As we cross the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia has launched its largest drone attack in Ukraine to date, and Israeli tanks are rolling into the Occupied West Bank for the first time in decades. US President Donald Trump has issued repeated threats to “take over” and “own” Gaza, “buy” Greenland, and “absorb” Canada as the “51st state.” Even the fiction of the US-enforced “rules-based international order” has collapsed, and a new, terrifying world disorder—one that more closely resembles the geopolitical periods preceding World Wars I and II—is emerging.
This new era is characterized by heightening inter-imperial conflicts between great powers like the US, Russia, and China, and emerging regional powers, the rise of far-right and authoritarian governments around the globe, and the accelerated drive of those governments to annex and take over other countries, deny their populations the right to self-determination, and plunder their resources. But this tectonic shift in 21st-century geopolitics has, in turn, provoked growing struggles for self-determination and national liberation. From Palestine to Puerto Rico, from Ukraine to Xinjiang, how can working-class people in the United States and beyond fight for a different future and an alternative world order founded not on imperial conquest, war, and capitalist domination, but on solidarity without exception among all poor, working-class, and oppressed peoples who yearn to live freely and peacefully?
This is Solidarity without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network, in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network, hosted by Blanca Missé and Ashley Smith. In the inaugural episode of this series, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joins Missé and Smith to dissect how the world order has changed in the three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and how the simultaneous unfolding of the war in Ukraine and Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Palestine has revealed both the centrality of anti-occupation struggles for self-determination in the 21st century, and the need for global working-class solidarity with all oppressed peoples waging those struggles.
Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Blanca Missé, Kayla Rivara, Ashley Smith
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Music Credits:
Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk | https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusic
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcript
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Rafael Bernabe: My support for the Ukrainian people to self-determination doesn’t mean that I necessarily support the policies or even support the government of Zelenskyy. What it means is that it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide what government they have — Not for Putin to decide that or anybody else but the Ukrainian people. That’s what self-determination means. They decide what kind of government they want to have, which is what we are also fighting for in Puerto Rico, which is what we are also fighting for in Palestine and everywhere else.
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Maximillian Alvarez: This is Solidarity Without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and I’m sending my love and solidarity to you, to all poor and oppressed people around the world, and to all who yearn and fight to live freely.
Blanca Missé: And I’m Blanca Missé. I teach at San Francisco State University. I’m with the Ukraine Solidarity Network and the Labor for Palestine National Network, and I also organize with Workers’ Voice. I’m really excited to start this podcast because we see the old world order crumbling, and we need to figure out how to put forward principle politics to defend working people’s rights and struggles in the US and all over the world. And we want to share with you all the discussions we’ve been having with Ukraine activists, Palestine solidarity activists, immigrant rights activists, and labor folks in the US.
Ashley Smith: I’m Ashley Smith. I’m a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and also a member of the Tempest Collective. I think this podcast is incredibly significant, especially with Donald Trump’s assumption of power in Washington DC, because I think it’s accelerating the development of what we could call a new world disorder; of a stagnant world economy; heightening interimperial conflicts, especially between the US, China, and Russia; and a rise of far-right governments and authoritarian governments all around the world, which is accelerating an annexationist drive to take over countries, deny them the right of self-determination, which is provoking struggles for self-determination and national liberation in response.
So the questions that we want to address in this podcast is how do we oppose all imperialisms from the US to Russia to China, but most importantly in the US, how we oppose US imperialism without extending support to its rival imperialisms? How do we build solidarity with all oppressed peoples and nations fighting for self-determination, from Puerto Rico to Ukraine to Xinjiang? That is, how do we build solidarity without exception, not only with struggles of national liberation, but also struggles of working-class people and oppressed people from below throughout the world.
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Reporter 1: Good evening, and we’re coming on the air at this hour with breaking news. After the US warned all day of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, that it was imminent, Vladimir Putin has just addressed the Russian people moments ago, announcing what Putin called the start of a military special operation, in his words, to demilitarize Ukraine.
Reporter 2: The Russian president says A military operation is now underway in Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has declared a state of emergency.
Reporter 3: The full-scale invasion that intelligence officials had been warning about for weeks is now underway, and there are reports of explosions and attacks at several major Ukrainian cities.
Reporter 4: Ukraine’s president has been calling on civilians to fight, appealing for help while this assault is unfolding across Ukraine. Global leaders are responding with stronger sanctions.
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Maximillian Alvarez: February of 2022 was an intense time in the world, and there was a lot going on in the world before Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February. Here at The Real News in January through February of 2022, we were covering stories like the electoral victory of Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Borich and the Canada “trucker convoy”. We were covering this incredible story of Mexican autoworkers at a GM plant in Silao, using the provisions of the renegotiated NAFTA to wage this heroic effort to vote out their old, corrupt union and vote in a new, independent union. And I was interviewing folks involved in that struggle from Mexico.
The Starbucks union wave was really kicking into high gear at that point. I was interviewing workers at stores here in Baltimore and around the United States. And I had just conducted what would become my first of many, many interviews with railroad workers here in the United States — And that was after I learned that a US district court judge had blocked 17,000 railroad workers at BNSF railway from striking on Feb. 1.
So that’s where I was and where we were as a news network leading into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. But when that invasion happened, there was this real chilling sense of history, that something was changing, something irrevocable had been broken, and that things were never going to be what they were on Feb. 23, 2022.
Ashley Smith: I guess I was shocked but not at all surprised, because, I think, if you go back now three years, it was really clear that the world was changing rapidly. And I did a lot of on-the-ground organizing through all the years Trump was in power. And then we were a year into the Biden administration. And what really struck me is this massive wave of struggle that swept through the United States under Trump, lots of it was co-opted, neutralized, and taken over by the Democratic Party, and the movements collapsed around us.
In particular, Black Lives Matter really went from one of the biggest social uprisings in US history to dissipating before our eyes. The Democratic Party successfully co-opted that big, enormous wave of struggles behind a project that I saw as hardcore imperialist in its very nature, a project to rebuild US capitalism and rally Washington’s allies for a great power confrontation, in particular with China and Russia.
And during that time, I was writing a book about all of this with several co-authors called China and Global Capitalism that was an attempt to explain this developing period in history that we were living through. And we were writing that book right when China and Russia struck their friendship without limits agreement. And that showed from the other side of the interimperial rivalries that another camp was forming in opposition to the US.
So then when Russia invaded Ukraine soon after that friendship pact, I really wasn’t surprised by it at all. And really because the war had been going on since 2014, the actual beginning of the war wasn’t three years ago in 2022, it was back in 2014 when Russia took over the sections of Donbas and the Crimea and had been trying to figure out how to annex the rest of the country.
And Putin was doing this for clear reasons that had to do, in part, with response to NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but more importantly, I think, in response to the democratic uprising within Russia itself, the pro-democracy movement, the attempt to address the class and social inequalities inside Russia itself. And so Putin turned to increasing authoritarianism at home and an explicit imperialist project abroad to reclaim not the Soviet Union’s project, but the great czarist project of the 19th century. It’s not an accident that his big heroes are czars of that period.
And I totally agree, Max, I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine ushered in an epochal shift in world politics that has shaped everything in every corner of our globe all the way through till today. That is a new epic of annexation imperialism which is coming from Russia, from China, from the US, smaller regional powers. And in response to that, it’s triggering a new epic of struggles for national liberation and self-determination, which are going to be at the heart of all international political discussions.
Blanca Missé: When I tried to rewind to February, 2022, many of us here were, I mean at least I was coming out of a big fight against austerity measures in my university after COVID. The preunfolding of what we’re seeing a little bit with this massive attack to the Department of Education, to public universities, there’s been a long time coming of a restructuring of social services and an attack on free speech, academic freedom.
