The following essay started as a technical analysis of the disparities in American healthcare between rural and urban communities. It was originally written in an academic style with very dry language and the use of vocabulary words that are not well known outside the field of healthcare administration. However, the essay has been revised into a summary of the healthcare system in rural America, and a persuasive argument in favor of moving towards a socialistic system of healthcare. The purpose of this is to demystify the healthcare system for American workers, to reveal the contradictions laying at the base of the system and explain how they have led to the system’s many failures. Any thorough analysis of the U.S. healthcare system such as this will blatantly reveal the contradictions of capitalism itself, and the many ways that capital has infected American healthcare.
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Additionally, this analysis critiques the toothless ‘solutions’ to the problems in healthcare being proposed by ‘healthcare policy experts.’ While these experts are deeply knowledgeable about the existing system, they almost always overlook the blatant contradiction between the profit motivations of healthcare capitalists, and the intended goal of the system, which is to maximize health outcomes for the population. Policy experts generally suggest technocratic changes to the system, which never threaten the billions of dollars in revenue that shareholders make from the system each year. Solutions produced by these policy experts are often funded by enormous healthcare conglomerates such as United Health Group Inc. Therefore, the very companies who constitute the root of the healthcare system’s problems, are those who oversee producing solutions for fixing the same problems they caused. This shows how deeply capital has infected the system and captured the discourse surrounding it.

One of the primary healthcare concerns that has plagued the rural United States for decades has been lack of access to hospitals and emergency care. Rural America has a general shortage of physicians and healthcare professionals, a lack of sufficient healthcare facilities, and has experienced overall economic stagnation throughout the last 40 years. Four decades of neoliberalism, the political-economic ideology favoring unregulated capitalism and minimal social safety net, has battered the economies and healthcare systems of most every town in the rural U.S. In the last decade alone over 100 rural hospitals were shut down due to lack of revenue, leaving many rural residents without access to a hospital within a reasonable distance. An overall shift in healthcare, towards outpatient care and away from inpatient, has also contributed to the falling number of rural hospitals.
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Various solutions have been proposed to tackle the issue of declining rural hospital access. Many policy experts have called for Freestanding Emergency Departments (FSEDs) to provide emergency care for rural areas in desperate need. FSED’s are essentially mobilized emergency care departments, that don’t offer the other services traditionally associated with hospitals. Proponents of FSEDs argue they deliver care faster and are farther reaching than traditional hospitals but are cheaper to maintain as they require less staff. FSEDs have seen some success in practice, however, that success is usually dependent on the economic conditions of the community it’s implemented in, as well as how much Government financing the FSED receives. FSEDs are not a viable solution to the massive problems facing the rural healthcare system. Based on the existing barriers between rural Americans and hospital care, and the consistently decreasing number of hospitals in rural areas, much larger scale changes are needed to improve access to quality hospital care for the rural U.S.

To better understand the problems facing rural America specifically, we can compare relevant health statistics between urban and rural communities. Over the past four decades a large body of literature has been produced detailing the disparities between rural and urban healthcare. A comparative study was done in 2007 analyzing the differences in healthcare quality indicators between urban acute care hospitals and rural critical access hospitals in the U.S. Of the 12 quality indicators measured, 8 showed a statistically significant difference between urban and rural, with 7 of the 8 favoring the urban acute care hospitals (Lutfiyya, 2007). The study concluded that urban communities have access to higher quality healthcare services than rural communities overall. Since that study, 164 new rural hospitals have closed according to the University of North Carolina’s Shep Center for Health Services Research, further decreasing the already low level of hospital access for rural residents. This data reveals that poor access to health services and low-quality hospital care have been issues in rural communities for many years and have only gotten worse with time.

Many policy experts believe the solution to decreasing healthcare access is mobilizing FSED’s for the purpose of providing emergency care in rural areas. Thus, we must take a closer look at FSEDs and how they function. The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) define an FSED as “a facility that is structurally separate and distinct from a hospital and provides emergency care.” There are two types of FSEDs: Hospital Outpatient Departments (HOPDs) also known as Hospital-Based Off-Campus Emergency Departments (OCEDs) and Independent Freestanding Emergency Centers (IFECs).

HOPDs belong to, and are controlled by, larger medical centers or hospital systems. These systems tend to accept Medicare and Medicaid payments, thereby placing them under the regulatory rules of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The CMS regulations governing HOPD style FSEDs, are the same regulations that most Emergency Departments in the U.S. operate under.

The other style of FSED are IFECs which differ from HOPDs in that they can be owned by individuals or private businesses. CMS does not recognize IFECs as Emergency Departments, which prevents them from taking Medicare or Medicaid payments, and exempts them from the regulations that govern HOPDs and traditional emergency departments. Because of this the regulations for IFECs are incredibly inconsistent and vary by state. Some states have decided to regulate IFECs under guidelines of the Emergency Medical Treatment and labor act (EMTALA), which ensures hospitals treat and stabilize patients regardless of their ability to pay. A handful of states have taken no regulatory action at all, allowing FSEDs to act largely unregulated. Many states will not give licenses for any kind of FSED, and others will only license HOPDs style facilities governed by CMS regulations. 

So, who is advocating for this move to Freestanding Emergency Departments as the mode of delivering healthcare in the rural U.S.? In an article from the Rural Health Information Hub discussing FSEDs as an alternative healthcare model for rural communities, the organization spoke to MD and ACEP member David Ernst who advocated for the IFEC model, the model which allows for FSEDs to be privately owned. Ernst argued that independently owned IFECs are more sophisticated, efficient, and economically streamlined compared to other models which are hampered by federal enforcement of Medicare mandates (though Ernst does not explain here what he means by any of these statements specifically.) He also mentions that IFEC facilities tend to thrive in high income urban and suburban areas where most the population has high quality insurance (Lukens, 2016).
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How the large-scale implementation of IFEC facilities would improve healthcare quality and access in rural areas is truly a mystery. Anyone who genuinely offers this as a solution likely does not understand the nature or the gravity of the problems facing rural healthcare, and the U.S. healthcare system in general. Most who offer it as a solution likely have contradictory motivations leading them to believe that this is a viable solution.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s causing poor health outcomes for rural Americans. The National Library of Medicine did an analysis of the historical problems in rural healthcare and found that the general lack of rural hospitals is largely due to ‘financing issues,’ as rural healthcare facilities often struggle bringing in enough revenue to remain profitable in sparsely populated rural areas. Additionally, when larger healthcare systems realize they are no longer making a net profit from selling healthcare within a certain geographic area, they have historically chosen to remove healthcare providing facilities from that area, regardless of how it effects the residents in that area. The analysis identified that the primary elements contributing to rural healthcare’s worsening condition are decreasing and disproportionately elderly populations, economic stagnation, high rates of underinsured residents, and the trend towards outpatient over inpatient care (Weisgrau). All the relevant scholarly literature agrees that the most influential problems facing rural healthcare are economic in nature.

These issues highlight the inefficiencies of the market when it comes to protecting the interests of working-class citizens, and the lunacy of the idea that profit driven private companies working within healthcare will prioritize the interests of vulnerable populations over their own monetary interests. In fact, companies could not prioritize population health outcomes even if they wanted to. Market competition rewards those who sell the most healthcare at the greatest margins, but harshly punishes those who would bring healthcare to a population of people who can’t afford to pay both the costs of the healthcare services provided, as well as the profits of the private shareholders who own the facilities providing care.

So now that we have a more concrete understanding of the problems rural healthcare is facing, let’s turn back to the proposed IFEC model to ask whether it truly addresses the economic barriers in rural healthcare? Given that IFECs can’t accept Medicaid payments, it is unlikely that underinsured populations will have access to IFEC care. In many states IFECs can turn away underinsured without giving care, as they are not subject to CMS regulations and therefore EMTALA. For the private business entity who owns the IFEC this is a positive, as IFECs can avoid the revenue loss that traditional hospitals incur from being forced by regulation to provide unpaid care. However, IFECs do nothing to improve deficient access to care for the underinsured, or the 12.3% of rural residents who are completely uninsured (Day, 2019). IFECs may be a less costly way for businesses entities to maintain Emergency Department style facilities in rural areas that can’t support full-service hospitals, but they do little to address the most impactful barriers to healthcare affecting rural citizens. IFECs do nothing to provide healthcare for those who lack insurance coverage, which is one of the foremost barriers to healthcare in the U.S.

The proposed system could easily be exploited by predatory business interests. With a declining number of rural hospitals, business entities could theoretically wait for an area’s hospital to close, then fill the healthcare void in that area by implementing an IFEC style FSED. The facility would be under no obligation to treat those residents who cannot afford to pay for care. They could perform services exclusively for people with income levels high enough to afford them, or those desperate enough to pay more than they can afford. After operating in this manner for a period, the IFEC owners would get an understanding of who in the rural community can afford ED services and how much they’re willing to pay. The facility could then be staffed with only as many employees as necessary for performing those services, decreasing variable costs for the facility, and maintaining sufficient revenue levels for the business owners. Moving towards IFECs would allow healthcare investors to generate revenue in rural areas where they previously could not but would do little to address poor health outcomes for rural populations that need it most.

So why did MD David Ernst promote the IFEC model in his interview with Rural Health Information Hub? Well, it may have something to do with the fact that Ernst is the president of a company that provides telemedicine software to 325 emergency departments and hospitals across the U.S. Ernst thus stands to profit from the implementation of more FSEDs, as the facilities are reliant on telemedicine software to communicate with other facilities. Creating more FSEDs would increase demand for the software produced by Ernst’s EPOWERdoc company. Obviously, there is a conflict of interest here, and Ernst is likely promoting the FSED model to boost his private companies’ revenue. Despite the conflict of interest, Rural Information Hub present Ernst’s interview as if he were an unbiased expert. A clear example of how the solutions to the healthcare systems many problems are being produced by profit driven interests, who do not prioritize the health outcomes of the communities they serve, but rather the revenue of the companies they belong to.

