren’t friends. Israel continually threatens – for decades – to bomb Iran, it regularly hits Iranian and Hezbollah military assets in neighbouring Syria, and its leaders fiercely campaign against any US attempt to revive the JCPOA or ‘Iran nuclear deal’, signed by Obama in 2015 but scrapped by Trump in 2018. For its part, Iranian leaders regularly make fiery denunciations of the Zionist regime, predictions of its immanent collapse, and somewhat laughable threats to help bring this about.

Yet both are monstrous regimes that deserve to be utterly condemned by anyone with a progressive bone in their body.

For the US and other western imperialist states, Israel’s crimes against humanity, massive violations of human rights, flagrant violation, for many decades, of the most basic rules of international law, its apartheid, its ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people, are met with mild rebuke at best, full-scale encouragement at worst, but whatever the case, ongoing economic, diplomatic and military support and the absence of any kind of sanction; yet for the same powers, Iran’s crimes against humanity, massive violations of human rights, gender apartheid and the like deserve condemnation, economic sanctions and so on.

Unfortunately, this has led a certain section of the western left, especially among those who have a hollow and class-free conception of “anti-imperialism,” to simply reverse the hypocrisy of western leaders, by vigorously denouncing Israel (sometimes to the point of placing the Israel issue at the centre of world politics, in a dangerous tendency), while providing every kind of rationale for the actions of the Iranian theocratic despots, in some cases hailing the mullahs as “anti-imperialist,” and quite often appearing to be sucked in by the hollow support for Palestine expressed by the regime. Many of these people denounce today’s glorious uprising of long-oppressed Iranian women, daily confronted by the bloody regime’s bullets, as a CIA-orchestrated ‘regime-change’ operation or ‘colour revolution’, two of the counterrevolutionary tropes these “leftists” have adopted over the last two decades to condemn people fighting against oppressive and fascist regimes.

Internationalism, by contrast, demands 100 percent support and solidarity at all times to the popular masses fighting for their liberation against all oppressive regimes.       

The fact that both are monstrous regimes yet are engaged in hostility is no contradiction: there is no law that says “good” governments like each other, “bad” governments like each other, and conflict only occurs between “good” and “bad” ones, even if one were naïve enough to believe in such terms; while US president Biden recently claimed that the Ukraine conflict was part of a global conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, no serious person believes such fairy tales (and in any case, how would Biden, who wrongly sees Israel as a democracy, explain its steadfast refusal to provide Ukraine with any of its advanced missile defence equipment?). The world is not in some Manichean conflict between good and bad, and the very concept of good and bad governments is, for the most part, absurd.

Even if we use Biden’s “democracy versus authoritarianism” meme to distinguish between governments which currently are some kind of democracy and do not systematically repress, jail or kill political opponents and those that do (and ignore everything else, such as poor people dying in the US due to lack of health insurance, or state violence against the Black Lives Matter uprising), this would tell us nothing about alliances throughout the world: during the Cold War decades of 1945-1990, the ‘democratic’ US installed, financed, backed and armed dozens of brutal dictatorships throughout Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and even southern Europe. US support today to brutal dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, to the Israeli apartheid regime, to military coups in Honduras, Bolivia and elsewhere, tell us that ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’ are not exports of like from a mother country. 

Comic-book explanations of the conflict

In other words, there is nothing unusual about two brutal regimes being enemies. But why Iran and Israel? One may well ask, since both Israel and Iran have a policy of uprooting and “cleansing” millions of Arabs (in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria) as they strive to dominate the region, and since they are effectively separated from each other by the mass of largely Sunni Arab humanity that they both see as Untermenschen, why can they not be allies rather than competitors in this?

Hostility can have many causes; let’s first knock on the head the comic-book explanations. Some wide-eyed “anti-imperialists” believe that Iran, despite its class nature as a brutal capitalist tyranny, is somehow motivated by genuinely emancipatory, anti-imperialist intentions, and via Hezbollah aims to liberate Jerusalem and the Palestinian people. Others who are less sure about such motivations nevertheless believe this alleged Iranian quest to “liberate Palestine” is a remaining impact, via osmosis, of “the Iranian revolution” some half a century ago, somehow pressuring the mullah-fascists from below to engage in regional “liberation” moves. And the reactionaries and racists running Israel pretend to be in full agreement with these starry-eyed leftist admirers of reactionary mullahs, except rather than term it liberation of Palestine, they tell the world that the mullahs are, for reasons unknown, determined to “destroy Israel” and drive them into the sea.

