Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
September 30, 2023
by Frank Arango, Seattle Workers' Voice
The Ukrainian government and people have been resisting the full-scale Russian imperialist invasion of their country for more than a year and a half, and in recent months the Ukrainian armed forces have been pushing back the aggressors in heavy fighting. This resistance is overwhelmingly supported by Ukraine's trade unions, socialists (not the neo-Stalinists) and anarchists, feminists, LGBTQ activists, and its Jewish, Roma and Tatar communities. Together, they pour heart and soul into the struggle to drive out the foreign oppressors. It is therefore only natural for anti-imperialists and progressive people everywhere to want to build and support a larger and more active solidarity movement with the fighting Ukrainians. But to do this often requires refuting the justifications for the Russian aggression that are not only spread by the Putin and his right-wing supporters globally, but also by several left groups in this country.
Code Pink: Women For Peace has a big voice. Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and Ann Wright have many articles published in Salon, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Common Dreams and Consortium News. Code pink members write books which may be purchased on Amazon. They get interviewed on NPR. Code Pink has a weekly radio show that is carried by a number of stations across the country. And they're in the news when they do such things as disrupt the politicians in Washington. Further, Code Pink is wealthy when compared to other anti-war groups, (1) and this allows its members to fly around the country and the world in order to spread their message.
Code Pink hides its real standpoint, to denounce resistance to Russian imperialism, behind general declarations that seem to say the opposite. For example, in the spring of 2022 it gave nice sounding slogans, such as "End the war in Ukraine" and "Peace in Ukraine," but which avoided targeting the Russian aggressors. And when it did at one point demand "Russian troops out...," it placed this on par with "No to NATO expansion," when the two are very different things. This year, Code Pink takes this farther by asserting that the "300,000+ killed so far in the ongoing war in Ukraine" is the result of a U.S. military intervention! (2) Moreover, while the Code Pink leaders say the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine is a "mistake," "illegal," "reckless and, ultimately, indefensible," and while they also talk about the suffering the Ukrainian people are enduring, they do not conclude from this that they should assist in building solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance. Instead, they hasten to add a "but" after their brief comments against the Russian invasion, and then proceed with arguments that betray the Ukrainian people.
So let us look at what follows Code Pink's "buts", as well as how
the Trumpists say the same things. And since Code Pink co-founder Medea
Benjamin has tweeted to the notorious Georgia Trumpist Rep. Marjorie
Taylor Greene, "What does it say about progressive Democrats in
Congress when the best person on Ukraine is Rep. Marjorie Taylor
Greene???," and Greene has replied, "Ukraine is the MIC’s [military
industrial complex's] new Iraq wrapped up with a pretty little NATO
bow, with a nuclear present inside," we'll use Marjorie Taylor Greene's
statements to illustrate who Code Pink is in bed with when it comes to
Ukraine.
In his speech on the eve of the Russian imperialist war of
aggression (February 24, 2022) Putin tried to frighten the Russian
people with the specter of a “steadily expanding” NATO that was
“bringing its military infrastructure closer to Russian borders.” He
said “the military machine is moving and, I repeat, is coming close to
our borders...I repeat, our actions are self-defense against the
threats posed to us.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "The American people do not want war with Russia, but NATO and our own foolish leaders are dragging us into one...We should pull out of NATO." Further, with regard to Ukraine's desire to form alliances with the West: "Ukraine just kept poking the bear and poking the bear, which is Russia."
Code Pink's Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies write of NATO's “relentless expansion,” and say that “Without NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s borders and its history of aggression, we doubt that Russia would have invaded Ukraine.” And the Code Pink website has articles with headlines like "The U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine" and "The USA Caused the War in Ukraine."
Back to reality, even if Ukraine had been on the verge of joining NATO, which it wasn't, this would have been no excuse for Russia launching a bloody invasion. History must be paid attention to. Ukraine could not join NATO due opposition by the French and German governments, governments which maintained their opposition even after Russia had seized Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014.
