The proxy war in Ukraine is also leading to highly strange upheavals in the West. Quite a few staunch leftists (or those who define themselves as such) are suddenly pleading, in intimate unity with conservative agitators, for the use of Western weapons systems against targets in Russia – including Taurus cruise missiles! Getting them to do so is much easier than you think: you just have to bait them properly.
“The Left”, if one may generalize so inadmissibly, was never pacifist in its entirety. On the contrary, decidedly pacifist positions were often showered with scorn and ridicule. But there have always been great personalities at all times who took an unequivocal and eloquent position, at least against certain wars – and often had to pay bitterly for this anti-war effort. This was called “anti-militarism”.
Anti-militarism
Every year in mid-January, we rightly remember Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the personalities of the German left, who are the first to come to mind in this context.
Rosa Luxemburg, who, on the eve of the First World War, in 1912, together with the French socialist Jean Jaurès, succeeded in Paris in committing the European workers’ parties to a general strike in the event of a war (which, however, did not take place when things got serious); who in the autumn of 1913 at an anti-war demonstration in Frankfurt am Main called on the crowd of hundreds of thousands to refuse military service and obey orders: “If we are expected to use the weapons of murder against our French or other foreign brothers, we declare: ‘No, we will not do that!'” and was sentenced to 14 months in prison for this; who suffered a nervous breakdown when the SPD, together with the other parliamentary groups in the Reichstag, voted unanimously on 4 August 1914 to take up a special fund worth billions to finance the war and even considered suicide for a short time; who was interned in various prisons for a total of three years and four months between 1915 and 1918 and was treacherously murdered by Freikorps soldiers on January 15, 1919 and thrown into the Landwehr Canal.
Karl Liebknecht, who had already written a pamphlet “Militarism and Anti-Militarism” in 1907 and was sentenced to one and a half years in prison in the same year for “preparation for high treason”; who still spoke at anti-war events in Belgium and France in July 1914 and on December 2, 1914, was the only member of the Reichstag to have the courage to vote against the approval of another special fund for war financing; who, on May 1, 1916, as the leader of an anti-war demonstration on Potsdamer Platz, uttered the word with the sentences “Down with the war! Down with the government!” and was then charged again with high treason and sentenced to four years and one month in prison, of which he served just under two years; and who was murdered by Freikorps soldiers on the same day as Rosa Luxemburg.
The Trojan Horse
Once again: Even if one sometimes took an anti-militarist position depending on the situation, “the left” was never pacifist. Just as the use of force has never been rejected in principle. Subcutaneously, ideas of ‘just war’ and ‘just violence’ always resonated – at least as long as both were either revolutionary, anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist!
And this is exactly where the left Achilles’ heel lies. This is the point where a Trojan horse can most easily be infiltrated into the discourse, which, if done cleverly, can lure some leftists (or those who think they are) into a Third World War. In the case of Ukraine, it goes like this:
Is it possible to sell certain people who consider themselves left-wing with the thesis that Ukraine is in a “anti-imperialist defensive struggle” or, going even further, Russia must absolutely “decolonized“, then these people have been brought into line most elegantly. Suddenly, they find themselves with a clear conscience not only in the immediate vicinity of smart-woke lifestyle “leftists” such as Baerbock, Habeck and Hofreiter, but also in a front line with the unvarnished agitators Strack-Zimmermann, Kiesewetter, Wadephul and Friedrich Merz. If they had enough guts in their bones, they could happily go into battle as interbrigadists side by side with ultranationalist Ukrainian paramilitaries.
A breathtaking “united front”, indeed!
