While I would prefer to spend this episode focusing on the heroic women who stood up in Petrograd on March 8 1917, playing a key role in overthrowing a tsar, ending a war and changing world history, the current reality demands that I address the situation in Ukraine.
This is itself noteworthy. The western media never provided non-stop coverage of the now seven-year long war in Yemen. The NCRA never sent out recommendations to campus/community radio stations across Canada telling them to beware of Israeli misinformation during that country’s multiple assaults on Gaza. Neither Iraq nor Libya nor Syria nor Afghanistan were covered in this way with people being forced to choose sides by the powers that be. The last time I remember that happening was after 9/11 in 2001. The Russian incursion into Ukraine is being treated as an attack against us all, in the same way as when those planes hit the twin towers in New York. And it’s worth asking why that is.
Numerous western news outlets, from CBS to the BBC, have openly stated that the reason why the war in Ukraine is so terrible is because it is a “civilized” European country populated by white people who “look like you and me”. And the idea that we must stand in racial solidarity with a white country under attack is a dominant subtext in the media coverage of this war. The same reporters repeat that Ukraine is not Afghanistan or Iraq where violence has effectively been normalized in public discourse and that we should be shocked by a war on European soil, even though we’re talking about a continent marked by the bloodiest conflicts in human history.
We see the same racialized sentiment in how refugees are being treated in Ukraine and Poland. The reality of segregation among refugees is finally being recognized in the mainstream media after widespread outrage on social media at seeing Black and Brown people, mainly international students from India and numerous African countries, being forcibly prevented from boarding trains and buses out of the country. Refugees of color have faced violence from security forces and armed Ukrainian civilians.
I want to stress that the present war is not new. It did not begin with Russia’s intervention on the 26th of February, in fact it’s been raging since 2014 when the democratically elected government of Ukraine was overthrown in a US-backed coup. The coup, often referred to as the Euro Maidan, featured a heavy presence of far-right neo-Nazi elements acting as shock troops against government security forces in the street battles that erupted in Kiev and other cities. These forces then gained prominent positions in the post-coup government that was fully backed by the United States and NATO, which proceeded to destroy or drive underground every progressive political force in the country – from trade unions to the communist party. The 2014 Odessa massacre, in which dozens of people were shot or burned to death by neo-Nazi militia at the trade union headquarters in the city of Odessa was among the ugliest incidents in this campaign of terror, which also involved banning the Russian language in schools and businesses and essentially giving away the entire Ukrainian economy to the IMF and western business interests.
This is what led to the civil war in eastern Ukraine which continues to this day. Ukrainian leftists and Russian-speaking sectors of the population armed themselves in defiance of the coup government and its fascist thugs. They defended themselves, and while they received some aid from Russia, they were mainly on their own in the harrowing battles of 2014 and 2015 when the self-proclaimed Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were besieged again and again. The signing of the Minsk Accords in 2015 was meant to end the conflict by granting autonomy to the breakaway republics within Ukraine and guaranteeing new elections, but it was never implemented by the Ukrainian government, which went on shelling and attacking Donetsk and Lugansk right up to the current escalation of the war in 2022. 15,000 people have died in eastern Ukraine since 2014, yet this goes unrecognized in western media portrayals of the conflict.
The same is true with regard to the powerful influence of neo-Nazi and far-right political forces, which were strong enough to openly defy the Ukrainian president in 2019 when he belatedly tried to implement the provisions of the Minsk Accord and force him to back down. The neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and similar military formations are now fully integrated into the Ukrainian Army, National Guard and police. They are not fringe elements as some would have you believe and their bloody reign of terror against leftists and ethnic minorities in Ukraine has continued. I’ve talked on this show before about how Canada, the US and Israel have armed and trained these fascist goon squads.
But the pivotal US role in the conflict must be understood, because it would never have even begun without the US-supported coup in 2014 and NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe after the Cold War. The war in Ukraine the most manufactured conflict I've seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US engineered the violence in 2014 in order to secure its own strategic interests in Eastern Europe and it has never allowed for any peaceful settlement or meaningful de-escalation since then. For the past two months we've seen the United States government deliberately escalating tensions, preparing people for war via the most insane media blitz I've ever seen, while rejecting Russian diplomatic overtures and sabotaging every attempt at dialogue and de-escalation between Russia and Ukraine. Now it is dumping more guns and military hardware in Ukraine instead of facilitating peace talks, just like it did in Syria. This is not an inter-imperialist conflict between rival empires. This is an example of a global superpower manipulating two neighboring countries into fighting one another by rendering peace impossible. The US is effectively using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder against Russia and it's absolutely sickening.
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