Fascism and its Neocon Variants

Western media concentration on what have been so far mainly pinprick Ukrainian attacks on targets in Russia, such as the drone attack on the Kremlin, the recent short-lived invasion of Belgorod, targeted assassinations of soft targets, and hits on oil depots and train derailments have one thing in common: they support a narrative of Ukrainian audacity, in daring-do exploits reminiscent of cinematic James Bond-style movies.

When such optic-obsessed manouvers are the focus of western media attention, and when the scale and range of Russian attacks on Ukraine receive barely a mention, then they arouse the admiration and support of western audiences (or can be plausibly said to do so) which in turn permits western politicians to continue not just to feed weapons to Ukraine (wea[pons which, increasingly, western countries no longer have), but also to escalate the conflict ever more closely to the possible use of nuclear weapons (which of course the US and Russia and the EU have in abundance).

The actual scale, intensity and significance of Russian attacks on Ukraine is of course greater by several orders of magnitude than those of Ukraine on Russia. Ukrainian attacks also come closer to definitions of “terrorism” than to “war,” but at this stage of the conflict the last thing western media care about is terrorism or entertaining scruples in their endorsing of terrorism when these things are committed by “our” terrorists.

Critics of Russia typically refer to what they consider to be the self-evident illegality of Russia’s “unprovoked” Special Military Operation, a viewpoint that, once accepted, would seem to amount to the greatest act of terrorism of all, an unprovoked war. I and many others including, I notice, Ray McGovern and John Mearsheimer, have argued not only that this was a highly provoked war, one that Russia had been warning the west against for some three decades but also that it was one that Putin no longer had meaningful options other than to fight, given (1) western determination, many times expressed, more often insinuated, to destroy the Russian Federation; (2) Biden’s continuing disinterest in responding to Putin’s request for discussions about the deployment of missile systems in Romania and Poland (when the US would never tolerate Russia’s placing of such systems in Mexico or Canada), and (3) in the face of intensified ramping up of its forces, and killings of Donbass citizens, by the Ukrainian Army.

In Canadian Dimension recently professor Paul Robinson of Ottowa University examines the Belgorod incident. He makes the claim that the “Ukrainians” in question appear in fact to have been Russians fighting on the side of Ukraine but does not note that most if not all of them were actually Ukrainian citizens, in an operation that was almost certainly financed and staged by the Ukrainian army and its western sponsors (note the use of US vehicles). Robinson also dismisses the claim that Ukraine is Nazi to be Russian propaganda. This view, common to pro-Ukrainian Canada, (1) seriously underestimates the role of Banderite organizations in securing by violence the victory of Maidan protestors in 2014 and thereby executing the US-backed coup d-etat of that year. It downplays (2) the anti-Russian vituperation of the coup regime that inspired an almost instantaneous secession from Ukraine of pro-Russian Crimea as well as the formation of the two pro-Russian people’s republics of the Donbass whose main conern was that Kiev should make progress towards implementing the Minsk accords (which of course it never did nor even intended so to do). It overlooks (3) how the relative invisibility of Nazi groups in the Ukrainian RADA belies their much more important influence in Ukrainian military, intelligence and militia. And it disregards (4) and, I would argue, disrespects, the horrendous history of Nazi ideology in Ukraine before and during World War Two, and the subsequent legacy of that movement.

The Belgorod invading force, Robinson reports, appears to have involved members of two groups, the Freedom of Russia Legion (FRL) and the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC). The FRL was founded by former Russian Parliamentary Deputy Ilya Ponomarenko and its stated aim is the preservation of a one and indivisible Russia within its 1991 borders. The Russian Volunteer Corps is led by one Denis Kapusti, apparently a football hooligan and Russian neo-Nazi who is currently banned from the European Schengen zone and is a resident of Ukraine. The RVC wants a Russian Federation that is a national state consisting of predominantly ethnic Russian regions.

Formal Russian policy on the other hand is opposed to extreme Russian nationalism. It prioritizes membership of the Russian Federation in its current form over ethnic membership. It treasures and advocates for multiethnic and multi-religious culture. Ukraine and its western sponsors appear to want to weaponize ethnic white fascism that is in line with their goal of breaking up the Russian Federation as it currently exists. By launching attacks on Russian territory, these fascist groups, whether Russian or Ukrainian, seek to divert Russian resources from other fronts and to undermine Russian perception of the competence of Moscow leadership.

