Dangerous and irrational U.S. foreign policy decisions are driven by fear of the end of white world supremacy and the determination to follow the principles of full spectrum dominance. Ajamu Baraka explains in this interview which originally appeared in Global Times .
Editor's Note:
Ajamu Baraka (Baraka), the Green Party nominee for Vice President of the US in 2016, told I-Talk show why nowadays a third party can hardly affect the monopoly of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in US politics and how partisanship will evolve. He also discussed China-US relations, stressing that white supremacy is what's driving much of US policy. "They cannot accept the fact that they are quickly facing the real prospect of the end of white supremacy. And they can't handle it."
GT: You were once the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party in 2016. What impact could a third party have on the monopoly of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party of US politics?
Baraka: What it could have is to expand the space of political discourse and provide the US population with more choice. But there are some objective and structural contradictions - the duopoly as we refer to it - the two main parties that basically control the political process that represents the class interest of the bourgeoisie in the US. They have structured the election laws in such a way where it becomes very difficult or even impossible in some cases for a so-called third party to run. We faced that back in 2016, where we were able to get on the presidential ballot in 46 states. But in 2020, the Green Party candidate was only able to get on the ballot in 30 states. And they had the right end in the other states. In fact, what happened was that the Democratic Party engaged in a process of suing various state processes, like in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to keep the Green Party off the ballot and they were successful.
So the monopoly is intact. It would expand a democracy if there was a real democracy in the US. But right now, democracy in the US is still aspirational.
What we find today is that we have a form of democracy. But what we have, in fact, is a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Reform seems to be almost impossible. What needs to take place is a complete restructuring of these processes. And what that suggests is a fundamental restructuring of the entire edifice of governance in the US. We need radical change in the US if we're going to be able to be at some point a democracy that corresponds to the conditions of the US.
GT: There is hardly any compromise in US partisan struggles. For instance, the topics of gun control and abortion are dividing the US in a profound way. When do you think can this issue be solved?
Baraka: We see those issues as being almost divergence from the deeper structural issues that the nation faces. Gun control, for example, is connected to the deepening social crisis in the country that is manifest not only in terms of mass shootings, but also in terms of how violence is depicted in the culture.
When you understand that this country was established as a settler colony, the instrumentality which was used to establish and expand a settler colony is occupied by an indigenous people. At the core of that process is violence. So violence has always been a fundamental part of the US experience.
It is the same thing as the issue of abortion. Basically, we see that what is really in place has to be addressed is not just access to abortion as important as that might be, but what the framework referred to as reproductive justice. So the question is, for example, what about those women who are poor? Who decide that they want to have a child? What kinds of societal support systems are in place that allow for a child to be born and to be raised in conditions of security or where their fundamental rights are protected, or where they have access to food, housing, clothes, quality education, and healthcare.
So the framework that goes beyond the limited objective of abortion rights is reproductive justice. And those issues of reproductive justice, again, go to the structural nature and the structural contradictions of society. For us, those are the issues that are more important. Then these issues that are polarizing, but they don't get us to what we need to go, which is a critical examination of the structure of the society and a commitment to transcend these structures and to build something completely new that addresses the people-center human rights of the people of this country.
GT: When you commented on the Summit for the Americas, you suggested US diplomacy is dominated by white supremacy. Do you think the US' China policy is somewhat affected by white supremacy?
Baraka: Of course. And Trump understood that it would be much easier to galvanize support for aggressive US policies toward China, than even Russia. Why? Because of the issue of racialization, the issue of white supremacy, the psychopathology of white supremacy. I find it impossible to deal with people who are infected with this disease, with dignity or in an equal way.
The anti-China potentiality is there. We saw it already in the US with some of the irrational violence directed toward people of Chinese descent who have lived in the US for a few hundred years. That was just the tip of the iceberg. White supremacy is what's driving much of US policy. There are people making critical decisions for US policies that seem to be delusional. They cannot accept the fact that they are quickly facing the real prospect of the end of white supremacy. And they can't handle it.
GT: It seems that the two main political parties in the US can only reach consensus on China-related affairs. Meanwhile, the solution to many problems in the US depends on China. How do you see such contradictions?
Baraka: It's important to know that there were real divisions within the foreign policy community vis-à-vis China. Until the Trump administration, even Trump himself was more committed to trying to galvanize a support for his focus on China. He wanted to pivot away from the conflict and the tensions with Russia, but he wasn't allowed to do that at first, but gradually, he was able to win most of the ruling elements over to his focus on China. And that's what we saw with the so-called trade wars. We saw the continuation of the so-called pivot to Asia, and of the abrogation of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty.
And the Biden administration has, in fact, continued that. They have, again, doubled down.
Unfortunately, it is probably going to continue to deteriorate, unless we're able to build a more effective anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in the US. US policymakers made it clear in their policy statements that they're still committed to the doctrine of full-spectrum dominance. They don't hide this. This is their objective and national security strategy. As long as they have that commitment, then the global environment is a dangerous, destabilizing one. And you couple that with what appears to be floundering of the part of the policy formulations by the Biden administrations and the immaturity and ineptitude of western European leaders, and the disarray we see in the UK.
GT: The FBI recently searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. In one of your tweets, you said that the public sees clearly that the raid constitutes government overreach and a partisan move. What, do you think, is the purpose of FBI's moves?
Baraka: It appears to me that the strategy on the part of the democrats is twofold. One is to provide a basis to a disqualify Trump for running in 2024, but secondly, to also undermine his influence.
The problem with this though is this is a very dangerous strategy, because Trump received the second highest vote in US history, which is 74 million votes. Of course, Biden came in No.1. So the attempt to undermine the ability of Trump to run again with that kind of social base is running the risk of further destabilizing of the society politically as already in a crisis of legitimacy when it comes to all of the US institutions. It seems that the consequences of this strategy in this fragile environment can be completely unknown. It could be very violent or it could be other kinds of consequences that we can't even imagine. So it's a very dangerous strategy.
No one would be surprised if the Republicans use this as an opportunity, if they control the House of Representatives, to launch investigations in ways similar to what we see coming from the Democrats.
So the revenge is there. And they have a number of things that they want to examine. For example, the whole evolution of the so-called Russiagate. There is a lot in terms of very troubling questions around how some of the same agencies involved in the FBI conducted themselves in those months leading up to the election and afterward. They also have the issue of Hunter Biden. There's never really been clearly explored the connection of the Bidens, and Ukraine. Many people have forgotten, but for many Republicans, they are still interest in taking a look at the Clinton Foundation. There is a very attempting and tantalizing targets for the Republicans, if they in fact seize political power.
GT: Your work is to apply international human rights standards to the US. That's interesting. Could you give a detailed introduction? Does this mean that US human rights standards need international scrutiny?
Baraka: US law has to be based on human rights standards. We see as a contradiction for the US to pretend to be a leader of human rights when its law and practice is anything but practices in law that are in correspondence with human rights standards. We believe that if there's going to be legitimacy and the international human rights framework, that has to be a framework that is applied equally to all nations.
For example, when we were building the US human rights network that would apply international human rights standards to the US, looking at issues of mass incarceration that we have in the US, looking at the failure of the US state to address the basic human rights needs of the people around issues like food security, access to food, our health care, education, a clean environment, water that was safe, the jobs that will allow people to live in a decent way.
So the basic material needs of the people which are reflected in a number of the human rights instruments from a universal declaration on human rights, to do the international covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights, of the rights of child and women, and of the right to be free of racial discrimination. These are all the international framework that has to be applied also to the US.
But we say also that we go beyond the international framework as important as it is. We say that we have to have a framework even more relevant to the needs of the people, especially developing people who are still trying to free themselves from the yoke of Western colonialism.
We center our work in what we call the people-centered human rights framework. This is the human rights framework of people who don't have power, but who we say that the range of human rights are created by the people in struggle that would not and should not be constrained by the international framework.
