Why we need a new spirit of internationalism. By EDWY PLENEL; March 4, 2022
The invasion of Ukraine is now forcing the world to face up to the unprecedented threat posed by Russian imperialism. In this op-ed article, Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel argues that what is needed is a surge of international solidarity to defend and help the Ukrainian people who are resisting that aggression.
A new imperialism is
threatening world peace and it is Russian. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is
finally forcing us to face up to this reality. This truth has been staring us
in the face for a decade, to be precise ever since March 2012 and the third
presidential term of Vladimir Putin, who has held uninterrupted power in Moscow
for what will soon be a quarter of a century.
Doubling Down On Double Standards – The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz
‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst since 2018... The inevitable result of this level of media bombardment on many people: Conflict in Ukraine is ‘our’ war - ‘I stand with Ukraine!’... We can be sure that Facebook Instagram, Twitter YouTube and Tik Tok will never be awash with the sentiment: ‘I stand with Yemen!’
This truth, well-documented on Mediapart, is that of vengeful imperialism, driven by the resentment of defeated nations who turn their pain into aggression against other peoples. It is also of an imperialism guided by a mission, the conviction that it is defending a conservative and nationalistic vision of the world, as an alternative to democratic ideals that are equated with Western decadence.
Finally, this truth is
about a nuclear power at the mercy of one man and his oligarchic clan, a regime
which has moved from authoritarianism to dictatorship, that murders opponents
and journalists, muzzles and jails political dissidents, bans organisations in
civil society and demonises any challenge as foreign plotting.
In addition to its own
people, who find their social aspirations and democratic demands hijacked by
this headlong dash for war, the main target of this imperialism is the free
will of different peoples to make their own decisions, their right to choose
their own destiny, their freedom to invent their own future.
That has been the
driving force of the Ukrainian crisis since 2014. But it was also behind the
Russian intervention in Syria, when in 2015 Moscow came to the aide of one of
the worst dictatorships in the Arab world. And it was the driving force behind
the second Chechen War in 1999 when, even back then, Vladimir Putin was
asserting his power through violence by conducting a war of extermination
against the desire for independence of a people from the Caucuses.
The annexation of the
Ukrainian Crimea eight years ago was the first time since World War II that a
European state has captured a region belonging to another European state. Yet
this violence was not a response to aggression, other than that which was
implied - as far as Vladimir Putin and his supporters were concerned – by the
democratic aspirations of the Ukrainian people expressed in their desire to
formalise an association with the European Union.
In fact, it was the rejection of this association by the then-president in Kiev, who preferred an agreement with Russia, which triggered the Euromaidan protest movement in Ukraine in late 2013. When Russia then unleashed a cycle of war at the heart of the European continent – of which this invasion is the culmination – it was not about propagandist quibbling over the supposed threat of NATO. It was against that democratic awakening in Ukraine.
Whether through
indifference or lack of awareness, many diplomats and politicians offered
reassurance by regarding the annexation of the Crimea as an internal affair
within a Russian-speaking geopolitical arena. Their ideological blinkers - or
more prosaically their prejudices in relation to non-European peoples, in
particular Muslims - stopped them from seeing any further. For taking the time
to evaluate the aggressive dynamic of the new imperialism represented by
Vladimir Putin would have meant paying more attention to the tragic fate of the
Syrian people.
If they had supported,
welcomed and listened they would have known. Syria, which become the epicentre
of the democratic Arab revolutions after the military coup
d'État in Egypt in 2013, was in fact the first theatre of Russian military
expansion outside the parameters of the former Soviet Union. It has continued
since with Russian's interventions in Africa, in particular in sub-Saharan
Africa, carried out under the cover of the mercenary group Wagner.