Of course, all this is the purest of fantasy. The mullahs couldn’t care less if the Palestinians were exterminated, and all the bluster about Palestine is done from a safe distance. So unless any serious observer believes that the Iranian regime is either so emancipatory that it wants to liberate Palestine (while oppressing everywhere else it occupies), or so irrationally imperialistic that it aims, come what may, to conquer Israel through several countries in between and annex it to an Iranian empire, then we can now move beyond the realm of fantasy.

“Rivalry”?

The most common explanation for hostility between various capitalist powers is simply ‘rivalry’. Capitalism is built on competition; national capitalist classes rival each other; their state machines reflect this rivalry with policy. It is never as simple as that, but it is a good basis from which to start. However, state regimes also have to maintain support of their own populations, or at least consensus to rule; and this is achieved through hegemonic ideologies which can be based on ‘nation’, ‘race’, religion or other ideologies, which can take on a life of their own and not always correspond neatly to economic interests abroad. Let’s explore these concepts.

If we look at Israel and Iran and decide their conflict is based on ‘rivalry’ for domination of the Mideast region, there are some problems with a simplistic understanding of this.

If we begin by way of contrast, the region-wide conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran would appear to have a firm basis in ‘rivalry’; both are medium-sized capitalist states in the same region (as is Turkey, which likewise rivals both); both claim to be ‘Islamic’ governments representing the hundreds of millions of Muslims in the region; and therefore, there is a logic to their rivalry, because a larger sphere of influence within the region for one or the other means more trade, more investment, more goods sold, more economic deals and links, more profit. We can say they are engaged in ‘sub-imperialist’ rivalry, which has taken on quite an active form in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen in particular. The fact that one is led by a monarchy allied to the Sunni religious hierarchy and the other is run by the Shia religious hierarchy by no means determines who all their allies are; on the contrary, both act out of ‘national interests’, and countless examples can be given for this. However, it does give them a mobilizational arm when necessary, so a degree of sectarianism can be used when necessary to bolster support in some region or another against their competitor in their geopolitical rivalry.

But can we say the same of Israel and Iran? Israel as a colonial-settler state and mini-imperialist power is in the unusual position of being the absolutely leading economic power of the region (the only indisputably ‘First World’ economy), yet not being able to directly “rival” neighbouring capitalist classes in the region itself, because it is effectively locked out of it. High-tech Israeli capitalism is spread far and wide throughout the rest of the world instead. Unless Israel were ever to allow a just peace settlement with the Palestinians – something which essentially defies the very nature of Zionism – then Israeli trade and investment in the region will remain at its current absolutely negligible and in most cases non-existent level. It can therefore not be engaged in ‘rivalry’ with Iran (or Saudi Arabia or Turkey) at least in this common understanding of the term.

For example, despite having relations with Egypt, alone within the Arab world, for over four decades, Israeli exports to Egypt were under $100 million in 2016–2017 (0.1 per cent of total Israeli exports), and Israeli imports from Egypt were around $50 million a year at that time, a similar percentage; likewise, Israel’s share in Egypt’s total exports of goods in 2016 was 0.3 per cent, and its share in Egypt’s imports of goods was 0.1 per cent. Egypt is 39^th in the world in value of Israeli trade ties. This is despite Egypt being a very large country directly bordering Israel. While trade has increased and there is potential for better economic relations via Mediterranean gas politics, none of this could be considered to be part of “rivalry” with Iran, or anyone else in the region; while Egypt and Iran have trade relations, they are geographically distant, trade is small-scale, and as a solidly Sunni country, not a potential part of any Iranian-dominated region. All the same points could be made about Jordan, Israel’s immediate neighbour, which established diplomatic relations with it in 1994: Israeli exports to Jordan around 2017 stood at some $50–100 million per year, about 0.1–0.2 per cent of total Israeli exports to the world, Jordan being Israel’s 51^st largest trading partner!