A detailed cost analysis of FSEDs concluded that IFECs would not be financially viable in rural areas, especially if they are not allowed to accept Medicare and Medicaid payments. The analysis also found that the alternative HOPD model has only worked in areas with relatively high population density and favorable payer mixes. They have been far less successful in the sparsely populated and poorer areas of rural America. Hospital systems rarely think it is worth their effort and resources to implement and maintain FSEDs in these areas. Doing so rarely generates revenue and can even work in reverse as a drain on total revenue (Williams, 2015). While FSED implementation may be an improvement in rural areas with no nearby hospitals at all, they are a deeply flawed concept, and one that has been debated since the early 1970s. Bringing high quality healthcare to rural America will require new solutions that seek to enact macro level changes, rather than outdated solutions which have largely failed to address historically prevalent issues.

The primary contradiction in rural healthcare, and the healthcare system in its totality, are the profit incentives of the various entities who provide healthcare services and mediate payment. Cuba is a vastly poorer country than the U.S. that has faced an embargo limiting its economic activity for decades. Despite that, Cuba has achieved and maintained universal health care for many years, including the rural and mountainous regions of the island. Since 1959 Cuba has invested substantial resources towards developing their healthcare infrastructure and training new doctors. Cuban doctors receive free medical school in exchange for pledging to serve the rural areas of Cuba for a certain time after graduation. A beautiful example of a policy designed to both train new staff and ensure that the staff serve the neediest parts of the country.
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In 1999 Cuba assisted Venezuela in implementing similar policies, as well as an effort to increase the level of preventative care services. Their efforts resulted in a substantial increase in the number of rural clinics, physicians, nurses, and dentists as well as a 30% decrease in ER visits thanks to the newly implemented preventative care (Westhoff). If the U.S. were to implement a similar program, focusing their resources on developing the healthcare system, similar policies to those enacted in Cuba and Venezuela could be implemented on a massive scale. The problem is that Cuba’s reforms required Government initiatives to ensure the nation’s resources were utilized to develop the rural health infrastructure, and train more rural healthcare staff. Government planning was used to do what the free market could not.

The healthcare markets and private hospital systems in the U.S. have shown time and time again that they will not adequately serve rural communities unless it is profitable. In sparsely populated communities across rural America, it is rarely profitable. Thus, the state of rural healthcare can only be improved if the U.S. abandons the dogmatic belief that market forces always generate optimal outcomes for everyone – especially in the realm of healthcare where profit motivations so clearly contradict the effort to create an optimal system for everyone. The healthcare system itself must abandon the idea that it can maintain the current profits that it generates for investors, while also meeting the needs of rural populations. Rational economic planning is what is needed to fix the system’s problems in the future. Rational planning is impossible under the system’s current ownership, whose only rationale is maximizing their own revenue. Workers must seize control of the healthcare system from the shareholders and executives who have captured it and turned it into a profit generating monstrosity. This change in ownership over the healthcare system’s ‘means of production’ is the only way to create a rational system which works to optimize health for the working masses of society.

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References

Lutfiyya, M. N., Bhat, D. K., Gandhi, S. R., Nguyen, C., Weidenbacher-Hoper, V. L., & Lipsky, M. S. (2007). A comparison of quality of care indicators in urban acute care hospitals and rural critical access hospitals in the United States. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 19(3), 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzm010

University of North Carolina. (2022, January 11). Rural Hospital closures. The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. Retrieved April 18, 2022, from https://www.shepscenter.unc.edu/programs-projects/rural-health/rural-hospital-closures/

Lukens, J. (2016, November 30). Freestanding emergency departments: An alternative model for rural communities. The Rural Monitor. Retrieved April 18, 2022, from https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/rural-monitor/freestanding-emergency-departments/

American College of Emergency Physicians. (2020, April). Freestanding emergency departments. acep.org. Retrieved April 18, 2022, from https://www.acep.org/patient-care/policy-statements/freestanding-emergency-departments/#sm.00000p5gnbn6o8e9rs6g9980zvd72

Weisgrau, S. (1995). Issues in rural health: Access, hospitals, and reform. Health care financing review,17(1),1-14.
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Day, J. C. (2019, April 9). Rates of uninsured fall in rural counties, remain higher than Urban counties. Census.gov. Retrieved April 18, 2022, from https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/health-insurance-rural-america.html#:~:text=Residents%20of%20rural%20counties%20still,percent%20for%20mostly%20urbhttps://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/health-insurance-rural-america.html#:~:text=Residents%20of%20rural%20counties%20still,percent%20for%20mostly%20urban%20counties.an%20counties.

Williams, J. D., Song, P. H., & Pink, G. H. (2015, November). Estimated costs of rural freestanding emergency departments. ShepsCenter.unc.edu. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://www.shepscenter.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2015/11/Rural-Freestanding-ED.pdf

Esposito, C. L., Gilbert, J., Ciampa, A., & Markman, J. (2017, August 1). Against All Odds: Cuba Achieves Healthcare for All- An Analysis of Cuban Healthcare. nysna.org. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://www.nysna.org/sites/default/files/attach/ajax/2020/08/NYSNA.Response.to_.the_.New_.York_.State_.Department.of_.Health.Final_.pdf

Westhoff, W. W., Rodriguez, R., Cousins, C., & McDermott, R. J. (2010). Cuban healthcare providers in Venezuela: A case study. Public Health, 124(9), 519–524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2010.05.008 

I wholeheartedly appreciate the trust and support of the people, because without it, without the support of the people, we could not resist the onslaught of the corrupt conservatives or achieve (which is the most important thing) the beautiful ideal of continuing to transform the country. We are inspired by our exemplary history in the legacy left to us by our heroes, and in the cultures of deep Mexico, from which they demand the best lessons of work, freedom, justice, democracy, honesty, dignity, and love for others.

In the time that we have (two and a half years to go, a little less), I hope that, as has been the case up until now, with the support of the people, we continue walking towards a welfare state that allows us to eradicate hunger and live free from misery.

We have the task of guaranteeing social security from birth to death, that no one in Mexico is born condemned to poverty, without justice, without a future. May the widest opportunities open up to climb the social ladder through study and work, without abandoning our identity, the pride of our origin, and that the right to happiness become a reality.

I think there are two fundamental things, they continue to promote the revolution of consciences with words and deeds, which is the most effective way to confront the conservative and reactionary thinking of our opponents. And not only for that, so that the conquests of our times become irreversible, so that everything we achieve for the benefit of the people cannot be reversed. And the best guarantee, the best insurance, is a change in the mentality of our people, because the people will be in charge of defending these achievements for their benefit.

And do not forget that material well-being and also the well-being of the soul must be sought, because man does not live by bread alone. There is no doubt that human beings need well-being. We all need to live well, no one can be happy without work, food, health, housing, or any other basic satisfaction. A man in poverty thinks only how to survive before taking up political, scientific, artistic, or spiritual tasks.

Frederick Engels masterfully explained it in his speech at the grave of Karl Marx, arguing that “just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, Marx discovered the law of development of human history." "The fact so simple," according to Engels, "but hidden under the ideological undergrowth that man first of all needs to eat, drink, have a roof over his head, and clothe himself, before he can do politics, science, art, or religion."

But the meaning of life, I maintain, should not be reduced solely to obtaining the material, to what we possess or accumulate. A person without attachment to a code of principles, without attachment to an ideal, to a doctrine, hardly achieves happiness; in some cases he will succeed at all costs and unscrupulously leads to an empty life, an unhappy life.

Hence, the balance between the material and the spiritual should always be sought. Ensure that no one lacks what is essential for survival, and cultivate at the same time, the best feelings, and attitudes towards our fellow men. In short, let us never stop acting with mysticism in our public work, in our political work, nor let us ever put aside humanism and fraternity.

​Many thanks.

Author

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO): President of Mexico.

Chinese people and the Chinese government are two different things on this issue. Among Chinese people there’s been huge energetic support for Russia, there was even a movement among people to buy all the Russian products from online shops in China and everything sold out very quickly. 

People have been bringing up the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy during the war in Yugoslavia (3 dead, 20 injured). The United States said it was a mistake, but Chinese people never forgave NATO for that. There is also a belief that if Russia is sanctioned today then it could happen to China tomorrow, so people believe they should support Russia now. 

However, the government has been sticking to its long-held foreign policy and maintained its neutrality, but that doesn’t mean that it’s been ignoring the issue. China always supports upholding the territorial integrity of countries. As they built good relations with Russia, they never recognized Crimea as Russian, China still recognizes it as part of Ukraine. The Chinese government has also been vocal about recognizing the legitimacy of Russia’s security concerns. China has always opposed the escalation of armed conflict and that’s why they voted neutral at the UN on the question of the Ukraine conflict. They oppose the use of military intervention and also the use of sanctions. This has been China’s position with regard to every conflict that has come before this too. 

China, while maintaining its neutrality, has emphasized that the principal motivation for the crisis is NATO expansionism and its inability to recognize the legitimacy of Russia’s demands. This is a much more nuanced position than that taken in the West where they just say ‘Putin is crazy’ and ‘he wants to invade the whole of Europe’.

China has also been denouncing the biolabs in Ukraine where it seems that the US has been developing biological weapons. Since the start of the pandemic, China has suspected that the origin of the virus could be in the US military lab in Fort Detrick. They’ve always insisted that Fort Detrick should be investigated just as Wuhan was. The US has recognized that these labs in Ukraine exist, but say that they’re not for biological weapons. 
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Xi Jinping has been speaking to France and Germany and has tried to get them to take a bigger role in achieving a peaceful solution because after all, Europe is the most affected by this conflict. China is emerging as the ideal candidate to broker a solution to this conflict, but we don’t know what will happen. 

UnionPay is a payment system used for credit and debit cards, basically the Chinese version of Visa. However, in China, most people pay for everything electronically on WeChat and Alipay, so maybe Russia can now be the best growth market for them. UnionPay was already present in Russia and its cards are accepted by most ATMs there and around the world, so the transition is not difficult, and it means the Russian banking system won’t just collapse. The sanctions have also left the Russian market open for Chinese consumer goods now that Western companies have pulled out. For the Chinese companies that don’t have business in the US, this is a huge opportunity for them to move in and scoop up the Russian market. This will also help accelerate the de-dollarization of the global economy, and for this transition period, China is well-placed to help fill the gaps while Russia develops its own self-sufficiency, which Lavrov says is their aim. 

At the beginning of the conflict, a lot of Taiwan separatists were mobilizing to express support for Ukraine and this generated a lot of mockery on social media even within Taiwan. Remember that only a minority of Taiwanese people want independence, the majority support the status quo as long as they continue to benefit it from it. Most Taiwanese people know that separating from China would be an economic catastrophe for them. People there are still culturally Chinese, and it’s a very pragmatic society, so they have no desire to separate. Taiwan’s elites don’t want that either. The attempts to make comparisons between Ukraine and Taiwan haven’t been successful for anything other than generating a few joking memes, people aren’t comparing the two issues.

