Tag: Ukraine

Interview with an anti-militarist from Odessa

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The following interview was carried out by comrades from the Československé anarchistické sdružení – CAS a Czech Internationalist Anarchist Group.

1)Please introduce yourself briefly to the readers of our magazine. Are you from Ukraine, where you were born and spent your youth?

Hi. My name is Vadym Yakovlev, I’m Ukrainian queer writer and journalist and I’m against the war and nationalism. I was born in Odesa, the largest southern multicultural city in Ukraine, a few months before the collapse of the USSR. My mother is Ukrainian and my father is Russian. Their fathers were military. My father worked in a factory. With the collapse of the USSR, the factory was closed, and my father lost his job. It affected my family and my childhood. I grew up in Odesa, but one year before I escaped Ukraine I was living in Lviv, the biggest city of the Western part of Ukraine. At home my relatives spoke Russian and Ukrainian, so I never focused on issues such as national identity. My family was an unhappy international family that lost a lot with the collapse of state communism in Ukraine. I guess all of that influenced me a lot in my search of my true political views and my desire to do something that can have influence on society.

2)You left Ukraine, what led you to this decision?

On the one hand, I could no longer work in Ukraine because of my political beliefs. The Ukrainian intelligentsia, journalists and artists as a community with the beginning of the war decided to become privileged elite propagandists in the service of the state. I didn’t want to be a propagandist, so I lost the opportunity to publish my articles. And if you publicly express in Ukraine the views I have, authorities can put you in the jail. On the other hand, of course due to my views, I didn’t want to go to war on the frontline. That’s why I escaped.

3)What is your attitude towards war and antimilitarism?

Much of my work in Ukraine was related to my anti-patriotic beliefs. My articles and participation in art projects were very often devoted to criticism of Ukrainian patriotism, Ukrainian nationalism and the mainstream privileged “pro-Western” and pro-war civil and cultural Ukrainian elite. I have always been interested in anti-war art and anti-war activism. Since 2022, I had to start doing this, even at the cost of losing the opportunity to stay and work in my native country and the loss of close friends who abandoned me because of my beliefs.

4)The war in Ukraine changed a lot of things. Are you in touch with your friends back home? What are their attitudes towards the war? How do they live

As I said in answer to the previous question, I lost most of my friends from the privileged art scene and the journalist-activist community. Almost all of them became propagandists, receiving support from the state and Western foundations. I also lost touch with the majority of the Ukrainian leftists, who are supporting militarism, nationalism and NATO. This type of leftists is supporting by the state and Western foundations too. But I’m still in touch with my friends, who are don’t work with the state and have nothing to do with privilaged classes. They support me and my anti-war views. A lot of them, if they are men, are living an awful life now, cause they have to hide all the time at their apartments in the fear of getting outside. Ukrainian army is kidnapping people from the street and sending them on the frontline without their permission. And majority of people with man gender marker in the documents are not allowed by the law to left the country.

5)Have many people, including anarchists joined the army and left antimilitarism? And not much is known about them? Maybe they are afraid. Do they exist? Are you in contact with them?

Regarding anti-war anarchists in Ukraine, we have anti-war collective called Assembly. They are from Kharkiv and have their own website where they are publishing anti-war and anti-conscription texts. This group of anarchists is anonymous and they hide the names of their team members. This is the only way to conduct any anti-war activity in Ukraine. There was only one Ukrainian organization that did not hide the names of its members and openly spoke out against the war – Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. The Security Service of Ukraine accused them of support of Russia and sent its leader to court. After that, the organization significantly softened its public position, fearing prison. Many Ukrainian leftists sided with the war, it seems to me, because of conformity. They are afraid to express their real position or simply don’t even have one, as it seems to me, and just are following mainstream trend. But these are just my assumptions. In Ukraine, as an authoritarian militaristic country, it is extremely unsafe to be against war.

6)What about Ukrainians in exile? Are they doing any anti-war activities? Are they organizing in workplaces?

