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The spread of the “constitutional sheriffs” movement—which claims that local county sheriffs are the supreme law of the land, capable of overruling federal and state laws, as well as prohibiting federal and state agencies from enforcing them—throughout rural American sheriff’s offices has often seemed like a quaint but localized problem: Sure, having set themselves up as laws unto themselves, they seem to always run their jurisdictions like private fiefdoms, but it doesn’t affect people outside those counties.
But we have in fact seen—notably in the case of Klickitat County, Washington’s “constitutional” sheriff, who undermined the entire state’s ability to regulate the hunting of endangered mountain lions—that in fact their actions can have broad consequences. That’s especially the case with Michigan “constitutional sheriff” Dar Leaf, who was exposed recently spearheading a broader effort to enlist other sheriffs in seizing voting machines from local election officials to ostensibly prove Donald Trump’s Big Lie about fraud in the 2020 vote.
Today’s U.S.-orchestrated war in Ukraine has been a boon to the crisis-ridden capitalist elite with skyrocketing war spending at record highs
Serious political analysis on the left always begins with the facts. Substituting abstract theories not based on facts is always a deadend for the socialist movement, today terribly divided over how to evaluate and act on the unfolding and complex events attendant to the Ukraine War and the Russian invasion.
Let U.S. begin with some hard facts and context that are today tragically absent from the assessments of large sectors of the left and antiwar movements in the U.S. and worldwide.
2014 Maidan Square fascist rooftop snipers
The Ukraine tragedy began in February 2014 when rooftop fascist snipers opened fire on Maidan Square Kiev protestors assembled to resist the Victor Yanukovych government’s corruption and austerity measures. The fascists murdered almost 100 in cold blood, including some of their own for good measure. Yanukovych, the elected president, was instantly blamed and pilloried by the world’s corporate media, paving the political road for what followed. He fled for his life.
These facts were attested to by U.S. representative to the European Union, Victoria Nuland. They were based on her taped remarks. No one has denied them. The transcript is readily available on the internet. Nuland revealed that the rooftop assassins were of the fascist Svoboda Party and Right Sector ilk and not Yanukovych’s police or military. The armed thugs had come from across Ukraine and beyond to dominate the Maidan events. U.S. Senator John McCain shared the stage with fascist orator and Svoboda Party leader, Oleg Tyahnybok, while Nuland handed out U.S. friendship cookies. McCain roused the crowd with promises of “democracy, freedom and independence,” contingent, of course, on Ukraine’s reversing the government’s already-approved bail out agreements with Russia.
The fascist Svoboda Party leader, Andriy Parubiy led the storming of the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, barring the two largest and majority parties from entrance. Some were previously armed and trained at U.S.-organized training camps in western Ukraine. Others secured weapons by storming local police stations.
The fascists declared themselves the new government
The March 5, 2014 on-line British Channel 4 news account told the story well: “The man facing down Putin’s aggression as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy. He oversees national security for the nation, having previously served as [self-appointed] ‘security commandant’ during the anti-government protests in Kiev.”
Channel 4 identified Parubiy as a member of fascist Svoboda Party and a founder of its pro-Nazi predecessor, the Social National Party, which traces its roots to the pro-Nazis Ukrainian movements of WWII. The British television station’s account continued: “Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector—a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine.”
Other Svoboda neo-Nazis leaders instantly “elected” to the top echelons of the coup government were Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych, Ecology Minister Andriy Mokhnyk, Agriculture Minister Ihor Shvaika, and acting Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitsky. In 2016 Parubiy became Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament.
The fascists in power instantly banned the Russian language from schools and public institutions. They ordered the Ukrainian Army, replete with its now formally integrated fascist Azov, Aidar, Dnipro and Tornado battalions, to march on the Donbass in the east to take control of this largely Russian-speaking population. Now with “government” approval, they attacked anti-coup demonstrators across the country. In Odessa, they murderer 48 coup protestors outright, setting a trade union building afire and slaughtering survivors who were compelled to leap off the flaming edifice. The coup “government” and its subsequent manifestations, formally “rehabilitated” the infamous. WWII-era fascist leader Stephan Bandera, designating major streets in his name, despite the objections from European Union leaders. Bandera was a Nazis collaborator whose troops slaughter tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews at the onset of the war when Hitler’s troops entered Ukraine.