Israeli trade and economic cooperation with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), by contrast, has shot up to $1.4 billion just in the first 7 months of 2022, following the establishment of diplomatic relations in 2020, and the free trade agreement signed this year, the first with any Arab country. Yet interestingly, the UAE also has multi-billion dollar trade ties with Iran, indeed the UAE is Iran’s second largest trading partner, and a major conduit for Iranian economic links with the world in the context of western sanctions. Indeed, despite the popular, but false, analysis in the mass media which suggests the Israel-UAE rapprochement was directed against Iran, the UAE is currently busy upgrading its relations with Iran. But it would take a brave person to decide that Israeli-Iranian conflict is due to “rivalry” merely for the small UAE market; on the contrary, the UAE excels precisely in having excellent relations with both.

Of course, Israel would like the opening provided by the UAE to extend to the major prize, the Saudi market, but currently the value of underhanded Saudi-Israeli trade is around $11,000 per year, basically a grain of sand on a beach in terms of economic value. And in any case, being the main actual rival to Iran in the region, Saudi Arabia’s negligible trade with Israel is hardly due to Iranian rivalry! Rather, while Saudi trade with Iran is valued at some fifty times the value of its trade with Israel, it is still only in the hundreds of thousands; in opposite fashion to the UAE, Saudi Arabia maintains only the most minimal relations, trade or otherwise, with both Israel and Iran (the decade-long daily excitable claims that Israel and the Saudis are forever on the verge of establishing relations notwithstanding). 

A map of Israeli exports to the world shows all this graphically: the entire Middle east is a huge black spot for Israeli exports, rivalled only by Greenland!

Ideological mobilisation

Rather, the essence of the ‘conflict’ – largely a ‘phoney war’ as will be discussed below – is rooted in hegemonic mobilisation: the Zionist and Iranian ethno-theocratic projects both need the “great enemy” of each other to justify themselves. The Iranian “threat” to Israel – whether the “liberatory” or the expansionist-genocidal – is an entirely manufactured threat, but the need for such a major “threat” is crucial to the ideological foundations of the late Zionist state, as it is likewise to the ‘Islamic Republic’ state.

Israel felt so unthreatened by Iran during Iran’s much more “revolutionary” era of the 1980s, just fresh from the revolution and with the firebrand Khomeini still in power, that it armed Iran in its war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and openly advocated Iranian victory, as is extremely well-documented. But following the US destruction of Iraq in 1991, Israel began to vocally declare Iran to be its worst enemy.

According to the article ‘The Forever Threat: The Imminent Attack on Iran That Will Never Happen’, Israel has been making noises about launching an imminent attack on Iran, often “within weeks,” since 1994. For example, on December 9, 1997, “The Times of London headline screamed, ‘Israel steps up plans for air attacks on Iran’. The article, written by Christopher Walker, reported on the myriad “options” Israel had in confronting what it deemed ‘Iran’s Russian-backed missile and nuclear weapon programme’.” The Forever Threat shows dozens of similar headlines from the past quarter century about Israel being ready to attack Iran any day now. When an Israeli attack on Iran is not just generally a possibility but is “imminent” in 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015 and onwards, we start to get what the title of the article means: it will (likely) never happen because there is no Iranian threat to Israel to require it.  

This continually repeated “imminent” threat, the permanent call on Israelis and the whole region to be on tenterhooks expecting Armageddon any time, the permanency of a state of advanced paranoia, xenophobia and existential “threat” to Israel and the Jews, serves a purpose: Israel may never attack, but the daily threats that it is always around the corner are their own goal.

For many years now, Zionist ideology has been in crisis. The success of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the growing questioning of Israel’s savage treatment of the Palestinians; the obvious contradiction between being a “Jewish state” and democracy; support around the world for Palestinian statehood; are all manifestations of this.