We embrace, for example, the notion of self determination, but we also raise up the right to development, the collective rights. So we need to transcend the sort of individualistic framework of the liberal framework. That is what we see. And that's what we strive for and something very similar that what we see developing in China with a state power and the commitment to people-centered human rights.
GT: America has always been known as city upon a hill. Do you think the US still deserves this title?
Baraka: We believe that the US never deserved that title. The point in history a city upon the hill, something to be admired and copied, was that when they started their march across the US territory slaughtering the indigenous people, was that when they transported Africans from the African continent to provide labor in the US, was that it wages wars against the Mexicans and against various indigenous populations, was that when they then spilled after they marched across the territory by the late 1800s, was when they then started to move further to the west by conquering people. So when was this shiny city on the hill, I we don't see it. From our perspective, it is all a myth - the idea of the American dream where you had people who were kids and confined to child labor, where you had a working class that was super exploited.
We don't see where this is something that's viable. And we're so happy that peoples and states around the world are finally putting a stop to allowing for the US to pretend to be some kind of champions of human rights and democracy, to call them out on their own history and to demand honesty in a national discourse. So, this is a terrible myth like the American dream. And we don't give it any credibility at all.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico (Photo: Pedro Gonzalez Castillo/Getty Images)
The Summit of the Americas is not the property of the host nation. The U.S. has no right to exclude, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but has done so in disregard of their sovereignty. The U.S. is not fit to judge others or to be responsible for bringing nations together. Every leader in the hemisphere should boycott what has become a farcical event.
I applaud the decision by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador not to attend this week’s so-called Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and hope that by Wednesday a majority of the nations in our region would have joined him. However, I am hoping that unlike President Lopez Obrador who is still sending the Mexican foreign minister, other nations demonstrate that their dignity cannot be coerced and stay away completely. Why do I take this position?
If the threat by the Biden Administration as host of the Summit not to invite Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, all sovereign nations in the Americas’ region, was not outrageous enough, the announced rationale that the administration did not invite these nations because of their human rights record and authoritarian governance is an absurd indignity that cannot be ignored.
I firmly believe that the U.S. should not be allowed to subvert, degrade, and humiliate nations and the peoples of our region with impunity! A line of demarcation must be drawn between the nations and peoples who represent democracy and life and the parasitic hegemon to the North which can only offer dependence and death. The U.S. has made its choice that is reflected in its public documents. “Full spectrum dominance,” is its stated goal. In other words – waging war against the peoples of our regions and, indeed, the world to maintain global hegemony. It has chosen war, we must choose resistance – on that, there can be no compromise!
The peoples of our region understand that. It is historically imperative that the representatives of the states in our region come to terms with that and commit to resistance and solidarity with the states that are experiencing the most intense pressure from empire. The rhetorical commitment to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela is not enough. The people want actions that go beyond mere denunciations of imperialism. The people are ready to fight.
And part of this fight includes the ideological war of position. We cannot allow the U.S. to obscure its murderous history by dressing that history up in pretty language about human rights.
The idea that the U.S., or any Western nation for that matter, involved in the ongoing imperialist project, could seriously see itself as a protector of human rights is bizarre and dangerous, and must be countered. The fact that the U.S. will still attempt to advance this fiction reflects either the height of arrogance or a society and administration caught in the grip of a collective national psychosis. I am convinced it is both, but more on that later.
A cognitive rupture from objective reality, the inability to locate oneself in relationship to other human beings individually and collectively in the material world are all symptoms of severe mental derangement. Yet, it appears that this is the condition that structures the psychic make-up of all of the leaders of the U.S. and the collective West.
It is what I have referred to as the psychopathology of white supremacy:
A racialized narcissistic cognitive disorder that centers so-called white people’s and European civilization and renders the afflicted with an inability to perceive objective reality in the same way as others. This affliction is not reducible to the race of so-called whites but can affect all those who have come in contact with the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the Pan-European colonial project.
How else can you explain the self-perceptions of the U.S. and West, responsible for the most horrific crimes against humanity in the annuals of human history from genocide, slavery, world wars, the European, African and Indigenous holocausts, wars and subversion since 1945 that have resulted in over 30 million lives lost – but then assert their innocence, moral superiority and right to define the content and range of human rights?
Aileen Teague of the Quincy Institute points out that the U.S. position on disinviting nations to the Summit of the Americas because of their alleged “authoritarian governance,” is “hypocritical” and “inconsistent,” noting the U.S. historical support for Latin American dictators when convenient for US policy.
Yet is it really hypothetical or inconsistent? I think not. U.S. policymakers are operating from an ethical and philosophical framework that informed Western colonial practice in which racialized humanity became divided between those who were placed into the category of “humans” which was constitutive of the historically expanded category of “white” in relationship to everyone else who was “not white,” and therefore, not fully human.
The “others” during the colonial conquest literally did not have any rights that Europeans were bound to recognize and respect from land rights to their very lives. Consequently, for European colonialists they did not perceive any ethical contradictions in their treatment of the “others” and did not judge themselves as deviating from their principles and values. This is what so many non-Europeans do not understand. When Europeans speak to their “traditional values,” it must be understood that those values mean we - the colonized and exploited non-Europeans are not recognized in our full humanity.
Is there any other way to explain the impressive solidarity among “white peoples” on Ukraine in contrast to the tragedies of Yemen, the six million dead in the Congo, Iraq – the list goes on.
That is why it was so correct for the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) to call for a boycott of the Summit of the Americas by all of the states in our region. BAP argued that the U.S. had no moral or political standing to host this gathering because it has consistently demonstrated that it did not respect the principles of self-determination and national sovereignty in the region. But even more importantly, it did not respect the lives of the people of this region.
A boycott is only the minimum that should be done. However, we understand it will be difficult because we know the vindictiveness of the gringo hegemon and the lengths it will go to assert its vicious domination. In the arrogance that is typical of the colonial white supremacist mindset, the Biden White House asserts that the “summit will be successful no matter who attends.”
Yet, if Biden is sitting there by himself, no manner of will or the power to define, will avoid the obvious conclusion that the world had changed, and with that change, the balance of power away from the U.S.
And the people say – let it be done!
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition
The incidents of mindless, mass carnage in the United States have become so routine that they do not even make national headlines unless the incident has a potential attention-grabbing twist. One of those dramatic twists is when the victims of a mass-shooting are from a common social identity and the perpetrator appeals to be motivated by hatred of the targeted group. This is what makes the shooting in Buffalo stand out. The authorities could not hide the fact that it was a hate crime and the media saw a juicy story, if only for a day or two.
However, for those of us who are members of communities and peoples who are increasingly finding ourselves on the receiving end of state and private racially motivated violence, we have a life-or-death requirement to attempt to understand the complex political and socio-cultural elements that are producing this dangerous environment. This understanding is not academic but represents a historical imperative for our communities and peoples in order for us to survive the end-days of global white supremacy.
It is important that we understand that the racist assault on the Black community in Buffalo did not occur in a socio-cultural or political vacuum. The premeditated murder of thirteen human beings, eleven of them Black, by a young white man wearing a sonnenrad or black sun, one of the symbols of white supremacy that the white supremacists wear in Ukraine, had a perverted logic perfectly consistent with the values of the U.S. settler-colonial project. And while the liberal, white supremacist settler corporate press tries to muddle-up the connection between the Buffalo shooter and Ukrainian white supremacists, we must make the connection, including the attempts to obscure the relationship by the media, and we must be clear on its political implications.
When Cristoforo Colombo, better known as Christopher Columbus, the original genocidal gangster, “discovered” a route for a sea bridge between the kingdom of Spain and what became the “Americas,” it ushered in a new historical epoch that would see levels of human degradation, violence, and depravity unlike any other era of the human experience on this planet. At the center of the cosmology of these strange people from Spain and later from other parts of what became Europe was an ideal of human difference, at first informed by religion but very soon intersected with a process of racialization that hierarchize race with so-called whites and white civilization at the top. That racial hierarchy, rationalized by some of Europe’s greatest philosophers from Locke and Immanuel Kant to Hegel, called into question or even excluded the non-European “others” as full human beings.
