ANC Secretary-General Says Putin Welcome In South Africa Despite ICC Arrest Warrant

Editor’s Note: The following opinion was produced by Globetrotter.

Surprise and horror have defined the reaction to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. That’s likely because although the intervention has followed the contours of a modern land war, it has also marked a break with the past in a number of ways. The world has become used to military interventions by the United States. This is, however, not a U.S. intervention. That in itself is a surprise—one that has befuddled reporters and pundits alike.

Even as we deplore the violence and the loss of life in Ukraine resulting from the Russian intervention (and the neofascist violence in the Donbas), it is valuable to step back and look at how the rest of the world may perceive this conflict, starting with the West’s ethnocentric interest in an attack whose participants and victims they believe they share aspects of identity with—whether related to culture, religion, or skin color.

White Wars

War in Ukraine joins a sequence of wars that have opened sores on a very fragile planet. Wars in Africa and Asia seem endless, and some of them are rarely commented upon with any feeling in media outlets across the world or in the cascade of posts found on social media platforms. For example, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which started in 1996 and which has resulted in millions of casualties, has not elicited the kind of sympathy from the world now seen during the reporting on Ukraine. In contrast, the startlingly frank comments from political leaders and journalists during the conflict in Ukraine have revealed the grip of racism on the imaginations of these shapers of public opinion.

It was impossible recently to get major global media outlets interested in the conflict in Cabo Delgado, which grew out of the capture of the bounty of natural gas by TotalEnergies SE (France) and ExxonMobil (U.S.) and led to the deployment of the French-backed Rwandan military in Mozambique. At COP26, I told a group of oil company executives about this intervention—which I had covered for Globetrotter—and one of them responded with precise accuracy: “You’re right about what you say, but no one cares.”

No one, which is to say the political forces in the North Atlantic states, cares about the suffering of children in Africa and Asia. They are, however, gripped by the war in Ukraine, which should grip them, which distresses all of us, but which should not be allowed to be seen as worse than other conflicts taking place across the globe that are much more brutal and are likely to slip out of everyone’s memory due to the lack of interest and attention given by world leaders and media outlets to them.

Charlie D’Agata of CBS News said that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city, where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that… [a conflict] is going to happen.” Clearly, these are the things one expects to see in Kabul (Afghanistan) or Baghdad (Iraq) or Goma (the Democratic Republic of the Congo), but not in a “relatively civilized, relatively European” city in Ukraine. If these are things that one expects in the former cities respectively, then there is very little need to be particularly outraged by the violence that is witnessed in these cities.

You would not expect such violence in Ukraine, said the country’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor David Sakvarelidze to the BBC, because of the kind of people who were caught in the crossfire: “European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed every day.” Sakvarelidze considers the Ukrainians to be Europeans, although D’Agata calls them “relatively European.” But they are certainly not African or Asian, people whom—if you think carefully about what is being said here—certain world leaders and international media outlets expect to be killed by the violence unleashed against them by the global great powers and by the weapons sold to the local thugs in these regions by these great powers.

Worst War?

On February 23, 2022, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres—in a heartfelt statement about the Russian military intervention in Ukraine—said, “In the name of humanity do not allow to start in Europe what could be the worst war since the beginning of the century.” The next day, on February 24, with Russia launching “the biggest attack on a European state since World War II,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemned this “barbaric attack” and said that “it is President Putin who is bringing war back to Europe.” “Bringing war back to Europe”: this is instructive language from Von der Leyen. It reminded me of Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950), where the great poet and communist bemoaned Europe’s ability to forget the terrible fascistic treatment of the peoples of Africa and Asia by the colonial powers when they spoke of fascism. Fascism, Césaire wrote, is the colonial experiment brought back to Europe.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, neither the United Nations secretary-general nor the president of the European Commission came forward to make any immediate condemnation of that war. Both international institutions went along with the war, allowing the destruction of Iraq, which resulted in the death of more than a million people. In 2004, a year into the U.S. war on Iraq, after reports of grave violations of human rights (including by Amnesty International on torture in the prison of Abu Ghraib) came to light, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the war “illegal.” In 2006, three years after the war had begun, Italy’s Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who had been the president of the European Commission in 2003, called the war a “grave error.”

In the case of the Russian intervention, these institutions rushed to condemn the war, which is all very well; but does this mean that they will be just as quick to condemn the United States when it starts its next bombing campaign?

War Stenography

People often ask me, what’s the most reliable news outlet? This is a hard question to answer these days, as Western news outlets are increasingly becoming stenographers of their governments (with the racist attitudes of the reporters on full display more and more often, making the apologies that come later hardly comforting). State-sponsored outlets in Russia and China now increasingly find themselves banned on social media sites. Anyone who counters Washington’s narrative is dismissed as irrelevant, and these fringe voices find it hard to develop an audience.