But if Israel and “the Jews” are under existential threat, then Israel and its allies have something with which to homogenise Israeli and Jewish opinion about the need for a Jewish homeland. As the alleged “threat” of another Final Solution coming from the oppressed and terrorised Palestinian “terrorists” looks more and more ridiculous to rational people, what can rescue this charade better than a powerful regional state, with a regime that similarly relies heavily on bloated “anti-Zionist” rhetoric, allegedly developing a nuclear bomb with which to wipe out Israel? Israel had found itself the necessary “new Hitler.”

As for Iran, for how many decades has the “road to Jerusalem” gone through either Baghdad, or Damascus or some other unfortunate Arab capital over the bodies of tens of thousands of Arabs? Iran and its proxy forces can slaughter Arabs in Baghdad, in Ramadi, in Mosul, in Aleppo, in Homs, in Damascus, in Qaysar, and claim to be fighting the great battle for Jerusalem! [and an either ethically corrupt or criminally ignorant section of the western “left” can help spread this literally other-worldly propaganda]. The reactionary ‘Islamic Republic’ regime has also been in a long-term crisis of legitimacy, demonstrated by repeated popular upsurges over the last decade and a half, in every case met with bloody repression. The ideological clap-trap about allegedly being a ‘rejectionist’ state in relation to Palestine is key to the regime’s propaganda arsenal throughout the region, and among a section of its own people.

The Iranian regime of Ahmedinejad was particularly adept at pushing rhetoric to the limits and playing into the hands of Likudnik hawks and neo-con nutjobs. While it is true that his statement that Israel will “disappear from the hand of time” was deliberately mistranslated by Zionist and imperialist hacks to Israel will “be wiped off the face of the Earth,” this mistranslation was made more believable by other vile Ahmedinejad noises and actions: Israel could hardly believe its luck when he organised a Holocaust-denial conference and invited, among others, David Duke, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Perfect for Zionist homogenisation: a “holocaust denying regime wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and is building nuclear weapons to do it with!”

In reality, the geographic distance between Iran and Israel is precisely what makes this propaganda game safe for both. This was also the case for past reactionary Arab dictatorships claiming the ‘rejectionist’ mantle, namely Gaddafi’s Libya and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; the further away, the louder you can bark. This has also been the case with Erdogan’s Turkey for much of the period since 2009.  

It was only the actual contiguity of a Lebanese Shiite population under brutal Zionist occupation in southern Lebanon for over two decades that led to the growth of Hezbollah and thus actual confrontation between Israel and an Iranian-backed force; this was a genuine national liberation struggle, where Iran just happened to be in the right place to be able to gain political credit from afar. But Israel was evicted from Lebanon in 2000 – 22 years ago – and as such Hezbollah has not the slightest interest (let alone ability) in using its position to “liberate Jerusalem” or even to fire a rocket; apart from the 2006 flare-up, the Israeli-Lebanese border has been particularly quiet.

However, the phoney “war” atmosphere requires Israeli strikes when Hezbollah or Iranian-backed forces inside Syria get within striking distance of the occupied Golan. Not because these forces want to use this position to “target Israel” – on the contrary, their presence has only ever been used to kill Syrian people – but because the entire Zionist case that Iran is out to destroy it would go up in smoke if Israel let them be when in “its vicinity” and nothing happened. The fact of the matter is that while Israel has struck Iranian assets in Syria hundreds of times (in open cooperation with Putin’s Russia, which controls Syria’s air defence system and allows all this …), neither Iran nor Hezbollah has ever initiated an attack on the occupied Golan, and possibly only twice have ever even returned fire.

It would certainly be difficult to see Israel’s bombing of Iranian and pro-Iranian targets in Syria as “rivalry” with Iran for influence – economic or otherwise – within Syria. On the contrary, while Israel and Iran agree on one thing – the preservation of the Assad regime, and the crushing of the anti-Assad decade-long uprising – Israel knows well it can never gain any support among the Syrian population – pro- or anti-Assad – as long as it occupies the Syrian Golan Heights. Despite bombing Iranian forces – Assad’s allies – Israel never attempted to aid the anti-Assad forces; there was not a singular instance where Israel bombed Assadist or even Iranian or Hezbollah forces while in active conflict with the opposition. And it is no coincidence that Israeli strikes on pro-Iranian forces have increased precisely as the threat to the regime from the largely defeated rebels has receded; as then Israeli Defence Minister, far-rightist Naftali Bennet put it, “Iran used to be an asset for the Syrians [ie, as long as it was useful in crushing the rebellion] … but now it’s a burden.” Similarly, the opposition has always emphasised the need to recover the stolen Golan and expressed its solidarity with Palestine. Rather, Israel’s key alliance within Syria has always been Assad’s most strategic backer, Putin’s Russia, the main actual rival of Iran for domination over the recovered Assadist state and its resources.

