The War in Ukraine is a Case of Imperialism

An Alternative Perspective on the Ukraine Crisis - cognitive brainwashing, Illiberalism, and the Urban Petty Bourgeoisie's Identity Politics (This article was written in 2022) 

The situation in Ukraine calls for analysis that goes beyond the mass psychotic hysteria that has characterized the debate. This article raises the question of how much confidence we may have in news broadcasting under censorship exercised by Big Tech. The "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," described in Revelation 6:1-8 are reborn with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which breathes life into the war hysteria and an armament upward spiral using sophisticated psychological methods. These can best be described as brainwashing and the use of cognitive techniques promoted by the Secret Service's information wars against the Russian Federation. In terms of social class, this means that the illiberal urban petty bourgeoisie and the identity political strategy become the tool of the ruling class, with the urban petty bourgeoisie as a proxy carrying through the collective and politically correct brainwashing of the populations of Europe and North America. This process can take many appearances and veil the underlying structures not recognized in public debates dominated by what we in Denmark call everyday awareness. This is a tendency whether you talk of correct branding of goods and services, George Floyd, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the Ukraine war. It is a constructed narrative rooted in the strategy of cognitive brainwashing. Furthermore, this explains why the independent peace movement of the 1980s, neither a puppet of the West nor of the Soviet Union, has been forgotten. An alternative strategy to the warmongers' preferred scenarios implies peace-seeking rather than advanced manipulation of entire populations. Moreover, it requires negotiation and dialogue instead of warfare. It can only be surprising that today's Danish Left, in opposition to the non-aligned line of the 80s, is joining common cause with NATO's militarism and the imperialism of the world capitalist economic center.

The four Horsemen

These days, we are witnessing mass hysteria, the like of which we have not seen since the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956. Everyone must display a nice little Ukrainian flag on their Facebook profile, which can only be seen as automatic or knee-jerk virtue signaling allegiance to extreme right-wing ideologies. This is true whether you are a politically correct, self-righteous "wokist", or just a victim of the information wars of Western media, of American politicians, of NATO bureaucrats, and the so-called fact-checking bureaus. Obviously, the "look at me" attention-seeking hypocritical narcissists searching on social media for their "next new thing" are encouraged by mainstream media's incompetence in its direct and sustained effort to promote propaganda instead of factual news. When Sarah Wagenknecht, a member of the German Parliament for the socialist party "Die Linke" (The Left, today her new party is the BSW - Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht), in her book, is talking about the "self-righteous, intolerant liberals", the "left liberals" or de facto the "illiberals", she talks about pretentious "left-wing" people who have shifted side. Ignoring socialist and Marxist discourses rooted in the classical theory of Class Struggle, Anti-imperialism, the Labor Theory of Value, and the Critique of the Political Economy (Das Kapital) and substituting them with identity-political bogus is the same as shifting sides in the public discourse.

When Wagenknecht represents the Left in Europe, it may be unknown to an American audience that the term the "Left" is something totally different in a European context than how the term "the Left" is used in the U.S. The U.S. Democratic Party is in the American debate, often called the left. Nevertheless, with the advent of an increased degree of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party, a European leftist will see the neoliberal Democrat as belonging to the bourgeois right-wing power block. Since the early seventies, the European Left has critiqued neoliberalism and globalization, understanding its followers as laissez-faire market follies that want to roll back the frontier of the State, perform union-busting, and adhere to neo-imperialism. Aimed at exploiting developing economies and expanding into the former State-capitalist systems of the USSR and Eastern Europe, the World Bank, IMF, and WTO and not least shifting administrations from Reagan, the Bush family, Clinton, Obama, Trump, and Biden all advocated a global neoliberal policy. Contrary to that, the European Left is rooted in Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.