So-called cancel culture demonstrates its limits. D’Agata has apologized for his comment about Ukraine being “relatively civilized, relatively European” compared to Iraq and Afghanistan and has already been rehabilitated because he is on the “right side” of the conflict in Ukraine. Cancel culture has moved from the chatter of social media to the battlefields of geopolitics and diplomacy as far as the Russian-Ukraine conflict is concerned. Switzerland has decided to end a century of formal neutrality to cancel Russia by enforcing European sanctions against it (remember that Switzerland remained “neutral” as the Nazis tore through Europe during World War II, and operated as the Nazi bankers even after the war). Meanwhile, press freedom has been set aside during the current conflict in Eastern Europe, with Australia and Europe suspending the broadcast of RT, which is a Russia state-controlled international media network.

D’Agata’s reliability as a reporter will remain unquestioned. He “misspoke,” they might say, but this is a Freudian slip.

Calculations of War

Wars are ugly, especially wars of aggression. The role of the reporter is to explain why a country goes to war, particularly an unprovoked war. If this were 1941, I might try to explain the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II or the Japanese assumption that the Nazis would soon defeat the Soviets and then take the war across the Atlantic Ocean. But the Soviets held out, saving the world from fascism. In the same way, the Russian attack on Ukraine requires explanation: the roots of it go deep to various political and foreign policy developments, such as the post-Soviet emergence of ethnic nationalism along the spine of Eastern Europe, the eastward advance of U.S. power—through NATO—toward the Russian border, and the turbulent relationship between the major European states and their eastern neighbors (including Russia). To explain this conflict is not to justify it, for there is little to justify in the bombing of a sovereign people.

Sane voices exist on all sides of ugly conflicts. In Russia, State Duma Deputy Mikhail Matveev of the Communist Party said—soon after the Russian entry into Ukraine—that he voted for the recognition of the breakaway provinces of Ukraine, he “voted for peace, not for war,” and he voted “for Russia to become a shield, so that Donbas is not bombed, and not for Kyiv being bombed.”

Matveev’s voice confounds the current narrative: it brings into motion the plight of the Donbas since the U.S.-driven coup in Ukraine in 2014, and it sounds the alarm against the full scale of the Russian intervention.

Is there room in our imagination to try to understand what Matveev is saying?

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Editor’s Note: This is based on a presentation the author gave during a February 6 webinar, “U.S./NATO Aggression at the Russian Border. No War with Russia.” The event was a conversation between Russian, Ukrainian and U.S. activists the United National Antiwar Coalition had organized.

We have serious concerns that the accelerated drive to militarization and war by the United States and its allies dramatically unfolding with the crisis in Ukraine might very easily escalate to the point that it could threaten global humanity.

In their mad drive to advance their geostrategic interests to the detriment of everyone else—the Democratic Party version of “America First”—the Biden administration willfully violates all of the core principles of international relations and law. The respect for national sovereignty, the prohibition against threatening other members of the United Nations with military actions, non-intervention and adherence to international law are not recognized by the United States, which sees itself as an exception to the rule of law.

The manufactured crisis in Ukraine is just the latest episode of the reckless and delusional drama that the United States is involved in to attempt to maintain hegemony in conditions that have fundamentally changed. That is why contextualizing Ukraine as another example of why a global anti-war and anti-imperialist movement is so vitally important.

As long as the commitment to “Full Spectrum Dominance” remains bipartisan policy, today, it’s Ukraine. But tomorrow, it is certain to be another nation, another issue that will require a response from the peoples of the world.

As stated in the final declaration of the Fourth Canada-United States-Mexico Trilateral Peace Conference in Moca, Dominican Republic, held in September 2018, there must be a firm and principled commitment on the part of peace and anti-imperialist organizations that “peace must be based on the principles of non-intervention and full respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination and independence of all states, as stipulated in the United Nations Charter and covenants of international law enacted since the end of the second imperialist war known as World War II.”

Yet, the web of global U.S. command structures—with over eight hundred military bases—NATO as the largest military alliance in the world; illegal, draconian sanctions; and political subversion through coups makes national sovereignty impossible. The illegal and unilateral actions by the United States and its allies represents a constant threat to international peace and perpetuates a lawless, international Hobbesian state of nature.

So, while it is quite clear how we got to this moment with the situation in Ukraine, the challenge for the anti-war, pro-peace movement—and more specifically for the anti-imperialist organizations and movements in the United States and Europe—is to ground our understanding of the driving force and objective interests responsible for where the international community is at this moment.