So I have to say I was shocked and stunned by the February invasion. I agree with Ashley that the war technically had started in 2014. But I’m from Europe, I’m Catalan, and I’m in conversation with my family in Barcelona, friends in France, in Italy, in Portugal, and for all of us Europeans from the old world to see tanks back invading territory and trench building and alarms for bombs and people going into the refuges, it sounded like a real situation, like we’re back to the 20th century wars, which a lot of the US propaganda in Hollywood is telling us that the wars are going to be driven by drones and precision weapons, and there you have all this huge human capital and life being murdered, slaughtered at the front.
That was a huge shock to me, and I started rethinking what is happening. Many of the first explanations were Putin has gone crazy. This guy is out of control. And this explanation of one person just being crazy in power, it does not hold long enough to explain this war. And you see, it’s pretty clear that since Putin arrived to power, he radically transformed the Russian state. He turned the Russian state into an imperial state. He concentrated all of the power, all of the industries, he squashed all of the opposition, and he needed to preserve this area of influence to sell its gas, its oil, to extract resources, to submit all of these areas of Belarus, the Baltic states, Ukraine, with huge debt deals. And any attempts to contest that, like it was in Maidan in Ukraine, or even the beginning of the opposition in Russia, prompted him to invade Ukraine.
When you start understanding more the geopolitical, social, economic history of this part of the world, then the invasion makes total sense. I thought there was a beginning and an after because this war kept going on and on, and many of us thought this is going to just be two, three months and they’re going to negotiate. And we’re in year three of this war. And this was compounded also with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which was restarted last year after the October events.
And so I do agree fully with Ashley that the way I was processing this, first I joined the Ukraine Solidarity Network. It was crucial for many of us active to have conversations with Ukrainians and with Russians who were also educating us and exchanging with us their views about what’s happening in the world. So we were trying to form a collective, internationalist viewpoint so we could process things across countries.
And also I started reading a lot of history, maybe because I’m a nerd, and I realized that our world right now is not anymore this “stable” US hegemonic world. As Ashley was saying, it looks more and more like the pre-World War II world with rising empires competing with each other and trying to steal land and colonies — At the time they were colonies, today they’re not, they’re supposedly independent countries — But they’re trying to annex them to put them under their thumb for control of their resources, of their markets, of their populations.
So I am still processing the war, and the war is getting more and more complicated because it is enmeshed in this world mess. How could you explain that we have North Korean troops fighting today on the Russian front? We need to be able to unpack all of this mess and be able to explain it clearly to working people so we can find a sense of direction, a sense of understanding of our history, and a sense of agency. And I think the goal of our podcast and also doing this reflection is how we can win back agency in this country to stand up for our rights.
Maximillian Alvarez: I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, and it is very much the soul of this podcast series. That really is our goal here, is to help you all navigate what has become such an unnavigable, or seemingly unnavigable, terrain, where you have these competing allegiances and things pulling at your heartstrings, when we want to lead with a basic humanitarian principle of defending life, defending people’s right to national sovereignty.
I wanted to take us back down to February of 2022 and what people were seeing and what was making sense and what wasn’t at that time. For most people — And the national polling really bore this out at the time — The question of who the bad guys were here, who the good guys were, and what the evil deeds were seemed pretty apparent on its face: Russia violating the national sovereignty of Ukraine, Russian troops entering Ukrainian territory, opening fire on Ukrainians, and committing the basic war crime of invading another country. And again, on its face, this is what people were seeing, this is what was being reported, and the question of who deserved our solidarity and why was seemingly pretty clear cut.
But as you guys already alluded to, there was an immediate discourse battle unfolding here where a lot of complicating factors were being introduced, whether they be the role of NATO expansionism and the US involvement in the 2014 coup, where you guys pointed out this war really started in 2014. The US had a lot of direct involvement in that. There were facts circulating about the far right neo-Nazis. Putin himself was claiming that this was a campaign of de-Nazification in Ukraine.
And so all of these interceding points start coming into the basic vision of your average person who’s seeing a sovereign country being invaded by its powerful neighbor. And these interceding factors served, at best, to complicate the official US narrative about the war. But at worst, they served to justify what Russia was doing. And I think somewhere in the middle, for many, the point was to essentially justify a lack of solidarity with Ukraine and a basic conviction that this was not our problem.
Ashley Smith: I think the surface, gut-level response of most people to seeing a country invaded was of solidarity with the victims of such an invasion. And I think it’s very important to affirm that gut instinct of solidarity because that provides a guiding light for people through the points of confusion about the origins of the war, the nature of Ukraine, the politics of Ukraine, and the nature of its struggle for self-determination.
And a few things about that. There is no doubt that NATO expansion set the stage for this, in part. But as I said earlier, the motivations of Putin were laid out numerous times in speeches that he gave over and over and over again that said this war was about proclaiming and reclaiming a Russian empire, and that entailed the eradication of an entire national state and national people: the Ukrainian people.
Now, those Ukrainian people rose up in resistance, legitimately so — Not just the government but the vast majority of the people — All the way back in 2014 and then again in 2022. And one of the things that’s very important to say about the so-called coup in 2014 was that it wasn’t a coup, that this was a national popular uprising of the vast majority of people against a government that was essentially aligning itself with Russia, and therefore threatened the people in Ukraine with an authoritarian regime that they fundamentally rejected.
And when the government attempted to crush the protests in opposition and brutalize the population, it transformed into a national popular uprising that drove the government from power. Which to Russia felt like a threat because what it showed is the agency of people to fight for their rights against an authoritarian regime, which, back in Russia, was ominous for Putin. So Putin had the ambition from the very beginning to set an example for the Russian people that if you rise up against the dictates and program and project of Putin’s regime, it will be crushed in blood.
And the more you read about Ukraine, the more clear it becomes that this is a genuine progressive struggle for national liberation. Now, that doesn’t mean that there are not lots of complexities within Ukraine, but frankly, there’s lots of complexities in every single nation state around the world.
And sometimes when I heard people talk about the right in Ukraine, I was like, oh my God, we live in the United States where we had Donald Trump, so it was a bit rich to hear people pick points about the politics of Ukraine. And the more you read about the actual politics inside the country, the more marginal, actually, the right is in the society. That doesn’t mean it’s not a threat, but it’s the Ukrainian people’s fight to deal with their own right wing, which is our responsibility here in the United States to deal with our own right wing.
And the final thing I’ll say about this is you don’t have to have perfect victims to grant solidarity to people. And I think this is a very important point that Mohammed El-Kurd makes in his new book, Perfect Victims, about the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation, because they don’t have to be perfect victims to have solidarity extended to them, nor should Ukrainians. We should be in solidarity with Ukraine’s struggle and Palestine’s struggle for self-determination, with all the complexities of their societies recognized, and understanding that only Ukrainians and Palestinians can deal with those problems, and it shouldn’t mean that we deny them our solidarity.
Blanca Missé: When you see a country being invaded, you have your gut reaction to say, I side with them. And I think in the United States we have several added complexities. I think we have maybe different guts or different ways of feeling that are compounded because, on the one hand, most of the folks who maybe are indifferent or are questioning whether we should support Ukraine, they don’t deny that what is happening to Ukrainian people is horrible.
The hesitations come from the fact that, in the United States, we have such a long history of our US government leading wars at home and abroad. So then suddenly when they see a bad actor doing a bad thing, but they see the US government taking the side of the victim, they’re saying, maybe there is something fishy here. And that is an understandable conflict.
And then because one logic would be the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that’s something we’re trying to unpack here. The enemy of your enemy doesn’t have to be your friend. It can also be another enemy that is going to come after you.