But why would Ukraine want to join NATO? After Chechnya declared independence in 1991, Russia replied with two wars (beginning in 1994 and 1999) in which at least one tenth of the Chechen population was killed, and perhaps one fifth of the population. Later, when seven NATO countries blocked Georgia's application to NATO in April 2008, four months later Russia invaded and occupied the northern part of the country. So in this context the ruling classes of the former Soviet republics or Eastern bloc countries who applied for NATO membership did so because they saw no other way to defend their independent existence, not because the U.S. or NATO twisted their arms. Moreover, when Putin says that "the military machine is moving and, I repeat, is coming close to our borders" and the like, he leaves out that the major NATO enlargements happened in 1999 and 2004, i.e., 19 and 24 years ago. (3)
Putin also used his February 24 speech to claim that Ukraine had been placed under “complete external control,” and that the West had taken Ukraine “hostage” in order to use it against Russia. In other words, Ukraine was being used as a proxy by the West. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly asserts that this is a proxy war, and Code Pink's Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies make the same assertion.
The facts, however, belie this. If Biden was planning to use the Ukrainians as cannon fodder in a war for U.S. interests, why--at the beginning of the full-scale invasion--did he offer to evacuate President Zelensky from Ukraine? And after Zelensky replied "the fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride," why has Biden consistently dragged his feet in supplying Ukraine with the modern tanks, rocket and missile systems and fighter jets that Zelensky has repeatedly demanded, and then supplied too few of them?
No. Neither the U.S. or NATO wanted to instigate a proxy war with Russia. And the slowness with which the U.S. and other major NATO powers have acted has cost many Ukrainian lives. It also gave the Russian aggressors time to construct their 600-mile long three-deep defensive lines of mine fields, tank traps and concrete fortifications that the Ukrainian army has been pushing through at great costs in order to liberate their country.
Another of Putin's justifications for waging war on Ukraine is that he's denazifying it. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said: "NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them. What the hell is going with these #NATONazis?" And Medea Benjamin, Nicolas Davies and others in Code Pink have gone on and on about the neo-Nazi Azov battalion and how "the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup, and then by redirecting it to fight separatists [their word] in Eastern Ukraine."
Well, Russia's launching a full-scale war to overthrow the government of smaller and weaker Ukraine, a state that was attacking no one, is blatantly imperialist no matter what the nature of the Ukrainian government. But since the aim of our unholy alliance against the Ukrainian resistance is to strip it of support by muddying the waters with talk of Ukrainian Nazis, we must proceed farther.
First, there was no right-wing coup in 2014. In late 2013 there was already broad dissatisfaction with government corruption, abuse of power, human rights violations and the influence of oligarchs. Then, when President Yanukovych suddenly decided to not sign the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement, which the Rada (parliament) had overwhelmingly approved, demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people broke out, and one day an estimated 800,000 Ukrainians marched. This was the Euromaidan movement. Yanukovych, who wanted closer ties to Russia, responded with police repression, and on February 20, 2014 around 100 protesters were shot dead. With the people enraged, Yanukovych fled to eastern Ukraine (and later to Russia). The Rada then removed him from office for deserting by a unanimous vote, including by all 36 deputies of his own Party of Regions who were present.
Secondly, the small neo-Nazi led Azov battalion (now a regiment) did play a role in the gigantic Euromaidan protests, especially in defending them from the police, but this cannot be used to smear the entire movement and its overall progressive character. Indeed, in 2014 the battalion membership was only in the high hundreds, and, according to Wikipedia, the most combatants it ever had was 2,500 in 2017.
Thirdly, one does not have to know the details of the 2014 events in order to judge what Ukraine is today. (4) For example: along with removing Yanukovych, the supposed ultra-right or Nazi coup leaders abolished the special riot police and held elections...two of them. In May 2014, members of Yanukovych's old party ran in the Opposition Bloc, and garnered 9.8% of the vote. Poroshenko, an Independent, won with 55% of the vote. But then these supposed ultra-rightists or Nazis (depending on the source) allowed a new party to be formed, Zelensky's Servant of the People party, which swept them from office in the 2019 election! (In the second round Zelensky received 73% of the vote, Poroshenko 24% and the far right candidate 1.6%.) So while Putin ridiculously claims he's denazifying Ukraine, the country now has a Jewish president, a Jewish prime minister and a defense minister who's a Crimean Tartar of Muslim heritage. For sure, Zelensky's government is neo-liberal capitalist, and last summer it pushed through a reactionary labor law reform that removed companies with less than 250 employees from the Labor Code. But in the midst of war the trade unions and the pro-socialists and anarchists agitated against this without being repressed. That's not what happens under an ultra-right or Nazi government.
