While the quotes lack appropriate context, all include links to sources.
Taken collectively, they make for depressing, indeed exhausting, reading. These are the kinds of quotes you can often hear on some of Russia’s talk shows, which The Atlantic‘s Tom Nichols today aptly described as “a hallucinatory experience, a kind of febrile nightmare shot on sets that look like a dark mash-up of a manic game show, Fox News, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But the creepy star-chamber vibe and the vertigo-inducing camera work are perfectly suited to the deranged rantings of the hosts and guests.”
Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, an Australian-based journal that calls itself both a “journal for a post-Cold War left” and a journal for “Socialism of the 21st century,” has been publishing excellent material on the continuing Russian war on Ukraine.
An interview with Hanna Perekhoda, a University of Lausanne Ph.D. candidate in history who was recently featured on Democracy Now!, has also just appeared at Links’ ecosocialist “sister publication,” Green Left. Federico Fuentes’s interview with Perekhoda, entitled “Ukraine: Peace in Donbas ‘requires the complete withdrawal of Russian armed forces’,” is one of the most thorough yet concise summaries of the entire conflict and well worth reading, especially for its insights into the Donbas region.
The Links web site devoted to “special coverage” of the war includes an exhaustive listing of links to articles from the Ukrainian left, on Russian resistance to “Putin’s war,” and covering global and historical dimensions of the current crisis. It is an excellent resource.
Writing in the Marxist journal Spectre, Moscow-based historian, political theorist, and cultural activist IlyaBudraitskis considers whether and how the term “fascism” is an appropriate descriptor for Putinist Russia. His article “Putinism: A New Form of Fascism?” draws on Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, and other leftist thinkers to argue that Putinism is not an aberration, but is an outgrowth of the market rationality and “social atomization” of neoliberal capitalism in its “late” crisis phase.
In attempting to impose order on a crisis-ridden world, he argues, Putinism is a form — the clearest and most intensified to date — of a new “fascism from above.” Where in the first decade of this century, Putin’s “neoliberal authoritarianism” relied on technocratic management and “mass depoliticization, associated with increased consumption, enjoyment of ‘stability,’ and a focus on private life,” from 2011 it “began the process of ‘fascistization,'” by which the leader transformed himself into the defender of the “traditional family,” the “silent conservative majority,” and the “besieged fortress” of Christian Russia. Finally, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the regime took “only weeks to establish a new political order,” which it did “with the utmost ferocity” and brutality.
Budraitskis concludes:
This is the “normality” and familiarity of Putin’s regime: it oversees the passivity and atomization of society, the reactionary anti-universalism of its rhetoric, multiplied by the utmost cynical rationality of its elites. And it is worth explicitly calling it fascist, not only because it fits that definition, but also so that the emancipatory movements of the present can understand the scale of the global threat to our common future.
A promising new initiative, entitled SONIAKH Digest, was launched this week by an editorial collective “of artists, curators, journalists, editors, media experts and academics” from Ukraine and beyond. It describes itself as
a platform amplifying voices and visions from Ukraine and those of Ukraine’s allies and neighbors — by artists, activists, and scholars — in response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and its worldwide propaganda machine.
The title references the anonymous woman handing out sunflower seeds to invading Russian soldiers, described here.
The online publication and affiliated think tank seeks to counter misinformation, disinformation, negative stereotypes and propaganda that obfuscate, relativize and undermine the efforts of Ukrainians to defend themselves against the Russian colonial invasion. The initiative is embedded in the context of contemporary art, using the artistic medium to enhance strategies of public communication. The curatorial strategy merges a variety of media with academic analysis and journalistic integrity to reach diverse audiences. SONIAKH digest reincarnates and mutates the archaic journalistic tradition of the “digest” as an outlet where information, propaganda, analysis and artistic production are collated, summarized, illustrated and amplified for a general audience.
The journal Spilne/Commons is continuing to publish incisive and probing left-wing commentary on the Russian war on Ukraine. A collectively written editorial, “Support Ukrainian Resistance and Disempower Fossil Capital” (Sept. 27), takes on and debunks the arguments of a group of German leftists who recently argued (essentially) for an “anti-militarist” capitulation to Russian goals. Meanwhile, Vladislav Starodubtsev’s “International Solidarity: How Foreign Leftists are Helping Ukraine in the War” (Oct. 4) identifies several organizations on the global left who are appropriately supporting Ukrainian resistance, and who therefore make up a kind of pro-Ukrainian alternative within the international left.
The journal is also organizing a conference to take place October 21-23 on “Reconstruction and Justice in Post-War Ukraine.” Topics will include socio-economic development in the post-war context, energy sustainability, labor rights, housing, the role of the Ukrainian left in the Russo-Ukrainian war, and “the crisis of hegemony, imperialism, and challenges to world security.” The international, online conference will be open to the public. Conference details can be found at the journal’s Feuerbach 11 conference web site.
