Victory in Death

Today, May 9, Russia celebrates victory of the Soviet Union and the Allies in World War 2 against the forces of Nazi Germany. No other combatant came anywhere close to Russia in terms of the lives it sacrificed in the war, in the midst of one of the greatest social experiments of human history namely Communism, the inevitable response to unbridled financial and industrial capitalism (and the cause of that war) an experiment from which others, including China. have learned important lessons and to which they accommodated. The Soviets took the path of state capitalism; Russia, seduced by the false promises of the West simply abandoned the entire Communist project but from a centrist standpoint; the Chinese have chosen to combine a strong measure of centralism with capitalism. Socialist movements in the West have adhered to goals of social improvement within frameworks of capitalism, a bargain with the devil in which they have suffered abuse, gaslighting and abuse and abandonment.

We shall have to wait and see how all these trajectories work out. Russia and China have discovered that the first cold war was not a battle between communism and capitalism as they imagined, but a race by the West, in the name of an ideology of free competitive capitalism to co-opt and manipulate both the Global South and the progressive West in a bid to secure and monopolize as much of their wealth as possible.

Even now Russia and Chine still exhibit vulnerability to the seducements and inducements of the West, fooled by the West’s flattering image of itself, it’s skill in the manipulation of images and the wealth accumulated by the West through empires and colonization and by the dominant freakish logic of Western corporatocracy which spews outstandingly silly justifications for its hegemonic ambitions. Like. right now, genocide is good for you, that Israel needs more weapons to conduct an actual genocide in Gaza while a nonexistent Xuighur genocide in China is the worst of evils or that a non-nuclear Iran is a far great nuclear threat than an Israel with hundreds of nuclear warheads, or that a choice between genocide Joe and genocide Don is a stunning achievement of “democracy” at work. Meanwhile the comparatively sane, rational, wise and collectivist leaderships of Russia and China exemplify something the West calls “autocracy” simply because they have seen through the flagrant hypocrisy of a “rules-based” order where one party makes up and breaks the rules and never explains to anyone what these rules specifically are and why the Global Majority isn’t consulted in their drafting.

So it is this week that western mainstream media have passed by largely in silence that for at least for the second major time (there have been other slightly less dangerous moments) in post-World War 2 history a nuclear war of annihilation has been avoided largely by Russia showing the West some of Russia’s own rules, and secondly that Russia “does not do strategic ambiguity,” as one wit observed. For the moment at least it looks as though the West has climbed down over Ukraine, that NATO will likely announce at its July summit, maybe before, that it will not put boots on the ground in Ukraine and that Ukraine will not join NATO. This does not mean the war will end but the remaining people of Ukraine, under the whip of an illegal and dictatorial president, may soon decide that enough is enough, even as Poland, Lithuania, and other NATO nations force military age Ukrainian males back home to death in Ukraine from the relative safety of Europe.

Genocide Joe, having recently stepped up US arms deliveries to Genocide Net,and having sent his thugs to crack the skulls of right-thinking, courageous and intelligent young men and women on university campuses throughout the country, and even as the land of God’s chosen, Israel, is actually already attacking one and a half million starving, unarmed men, women and (600000) children in Rafah….Genocide Joe decides to stop the flow of arms to Israel for a day or two. The dead will not die in vain.