A substitute teacher at an Arlington, Virginia middle school has been suspended for teaching an insufficiently one-sided perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apparently one of the students recorded the lesson and showed it to their parents who complained to the school.

This happens as RT America shuts its doors following an astonishingly aggressive censorship campaign against Russia-backed media outlets throughout the western world.

The virulent post-9/11-like hysteria about Russia that has been promoted by one-sided mass media reporting on the war, and by the five years of fact-free conspiracy mongering which preceded it, has created an environment where you’ll get shouted down on social media for voicing any opinion about this conflict apart from saying Putin invaded because he is evil and hates freedom. Voices calling for diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are being systematically drowned out.​

​Meanwhile you’ve got massively influential pundits like Sean Hannity calling for a direct NATO airstrike on a Russian military convoy in Ukraine, without the slightest risk of losing his immense platform for advocating a move that would probably lead to a very fast, very radioactive third world war.
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“You know, if we can see on satellite imagery where the convoy is, I don’t know, maybe some smart country, maybe NATO might take some of their fighter jets, or maybe they can use some drone strikes and take out the whole damn convoy,” Hannity said on Premiere Radio Networks’ The Sean Hannity Show on Wednesday. “And then nobody takes credit for it, so then Putin won’t know who to hit back.”

Hannity hastily adds that he’s “not talking about nuclear war,” but then adds a “but” which completely contradicts him.

“But at what point is this gonna end?” Hannity asks. “Cuz nobody did anything after Georgia was taken in ’08, nobody cared about Crimea being annexed in 2014.”

Hannity has also made repeated calls for Putin’s assassination, saying that “if you invade an innocent sovereign country, and you kill innocent men, women and children, you don’t deserve to live.” An interesting position for one of the most aggressive defenders of Bush’s Iraq invasion.

​On the other side of illusory US partisan divide you’ve got MSNBC pundits like Richard Engel and Clint Watts also calling for direct hot war with Russia.

“Perhaps the biggest risk-calculation/moral dilemma of the war so far,” tweeted Engel on Monday. “A massive Russian convoy is about 30 miles from Kyiv. The US/NATO could likely destroy it. But that would be direct involvement against Russia and risk, everything. Does the West watch in silence as it rolls?”

“Strangest thing – entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back,” tweeted Watts less than two hours later. “NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming.”

“Putin knows stop the West throw ‘nuclear’ into discussion and we’ll come to a stop, but the world should not be held hostage to a killer of societies, the west has nuclear weapons too, and Putin’s track record is clear, every war he wins is followed by another war,” Watts added.
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You’ve also got increasingly bold calls for no-fly zones and close air support from the western political/media class, which would also mean hot war with Russia.

​Now, theoretically, the actual decision-makers of the imperial war machine know better than to initiate a hot war with Russia because it would likely lead to an unthinkable chain of events in which everyone loses. But what these insane Strangelovian calls for nuclear armageddon do, even if they never come to fruition, is push the acceptable spectrum of debate far toward the most hawkish extremes possible.
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When you’ve got the hawks screaming that Putin is Hitler and calling for airstrikes on the Russian military while the doves are using extremely mitigated both-sides language and taking great pains to forcefully condemn Putin to avoid being shouted down and censored, what you wind up with is a spectrum of debate that has been pulled so far toward insanity that the “moderate” position becomes support for unprecedented acts of economic warfare and funding a brutal insurgency in Ukraine.

As a result, advocating for western powers to initiate de-escalation, diplomacy and detente becomes an extremist position, comparable to or worse than advocating for hot war with a nuclear superpower. In reality it’s the obvious moderate, sane position on the table, but taking that position unequivocally would be disastrous for the career of any mainstream politician or pundit in today’s environment, because the spectrum of debate has been pulled so far toward hawkish brinkmanship.

Noam Chomsky outlined this problem clearly when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

And that’s exactly what we are seeing here. Look at this soup-brained take by comedian Tim Dillon, for example:

​Ideally this kind of insane extremist talk would get you chased out of every town and forced to live alone in a cave eating bats, but because the Overton window of acceptable debate has been dragged so far away from its center, people think it’s a moderate, heterodox position. Dovish, even.
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This spectrum of debate has been further shoved away from moderation with the help of pseudo-left narrative managers like  George Monbiot and The Intercept, who have both published obnoxious finger-wagging articles scolding leftists who’ve been insufficiently servile to the US/NATO line on Ukraine. As though there’s somehow not enough promotion of the State Department narrative on this subject by every single one of the most powerful governments and media institutions in the entire western world, rather than far, far too much.

The worst people in the world have their foot on the accelerator driving us toward escalations that should terrify anyone with gray matter between their ears, while those who want to tap the brakes get their foot immediately slapped away. This is not leading good places. And we know from experience how profoundly unwise the power structure overseeing all this can be.

Treasure each moment, my lovelies.

Originally published in Caitlin's website.

​For socialists, the fundamental understanding of imperialism goes back to World War I and is found in the pamphlet written by V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”
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Imperialism is not a policy chosen by one government and dropped by another. Imperialism is a system.

The first world war was the outcome of imperialism, Lenin wrote, an imperialist war waged for the political and economic exploitation of the world, export markets, sources of raw material, spheres of capital investment, etc. The imperialist powers raised huge armies and navies, not only to forcibly subjugate oppressed people in the colonies, but to make war against other imperialist countries competing for control.

According to Lenin, the world was already divided among the great capitalist powers when he wrote “Imperialism” in 1916. The war resulted from inter-imperialist rivalries to redivide the world.

The wars since WWI have changed circumstances. And World War II signaled a turning point in world imperialist relations. The United States emerged from WWII as the world’s most powerful imperialist country, gaining control of former European empires in Asia and Africa.

The overturn of the socialist Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet republics into individual nation states was a dismantling of a planned economy, resulting in capitalist economies that are under-developed. There has not been a sudden, almost magical appearance of an imperialist Russia.

Lenin thought that there were a few characteristics of imperialism, including the rise of finance capital and the export of capital, not just commodities. The U.S., for example, exports not just commodities but capital — mostly in the form of loans or investments. U.S. banks are at the center of world commerce.

Russia’s economy almost neocolonial

Today, capitalist Russia’s GDP is smaller than that of South Korea or India. Russia’s economy is almost neocolonial, dependent on the exchange of raw materials such as oil and ores. This is the classic economic relationship of a colony to imperialist finance capital. In the list of the top 50 banks in the world, not one is Russian. The ruble is not a currency of trade. Russia does not export capital.

During the Soviet period, Russia and the other republics that formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics made remarkable industrial progress. Indeed, between 1921 and 1988 there were no years of negative economic growth — no recessions — except for the World War II years.

The Soviet economy fell into recession only in 1989 as the Gorbachev government began to dismantle the planned economy.

Under Gorbachev and then even more drastically under the openly anti-communist, anti-socialist government of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian Federal Republic, and in the new non-Russian former Soviet republics including Ukraine, socialist industry was dismantled.

Yeltsin finished the job of dismantling the Soviet economy that Gorbachev began. The years of Yeltsin are now remembered as perhaps the worst period in Russia’s 1,000-year history. This was the greatest economic disaster any country has seen in modern times, in war or peace.

Ukraine had the second-largest economy in the USSR. “Independent” Ukraine is now the poorest country in Europe. By the end of 2020, some 45% of the population were in the poor category, according to a study by the Ptukha Institute. The deep poverty has created the conditions for fascist gangs to emerge.

Putin’s role

Putin, who was Yeltsin’s prime minister and chosen successor, took a more protectionist direction, unlike Yeltsin and Gorbachev, who had fawned on the West.

Does that mean Putin moved away from the policies of Yeltsin and Gorbachev that had oriented the economy to exporting raw materials? Did Putin adopt a policy of industrialization?

Under Putin, there has been little growth of Russia’s manufacturing production that had been demolished by the “perestroika” reforms. Manufacturing is the foundation of any successful modern economy. Yet, under Putin, Russia continues mainly as an exporter of raw materials.

Russia now accounts for about 6% of the global aluminum supply, 3.5% of the copper supply, and 4% of the cobalt supply. And Russia is the world’s largest producer of crude oil and second-largest producer of dry natural gas, after the U.S.

Russia is in the top 10 exporters of grain crops, including barley, corn, rye, oats and especially wheat. From 2017-2019, it was the biggest exporter of wheat, accounting for about 20% of the world market.

Russia is a capitalist state, but that does not make it imperialist. Not all capitalist countries are imperialist nations. For example, Mexico is a capitalist country with an economy that’s similar in size to Russia’s, but is Mexico an imperialist country or an exploited country? Saying that it is capitalist is not enough to know the answer.

Lenin named at least four characteristics of imperialism: concentration of production into monopoly; merging of bank capital with industrial capital, creating finance capital; the export of capital; the fusion of finance capital and the state.

The role of finance capital may be most important. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have taken over the economies of the world. The dollar (not gold) is the currency of world trade. Today almost every country is capitalist, and most of those are exploited by imperialism, by finance capital.

Mexico is capitalist but it is not imperialist. Russia, too, is an exploited country in relation to imperialism, like Mexico.

NATO targets Russia

Russia is the primary provider of gas and oil to much of Europe. The European Union imports 40% of its gas from Russia. That’s put Russia in competition with the U.S., the biggest producer of gas in the world. 

The U.S. has been on a drive to control the world market in oil and gas. This can be seen in its attacks, actually acts of war (sanctions), against Iran and Venezuela as well as its war on Iraq. These are countries that had sought national sovereignty over oil and gas.

Russia, too, has been a target, especially its Nord Stream 2 pipeline, but not just for that. 

Look at a map of NATO’s expansion since the breakup of the USSR. The countries put under NATO include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria.

In 2008, NATO put the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia, both bordering Russia, on the table.

NATO war on Yugoslavia

Despite the war propaganda that’s presented as news these days, the first war in Europe since World War II didn’t just start. That war was launched by the U.S. and NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999. 

For 78 days, from March 24 to June 10, 1999, NATO bombers hit Belgrade, Pristina in Kosovo, Podgorica in Montenegro and several other cities. On the first day more than 20 buildings in Belgrade were leveled. 