As Cedric Robinson argued , European racial consciousness did not emerge as some devious invention by capitalists to divide the working class. Instead, it represented a historically pre-conditioned consciousness of an incipient racialization in Europe that then as a result of the colonial encounter crystalized into a fully developed sense of race and racial hierarchy.
When Bartolome de La Casa made his famous argument that the Indigenous peoples who were being systematically destroyed by slavery were in fact human beings with souls and should not be subjected to inhumane treatment, the switch to enslaved Africans was seamless. Because even though the Indigenous were then seen as a lower form of human, they were eligible to be converted since they had a soul which meant they were at least partially human, but that consideration was not extended to the soulless Africans.
The military conquest of the lands of the Americas and the enslavement of the Indigenous and then the importation of slave labor from Africa created enormous wealth for Europe. Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein but particularly Walter Rodney in his masterpiece, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, demonstrated how colonial subjugation and plunder created a vast material gulf between the conquered, enslaved, and colonized peoples and Europe that further reinforced the racialized idea of European and normalized white supremacy.
From the settlers who shot and killed their way across the lands that were incorporated into the colonial United States, to the brutality, rape and terror of plantation slavery to the lynching and burning of Black communities, the denial of the value of Black life and indeed all non-European life, has been an enduring feature of the Pan-European colonial and settler-colonial project. So, should Dylan Roof who murdered nine Black people in Charleston, North Carolina or the murders by Payton Gendron in Buffalo be seen as aberrant behavior?
That is not to say that all Europeans would condone the wanton violence of spraying bullets at non-Europeans out on a Saturday afternoon just trying to shop. Most would condemn those actions. But this is where the contradiction at the heart of European liberalism comes in.
Morally, what is the difference between the attack on Libya by NATO, an instrument of white supremacist state power that resulted in up to 50,000 African people dying and was largely supported by the public in the West, and the mass shootings of Roof and Payton Gendron?
The Buffalo shooter was clear about where his sentiments were when he prominently and self-consciously displayed the same symbol of white supremacy that the Azov regiments and other white supremacists’ organizations wear in Ukraine. Yet, Biden who traveled to Buffalo and most of the political class along with the neoliberal media have gone out of their way to erase and/or rehabilitate the existence of those elements in Ukrainian society and in the state that are avowed white supremacists like the shooter.
When the largely peaceful Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych made a violent turn in late 2013, it was widely acknowledged that it was the neo-fascists element, especially elements from Western Ukraine who assumed the frontlines against the government and turned toward violence. After the coup of February 2014 when four known ultra-right nationalists secured governmental ministries in the new government, along with literal neo-Nazis in the parliament and in the security forces, press reports responsibly covered those developments.
Reports also begin to circulate about Ukraine becoming a symbol and, indeed, the epicenter for a resurgent transnational white supremacist movement. Those concerns were reflected in reports from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and were the object of discussions in the U.S. Congress.
Yet, that history and all of those concerns were minimized when the propaganda objective was to win the public over to supporting an escalating proxy war with Russia. The incredible irresponsibility of this propaganda tactic was reflected when merchandise from Azov appeared on Amazon and the reporting on Ultra-right and neo-Nazis in Ukraine was “disappeared” except to denounce any reference to fascists in Ukraine brought up by social forces opposed to the war as Kremlin talking points.
In fact, while knowing the history and reality of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society and state, the corporate media made heroes out of elements like the neo-fascist Azov battalion. Is it then hard to understand why an impressionable teen would be attracted to those courageous fighters, especially when he also shares their racial animus?
But instead of engaging in some principled reporting on the shooting in Buffalo, the neoliberal press decides to politicize the event to favor the political objectives of the democrat party by attempting to connect the shooter to Donald Trump and the entire MAGA movement that they are trying to criminalize. Even though the shooter himself made the connection with the movement in Ukraine. Of course, some are falling for it, including the liberal/left that had become cheerleaders for Ukraine, even as Ukrainian president Zelensky shuts down left parties, the press and gives a green light to repressing, including the murder, of any opposition to his policies.
Zelensky talks about the need to “defend the West,” “Europeanness,” “Western values,” and the liberal/left does not recognize the inherent assumptions of white supremacy in those terms. But Payton Gendron did and is why he enlisted in Zelensky’s fight not in Ukraine but in the middle of an African American community.
An exaggeration?
History will determine that. But what some of us see is a racialized discourse operating just below the surface in which Europe and Europeaness that Ukrainians strive for is also connected to a racialized trope of Europe being ontologically civilized while the less-white Slavs are barbarians, prone to irrational violence, like the Russians who decided “out of nowhere” to just attack Ukraine!
We also understand that downplaying the threat of a resurgent white supremacist fascism in its most sophisticated form represented by Zelensky who has become that slick, right-wing politician with politics as racist as Trump but without the crudeness who many feared could emerge in the U.S. No one could have anticipated that person would emerge in Europe as the lovable face of fascism.
Buffalo closes the loop that connects crude white supremacy with its more polished and dangerous expression. Both of these versions represent a consensus that is committed to using force and violence to ensure that white power will not to be “replaced.” This new consensus has created the ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross-class white supremacist defense of something called European values and the interests of Europe. The lack of concern for the consequences of the war and sanctions on the rest of the world confirms that this consensus and the interests it defends are in contradiction to the interests of the non-Western global majority.
For us, Buffalo is not a wake-up call but a declaration of war.
The incidents of mindless, mass carnage in the United States have become so routine that they do not even make national headlines unless the incident has a potential attention-grabbing twist. One of those dramatic twists is when the victims of a mass-shooting are from a common social identity and the perpetrator appeals to be motivated by hatred of the targeted group. This is what makes the shooting in Buffalo stand out. The authorities could not hide the fact that it was a hate crime and the media saw a juicy story, if only for a day or two.
However, for those of us who are members of communities and peoples who are increasingly finding ourselves on the receiving end of state and private racially motivated violence, we have a life-or-death requirement to attempt to understand the complex political and socio-cultural elements that are producing this dangerous environment.. This understanding is not academic but represents a historical imperative for our communities and peoples in order for us to survive the end-days of global white supremacy.
It is important that we understand that the racist assault on the Black community in Buffalo did not occur in a socio-cultural or political vacuum. The premeditated murder of thirteen human beings, eleven of them Black, by a young white man wearing a sonnenrad or black sun, one of the symbols of white supremacy that the white supremacists wear in Ukraine, had a perverted logic perfectly consistent with the values of the U.S. settler-colonial project. And while the liberal, white supremacist settler corporate press tries to muddle-up the connection between the Buffalo shooter and Ukrainian white supremacists, we must make the connection, including the attempts to obscure the relationship by the media, and we must be clear on its political implications.
When Cristoforo Colombo, better known as Christopher Columbus, the original genocidal gangster, “discovered” a route for a sea bridge between the kingdom of Spain and what became the “Americas,” it ushered in a new historical epoch that would see levels of human degradation, violence, and depravity unlike any other era of the human experience on this planet. At the center of the cosmology of these strange people from Spain and later from other parts of what became Europe was an ideal of human difference, at first informed by religion but very soon intersected with a process of racialization that hierarchize race with so-called whites and white civilization at the top. That racial hierarchy, rationalized by some of Europe’s greatest philosophers from Locke and Immanuel Kant to Hegel, called into question or even excluded the non-European “others” as full human beings.
As Cedric Robinson argued , European racial consciousness did not emerge as some devious invention by capitalists to divide the working class. Instead, it represented a historically pre-conditioned consciousness of an incipient racialization in Europe that then as a result of the colonial encounter crystalized into a fully developed sense of race and racial hierarchy.