Never baulking at war crimes against civilians, the Russian intervention saved Bashar al-Assad's bloody regime, against whom the Syrian people had risen after the 2011 uprising in Tunisia, with citizens of different beliefs and convictions uniting in peace. At the same time as it was asserting its power outside Russian borders, the Putin regime stepped up its domestic political violence. Its imperial court also became a dictatorial one. The start of the war in Ukraine was marked by two events which would go on to symbolise its capacity to violate norms, in the manner of a rogue state.
On July 17th 2014 a
Malaysia Airlines Boeing jet airliner carrying 283 passengers and 15 crew was
shot down in mid-flight above the region of Donetsk in the east of Ukraine
which was under the control of pro-Russian separatists. The initial revelations
from CORRECT!V, reported by Mediapart, about Russia's
responsibility in this crime have since been confirmed by international
investigations.
Then on February 27th
2015 the Russian politician and Vladimir Putin opponent, Boris Nemtsov,
was murdered on a Moscow bridge a short distance from the
Kremlin. He had been preparing a report on
the Russian war in Ukraine, against which he had called on people to protest.
Since then Russian special services operations against opponents and dissidents
using deadly poisons in particular, including abroad, have increased in number.
Having miraculously
escaped an apparent murder attempt thanks to Germany's intervention, the key
Russian opposition figureAlexei
Navalny is now rotting in prison on the basis of an entirely
fabricated case, as is also true of other dissidents. A short time before his
arrest Navalny had published an online video investigation carried out by his
Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) about 'Putin's
Palace', a symbol of the cynicism of a government based on grasping and
predatory capitalism.
The Moscow government
has progressively ended what remained of public, pluralist and independent
expression and of Russian civil society. Propaganda reigns supreme in the
media, with no room for opposing views. Non-governmental organisations who
receive foreign aid, in particular from foreign foundations, have come under
attack, with a 2012 law paving the way for them to be first marginalised and
then banned altogether after a toughening of the rules in 2020 forced such ONGs
to declare themselves as a “foreign agent”.
In such a context,
with myth holding sway over reality, the past can no longer be discussed or
re-evaluated any more than the present. Thus on December 28th 2021 the Russian
Supreme Court announced the dissolution of the NGO Memorial, founded in 1989
with the support of the Russian nuclear physicist, father of the Soviet
hydrogen bomb and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Andrei
Sakharov. On top of its work defending human rights, we owe a debt to
Memorial for its work documenting the crimes of Stalinism, in exhuming camps
and mass graves, as well as the rehabilitation of all its victims.
A spectre who emerged from the wreckage of the USSR, Vladimir Putin offers up a blend of Great Russian Tsarism and communist Stalinism. That is, in outline, the reality of the Putin regime. It is impossible to detect within it an ounce of progressive ideals, democratic principles or political morality. The far right, particularly in France, know the reality, and went there for their funding and to court the regime's leaders, as our investigations have clearly demonstrated. Meanwhile from the campaign for a nationalistic Brexit in Great Britain to the election of the supremacist Donald Trump in the United States, the Kremlin was happy to serve its own interests by using the full array of virtual weapons made available by the digital revolution, those of disinformation, brainwashing and manipulation.
But with the invasion
of Ukraine Vladimir Putin is now unleashing far more real weapons against
Europe, even to the point where - in the manner of a modern day Dr Strangelove
- he brandishes the nuclear threat. Whatever illnesses the leader may have,
whatever his solitude and his paranoia, speculation about his irrationality or
madness hide the key point: the coherence of his imperial project, which has been
considered and thought about for a long time, and which has set Russia on its
aggressive and belligerent course.
In 2015, the year
after the start of the Ukrainian crisis, a meticulously-documented essay
allowed us to understand this. 'Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine'
('Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin') by philosopher Michel
Eltchaninoff, published by Solin-Actes Sud, is an exhaustive inventory of the
ideologies that drive Vladimir Putin. Having returned to the presidency of
Russia in 2012, after the fictional interlude when he was prime minister to his
second-in-command Dmitry Medvedev, Putin openly embarked on a conservative
shift of direction that was guided by the notion of the 'Russian Way'.