For the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) the common enemy is the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination. We argue that we must center our analysis within the context of the global class struggle—a struggle sharpened by the ongoing and irreconcilable contradictions of the global colonial-capitalist system.

That is important because if we do not identify the real, concrete material forces, we can find ourselves struggling against shadows, instead of against the corporeal reality of an alliance of states dedicated to advancing their interests to the detriment of everyone else.

It is imperialism, led by the United States, that is the culprit. Its parasitic imperialist domination would be impossible without its core instrument of enforcement and control: State violence. That is why we are discussing Ukraine today. 

Imperialism: That is framework. Today, it is Ukraine. Tomorrow, it might be China. Why? Because with the seemingly sudden and spontaneous crisis that emerged with Ukraine, the steady, violent, oppressive and repressive relations of power between the United States and Western capital and the rest of humanity continues. Objective reality bears this out. While we are focused on Ukraine as the most immediate danger, the people of Afghanistan are starving, bombs are still dropping in Yemen, coups are unfolding in Africa, the United States is still pivoting to Asia, and the peoples and nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are still suffocating from the predatory weight of the U.S. hegemon.

When we remind ourselves that the doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance animates U.S. foreign policies, we can disabuse ourselves of any illusions on what our historic task must be.

The drive for dominance has always been fueled by one objective: To position U.S. capitalist interests to be able to more effectively plunder the labor and resources of the peoples and nations of the world.

Is that not what is in play in eastern Europe? Is it not capitalist competition and its geostrategic implications that is driving events? Can we understand Ukraine, the role of NATO and the United States, without understanding the economic interests involved with Nord Stream 2 and the Eurasian Economic Union and even the Belt and Road Initiative? Was it a surprise that after being pushed out of Afghanistan, a crisis would emerge in Kazakhstan as the United States desperately tries to re-position itself in central Asia? That is why nothing short of the defeat of imperialism must be seen as our task.

There are significant points of resistance emerging from popular struggles that are moving us toward that task of building powerful international peoples’ movements:

1. Prohibition against nuclear weapons. January represented the one-year anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW came out of UN General Assembly resolution in July 2017. It represents the first legally binding agreement that comprehensively prohibits nuclear weapons with ultimate goal of total elimination. The treaty came into force January 22, 2021, after reaching the goal of fifty instruments of ratification or accessions. The Black Alliance for Peace was one of the first organizations to take up the work of publicizing the treaty as soon as it emerged from UN General Assembly in July of 2017.
2. We must work to abolish NATO. In a 1997 essay published by the New York Times, Kennan said, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era… Such a decision may be expected… to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” But our concerns on NATO extend beyond the contradictions that NATO poses in Europe. For African peoples and other colonized peoples, NATO is correctly seen as an instrument of U.S. and European military domination. BAP actively campaigns to dismantle NATO and considers it an integral part of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination. The international campaign to close U.S. and NATO bases and shut down the U.S. global command structures represents much needed international cooperation and coordination to bring attention to and build opposition to the global U.S. and NATO network of military bases and structures
3. Support movements for Zones of Peace. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) declared the Caribbean and Latin America to be a “Zone of Peace.” BAP is leading an effort to revive the civil society element of this state-centered declaration by popularizing the declaration and building popular support across the region.
4. Campaign against sanctions. There is a growing awareness of the devastating consequences of economic sanctions on the general population in those more than 30 nations that are under the illegal sanction regime of the United States and Europe. Coalitions like Sanctions Kill have been organizing to bring attention to this issue in the United States and globally.

The white supremacist, colonial-capitalist, patriarchal ruling classes of the United States and Europe are clear—even if we are not—that war and repression will be used with maximum efficiency to maintain their hegemony. Therefore, we can have no illusions: We must fight back, and we must win!

Every mobilization against illegal sanctions; subversion in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba; the global U.S. command structures and bases; mass incarceration in the United States; police killings; the murder of Palestinians; and the continued capitalist assault on Mother Earth have to be seen as part of our efforts to defeat the colonial-capitalist order—to fight imperialism, and the way we do that is to turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism!

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

NATO’S AFRICAN HYPOCRISY

The West wants African countries to condemn the war in Ukraine, but doesn’t want to hear their views on conflicts in Libya or Yemen. Why not? African Stream’s Clinton Nzala outlines the double standard during a discussion on Bolivia’s Kawsachun News. pic.twitter.com/ecuJ9Xslr9

— African Stream (@african_stream) April 11, 2023

The West wants African countries to condemn the war in Ukraine, but doesn’t want to hear their views on conflicts in Libya or Yemen. Why not? African Stream’s Clinton Nzala outlines the double standard during a discussion on Kawsachun News.