When Bartolome de La Casa made his famous argument that the Indigenous peoples who were being systematically destroyed by slavery were in fact human beings with souls and should not be subjected to inhumane treatment, the switch to enslaved Africans was seamless. Because even though the Indigenous were then seen as a lower form of human, they were eligible to be converted since they had a soul which meant they were at least partially human, but that consideration was not extended to the soulless Africans.
The military conquest of the lands of the Americas and the enslavement of the Indigenous and then the importation of slave labor from Africa created enormous wealth for Europe. Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein but particularly Walter Rodney in his masterpiece, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, demonstrated how colonial subjugation and plunder created a vast material gulf between the conquered, enslaved, and colonized peoples and Europe that further reinforced the racialized idea of European and normalized white supremacy.
From the settlers who shot and killed their way across the lands that were incorporated into the colonial United States, to the brutality, rape and terror of plantation slavery to the lynching and burning of Black communities, the denial of the value of Black life and indeed all non-European life, has been an enduring feature of the Pan-European colonial and settler-colonial project. So, should Dylan Roof who murdered nine Black people in Charleston, North Carolina or the murders by Payton Gendron in Buffalo be seen as aberrant behavior?
That is not to say that all Europeans would condone the wanton violence of spraying bullets at non-Europeans out on a Saturday afternoon just trying to shop. Most would condemn those actions. But this is where the contradiction at the heart of European liberalism comes in.
Morally, what is the difference between the attack on Libya by NATO, an instrument of white supremacist state power that resulted in up to 50,000 African people dying and was largely supported by the public in the West, and the mass shootings of Roof and Payton Gendron?
The Buffalo shooter was clear about where his sentiments were when he prominently and self-consciously displayed the same symbol of white supremacy that the Azov regiments and other white supremacists’ organizations wear in Ukraine. Yet, Biden who traveled to Buffalo and most of the political class along with the neoliberal media have gone out of their way to erase and/or rehabilitate the existence of those elements in Ukrainian society and in the state that are avowed white supremacists like the shooter.
When the largely peaceful Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych made a violent turn in late 2013, it was widely acknowledged that it was the neo-fascists element, especially elements from Western Ukraine who assumed the frontlines against the government and turned toward violence. After the coup of February 2014 when four known ultra-right nationalists secured governmental ministries in the new government, along with literal neo-Nazis in the parliament and in the security forces, press reports responsibly covered those developments.
Reports also begin to circulate about Ukraine becoming a symbol and, indeed, the epicenter for a resurgent transnational white supremacist movement. Those concerns were reflected in reports from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and were the object of discussions in the U.S. Congress.
Yet, that history and all of those concerns were minimized when the propaganda objective was to win the public over to supporting an escalating proxy war with Russia. The incredible irresponsibility of this propaganda tactic was reflected when merchandise from Azov appeared on Amazon and the reporting on Ultra-right and neo-Nazis in Ukraine was “disappeared” except to denounce any reference to fascists in Ukraine brought up by social forces opposed to the war as Kremlin talking points.
In fact, while knowing the history and reality of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society and state, the corporate media made heroes out of elements like the neo-fascist Azov battalion. Is it then hard to understand why an impressionable teen would be attracted to those courageous fighters, especially when he also shares their racial animus?
But instead of engaging in some principled reporting on the shooting in Buffalo, the neoliberal press decides to politicize the event to favor the political objectives of the democrat party by attempting to connect the shooter to Donald Trump and the entire MAGA movement that they are trying to criminalize. Even though the shooter himself made the connection with the movement in Ukraine. Of course, some are falling for it, including the liberal/left that had become cheerleaders for Ukraine, even as Ukrainian president Zelensky shuts down left parties, the press and gives a green light to repressing, including the murder, of any opposition to his policies.
Zelensky talks about the need to “defend the West,” “Europeanness,” “Western values,” and the liberal/left does not recognize the inherent assumptions of white supremacy in those terms. But Payton Gendron did and is why he enlisted in Zelensky’s fight not in Ukraine but in the middle of an African American community.
An exaggeration?
History will determine that. But what some of us see is a racialized discourse operating just below the surface in which Europe and Europeaness that Ukrainians strive for is also connected to a racialized trope of Europe being ontologically civilized while the less-white Slavs are barbarians, prone to irrational violence, like the Russians who decided “out of nowhere” to just attack Ukraine!
We also understand that downplaying the threat of a resurgent white supremacist fascism in its most sophisticated form represented by Zelensky who has become that slick, right-wing politician with politics as racist as Trump but without the crudeness who many feared could emerge in the U.S. No one could have anticipated that person would emerge in Europe as the lovable face of fascism.
Buffalo closes the loop that connects crude white supremacy with its more polished and dangerous expression. Both of these versions represent a consensus that is committed to using force and violence to ensure that white power will not to be “replaced.” This new consensus has created the ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross-class white supremacist defense of something called European values and the interests of Europe. The lack of concern for the consequences of the war and sanctions on the rest of the world confirms that this consensus and the interests it defends are in contradiction to the interests of the non-Western global majority.
For us, Buffalo is not a wake-up call but a declaration of war.
Rev. William Barber, an indisputable champion of the poor and a consistent voice demanding an end to poverty, may have made a serious moral and ethical error that effectively placed him outside of the “Kingian” framework that informed Dr. King’s work especially during the last year of his life.
In an attempt to make a point about the flawed priorities of the duopoly, Dr. Barber wrote in an email to the “movement family” on Saturday, April 30, 2022 that, “despite the political gridlock on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats have acted swiftly to approve historic military aid to Ukraine. In the face of such a moral imperative, it would be anathema for either party to ask, “How are we going to pay for it?”
He then went on to suggest that the “moral clarity” that informed the decision to provide military support to Ukraine was contradicted by the lack of moral clarity or support for addressing the pressing needs of the poor. He identified those two contradictory policy orientations – money for war but no money to pass “Build Back Better” legislation, for example, as representing the moral and ethical contradiction at the heart of U.S. politics.
I will give our dear brother the benefit of the doubt. He was making the point that the duopoly will support in a bipartisan manner those items that it deems a priority. For Rev. Barber and the Campaign, the issue of poverty and its devastating social consequences should be a priority for the U.S. state. However, in trying to make that point Rev Barber seemed to support the Biden’s administration’s war policies which as a follower of Dr. King would seem like a major contradiction. It would seem that to equate a moral imperative for providing military aid to Ukraine to wage war, no matter if it is claimed to be defensive, would be a dramatic departure from the non-violence ethos at the center of Dr. King’s worldview.
Dr. King said himself that it was his silence on the war that presented a moral contradiction that could only be ultimately resolved by him speaking out in opposition to the Vietnam war . It is unimaginable that Dr. King would give his blessings to a military aid package that Rev. Barber’s language appears to do while simultaneously not demanding an end to the conflict as Rev Barber clearly failed to do in his communication to the movement family. We must now ask Rev Barber if his characterization of the military aid package as a moral imperative was just a clumsy use of words or does he actually support the ultimate expression of violence – war?
We all know the history. After the student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and all the radical Black liberation and socialist organizations had condemned the war in Vietnam, Dr. King finally broke his silence, as he framed it, and began to speak out against the war in early 1967 with the most extensive and important speech on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York. The capitalist rulers understand symbols and so on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis where he was supporting a strike of Black sanitation workers against the Memphis city government.
Rev. Barber claims that “King was gunned down for his efforts to build a Poor People’s Campaign.” There is no doubt that the poor people’s campaign was a significant factor. The rulers understood the danger of Dr. King venturing into class politics, especially with his social democratic positions becoming more evident. But what Barber glosses over is that while the poor people’s campaign was seen as a threat, it was King’s break with the democratic party establishment, and at that time the majority position of the U.S. public who supported the war effort, that made Dr. King the most hated man in the country.