Amid a hodgepodge of
ideas in which intellectual proponents of a Greater Russia from the time
of the tsars, White Russians opposed to the Bolsheviks and Alexander
Solzhenitsyn from Soviet dissidence days are all intermingled, one factor
remains constant in the regime: the promotion of an eternal Russia, pared down
to its Christian and Slavic identity. This idea is held up as an alternative to
modern democracy, which is dismissed as a Western deception. During a Youth
Forum held in August 2014 in the Crimea, a few months after it was annexed, a
Moscow-based lecturer and Putin supporter summed up what was at stake:
“Building a separate civilisation … and to consider ourselves as the guardian
saviours of Europe”.
Russia's posturing as
a victim - of a supposedly aggressive and scornful West under North American
domination - is taking root alongside rhetoric from the past. This rhetoric can
be summed up in the words of the anti-communist philosopher Ivan Ilyin(1883-1954), who said that the
“Western peoples neither understand nor support Russian originality” and that
their objective was to “dismember Russia, to subject her to Western control, to
dismantle her and in the end make her disappear”. Moreover, in January 2014 'Our Tasks', a collection of essays by Ilyin, who was
briefly attracted by Nazism, was handed out by the Russian administration to
all senior civil servants, governors and senior figures in the United Russia
party.
On March 18th 2014, in his address to the Russian Federation after the annexation of the Crimea, Putin himself explicitly echoed such sentiments. “The policy of containment [of Russia], led in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today. They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner...” he declared. Meanwhile in an interview with the Russian publication Pravda, an historian close to the Kremlin, Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister who signed the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, stated: “A war has been waged against Russia for a thousand years. Today is no exception. The West's struggle against Russia will never end.”
A spectre who emerged
from the wreckage of the USSR, whose fall in 1991 he describedon
April 25th 2005 as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”,
Vladimir Putin offers up a blend of Great Russian Tsarism and communist
Stalinism. There is nothing illogical about this when one considers the extent
to which Joseph Stalin, who made a clean and murderous break with the
internationalist ideals of the October Revolution of 1917, reduced Sovietism to
blind love for the Russian Fatherland, to a culture of military obedience, with
the organs of repression and espionage – the KGB, now the FSB, where Putin
started his career – forming the backbone of the state.
This is no mere
speculation. The connection was acknowledged by the Russian president himself
in his speech of February 21st 2022 which stunned the world
when he announced that his offensive against Ukraine was being stepped up.
Denying the very historical existence of Ukraine, which he called an
“invention” of the Bolsheviks, Putin returned to the issue which marked the
schism between Leninism and Stalinism, a rupture whose memory would endure in
opposition from the Left, from Trotskyism: and this was the issue of
nationalities.
For Putin, the indelible fault committed by Lenin - “worse
than a mistake … when it comes to the historical destiny of Russia and its
peoples” - was to have wanted to “satisfy the ceaselessly growing nationalist
ambitions on the outskirts of the former [Tsarist] empire”. By refusing
to put oppressive imperialism, with its conquests and colonial dominions, and
the forces of nationalism which were rebelling in order to free themselves on
an equal footing, Lenin was in effect defending the right of peoples to make
their own decisions. Stalin, meanwhile, sought to place the small nations of
the failed Tsarist empire under Russian domination.
Just as the colonial
issue still affects our current day societies – in their diversity, in the
discrimination and racism that exists – so, too, this question of nationalities
is at the heart of the Stalinism that persists in Putin's ideology. Stalin's
only theoretical work, 'Marxism and the National Question', which was
written in 1913 under the supervision of Lenin, led to him becoming the
Commissar of Nationality Affairs from the start of the Russian Revolution until
1923. The work is characterised by Great Russian chauvinism and opposes
self-determination to the point where it considers demands for secession to be
counter-revolutionary particularly, even back then, in the case of the Ukraine.