The deception of left liberalism comprises de facto an "illiberalism," which is neither the original European Left's paradigm nor the virtues of classical liberalism. It is in opposition to both political currents. An important demand of any form of liberalism is that one shows tolerance to others' opinions. "Illiberals" belong to the urban petty bourgeoisie who live in isolated bubbles of privilege and are well-off and disenfranchised from classic liberalism, which advocates the core values of equal rights for everyone. Liberalism meant freedom of speech, freedom of the press, democracy, and equal opportunities. What we see nowadays from the urban petty bourgeoisie is a complete breakdown of these democratic values or ideals. In 2020, The Harper's' Letter, signed by 153 intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Mark Lilla, J. K. Rowling, and Salman Rushdie, criticized these petty-bourgeois elements for their intolerance and pettiness. A vast group of researchers, professors, writers, cultural workers, and media workers wrote an open letter to the public saying: "The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy."....... "The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture."…. "An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, deliver hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study, and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price of greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement."

Wagenknecht, representing the true Left, expands on Harper's letter by noticing that those right-wing populists and the left illiberals do not just resemble each other when it comes to intolerance alone. Neither are these creeds contradictory. The extreme right wing is, in its understanding, a proponent of war, government financial austerity, cuts in social spending, and unequal distribution of wealth and incomes. These are attitudes consciously or unconsciously shared by the urban petty bourgeoisie represented by green, left-liberal, and social-democratic politicians that are well off in comparison to the wage working class struggling every day to make ends meet. For the Illiberal, income and wealth distribution are less important than gay people and transsexuals obtaining privileges, racial issues, and privileges to white Ukrainian emigrants who these days are considered more refugees than people from Third World countries. In general, the illiberal "look at me" syndrome comes to its full display these days when people compete about who can be most anti-Russian. Especially in the Ukrainian case, we have even seen politicians belonging to the socialist Left beat the drums of war, sanctions, and demonization of this imaginary Russian enemy. The atmosphere in Western social and political settings has for quite a while been poisoned by societal group pressure aiming at demonizing everyone that does not walk around and boasts politically correct support to brave Ukraine fighting for "freedom and democracy". The Jews of our times are like the Serbs in former Yugoslavia, the Russian subhuman monster - in German, the "Untermensch". Woe to the one who dares to question the established truth emanating from the quarters of petty-bourgeois suburbia and the power centers of Western imperialism. We are indeed facing the era of the illiberal, self-righteous witch-hunt on citizens with dissenting attitudes to the established "truth".

One may ask how it came that you must believe that Putin is the Romanian king Vlad, the prototype of a blood-sucking Dracula who is evil himself. He must have had a thick wooden pole hammered through his heart. He must die, said an alcoholic swamp-looking American politician - isn't there a Brutus over there ready to lead the knife against this modern incarnation of Adolf Hitler?

Furthermore, the group of lemmings must, of course, with froth coming out of the mouth, follow suit and do what the group decides in good submissive order. Hitting a pole through evil justifies "humanitarian interventions," as we already saw when the Clinton administration and his NATO-allied terror bombed the Serbian civilian population in the former Yugoslavia. Suppose you do not want to submit to the neoliberal and neo-imperialist worldview. In that case, you belong in Count Dracula's kingdom - today, Putin, yesterday, Milosevic, while Clinton's allied Bosnian Muslim Jihadist war criminals went free. The successful destruction of the unique Yugoslav experiment of workers' self-government turned into the baby being thrown out with the dirty bathwater.

This also reinforces the idea of absolute collectivism rather than a dialectically fruitful relationship because the synthesis regarding individualism within the collective creates something that is qualitatively better. According to the majority rulers, the individual identity must be governed by group pressure, and as a result, one's personality is blurred. One alone takes over the identity of the majority. We are in a deeply disturbing time that gives associations back to the mass psychosis that arose from Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry and the entrance of Nazism into the German Weimar Republic.

Where is the left wing?

In this context, one would expect the Danish left to be the first to look critically at "news" rather than be fascinated by cognitive brainwashing; instead, there are quite many who have succumbed to pure opportunism, even governed by the same psychological mechanisms as just described. For many years, it was good Latin on the Left, with the Danish Communist Party as an exception that neither Washington nor Moscow set the agenda. Is it true that left-wing forces in Europe have abandoned this position regarding security policy and foreign policy issues? Something could indicate that leading forces in the Danish Socialist People's Party and the Socialist List of Unity do not have the analysis in order. It is even worse if there has been a policy change, so we now observe approval of Yankee imperialism, NATO's militarism, and the attempt to lift the Danish reservation regarding a European Army through a referendum in June 2022. Where we, for instance, previously saw a US-critical Socialist People's Party that would disarm Denmark and leave NATO, we now see a NATO-friendliness and an acceptance of a future E.U. defense collaboration.