Strategic positioning and competition

Nevertheless, there may have been an element of quiet “rivalry” involved in bombing Hezbollah when looked at closely: for many years, Israel and Lebanon (with Hezbollah in the Lebanese government) have been engaged in hard bargaining over demarcating the gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea (and, ironically perhaps, Assad’s Syrian regime also has a demarcation dispute with Lebanon over the gas in the sea in Lebanon’s north).

Therefore, with the just-signed historic US-negotiated Israel-Lebanon maritime agreement – with a Lebanese government that includes Hezbollah, and led by Hezbollah-allied president Aoun – enabling demarcation of drilling rights in the gas fields of the Mediterranean Sea – there is reason to believe that Israel-Hezbollah “tensions” may relax; indeed, notably, the most recent Hezbollah threat of sabotage action was related directly to pressure on Israel’s position during the bargaining over this treaty. It may be too early to say, but it is notable that, while Israel struck Iranian and pro-Iranian targets in Syria at an unprecedented rate throughout 2022, as of late October there have been no more such attacks since September 17 – some six weeks – the maritime agreement, signed on October 11 and welcomed by Hezbollah and Syria as well as the two signing countries being a possible explanation.   

At a larger level, the ideological positioning, while driven by the requirements of internal hegemonic mobilisation, has also gained a life of its own as a strategic tool for Israel in the region, in Israel’s drive to open up more of the Arab market via avenues such as the Abraham Accords signed between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, further bolstering relations Israel already has with Egypt, Jordan and Oman, and attempting to drive open the Saudi and further Gulf markets. In particular, by drumming up the Iranian “threat,” Israel’s major military and “security” industries aim to profit via cooperation with the military and repressive forces of these regimes.

Ironically, however, that does not necessarily mean most of these regimes do feel “threatened” by Iran – only Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival, with a large Shiite minority in the east, and Bahrain, where a Sunni monarchy rules over a disenfranchised Shiite majority, have an Iran problem, and while Bahrain has been in the forefront of rapprochement with Israel, the Saudis, as we have seen, are very much the rearguard, at most, of this move.

Rather, for the UAE, Egypt and Jordan, what they share with Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Assad regime is seeing the regional Muslim Brotherhood (sponsored by Qatar and the Erdogan regime in Turkey) as a strategic enemy: a movement which attempts to combine Islam and democracy, no matter how precariously or dishonestly, which was active throughout the Arab Spring, including in Syria and Egypt, and in Palestine takes the form of Hamas, is considered anathema. Military and security cooperation with Israel serve the purposes of internal and regional counterrevolution (something they have in common with Iran in fact), not just against the MB but against democratic upsurge more generally. But the bogey of a large and powerful state like Iran with a very loud mouth, large armed forces and a supposed nuclear threat makes much better propaganda for bolstering “security” cooperation and profiteering than the threat from below. So Israel needs to continually pose as a regional “anti-Iran” leader, the regional First World military hegemon that can offer “security.”

Indeed, it is hardly surprising that all the Arab regimes that have cozied up to Israel the last few years are identical to those who have cozied up to the Assad regime, re-established relations with both, or always had them: Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman and Sudan, with the Saudis more quietly supporting from behind but refusing to openly budge on either. This fact renders all discussion of Middle East “camps” the nonsense they are, leftover ashes of what was perhaps a partial reality some half a century ago that many still live in: the regional counterrevolution is largely the same camp, with bumps at the edges.   