How Putin
propaganda twists aggression and turns it into victimisation
Exactly a century
later – the USSR was created in 1922 – Putin thus portrays himself as Stalin's
political heir. When work first began in in August 1922 on defining relations
between the future Soviet Republics and Russia, Stalin only wanted to give them
a vague autonomy inside a federation that was entirely subordinate to Russia.
Lenin was strongly opposed to this, to the point where, as well as his belated
awareness that “Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited
authority concentrated in his hands”, this issue of nationalities would be his
last fight before illness struck him down.
In his well-known 'Testament' written in December 1922, which was kept secret
by the Soviet authorities for a long time, Lenin attacked the “truly
Great-Russian nationalist campaign” advocated by Stalin, whom he described in
not very flattering terms as a “Georgian … who carelessly flings about
accusations of 'nationalist-socialism', whereas he himself is a real and true
'nationalist-socialist', and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully ...”
In contrast, during
his speech on February 21st 2022 the current occupant of the Kremlin
acknowledged that Stalin had “fully implemented … not Lenin’s but his own
principles of government”, in other words a “tightly centralised and absolutely
unitary state”. Putin's only criticism is that Stalin “did not formally revise
Lenin’s principles underlying the Soviet Union”. In other words, he did not
challenge the right – on paper – for the republics to have self-determination
and to secede. Putin described these rights as “odious and utopian fantasies
inspired by the revolution, which are absolutely destructive for any normal
state”.
Rather than a sign of
madness, Vladimir Putin's historical meanderings justifying his war of
aggression indicate the coherence and dangerous nature of his project. When the
dead hand of the past captures the present it becomes the driving force behind
the ideologies of resentment which make nations dangerous. Their obsessive
refrain is of the humiliations they have suffered and of the greatness they
have lost, which fuels the conviction that they can only rediscover the latter
by avenging the former.
During his speech on February 24th which marked the triggering of
the invasion of Ukraine, Putin spoke about the end of the Soviet Union and
stated that it had made him certain that “the paralysis of power and will is
the first step towards complete degradation and oblivion”. He followed this with
a diatribe against the United States and its European allies, the “collective
West”: “They ... tried to put the final squeeze on us, finish us off, and
utterly destroy us.” Putin continued: “They sought to destroy our traditional values
and force on us their false values ... attitudes that are directly leading to
degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.”
This twisting of
aggression into victimisation is the trap set by Putin propaganda, which hides
his desire for power behind the need for self-defence. The supposed military
threat from NATO is held up to stifle the democratic aspirations of the peoples
of Central and Eastern Europe.
It goes without saying that the long list over the past three decades of missed opportunities, persistent blindness and tragic errors on the part of the United States and its allies gives some substance to this rhetoric. Indeed, quite understandably, such rhetoric resonates with the peoples who have suffered the consequences of such errors and paid the price. None of these faults, even crimes, on the West's part can excuse the Russian aggression. They have certainly assisted the advent of this Russian imperialism. But they are not the cause of it.
Yes, the reality is
that the West became intoxicated by its default victory when the USSR collapsed
in on itself in 1991. Colluding with the new ruling class there that got rich
pillaging the remains of the Soviet Union, the West behaved with domineering
arrogance, carried away by its belief in an End of History in which capitalism
- free of any obstacles and threats - would be the end state.
Yes, in the decade
after 2001 and 9/11 in New York, the West went into Afghanistan and Iraq, in a
war against terrorism that was as disastrous as it was deceitful, violating
international law, trampling on the sovereignty of nations, increasing the
number of human rights abuses, and tolerating torture, illegal detentions and
war crimes. All this was done while it allowed the continuing violation, even
the denial, of the Palestinian people's rights by a sovereign state.
Yes, when the
democratic Arab revolutions sprang up in 2011, rather than showing solidarity
the West worried about how long its domination would last, to the point where
it again colluded with the old order of absolute monarchies and nationalist
dictatorships. President Nicolas Sarkozy's France even went further, with a
military intervention in Libya to which Russia and China were not opposed, a
sham war with aims that were not stated because they could not be stated,
hiding as they did his own corruption.