Furthermore, Danish leftists now opt for a "tearing of the contract between the Danish company Ørestaden and the Russian company Gazprom into pieces." Both the Socialist People's Party and the Socialist Unity List, together with the bourgeois power block (including the social democrats), will ban the import of Russian gas into the E.U. Further price increases in energy prices are waiting ahead, which will hit pensioners, students, and working-class members the hardest. A marginal Danish Krone for these groups means more than for the urban petty bourgeoisie and the social-liberal middle classes. These "saloon socialists" have so much money that they can cancel the class struggle and alternatively pursue their correct identity politics. The Socialist People's Party's Karsten Hønge, who otherwise excels at speaking out on behalf of pensioners and the working class, stood "festively" in front of the Russian embassy, demonstrating together with the politically correct bourgeois and petty-bourgeois friends of semi-fascist Ukraine.

The Socialist Unity List favors the harshest possible sanctions against Russia. It is bogus, although it sounds so beautiful that deliberate economic sanctions will hit Russia's elite alone - yet nothing is said about the Russian working class who will be hit the hardest.

Furthermore, these glorious political economists believe that Russia can be cut off from the global financial systems. Again, this is hot air - those who have traded with Russia using the Swift system can find other ways to pay for the import of goods or claim export payments. Do not forget that Russia aims to return to a gold standard system where rubles become the reserve currency, like in the days of the Bretton-Wood System. The Russians have already declared that all future energy payments will be in rubles. In addition, Russia and China are developing an alternative international payment system with means of payment other than the almighty dollar. Recalling the days of European economic currency units (E.C.U.), an alternative basket of the BRIC countries' currencies can be the alternative to the petrodollar system. That some politicians in the West seriously believe that the former Soviet economy cannot do without East-West trade is exaggeratedly optimistic. Russia can divert all of its trade relations to benevolent states, especially the giant Chinese economy, but also economies within the BRIC countries like India and Brazil and all friendly countries to Russia and China - One is probably not wrong when anticipating that the heavy sanctions implemented by the ruling class of the western countries are the same as preparing the closing of the gardens of the West.

Nonetheless, the Danish Left wants a permanent stop to importing gas, oil, and coal from Russia, made possible through a rapid and massive expansion of green energy in Europe. Of course, even if it were possible to substitute green energy, this could not provide the same capacity as importing the three main energy sources from one day to the next. Such statements are a policy of empty promises!

Furthermore, what would one do if the Russian State expropriates the assets of multinational corporations that resulted from direct investment in Russia? One does not even have to compensate the companies now that the West can expropriate Russian assets without compensation. This would be to Russia's advantage because it would be a free transfer of know-how and technology. The mere fact that Russia can turn off the pipeline valves would be a serious blow to the European economy. The sanctions adopted are mosquito bites to what Russia could do and will do if the situation worsens further.

Sanctions can look very innocent because this is not a real war - or is it? It is factually wrong to portray these assaults as "peaceful"; sanctions are an act of war initiated by a global ruling class and the willing tools of this class - the petty-bourgeois illiberal city slickers, politicians, bureaucrats, media moguls, and various other key decision-makers. The sanctions are attacking working people. In other words, sanctions affect the working class, eroding its purchasing power if there is a shortage of goods and subsequent price increases. In addition, unemployment may arise on both sides of the "new Iron Curtain" because the global production chains are cut to pieces. This does not hurt Russia as much as the West because Russia is self-reliant in terms of staple foods. Yet, this erodes the purchasing power and impoverishes the people who must make a living from selling their Labor. Finally, sanctions could lead to a shortage of medicines and a deterioration in food security in the West and in developing economies, which in the case of Venezuela had a genocide-like outcome with over 40,000 deaths. When the Danish Socialist List of Unity, member of the Danish parliament Pernille Skipper thus stands up and wants to block Danish ports from Russian navigation, and when she speaks for other sanctions in violation of international agreements and the U.N. human rights declaration, she supports the global ruling class's oppression of the Russian and Western working people, and that she cannot in decency do if she calls herself a socialist.

