Czech Protesters Rail Against Inflation, Sanctions and the Ukraine Proxy War

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.

Activists on the left, as well as radical U.S.-based organizations, came out yesterday against the indictments of three members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), one former party member, and three Russian nationals for allegedly attempting to sow discord in the United States by working with Russia.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday, April 18, that a federal grand jury returned a “superseding indictment” charging the four people with:

…working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.

The four charged include:

• Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who serves as the chairman and founder of the APSP;
• Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who is chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee;
• Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who is chair of the APSP’s Uhuru Solidarity Movement; and
• Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who once served as secretary-general of the APSP and is a founder of the Black Hammer Organization in Georgia.

Repressing Africans in Struggle

Hess and Nevel are white solidarity members. Nevertheless, that an African organization was targeted has raised concerns.

Anti-imperialist African organization Black Alliance for Peace yesterday issued a statement pointing to the U.S. government’s history of repressing the African liberation struggle:

Not since the Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, nor since the indictment of W.E.B DuBois in 1951, or the confiscation of Paul Robeson’s U.S. passport during the anti-communist “McCarthyist” era, has there been such a hysterical response to African people asserting their rights and freedom of speech in the United States. This renewed attack against anti-imperialist Africans, framed within the absurd notion of “Russian influence,” comes as capitalism decays and U.S. global hegemony loses its hold on the world. The attacks on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement are part of a historical tendency to align African political activists with U.S. “adversary” states to marginalize African internationalism (including solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, for example) and to suppress Black radicalism.

It is also an assault on the efforts of Africans organizing against the violence and murders suffered at the hands of the U.S. state. Indeed, Africans do not need Russia to tell them they are suffering the brunt of violence in the heart of the U.S. empire!

Wayne State University professor Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly noted her forthcoming book, Black Scare/Red Scare, points to the APSP raid of July 2022 to draw the connection between U.S. domestic anti-communist purges of the past and repression of activists today.

“It is no coincidence that an African socialist organization is being targeted,” she tweeted.

US charges 4 Americans, 3 Russians in election discord case

I start the epilogue of Black Scare/Red Scare with this case to discuss the resonances of those scares today. It is no coincidence that an African socialist organization is being targeted. https://t.co/SnVgP94m3N

— Dr. CBS (@blackleftaf) April 19, 2023

Interfering in Elections

The DOJ attempted to connect the charged activists with a Russian conspiracy to interfere in U.S. elections, beginning with the 2016 election of Trump.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights—freedoms Russia denies its own citizens—to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the DOJ’s National Security Division.

However, much evidence exists to show the United States interferes the most in other countries’ elections and democratic processes. Aside from invading 201 countries since the end of World War II, the United States deployed 64 covert operations to subvert governments around the world between 1947 and 1989, according to political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke. Meanwhile, political scientist Dov Levin’s work found the United States interfered in 81 elections between 1946 and 2000.

Attacking Activists

The APSP had been preparing for this moment since late December, when they received “strong indications” of indictments coming down in early 2023 after the FBI had raided the party’s properties in July 2022, as Toward Freedom had reported. Then the APSP announced last month that Regions Bank, a financial institution in the U.S. South, had closed the party’s accounts and withdrawn lines of credit. The APSP referred to that move as “U.S. economic sanctions” on Black community projects.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization also issued a statement that referred to more recent history of repression.

On September 24, 2010, the FBI raided seven homes of anti-war activists and the office of the Twin Cities Anti-War committee. All told, twenty-three activists were subpoenaed to a Chicago-based grand jury that claimed to be investigating “material support for terrorism.” As time went on, the FBI continued their attack on anti-war and international solidarity activists by targeting important veterans of the movement who worked with the Anti-war 23, including Chicano activist Carlos Montes in Los Angeles and Palestinian organizer Rasmea Odeh in Chicago. A national defense campaign defeated most of these attacks.

Toward Freedom Board Secretary and independent journalist Jacqueline Luqman commented on the danger for all activists who oppose U.S. global hegemony.

“Today it’s the APSP. Tomorrow it could be you and me,” she tweeted. “All you need to do is oppose US imperialist policy in Ukraine and Palmer Raids 2023 will be unleashed to silence you.”

Today it's the APSP. Tomorrow it could be you and me. All you need to do is oppose US imperialist policy in Ukraine and the Palmer Raids 2023 will be unleashed to silence you. #NoCompromiseNoRetreat https://t.co/E9qb3pQz1F

— Luqman Nation Media (@luqmannation1) April 19, 2023

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock and the Washington Post (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2021)

Afghanistan was thrust into the international media spotlight and public consciousness in August, when the United States and its coalition partners fled the country as the Taliban walked into the presidential palace, establishing itself as the ruling authority. While Afghanistan may finally be free of outside military occupation, Afghans are still suffering the deadly consequences of 40 years of U.S.-led subversion and war. Today, tens of millions of mostly poor and rural Afghans are at risk of dying due to lack of food, with the United Nations estimating 97 percent of people could be below the poverty line by next month. This is all largely a result of international sanctions and the United States freezing Afghanistan’s sovereign assets.