Longer term, it could be projected that Israel’s ideology of the phoney “Iran threat” could be related to a kind of future strategic competition between Israel and Iran: competition for this very position of regional cop as recognised by world imperialist powers. There is little doubt that Iran’s role in crushing the Syrian revolution, while the US looked on and did deals, and its role in defeating ISIS in Iraq in cooperation with the US, was widely appreciated, but the stripes gained were looked upon with apprehension by Israel. Of course, most readers would say this is far-fetched, which it is, for now: the mantle of regional cop, especially for US imperialism, clearly belongs to Israel. But the emergence of a powerful, relatively ‘modernised’, non-Arab state of 70 million people from imperialist sanctioned isolation to imperialist-blessed prominence, via the nuclear accord and its possible revival, cannot but be seen as a threat to its position by Israel in the longer term.

In this sense, Israeli leaders are not wrong that US-Iranian nuclear negotiations, and the possibility of a new deal, are an existential threat to Israel, but in a very different way to what they claim. If western imperialism’s need to bring Iranian capitalism more fully back into the world capitalist system leads to a deal that allows Iran to peacefully develop nuclear energy, then 30 years of Zionist bluster is out the window and finding a new “threat” of that magnitude will not be an easy task.

_{Above: Gabbard and Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad; below, Gabbard and friends at Christians United for Israel conference}

By Michael Karadjis

Dedicating an article to a particular US politician may seem overkill, but there are few American politicians that the ‘alt-left’ have lauded as much as reactionary, alt-rightist Tulsi Gabbard, former Democrat representative from Hawaii. For example, here is professional campist and apologist for mass murder, “journalist” Ben Norton, singing her praises back in 2019:

“Yeh I’ve been really impressed by Tulsi Gabbard … she’s really been hitting hard at the regime change war problem … Tulsi [her admirers are all on first name basis with Gabbard] is great because she has made this the key part of her platform.”

This is just one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar examples from the last decade or so. So no doubt they were impressed that Gabbard recently quit the Democratic Party, especially as she began by claiming they were led by an “elitist cabal of warmongers.” However, most of them quoting this – and many did – would have stopped there, embarrassed by what came after (though in many cases still not embarrassed enough to not cite her!). Let’s have a look at more of Gabbard’s resignation speech:

Gabbard resigns from “woke,” “anti-white,” “anti-God” Democratic Party

“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are… hostile to people of faith & spirituality, demonize the police & protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”

Have you ever seen a bigger right-wing dog-whistle while still making vague signals to the left? So, for Gabbard, the ruling class Democratic party is a hotbed of “anti-white racism”! Hostile to “people of faith”! “Undermines the police”! Believes in “open borders”! Yes, the alt-left, the campist-tankie left, can have her. Of course, none of this is new – anyone who looked knew that Tulsi Gabbard has been an out and out reactionary for years, well, always.

Unlike many, this was too much even for Norton, who now declares her “a right-wing sheepdog [who] cynically tries to lure anti-war people into the GOP.” Yeh, Ben, that’s what we said when you were singing her praises. Norton recently quit the red-brown propaganda-for-tyrants site, Grayzone, apparently because he felt his co-thinker, Max Blumenthal, was taking conspiracist thinking a little far with his conversion to Covidiocy. Will be interesting to see how Grayzone explains their idol’s talk about the dangers of “anti-white racism” and the like.

It’s rather obvious from her resignation which direction she is heading after the Democrats. Earlier this year, Gabbard was invited and spoke to the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where she spoke alongside Glenn Beck at the Ronald Reagan memorial dinner. She declared, not wrongly, that she finally found where she belonged, which helps us understand where her new “home” will be (where in reality it always was).

Gabbard: Apologist for genocidal Assad regime

Gabbard was good at hoodwinking the red-brown, tankie, campist “leftists” because they are not only easily fooled by definition, but also tend to be consciously and defiantly ignorant. One of the issues that really endeared them to Gabbard was her apologism for genocidal mass-murdering Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, who she personally visited in 2017. Her explanation for this was that she was for peace, and therefore it was necessary to talk to everyone involved, including Assad. This was a very thin smokescreen, however, as she propagated almost all Assadist talking points.