Lately, many Ukrainian anti-war initiatives have appeared abroad. For example, Ukrainians are now organizing demonstrations against mobilization and human rights violations in Ukraine. These demonstrations are taking place in Germany, Italy, and France. Often, these actions are organized by Ukrainian leftists who have nothing to do with the pro-war Ukrainian left mainstream such as the so-called “Ukrainian anti-authoritarians” or Solidarity Collectives. All these groups of anti-war Ukrainian leftists are not financed by anyone, they are a personal initiative of convinced and active young people. There will be more of these actions, and I am in active communication with the organizers and members of this initiatives, this is very inspiring! In addition, in the West there are a certain number of Ukrainian scientists and artists who are against the war and who are constantly being marginalized and silenced here in the West.  But we have all been silenced for too long, our voices have been erased for too long, and now we are increasingly trying to build horizontal connections at various levels, organizing an anti-war front here abroad against the war and the propagandists. There are many more of us than even we think.

7)The media is silent about the forced mobilization of the Ukrainian government. Rarely does information about deserters leak out? What can you tell us about it?

Nobody knows the exact number of deserters from the Ukrainian side, but according to official and unofficial statistics, there are about 150-200 thousand people! These are huge numbers. The official Ukrainian media are controlled by the state or the Security Service of Ukraine. Ukrainians mainly consume information from anonymous news channels on Telegram or TikTok. It is there that videos of violence against civilians by the Ukrainian army are constantly published. These videos, full of terrible scenes and evidence of human rights violations, do not make it into the official media. The Ukrainian authorities are constantly trying to find the authors of anonymous Telegram channels who criticize the actions of the Ukrainian army or advocate for peace, and put them in prison. Sometimes the authorities succeed. The Ukrainian government, police and the Security Service of Ukraine do not hesitate to use any methods to silence alternative voices. For example, the police recently arrested the mother of a blogger who is abroad and speaks out against forced mobilization, for publishing his post! There are also unofficial ways to shut up dissenters. I remember one teenager who had his own channel on Telegram, where he criticized Ukrainian nationalism and mobilization. He identified himself as an anarchist. Fascists came to his home for a “conversation”, after which he publicly renounced his beliefs. But the pro-war Ukrainian leftists, who are propagandists and accomplices of all these crimes against Ukrainians, will never tell you about such things.

8)Do you have acquaintances who have deserted or evaded the draft? How can we in Czechoslovakia help them?

I know people who have illegally fled the country, and I have many acquaintances and friends in Ukraine who are hiding from the army and conscription. Perhaps, over time, it will be necessary to create initiatives to help such people within the framework of anti-war Ukrainian movements abroad, which have only just begun to emerge. If such initiatives appear, I hope that there will be people in the Czech Republic and Slovakia who will want to help these Ukrainians.

9)What message would you give to Ukrainian and Russian workers at home and abroad?

The only thing I want to convey to those who are not part of the privileged classes (and this is not only the proletariat), regardless of their nationality and location: never trust those who build their happiness on your exploitation, marginalisation and systemic discrimination, and especially do not be fools and do not participate in their wars, it is simply stupid!

10)Thank you for the interview and if you have anything else to say, we would be happy to.

Thank you, comrade, for interviewing me.

Please see my Facebook page for more: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100013291847024

Martin (CAS)

How many more corpses do you need to understand what’s going on?

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An article by Lukas Borl – https://lukasborl.noblogs.org

The Russian and Ukrainian state sends people to war to defend the rule of the Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisie. The Israeli state and Hamas do the same for their own local bourgeoisie. People are dying by the thousands under the flags of “their” states and nationalist movements. They murder each other for the sake of “their own” rulers, for the business of “their own” bosses, for the property and power of “their own” bourgeoisie. “We are defending the survival of our own nation”, these people shout, while running towards their own destruction on the field of war. “We are fighting for the right to national self-determination” they chant in chorus, while overlooking that everywhere in the world it is the bourgeoisie that dictates the conditions of our lives. There is no self-determination anywhere. The bourgeoisie in Ukraine determines (i.e. imposes and dictates) the conditions of the local proletariat, the bourgeoisie in Russia does the same to the local proletariat. The various bourgeois factions around the world are uniting in transnational alliances to compete with their rivals. How can anyone believe the delusion that by waging war for one of these factions the working class can gain the possibility of self-determination? So, if the proletariat in the Ukraine, Gaza or Israel sacrifices enough lives on the front, the bourgeoisie will give it as a gift the voluntary surrender of its own power and will no longer exploit the proletarian masses?