As the war drags on and the brutality and terrorism of Russian aggression continue, achieving depths of depravity barely imaginable just one year ago, the news of the day — Putin’s announcement of a draft and the mixed Russian responses that greeted it (ranging from visceral protest to quiet flight to media discombobulation to further fascist frenzy), the kidnapping and subsequent release of the director of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, Ukrainian armed forces’ victories in the northeast and southeast — all seem like blips on a screen that continues to flicker its emergency signal to a world gradually, and increasingly, tuning out.
There is of course much that I could be sharing here on this blog, but most of it is easily found. The New Yorker’s David Kortava’s piece on Russian “filtration camps,” for instance, makes for suitably depressing reading. The camps, according to Human Rights Watch researcher Tanya Lokshina, are used for multiple purposes, including for “processing civilians for transfer to Russia, screening for combatants and saboteurs, gathering military intelligence, soliciting false testimonies of war crimes committed by Ukrainian soldiers, collecting personal data on the civilian population, and purging the occupied territories of residents insufficiently loyal to Moscow.”
The piece ends with its central figure, Taras, speaking of Mariupol “not as a real place in the world, under temporary occupation by the Russian Federation, but as a memory or a dream, a phantom city situated somewhere in the distant past. ‘I would really like to return there, but Mariupol doesn’t exist,’ Taras said. ‘There’s nowhere to return to.'”
The genocide continues. For those with doubts about the fascist nature of Russian mobilization, a glimpse of the “Holy War” rhetoric celebrating the “annexation” of parts of eastern and southern Ukraine — “holy war” against “madmen, perverts, and Satanists” — should suffice to remind us what the world is up against. The response is somewhat tepid, showing that many of those present are bussed-in state employees; if anything, this is fascism-from-above.
Over 40 expert Ukrainian and international speakers – architects, artists, historians, economists, poets and others – will gather this September to discuss Ukraine’s past, present and future in light of Russia’s ongoing invasion. The overall theme of the conversation will be reconstruction: broadly-conceived to refer to the rebuilding of architecture and infrastructure, but also of institutions, social bonds, individual and collective bodies and minds.
The symposium will take place virtually over the course of three days from September 9−11. The official website for the symposium, along with more information about the event, can be found here: https://reconstruct.in.ua/. To register, please follow this link. Accompanying links to the symposium’s Instagram and Telegram channels can be found here.
The round table discussions held over each of the three days will range from housing, preservation, masterplanning, the political and economic challenges of reconstruction, the impact of gendered and sexual violence, remediation of the country’s psychological trauma, among many other subjects.
WNYC’s On the Media stands out among media-analysis podcasts. Its latest program, “Russia’s War,” focuses entirely on Russia and the war in Ukraine, and it is excellent.
All three segments — on the crackdown on Russian independent media, “info ops” (information warfare), and one person’s (journalist Anastasiia Carrier’s) experience unlearning Kremlin narratives — are well worth listening to. The latter sounds a lot like the kinds of things people go through when they leave “cults” (religious or political), so there are even lessons here for how to deal with family members you may have lost to QAnon, MAGAworld, and their cousins in other countries.
Meanwhile, they have just added an additional 15-minute segment on Ukrainian media called “Big Tech vs. Ukraine’s Local Media,” which examines how Facebook/Meta and Google/Alphabet (including YouTube) have, contrary to popular belief, been supporting Russian state media at the expense of independent Ukrainian media.
The left lacks a unified theory of geopolitics, capitalism, war, and movement strategy to act as a reference point for its internal discussion. It lacks even a range of contending, explicitly articulated theoretical perspectives drawn from within its own ranks, and consistent with its broader world view, that clearly describe the lines of debate.
What it has instead is a mess of half-examined folk-theories, sentiments, and habits of argument. These have been drawn impressionistically from recent history, borrowed selectively from philosophically incompatible traditions—such as realism—or half-excavated from the bedrock of the left’s own past.
The article draws in depth on Vladimir Lenin’s own writings and positions to show that the founding father of the Soviet Union, for all his contradictions, had a much more nuanced understanding of war than today’s “anti-war left” has shown itself capable of. In his conclusion, Dale argues that the war in Ukraine
pits a flawed democracy against a personal autocracy; a social system with the potential for evolution against one hard-cased by a police state; and national self-determination against colonial annexation and cultural annihilation. Whatever one thinks, strategically, of Ukraine’s manner of handling its relations with the West and Russia, these are the matters at stake, and the primary ground on which the question of military support should be decided.