Yes, since the start
of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 Europe has been faint-hearted, displaying a
mixture of lack of awareness and hesitation. While rarely refusing to do
business with the Putin oligarchy - even tolerating the greed of some of its
former leaders - it relied on the Atlantic alliance under American domination
rather than asserting itself as an independent power, including in defence
matters. At the same time it turned its back on the world, barricading itself
in a fortress built on security and national identity.
This Europe which is
now rediscovering war on its own continent, with the resulting processions of
refugees, disasters and human misery, is the same Europe that very often –
particularly France – closed its doors to the wounded humanity that arrived
there. It refused to come up with a new relationship based on interdependence
and solidarity with the peoples of the Mediterranean and Africa.
Evidence of this in
recent days has been the casual, accepted racism seen in the necessary moves to
take in Ukrainians fleeing the fighting. These actions were accompanied by talk
about how these refugees are similar to us - in short, they are white – and
that this is about “quality” emigration (unlike migration that comes from
elsewhere) (read Ellen Salvi's op-ed on this in French).
Meanwhile non-Europeans, in particular Africans, who were doing the same thing
on the borders of Ukraine have been unceremoniously turned back.
However, none of these
faults, even crimes, on the part of the West can excuse the Russian aggression.
They have certainly favoured the coming of the aggressive, belligerent and
reactionary Russian imperialism that Vladimir Putin represents. But they are
not the cause of it. The “Russian Way” that he wants to impose on the world has
a logic of its own.
This invasion of
Ukraine has forced the world to become aware, albeit belatedly, of a brutal new
reality that we have to face head-on rather than just resorting to old
approaches, automatic reactions or the tendency simply to take a particular
side. Those who have absolutely no sympathy for the ravages caused by
economically predatory, environmentally devastating and geopolitically dominant
capitalism cannot use them as a reason to absolve the Russian aggression or not
take a stance on it, when faced with the duty to show solidarity with the
Ukrainian people.
During the wars in
Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001, the first time that the sound of gunfire returned
to Europe, we also had to confront this new reality of states and armies that
arose from the collapse of socialism and who espoused a murderous,
nationalistic and racist ideology. This led to the carrying out of crimes
against humanity whose victims were the Muslims of former Yugoslavia.
The dilemma then was
to do nothing and wash one's hands of it, which was unthinkable both politically
and morally, especially after the genocidal crimes at Srebrenica in Bosnia, or
instead to take action, even if there was a risk that the response was carried
out within a debatable framework that was open to criticism – for Kosovo it
meant a NATO operation that was not part of a United Nations mandate.
It is, however, easy
to get out of this false dilemma: one simply has to listen to those most
involved, in particular Ukrainian, Russian and Polish voices who share the
socialist and anti-imperialist commitments of the European radical Left. For
them, as was the case during the Russian intervention in Syria (read
this opinion article by Franco-Syrian author and publisher Farouk Mardam Bey on Mediapart), there is no debate,
unless one wants to be an accomplice to fresh oppressive and criminal
domination.
This is the approach
of The
Social Movement, a new political organisation in Ukraine which brings
together trade unionists and activists from various former organisations on the
Left. Attacking the “resurrection of Russian imperialism” it has launched an appeal to the “international left” to
“condemn the imperialist policies of the Russian government and to show
solidarity with people who have suffered from the war that has
lasted almost eight years and who may suffer from a new one.”
It continues:
“Unfortunately, the decline of American imperialism has been accompanied not by
the emergence of a more democratic world order, but by the rise of other
imperialist predators, fundamentalist and nationalist movements. Under these
circumstances, the international left, accustomed to fighting only against
Western imperialism, should reconsider its strategy … Just like in the 19th
century, when the Russian Empire was the gendarme of Europe, the Putin regime
is now becoming the roadblock of social and political changes in the
post-Soviet space.”