War between states will never bring us the opportunity to determine the free conditions of our lives. Even if the “smaller and weaker” or “invaded” state wins the war with the help of the allies, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will be preserved. Being exploited by the local bourgeoisie and oppressed by the local state is no victory. It’s not something we should sacrifice our lives for. Yet some are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives for the illusion that the victory of one state is important for the future liberation from all states. It’s one of the many oxymorons of these people. In the name of fighting against states, they urge us to defend a particular state and its nationalist/democratic ideology. In the name of fighting against war, they tell us that we must engage in war. How many more people have to die on the front for these oxymoron lovers to realise that war between states cannot bring peace, that against tyranny of states cannot be fought by collaboration with states, that capitalist exploitation cannot be fought by working class alliances with capitalists?

Warmongers on both sides of the war line use economic, violent and ideological pressure to mobilize people for war. If we proclaim the struggle against all factions of the bourgeoisie, including the struggle against the bourgeoisie of the “invaded” states, they accuse us of aiding the more aggressive, dictatorial, imperialist states, as if it were not perhaps obvious that we are also waging the struggle against them at the same time. They believe that collusion with this or that local bourgeoisie and state is a question of survival. They do not take into account that the same bourgeoisie they defend does everything to avoid being conscripted to the front itself, while the state authorities forcibly dress the proletarians in uniforms and drive them to their deaths in the front struggle. They sees that, the “friendly” bourgeoisie, uses the state to close the borders to men who want to travel to safety. They fail to see that the bourgeoisie is not concerned with saving the lives of the entire bombed population, but with forcing the proletarian part of the population to shed blood to save their own power, property and sphere of economic influence. When it comes to saving lives in a war zone, the proletarians certainly have to look for other options than enlisting in the army.

Whether the warmongers are capitalists, nationalists or the left of capital, they are all terrified by the idea that the enemy state will win the war, but they are not at all terrified by the corpses of proletarians that war always “produces” on both sides. No matter what banner they stand under, no matter what ideological label they put on themselves, we must repudiate all warmongers. When the question is put to us as to which side we take in the war, we clearly answer that we take the side of the proletariat in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel and all over the world. We do not choose the side of this or that state in the war, but the side that organises against states. We do not stand aside while war massacres our class brothers and sisters. We stand on the side of those who rebel against the war and resist all efforts to drag us into the war. The only way to stop wars is to undermine the ability of all states to continue to wage war.

The aim of ‘revolutionary defeatists’ today is not that one side should win and the other lose but to draw a clear line between the capitalist perspective which entails ever more war and misery, and the proletarian revolutionary perspective, which entails humankind’s liberation. There is no compromise between them possible.

Internationalist perspective

https://lukasborl.noblogs.org/how-many-more-corpses-do-you-need-to-understand-whats-going-on/#more-1958

Capitalism’s ‘Social-Peace’ is Class War!

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“War Is Peace!” – George Orwell ‘1984’

Hundreds of thousands have marched repeatedly in London and across these islands against the carnage of the Gaza war.  Many expressing their impotent outrage at the suffering. 

Most however as partisans of one capitalist state solution or another, blind to or ignoring of their own experience of the state’s relationship to war and our class.  How’s that working?  It isn’t. It is instead weaponised turning communities against each other as alleged hate speech. 

Without open class conflict it can achieve nothing that doesn’t suit the interests of the rival belligerents and their respective capitalist bloc sponsors. And why one war but not another?

It’s hardly surprising that people are fatigued by their exposure to the horror of war.  A sense of powerlessness threatens to overwhelm us. Easier to imagine that it could never be us rather than acknowledge the blood is spilling on our doorstep.