All leftwing parties were banned by the coup government. The bailout agreements negotiated by the Yanukovych government with Russia, on terms far less onerous than those offered by the European Union, were revoked, and instead, an economically punishing “Association Agreement” with the European Union, that largely subordinated Ukraine to the -dominated International Monetary Fund, was approved.
U.S. appoints Ukraine president
The question then was immediately posed. Who would take Yanukovych’s place? Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, made that decision. Again, in her own taped remarks, Nuland named Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a hard right member of Fatherland, the ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian formation. The Europeans, especially the Germans, wanted a more moderate figure to head Ukraine. They favored Vitaly Klitschko, a boxer turned politician with more moderate views than Yatsenyuk. During the hacked call, Nuland blurted out, “F***K the EU,” and, of course, the U.S. pick, Yatsenyuk, became the Prime Minister of Ukraine, forming a coalition governing majority with the fascist Svoboda Party. The coup’s finance minister was U.S. citizen and high-ranking diplomat, Natalie Jeresko, who was granted Ukrainian citizenship the day after the coup. Joe Biden’s son took a position on the board of Ukraine’s largest natural gas company earning a monthly salary of $50,000.
The U.S.-backed rump government declared itself the leader of the nation. Nuland remarked in her intercepted phone call, that Vice President Joseph Biden, in charge of the Ukraine events at that time, would give the ultimate “atta boy” to the coup leaders. The U.S. had previously laid the ground for the coup, pouring $5 billion into Ukraine over the years to support hundreds of NGOs aimed at moving Ukraine into its orbit, one way or another. To our knowledge, none of the facts above have been refuted.
U.S. military base established in Ukraine
Shortly after the 2014 coup, in 2015, the coup makers established the so-called International Peacekeeping and Security Center, a U.S.-run western Ukraine military base, near the Polish border, that had been, according to the March 14, 2022 New York Times, “a hub for Western military troops to train Ukrainian forces since 2015.” The Times added, “Troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, among others, have trained 35,000 Ukrainians there under a project called ‘Operation Unifier.’” This is the “operation” that aimed to forcibly “unite” western Ukraine, with the Russian-speaking eastern and southern populations that rejected the fascist coup. U.S. paid troops included the modern-day descendants of the privatized Blackwater forces of Erik Prince that slaughtered civilians in Iraq during that “weapons of mass destruction” regime change war that killed 1.5 million Iraqis. Need we note that with the exception of Sweden, all the above nations are NATO affiliates, training, arming and financing non-NATO Ukraine to wage war on behalf of NATO’s U.S. puppet master?
Ukrainian Army desertions
Here we add that the official Ukrainian armies in the east and south also rejected the 2014 coup as they did orders from the coup government to turn their guns on the Russian-speaking populations. Indeed, with near zero exceptions the Ukrainian soldiers deserted the Ukrainian Army and joined the Russian Army without a shot being fired. The same with the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population in Crimea. They voted 97 percent to affiliate with Russia in a referendum result contested by virtually no one. The turnout was 87 percent.
The March 14, 2022 Times article concludes, “But Western nations withdrew their forces ahead of Russia’s [February, 2022] invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the base has been used by Ukraine to train and organize the thousands of foreigners [from 28 nations] who have arrived in the country and volunteered to help defend it.” This single paragraph comes close to defying rational explanation, unless, of course, it is The Times’ explanation of the instant transformation of a secret U.S./NATO military base operating on Ukrainian territory into a solely Ukrainian-run base aimed at training the Ukrainian version of jihadist terrorists. No doubt these instantly discovered “foreign fighters” suddenly flocking to defend “Ukraine’s freedom” are akin to those jihadists murderers armed, trained, financed and deployed by the U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchies to take down the Syrian government in that ten-year failed U.S. regime change war. 500,000 Syrians died in that U.S. regime change horror. By all accounts, today’s Ukrainian “freedom fighters” were drawn from the ranks of Europe’s growing fascist and far right fanatics. Ukraine has become their central focus.