Much of the U.S./NATO bombing hit civilian targets. A passenger train was bombed. Cruise missiles could be seen flying down the streets. The U.S. directly bombed the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Belgrade, killing three Chinese reporters.

Russia understood the lesson of Yugoslavia and told the U.S. and NATO “no” to expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, on Russia’s borders – 5 minutes by missile to Moscow.

The former U.S. ambassador to Russia, William J. Burns, who is now director of the CIA, said in a February 2008 embassy cable that Ukraine joining NATO constituted a security threat for Russia. Burns noted that to push for this “could potentially split the country [Ukraine] in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

The U.S. never withdrew the proposal to include Ukraine.

Maidan coup

In Ukraine, the so-called Maidan coup in 2014 that was openly supported and financed by NATO put in a government that made NATO membership a policy mandate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly requested Ukraine’s entrance into NATO. On Feb. 19, Zelensky demanded, once again, entry to NATO, saying, “Eight years ago, Ukrainians made their choice [the Maidan coup].”

Actually, many Ukrainians resisted the Maidan coup, particularly in the working class. In the Maidan civil war, fascist gangs emerged as a force for the coup. Resistance to the coup was strongest in the eastern section of the country. In Odessa, a neo-nazi pro-Maidan gang targeted the Odessa House of Trade Unions, near the center of the resistance. The building was firebombed and at least 46 anti-fascists and labor activists were burned alive.

The resistance to the Maidan coup has continued from 2014 to today. The independent Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic were created when the people there voted overwhelmingly (89% and 96%) to secede from the Maidan regime. They have been subjected to continuous attack since then, particularly by the Ukrainian National Guard’s Azov regiment, a neo-nazi stormtrooper-like operation. More than 14,000 have been killed in Ukraine’s war on Donetsk and Lugansk.

As U.S. Ambassador Burns predicted, Russia was pushed into a corner by the unrelenting drive for NATO entry to Ukraine as well as the growing buildup of neo-nazi militias and the war on Donetsk and Lugansk. Ukraine had promised in the Minsk agreements it signed in 2014 and 2015 there would be a ceasefire, an end to all fighting, withdrawal of heavy weapons, release of prisoners of war, and the recognition of self-government in Donetsk and Lugansk. Ukraine fulfilled none of these promises.

Putin may not be an anti-imperialist leader, but the Russian military operation to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine and recognize the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic is a move against imperialism, U.S. and NATO imperialism.

​The closure of RT America follows effective censorship of the channel. The ultimate decision to close was made following a cut off of service by DirecTV and Roku. Big Tech firms were also increasingly targeting RT.

​Reuters reported: "Tech companies in recent days have moved to restrict Russian state-controlled media including RT and Sputnik in response to requests from governments and calls to prevent the spread of Russia propaganda." 
Many will try to argue that the developments in the U.S. are completely different from the European Commission recently banned RT and Sputnik. 
​
But it more clearly highlights the congruence of government and major corporate agendas. And indeed, as with Big Tech censorship generally, sometimes the collusion is outright, see my interview last year with Nadine Strossen, former head of the ACLU. Contrary to the common mantra that Big Tech platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter get to decide what content they want, Strossen argues "Private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment" if they are being coerced by or colluding with the government.

And direct censorship has been done by the U.S. government. For example, in 2020, the Trump administration seized the internet domain for the American Herald Tribune, claiming it was controlled by Iran. The following year, the Biden administration seized the domains for Press TV and over 30 others on similar grounds. The mechanism for this was sanctions that were placed on Iran -- thus, sweeping sanctions can be used effectively as an instrument against the First Amendment. 

Such compulsions go back. In 2008, a New York man who was trying to make Al-Manar, a TV station backed by Hezbollah in Lebanon, available to people in the U.S. was sentenced to at least five years in prison. There were at best minimal efforts to oppose this on First Amendment grounds. 

But RT America was different from many of these in that RT America reached a lot of people. I remember chatting with an elderly man several years ago in rural Maryland who I happened to strike up a conversation with in a store. After our talk turned to politics, he excitedly told me about this great outlet he was watching for news -- RT. 

In all honesty, I was surprised at first when I saw RT's substantial operations in DC. The U.S. government had shut down Press TV's offices in DC. But there RT's offices were -- rows and rows of producers and other workers. 

I began to suspect that RT and RT America were allowed to blossom in part because a pretext could always be found to pull the plug on them. 

I worked for a time in 2007 with The Real News, then based in Toronto, which aimed to be a genuinely independent media outlet. The Real News had relatively modest funding but a lot of promise. 

I thought The Real News at that point was a terribly important project -- what could challenge the power of the U.S. establishment more than an independent, vibrant 24/7 media outlet?

But part of a strategy of preventing the emergence of a global independent media outlet might have included allowing the emergence of national outlets which tapped into dissent and discontent in the U.S., but which could easily have the rug pulled out from under them at any time chosen by the U.S. establishment. So, did RT end up effectively syphoning off the viewers that could have helped build up The Real News?

In January of 2021, in explaining the lack of a vibrant independent media outlet in the U.S., I wrote: "The possibility of something emerging was ironically hindered by other nationalist outlets. After Al Jazeera dudded out, instead of people in the U.S. and elsewhere trying to build something, people turned to RT etc with obvious problems, I *suspect that RT was allowed to become entrenched by the U.S. establishment for exactly this reason -- its rise and funding helped preclude people from building a grassroots network and RT could obviously be dismissed when the establishment chose to do so."

Given the secretive nature of U.S. government institutions, it's virtually impossible to show that that's what happened, but regardless, clearly the U.S. establishment is now gunning for RT.

To be clear, beyond the obvious limitations, I have thought that RT, perhaps because of its governmental backing, was at times quite limited in its critique of U.S. government policy, see my piece "Stated Goals vs Actual Goals: 'CrossTalk' Lives Up to Its Name" from 2015. I end that piece: "We have these media outlets of various nationalities -- RT for Russia, France 24 for France, CNN for the U.S. establishment, Fox for the U.S. establishment rightwing, MSNBC for U.S. establishment corporate liberals, Al-Jazeerafor Qatar, Al-Arabia for Saudi Arabia, CCTV for China, etc.
"They all foster shallowness and ultimately prize hacks over real journalists.

"We desperately need a global, real network dedicated to real facts and meaningful dialogue between various viewpoints."

So, ironically, there may be a silver lining: The demise of RT America might in fact be an opportunity to build the global media structures we so desperately need.

Such an attempt, if it were even mildly successful, will likely face brutal attack.

In 2010, following pressure from then Sen. Joe Lieberman, VISA, Mastercard and Amazon pulled the plug on WikiLeaks, which had become a major sensation based on the "Collateral Murder" video.

When "Collateral Murder" came out, one could see the promise of WikiLeaks, getting direct support from millions around the world and developing a new type of journalism that could powerfully hold governments and corporations to account. But of course, WikiLeaks has been savagely attacked, such that most of their resources had to be directed at defending their founder. Still, the assaults on WikiLeaks have come at a cost for the U.S. government, exposing their tortured onslaughts on the group.

Given the seemingly ever more demented state of affairs, the lack of focus on the facts that people need to know, the manipulation of information by Big Tech, the lack of meaningful dialogue or debate on large media outlets and so many other obstacles, the need for an independent, global media outlet is more urgent than ever.

​The tactic of the punitive Nazi battalions which are suffering defeat in the clash with the DPR and LPR troops is very clear. It is the same “scorched land” tactic as that used by the Nazi occupiers as they were driven by the Red Army out of the territory of the USSR, including Ukraine. The Germans blew up the Dneproges Power Plant, destroyed hundreds of factories, mines and bridges and burned tens of thousands of Ukrainian homes.
​
The Nazis of the “territorial battalions” are engaged in the same business. Even as they are retreating from Donbass, they continue shelling with 122- and 152-mm guns the cities and villages of this long-suffering region. Civilians die every day. These are war crimes. The West does not even try to stop the shelling of Donbass residential neighborhoods, which makes the “moralists” and “humanitarians” in the European Union and the USA accomplices in war crimes.

Trying to create the impression that civilians are dying at the hands of the Russian army, they resort to grisly provocations by shelling the cities under their own control. A powerful explosion has rocked the center of Kharkov. All the “world” media outlets which are totally controlled by Washington, are trumpeting that Russia is to blame. And yet it was obviously an explosion of a vehicle stuffed with hundreds of kilograms of explosives, which points to those who ordered and executed the crime. These are the tactics used by numerous CIA-controlled terrorist organizations across the world.

The West and its “fifth column“ in Russia are defending out-and-out Fascists and terrorists who have seized power in Ukraine and turned its citizens into hostages of their grisly Russophobia and anti-Sovietism. Hostages in the direct sense of the word. For example, in Mariupol, surrounded by LPR-DPR forces, the Nazis from the Azov and Aidar regiments are preventing civilians from leaving the city. They are placing gunmen on top stories of residential blocks to prevent people from leaving. The Nazi units are using these people as human shields.

We appeal to the European Union and the USA to condemn the terrorism of Bandera nationalists against Donbass cities, the practice of taking hostages as human shields and of placing guns and mortars in residential quarters of cities under their control.  If the West does not prevent this flagrant violation of elementary norms of warfare the responsibility for the crimes of its vassals will rest with their patrons.

The West should take a closer look at those it is so strenuously defending. These are the followers of Hitler’s hireling Bandera and his thugs. It was Bandera’s followers who committed the most heinous crimes on Soviet territory occupied by the German troops. It was Bandera’s thugs who massacred Jews at Babiy Yar, butchered Poles in Volyn and burned people alive in the villages of Byelorussia. The way they burned alive tens of people in Odessa in 2014 indicates that these monsters have inherited from their Hitler forerunners a readiness to commit crimes against humanity. No decent person can associate oneself with them.

We are amazed at the duplicity and hypocrisy of the “peace champions.” We ask one simple question: why have you been silent for eight years when Donbass residential neighborhoods were shelled almost every day. Civilians died every day. Why did you not show even a little sympathy for the relatives and close ones of those who were killed and maimed? You were silent all these years. So we have very grave doubts about the sincerity of these new “champions of peace.”