We are daily witness to such horrors that t it seems beyond our imagination. How could this be? What could it be like? Could it ever be us?

If we want to conjure an image of what Ukraine might be like think of towns like Cannock or Whitby or Newport reduced to rubble. If you think of Gaza imagine somewhere between the size of the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Man flattened by the bombs of the proud capitals of ‘democracy’.

Beyond where we want to go are the shocking memories of Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving police officer. Think of the tens of thousands raped, murdered, slaughtered by proud men in uniforms endorsed by their governments!  ‘Democratic’ or otherwise makes little difference to the victims.

This is neither far away or long ago but now, no further than a holiday you may have thought of in Gran Canaria or Cyprus. And these are only the wars the media is reporting on, much of the rest of the world is aflame: Sudan; Ethiopia; Congo; Myanmar, to name a few.

The war is no further away than the nearest arms or components factory.  No further than the nearest logistics depot, transport hub, communications centre.  The war is where the ports and airports are, the military bases and their reserve volunteers’ stations.

It is the rail networks and motorways, the towns, estates, cities and factories where we as workers’ pay the price of war in widening poverty and worsening austerity.  Worsening conditions, lower pay and the threat of military call up or conscription.

In truth we cannot move without being at war and when we notice it, the rhetorical guns blaze “disrupter, extremist, terrorist!”  We are already, through our toleration of their economic planning and its social and political consequences, being partially conscripted by capitalism and its state actors into its destructive rivalry.

The blood and treasure of our labour is being stolen and squandered to steal the treasure of the labour of others like ourselves!

Where we notice and try to act our protest and resistance is squandered too.  Marshalled by capitalisms loyal ‘left wing’ opposition into the passivity of marches to support or oppose one side or the other.  The abattoir or the slaughterhouse!

This is not peace! It is capitalisms ‘Social-Peace’ of order, discipline, defamation and control.  The bloodied Home-Front of their fratricidal wars next door.

If in doubt of the violence of their Social-Peace, reflect on the defeated strikes, the disaster of the care sector, Covid and the collapsing health services, the 25% annual increase in rough sleepers and the lengthening food banks queues!

This is their war against our class at home while they openly talk of expanding their wars abroad fed by enforceable military service.  If it achieves nothing else, it creates fear and a misplaced gratitude for the devil you-know – their Social Peace.

Here and abroad, it is capitalism and its state that is the disrupter, the extremist, the terrorist!  Don’t just march, organise and act:  this ‘Warfare State’ is the enemy at home and our resistance to it, our struggle with it, our ‘Class War’ is our necessary, best and urgent response against it!

Article by Dreyfus

The Coming War We Must Resist

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“My fellow Americans, I…will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” – President Ronald Reagan 1984.

A 20 year truce until war breaks out, suggests a senior NATO commander.  As General Foch described the end of the First World War in 1919, “This is not peace…. It is an armistice for 20 years.”  World War Two in Europe began in 1939.

The worst global crisis since the Second World War, as Gaza witnesses more deaths than in the London Blitz.  The UN is considering legal action on ‘Genocide’, the concept itself defined by the annihilation events of that last great international conflagration.

This is not history on the edge of repeating itself, nor the consequences of a lesson unlearned.  The current crisis is a continuation of the drive inherent in Capitalism for domination of our Class through control of global markets for profit.  This rivalry and the destruction it demands, once again puts us on the brink of extinction.

These are not paranoid conspiracy theories, but the words of our rulers and their military class themselves.

UK Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps said on 15th January that we are “moving from a post-war to pre-war world…. The enemies are gathering all around us, we need to make sure we lead our allies in the conflicts to come.”

Two days later, Admiral Bauer, of the Royal Netherlands Navy, said that preparation “starts there. The realisation that not everything is plannable and not everything is going to be hunky dory in the next 20 years.”

Within a week, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing UK Chief of the General Staff chipped in that ordinary citizens should be “trained and equipped” to fight in the military in the event of a war with Russia.

Shapps’s ex-army predecessor, Tobias Ellwood, said the military chief should be “listened to carefully….  What’s coming over the horizon should shock us. It should worry us and we are not prepared.”