She declared herself against an (actually non-existent) “US regime-change war” against Assad, leading tankies to see her as one of them, deciding she was “anti-war”, as in Norton’s quotes about “regime change” above. In reality of course, the only US bombing war in Syria since 2014 has been the air war against ISIS (which destroyed ISIS in Syria), but which also hit anti-Assad, anti-ISIS Islamist rebels, especially, from the first day, Jabhat-al-Nusra; this US intervention welcomed by the Assad regime. Far from being anti-war, Gabbard accused the US of not bombing them enough. She welcomed the onset of Russia’s terror bombing of Syria on behalf of Assad in 2015, claiming, falsely, that the “US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria” (the US bombed Nusra targets hundreds of times, killing large numbers of civilians in the process, and often enough, even mainstream anti-Assad rebels), and proceeding to state “but it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists,” despite the fact that the vast majority of Russia’s bombs, and Assad’s bombs, hit mainstream rebels, not “al-Qaeda.”  

Returning from her trip to Assad’s palace, Gabbard made videos calling for an end to the imaginary “US regime change war,” which showed vast footage of the massive, unending destruction of entire regions as far as they eye can see that Assad’s bombing had wrought, implicitly blaming it on the US, or on the anti-Assad rebels, who only had small arms: the cataclysmic destruction in the footage is clearly the work of an airforce and advanced missiles, possessed only the regime and Russia.

According to Gabbard, “If Assad is removed and overthrown, ISIS, al Qaeda, Al Nusra, these Islamic extremist groups will walk straight in and take over all of Syria … they will be even stronger,” sounding identical to Trump, Cruz, Gingrich, Bolton or any of the American and global hard right. She claimed “Their message [ie, the message of her Assad regime handlers!] to the American people was powerful and consistent: There is no difference between ‘moderate’ rebels and al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) or ISIS—they are all the same,” claiming it was “a war between terrorists under the command of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and the Syrian government.” This shameless grouping together of terrorists and the millions who rose up against Assad is the most typical Assadist talking point: anyone opposed to a regime of torture and mass murder can only be a jihadi. The fact that ISIS fought rebels far more than it ever fought the regime, and the regime also fought the rebels far more than it fought ISIS, and the regime regularly bombed the rebels whenever they were fighting ISIS, is irrelevant to crude propagandists for mass murder like Gabbard.

But of course tankies, campists and red-browns think someone is progressive and anti-war when they support a genocidal tyrant who has killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed entire towns and cities throughout his country. Well, each to their own I suppose, so for argument’s sake, let’s go with that.

With exceptions, most of these same tankies and campists and even many red-browns pretend to be very pro-Palestine (unlike the far-right ‘browns’ they bloc with who are overwhelmingly pro-Israel). It is their one alleged point of honour. If you point out massive repression by an Assad, Putin or Khameini, they can “what about Israel” you in response? “Why doesn’t the US stop Israel?” Since every genuine leftist has supported the Palestinian struggle their entire political lives, and has never stopped condemning the unconditional US support for the regime of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, this whataboutism is irrelevant and stupid, of course, but it gives them something to say. So, OK, let’s again go with that.

Gabbard: Hard Zionist

It therefore takes a very, very deliberate kind of ignorance to not know that Gabbard is also a hard Zionist (and of course there is zero contradiction between being a Zionist and an Assadist – virtually the entire global far-right achieve that, not just Gabbard). So then why do they extol someone who should be their enemy? Because she’s pro-Putin? Yeh well, so is Netanyahu! The bottom line is, her support for the Assad regime and Putin are far bigger priorities for the alt-left than the alt-left’s symbolic pro-Palestine views. Indeed, given Assad’s murder of thousands of Palestinians in Syria and his destruction of their camps, their support for Palestine while shilling for Assad is not only hypocritical, but also anti-Palestinian.

But let’s look at Gabbard’s well-known Zionism. Here is Gabbard at the Christians United for Israel convention, alongside John Hagee, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and every other kind of hard US reactionary. Here she is in the far-right Breitbart, exclaiming  “Put yourself in Israel’s shoes”, as she defends staying for Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress, where he was invited by the Republican Party rather than by the Obama US government, when nearly 60 Democrat reps boycotted. Gabbard stated that the US-Israel relationship “must rise above the political fray, as America continues to stand with Israel as her strongest ally.” During Israel’s genocidal Operation Protective Edge, Gabbard co-sponsored a congressional resolution that said that Israel exclusively “focused on terrorist targets” and that Israel “goes to extraordinary lengths to target only terrorist actors”!