Imperialist obfuscation
From 2015 to just before the Russian invasion, that is, for seven years, the U.S. and NATO forces have been arming, training and financing, inside Ukraine, the coup government’s war against the Russian-speaking population. That war has killed some 14,000 people in the Donbass and wounded 50,000, mostly civilians. That the victims are pilloried for defending their lives and for seeking and obtaining Russian aid, constitutes yet another travesty of fundamental human and democratic rights, not to mention the right of an oppressed people to self-determination, that is, to be free from annihilation at the hands of the U.S.-installed fascist coup government.
Refugee crisis
We will add here that in addition to the refugee tragedy of some two-plus million Ukrainians fleeing the war to the west, mostly to Poland, almost 800,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians have fled to the east, that is, to Russia. We stand in full solidarity with the terrified war refugees fleeing to the east and west. Yet we aim our main fire against the U.S. government and its U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist alliance, centrally responsible for the still unfolding Ukraine catastrophe. We add that we categorically reject the coup government’s segregating out Ukrainians of African and Middle East origin, who have been shunted to the end of the line in the face of NATO ally’s racist, white supremacist policies refusing to accept immigrants “who don’t look like us.” Yesterday’s Polish and Hungarian NATO governments, whose, virulent anti-immigrant venom helped power them to office, have become today’s instant converts to the U.S. “humanitarian” orchestrated agenda!
Russian public opinion polls
An April 2, 2022 front-page article by Anton Troianovski, Moscow Bureau Chief for The New York Times, previously Moscow Bureau Chief of The Washington Post, who spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York, apparently missed the eye of U.S. government censors. Entitled, “Shaken at First, Many Russians Now Rally Behind Putin’s Invasion,” Troianovski wrote, “The public’s endorsement of the war lacks the patriotic groundswell that greeted the annexation of Crimea in 2014. But polls released this week by Russia’s most respected independent pollster, Levada, showed Mr. Putin’s approval rating hitting 83 percent, up from 69 percent in January. Eighty-one percent said they supported the war, describing the need to protect Russian speakers as its primary justification.” [Emphasis in italics added.] That some three-quarters of a million Russian-speaking Ukrainians, mostly from the beleaguered Donbass region, have fled the fascist-led attacks, undoubtedly weighed heavily on the poll results. That Levada is described as “Russia’s most respected independent pollster,” is even more revealing. For the past eight years, prior to the Russian invasion, a state of perpetual war has prevailed in the Donbass region, with the U.S. government backing the reconstituted and ever U.S./NATO reinforced Ukrainian Army’s unrelenting attacks – spearheaded by fascist troops that have been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian army and National Guard.
Putin’s current popularity notwithstanding, there can be no justification for his repression of dissent, including those who disagree with his war policies, including some of our own comrades in Russia with whom we disagree. In the U.S., Biden’s repression takes on the character of the classic iron fist in a velvet glove, wherein the virtual monopoly of the corporate media enforces an Orwellian consensus. And even here, when a rare ray of light breaks through the social media blockade, it is increasingly stamped out by the online censors resort to exclusion and banishment. Even here, we must add, that Biden’s approval ratings, at barely 40 percent, tells us in Shakespeare’s words, “All is not well in Denmark.”
