This site contains articles I’ve written over the last three decades on global issues such as Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Syria and Ukraine among others. It is dedicated to analysis of a number of the more ‘controversial’ global issues from a left-internationalist, anti-campist, perspective.

‘Campism’ sees the world divided into ‘camps’ of capitalist and imperialist powers and chooses which ‘camp’ they consider preferable. In doing so, ‘campists’ aim all their fire at the oppression and crimes carried out by the side they condemn, and actively engage in vile apologetics for the side they support. Internationalism by contrast always resolutely takes the side of the oppressed whenever they are in conflict with their oppressors no matter which ‘camp’ they allegedly belong to. Campism is not only morally and politically bankrupt, but as will be explained below, also based on a myth – because these alleged ‘camps’ do not actually exist, rather, global capitalism is one camp with a myriad over overlapping and contradictory rivalries which render campism meaningless even on its own terms.

One kind of ‘campist’ is the so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ campist. They have decided that US imperialism is the only or worst imperialism, and therefore, while they rightly condemn crimes against humanity carried out by the US or its allies (or what are deemed its allies) – Israel’s long-term genocidal campaign to erase the Palestinian people, the US invasion of Iraq and previous US wars and invasions throughout the world, US support to bloody juntas and so on – they tend to hold the complete opposite opinions when other imperialist countries (eg Russia) or states deemed, rightly or wrongly (usually wrongly), to be ‘anti-imperialist’, for example Milosevic’s Serbia in the 1990s or Assad’s Syria in the 2010s, becoming spokespeople for some of the most genocidal crimes.

The opposite campist is the liberal campist, and here I am not concerned with obvious right-wing liberals that are part of the western imperialist ruling class, but rather leftish and progressive liberals. They are rightly very concerned about crimes against humanity when carried out by a Putin, a Milosevic, an Assad, but get all bogged down when the crimes are being carried out by western imperialist states and their allies. This has blown up now with Israel’s horrifically genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza – many leftist and progressive minded people who have been working to provide a left-wing understanding of support to Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s horrific invasion have either taken Israel’s side or, more commonly, taken a ‘pox on both your houses’ view (this phenomenon is much less the case with leftist supporters of the anti-Assad revolution in Syria, who tend to rightly equate the crimes against humanity of the Assad regime and Israel).

Given that I operate within the western left socialist, anti-imperialist and anti-war tradition, most of my focus has been on the first group of campists who claim to be ‘anti-imperialist’. This is why my site largely  – but not solely – focuses on a number of ‘controversial’ issues – not controversial within mainstream hegemonic circles in western capitalist countries (such as Australia where I live), but rather, controversial among left, progressive, socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist circles. So, if you look down the sidebar and find (under a number of headings) that many articles concern issues over the last few decades such as Bosnia, Kosovo/a, Syria and Ukraine, this is the reason.

The case I put here is resolutely in support of the oppressed, of those struggling for liberation – the Bosnian multi-ethnic population and the Bosnian Muslims facing genocide at the hands of fascist and racist forces unleashed by the breakup of Yugoslavia; the Kosovar Albanians fighting for self-determination and against ethnic cleansing as a result of the same; the Syrian people who rose up in one of the broadest and most sustained revolutionary uprisings of the 21st century against a right-wing dictatorship which preferred to bomb its own country into a moonscape than give up an ounce of power; the Ukrainian people resisting a horrific invasion by a nuclear-armed imperialist superpower.

But why are certain cases of support for the oppressed and support for liberation controversial among the left?

As Ramah Kudaimi, who I follow on Twitter, puts it: “palestine separates liberals from radicals & then syria helps us figure out which radicals out for real liberation & which just ideologues.”

One may think it is straightforward that a leftist, a socialist, an anti-capitalist, would always be on the side of the people, of the oppressed, against the oppressors, the exploiters, the tyrants. Unfortunately, this is not so; since the end of the Cold War, an important wing of the left – let’s call them the ‘New Old Left’, meaning the degeneration of parts of the ‘New Left’ which arose in the 1960s – began taking the side of tyrants, oppressors, regimes which carry out ethnic cleansing, regimes which represent ultra-wealthy capitalist plutocracies, even rising imperialist powers, as long as they had some kind of conflict with US imperialism. While the internationalist left sees the two sides as oppressed versus oppressors, working people versus capitalist oligarchies, those fighting for liberation versus imperialist, sub-imperialist or neo-colonial oppressors, this campist left see the two ‘camps’ as those allied with US imperialism and everyone allegedly against US imperialism, even if often only rhetorically so, even rival imperialisms.