Would you have protested if the Ukrainian forces and the Nazi battalions had invaded Donbass, as was being planned, and staged a massacre of the defenders of DPR and LPR? Or would you have kept silent? Unfortunately, I have no doubt that not even rivers of blood in Donbass would have induced you to take to the street and demand an end to the genocide of the Russian people and the Russian-speaking population.

We are also for peace and always come out for a peaceful solution of any conflict. We are against bloodshed. And we very much hope that serious losses can be avoided not only among Russian army men, but also among the soldiers and officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces among whom there are many Russians and deceived Ukrainians. We sincerely hope for an early end to the hostilities and a political settlement through negotiations. We are doing all we can toward that end. We appeal to the West, especially the USA, not to obstruct the search for a peaceful settlement.

We are well aware that the USA is more interested than anyone in the preparation and fomenting of a conflict between Russia and fraternal Ukraine. However, many honest political and public personalities, journalists and scientists in the USA, Europe and many other countries know full well the real essence of what is taking place. We sincerely appreciate their deep understanding of the West’s responsibility for unleashing this conflict.

America and the European Union are not struggling for Ukraine. They seek to use the local Nazis in a bid for the right to plunder Ukraine and turn it into a bridgehead for aggression against Russia. We call on the international community to understand the danger of this course for the cause of peace and genuine democracy in the world and to actively resist attempts to disrupt the process of political settlement in Ukraine.

​The militarization of Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty is a fact. Washington’s aggressive designs were demonstrated in the process of destruction of Yugoslavia. The plans of the US and its NATO satellites to enslave Ukraine must not be realized. These aggressive plans create critical threats to the security of Russia. Simultaneously, they blatantly contradict the interests of the Ukrainian people.

The USA seeks to increase its competitive advantages in the global world at all costs. It is not deterred by the fact that sanctions against Russia, torpedoing of Nord Stream-2 and the threat of war in Europe spell heavy economic losses for eurozone countries. It is particularly important for the peoples of the world to become aware of the adventurous nature of Washington’s policy and recall the experience of broad anti-war movements. The unfolding of such a movement would ensure solidarity with the peace-loving peoples of Russia and Ukraine and protect their right to independent development.

The CPRF proceeds from the need to dismantle the results of many years of efforts to Banderize Ukraine. Real policy on its territory is in many ways dictated by rabid nationalists. They terrorize Ukrainian people and foist on the authorities an aggressive political course. By caving in to this pressure Zelensky betrayed the interests of his fellow-citizens who had elected him as a president of peace in Donbass and good-neighborly relations with Russia.
​
In the situation when the Russian Federation has taken a stand in defense of the people of Donbass, it is necessary to render every possible assistance to refugees and the civilian population of the DPR and LPR. We call on our society to render them all the necessary succor and support.

Coercing Kiev provocateurs into peace and restraining NATO aggressiveness has become the bidding of the time. Only demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine can ensure lasting security for the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and the whole of Europe. We consider it important to make wide use of the methods of people diplomacy and humanitarian cooperation in protecting peace and preventing the resurgence of Fascism.

The strategic position of the CPRF is well-known: the main guarantee of peace, creative endeavor and development is movement down the path of social progress and social justice, the path of socialism.

​So Putin has finally made a move, issuing a decree formally recognizing the sovereignty of the separatist-held Donbas territories in eastern Ukraine known as the DPR and LPR. Russian troops are being deployed to the region in what Putin describes as a “peacekeeping” mission amid a dramatic spike in ceasefire violations.
​
“The recognition of the DPR and LPR means Russia’s withdrawal from the Minsk agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015 to establish the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine,” writes Antiwar’s Dave Decamp. “Under the Minsk agreements, Ukraine agreed to cede some autonomy to the DPR and LPR. Russia has grown increasingly frustrated over the fact that Kyiv hasn’t fulfilled its end of the agreement.”

Needless to say, the US empire has not been happy about this move. President Biden has already imposed strict sanctions on the DPR and LPR, saying Moscow’s recognition of their independence “threatens the peace, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and thereby constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

“Tomorrow we will be announcing new sanctions on Russia in response to their breach of international law and attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki added.

“This decision represents a complete rejection of Russia’s commitments under the Minsk agreements, directly contradicts Russia’s claimed commitment to diplomacy, and is a clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” adds Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

Other member states of the empire were equally upset about this unforgivable violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

“Canada strongly condemns Russia’s recognition of so-called ‘independent states’ in Ukraine,” tweeted Justin Trudeau. “This is a blatant violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and international law. Canada stands strong in its support for Ukraine – and we will impose economic sanctions for these actions.”

“Tomorrow we will be announcing new sanctions on Russia in response to their breach of international law and attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” tweeted UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.
​
“This further undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, erodes efforts towards a resolution of the conflict, and violates the Minsk Agreements, to which Russia is a party,” says NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

​There are all kinds of criticisms that one can level against this move by Moscow, if one feels that the entire western political/media class screaming all of these criticisms in unison does not have enough amplification. For myself, I would just like to point out that the US-centralized empire is the very last institution on this planet who has any business babbling about the “sovereignty” of other nations. Absolute dead last.
​
I say this not out of any kind of fondness for Putin or support for his decisions, but because the absolute worst violator of national sovereignty in the entire world by a truly gargantuan margin complaining about violations of national sovereignty is bat shit insane.

Pointing out things the US empire has done while it shrieks about the actions of a foreign government will get you accused of “whataboutism”, but it’s not a whataboutism. It’s pointing out that the US is the absolute least qualified government on earth to comment on the issue at hand, so it should shut the whole entire fuck up about it. If the US wants to legitimately complain about the transgressions of unaligned governments, then it must cease being the worst transgressor.

Some might say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Okay. But inflicting ten thousand wrongs definitely means you should shut the fuck up about anyone doing one wrong.

This would after all be the same empire that has is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. Its sanctions and blockades are starving people to death en masse every single day. It works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups, proxy armies, partial and full-scale invasions, and the most egregious number of election interferences in the entire world, while threatening the entire species with nuclear brinkmanship on multiple fronts.

​What the US and its proxies are doing in Yemen alone is orders of magnitude worse than anything Russia is doing to Ukraine. Or what the US is doing in Afghanistan. Or in Venezuela. Or in Syria. Hell, the Biden administration has already done worse than what Putin just did in recognizing Israel’s outright annexation of the Golan Heights.

To say nothing of the fact that the US thought so little of Ukrainian sovereignty in 2014 that it was perfectly comfortable staging a coup there with the support of actual neo-Nazi militias, who the liberal media are still running PR segments for to this day even after years of yelling about Donald Trump’s intimacy with the far right. The US thinks so highly of Ukraine’s sovereignty that it’s willing to ramp up cold war brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower to defend it, but not highly enough to refrain from backing literal Nazis to topple its government.

The US empire criticizing Russia for violating another nation’s sovereignty is like Jeffrey Dahmer criticizing someone else’s eating habits.
​
After watching the insane, erratic, dishonest way the western power alliance has been navigating the Ukraine crisis, it is clear to anyone with open eyes that this is the very last institution we should want negotiating a power struggle that could quite literally end our world. We can only hope that the empire’s demise arrives before it manages to get us all killed.

Author

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Republished from Caitlin's website.

​The chain of events that led to today’s current crisis in Ukraine is connected to the 2014 Euromaidan protests. The year prior, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych rejected a pending free trade agreement with the EU, choosing instead to pursue closer relations with Russia. This sparked protests and occupation of Kyiv's Independence Square that spread to Ukraine’s other western provinces. In the more pro-Russian eastern parts of Ukraine, the Euromaidan protests sparked counter protests. The situation eventually escalated into a military conflict between pro-separatist groups with Russian support on one side and the Ukrainian government on the other.
 
As a result of this protracted conflict, Russia annexed Crimea and pro-Russian forces control the eastern part of the mining Donbass region. In 2021, despite Russia’s insistence that it will not invade, its troop movements towards the Ukraine border have re-ignited fears of a potential invasion. From the Russian side, they have stated that their actions are a response to the possible expansion of NATO into Ukraine, which would put NATO right up against Russian borders.
 
To help explain the crisis in Ukraine, the International Strategy Center (ISC) interviewed Volodymyr Ishchenko (Ishchenko), a Research Associate at Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin and a member of PONARS Eurasia. Ishchenko’s work on deficient revolutions and Ukrainian protest movements have made him a sought out left wing voice on Ukrainian politics, including interviews and articles with the Jacobin Magazine, Al Jazeera, and Truthout. Below is an excerpt of an interview with Ishchenko by the International Strategic Center for our monthly Progressive Forum. 

​ISC: The contemporary narrative in much of the world about Ukraine during the Soviet period is that of a colonized people who suffered under Soviet oppression. Conjured up is the Holodomor, in which millions of Ukrainians died in a famine between 1932 and 1933. Notably missing from the narrative is the fact that under the Soviet Union, Ukraine became one of the most industrialized soviet republics or that even as late as 2002, the Communists still had the single largest plurality. In your view, what is the legacy of Soviet Communism in Ukraine today?
 
Ishchenko: This is understandably a very important question. One can debate whether or not  Ukraine was a colony during the Russian empire, but I would say Ukraine as a colony in the Soviet Union would be considered a marginal position among the scholars. Despite all the terror, the Great Famine (better known as the Holodomor), Ukraine made enormous progress towards modernization. The Soviet Union turned a country that was 80% peasant, with about the same number of illiterate people, into one of the most industrial nations in the developed world. For example, the first computer in the USSR was developed in Kyiv. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine’s industry took a severe blow. Much of it was stolen, degraded, and it couldn’t find any alternative markets after the former Soviet trade links were broken. In that sense, the Soviet Union transformed Ukraine in a revolutionary way.
 
The vision of Holodomor is a big part of the nationalist narrative about Soviet Ukraine, projecting it [Holodomor] as an ethnic genocide of the Ukrainian nation, consciously designed by Stalin or the Communist party elite in order to break the will of the Ukrainian people. But this narrative is contested, not just in Ukraine, but also among historians, who would point out, for example, that in the same year, peasants were dying in other parts of the Soviet Union. It is literally impossible to find any evidence that Stalin wished to kill millions of Ukrainians. What is also not discussed is how the Holodomor was connected to the crisis of capitalism in 1929 which caused prices of Soviet exports to drop and required much more extraction from the peasant economy in order to fulfill their industrial targets during the first five year plan. So, certainly it’s more complicated and contested than the narrative about colonial oppression and there are different positions among scholars of Ukraine.
 