It is always dangerous to be in a nation that is undergoing an irrational war frenzy, but the danger is exponentially increased if you are a dissident. Rev. Barber is a student of history and understands the potential threats when you break with power. Perhaps in order to try and salvage some semblance of the Build Back Better legislation Rev. Barber believes it prudent to concede the war effort in Ukraine in order to avoid alienating elements of the democratic party that he feels he has to continue to work with, even if it is clear that the party continues to move to the right, even rehabilitating ultranationalist white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis in the Azov regiments.
But as that old saying goes, when you lay down with dogs you might very well get up with fleas. And if you concede moral positions because of pragmatic considerations, you undermine your moral standing with your base and on top of that your opposition usually loses respect for you.
Rev. Barber and the Poor Peoples’ Campaign have already created a moral and political contradiction for themselves with their sloppy and dubious moral reasoning on Ukraine. That is, if the bipartisan decision to provide more weapons of war to Ukraine represents a morally uncontested position, how will the Campaign counter the argument that it is equally moral to continue to vote for the ever-increasing military budgets of the Pentagon in light of the supposed security threats from Russia and China?
It is the lack of political and ideological clarity that distorts moral clarity to the extent that you can believe you are behaving morally when instead you have only surrendered to power and are working on its behalf.
Dr. King made a choice. He put principles over politics and broke with power. The Poor People’s Campaign will find it difficult to bring people together to denounce poverty while now having to mute their criticism of military spending. It is this kind of politics that is at the heart of the contradiction between the people and the neoliberal capitalist democrat party and its sycophants.
A march of the Azov Battalian, Svoboda, and other far-right radical groups in Kiev, October 14, 2017. (Photo: Reuters / Gleb Garanich)
The Biden administration and corporate media cover up the existence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. They are disappeared from the official narrative in order to get public buy-in for U.S. policy.
In 1999 US and NATO forces bombed Serbia for 78 days, ushering a new century further characterized by war and militarism. With no negative consequences of military overreach, especially after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the U.S. unleashed war in its various forms (from direct attacks to sanctions, drones, and subversion) with a wanton disregard for its human and political consequences. Yet, even when massive numbers of U.S. troops were deployed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and other ancient cities whose names are in the great religious texts of the world, and reduced them to rubble, the awful reality of war was carefully hidden from the U.S. public.
U.S. propagandists had learned from the Vietnam experience that it was much safer to shield the public from the brutality that their troops were dishing out to poor villagers, students, ordinary workers, and anyone who dared to resist the military might of the U.S. military on a daily basis.
But the Ukraine war, at least the portion that began with the Russia “special operation” in February, was one of those instances where exposure to the dehumanized reality of war was welcomed.
Why?
The images of the burnt-out buildings and frightened refugees crossing the frontiers of the nations that border Ukraine served an especially important purpose. It was to generate public support for war. War in support of Ukraine and revulsion against the Russian “invaders!” And it did not hurt that the victims were white!
An important lesson was learned from the U.S. and NATO wars to dismember Yugoslavia in the 1990s and it was that white victims made selling war amazingly easy– especially when framed as a humanitarian mission to rescue people from tyranny.
We know what emerged from this discovery. The ideological weapon of humanitarian intervention and the mantra, “responsibility to protect” became invaluable to justify imperialist war, even when the victims were not white, because an appeal could be made to another powerful force – liberal white saviorism!
However, in this short essay I want to address something even more insidious and dangerous than the general propaganda efforts to generate support for the war against Russia, and that is: in the process of building support for war, the white supremacist, ultranationalist, and neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society and in the state were downplayed, if not ignored.
That whitewashing, coupled with the inordinate attention given to the war, with the inevitable sympathy for the white victims of this war – a war motivated by the desire of Ukrainians to join Europe, to “defend Europeanness,” and European “civilization” – revealed a contradiction that has always been present at the heart of the emergence of what became Europe. That contradiction was the hyper-valuation of white lives, of “whiteness,” in relationship to the racialized “others,” a contradiction that I refer to as the “white lives matter more movement.”
This whitewashing of Ukraine is particularly dangerous because it is occurring at a historical moment of deep crisis for the global capitalist order, producing proto-fascist movements across Europe that are becoming more visible and bolder. As I said in previous writings on this subject, U.S. authorities and the U.S. and Western European press understood that Ukraine had an active problem with white supremacist ultranationalists and literal neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, in order to engender support for Ukraine and to set the stage for the performance of a lifetime by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s actor president, Ukraine had to be recreated, minus the ultranationalist influence and Nazis.
Herein lies the danger for non-Europeans.
The coup in 2014 saw for the first time since the second world-war, literal neo-Nazis serving in the government of a European state. Moreover, even though the ultranationalists and neo-Nazis did not have a commanding electoral base, their non-state presence controlling the streets of major cities and towns across Ukraine was significant. They were notorious for their attacks on LGBTQ populations, anarchists, non-Europeans, and Roma peoples. Their violent opposition to communists and communism and socialism of any sort was officially amplified with repressive legislation that outlawed and repressed most left political tendencies.
Beginning in 2014, white supremacists from throughout the European world traveled to Ukraine, with over four thousand “volunteers” traveling to Ukraine recently to fight in response to Zelensky’s call to help fight the Russians. It did not matter to Zelensky or the European nations supplying weapons and paying the salaries of these “volunteers” that most of them were self-identified white supremacists.
Again, we do not need to make the case of the presence of these forces in Ukraine. That has already been done, here , here, and here . The political issue is that the sanitizing of the right-wing Ukrainian state has strengthened the far-right not only in Ukraine but globally. The whitewashing by liberals and the liberal/left in the U.S. that transformed these elements into “moderate” Nazis is having the effect of legitimizing their proto-fascist racialized politics, a politics that is emerging across the white world. There is a reason Marine LePen has a chance to defeat Emmanuel Macron, even after he moved further to the right after being elected.
Liberals pretend to be opposed to the right, but they do not because they aligned themselves with the neo-liberal right more than two decades ago. The right will never defeat the far-right – the dilemma of the democratic party in the U.S. But in embracing the illusion of being in opposition and conceding ideological terrain in the elusive quest for “bipartisanship” the far-right is further legitimized and emboldened.
The whitewashing of the right in Ukraine in order to support its U.S.-backed government will have domestic political consequences. For example, the liberal and left/liberal argument for opposing Trump was that his supporters were infected with racism and his movement represented a proto-fascist political development in the body politic of the U.S. The political and ideological challenge now is to square this support for white supremacists in Ukraine with their opposition to Trump. How do you condemn Trumpian racism after embracing a government and society infested with white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis?
What is the answer? Liberals and left/liberals are forced to whitewash the white supremacist threat in both places. The blatant appeals to European unity and unspoken but, nevertheless, acknowledged assumptions of the civilizational superiority of the “West” – that discourse around the Ukrainian issue – poses an existential threat to the non-European world. By not challenging this discourse, with Ukrainian president Zelensky being the main spokesperson for, is creating a dangerous ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross class white supremacist alliance to defend something called “European values” and the interests of Europe, interests that will be poised as one in contradiction to the interests of the non-Western global majority.
NATO and White Supremacy: How Can a Self-Respecting African Support Ukraine?
The images of Africa and other global-South peoples desperately trying to flee the war in Ukraine only to be met with the dehumanizing white supremacy that is such a normal element throughout Eastern Europe but in particular in places like Poland and Ukraine, cannot be erased, nor should they be. Outside of the urbanized socialist, communist and LGBTQ communities, the Azov-enforced social conservatism of the right in Ukraine has more of a grip on the consciousness of Ukrainian society than most people outside of Ukraine and Eastern Europe understand.