And so this very mechanical gut reaction when you have these two competing things, I think — And that was a case for all the racialized populations in the United States, that they were feeling maybe less identified with the plea of the Ukrainian people, not because they’re not human, but because they were suddenly surprised and, actually, angry that their own government, who has been oppressing their communities and their own people at home, suddenly wanted to drop everything and find money that supposedly we don’t have; we don’t have money for schools, we don’t have money for social services, we don’t have money for healthcare, and then send all of this money to Ukrainians. So that didn’t help.
And so this is why it’s so important, and it has been so important for our Ukraine Solidarity Network work to do everything from a standpoint of independence from the US government, independence from the Trump and Biden administrations, because we’re not here about backing any government or state. We’re here about building working-class solidarity from below, direct worker-to-worker, people-to-people connections.
And the other thing I want to add here, when there was this reaction of not a problem, most of the time working people in the US — And this is particularly white people — It’s not their problem what happens in the world, right? It is their problem when it comes to their pockets. But there is a socialization about we around the world, we are the ones who deserve all the wealth, and we can extract the wealth of the rest of the world and make all these cheap products abroad for slavery wages, and plunder the resources of the world so we can have a way of living. [This] makes it that we don’t care about what happens in the rest of the world because in everyday life we have to care about what happens to the working class in the world. We could not sleep for the nightmares that we would have about what our standards of living and our consumption conditions require.
So there is also something, there’s two perverse ways in which the US capitalist system and the US state has socialized us and desensitized us not to care. One is because we are US-centric, born and raised to be US-centric and not care about the rest of the world and not spend money abroad when there are needs at home. And the other thing is that we also have a lot of folks who have been so much damaged, tortured, aggressed, harmed, hurt by the US empire, that their first gut reaction is to be against any cause the US government supports.
And we have to deal with all of this mess, of all of this. And it’s important to call it gut reactions and say how we start unpacking, validating the way people think, of course, but then start showing them the way other people are feeling and thinking, and trying to put these two things together so we can build internationalism and solidarity for below.
It is difficult work, but this is why we’re doing this podcast, because we think this work must be done, and it can be done together if we have productive conversations across the different sectors of our class internationally.
Maximillian Alvarez: Another condition that your average working person in America is in, living in the heart of empire, being subject to a capitalist dominated society and an imperial war machine installed in our government. People, over ,get really, really tired of getting jerked around and lied to and feeling duped. And the better angels of their nature are being exploited by the people in power to justify doing awful things. And I think that that’s where also you get this malaise that so many of us feel.
One of the, I think, other factors to consider is that, for your average person, the decision about what to think about this was also broken into two choices: Is my duty here to do something to stop this, or is it to have the right position on it? And I think that that’s actually symptomatic of the broad powerlessness that we are raised to feel in this country when we sense that we have so little influence over the power structure that we are finding out has had a hand in NATO expansion, that has had a hand in creating the crisis that we’re watching unfold on our televisions, our impulse is just throw our hands up and say, I don’t want to associate myself with this crap. And in that position, you can gravitate towards the one thing you do have, which is the righteousness of your own perspective.
And so when you’re in that mode, you latch onto these reasons to not care, to not give your heart so willingly to a cause like we did after 9/11, like we did in Vietnam, like we did in Desert Storm. People remember what it felt like to learn how wrong we were in those days gone by, and we don’t want to make that same mistake again.
And so when we hear that there are far-right Nazis in parts of Ukraine, that’s enough of an excuse to write off an entire population. When we hear that, once again, the US has had a strong hand over years and decades in creating the crisis that is unfolding now, we throw up our hands and say it’s the US’s fault. We don’t want to deal with it.
So I think that that reaction from a lot of folks is more symptomatic of our learned powerlessness in a craven, imperialist society that is constantly looking for our emotional validation of its imperial exploits and people refusing to give it, but doing so by writing off an entire population that needs our solidarity.
Ashley Smith: I think what you’re saying, Max, is really important because there’s a healthy knee-jerk suspicion of the US government that is the legacy of the absolutely criminal history of US imperialism, all the way back to the 19th century, from the Spanish-American war to today, in which they lie, cheat, and steal to make profit through plunder of other countries and military dominance and manipulation of debt and gunboat diplomacy and fake alibis for wars, et cetera. So there’s a good knee-jerk suspicion of the US government, and I think that’s particularly concentrated, rightly so, among progressives.
But then it can lead to the kinds of problems that you’re describing, of not thinking our lives are bound up with people in Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian people don’t deserve our solidarity and support.
And I always come back to Martin Luther King’s famous statement as part of his opposition to the Vietnam War when he said that a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I think we have to internalize that because I think we need a healthy knee-jerk anti-imperialism towards the US government, but also towards other governments and imperial powers throughout the world.
In this case in particular Russia, because I think Russia set a precedent that is now spreading, that is that you can have an imperialist war to annex and eradicate an entire country that first started in Europe, the first ground war in Europe since World War II. Now you’re seeing that spread with Israel and its using a logic of colonial annexation that’s eerily familiar from what Russia said about Ukraine. Because if you put what Netanyahu says right next to what Putin says about each country they’re annexing and colonizing, they’re eerily similar. And if you look at what Trump is now saying about Gaza, the ethnic cleansing and seizure of Gaza — Not only Gaza but Greenland, Panama, and if God can believe it, Canada as the 51st state.
So there’s a whole logic of a territorial imperialism and annexation that Russia’s war initiated globally, and it’s why our interests as working people and progressives here in the United States are bound up with Ukrainian people’s struggle for self-determination. Because if they lose in their struggle, that sets a precedent for powers to go after other subject peoples and nations all around the world.
And what’s most eerie right now is that Trump is rewarding Russia’s aggression and saying, sure, you can have 20% of Ukraine. That’s fine. We’ll sit down and make a deal over the heads and without the involvement of Ukraine’s government, let alone its people. That is eerie. That’s what Netanyahu and Trump are doing about Palestine. Who knows what’s going to happen between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump about Taiwan. Who knows what’s going to happen in Latin America and Panama and Greenland. We’re entering a very ominous phase, and it began, really, with the invasion of Ukraine. That’s why, whether we like it or not, our lives and destinies are bound up with the struggle of the Ukrainian people.
Maximillian Alvarez: Exactly. And to even look backwards at the Biden administration’s handling of this, again, I think what you’re describing with Trump still puts your average American in a similar position because we had just clearly stated evidence that, under the Biden administration, that while we may, from our gut impulse, want to support Ukrainians fighting against this imperialist aggression, defending their national sovereignty, their lives, their communities, and that was the official line that we were hearing from Washington, DC, throughout the media. But then you also get these media clips from then Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who, in April 2022, told reporters:
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin: We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.
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Maximillian Alvarez: So right there you have, in the center of those two statements, you have your average working person trying to square that contradiction: Is this about supporting Ukrainians fight for their lives or is this about putting them in the firing line as cannon fodder so that our enemy Russia weakens itself slaughtering the people that we are in solidarity with? What is your average person supposed to do in that situation? What are they supposed to think?
And so you have those contradictions swirling around in general, but you also have other contradictions that clash, I think, are the deeply held principles of people who might describe themselves as on the left or having more leftist and progressive principles that they try to live by that are in seeming conflict in a situation like this and our clear-cut principal opposition to Nazis anywhere. So yes, of course if there are and where there are Nazis in Russia, Ukraine, anywhere, fuck them. But they are not the entire population, just like the Nazis who are literally marching on the street right now in the United States of America do not represent the entirety of the US population.