 
ISC: In 1998, the Ukrainian Communist Party took 121 seats, more than any other political party in the Rada. By 2012, the Communist Party’s presence in the Rada fell to 32 seats. The fact that the party had won so many seats right after the collapse of the Soviet Union does speak to how the legacy of Ukraine’s communist past has not been portrayed accurately in much of the popular media. Nevertheless, the party had seen some pretty bad losses in recent elections, so why has the Communist Party’s influence declined over the past few decades?
 
Ishchenko: It’s true that the Communist Party was the most popular party until 2002. There were even left wing majorities in the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, that allowed a socialist, Oleksandr Moroz, to become the Chairman of the Rada for several years. He was one of the most outspoken critics of Leonid Kuchma, the president at the time. This does indeed debunk the anticommunist narrative that the moment Ukrainians were free from the Soviet Union, they would choose liberal nationalism, because they didn’t choose liberalism or nationalism. They continued to vote for the communists. The people saw that the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t lead to any progressive development, which steered many people back towards the Communists.
 
So why did the left’s influence start to decline after 2002? One needs to understand that ideological politics, both right and left, started to decline in Ukraine. They were overtaken by oligarchic parties that were built more on paternalistic relationships than on any kind of ideology. So the people who voted for the Communist Party started to vote for the Party of Regions, which was made up of some of the most influential oligarchs in the country. They had instrumentalized many of the grievances in the South and Eastern parts of the Ukraine, which were also some of the most industrialized regions in the country.
 
The same process was happening in the Western part of Ukraine, when the ”People’s Rukh” (“Movement”), an important movement during Perestroika, consolidated the liberal and nationalist intelligentsia. This party was actually the 2nd most popular after the Communists until the end of the 1990s. However, they started to split and lose support. Eventually, they were overtaken by other oligarchic parties.
 
By the start of Euromaidan, the only other really relevant ideological party besides the Communists was the far right Svoboda party. They used to be called the “Social-National party of Ukraine” which as you know sounds just like “National-Socialist”[1] switched around. They later rebranded themselves as the Svoboda party, which means “freedom.” They actually had support from the Party of Regions, who hoped they would mobilize an eastern electorate that was terrified of the rise of Ukrainian fascists. But even after Euromaidan, the far right didn’t turn into a strong electoral force. They have only a few seats in the parliament. They grew stronger in the streets but not in other ways. What mattered mostly in Ukrainian elections was the media and money of the different oligarchic groups. But ideology, whether it was communist, liberal, or nationalist don’t play a big role.
 
ISC: What do you contribute to this loss of ideology in Ukraine, which has led to the situation today where the only political party with an ideology is the far right?
 
Ishchenko: The crisis of ideology is what we see globally. We see it among the populist movements that have swept the world. These movements have very amorphous claims, they’re not really structured, and there’s no political program or ideology like say those in the 60s, where one could call themselves committed communists, nationalists, fascists, or liberals. The Soviet collapse meant the destruction of society and politics itself. What happened was the majority of society saw a handful of individuals take large chunks of state property and privatize them in a matter of months and become super rich, while most of the people were collapsing into poverty. So, ideology became seen as just a way to deceive people. The people who were voting for communists were not necessarily doing so because they were committed to building the dream of a stateless and classless society, as it was discussed a 100 years ago. They voted for the communists because they were just trying to save what they had, the last remnant of a normal life.
 
This explains the enormous support for the Communist Party in the 1990s, but when the oligarchs consolidated power in the 2000s, the people were moving towards them, not because they believed the oligarchs could lead Ukraine towards progress and development, but because they offered a means to deliver at least some kind of stability. It’s the same reason people started to vote for Putin in Russia or Lukashenko in Belarus, because these were the leaders who were able to stop the post-Soviet collapse. Even if there weren't any real progressive breakthroughs, people still remembered when they couldn’t get their pensions or wages for months. They lost everything in a very short time, so they were just glad that there was some stability coming to their lives.

ISC: Many have characterized Euromaidan as having been driven by far-right nationalist forces, such as Svoboda. As you’ve pointed out, these parties don’t have a lot of formal representation in the legislature. However, in your interview with Jacobin, you mentioned that far-right politics in Ukraine resembles 1930s fascist street level organizing rather than contemporary nationalist movements in Western Europe. Is the influence of the far-right overstated or are elections not an accurate way of measuring their strength?
 
Ishchenko: Yes, thank you for this question. The role radical nationalists played in post-Maidan politics is critical to understand the whitewashing of Euromaidan by so called liberal civil society, and the so called “friends of Ukraine” in the West. Contrary to the liberal narrative, the far right, particularly the Svoboda party and Right Sector coalition, played a crucial role in sustaining the Euromaidan protests and escalating the situation to a violent uprising. It should come as no surprise then that Svoboda had the largest number of ideological militants. Most of the centrist parties are just electoral machines for oligarchs, while most of the liberal NGOs have influence because of their connection to western embassies, not because they can mobilize people in significant numbers.
 
If you looked at nationalist campaigns before Euromaidan, to ban the Communist Party, for Ukrainization, for glorifying Ukrainian nationalist collaborators with Nazis, these were all implemented by nominally non-far right politicians after Euromaidan. They needed to go into this agenda, even though it wasn’t actually that popular among Ukrainians. In polls, Ukrainians have rated questions about history and language quite low. When ranking priorities, Ukrainians care more about wages than whether a statue should be taken down or not. But these nationalist policies create an illusion of change, when nothing else has really changed, when the same oligarchs retain their wealth or some got even richer. You see the same people on the list of Forbes richest Ukrainians, before and after Euromaidan. The one exception may be Poroshenko[2] who improved his relative position making him the perfect example of exploiting one’s political office for personal profit.
 
Some people may say the Ukrainian far right isn’t powerful, they may say, “look at Le Pen who can regularly count on 20-30 percent of the vote,” but come on, that's a very narrow view of the politics of the far right. The far right in Western Europe don’t have paramilitaries. After Euromaidan, these radical nationalist politics became stronger because they exploited the war situation. They built up armed units and their party infrastructure. The most notorious example is of course the Azov regiment, which was founded by extreme right militants, turned into a regular unit in the National Guard and later founded an affiliated political party. The far right in Ukraine isn’t influential in the electoral sense, but they are influential in the streets, and this requires a totally different approach in how to deal with them.
 
ISC: Do you have any final words? Where do you find hope in this difficult current situation?
 
Ishchenko: It’s not the best time to ask for hope in Ukraine. This is not like your usual discussions, where you have a progressive side in the conflict you can sympathize with or social movements that the international left can align with. We are bombarded with news that the Russians are going to invade everyday. It’s difficult to project anything beyond the next week. Ukrainian neutrality and progress with the Minsk agreement[3] could be a solution to this crisis, but whether we have time for this or if it’s possible is hard to say.
 
Most Ukrainians are just living their normal lives. A poll had recently shown that nearly half of Ukrainians don’t believe that there’s going to be an invasion. If you looked at the patriotic marches, you’d be shocked at how small they are. There was this protest in Kyiv, a city with several million people, and they were able to mobilize at most several thousand people. It really goes to show how distant these discussions are to the daily lives of most Ukrainians.


[1] Editor’s Note: The Nationalist Socialists in Germany are commonly known as Nazis.

[2] Editor’s note: Petro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko was the Ukrainian president from 2014 to 2019.

[3] Minsk Agreement, or Minsk Protocol, is a 2014 agreement to try to stop the fighting in the Donbas. The agreement was between Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe mediated by France and Germany. 

Interviewer: International Strategy Center (ISC)
The International Strategy Center (goisc.org) is a non-profit organization rooted in Korea's social movements and reaching out to struggles, campaigns, movements, and experiments abroad. Our strategy is to bring the alternatives and struggles of those abroad to Korea's social movements, and vice versa. We are driven by the belief that in our globalized world, greater exchange and solidarity between social movements is the only way we can strengthen our local and global movements.

​​Interviewee: Volodymyr Ishchenko: is a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His research focused on protests and social movements, revolutions, radical right and left politics, nationalism and civil society. He authored a number of peer-reviewed articles and interviews on contemporary Ukrainian politics, the Euromaidan uprising and the following war in 2013-14, published in Post-Soviet Affairs, Globalizations and New Left Review, among other journals.

​On James Joyce’s 40th birthday, Sylvia Beach in Paris published his now most famous work, Ulysses, written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, 1914-1921. That was on February 2, 1922. Excerpts had appeared in the U.S. magazine The Little Review between 1918 and 1920. But deemed obscene, it was banned in the English-speaking world. The modernist novel immortalizes in its nearly one thousand pages a single day in Joyce’s home town of Dublin—June 16, 1904, the day he met Nora Barnacle, then a chambermaid from Galway, working in Dublin. Bloomsday, named after the main hero Leopold Bloom, has been celebrated in Dublin and the world over ever since Ulysses was published.
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Joyce was born in 1882, the eldest of ten children, into a lower middle-class family in Dublin, which rapidly became impoverished due to his alcoholic and financially inept father. A turbulent youth was followed by language studies and first literary attempts, as well as efforts to gain a foothold in Paris. After the death of his mother in 1903, the family fell apart, and Joyce persuaded Nora to leave Ireland with him a few months after they met. Following their own odyssey, Joyce found employment teaching English mainly to naval officers in Pola, an Austro-Hungarian naval base, now Croatia. He gave up this post soon afterwards in favor of employment at the Berlitz language school in Trieste, in 1905. From Trieste (then Austro-Hungary), where by 1915 he was considered an enemy alien, as a British citizen, he moved to neutral Zurich. In 1920, the family moved to Paris, where they lived until 1940. After the invasion by the Wehrmacht, the Joyce family hoped to return to Zurich, but this was only possible in December 1940 after months of great effort. Joyce died just weeks later, on January 11, 1941.

At its most succinct, Ulysses is about how three characters, the advertising seller Leopold Bloom, the teacher Stephen Dedalus, and the singer Molly Bloom, spend the day. Stephen Dedalus teaches in the morning and gets paid for it; in the afternoon he attends a discussion at the National Library; in the evening he gets drunk and goes to a brothel. Leopold Bloom prepares breakfast for his wife, goes to a funeral, worries about selling an advertisement, wanders around town, and also ends up in a brothel. At night, Stephen and Leopold go to Bloom’s house together and have a drink. Then Stephen leaves and Bloom goes to bed. Molly, who had received her lover during the day, lies in bed thinking.