That is why, with the defense of the white supremacist NATO structure and the objective social situation of normalized racism and oppression in Ukraine, it is absolutely bizarre that self-respecting African/Black peoples would be giving unqualified support to Ukraine. Doing so puts them in alignment with the imperialist agenda of the U.S., an agenda whose main objectives are to keep Europe subordinated to U.S. capitalist interests by disarticulating the European market from Russia, but also, and more importantly, to weakening the Russia-China strategic partnership.
This agenda does not represent anything close to the needs and interests of the African working class in the U.S. In fact, with this conflict (that I lay completely at the feet of the U.S), it is now the working classes and poor around the world, and especially for us in the U.S., that are being asked to pay the price for this agenda through increased fuel and food prices and a capitalist imposed inflation that amounts to a pay-cut for workers.
One of the many lessons of this Ukrainian situation that Africans and the colonized are learning is that we cannot depend on most of the European left in the U.S. and Europe. What we have seen is that the assumptions of ethnocentric universality (the worldviews of the white West are only views and standpoints that matter) connect significant elements of the white left to liberalism and blind both the white left and white liberals to the impact of Western policies on the non-European world. This lack of self-consciousness is one of the components of the psychopathology of the white supremacist mind-set and a threat to the decolonial movements around the world.
It is also why that, while no one wants to see war and we all fight to preserve peace, it would be tragic for the global South, and especially for African people, if Ukraine was able to maintain itself in its present form – as a bastion of white supremacist reaction.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
Now the beneficiaries of American foreign policy largesse are white supremacists from around the world who have made their way to Ukraine.
Hilary Clinton declared during a February 28, 2022 interview with MSNBC that the model for Ukraine should be Afghanistan where the U.S. armed the Afghan mujahideen as part of the U.S. strategy to create a “Vietnamese quagmire .” For Clinton and some elements of the foreign policy community, it is of little concern that the training and real-world military experience and political networking that resulted from bringing radical right-wing Islamicist together created al-Qaeda, the Taliban and later ISIS.
But for African and other colonized people on the receiving end of the U.S. and Western self-centered and opportunist policies, illusions about the real intentions of the White West have usually proven to be deadly. This is even more true in the current crisis of legitimacy and generalized decline of the Western colonial/imperial project. The proclivity of Western imperialism to resort to naked, direct violence to advance its interests and to use anyone and everyone, the possibility that the U.S. would allow extremist right-wing white nationalists and neo-Nazis real-world training, combat experience and networking represents an existential threat.
European colonial history is replete with examples of the divide and conquer tactics of the colonists using one segment of the people to colonize against the other. And since there has been no break with colonialism, no “post-coloniality,” we have witnessed a continuation of those tactics, which today also include the manipulation of nations to wage war against their own national interests in order to advance the interests of the colonial West.
A sad and pathetic contemporary example of this phenomenon is the people of Afghanistan, abandoned and left to starve as the U.S. has moved on. That is why it is so incredible that the people of Ukraine would allow themselves to become the latest cannon fodder for Western imperial vanity and the narrow interests of U.S. capital.
Baiting the Russians into military action was not just a result of miscalculation, no more than the revelation by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s report in 2012 that the Obama Administration’s support for right-wing jihadists in Syria was the result of a “willful” decision. In both cases they understood the possible ramifications, and didn’t care about the consequences.
As soon as the Biden Administration took power, the plan to escalate the situation in Ukraine was executed — a plan that included a clear understanding of the nature of forces behind the newly elected presidential front man for the right-wing Ukrainian oligarchs and U.S. forces that engineered his election. The Biden Administration also understood that the most effective military forces in Ukraine were grouped around and/or associated with various ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements. But who cared when the commitment to “full spectrum dominance” and interests of U.S. finance and corporate transnational capital are driving U.S. policy in Ukraine?
We, the colonized, the working class, the oppressed, must be as cold-blooded and sober in our analysis and actions. Look at how they lied to the public on the existence of ultra-right forces in Ukraine and the nature of that corrupt regime. We will not lie to the people, but we have to separate ourselves from the propaganda when attempting to understand the world.
The U.S. press loudly proclaiming that there was no neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine even though it was common knowledge in the United States and Europe for years that there was always a problem with the extremist nationalist elements in that country. Because of that, the line taken by the U.S. state and the capitalist press after the U.S. engineered coup in 2014 with the extreme right and neo-Nazi forces at the center of the action, was that while those forces’ presence in the street actions was never disputed, the line was that their political significance in the government was minimal.
That line was taken because the historical record was replete with references to the role of the ultra-right in Ukrainian politics since world-war II. And that not only did Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and literal neo-Nazis end up in the new post-coup government in 2014, but the press, human rights organizations, the governments of Europe, and the U.S. were aware of the nature of those forces
That is what made the new line by the liberal corporate press that there was not an issue with the extreme right in Ukraine so bizarre. Apparently, to buttress their drive to war, the new narrative required that the Ukrainian state be represented as the innocent victim of the mad Vladimir Putin, and the presence of ultra-right forces, including neo-Nazis, as a figment of his imagination.
Yet, there is always a method to the madness, in this case the real madness of U.S. imperialism.
Victoria Nuland, under-secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the primary on the ground coordinator of the 2014 coup, with Joe Biden as the overall point person for the Obama Administration, were all absolutely clear about the nature of neo-fascist forces in Ukraine like the Right Sector and the Azov Battalion.
In fact, that was precisely why those elements were used as muscle during the violent street fights leading up to the coup. It is also why they were unleashed against their fellow Ukrainian citizens in Eastern Ukraine when they rejected the legitimacy of the coup government.
U.S. authorities also understood then as they understand today that those neo-fascist forces represented a dangerous, if one is concerned about violent right-wing white supremacists, development for the global white supremacist movement that saw Ukraine as a liberated territory after 2014.
A 2018 FBI affidavit asserted that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States–based white supremacy organizations,” including members of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement, prosecuted for planned assaults on counter protesters at far-right events, including the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.
The danger was seen as so serious by some members of the U.S. Congress that in 2019 New York Rep. Max Rose, who chairs the counterterrorism subcommittee, submitted a letter to the State Department, co-signed by 39 members of Congress, that urged the department to add the Azov Battalion to the list of “Foreign Terror Organizations.”
Also in 2019, Jewish groups accused the Canadian government of training neo-Nazi organizations in Ukraine, despite warnings in 2015 from the same organizations that track the ultra-right that the Ukrainian military was saturated with neo-Nazi elements.
In 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray revealed that the agency was “monitoring very closely a trend that may be starting to emerge, … of neo-Nazi actors here in the US who are communicating online with similar like-minded individuals overseas.”
Yet, in 2021 it was clear that the Biden Administration, along with their Canadian and British allies, could not care less about organized white supremacy as a threat. Their objective was to mobilize public opinion to support their hybrid war against Russia.
To do that, they portrayed the war in Ukraine as a struggle of liberalism against authoritarianism, good versus evil. As Zelenskyy played his greatest role, appealing to “freedom fighters” to come and fight in Ukraine, it did not matter to him or Westerners that while the foreign fighters who arrived were a mix of radical Islamists, naïve liberals, and pan-Turkists, the overwhelming majority were ultra-right supremacists and neo-Nazis from across Europe and the U.S.
According to the Kiev governement, by March 6 at least 20,000 foreign fighters from 55 countries had entered Ukraine to fight against Russians. And just as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA is also involved in training special Ukrainian forces, that includes elements from the Azov forces, even though current and former intelligence officials predict a new “al-Qaeda,” a “transnational white supremacist network,” with alleged ties to the Ukraine conflict will be the next global catastrophe to befall the world as the threat of COVID-19 recedes.”
The U.S. oligarchy is clear. The war they baited the Russians into signals a return to waging wars of domination in Europe to augment the imperialist wars waged for the last 77 years in the global South. Now members of the European proletariat are dying on all sides and the people are shocked.