The U.S. or NATO have not been threatening nuclear war, and Ukraine couldn't start one because it signed over its nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for security and sovereignty guarantees in 1994. (We've seen how that worked out!) So it's only Putin, Medvedev and other Russian leaders who have threatened to use nuclear weapons. But Greene implies that it's the U.S. who will start a nuclear war by tweeting as follows: "Maybe now is the time to go 'into the streets' to stop this insane President and his cabinet from sending us into a NUCLEAR WAR with Russia. With our current fragile state, WW3 will destroy us all." And Benjamin and Davies write that “reclaim(ing) Crimea and the Donbas could only lead to massive Ukrainian death and suffering, and an increasingly dangerous proxy war between nuclear superpowers that threatened the life of everyone on earth.” Thus, the Code Pink leaders amplify Putin's threats, presumably with the intent of getting supporters of Ukraine's liberation war to give up their support.
Immediately after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Code Pink members carried signs demanding “Biden talk to Putin!” Later, they developed this into a long list of world leaders who they called upon to negotiate with Putin. On it they even included the likes of Israel’s former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who has said things like “I’ve already killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and there is no problem with that,” and to a Palestinian politician, “When you were still climbing trees, we had a Jewish state here”; India's president Modi, who incites violence against the Indian Muslims and other non-Hindu minorities, and whose troops occupy part of Kashmir; Egypt’s dictatorial president al-Sisi, who came to power in a bloody military coup; and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who has made homosexuality a “crime” punishable by death.
But Putin's negotiating position starts with the claim that Ukraine really belongs to Russia, that it's part of Russia's “own historical territories.” And in one of his pre-invasion speeches, he said that
"I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. … Since time immemorial, the people living in the southwest of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians … So, I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.” (5)
Thus, if Putin is forced to bargain it will be over how much of Ukraine Russia gets to keep...for now. (The Russian ruling class cannot be trusted to honor any agreement, e.g., it signed an agreement to end the first Chechen war, but after reorganizing it's military and making up some phoney excuses it launched the second Chechen war.) The other side of this is that while the Ukrainians are currently making good progress in recovering their national territory, it is still possible that the larger Russian military could regroup and make a devastating come back. If that happened it would be up to the Ukrainians and no one else to decide what they should do.
Victory to Ukraine!
Progressive politics begin with defending the interests of the
masses of people, and begin with defending the victims of imperialist
aggression. Yesterday this meant demanding that U.S. imperialism get
out of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, and no doubt
we'll again have to oppose U.S. wars of aggression. But today
progressive politics also means demanding that Russian imperialism get
out of Ukraine. What's more, a defeat for Russia is likely to make
reactionaries everywhere think twice about committing new atrocities,
and a Ukrainian victory is likely to inspire progressive activists to
advance their own struggles against capitalist exploitation, oppression
and wars. In this way a Ukrainian victory will be our victory too.
(1) Codepink Women For Peace had assets of over $1.84 million,revenues of over $1.53 million and expenses of over $1.69 million in 2022. - see https://www.guidestar.org/profile/shared/6e6345be-f095-4997-850d-a502f5605b1c#financials. It had 15 paid employees plus interns.
(2) Code Pink's unbelievable map is at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=725765239549044&set=p.725765239549044&type=3.
(3) See https://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-220525.html for more about NATO expansion.
(4) For more on what really happened in 2014, see https://www.communistvoice.org/49cUkraine.html
and https://mkaradjis.com/2023/06/15/ukraine-myths-used-to-justify-putins-terror/
(5) Putin's speech is at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828. <>
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