Despite these dire conditions, however, U.S. media outlets have moved on from Afghanistan after declaring it a colossal “failure” and publishing military and government officials’ memoirs and accounts of “lessons learned.” Encapsulating this kind of shortsighted thinking is long-time Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock’s first book, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. While the author delivers a thorough chronological history of the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan from the U.S. perspective, he largely fails to criticize the war aside from what has already been known for the entire history of this settler-colony: That its ruling military and government officials lie in pursuit of their narrow self-interests.

Of course, with a title as such, the book has received many comparisons to the Pentagon Papers, the leaked reports on the U.S. war on Vietnam that the New York Times published in 1971. Beyond the title of the book, Whitlock is clearly inspired by what has often been lauded as a great show of strength for the U.S. “free press”: Revealing systemic lies the highest ranking U.S. government and military officials have told throughout a war that had no clear objectives. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

If the reader is aware of this history, along with the other U.S.-waged or -backed wars across the globe today—in places like Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and now Ukraine—much of what is presented as revelatory may seem obvious. This is not to take away from the importance of the “Afghanistan Papers,” the nearly 10,000 pages of once-classified material, made publicly available courtesy of Whitlock and the Washington Post. Nor is it to deride the significance of the injustices that the U.S. government and military have inflicted upon Afghanistan and the region. Rather, it is to make the point that while the elites in Washington continue to hold much of the world hostage in what’s shaping up to be the most violent imperial decline in history—with nuclear ramifications that could bring about an end to life as we know it—this is a story that is becoming all too familiar.

That politics in the United States is a game for the elite—who are willing to do and say anything to maintain their power—is more common knowledge than Whitlock may think. This is evident with that only one-quarter of people in the United States say they trust the government. With this in mind, many readers will not be surprised to learn the Pentagon fabricated stories to justify the long war in Afghanistan. That military commanders made grandiose claims of the “progress” they were making on the battlefield. That consecutive White House administrations allowed for cycles of escalations and different iterations of the war to continue. And that elected officials—both Democrats and Republicans—have always come together at times of apparent bitter divides to direct the public’s attention away from such wars.

With that said, Whitlock misses an important opportunity to specify that—despite this seemingly impenetrable web of lies, deceit and deception—it is not so much the fault of the U.S. public for not being more aware. A majority are poor or working class, an entirely different class to Whitlock’s own. Nor is it that they are a docile group of sheep that can persistently be misled, as he frequently makes it seem. In fact, the vast majority of the U.S. public, struggling to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck, seem acutely aware of the levels of sophistication to which the U.S. government will go to pursue the narrow material interests of an elite few in Washington.

The issue does not lie in ignorance, which—following Whitlock’s logic—is something this book should have addressed. What prevents people from stopping the next U.S.-waged war is the same capitalist dictatorship in Washington that everyday Afghans have been made to bear for 40 years. It is the same class leading the war on poor and working-class people in the United States, marring any chance of popular democratic action against such wars.

Whitlock is clear that with the source material he relied on to craft his narrative, the book is by no means a definitive history of the war. Regardless, this narrow framework has the effect of placing Afghanistan—along with its rich history, culture and people—in a vacuum. In spite of the book’s thoroughness and detail, by the book’s final chapter, a reader with no prior knowledge of Afghanistan would be left with much to learn of the ongoing war, if economic sanctions are considered the next phase of the U.S. war on Afghanistan.

While Whitlock and the Washington Post have clearly gone to great lengths to make thousands of pages of once-classified Pentagon documents not only public, but digestible to the average reader, an important connection that could have further raised the reader’s consciousness was missed. Since it’s a story that’s been told before, what could possibly be missing from what has been lauded as the “definitive U.S. history” of the war?

By the book’s end, the average reader is likely to be left wondering why so many government and military officials were committed to lying about the justifications for the war and how it was actually playing out on the ground. What could have possibly been the driving force behind so many cover-ups and false narratives throughout? Could it be that the answer—either brushed aside or outright ignored by Whitlock and the Washington Post—has much to do with profit? Ultimately, Whitlock fails to answer the why question of the war, missing a crucial opportunity to provide a further clarity.

But, then again, that was not the book Whitlock set out to write. He delivers what has come to be expected from highly paid journalists at privately owned newspapers: A misleading narrative that U.S.-waged wars like those in Vietnam and Afghanistan only end when journalists like himself decide to put pen to paper. And not when the people living there—Vietnamese and Afghans alike—have no choice but to fight back.

This book is a vital resource that thoroughly details the atrocities U.S. government and military officials knew they were committing—and seemingly got away with—throughout the war on Afghanistan. Whitlock and the Washington Post certainly do not deserve condemnation for trying. But one can only hope that as conditions worsen for the poor in Afghanistan and the United States alike, Whitlock and the Washington Post will become stronger, more formidable opponents to future U.S.-waged wars. However, readers should be warned: Do not bet on that.

Patterson Deppen serves on the editorial board at E-International Relations, where he is editor for student essays. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Solidarity Network. His writing has appeared in TomDispatch, The Nation, The Progressive, E-International Relations and other outlets.