Violence has been key to the parasitic reality of the European project. The West under bourgeois rule has demonstrated it is prepared to maintain global hegemony through “any means necessary.” If that means the establishment of a cross-class white supremacist coalition under the political rule of the petit-bourgeois that they control (the classic fascist European configuration of class relations under fascism), they will do that.
The dog and pony show with their fake concerns about Trump and then aligning with neo-fascist, white supremacist forces in Ukraine should under normal circumstance result in a shift of consciousness that rejects all of the crude ideological attempts to hide the reality of white minority class rule. But these are not normal times. The power of the capitalist class to control narratives, and the objective reality that millions of people have been moved to global information platforms owned and controlled by capital that is now involved in systematic thought policing and suppression, is creating a narrowing dystopian counter-reality for the radical anti-capitalist forces.
And for those of us in the African revolutionary movement, it is becoming quite clear that, along with Palestinians, we are alone. We cannot depend on the petit-bourgeois settler white left that consistently demonstrates a conservative and collaborative tendency toward national chauvinism ,the class struggle and the ongoing fight for national liberation and self-determination of peoples and nations. It is also blind to the existence, let alone the influences, of normalized white supremacist ideology. For them white supremacy is representative of people like Trump as opposed to Obama.
But colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy is not reducible to race or any other socially ascribed categories. It is a system of power that must be overthrown if we are to survive.
Ukrainian Sports Bar (Image: BBC Panorama 2012 documentary "Stadiums of Hate")
The Biden administration is dusting off the same playbook that gave arms and money to jihadists in Afghanistan and Syria. Now the beneficiaries of American foreign policy largesse are white supremacists from around the world who have made their way to Ukraine.
Hilary Clinton declared during a February 28, 2022 interview with MSNBC that the model for Ukraine should be Afghanistan where the U.S. armed the Afghan mujahideen as part of the U.S. strategy to create a “Vietnamese quagmire .” For Clinton and some elements of the foreign policy community, it is of little concern that the training and real-world military experience and political networking that resulted from bringing radical right-wing Islamicist together created al-Qaeda, the Taliban and later ISIS.
But for African and other colonized people on the receiving end of the U.S. and Western self-centered and opportunist policies, illusions about the real intentions of the White West have usually proven to be deadly. This is even more true in the current crisis of legitimacy and generalized decline of the Western colonial/imperial project. The proclivity of Western imperialism to resort to naked, direct violence to advance its interests and to use anyone and everyone, the possibility that the U.S. would allow extremist right-wing white nationalists and neo-Nazis real-world training, combat experience and networking represents an existential threat.
European colonial history is replete with examples of the divide and conquer tactics of the colonists using one segment of the people to colonize against the other. And since there has been no break with colonialism, no “post-coloniality,” we have witnessed a continuation of those tactics, which today also include the manipulation of nations to wage war against their own national interests in order to advance the interests of the colonial West.
A sad and pathetic contemporary example of this phenomenon is the people of Afghanistan, abandoned and left to starve as the U.S. has moved on. That is why it is so incredible that the people of Ukraine would allow themselves to become the latest cannon fodder for Western imperial vanity and the narrow interests of U.S. capital.
Baiting the Russians into military action was not just a result of miscalculation, no more than the revelation by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s report in 2012 that the Obama Administration’s support for right-wing jihadists in Syria was the result of a “willful” decision. In both cases they understood the possible ramifications, and didn’t care about the consequences.
As soon as the Biden Administration took power, the plan to escalate the situation in Ukraine was executed — a plan that included a clear understanding of the nature of forces behind the newly elected presidential front man for the right-wing Ukrainian oligarchs and U.S. forces that engineered his election. The Biden Administration also understood that the most effective military forces in Ukraine were grouped around and/or associated with various ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements. But who cared when the commitment to “full spectrum dominance” and interests of U.S. finance and corporate transnational capital are driving U.S. policy in Ukraine?
We, the colonized, the working class, the oppressed, must be as cold-blooded and sober in our analysis and actions. Look at how they lied to the public on the existence of ultra-right forces in Ukraine and the nature of that corrupt regime. We will not lie to the people, but we have to separate ourselves from the propaganda when attempting to understand the world.
The U.S. press loudly proclaiming that there was no neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine even though it was common knowledge in the United States and Europe for years that there was always a problem with the extremist nationalist elements in that country. Because of that, the line taken by the U.S. state and the capitalist press after the U.S. engineered coup in 2014 with the extreme right and neo-Nazi forces at the center of the action, was that while those forces’ presence in the street actions was never disputed, the line was that their political significance in the government was minimal.
That line was taken because the historical record was replete with references to the role of the ultra-right in Ukrainian politics since world-war II. And that not only did Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and literal neo-Nazis end up in the new post-coup government in 2014, but the press, human rights organizations, the governments of Europe, and the U.S. were aware of the nature of those forces
That is what made the new line by the liberal corporate press that there was not an issue with the extreme right in Ukraine so bizarre. Apparently, to buttress their drive to war, the new narrative required that the Ukrainian state be represented as the innocent victim of the mad Vladimir Putin, and the presence of ultra-right forces, including neo-Nazis, as a figment of his imagination.
Yet, there is always a method to the madness, in this case the real madness of U.S. imperialism.
The Opportunism of the Neoliberal Right: From al-Qaeda to White Supremacists in the Service of the Lords of Capital
Victoria Nuland, under-secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the primary on the ground coordinator of the 2014 coup, with Joe Biden as the overall point person for the Obama Administration, were all absolutely clear about the nature of neo-fascist forces in Ukraine like the Right Sector and the Azov Battalion.
In fact, that was precisely why those elements were used as muscle during the violent street fights leading up to the coup. It is also why they were unleashed against their fellow Ukrainian citizens in Eastern Ukraine when they rejected the legitimacy of the coup government.
U.S. authorities also understood then as they understand today that those neo-fascist forces represented a dangerous, if one is concerned about violent right-wing white supremacists, development for the global white supremacist movement that saw Ukraine as a liberated territory after 2014.
A 2018 FBI affidavit asserted that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States–based white supremacy organizations,” including members of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement, prosecuted for planned assaults on counter protesters at far-right events, including the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.
The danger was seen as so serious by some members of the U.S. Congress that in 2019 New York Rep. Max Rose, who chairs the counterterrorism subcommittee, submitted a letter to the State Department, co-signed by 39 members of Congress, that urged the department to add the Azov Battalion to the list of “Foreign Terror Organizations.”
Also in 2019, Jewish groups accused the Canadian government of training neo-Nazi organizations in Ukraine, despite warnings in 2015 from the same organizations that track the ultra-right that the Ukrainian military was saturated with neo-Nazi elements.
In 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray revealed that the agency was “monitoring very closely a trend that may be starting to emerge, … of neo-Nazi actors here in the US who are communicating online with similar like-minded individuals overseas.”
Yet, in 2021 it was clear that the Biden Administration, along with their Canadian and British allies, could not care less about organized white supremacy as a threat. Their objective was to mobilize public opinion to support their hybrid war against Russia.
To do that, they portrayed the war in Ukraine as a struggle of liberalism against authoritarianism, good versus evil. As Zelenskyy played his greatest role, appealing to “freedom fighters” to come and fight in Ukraine, it did not matter to him or Westerners that while the foreign fighters who arrived were a mix of radical Islamists, naïve liberals, and pan-Turkists, the overwhelming majority were ultra-right supremacists and neo-Nazis from across Europe and the U.S.
According to the Kiev governement, by March 6 at least 20,000 foreign fighters from 55 countries had entered Ukraine to fight against Russians. And just as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA is also involved in training special Ukrainian forces, that includes elements from the Azov forces, even though current and former intelligence officials predict a new “al-Qaeda,” a “transnational white supremacist network,” with alleged ties to the Ukraine conflict will be the next global catastrophe to befall the world as the threat of COVID-19 recedes.”