The worst thing, however, is that most of the Unity List's main board is ready to arm the Ukrainian national army, including those parts of the army that operate on a clear Nazi platform. These extremists have committed a major genocide in the Donbas region. It is difficult to imagine that a socialist party will now participate in support of the Ukrainian army with 2700 anti-tank weapons. Although the decision created division on the main board of the Socialist Unity List, and although a narrow majority adopted it, it is clear that there is a schism between and within the two left-wing parties. Some members still have not left an alliance-free, pacifist, and resistant line to NATO and an E.U. army.

With fear as the driving force

When the Danish Left is now ready to make a common cause with the United States and NATO and the consequent unconscious and the dangerous arms race that inevitably follows from these reactionary forces wheeling and dealing with global security, there is more than an ever-good reason to look back on the eighties alliance-free line that the independent peace movement supported. The Danish Socialist People's Party's former chairman, the late Gert Petersen, writes in his monumental book titled "Med frighten som drivkraft. Tanker om den kolde krig" ("Fear as the Driving Force - Thoughts on the Cold War") that the Cold War was caused by the mutual fear that motivated the two superpowers' security policy initiatives. The situation today around Ukraine has regrettably recreated the absurd hysteria of these times. The paradox of the '80s was that neither side intended to attack the other during the First Cold War. The plans were there, and the superpowers armed themselves with mistrust on both sides that threatened the survival of human societies. However, it was not the hawks on both sides but the peace movement in the eighties that ended reflective thinking and the mutual images of enemies. The suspicion of these days was driven by an everyday consciousness that was not much different from the one we are confronted with regarding Ukraine and, in general, the U.S.'s relationship with Russia and China.

Due to the democratic efforts of the 1980s to change foreign and security policy in a more appeasing direction, a process was initiated that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, could have led to lasting peace. Now that the Warsaw Pact had been abolished, would it not have been appropriate if NATO had been dissolved, too? That was not how it went. Instead, and despite promises given to the USSR leaders, NATO expanded eastward and downward under the belly due to a weakened Russia.

Looking back to the '80s, the Danish Social Democrat Lasse Budtz and the left wing's policy of footnotes in official documents, unfortunately, became a historical bracket. No matter how much wiser it was to the unconscious rearmament race that the current Danish Social Democratic government participates in, the footnote approach was wiser than to the escalation of conflicts and the danger of a Third World War. According to Professor Nicolaj Petersen from Aarhus University, the escalation of the Cold War in the 1980s resulted in tensions both within NATO and among the member states. NATO policy was, up until 1979, based on the deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, allegedly in response to the Soviet Union's deployment of SS-20 medium-range missiles. The so-called "double decision" accompanied an offer to the USSR opening for negotiations on the abolition or limitation of the deployment and the so-called Star War project (SDI) if corresponding reductions in USSR missiles occurred. The Soviet Union criticized the NATO escalations, and there was also resistance from the Western European public. It was especially the peace movements and social democratic parties that were behind the protests. The Social democratic parties in Northern Europe articulated a critique of NATO, and it was extraordinarily initiated in Denmark during the so-called footnote period of 1982 – 88. A coalition of center-left opposition parties pressured the Danish right-wing Government through parliamentary resolutions, forcing the Government to formulate a critical position in NATO by 'footnoting' communiqués. The reservations in footnotes to official NATO documents clarified the Danish exceptions in the joint NATO decisions. Initially, the footnotes were opposed to missile deployments. The opposition in parliament (the "Folketing") continuously aimed to postpone NATO's deployment to negotiate with the Soviet Union. The footnote policy also aimed at the SDI question, which included the American goal of modernization of the Thule radar systems in Greenland. Although Denmark had a right-wing government in favor of NATO's decisions, the same Government chose to 'live with' footnotes instead of announcing an election. The result was domestic strife, allied criticism, and a policy that moved Denmark away from NATO's mainstream.