Joyce’s acquaintance with the Odyssey came via English translations based on the Latin version (Ulysses), hence this title. A thorough knowledge of Homer’s text is unnecessary to understand Joyce’s book. He alludes to the Homeric epic in the light of an archetype, a symbolic expression of human experience, and uses the contrast between a heroic past and an unheroic present ironically. The setting is dilapidated Dublin, Ulysses is not a king but an advertisement seller for a newspaper, and he returns home not to a loyal queen but to a woman he knows has cheated on him that day. Bloom is no Greek hero. He passively accepts Molly’s/Penelope’s infidelity. This puts both past and present into perspective. In addition to the Ulysses epic, other myths are invoked, that of the Wandering Jew (Bloom is a Hungarian Jew), the Eternal Feminine (Bloom is a man with many feminine qualities), as well as Jesus’s love of humanity (Joyce himself was an atheist).

Joyce’s image of Dublin paints a society in hopeless decay, exploited and ruined by the Catholic Church and the British Empire. There is a lack not only of heroism, but of productivity in general. There is hardly a worker in the book. Despite its setting in the colonial backyard of Britain, however, Joyce, writing in the years of World War I, creates the peaceful life 10 years before the outbreak of that war, in which three characters of the petty bourgeoisie simply go about their day. The plot remains set in the (partially impoverished) petty bourgeoisie.

One of the novel’s leitmotifs, Stephen’s refusal to pray at his mother’s deathbed, is related to his rejection of “The imperial British state…and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.” He rejects both England and colonial Ireland. Casualties of the Boer War are seen in the streets, as is the representative of the English Crown, Viceroy Dudley.

Taking Chapter 10 as an illustration, the opening and closing scenes with Father Conmee and the Viceroy not only add to the richness of the Dublin milieu, but also have symbolic significance: they represent the Church and the State, both of which Stephen refuses to obey. The chapter provides a cross-section of Dublin life between 3 and 4 p.m. Most of the episodes concern minor characters who appear in other episodes in the book. Father Conmee notices the stately smile on Mrs. McGuiness, who has in her pawnshop a large part of the Dedalus household; Dilly Dedalus meets her brother at a bookstall; a one-legged sailor is blessed by Father Conmee and receives money from a corpulent lady in the street as well as from Molly Bloom, who tosses a penny out of the window as she prepares for her lover Blazes Boylan’s visit. In the final section, the Viceroy makes his only appearance.

Random, unnamed characters such as the sandwich-board men who turn up throughout the book also make an appearance. There are references to the past and the future: the flushed young man Father Conmee sees emerging from a gap in the hedge with his girl will reappear as the medical student Vincent in the hospital scene; Stephen notices a “sailorman, rustbearded,” who will resurface late at night in the cabman’s shelter.

Seemingly unrelated phrases link this episode to others, at once evoking and reminding us that characters continue to exist in the background, even if they are not present at that moment. Thus, in the middle of Mulligan and Haines chatting over a snack and tea, there is a sentence about the one-legged sailor and the words “England expects….” There is more here than a mere reminder of the seemingly unrelated existence of the sailor hobbling down Nelson Street. It also points to the Viceroy. Thus, on the surface, a feeling of crowded Dublin life emerges in this chapter, and at the same time a sense that a reality exists independently of individual consciousness.

Joyce’s style is at pains to recreate the thought processes of the characters. Here Bloom leaves his house in the morning:

“On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I come back anyhow.” There is an unusual multi-layered interweaving of first and third person narration.

​The famous Molly soliloquy in the last chapter is different. By dispensing with punctuation altogether, Joyce attempts to reproduce actual stream of consciousness. The thoughts are now no longer interrupted by a third person narrator, but move into each other. The long soliloquy ends:
​
“O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around Him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

As well as ironizing the epic, the novel also contains humor, such as Bloom’s thoughts at the funeral:

“Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps.”

Anyone planning to tackle this work—which is, after all, Jeremy Corbyn’s favorite book—should read uninhibitedly and simply skip the passages that seem difficult on first reading.

Onward to Ulysses’ second century!

In the early 1990s, barely a decade after rejoining the Olympic movement, Beijing launched a bid to host the 2000 Games. Unfortunately by then, U.S. policy had begun to shift perceptibly from the honeymoon years of rapprochement. Gone was the incentive for even arch-reactionaries like U.S. Presidents Nixon and Reagan to embrace the People’s Republic of China (PRC) effusively in the name of hard-nosed anti-Soviet realpolitik. With the end of the first Cold War, anticommunism also receded as a guiding framework for U.S. imperial rhetoric, in favor of a universalized (if richly hypocritical) weaponization of neoliberal “human rights.” This was a discursive terrain tilted heavily toward bourgeois democracies in the imperial core, on which China was hardly more equipped to compete than it had been in the Mao era.

Sure enough, the U.S. mainstream press united in opposition to Beijing’s bid, with the New York Times anticipating the facile and now-omnipresent analogies with Nazi Germany, as University of Hong Kong historian Xu Guoqi quotes in his 2008 book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008: “The city in question is Beijing in the year 2000, but the answer is Berlin 1936.” Bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress vehemently urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reject the bid on human rights grounds. In the event, Beijing led in every round of voting until the last, when it narrowly lost to Sydney 45-43. It later emerged that the Sydney organizing committee had not only secured the two-vote margin via outright bribery (par for the course for the IOC), but had secretly commissioned an anti-China smear campaign laundered through a London-based human rights group. The bonds between white Anglo settler colonies prevailed, and the Sydney Olympics became the stage for a truly noxious whitewashing of Australia’s genocide against Aboriginal peoples.

Still smarting from its defeat and the naked hypocrisy of Western powers around the “politicization” of the Games, Beijing nonetheless forged ahead with a bid for the 2008 Olympics. This time it won with ease, aided by widespread sympathy for the circumstances of the 2000 loss, as well as a slick PR campaign designed to neutralize the attack lines that had sunk its previous attempt. Bid committee official Wang Wei assured the IOC that “with the Games coming to China, not only are they going to promote the economy, but also enhance all the social sectors, including education, medical care and human rights.” Despite strenuous efforts to weaponize large-scale unrest in Tibet in the months leading up to the Games, even limited boycott appeals from Western campaign groups went nowhere. The 2008 Beijing Olympics went down in history as China’s “coming-out party” and a seminal moment in its growing self-confidence as a rising world power.

It is telling that Jules Boykoff, the outspoken critic of the Olympics whose book Power Games I have relied on heavily in my research for this and other articles on this topic, makes no mention at all of this widespread popular perception of the 2008 Games or their significance in the broader arc of Chinese history. Instead he treats them as an exclusively elite project and focuses entirely on critical narratives, a tendency he has doubled down on in his most recent commentary on the 2022 Beijing Games. Possibly the most revealing line is his response to Beijing’s assurances from the 2008 bid: “This human-rights dreamscape never arrived. It’s telling that today, neither China nor the IOC are vowing that the Olympics will spur democracy.” It does not seem to occur to Boykoff to see this as a positive development: that China’s growing confidence in its own model frees it from the need to address Western imperialists in their favored (and deeply hypocritical) discursive terms. As the New York Times put it succinctly, “Where the government once sought to mollify its critics to make the Games a success, today it defies them… China then sought to meet the world’s terms. Now the world must accept China’s.”

This reflects a broader analytical lacuna in campaigns that take the Olympics themselves as an undifferentiated political target: they fail to account for the positions of different host countries vis-à-vis the imperialist world system. To flatten “the Olympics” or “human rights” as universal categories is effectively to privilege normative Western understandings of both. In practice this leads to the grossly uneven and asymmetrical treatment of Olympics hosted by self-styled democracies in the imperial core—historically the overwhelming majority—versus the few that are not. To be sure, local anti-Olympics campaign groups are undoubtedly justified in fighting the social dislocations they bring to host cities everywhere. (Full disclosure: I have previously worked with one such group, NOlympics LA, which does valuable work connecting the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics to gentrification and racialized policing.)

But where was the outrage over the illegal U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, when Salt Lake City hosted in 2002? Over Britain’s war crimes there and in Iraq, when London hosted in 2012? Over Japan’s continued refusal to acknowledge its colonial crimes against humanity, when Tokyo hosted in 2021? The indictment of entire host countries as “human-rights nightmares” (Boykoff’s crude label for China and Kazakhstan, when Beijing and Almaty wound up as the only finalists for 2022) seems to be reserved for nations outside the imperial core. The nascent transnational anti-Olympics movement needs to overcome these ideological blinders if it is ever to match the coherence of the great anti-racist mobilizations that shook the IOC in the 1960s and ’70s. Presently there seems little cause for hope, with leading figures like Boykoff and his fellow “left” sportswriter Dave Zirin uncritically propagating U.S. State Department lines on both Xinjiang and Peng Shuai in their coverage leading up to the 2022 Games.

New Emerging Forces

What, you might ask, was the People’s Republic of China up to in the world of international sport during its more than two decades in the Olympic wilderness (​​from 1952 to 1980)? The story of “ping-pong diplomacy” with the United States and other Western powers is already well-documented, reflecting an obvious Northern historiographical bias. But in an age of growing calls for “decoupling” between China and the West, and for South-South cooperation via the Belt and Road Initiative among other projects, the buried history worth uncovering is that of the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).

GANEFO emerged from a bold act of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist solidarity by the Indonesian government of Sukarno, the visionary anticolonial leader and co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1962, Indonesia as host pointedly refused to invite Israel and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) regime to the fourth Asian Games and was summarily suspended from the IOC. In response, Sukarno proclaimed that:

“The International Olympic Games have proved to be openly an imperialistic tool… Now let’s frankly say, sports have something to do with politics. Indonesia proposes now to mix sports with politics, and let us now establish the Games of the New Emerging Forces, the GANEFO… against the Old Established Order.”