“Anti-imperialism” …
For most, however, it is enough for the time being to send the appropriate equipment to Ukraine or to make full-bodied declarations to the world from the safe port. Like the top candidate of the Left Party for the European Parliament, Carola Rackete, who voted there in September last year, together with MEPs from left-wing parties from Finland, Sweden and Denmark, for a resolution calling on EU member states to “immediately lift restrictions on the use of Western weapons against legitimate military targets on the territory of Russia”. Some of the “The Left” faction even explicitly voted for the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles. (Measures that ex-US President Joe Biden, of all people, had long refused to take on the grounds that he wanted to avoid a direct military confrontation between the US and Russia at all costs!) In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, the former captain of Sea-Watch explained this as follows:
“To be left-wing means to be on the side of the oppressed, whether in Palestine, Kurdistan or Ukraine. If we agree on who is right and who is wrong, we can only act in that direction. I have always been critical of NATO, but in this case the situation is very clear: it was Russia that invaded Ukraine for the second time after Georgia. Putin does not recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and wants to destroy it. There is a clearly oppressed people and it is our duty to help them defend themselves. It is not a question of East or West, of Russia or NATO. It is a question of imperialism. We must help the weaker to defend themselves against the abuses of the stronger, and Russia is clearly stronger than Ukraine. For this reason, the EU must continue to supply weapons to Kyiv and allow it to attack on Russian territory.”
Anyone who knows so quickly who is good and who is bad here, who almost reflexively believes himself to be on the right, no: just side and acts accordingly, naturally does not need to concern himself with an intensive analysis of the prehistory of this war and its causes. The fighter against injustice assumes that with her commitment to the “oppressed” she would drag us all into a war with Russia in the worst case – Putin’s threat with the atomic bomb is only “a bluff” – approvingly accepted!
In a word: Anyone who fights against imperialism, i.e. is an anti-imperialist, may, if necessary, risk the very big war in Europe, even the world war – a truly breakneck maneuver, which (and here Ms. Rackete is quite consistent) the father of the left-wing theory of imperialism, a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, would certainly not have refused his blessing.
… and “Decolonize Russia!”
Some people – they also see themselves as leftists – are even more colourful and take this opportunity to fillet the entire Russian Federation, pardon me: decolonise it.
The idea is not entirely new, and its representatives have been in the starting blocks again since February 24, 2022 at the latest. Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, would At the beginning of the 1990s, “not only the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but also of Russia itself, so that it can never again pose a threat to the rest of the world.” What was missed back then – “to smash the Russian Empire” – is now finally to be made up. End of May 2022 wrote the American author Casey Michel in the prestigious magazine The Atlantic:
“The West must complete the project started in 1991. He must try to completely decolonize Russia. As soon as Ukraine fends off Russia’s attempt at recolonization, the West must support the complete freedom of Russia’s imperial subjects.”
And it did not stop at pompous demands. A “Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum” founded in May 2022 – it met on 31 January 2023 at the European Parliament in Brussels, among other places – lists a total of 41 regions of the Russian Federation that need to be transformed into independent states! Among other things, there is a black earth republic (prospective capital: Voronezh), a Volga republic (Samara), the United States of Siberia (Novosibirsk) and a Pacific Federation (Khabarovsk), already with the appropriate national flags. (By the way: Nationalist Ukrainians have already come up with a new name for the remaining Russian state: “Muscovy”!)
In Western Europe, not only hardliners such as the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Commission Vice-President Kaja Kallas jumped on the decolonization bandwagon, but also some leftists jumped on the roast, above all the taz and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which promptly organized an “11th European History Forum: Decolonize Yourself!” in November 2023. In short: European leftists and staunch neoconservative circles of the “Single World Power” smell decolonialist morning air in intimate unity! (Significantly, one does not come up with the idea of dismantling the Western hegemonic power itself under this motto …)
The consequences if Pandora’s box were actually opened? The bloody wars of the early 1990s in the post-Soviet space – Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova – and in the collapsed Yugoslavia send their regards!
But that’s not all: Since 2020, the nuclear doctrine of the Russian Federation has provided for nothing less than the possible use of nuclear weapons in the event of a threat to the state’s existence. Perhaps this should be taken into account before briskly trumpeting breathtaking demands for decolonization into the world.
Translated and edited by Hans Seckler