But you also had, for instance, within Ukraine, necessary critiques of the Zelenskyy government, of the wartime policies that have squashed labor rights, that have sold off more resources and terrain within Ukraine to other countries and private firms that are looking to take advantage of this situation. And so again, if you are, say, someone more on the left than not and you support unions and workers’ rights, and you are seeing them be violated in Ukraine by its own government, you have this difficult question to untangle. And I actually thought that in this great interview that Bill Fletcher did for us at The Real News in September of 2023 where he spoke with Olesia Briazgunova, the international secretary of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, she actually puts this into great perspective. Let’s play that clip.
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Bill Fletcher Jr.: I’d like you to explain to US workers who might say something like this: The Zelenskyy government is neoliberal, it’s reactionary. Yes, I don’t agree with the Russian aggression, but I don’t agree with the Zelenskyy government. I don’t think we should give any support to anybody. What would you say to someone that raises that?
Olesia Briazgunova: I want to emphasize that there are two different issues: Issues of war, genocidal war that includes massive killings of people, mass graves, torture, killing of children, deportation of children, people who are activists, human rights and labor activists under the threat of captivity in the occupied territories. So it’s two different issues. Yes, we need the support in this direction of fighting for decent work and labor standards. We need your solidarity. But to fight for workers’ rights, we need to survive. We need to survive and ensure that workers’ right to life is ensured. And then, of course, we will fight for better working conditions and decent work. And maybe in peaceful time, it would be more easy to promote our agenda within the social dialogue.
[CLIP ENDS]
Blanca Missé: The US government, the Biden administration has been weaponizing the principle solidarity American people felt for Ukraine, to actually use it against Putin, the Russian state, and weakening it. But it is even more perverse than that because all of these aid packages that were presented in Congress, which supposedly is money that we are sending to support Ukraine, if you look at the fine print, a third of each of these packages was just to restock the US military with more advanced weapons, giving huge contracts to the major war corporations. Another third was to boost NATO, to boost the CIA, to boost international surveillance. Only a third of what remained was to send material aid to Ukraine, which mostly what they send are the old weapons that are not really useful so much in combat today. Not the most advanced ones, not the airplanes, the ones they need to discard.
So they have been using the Ukraine war in two ways. One is, as you were saying, Max, to use the lives of Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken the Russian economy. They have also weaponized the war to impose sanctions on Russia to make it more difficult for Russia to upgrade its industry, its military production. But they also have been lying to American working-class people, telling them that this is about Ukraine [when] this is about boosting their own war machine.
And we have to be honest, we have to explain what’s happening. That does not mean we do not stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian working class. That does not mean we oppose material aid. But we need to explain the aims of this material aid. We need to explain the strings that come attached while we are on the material military side of the Ukrainians, and we fully agree that they need airplanes, weapons, tanks, anything they need to protect the sovereignty of the territory.
As Denys Bondar said in Episode 1, you cannot fight an invasion with pillows. You need weapons. That’s absolutely true. I think the perversity of the US imperial agenda went a step further, and we’ll talk about it later today when we talk about what happened once we combined what’s happening in Ukraine, what is happening with Palestine. Because the last aid package for Ukraine that was proposed by Biden was proposing the same package with aid for Israel and for the militarization of the border to further criminalize and repress immigrants in the United States. So the cruelty, the cynicism, the twisted mindset of the US empire that is supposedly here to support Ukraine, but is, in fact, using this war and the Ukrainian people and the working-class folks in the US to further its imperial aims, it’s absolutely disgusting and outrageous, and we need to be able to denounce it while we build solidarity for Ukraine.
And one of these things you were saying, Max, about this split between being a commentator of what’s happening versus being actively involved, we see that in a lot of the movements here, and I think it has to do with the fact that working people in the US feel really politically disempowered. I think the biggest manifestation of that is in what is supposed to be the most democratic country in the world, the political life is dominated, since the Civil War, by two huge parties which are controlled by money and by major corporate America, and working people don’t have an outlet. There is not a worker’s party. There’s no independent political parties. You go anywhere in the world, you run for elections, you have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 parties. You have coalition governments. Here in the US, folks have kind of accepted that they have to be ruled by one of the two evils.
And when you have interiorized that there is no good that could come from politics, that you have no political agency, that we cannot be in charge of running our country, but we have to defer to one of the two evils, it is logic that the mentality of the lesser of two evils gets applied to read the rest of the struggles, always speaking the less of the two evils.
And I think that’s important to remind ourselves that when we’re doing all of this work to stand in solidarity without exceptions, the first duty we have in the US is to stand in solidarity with ourselves, with working people in the US, to start challenging this imposed hegemony of the bipartisan system in our country so we can finally begin to articulate, one day, independent working-class politics for working people in the US too, not only for the struggles of the oppressed abroad.
I think these things are connected. Our incapacity, most of the time, in the US to read and understand the complexities and the class struggle dynamics of the wars and the conflicts and the national liberation movements and the democratic movements abroad is linked to our conditions here in the US and our political life in the US, which is really poor, and is made poor by the US state to make sure that we do not have a rich political life of debate or struggle of experience with the system so we can eventually liberate ourselves one day.
Ashley Smith: We should never underestimate the cynicism of the US government, whichever party is in power. I always think of the great quote from the American socialist John Reed who said, Uncle Sam never gives you something for nothing. He comes with a sack of hay in one hand and a whip in the other, and the price will be paid in blood, sweat, and tears by the oppressed.
I think we should keep that in mind always when we talk about the US government because the quote you read from the general, Austin, explains very clearly what the US is about, which is totally different than what the Ukraine Solidarity Network and movement is about. The US wants to use Ukraine for its own purposes to weaken Russia and to impose its agenda on Ukraine, which is not in the interest of the Ukrainian people. Because one of the things, to add to what Blanca said about the aid packages, they all came with debt attached to them, and the price of neoliberal restructuring and privatization of the Ukrainian people’s government, social services, and economy, and opening it to the plunder of multinationals, including US multinationals, which Donald Trump drew the logical conclusion by saying that he wants to buy half the country’s minerals — Or not even buy it, just get it through plunder.
So I think there’s the cynicism of what the US is up to we need to be clear-eyed about. Because as we oppose Russian imperialism and its annexationist drive in Ukraine, we should have absolutely no illusions of what the US government is about in Ukraine or anywhere on the planet. They don’t respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, whether under Biden or Trump. They’re after their own interests, not the interests of the Ukrainian people. And they have supported Zelenskyy, who is a neoliberal, who wants privatization, restructuring, and has agreed to all these debt deals for his own corporate backers’ interests.
And that’s why our solidarity is always with working people, with oppressed people in Ukraine and everywhere on the earth, because they have a different project than the capitalist governments and corporate rulers and far-right governments that rule over them, and that’s about liberation. And so our project is collective liberation from below with no illusions in any imperial power or in any existing government anywhere on the planet.
Maximillian Alvarez: I think that you both really importantly hit upon one of the common causes of our intellectual incapacity to see the world for what it is and see what’s right in front of our eyes. We reduce entire populations to the figureheads in their state houses and the official policies reported in the media, and we lose all ability to see things like class, to see the different power structures in a given society that don’t mean that because Zelenskyy said X every Ukrainian believes it and is undeserving of our solidarity. This top-down enforced hypocrisy has been so viciously on display from the time that Russia invaded Ukraine till now, and even before.
And before we head into the break, I wanted to play this clip from then President Biden, which was from April of 2022, that really makes the point here.
[CLIPS BEGIN]
President Joe Biden: I called it genocide because it becomes clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian. And the evidence is mounting. It’s different than it was last week, the more evidence is coming out of literally the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine. And we’re going to only learn more and more about the devastation. And we’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies, but it sure seems that way to me.
Reporter 5: Good evening, and thank you for joining us. At dawn local time, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented and large-scale surprise attack targeting dozens of locations in Israel. Right now, Israeli authorities say at least 200 people in Israel have been killed. The Gaza Health Ministry says 232 Palestinians are dead.