His bracing rhetoric is reminiscent of the Chinese IOC delegate Dong Shouyi’s 1958 broadside against then IOC President Avery Brundage, but shorn of any residual attachment to a mystical “Olympic spirit.” China enthusiastically jumped in to help organize and promote GANEFO in 1963, covering travel costs to Jakarta for 2,200 athletes from 48 countries, overwhelmingly based in the Global South. It left with a bumper crop of athletic victories—topping the overall medal table, followed by the Soviet second-string squad and the Indonesian hosts—and effusive goodwill from athletes across the emerging Third World.

There would never be another GANEFO, owing to the horrific U.S.-backed coup that ousted Sukarno and installed Suharto’s military dictatorship in 1965. But this piece of history remains more vital than ever to recover. Because the lesson of Beijing 2022 and the moves toward a diplomatic boycott, however farcical, is that the United States and its allies in the Global North will never fully accept China as a legitimate member of their elite club. In their current position as hosts, PRC officials may feel understandably constrained in denouncing the “politicization” of the Games. But it would be wise for them, for the Chinese people, and for the rest of the world to keep in mind the fact that politicizing the Olympics is a long, hallowed tradition for the workers and oppressed nations of the world. The People’s Republic of China has a storied place in that tradition, of which it can be justly proud.
​

When you think of Western capitalism and imperialism, what usually comes to mind are aggressive superpowers such as the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and so forth. Northern European nations such as Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, on the other hand, are seen as good-natured and insular, often used as examples of the way governments around the world should treat their citizens.

There is no denying that their policies at home are more progressive than say the U.S., but it's due in large part to strong unions and their decades of struggles to win such rights. Scandinavian workers have won policies that guarantee basic social safety in healthcare, education, employment and housing. However, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are not being seen in this period of refugee crisis as welcoming nations for those fleeing war and poverty.


In the 2016 presidential debates, Bernie Sanders pointed to them as model nations that the U.S. should “learn” from. A close examination of the region will demonstrate that Scandinavia largely maintains itself through violent imperialist policies just like other Western nations.
​

In 2008, Norwegian communications multinational, Telenor — partly owned by the state — was exposed in a documentary as partnering with a Bangladeshi supplier that employed child labor in horrendous conditions. The report also uncovered that the children were made to handle chemical substances without any protection and one of the workers even died after falling into a pool of acid. Not only was the treatment of workers unacceptable, they also ruined the crops of farmers in the surrounding areas with the waste from the plant. Like other Western multinationals that deliberately go to the developing world looking to save money on labor and operations costs, the company washed its hands of the accusations, denying knowledge about their partner's inhumane practices.


Similarly, Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil, also partly owned by the state, has been involved in multiple corruption cases around the world — especially in underdeveloped countries — where they have bribed state companies and government officials in order to obtain licenses for extraction. Their involvement is not only limited to these aggressive economic practices, they are also deeply involved in the West’s military exploits. Norway dropped 588 bombs on Libya but scarcely is mentioned as being part of these imperialist operations. Statoil has since started joint extractions operations worth millions in the ruined country.


Sweden’s foreign policy record is no better. Technology firms like Saab, BAE Systems, and Bofors compete with the U.S. and Israel in their development of a large variety of weapons that are sold to 55 countries around the world in deals worth billions. It seems that Sweden, like their Norwegian neighbor, actively participates in denying human rights to millions across the globe and especially in underdeveloped nations.
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The Swedish clothing giant H&M can retail affordable products in rich nations and make huge profits only because they exploit and underpay workers in impoverished nations such as Bangladesh. As John Smith points out in his book "Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century," only 0.95 euros of the final sale price of an H&M T-shirt remains in Bangladesh to cover the cost of the factory, the workers, the suppliers, and the government. The remaining 3.54 euros goes for taxes and transportation in the market country, with the bulk going to the retailer. In other words, Western nations capture most of the profit although it is the poor workers and nations that have put most of the input in terms of labor and resources.
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The Danish-British firm, G4S is the world’s largest security company and is known for its long list of controversies. They have supplied services to Israeli prisons and checkpoints, they have been accused of mistreatment of immigrants in detention centers, they have also played a huge role in protecting Western imperialist interests such as oil refineries and the territory around the Dakota Access pipeline. However, since the U.K. is known as the most aggressive of the two nations, the Danish component is frequently swept under the rug despite the fact that they were the founders and developers of the company.


It is no surprise then that the Nobel Peace prize, which was founded in Sweden and based in Norway, has given known war-mongers such as President Barack Obama and Colombian President Manuel Santos, among others, the award in what some argue are highly political moves.


The ‘Nordic Model’, as it has come to be known is hardly a system that we should look to for inspiration. No model, system, or structure that depends on the exploitation and domination of others can be ethical. Western nations and their people — if they are to be taken seriously by the rest of the struggling world — must begin to think about developing socialist political and economic structures that are internationalist and crucially, anti-imperialist at their foundations.

​
The social gains won by Western nations cannot and should not be made at the expense of exploited nations and people in the Global South. This social-imperialist dynamic seen in Scandinavian nations will ultimately fail in the long-run as it is harming much more people than it is benefiting. Those most likely to deal a deadly blow to capitalism today are those in the most dreadful conditions, which find the current Nordic Model directly in the way, rather than in the lead, of world progress.

​Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, issued a joint demand Thursday that NATO halt its plans for further expansion and end their continued push to whip up a “Cold War mentality.” Putin met with Xi in China, only a day before the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
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As the two nations issued their statement, the U.S. ignored the call for peace and sent a seventh planeload of offensive weapons, including missiles and anti-tank rockets, into Ukraine. NATO, via member state Turkey, sent more drones to the Ukrainian military. Turkish drones have been used by Ukraine in the past to kill Russian-speaking separatists in the People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government refuses to recognize those regions as autonomous, even though it agreed to so in 2014 in the Minsk Declaration. Right-wing and outright fascist entities, with the approval of the government in Kiev, continue to kill civilians in the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine.

“The parties oppose the further expansion of NATO and call for the North Atlantic Alliance to refrain from ideological approaches from the time of the Cold War,” the joint Russian-Chinese statement reads. It also urges NATO “to respect the sovereignty, security, and interests of other countries,” and, referring to Russia, “the diversity of their civilizational and cultural-historical ways; and to deal with the peaceful development of other governments objectively and fairly.”

The two countries also emphasized the need for cooperation between governments around the world, given the challenges of a fast-moving global economic situation, political upheavals, and a pandemic that continues to threaten millions and affect international security.

The joint statement backs Moscow on what it has been saying for months now—that it needs security guarantees limiting the expansion of NATO into Ukraine and Georgia, effectively barring the two former Soviet republics from membership.

​Documents leaked to the Spanish newspaper El Pais this week show that the U.S. had formally rejected any such agreement. Instead of seeking a compromise to end the crisis, the U.S. and NATO have followed up with another round of new weapon and troop deployments to eastern Europe.
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Some U.S. lawmakers did their part to raise tensions Thursday and Friday rather than to work for peace. They continued to try to rush through Congress powerful sanctions against Russia that could be levied immediately, not waiting for any Russian troops to actually cross the border into Ukraine. Some are resisting, however, saying sanctions should be levied only after an invasion actually occurs.

Beijing has committed to working with Moscow to develop financial systems that are resistant to sanctions and minimize dependency on the U.S. dollar.

While Russia would certainly welcome such help, it has already taken measures to protect against U.S. sanctions. Russia’s economy is largely prepared already to resist sanctions, having drastically reduced its dependence upon U.S. dollars over the last several years. The country has piled up enormous currency reserves of almost $700 billion, mostly denominated in euros, which can shield the ruble from collapsing under U.S. pressure.

The national debt in Russia is far lower than the amount in the currency reserves, which further strengthens their ability to ride out sanctions.

Another hitch in the U.S. economic warfare plan is Europe, which is heavily dependent upon natural gas and oil from Russia and has been reluctant to go along with the harshest possible sanctions. That means Russia can likely count on continued income from those countries, especially Germany, which has a joint pipeline with Russia under the Baltic Sea.

The improved condition of the Russian economy, however, works both ways. It is actually another reason why war hawks in the U.S. and NATO want to strike out against the country sooner rather than later before it becomes even more costly for the West to do so.

In order to steer attention away from the huge infusion of new weapons and drones into Ukraine Thursday, the U.S. put out additional alleged intelligence reports that the Russians were planning another false flag attack on either themselves or Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine. It involved a fabricated video that would supposedly be used by Moscow to make the case for invading Ukraine. The U.S. claimed the video involved the use of actors playing mourners and piles of corpses.

On Friday morning, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser John Finer backed off a bit from this after members of the press objected that the U.S. government had provided no proof of the production of any such video.

“We don’t know definitely that this is what they (the Russians) did, but we do know that they have a history of doing this type of thing,” Finer told the media. Members of the press have noted that it was their job to be skeptical, reminding U.S. government spokespeople of the false reports about weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the U.S. attack on Iraq years ago only to discover later that there were no such weapons.

The Russians said the reports about a video, like previous reports of false flag attacks allegedly being mounted by them, were false and designed, in fact, to lay the ground for military action against Russia by the West.

Another problematic issue for the war hawks in the U.S. and NATO is the steady flow of reports of how the Ukrainian people on the streets are going about their business as usual, not particularly worried about an impending Russian “invasion.”

To counter the disconnect between what Washington says is happening and the apparent reality on the ground in Ukraine, MSNBC on Friday sent a camera crew to a pizza shop in Kiev. There were no customers at all visible, but the network’s reporters talked to the owner who, they said, has offered free pizza to anyone who goes out and buys a gun to shoot Russians when they invade. The pizza proprietor assured MSNBC that the Russians will indeed invade and that the guns will be needed.

​The network did not give the name of the pizza shop, but Leonid Ostaltsev, a former Ukrainian army serviceman and founder of Veterano Pizza in Kiev has been a reliable anti-Russian voice in media outlets for years. He started the restaurant with money from “a Ukrainian-American investor,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s restaurant and food reporting team.
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As host of the radio program Army FM, he has been a vocal advocate of the Ukrainian government’s fight against separatists in the eastern part of the country. And whether it’s the Associated Press, the New York Times, Slate, or apparently, MSNBC, Ostaltsev has established a reputation as the go-to guy whenever a Western reporter needs a “man-on-the-street” to speak up for war.

A few moments after the pizza shop segment, Admiral James Stravridis, the U.S. officer who formerly commanded all NATO forces, appeared on MSNBC and declared, “I want to associate myself with the remarks by the pizza store owner in Kiev.”

Good reporting or well-planned nonsense?