It took a few days for coverage of this to emerge in the popular press, and politics and military might not yet be exactly on the same page.  Though let’s not delude ourselves, the preparation for global war has begun. Not just by parts of the globe lighting up with bombs from one side or the other, but in the propaganda, softening us up for more sacrifice beyond austerity, militarisation and even conscription.

Since these comments we have seen the dial, already high, turned up dramatically with speculation, as we have suggested before, that an attack on Iran itself from the US (or franchised out to Israel?) is now in open debate.

While any revolutionary class based opposition to these drives to war may seem a long way off, the steps towards that war are now seemingly uncomfortably close.

There’s been no shortage of wars since 1945, and no shortage of bodies.  Conservative estimates are around 90 million dead from 1945 to the present day.  As many as died in both world wars put together.  Yet we are led to imagine that this has been an era of relative peace.

This alleged bloody peace has been a prolonged and inevitable preparation for the next round of global imperialist conflict. The Eurasian frontier from the Indian Ocean to the arctic sea is aflame or bristling in preparation.

Whilst we are being encouraged in the West to see ‘our side’ as the benign party in the coming conflict, we should recall that it is precisely ‘our side’ that is the major obstacle in calls for an end to the bloodbath in Gaza.  This while US arms sales abroad reached a record of a quarter of a trillion dollars last year.

As for Yemen, they would hard pressed to spot the difference between the bombs and missiles being dropped by the British and Americans from the British and American missiles dropped on them by the Saudi led coalition over the last 9 years.

For most of us, the daily alienation of poverty and wage labour, the struggle to survive with dignity in a hostile sea of austerity and assault has inoculated us against the memory of war and its emerging threat.

For those who don’t remember the Second World War, (spoiler alert) Hitler dies… and with him it was hoped the atrocities of Nazism moved from the naive plain of beyond imagination to the impossible.

In recent years however, fascism has moved from an historic aberration via the theoretically possible to the conceptually plausible.  In reality, in some countries, fascist parties already have come to power, however they are practically choosing to understate themselves for the sake of acceptability at the moment.  Nationalism, Nazism and the Alt-Right are making themselves and their quest for conflict known all over Europe and America.

From Italy to Hungary, to key opposition groups in Spain, France, and Germany, fascism in reality never lost its potential.  It’s just a clever word for capitalism and its state operative, believing that they have the whip hand and can abandon the pretence of tolerance and democracy.

It requires a mixture of populism, a desperate ruling class retreating to narrow national chauvinism, unchallenged by a weakened working class.  Our class so conspicuously on the back foot since the banking collapse of 2008 failed to resist when capitalism called for us to rally behind austerity – that is to say the increasing repression and impoverishment of us as workers – in the ‘national interest’.

Austerity, in so many ways driven by war and global rivalry, not to mention climate change causing mass migration, is being weaponised into a call for sacrifice for the sake of preserving the nation state and capitalism.

In the face of this, the bosses have become emboldened as we have been weakened.   “..(Our) class is divided because it is weak, not weak because it is divided”. – Anton Pannekoek

Us versus them, ‘our’ state versus its external threat is a key ideological weapon aimed against the unity of our class.

We can see this in the barbarity and deafness of the state of Israel; Hamas’s intransigence, Putin’s relentless sense of impunity and in the threat of a second Trump presidency, despite his populist coup attempt.

In the face of this threat of war and calls for conscription, our unity now is more important than ever.  The last 2 years of workplace and industrial struggles have again shone a light on those on the political left, the Labour Party and the organised labour movement, who would seek to weaken and divide us further.  Warmongers all for one side or the other – watch Labour’s promises on defence and security as the election approaches!

Enough of disunity and defeat!  The generation that could witness our extinction is already here and the fight against the coming war is our most urgent task.  Damn their oppressive and hopeless ‘social peace’ and their drive to war!  Against their clamour and calls for national unity! 

We must prepare to fight and unify on every front of the class struggle.  Our very survival depends on it!

No war between peoples – no peace between classes!  No War but the Class War!

Article by Dreyfus