The Minsk Protocols
The early post-2014 coup years were punctuated by a series of negotiations referred to as the Minsk Protocols. Signed on Sept. 5, 2014 and Feb. 12, 2015, after negotiations between the Ukrainian coup government, Russia, Germany and France, they were purportedly aimed at stopping the bloodshed via a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front lines, release of prisoners of war, and a Ukrainian constitutional reform granting self-government to specified areas of Donbass. In practice, none of these Minsk Protocols were implemented, as the Ukrainian Army’s ceaseless incursions into the Donbass region aimed at subjugation and conquest as opposed to pursuit of a negotiated settlement. Some 100 “ceasefire” agreements were repeatedly violated, while the fascist-led Ukrainian military wreaked untold horror and devastation on the population. Pressured by the U.S., the Ukrainian government refused to implement the Minsk-projected elections in Luhansk and Donetsk. Endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution, the gist of the Minsk accords was to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine via a federalization process that would return the breakaway republics in exchange for their local autonomy. The latter implied that the resources of a federated Donbass, especially its vast fossil fuel reserves, and access to pipelines, would be under the control of local/regional governments, a proposition that the U.S. outright rejected. U.S. imperialism has since shifted the Ukrainian goalposts, in essence, moving to obliterate controlling Ukrainian capitalist fossil fuel interests in the east in favor of the U.S. corporate oil monopolies – yet another U.S. imperialist oil war if there ever was one.
Welcome to the embrace of the imperialist war machine
Today, admission to the good graces of the U.S. imperialist establishment requires hailing the “democratic” U.S.-led NATO imperial war pact. We decline the invitation. We decline to condemn the beleaguered Donbass people for asking for Russian aid and receiving it. We decline to condemn the Ukrainian and Russian-speaking populations’ opposition to the U.S.-engineered fascist coup and its U.S./NATO perpetuation. We decline to condone NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and its establishing nuclear weapons along Russia’s 1500-mile border. That 27 million Russians died in fighting Hitler’s fascist WWII invasion has not been obliterated from Russian popular consciousness.
And we decline to join the near-deafening bi-partisan war cries, echoed daily by virtually every U.S. corporation, every military contractor, every oil behemoth, every major media outlet and every politician to pursue war in Ukraine without hesitation. If there is any U.S. debate over the war among the corporate parties it is over whether to risk nuclear war via the U.S. implementing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, a doomsday scenario if there ever was one. Meanwhile, President Biden’s $33 billion pledge to Ukraine’s military was upped to $40 billion in a near unanimous vote in Congress, while Biden took the stage at a Lockheed-Martin plant to encourage workers to spare no effort in manufacturing deadly Javelin anti-tank missiles. The U.S. war machine is operating at full-throttle.
For an independent socialist Ukraine
We harbor no illusions in the class nature and politics of Putin’s Russia. We have long ago characterized Russia as a lesser capitalist-imperialist state headed by a predatory capitalist class of Stalinist origin. Putin‘s statements citing Czarist Russia’s Great White Russian Empire’s imperialist claim to Ukraine and Putin’s repudiation of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky’s historic championing of an independent socialist Ukraine must be condemned by all serious antiwar and socialist fighters. We have no truck with Russia’s 83 billionaire capitalist elite as we have none with the 780+ U.S. billionaires and China’s 1000! We note with revulsion that today’s neo-fascist and far right newfound U.S. allies in Poland and Hungary were yesterday’s Putin admirers. We note with contempt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s newly-proclaimed affinity for Zionist Israel’s model of a militarized state aimed at the subjugation of oppressed people.
Vladimir Putin’s government is no friend of working people. The recent Russian Army intervention in Kazakhstan to crush a nationwide working class rebellion informs us once again that placing political confidence in any capitalist government or leader is inimical to fundamental socialist principles.
The fight for an independent socialist Ukraine today resides only with the workers of Ukraine and Russia and never with their capitalist oppressors, whether in Ukraine, Russia or NATO. The construction today, of mass socialist parties, however difficult, aimed at breaking the capitalist-imperialist stranglehold on every aspect of public life, is the starting point for a socialist future free from every form of exploitation, oppression and denial of human dignity.
Any notion that political or military support to the present U.S.-puppet Ukrainian coup government is the guarantor of Ukrainian independence is as fundamentally flawed as granting support to any of the myriad U.S.-installed governments the world over. The recent U.S.-forced exodus from Afghanistan stands out as a classic example, where after 20 years of U.S. war and occupation, the U.S. puppet government there lacked the slightest credibility among the Afghan masses. The same with the U.S. puppet regimes from the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Chile in decades past, to Bolivia, Honduras and Haiti today, to name a few.