Reporter 6: The death toll across Israel and Gaza has topped 1,300 as the bloody conflict stretches into its third day. Israel today announced a total blockade on Gaza, including food, water, electricity, and fuel. Over 800 people have been killed in Israel, over 500 in Gaza. Thousands more have been injured on both sides of the separation barrier. Hamas says it’s taken over a hundred hostages, including civilians and Israeli army officers. The Israeli prime minister has told Gazans to leave, though it’s unclear where they’d be able to go, vowing to all but decimate the besieged territory.
[CLIPS END]
Maximillian Alvarez: Now, we’ve already mentioned earlier in this discussion Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, particularly on the besieged open-air prison of Gaza, which really rose to new heights after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. We are going to discuss that in more depth in the second part of this episode, and it’s going to be baked into everything that we’re discussing over the course of this series, which itself will end on the anniversary of Oct. 7 with an episode concluding this series focused on Gaza-Palestine.
Right now, in this episode and in this series, we’re trying to walk ourselves and our listeners from the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, all the way up to present day. And in that vein, I think in the period between Feb. 24, 2022, and before Oct. 7, 2023, we were already seeing, and many were calling out, the apparent double standards and the political and humanitarian inconsistencies that would really come to a head when both of these wars were playing out simultaneously in front of the global public.
And from the jump, these double standards were blisteringly, almost shockingly apparent in the way that many mainstream news outlets were covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Of course, there was the infamous example when Charlie D’Agata of CBS News really said the quiet part out loud in the early days of the invasion:
[CLIP BEGINS]
Charlie D’Agata: But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — City where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maximillian Alvarez: And that was by no means an exception. This was a pervasive, racist double standard that was so taken for granted that the people expressing it apparently felt no reserve or shame in just saying these “quiet parts” out loud. Like Daniel Hannan, as well, of The Telegraph, who wrote at the time, “They — ” Meaning Ukrainians — “seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. […] War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”
Now, of course, these double standards were being called out immediately. And in fact, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association released a blistering response to this pervasive coverage that we were seeing at the time. And that statement reads, in part, “AMEJA condemns and categorically rejects orientalist and racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilized’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict. This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected.
“Newsrooms must not make comparisons that weigh the significance or imply justification of one conflict over another — Civilian casualties and displacement in other countries are equally as abhorrent as they are in Ukraine.”
This double standard was pervasive not just in mainstream media, but it was even leaking into social media and the discourse that we were having at the time of the Russian invasion before the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s genocidal, scorched earth response.
You even had viral videos of a young Palestinian, of the famous Ahed Tamimi, who was arrested at age 16 in an altercation with an IDF soldier. That took place in 2017, she was actually in prison for eight months in Israel after that. But you saw a viral video, which was viewed more than 12 million times on TikTok alone, of Tamimi confronting this IDF soldier, but people were showing it as a Ukrainian girl standing up to Russian troops. And that also highlighted not just the racist double standard in the mainstream media, but the media illiteracy of users of social media who couldn’t even understand the double standard that they were embodying in holding up a Palestinian woman as an example of a Ukrainian standing up to Russians.
But it wasn’t just the media, of course. The racist double standards that were really coming to the fore after Russia’s invasion and before Oct. 7 were also made grimly apparent in the treatment of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian refugees who were fleeing the war.
Just to give you a few examples, in March of 2022, we republished this piece by Adam Bychawski, which was titled “’19th-century Racism’ at Ukrainian Border” and reads, and I quote, “Indian students in Ukraine who spent days stranded at the Polish border have told of ‘19th-century racism’ as they watched Ukrainians’ pets allowed to cross before they were. ‘It all comes back to black and white’ said medical student Muhammad, speaking from a hostel in Lviv on Tuesday. ‘They are Europeans and we are just Indians.’ Muhammad, originally from New Delhi, said he and hundreds of other foreign students had been denied access to the Polish border and forced to return to the city, 40 miles away, a few days earlier.”
There was also this example from another piece that we published at The Real News in March of 2022 by the great Molly Shah who wrote about Yemeni students who were fleeing Ukraine. And she writes, “The journey out of Ukraine for both Ahmed and [Mohammed Talat] Al-Bukari was incredibly difficult. They faced racist discrimination at many points during the journey, something that Jarhum — ” Who works with the group Yemenis and Ukraine — “says is a common thread running through most of the stories from Yemenis she worked with. ‘The discrimination on the border was… crazy,’ she said. ‘They prioritized women and children and Ukrainians over all other nationalities.’
“After a 26-hour bus ride from Kharkiv to Lviv, followed by a six-hour bus ride to the border, Ahmed was shocked when he was told he would not be allowed to cross. ‘They asked us if there were Ukrainians in the bus and there were no Ukrainians, [so] they forced us back seven kilometers to the gas station where non-Ukrainians congregate,’ he said, describing the Kafka-esque series of steps he went through before finally being permitted to cross the Polish border. ‘We waited in line for 18 hours, no sleep and no bathroom.'”
And of course, it wasn’t just people trying to enter Poland and nearby countries to Ukraine. NPR reported from here in the States in July of 2022 “Thousands of Afghans that were promised US visas remain on the run from the Taliban. The Biden administration, however, quickly cleared red tape for Ukrainians after Russia invaded Ukraine.” Highlighting again the horrific, racist, and hypocritical actions of our government to selectively sympathize with white Ukrainian refugees while leaving the Afghans that the US had already promised visas to, leaving them out in the cold while seizing on the political opportunity to welcome Ukrainians, thus again pitting people’s natural solidarity for one over the other.
Blanca Missé: I want to say something about this double standard because double standard in the media, it’s a nice way to put it. I want to go back to what I mentioned about the second aid package for Ukraine that was conditioning aid to Ukraine to aid to Israel and aid to the border. Because, in fact, it’s not just a double standard like, oh, we give money to these, but we don’t give money to them. It is even more perverse and cruel. It is if you want to save the Ukrainian people, you need to sacrifice Palestinian lives and immigrant lives. It’s the lives of those ones in exchange for the lives of these ones. And that is, in a nutshell, the core of imperialism, the core of the politics of any imperial state that is not only putting populations in competition but is asking those who are in need, if you want my help, it needs to come at the expense and sacrifice of these other parts of the population.
And so it’s not only the divide and conquer, it’s as if we need to become each other’s the transactional tool to legitimize the genocide of another people to prevent the genocide of one people. This is also the logic of austerity. This is a zero-sum game. There is not [enough] for everybody.
And what we’re trying to say all over and over is that, yes, we can save everyone. Yes, we need to stop all of the wars. Yes, we need to stop all of the genocides. But the system makes it impossible for us to do that because to stop all of the wars, all of the genocides, and have resources for everybody, will require that we working people take control of the system so we can dismantle it, so we can be in the driving seat.
And so in order to even prevent this question from being raised, the framing is a framing of double standard, but even worse, one in exchange of the other. It’s either this, either that. And I think that’s exactly the logic that we are trying to fight back against so we can put forward a true logic of solidarity without exceptions.
Ashley Smith: I just wanted to add to what Blanca was saying about the hypocrisy of the United States and Joe Biden, the idea that, at the same time he’s posturing as in favor of a rules-based order that he’s defending, in the case of Ukraine, he’s enforcing, collaborating in a joint genocidal war against Palestine. And what I think that blows up is the idea that we have anything that could be called a rules-based international order. If you really think about it, the US rules-based international order had Vietnam, had the countless invasions of independent countries by the United States: Panama, Haiti — Many times in Haiti — The war on terror, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And what the US has done in Palestine in particular is such an obscenity and has really delegitimized anything that could be called a rules-based international order.