In an interview with
the daily Slovenian publication Dnevnik, the Russian historian Ilya Budraitskis,
who lives in Moscow and who remains a voice on the Left critical of the
Putin regime, takes a similar line. “The European left has lost interest in
internationalism. They see the world as a conflict between US imperialism and
those who oppose it,” he said.
“Among them we find, quite surprisingly, sympathy for Putin, because he resists
the political domination of the United States. It seems to me that, in the
light of the conflict in Ukraine, there is an urgent need to renew the
internationalist approach of the European left to international politics.”
“That would be very useful for us,” Ilya Budraitskis added with quiet humour, even as he issued an alert. “We are in a worse situation than during the Cold War,” he warned. Why? Because the “ethics of responsibility” has gone from international relations on both sides, he said. And because Putin's Russia, unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, “cannot claim to offer any ideological, political, social or economic alternative to the American order”.
Finally, from Poland,
there is this address made to the Left in the West: “You don't
have to like NATO, but Russia isn't the weakest party or the one most at
threat.” These words come from the left-wing party Razem, whose name means
'Together', and whose politics are similar to that of Podemos in Spain and in
certain respects France's radical left party La France Insoumise.
“For decades,” write four of its leaders, “Russia has been trying to
portray itself as a victim surrounded by hostile forces who threaten its
security. The facts contradict that. It is Russia, with a powerful army, a
powerful arsenal of nuclear warheads and imperial ambitions, which is trying to
impose its wishes on its neighbouring countries – and it's that which the Left
must oppose.”
In short, confronted
with this new Russian imperialism this is no time to be haggling. Every stance
that treats the adversaries as equivalent, with both of them an equal threat,
boils down to an underestimation of the new reality and the dangers involved.
As a result the response cannot be to retreat inside a national fortress, to
adopt an illusory even-handed stance under the pretext of non-alignment. Faced
with a peril of this scale there is no other riposte than one carried out with
other nations, that internationalism whose abandonment by the European Left
paved the way for the return of identity-driven and xenophobic nationalism. And
which, as a consequence, paved the way for a new belligerent and authoritarian
imperialism.
Moreover, the origins
of the Putin regime that were outlined earlier underscore how any ambiguity
towards it ends up with a key concern relating to emancipation - and its
struggles and demands - being left to one side: and that is the issue of democracy.
As its far-right supporters demonstrate, tolerance towards the current Russian
government is, to say the least, an indication of low requirements when it
comes to freedoms: in truth, such tolerance indicates a fascination for
authoritarian governments.
Battling in 1941 at
the start of World War II against left-wing intellectuals who baulked at
standing behind their government in the fight against the Nazis, the British
essayist George Orwell happily conceded all the defects of the British regime,
which was then still an empire. In his essay 'Culture and Demicracy' Orwell
stated, for example: “After all, if the Germans are very cruel to the Poles,
our own behaviour is not so very nice in India.” But this was to better make an
obvious point that, while a crime is still a crime whether committed by a
democracy or a dictatorship, there is nonetheless no equivalence between the
two regimes; one allows a challenge, the other bans it. “In a country like this
we are not afraid to stand up and say what we think,” Orwell continued.
So that the Ukrainian
people today, the Russian people tomorrow, and the other peoples of Central and
Eastern Europe, can again stand up and say what they think and freely choose
their own destiny, there is nothing more urgent than supporting, defending and
helping – including militarily – those who resist the aggression of this new
Russian imperialism.
Nesrine Malik: Let the horror in Ukraine
open our eyes to the suffering of war around the world
Stalinism:
A Study of Internal Colonialism (1977) by Alvin Gouldner
Book
Review: Sankar Ray on Sobhanlal Datta Gupta's 'Comintern and the Destiny of
Communism in India'
10 Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats
(1977)
Ukraine:
India refuses to take a clear position on the Russian invasion