A relatively insignificant hit by self-proclaimed Nazi groups in Belgorod has picked up by and magnified approvingly by western mainstream media and commentators. This reception is indicative of the moral bankruptcy of these same institutions, their incomprehension of both the reality of Ukrainian history and the continuing threat of Nazi ideology among the disaffected of Europe’s children and the children, more broadly. of the collective west/ They have been held captive by neoliberal globalization and privatization (a product of the twentieth “century of the self,” one might say) and its imposition of identity politics and virtue-signalling with which the elites of a collective west enact their disconnection with the reality and complexity of EurAsia, China and the Global South.

We have come very close to a decisive moment, one that will likely take us further up the escalatrng escalator. Are we close now to the Ukrainian counteroffensive, or is the counteroffensive already in motion (perhaps conveniently replicating and validating anything that Ukraine is currently doing as though it was a meaningful strategy). Or will it, in fact, be constantly delayed?

There is an increasing crescendo of articles in the western mainstream media, as Simplicius the Thinker noted yesterday in his Substack blog, expressing alarm and despondency about signs that Ukraine is losing the war and has poor prospects of recovering ground in its presumed upcoming counteroffensive. The counteroffensive being thrust upon it by Ukraine’s western sponsors, few less impactful than neocon king Joe Biden, who seems to be escalating to F16s in return for a decisive Ukrainian launch

Instead of cautiously reviewing the wild swing that mainstream media have taken towards their new (and correct) assessment of battlefield reality in preference to the wooliness and propaganda that reigned even four months ago there is reckless escalation. I was aghast to read a piece written in January but just republished in the fine blog Natalyie’s Place, by Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general. In an otherwise thoughtful essay, Thankur appears to recklessly abandon facts on the ground and instead raves about Ukraine’s military achievements and excoriates Russia and the Russian military. But that is the expected product of an intelligentsia that has never critically examined the real political economy and business models of mainstream western media, their centrality to western capitalism and their devotion to western deep state military and intelligence leaders, and the impact of these machines for the construction of ideology on the thought processes of educated citizens.

Instead of this intelligentsia asking themselves why it is possible that western mainstream media could be so thoroughly wrong and misinformed about a situation that may lead to the annihilation of the human species, a good number of this same crew rise up in earnest, Churchillian indignation (for a disproportionate number of them are British) and urge more escalation, imposition of no-fly (=massive bombing) zones, more weapons, and, in train, more economic misery for Europe, more European sucking at the tits of the US hegemon, and a more rapid descent of that hegemon in competition for influence in an increasingly multipolar world. These are clearly people who are clueless about how wars are fought and about their consequences. All they have ever known is how to kill relatively defenceless “Third World” natives in wars that the collective West still manages to lose, because not-winning is vital to the political economy of the western armaments industry. These are the proponents of what we can call neocon fascism: they serve the interests of the mainly white plutocratic elites and their pawns in the political and corporate domains; they are prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives in the name of a fake principle, that of NATO’s “right” to expand (a mechanism for converting new members to NATO military requirements which convenienty align with the products of western arms manufacturers).

Whatever the situation was in January it is now even more self-evidently playing out in Russia’s favor, which is far from saying that the world is saved from nuclear disaster. Russia is advancing along almost all of the major points of friction along the front lines. It has retaken Bakhmut, it is in the process of taking many of the Ukrainian-held villages and settlements close to Bakhmut, it is likely to exercise a pincer seizure of Avdievka and Marinka that compares with its success in Bakhmut. Wagner forces are handing over to the regular Russian army in Bakhmut and, after a period of rest, recuperation and reconstitution will likely be deployed in other ways during the coming Ukrainian counteroffensive and its succeeding Russian offensive. Russian missile and drone attacks over Kiev and elsewhere serve the primary function of driving Ukrainian air-defense missile supplies to near exhaustion, while also hitting (when they do penetrate Ukraining air-defense - a good deal more often than Ukrainian claims would indicate) vulnerable supply-line infrastructure, weapon, ammunition and air-defense targets, and causing further damange when the shredded pieces of Ukraine’s S300 missiles and their targets fall to earth.