The right to self-determination of Ukraine’s oppressed Russian-speaking minorities
The U.S. imperialist government, with 1,100 military bases around the world in 110 countries is by far the world’s greatest purveyor of force and violence In contrast China maintains a single military base outside its borders – in Djibouti, at the Horn of Africa, while Russia maintains some seven military bases, mostly in the former Soviet Republics and one in Syria. U.S. imperialism spends more on its military — at least $1 trillion annually, including the CIA budget — than most of the world combined. That Russia and China are capitalist/imperialist states does not negate our responsibility to assess their actions in the context of unfolding events. Were we to blind ourselves to the reality of the events that transpired in Ukraine since the 2014 U.S.-instigated fascist coup and place an equal sign between U.S. and Russian imperialism, we would be gravely mistaken. We would be substituting the proposition that whoever fired the first shot is to be categorically condemned, rather than assessing what caused that shot to be fired. That U.S. imperialism planned and orchestrated a fascist-led coup aimed in part at obliterating the minority Russian-speaking people, 30 percent of the population, and that the same U.S. government seeks to orchestrate Ukraine’s affiliation to NATO, replete with nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep, cannot be removed from any serious assessment of today’s unfolding Ukrainian war. Neither are we neutral with regard to Ukraine’s oppressed Russian-speaking population’s right to exist, that is, their right to self-determination. They have legitimately sought Russian aid. We do not object to Russia’s providing it even if Putin’s motives for extending it are dubious to say the least.
Without the slightest equivocation, we support this right of all poor and oppressed nations to be free from imperialist war and conquest. This principle fully applies to all beleaguered nations, including Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
In Syria, the Bashar al Assad government fell victim to a U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchy 10-year war that slaughtered 500,000 Syrians. With the U.S.-backed jihadist armies occupying three-quarters of Syria, poised to take Damascus and with the U.S. government’s Secretary of State at that moment, John Kerry, preparing to install yet another coup government beholden to the U.S., the Syrians, exercising their right to self-determination, asked for Russian aid. The result was the defeat of that U.S. regime change horror.
History of U.S. oil wars
The same behemoth U.S. oil monopolies on whose behalf the U.S. government wages war today against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Libya Bolivia, and beyond, were critical players in the monstrous wars that killed millions and raped the planet in years and decades past. Four-plus million were slaughtered in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; 400,000 in Guatemala by U.S.-trained death squads; 50,000 slaughtered by Batista’s U.S.-backed dictatorship in Cuba; 60,000 murdered by Somoza’s Nicaragua dictatorship; 60,000 by Pinochet’s Chilean death squads and tens of thousands more in Argentina, Panama, Haiti, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Brazil – all by U.S.-backed and/or installed dictatorships! The modern era list of U.S. atrocities never ends; 1.5 million were murdered in Iraq; two million more in the U.S.-orchestrated 1980-88 Iraq/Iran War aimed at obliterating both nation’s competitive oil resources; tens of thousands in the U.S.-backed El Sisi Egyptian coup; one million in Afghanistan and today millions perishing in the U.S.-backed Saudi Arabian genocide in Yemen.
Unprecedented fossil fuel plunder in Ukraine
Today the U.S. warmakers have scaled unprecedented heights in a scheme to monopolize the world’s largest fossil fuel markets – Western Europe and beyond – by eliminating cheap Russian oil and gas scheduled to be sent directly through the undersea Nord Steam 2 pipeline. The U.S. scheme, forced upon reluctant German and French officials, contemplates closing existing Russian pipelines and Nord Stream 2 and substituting high cost U.S.-fracked liquid national gas. The coup government’s U.S.-backed military conquest of eastern and southern Ukraine is seen as a prerequisite to completing this barely disguised and latest U.S. fossil fuel war – a first magnitude confrontation at a time when the continued, if not expanded use of this deadly resource, spells doom for all humankind.