And imperialists and autocrats all around the world are taking advantage of that and display a similar kind of hypocrisy and double standard. So if you think about Russia posturing as against what is being done in Palestine while it does the same thing in Ukraine, all the powers of the world have these systematic examples of hypocrisy.
And I think the worst is around the question of migration. The racism of the border regime cannot be overstated. It’s impossible to overstate. You look at what the US is doing on the US-Mexico border and the selective treatment of Ukrainians versus the treatment of people from all over the world, especially from Global South countries and, in particular, racialized countries. The racist double standards are there for all to see. The European Union does the same thing. If you look at what the European Union does in the Mediterranean, it’s guilty of mass murder of North African refugees fleeing for sanctuary.
One of the things that struck me most powerfully is when I did an interview with Guerline Jozef, who’s a leader of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and she looked at the double standard that the US applied between Ukrainians and Haitians on the US-Mexico border, and she said very simply, of course Ukrainians should be let in, but so should Haitians. We should be treated with the same standards of respect and dignity of every other human being. And the conclusion of that is the border regime should be smashed. We should have open borders and the free movement of people until we can really challenge what is a fact, is the free movement of capital at the expense of workers of the world.
Maximillian Alvarez: I think that’s beautifully put, Ashley, and beautifully put by Guerline. Again, the response to seeing this racist double standard by which white Ukrainians are welcomed into the country while Haitian migrants, Latino migrants, migrants who are not white Ukrainians are treated horrifically and counted as lesser than human. The response is not to then say Ukrainians should be treated that way too, it’s that we should all be treated to the same universal standard of humanity. That should be the conclusion, but so often we are pushed and prodded and encouraged to feel the opposite.
And I think, honestly, that is the way that the United States and Israel, at the top echelons of their imperial governments, were expecting people to react after the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza that has been going on ever since. They were probably, I think, expecting that Americans especially would feel the same way towards Palestinians and Israelis as we’ve always been taught to feel. But that, of course, is not how things went.
And so I want to ask by way of getting us up to Oct. 7 and up to present day, how you guys feel the unfolding of the war in Ukraine, the unfolding and public display of these racist double standards, how do you think all of that set the stage for how people were going to perceive what was to happen in Palestine, in Israel in October of 2023?
Blanca Missé: In the particular case of Palestine and Israel, the US state had been funding the state of Israel since its inception, and socializing among the US population the fact that we are identified with Israeli people, they’re a legitimate people too, in a state, they are a nationality there, and they’re one of us. They’re the only democracy in the Middle East. We keep hearing this and this. There’s coded language: They’re the only white people like us in the Middle East.
So we are already predisposed by all of these layers of ideology, of discourse, of double standards to immediately extend our solidarity with any Israeli victims and deny humanity and solidarity to Palestinian victims and survivors. The very fact that we are already, even before the Oct. 7 attacks and what happened, we have been supporting the war machine, the occupation, the apartheid regime, and the genocide, the ongoing, slow genocide that Israel has conducted on Palestinian people without ever having any qualms or any major public debate in the US.
When the US was supporting the war in Vietnam, there was a big discussion in the US started by the anti-war movement about who the US should privilege and support. But this discussion has never really happened at the mass level in the United States. There has been a Palestinian solidarity movement that has been reinvigorated since the Second Intifada with the radicalization of youth around the creation of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, the tremendous success of the BDS campaigns. So there has been a beginning of an incipient resistance among specifically younger people who have been questioning these double standards.
But we cannot see that the majority of the US population has been seeing this as a double standard. They have rather considered that almost an Israeli is closer even to them than a Ukrainian. And I think that was the framework that was already in place, that people were, again, having these gut reactions to what happened on Oct. 7.
Ashley Smith: I think that there have been two responses to Israel’s genocidal war. There’s been the establishment response: bipartisan lockstep support for the eradication of the Palestinian people. This is a genocidal war, it’s a joint genocidal war by the US corporate military imperial establishment and Israel’s state, and there has been no debate about it across the political spectrum at the top, or only a handful of people dissenting.
Down below, I think we’ve seen a sea change within the US population towards Palestine, and I think it’s the expression of 15 years of radicalization that people have undergone at the base of society in opposition to all the problems: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, The [Red State Revolt], solidarity with Standing Rock, another wave of Black Lives Matter, and all the Palestine solidarity that kept flashing up through that period from the Second Intifada on and the BDS movement, all of this converged.
And, I think, in particular, Black Lives Matter and the growing consciousness among a new layer of Black radicals about the Black Palestine solidarity that has gotten organized, intellectual expression, people like Angela Davis writing books, drawing attention to it.
So there were the preconditions among a new generation that has been born of the radicalization since the great financial crisis of 2008. That was the preconditions for the explosion of solidarity with Palestine.
The other thing is the deep cynicism about the US government and what it does in the world born of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The deep suspicion among working-class people too, because the number of people that came back maimed, wounded, permanently impacted, and their families permanently impacted by the tens of thousands of soldiers deployed to that war meant there was a bedrock of suspicion.
And so people could see the hypocrisy. Not in the majority, as Blanca rightly says, but a surprising, much larger minority including of Democratic Party voters under a Democratic Party administration that was for a ceasefire. So I think there were preconditions that were built up from below that challenged the establishment’s commitment to this genocidal war, and it gives you tremendous hope.
The thing that’s striking is that there was very little crossover in terms of mass popular consciousness of sympathy with Palestine and sympathy with Ukraine because people saw the manipulation that the US was doing in the case of Ukraine and were suspicious of it in the case of Palestine. They saw the manipulation and fundamentally opposed it. And I think what we’re trying to do in this podcast is get people to see across that division and see the common bounds of solidarity between all oppressed, occupied, and terrorized populations, from Ukraine to Palestine.
So really I think the Palestine radicalization is one of the things that has torn the cover off of US imperialism and torn the cover off of the so-called democracy in the United States. Look at what has happened to Palestine solidarity activists on campuses, in cities, and communities across the country. We are being criminalized because of the threat this movement poses to the US government’s sponsorship of the genocide and its use of Israel as its local cop to police the Middle East to make sure that the US controls the spigot of the world’s largest reserves of oil in the world.
So I see the Palestine solidarity movement as one of the tremendous hopes for anti-imperialism in the world, but not without challenges politically that we need to overcome, in particular on overcoming any selective solidarity within the movement, and instead winning a method of solidarity without exception.
Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s talk about that a little more by way of bringing us around the final turn here, and talk about how the need for this podcast series itself really came roaring out of the contradictions that we were feeling, seeing, hearing, experiencing in the moment that we’ve been in over the past two years, when Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and Russia’s imperialist invasion and war on Ukraine have been occurring simultaneously on the same timeline in the world that we inhabit. Because this is, again, made complicated for your average person who may be seeing and hearing on the news quotes like this from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaking to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Copenhagen on Oct. 9 of 2023:
[CLIP BEGINS]
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: These days, our attention is focused on the Middle East. No one can ever forget what the terrorists did in Israel, thousands of missiles against peaceful cities, shooting people in cars on the roads, men, women, children. No one was spared, streets covered in blood. Israelis themselves, Israeli journalists who were here in Ukraine, who were in Bucha, now seeing that they saw the same evil where Russia came. The same evil. And the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine. The intentions declared are different, but the essence is the same. You see it, you see the same blood on the streets, you see the same civilian cars shot up. You see the same bodies of people who have been tortured.
[CLIP ENDS]
Maximillian Alvarez: Now, of course, there’s a political reality here where Ukraine is dependent on US support to maintain its war effort to stop the Russian invasion. And so by default, if not by ideology, the Ukrainian government is going to have to jump on whatever side it thinks that the United States is going to be on in this Israel-Palestine “conflict” so that it doesn’t mess up its one lifeline to keep fighting its fight against the Russians. And so we want to name, there are multiple reasons why Zelenskyy would make this claim.