Mowing towards a critical approach to today's hawks in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington DC and revisiting the footnote era of the eighties, there is an alternative to "hawkism" that can strengthen the peace struggle and oppose all superpowers and the anachronistic NATO alliance which stands for aggression and strike than deterrence and defense. The hawks in Washington and Brussels and the hawks among the generals of "The Red Army" are undoubtedly the greatest danger to world peace. That has been the case since the NATO encirclement of Russia began through the expansion to the east in the 1990s when former Central and Eastern European countries became NATO members. While the WAPA countries dissolved the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (The Warsaw Pact, WAPA), the NATO countries did not do the same. Despite the lack of an enemy, NATO has desperately, ever since 1991, been seeking to define a new role and some relevance despite common sense saying that when there was no enemy, it would be logical to close down the NATO corridors in Brussels.

The US-imperialist Western doctrine tells us vehemently that the only solution to bad guys on the prairie armed to the teeth is to let a good Republican like John Wayne armed with six guns spur his horse on a wild ride over the plains where he finally gets the Showell under an armed bandit. America's continuous military build-up and imperialist interventionism, election obstructions, and other evil acts are justified as good measures done by thousands of armed John Wayne bullies who are excused when cruelly treating the bad guys. The argument of the end that justifies the means is that this can be done through invasions when the U.S. repetitively starts wars either directly involved or by proxy. Moreover, the good guys can stage a coup and sponsor proxy conflicts. It does not matter if the good guys arm terrorists, and it does not matter if civilians are bombed back to the Stone Age. Just the good guys do it. Furthermore, torturing prisoners of war and civilians is considered fine.

Additionally, who cares when the good guys implement starvation sanctions on impoverished populations? Of course, the "Good Guys - Bad Guys" doctrine has no validity in the Ukraine conflict. As in so many other wars, the truth is that there are only "bad guys " on both sides. The neoconservative Putin is not a communist, as many mistakenly believe. He represents a capitalist oligarchy that, aided by wild privatizations recommended by Western neoliberal economists, was able to take control of the state-owned wealth and the many natural resources. The oligarchs acquired the accumulated Capital that generations of Soviet workers and farmers had built up since the October Revolution with fantastic deprivation that few in the West can imagine.

However, when the leader of the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and others today portray Putin as an incarnation of Adolf Hitler himself, this is senile nonsense in Pelosi's case and an infantile sham if proclaimed by younger forces. Putin is said to have been the driving force behind the recognition of Lugansk and Donetsk. Nevertheless, it was not Putin himself who was the leading force when the Russian DUMA recognized Lugansk and Donetsk in February. The outgoing force was the reformed Russian Communist Party when the leader, Gennady Zyuganov, took the initiative in the Duma to adopt a resolution calling on the Government to recognize the independence of the two Russian-speaking separatist republics.

Putin's demands that Ukraine be "demilitarized" and "denazified " are understandable demands, especially given the encirclement of Russia with the deployment of dangerous nuclear and conventional weapons and troops up to Russia's borders. However, as mentioned, the West's and NATO's containment of Russia must be condemned. The West must be forced to the negotiating table, which it has so far evaded despite repeated Russian attempts at dialogue.

The preparations that the Russian military made in terms of invading and the special military invasion itself may imply that one only goes for military targets. Nevertheless, this can be difficult because paramilitary Western Ukrainian Nazi forces place military posts in civilian areas and use civilians as human shields. But even attacks on military infrastructure, air defenses, airfields, and military aircraft constitute a dangerous escalation of the conflict that should not have taken place.

The United States, NATO, and Ukraine have hypocritically said they wanted peace despite their breaking the Minsk Agreement, while West Ukraine launched a genocide against the Russian people. West Ukraine took steps that were intended to provoke.

Of course, the main enemy of the Left is still imperialism, which is promoted by the ruling class of the world capitalist camp. Given the Left's partial genuflect to the international reaction, there is a need to revisit the critique of imperialism and the critique of the international political economy.