Today’s U.S.-orchestrated war in Ukraine has been a boon to the crisis-ridden capitalist elite with skyrocketing war spending at record highs, oil and gas prices at historic levels and monopoly control of basic necessities consciously driving inflation close to 10 percent. Meanwhile, the kept corporate media poses the U.S. warmakers as virtual saints while dissenting views are increasingly obliterated.
- U.S. Out Now! U.S. Hands off Ukraine!
- Abolish NATO!
- No to U.S./NATO nuclear war-threatening “no-fly zones” over Ukraine!
- Self-determination for the people of Donbass!
- For an independent socialist Ukraine
- No to U.S.-backed fascist coups and the establishment of U.S. puppet governments!
- No to U.S. oil wars everywhere!
- $Billions for human needs; not a penny for war!
- For a rapid transition to a safe, clean, fossil fuel free worker-controlled energy system that guarantees quality jobs and security for all!
- Close all military bases the world over beginning with the 1,100 U.S. bases in 110 countries, followed by Russia’s seven bases and China’s single base in Djibouti!
By Thierry Meyssan – Jun 21, 2022
While Stepan Bandera was an agent of the Gestapo and left only the memory (positive for some) of the massacres and tortures he organized, Dmytro Dontsov was—and still is—the reference thinker of Ukranian nationalists. It is he who invented Ukrainian racialism and imagined the fanaticism of Ukrainian nationalists as a weapon.
If in previous articles I have presented the history of the Banderist movement from the interwar period to the present day, I would like to talk here about their ideology.
Their reference intellectual, then and now, is Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973). Although he died in Canada and was buried in the United States, his works have not been translated, but his followers have made them known to us. This absence in the bookstores of other countries explains why he is unknown abroad. However, after a long period of absence, he has become one of the best-selling authors in Ukraine these recent years.
Feeding like the Nazis on his interpretation of Nietzsche, Dmytro Dontsov called for the birth of a “new man” with “a burning faith and a heart of stone” who would not be afraid to destroy the enemies of Ukraine without mercy. Thinker of the “integral Ukrainian nationalism,” he created a philosophy where everything nationalistic is against Russia and against Jews.
He wanted to create an elite people, far from the “egalitarianism of slaves” of the Russian October Revolution and the “universal ideals” of the French Revolution.
He said that the imagination of real Ukrainians must be “fed by the legend of the last battle,” the “denial of what is,” and the “fascinating image of the catastrophe that will bring something new.” They must serve “a categorical order” with “reckless obedience.”
According to him, “Ukrainian nationalism” is characterized by:
- the assertion of the will to live, of power, of expansion (he promotes “the right of strong races to organize peoples and nations to strengthen the existing culture and civilization”)
- the desire to fight and the awareness of its extremity” (he praises the “creative violence of the initiative minority”)
Its qualities are: fanaticism, and immorality.
The fanaticism refers to the religious character of his doctrine. Dontsov notes that this is what makes the warriors invincible. It is therefore perfectly logical that after the World War Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko agreed to work in Munich with the secret society of the Muslim Brotherhood, or that in 2007 their followers were able to form an Anti-Russian Front with Chechen jihadists.
At the beginning of his work, Dontsov was not inspired by Italian fascism or German national socialism; rather he appears to be impacted by the same reasoning as the Croatian Ustasha, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Slovak Glinka, the Polish Oboz Narodowo-Radykalny.
In contact with the Nazis, Dontsov began to claim a mythical geography and history. The “true Ukrainians” were said to be of Scandinavian or proto-Germanic origin and to have descended from the Varegues, a Viking tribe from Sweden. Their ancestors founded the city of Novgorod in Russia and subdued the Russian Slavs.
In this mythology, the “Ukrainian nationalists” are the Good, while the “Muscovites” are the Evil. It is therefore quite normal that the muse of the Svoboda (Freedom) Party, the MP Irina Farion, declared well before the Russian military intervention: “We came into this world to destroy Moscow.”