But for your average person who’s hearing that claim, again, it forces your soul into this sort of your car stalling out and you don’t know where to go because you have the president of Ukraine effectively trying to square this circle and compare the plight of Ukrainians fighting against the Russian invasion with the plight of Israelis who are, in Zelenskyy’s own terms, the ones who are being victimized by this terrorist invasion coming from Gaza, coming from Palestine.
And perhaps in years past that may have been an easier sell, but it wasn’t this time. That was not a line that, in fact, like you guys were saying, a lot of regular people were not buying this comparison.
Ashley Smith: I think the shortest thing to say about Zelenskyy’s statement is he has it precisely upside down and backwards because the analogy is between Ukraine and Palestine, not between Ukraine and Israel. The analogy on the other side is Russia and Israel. Those are the annexation aggressors in this circumstance. Russia on its own invading and annexing and occupying Ukraine, and in the case of Palestine, the US and Israel invading in a genocidal war against the Palestinian people. So the analogy and the solidarity is the exact opposite of what Zelenskyy said.
It’s important for us in the Ukraine Solidarity Movement to say that because Zelenskyy did a disservice to international anti-imperialism by making it that upside down and backward analogy. If he had said the right thing, then there would’ve been more sympathy with Ukraine’s plight from the insurgent movement from below. And that points to the importance that our solidarity is not with Zelenskyy’s government, but with the people in Ukraine.
And that said, I think there are a couple of things that we have to do to explain where Zelenskyy’s position comes from. First of all, he’s Jewish, and that’s important for all this stuff about Ukraine being a Nazi country. It’s got an elected Jewish leader of the government, so there’s a predisposition to identify with Israel and Zionism. There’s also the fact of a large migrant population, settler community of Ukrainians in Israel, one of a large population there.
That said, Ukraine traditionally has respected the sovereignty in the UN of Palestine and has advocated, whatever you think of it, a two-state solution for Palestine. That’s been the official position of Ukraine — Which I disagree with. I think we should have a secular democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all and the right of Palestinians to return.
I think the most important thing, though, is what the Ukrainian left did in response to this, which was to issue a statement of solidarity and opposition to the genocidal war conducted by Israel. And Commons Journal produced that, distributed, large numbers of Ukrainian intellectuals, trade unionists, and activists, and leftists signed onto that, and they did webinars to try and articulate a different position that gets the bonds of solidarity correct between Ukrainians and Palestinians against the aggressors that they face.
But that just shows that politics is not simple. You’ve got to work at it, and you’ve got to orient people and win arguments. And there’s a live debate in Ukraine about all this that has gotten better over time as the war in Gaza has exposed itself to the Ukrainian population. More people in Ukraine are more sympathetic with Palestine than at the start of the war when Zelenskyy made this upside down and backward statement.
Blanca Missé: Actually in the US, our Ukraine Solidarity Network put out a statement in solidarity with Palestine. And actually, we didn’t put only one statement, I think we [put out] three or four statements. And the importance of that is that as we saw the use of this country rising against the genocide, taking tremendous risks in the campuses, including on my campus, the only condition for us to link up the struggles is to assert from the beginning solidarity with without exceptions.
And the first question the Palestinian movement is going to ask is, OK, I will support your fight against Russian invasion, but will you support my fight for Palestinian liberation? Will you support our demand to end all USAID to Israel now? If you want aid for Ukraine, will you support the demand to end all USAID to Israel now? Because in the same way your people are dying under the bombs of Putin, our people are dying under the bombs of Netanyahu. But the crime is that the bombs of Netanyahu, they’re paid for by the United States, they’re fabricated, they’re built in the United States, many in the state of California where I work and live.
So to be able to, as Ashley says, in many ways, move away from these very top-down, simplistic, opportunistic narratives, to rebuild a more complex, but in the end, also connecting what we were saying with a universal and simple feeling of solidarity. There is a lot of unpacking to do, but most of the unpacking we need to do is to destroy and undo the compartmentalization of struggles that has been put in our heads and reconnect with some fundamental feeling and sense of solidarity, of compassion, of being together and say, I see you struggle. You see my struggle. We might not speak the same language, we might not have the same appearance, but we do understand that we’re going through each other.
What Zelenskyy said and did, it’s tremendously opportunistic, but he’s not the first leader to do that. It might seem as a shock to us, but during the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, there were also opportunistic sectors of the petty bourgeois elite, the Black elite here who were rooting for Japan because they wanted to be against the US. But rooting for Japan meant sacrificing the national liberation movement of the Chinese, and we had a huge Chinese immigration community in the US. So that position was also separating the Black movement from the Asian movement.
Or even worse, during World War II, the Egyptian elites were trying to figure out whether they will support the Nazis or they will support the British because they were calculating who might win the war. But those were opportunistic self-interest positions of these national leaders, elites, economic elites who, like our imperialist governments, they don’t believe in solidarity without exceptions. Nobody from below could in their right mind say, fine, let’s side with the Nazis. Fine, let’s side with Putin’s invasion. Fine, let’s side with Israel’s genocide. That will not be a defensible position ever. But these elites are training us to be calculating.
And again, I go back to this thing: can we save our lives at the expense of these others? Is this a trade we’re willing to make? And this calculating mindset is the number one mortal enemy of the struggles of solidarity. And that’s the point we’re trying to make over and over in our movements. And that’s also the main reason behind this podcast. Instead of calculating, let’s start thinking and let’s start feeling what we have in common to fight for a common liberation.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and as you both said, in so many ways, the need for that message, the need for this series and the need for folks to hear the voices they’re going to hear, the discussions they’re going to hear over the course of this podcast series really emerged out of not only the conflict between people’s solidarity with Ukrainians that was not being equally applied to Palestinians after Oct. 7, but also in the other direction within the growing movement of folks who were in solidarity with Gaza, with Palestinians, was not equally applied back to Ukrainians. And so that itself presented a clear case for why we needed to talk about this and figure out why.
But on that note, I think one thing that we’ve mentioned here that maybe we don’t have time to go into in as much depth on this episode, but has clearly been a major factor over the past two years in public opinion shifting on Israel and really shifting towards solidarity with Palestinians. A lot of that we saw happen in real time.
We saw mainstream Western journalists who were all stationed in Israel while all the Palestinian journalists were being slaughtered in Gaza, and journalists were not being let into Gaza. And so you had this Iron Dome attempt to maintain the long hegemonic narrative of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, as the United States’s permanent ally, as Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims in general as less than human, the terrorist aggressors who hate us and hate democracy because of who they are. You saw that line be enforced and reinforced in the ways that the media was covering the Oct. 7 attacks, the lies that were spread all the way from our White House down the Hasbara propaganda that was being unthinkingly regurgitated through Western outlets, through the mouths of Western diplomats and politicians.
But it didn’t hold, it didn’t have the command over the public mind that it would have in years past. And a big part of that was because regular people were seeing the counter evidence on their phones over social media. They were seeing the livestreamed genocide unfolding in Gaza, on TikTok, on Twitter, on Facebook, you name it.
But there really were insurgent realities, insurgent narratives, like breaking apart that US-Israel media-enforced consensus over the past two years. And when people in this country, people I know, people I grew up with, people like myself who, for years, for our entire lives, never questioned that line about Israel, about its rightness, about its right to defend itself, all that stuff. Here in the United States, you had so many members of the population finally be ready to ask about the other side, to learn about the other side in a way that we’ve never been before.