Not surprisingly, she got a “Champion of Freedom” award at the Jewish Values Gala, held by the World Values Network, founded by Trump supporter Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Here is a photo showing Gabbard with Shmuley and Miriam Adelson, the wife of Sheldon Adelson, another big Trump supporter who believes Palestinians are “a made-up people”.

In 2017, Gabbard co-sponsored H.Res.23, which supports the U.S. policy of vetoing “any one-sided or anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolutions that seek to impose a negotiated settlement on Israel and Palestine.” It also condemns boycott and divestment campaigns and sanctions that target Israel. Then in 2019, Gabbard voted for an AIPAC bill condemning Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).

_{Gabbard with some of her hard-line Zionist friends}

Gabbard: Islamophobe extraordinaire and “hawk” on the “war on terror”

One thing Gabbard’s pro-Assad and pro-Israel stances have in common is that they both accord with the very Islamophobic and “war on terror” basis of her politics. Both the Assad regime and Israel leaders, when they mercilessly bomb civilian infrastructure, medical facilities, schools, refugee camps, anything really, and murder with impunity on a daily basis, claim they are targeting “radical Islamic terrorists.” The US and Russia claim the same in their imperialist wars.

Therefore, among other things, for Gabbard this also includes:

• Being a hard-line supporter of Modi, the BJP and Hindutva chauvinism; Modi had been personally implicated in the murderous anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, which killed around 1000 people. Due to this, for about a decade, the US had refused to give Modi a visa. For Gabbard, this was a “great blunder,” claiming “there was a lot of misinformation that surrounded the event in 2002.”
• Loving bloody Egyptian tyrant al-Sisi (given that Sisi is allied to both Assad and Israel, this works well), who she visited in 2015, and declared “President el-Sisi has shown great courage and leadership in taking on this extreme Islamist ideology”

_{Left: Gabbard with India’s Hindu-chauvinist and pogromist leader Modi. Right: Gabbard with bloody Egyptian dictator al-Sisi.}

• While opposing non-existent US “regime change” war, on the “war on terror” Gabbard declares “I’m a hawk.”
• Calling for a “forever war” against “terrorism”
• Refusing to unequivocally condemn CIA torture: “I’m conflicted.”
• Continually slamming Obama and other leading Democrats for refusing to use the label “radical Islam” to describe ISIS and al-Qaida terrorism.
• Voting in favor of Republican-led “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act” in 2015, making it harder for Syrian and Iraqi refugees to get to the U.S.
• On a more humorous note, the ignorant Gabbard declared she wants to fight “radical wasabi ideology.”

The rest of her politics isn’t much different, even if she now claims to no longer be a homophobe, and one wonders how long that phase will last given the territory she is openly moving into. Her right-wing baiting about the danger of “anti-white racism” reveals a more reactionary Gabbard than even many of those aware of her real politics realised. For example, Gabbard claimed US could not possibly be a racist country, since Ahmaud Arbery’s killers were found guilty. That would certainly be news to the hundreds of African-Americans murdered by cops and vigilantes where the killers have gone free; apparently, Black Lives Matter was all about nothing.

Several years ago Gabbard refused to sign letter by 169 Democrats opposing far-rightist Steve Bannon being appointed appointed as Trump’s advisor; little wonder she has received praise from Bannon who claimed she “would fit perfectly [in the Trump administration] … She gets the foreign policy stuff, the Islamic terrorism stuff.” As well as praise from Nazis and white supremacists David Duke and Richard Spencer, from the leading right-wing economic/defence/security think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, from Fox News heavy-weight far-rightist Tucker Carlson, whose show Gabbard regularly appears on, really you name it, from almost anyone on the right.

So if tankie and campist leftists want to keep citing Gabbard of all people as an “anti-war” voice in support of Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine or Assad’s genocidal reign of terror in Syria, please go for it: she suits you.

_{Gabbard on Tucker Carlson show on Russian TV}