In 2015, President Petro Poroshenko and his Prime Minister Arseni Yatsenyuk passed a set of laws that on the one hand banned Communist and Nazi symbols and on the other rehabilitated Banderist symbols. In practice, since no one claimed to be a Nazi, the monuments to the victory of the Red Army over the Nazis were destroyed and replaced by others in honor of Stepan Bandera, who was responsible for the murder of 1.6 million of his compatriots, and his master thinker, Dmytro Dontsov.
The Council of Europe criticized these “decommunization” laws, which cast aspersions on regimes in general without mentioning the acts they condemn.
It was as a result of these laws that the motto of the Banderists became part of the official discourse: “Glory to Ukraine.” Of course, I have nothing against this slogan, any more than I have against the cry of the Muslims “Allah Akbar”, but after hearing it sung by the jihadists who wanted to cut my throat I can no longer think that “God is great,” and I am still haunted by what the jihadists mean by it.
Similarly, it makes sense that Ukraine has a legal framework that legalizes a form of racial discrimination. On July 21, 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law, introduced at his initiative, on the “indigenous peoples of Ukraine. It states that Tatars and Karaite Jews have “the right to full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms” (sic). This text, which seems very generous, is not at all so, because it is interpreted by default. It completes the texts recognizing the rights of Ukrainians of Scandinavian or proto-Germanic origin. In fact, it is used by the Courts to deny the rights of Ukrainians who do not recognize themselves in the general definition, nor in one of these minorities, in other words in those who say they are Slavic of Slavic origin. The latter people are not allowed to bring before a court their “right to full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms”.
On March 20, 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky declared in a video posted on his Telegram account, “Any activity on the part of politicians participating in dividing society or collaborating with the enemy will not succeed, and will receive a severe response.” With that, he banned 11 political parties (Opposition Platform – For Life, Sharij’s Party, Nachi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, Derjava, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists, Bloc of Volodymyr Saldo). While most of them were not represented in the single chamber, the Verkhovna Rada, Opposition Platform-For Life was the second largest party in the country. It received 13 per cent of the vote and won 43 of 450 deputies.
Also on March 20, President Zelensky signed decrees banning for five years three opposition channels that had been “suspended” for several months. In addition, he merged all remaining channels under the control of the Security and Defense Council.
So there is no more freedom of expression, neither for politicians nor for journalists. Ukrainian democracy is dead, not from Russian military intervention, but from the will of its own government.
A Council for the Development of Libraries was created on May 5, 2022. Among other things, it must decide on the Russian books that are overloading the shelves. The Minister of Culture and Information Policy, journalist Oleksandr Tkachenko, said that they could become a raw material for printing Ukrainian books on recycled paper.
Book burnings are a classic of dictatorships. This time, we won’t burn anything in public, but we will recycle the paper. It is less conspicuous and more ecological.
Now let’s come to the way of making war. One peculiarity of the Ukrainian army is noteworthy: it does not pick up the bodies of its dead soldiers. All other armies in the world do not hesitate to put themselves in danger for that. To give a dignified burial to their dead is indispensable in their eyes. Not to do so would have disastrous consequences on the morale of their companions. So why does the Ukrainian army act differently?
In Scandinavian mythology, the Valkyries are servants of the god Odin. They ride on wolves. But the Germans represent them on horses. The “Ride of the Valkyries,” set to music by Richard Wagner, announces both the death of the heroes and their glorious destiny in the coming battle at the end of time.
If I understand Dmytro Dontsov’s thinking, this is a preparation for the eschatological battle between good and evil. According to Scandinavian mythology, when a battle was fought by the Varegues, the Valkyries came down to the battlefield riding wolves. They decided who of the brave Vikings would die. Then they took their souls to Valhalla to form with them the future army of the “last battle.” Thus, the men fallen on the field of honor were not victims of the fate, but were chosen for a glorious destiny.
This sacred ideology refers to the “Prayer of the Ukrainian Nationalists,” written by Josef Mashchak in 1922. It is taught and recited in the Banderist youth camps. It is at the center of the ceremonies of the secret Centuria order, which the Banderists introduced into the NATO armies.