And when we were ready to finally see that other side, to finally admit that perhaps we did not know the whole situation, people had a wealth of literature, of interviews, of coverage of BDS and Palestine solidarity movements to learn from when they were finally ready to take advantage of them. I don’t think that folks had that when it came to Ukraine as readily available to us if and when we started asking similar questions.
But all of that is to say that in the two years since both Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza and Russia’s continued war in Ukraine have been occurring simultaneously, in as much as the openings that have presented the opportunity for people to feel more solidarity with their fellow workers and human beings in Palestine, what does that look like for Ukraine? What does that look like for Haiti? What does that look like for other parts of the world where the story’s not going to be the same?
And in fact, there was, I think, a really important point made by Daria Savrova in a panel, a Haymarket panel on Ukrainians who were in solidarity with Palestinians, asserting that we do not need equivalence for solidarity. We don’t need the situation in Ukraine to be exactly like the one in Palestine to feel that solidarity.
Ashley Smith: Yeah, I think, Max, you’re entirely right. There doesn’t need to be an equivalent experience of exploited and oppressed people to have the basis of solidarity. I think that point that Daria made is really important because if you look at what Russia has done in Ukraine, it’s horrific, like the mass murder in Bucha, the destruction of an entire city of Mariupol, the bombing of hospitals, the bombing of schools, that’s horrific. It’s not on the scale of what Israel has done in Palestine. And a lot of other wars and other experiences of countries under national oppression and experiencing exploitation aren’t identical, but you don’t need to have the identical experience to identify with people undergoing exploitation and oppression.
And in fact, that’s the hope of humanity, is that those of us down below among the working-class majority, the oppressed majority of the world, we have a basis for solidarity and common struggle and common identification. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this catastrophic moment in global capitalism that we’re living in, in which the scale of the crises and the problems and the wars from Ukraine to Palestine to Congo to Sudan to you name it. We are in an existential moment, and we have to have the hope and the trust in the workers of the world, the majority of the world’s population, that we can forge bonds of solidarity that can challenge all the governments that stand above and enforce this order. In particular, the big powers, the Europeans, the US, China, Russia that stand atop this mess. But that’s the hope of humanity is the bonds of solidarity which don’t require equivalence and identical experience.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and as we’ve already said in this episode, the need for that robust sense of solidarity, that durable sense of solidarity, the ability to know what we’re fighting for in a world that is spinning increasingly out of control is more necessary now than ever because we are living in that existential moment, as you said, Ashley, where it is a new and terrifying era in which the violability of national sovereignty is fully back on the table — And that’s not to say that it was off the table before. The US has been violating countries’ national sovereignty since our settler ancestors came here and genocided the Natives who were here, to say nothing of the wars in Iraq, the wars in Vietnam, the coups in Latin America, all across the world. We’re not negating that.
But we are saying that we are definitively in a new geopolitical era in which even the fiction of the US-enforced international rules-based order has fully collapsed. We are living in a time where Donald Trump can say that he wants to absorb Canada as the 51st state, that he wants to take over Greenland from Denmark, that he wants to turn Gaza into a real estate development, that he wants to retake the Panama Canal. Again, it is not just the United States that is making these kinds of proclamations, it is a world breaking apart under multiple competing imperialisms. This is the reality of what we call living in a multipolar world.
But for that reason, the question of what national sovereignty, what the right to it and the right to defend ourselves and our lands really means in a time like this. I wanted to ask if you guys could say a little more about what listeners who are living through this monstrous moment that we all are living through, what they’re going to get out of this series and why it’s important.
Blanca Missé: We are in a new world order that is still evolving and reconfiguring itself. It’s not like we know the shape it’s going to have, but we know there’s a huge geopolitical crisis. And I think in the midst of this turmoil, we need to be able to resist against all the regressive politics, the wars, the genocides, our own government, the US government, is going to carry out at home and abroad, and at the same time oppose all the regressive politics, wars, genocides that rival powers like China and Russia are going to carry out. And not only China and Russia — We also have the rise of regional powers that are collaborating with them and also oppressing people abroad.
And so when we talk about solidarity without exceptions, first, we need to have an understanding of what brings us together and how to articulate this solidarity. And more importantly here in the US, we need to also provide avenues for working people in the US to stand in solidarity with other struggles without relying on their government, without siding with their government. Obviously refusing to side with sponsoring wars, genocides, sanctions, tariff wars, but also being suspicious of some supposed aid packages and good aims they might have abroad. And the only way to do that is by developing a mutual understanding from below of what solidarity means.
And this is why we’re going to be bringing guests who are international guests, some of them are US-based, who are knowledgeable about the struggles of liberation, who have been active in the struggles of liberation, and also have been thinking through the complexities of developing solidarity without exceptions. And we’re all going to be learning together how, in the midst of this turmoil, how to collectively rethink from below what international solidarity is with a working-class perspective.
Ashley Smith: I want to go back to the moment that we’re in, because I think Trump has ushered us into a whole new phase of geopolitics, that he’s declared an American-first imperialism, a kind of unilateral annexationist, frankly, colonial imperialism that we haven’t heard articulated from the White House in a long, long time. And it’s not isolationist, it’s certainly not pacifist. It’s essentially saying might makes right — The US is going to use its hard power all around the world to get its way in an authoritarian fashion at home and a brutal, unilateral imperialist fashion abroad.
Max went through the list that Trump ticked off. He does want to annex Panama, Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, take over Gaza. These are not just idle threats. He’s really trying to implement them as policies. And this kind of authoritarianism is growing in every country all around the world, particularly in the historic great powers and the new powers. We are really headed for a global clusterfuck of interimperialist antagonisms unlike we’ve seen except in the run-up to World War I and World War II. More annexation, more war, more conflict, more militarism, increased military budgets all around the world. That’s going to produce increasing authoritarianism at home against our rights as working-class people and oppressed people like we’re seeing under Donald Trump, and more aggression abroad like we’re seeing under Trump. But not only Trump, all the other powers are doing the same kinds of things.
And what we’re going to be exploring is how we can bind together through a politics of solidarity, the national liberation struggles, the struggles for self-determination of oppressed peoples, and the struggles of working-class people politically throughout the world. So we’ll be exploring all these themes.
In the first round of episodes we’ll be talking about Ukraine, which we’ve been discussing today in detail, but we’ll do it with special guests from Ukraine about Ukraine’s struggle. We’ll also be then following up with Puerto Rico and then with Syria, with people who’ve actually just come back from the Syrian people’s victorious toppling of the Assad regime. But these episodes are going to be a part of many unfolding over the next year that are going to explore the politics of solidarity and solidarity without exception, which I think has to be the bedrock, the first principle of our collective liberation globally.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hell yeah. Well, I cannot wait to listen to them. And Ashley and Blanca, it is such an honor and a privilege to be producing this series with y’all. For everyone listening, you can find new episodes of Solidarity Without Exception right here on The Real News Network podcast feed. Get it anywhere you get your podcasts. Keep an eye out for those new episodes that Ashley mentioned, which will be coming out every two weeks from now.
And then we’re going to take a little break, and then we’re going to bring you a new batch of episodes. But again, this series is going to be continuing over the course of this year. Please let us know what you think of it. Please share it with everyone that you know, and please support the work that we’re doing here at The Real News Network so we can keep bringing you more important coverage, conversations, and series just like this. Ashley, Blanca, solidarity to you.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ashley Smith, Blanca Missé and Maximillian Alvarez.
Ashley Smith, Blanca Missé and Maximillian Alvarez | Radio Free (2025-02-24T21:54:21+00:00) The old world order couldn’t stop wars in Ukraine and Gaza; the new world order will accelerate more wars like them. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/24/the-old-world-order-couldnt-stop-wars-in-ukraine-and-gaza-the-new-world-order-will-accelerate-more-wars-like-them/
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