While in some ways this is a continuation of Cold War campism, in many respects it is worse. During the Cold War, many western socialists identified with the repressive regimes in the USSR, China and elsewhere who claimed to be ‘socialist’ and were ruled by parties called ‘Communist’. Many others, including the political tendency I was part of, rejected any identification of the ideals socialism and communism with such vile anti-socialist dictatorships. However, one could argue there were ‘aspects of socialism’ – the nationalised economies did on the whole mean these societies had less socio-economic inequality, the irrationality of unemployment and homelessness, endemic to capitalism, was largely absent, health and education were officially free and so on. This certainly did not justify the repressive rule of an unelected clique, let alone when it resulted at times in massive crimes against humanity. But for hundreds of millions suffering extreme poverty and exploitation in the capitalist ‘Third World’ brutally exploited by western imperialism, it may well have looked better; and even for those western leftists suffering from extreme delusions, we should remember they lived before the age of the Internet; many honestly believed that the bad stories were just western propaganda, especially among the layer of workers who grew up during the Great Depression and the subsequent role of the USSR in defeating Nazi Germany.

But however we judge all this, these factors became irrelevant following the collapse of bureaucratic state ‘socialism’ in the early 1990s. None of the regimes that modern-day campists have gone apologist for have even the slightest relation to socialism in theory or in practice; most in fact have a close relationship to fascism ideologically, and internally their repressive regimes defend new ruling classes which are every bit as vile, as exploitative, as any other, in some cases arguably more so. And their crimes against humanity are taking place in the world of the Internet where illusions in tyranny have essentially become irrelevant to common sense.

This does not mean that these are the only important issues of course; for example, I have had a multi-decade involvement with support for the Palestinian liberation struggle, first joining the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in Sydney in 1982, around the time of the Sabra-Shatilla massacre. My earliest political involvement was a decade earlier, marching as a young high school student against my government’s involvement on the side of US imperialism in the genocidal war in Vietnam; and as recently as the last decade I was involved in Sydney in setting up an Agent Orange Justice campaign. In other words, I am on the same side in all these and other struggles: the side of the oppressed people fighting for liberation.

If this blog does not focus as much on these issues it is simply because they are not controversial in leftist circles; solidarity with Palestine, opposition to US imperialist wars such as in Iraq or Vietnam or Latin America, and opposition to western imperialism in general, are simply a given. However, there are various articles which do discuss Palestine and a number of other issues, and this has become increasingly important now with Israel’s Gaza genocide.

This brings me back to the liberal form of campism. It should go without saying that this site is just as resolutely opposed to any tendencies from within the internationalist left to abandon internationalism by becoming ‘reverse campists’, and to effectively turn themselves into a left shadow of western liberal imperialism. When Israel launched its horrific Gaza operation following Hamas’ gruesome attack on October 7, Ukrainian president Zelensky responded with an absolutely effusive declaration of support for Israel, even offering to visit Israel to declare support from there (which Israel turned down with a curt “not the right time”). This was despite Ukraine’s actually very correct UN voting record on Palestine, and Israel’s 18-month resistance to US demands to aid Ukraine’s defence against Russia – which Israel had very good relations with.

But we don’t care about Zelensky – we defend the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression regardless of their political representatives, just as we defend the Palestinian people against Israeli occupation and dispossession regardless of the Fatah and Hamas misleaders. The problem was however that a significant number of pro-Ukraine progressives swung behind Zelensky and claimed Israel and Ukraine were similar because both were “attacked” – somehow missing the 75-year long Israeli “attack” on Palestine. But this was not just about following Zelensky – this was the result of illusions that had been built up over a period of time among many left progressives and liberals who had condemned the crimes of Assad, of Putin, of the Iranian mullahs, perhaps earlier of Serbian nationalism. Some had begun to see the world through the prism that now Russian and Chinese imperialism were the big bad guys, who supported fellow authoritarian rulers everywhere (as if authoritarianism were an export) and violated international law; and conversely, that while US imperialism certainly had a violent ‘past’, it was now mostly supporting ‘democracies’ since the end of the Cold War, and its illegal invasion of Iraq was widely seen as wrong and had led to its defeat and its global weakening; so therefore the worst enemy was now the other ‘camp’.

This campism tended to bend towards accepting US president Biden’s claim regarding Ukraine that the US is leading a global struggle for ‘democracy’ against ‘authoritarianism’. It isn’t, indeed it is not even ‘liberal’ imperialism given the number of reactionary autocracies or apartheid regimes US imperialism supports – yes, less than during the Cold War when the US supported virtually every non-Communist dictatorship on Earth, but still a substantial number. Or to accepting the US claim that it is defending a ‘rules-based international order’ which countries like Russia or China want to violate – this is absurd as anyone knows who is only slightly familiar with issues such as unconditional US support for every Israeli violation of international law for decades, let alone its own violations and those of other allies.