The U.S. oligarchy is clear. The war they baited the Russians into signals a return to waging wars of domination in Europe to augment the imperialist wars waged for the last 77 years in the global South. Now members of the European proletariat are dying on all sides and the people are shocked.
Violence has been key to the parasitic reality of the European project. The West under bourgeois rule has demonstrated it is prepared to maintain global hegemony through “any means necessary.” If that means the establishment of a cross-class white supremacist coalition under the political rule of the petit-bourgeois that they control (the classic fascist European configuration of class relations under fascism), they will do that.
The dog and pony show with their fake concerns about Trump and then aligning with neo-fascist, white supremacist forces in Ukraine should under normal circumstance result in a shift of consciousness that rejects all of the crude ideological attempts to hide the reality of white minority class rule. But these are not normal times. The power of the capitalist class to control narratives, and the objective reality that millions of people have been moved to global information platforms owned and controlled by capital that is now involved in systematic thought policing and suppression, is creating a narrowing dystopian counter-reality for the radical anti-capitalist forces.
And for those of us in the African revolutionary movement, it is becoming quite clear that, along with Palestinians, we are alone. We cannot depend on the petit-bourgeois settler white left that consistently demonstrates a conservative and collaborative tendency toward national chauvinism ,the class struggle and the ongoing fight for national liberation and self-determination of peoples and nations. It is also blind to the existence, let alone the influences, of normalized white supremacist ideology. For them white supremacy is representative of people like Trump as opposed to Obama.
But colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy is not reducible to race or any other socially ascribed categories. It is a system of power that must be overthrown if we are to survive.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.
It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.
The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.
In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!
Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.
But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.
These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government .
For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be, just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.
The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.
Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.
The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.
The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.
It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisies, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.
In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa , resulting in death from famine.
In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.
The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.
No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunkey allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.
This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War ”:
"Until the philosophy
Which hold one race superior and another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war"
Image: Luo Jie China Daily
U.S. determination to be the world's hegemon created the crisis in Ukraine. The impacts are felt by working people in this country, who must look outside for solidarity and leadership as they struggle in a political system that offers them no representation.
“As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, the politics of location necessarily calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision” (bell hooks)
+The constant morality play that the U.S. public has been exposed to has resulted in mass support for war. Of course, ordinary people will pay the price, the ruling class will get over once again and Biden achieved his bipartisanship the old fashion way - through war!
+The U.S. corporate media frames the Ukraine conflict as a premeditated, unprovoked attack by the maniacal government of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. But from the very beginning of Biden’s administration, it seemed like his agenda was to create the conditions in Ukraine that would evoke a conflict with the Russian Federation. It has turned out to be one of the few objectives of his administration that was met.
+The claims by commentators in the U.S. that war crimes and crimes against humanity that are being committed by the Russian state perfectly reflect the psychopathology of white supremacy, a narcissistic cognitive disorder that renders the afflicted with an inability to see objective reality in the same way as others.
+It is not just gas prices going up. These bumbling incompetents thought they could impose sanctions on a country fully integrated into the world capitalist economy without it hurting consumers in the U.S.- will now have to explain why food prices will go up.
+It appears that along with Russia, consumers in the U.S. will feel the effects of economic sanctions with higher prices and austerity while U.S. energy companies experience windfall profits. Perhaps with those profits that will be realized by the energy companies and the military/industrial complex they might have enough tax money to provide a little relief for workers through Build Back Better legislation. Oh, but my bad! The biggest corporations do not pay taxes in the U.S.
+I thought this was 2022 but it is really 1914. Inter-state war between capitalists to re-divide markets and colonial spheres of control is a class issue. The working class should never align itself with its bourgeoisie under the illusion it is carrying out some moral campaign.
+Black Alliance for Peace, "The crude ideological framing of the U.S. and Western Europe positions on Ukraine as a battle between "democracy" and authoritarianism that is successful in the white supremacist colonial West, does not work in the global South where Western backed coups and wars are the norm."
+I support the expropriation of oligarchs and capitalist property without compensation, apparently the same way that the U.S. does with the confiscation of the property of Russia capitalists! Does that mean that I am finally on the same side as the U.S. state?
+The moral bankruptcy of Western liberalism is as follows: Whenever someone applies to Europe the normalized behavior of European colonizers in the global South, they become the embodiment of evil (Hitler) There is nothing in Ukraine that is unfamiliar to us in the global South at your hands!
+Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky continues to prod the West to take on more responsibility to protect Ukraine since in his inexperience he allowed his people to become yet another group sacrificed to advance U.S. strategic interests. But it is too late. When will people learn?
+Former Bolivian president Evo Morales tells the United Socialist Party of Venezuela congress that it is time to think seriously about how to put an end to NATO and U.S. imperialist policies, while some liberal/leftists are finding ways to support their bourgeoisie and NATO once again. There is such a fundamental gap between Western leftists and revolutionaries in the South.
+For anyone who wonders how societies go mad and embrace totalitarianism - this is it. You see how easy it is to seduce the public into supporting un-freedom by weaponizing "freedom?" It is all presented as common sense and decency, and anyone who does not conform is the enemy.
+With all of the crimes committed by the U.S. state, the peoples in the global south always separated their criticism of the U.S. government from the people of the U.S. But the crude, ignorant, liberal led public opinion in the U.S. does not seem to be making that distinction with Russia.
+The coverage of conflict in Ukraine by capitalist media is appalling. Where is any voice expressing a different view, an alternative strategy to continued war, a call for a ceasefire and diplomacy? Instead, media pushes a line of war and sensationalist fantasies of Ukrainian victory.
+The great patriotic U.S. energy companies are calling for immediate sanctions on Russia oil and gas. With Iranian and Venezuelan oil suppressed and Russia energy out of the market, guess who supplies the gaps? Higher gas prices for us, windfall profits for them. War is a racket!
+The incompetents running Biden's foreign policy ignored advice from old school realpolitik professionals ,from the late George Kennan to Henry Kissinger, not to threaten Russia with game-playing in Ukraine. The result is a war the working class will pay for with higher gas and food prices.
+Sanctions are forms of economic warfare meant to give a comparative advantage to the U.S. and its Western European allies. Its use is of course illegal and violates all of the principles of the World Trade Organization that all of the big capitalist nations are a part of, and exposes the mythology of the free market.
+Illegal economic sanctions used by U.S. and European capital to give it a comparative advantage in global market and to discipline and punish global South nations, (surely no one believes they have anything to do with justice) has run into its own contradictory logic with the attempt to impose them on an economy integrated into the global system.
+The fight for voting rights and procedures is not the fight for real democracy. Democracy is more than voting. For example, in the U.S. there are no representatives from a working-class party in either the House or Senate & legally democrats & republicans enjoy a monopoly.
+Sanctions are sold by U.S. propagandists as targeting specific nations, but the real target is not just those nations like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and now Russia, but also the so-called allies of the U.S. and now U.S. consumers.
+The objective of U.S. policy in Russia was always economic. It was to create the conditions for more draconian sanctions on Russia in order to disarticulate the Russian economy from Europe, making it easier for U.S. capital to assert its hegemony over Germany and France, and thus, all of the European market.
+U.S. policies are increasingly being seen as reckless and disruptive to the global economic order. The dollar, once seen as a safe haven for excess capital and accumulation that could be tucked away in New York and London banks, is now seen as subject to the wild vicissitudes of whatever administration holds the reins of government in the U.S. The steady and mature stewardship of the global capitalist order by senior policymakers steeped in realpolitik has been replaced by immature ideologues who are unable to grasp the changed world that the U.S. finds itself in.
+There are a number of nations that can talk about war crimes and crimes against humanity that nations commit. But the one nation that absolutely should never be allowed to utter a word about war crimes committed by another nation is the U.S.
+Freedom is living in a nation that has no oligarchs - supposedly like in the U.S. The billionaires that control the economy, politics, state and culture in the U.S. are just called "billionaires" and the people love them.
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 Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.