Israel’s monstrous war on Palestine since October 2023 should have given a rude shock to such illusions, but in some cases the opposite occurred. In some cases it is justified because they don’t like some of Israel’s alleged enemies, such as Iran – a position morally as bankrupt as opposing campists shilling for that Iranian regime, and not even based on logic on its own premises, given Israel’s close relations with Putin, its long-term stated preference for Assad to remain in power in Syria, and its alliance with Serbian nationalism.

And this brings us back to my note above that in reality these ‘camps’ do not even exist, and that therefore campism is nonsense even by its own politically bankrupt standards. Some rulers who eventually fell out with US imperialism for tactical reasons, such as Milosevic, Assad and Putin, were at other times on excellent terms with the US, and extensively collaborated, which even continued at a certain level when relations had soured; and too many states simply cannot be classified as being on any one ‘side’. Take for example US ally Israel’s extensive collaboration with Russia in Syria and the Putin-Netanyahu love-fest, or for that matter Israel’s past alliance with Milosevic and Serbian nationalism; or the strong support for the reactionary Russian-backed Assad regime from US-backed reactionary Arab regimes such as Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who, incidentally, welcomed the onset of Russian bombing of Syria to save Assad; or the close collaboration of the UAE with Russia and Wagner in a series of imperialist ventures in Africa; or the fact that it is the exact same group of reactionary Arab states – UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Sudan – which are leading Arab rapprochement with both Israel and the Assad regime at the same time; or the close Saudi-Russian relationship in OPEC; or the burgeoning Gulf state-China relationship, symbolised by China’s sponsorship of the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement; or the fact that China’s Monroe Doctrine-style aggression in the South China Sea has as its main victim Vietnam, the very country that fought US imperialism to a standstill; or the alliance of far-right rulers of sub-imperialist states India and Brazil, Modi and Bolsonaro, or for that matter Oran in Hungary, with both Russian and US imperialism, and in particular with both Trump and Putin and Netanyahu). The list is endless; this paragraph could be an entire article; campism is as false in its own logic as it is morally and politically repugnant.

Why is this important? For me personally, it is partly trajectory, related to living in Greece – ie the Balkans – in the 1990s, during the rise of anti-Macedonian Greek nationalism, and then the descent of Yugoslavia into its nationalist hell, with my Greek nationalist opponents supporting fascistic Serbian nationalism; having a Cypriot background – there’s a ‘controversial’ issue by defintion!; my background in Palestine solidarity, which for me led naturally to support for the similar struggles of the Bosnian people or the Syrian people, even as other supporters of Palestine managed to dishonorably draw opposite conclusions, which denies the essentially liberatory nature of the Palestine struggle – indeed, having written articles in the 1980s defending the Palestine Liberation Organisation from the constant bloody attacks by the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad (sometimes in coordination with Israel), father of the current tyrant, was a useful precursor to the 2010s; and so on.

But it is well beyond personal: I’ve been a socialist, a Marxist, an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, since I was 13. I still wish to see a world free of capitalist exploitation and oppression, and I continue to think it’s possible. But it is based on emancipatory politics, and on internationalism, or it is nothing. The ‘campist’ left – to use the politest possible term for a collection of leftists which includes what we call ‘tankies’ (ie those who support ‘tanks’, and barrel bombs, chemical weapons, torture, ethnic cleansing etc, against fellow working people on other countries), and ‘red-browns’, those who try to bridge the gap, in theory or in practice, with the ugly, repugnant far-right, due to their common view on many of these issues – are doing indescribable damage to everything we as socialists, leftists or even progressives have struggled for throughout our lives, and to the future struggle for human emancipation.

Incidentally, in my current teaching role at Western Sydney University College, I teach a subject, the curriculum of which I wrote, called in ‘Issues in World Development – Rich World, Poor World’. This course examines the relationship between global imperialism and issues of exploitative capitalist ‘development’ and underdevelopment, chronic poverty and widening inequality, which characterise today’s ‘Global South’. Basically a course on neo-colonialism. Needless to say, US and European imperialism play a much bigger global economic role than do Russian and Chinese imperialism, and so they are the main target (though Chinese imperialism is challenging US hegemony, and Russian imperialism is engaged in brutal 19th century style gunboat imperialism in Syria and a number of African countries); the global system of imperialism as a whole is the enemy of humanity, not particular countries within it, and ultimately none are better or worse than others.

Michael Karadjis