The war of the “Ukrainian nationalists” against the Slavs has therefore just begun.
Dobbs is a watershed attack that will come to be known as an infamous consolidation of an unrelenting extremist assault on this country’s gains for equality and justice.
A Growing Layer of Union Activists …
The first thing on everyone’s mind at the conference was the sheer size of the thing. Four thousand people registered. It was a sold-out crowd, and the biggest ever at a Labor Notes conference. Almost every session I went to was overflowing: the chairs were all filled; the walls were lined with bodies; people crouched in all the aisles.
It’s a key point because Labor Notes is one of the ways the most committed, energized rank-and-file activists in the labor movement — representing a swathe of industries and unions across the country and the world — gather themselves and talk to each other.
The fact that this was the biggest Labor Notes conference means that that active, energized layer of activists — helping drive union struggle across the country — is growing.
Not only is it growing, it’s discussing how to fight in a militant, disruptive way.
Striking was a key topic. The Teamsters are preparing to negotiate a contract next year at UPS, and it seems like a UPS strike is on the horizon. Two members of the caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union gave a seminar on Saturday afternoon on how to prepare a strike, based on their own experience in 1997. The panel also explored how to strike during a contract too — something labor bureaucrats have been terrified of for decades.
Another panel explored how to strike without a contract. There, a panelist said labor law is not the source of power — and he’s right. Our power comes from how well we can organize and squeeze the profits we make for the bosses, he said — not waiting for the government to save us. In the same vein, Joe Burns — author of the new Class Struggle Unionism and part of the leadership of the AFA-CWA union — called for a “class struggle unionism” unafraid to break laws when it strikes.
These are all ideas reaching a growing layer of union activists now. And many of the labor activists hearing these ideas were young, and often queer — part of “generation U,” as I’ll say again later, who don’t have the huge weight of an old bureaucracy teaching them to be “careful,” to avoid strikes, to play it safe.
… and a Radical Layer
But it’s not just that the conference was huge or that it was throwing around militant ideas. It’s also that, again and again, it seemed like the huge audiences were far more radical, far more to the left, than many of the panelists themselves. Again and again, they drove the conversation in more radical directions.
For example, not a single official panel title or description on the Labor Notes conference program mentions socialism. But at every panel I saw, the audience brought up socialism and said (in one way or another) that socialism is the goal of our fight.
Another example. One panel said it would tackle how unions should relate to the problem of the murderous, racist police. On that panel sat a member of a nonprofit in Minneapolis. He stood up to talk about how to reduce the tensions between communities and the police. He said, “Well, we know, not all cops are bad, some are really good people.” The audience jeered him: “Fuck 12! Fuck the police!”
During the Q&A, one of my own Left Voice comrades — a rank-and-file activist from SEIU in Los Angeles — stood up. She pointed out that cops aren’t just the descendants of slave catchers. They’re strikebreakers, enemies of every real union. Cops have no place in the labor movement, and we need to kick them out of all our unions and federations to strengthen the movement, she said — to wide applause.
It was just after this that a Minneapolis activist — identifying themselves as queer and Black — stood up. They pointed out the ways that nonprofits worked overtime in the wake of the huge 2020 uprising to co-opt the struggle for racial justice, to rob the movement of its radical energy, and to channel it in safer directions — then led us in Assata Shakur’s chant: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” The crowd cheered them on.
All this seems like an important change from other kinds of LN meetings. In 2021 — just one year after the biggest social movement in history, which was a struggle against racist police — I went to Labor Notes’ “Troublemaker School” in Philly. It was nothing like this.
It was big. But by comparison, it was much tamer. The only session on racial justice and unions was like an HR session from my boss. It called for us (individually) to be anti-racist in our unions — surely a good message. But never did the speakers talk about our own unions’ role in fighting the murderous, racist cops. I raised the issue, but it fizzled.
In fact, the content of our discussions at this year’s conference was a major move to the left from Labor Notes as an organization. The pages of LN never, or almost never, hazard a mention of socialism. They don’t dare criticize the Democrats like even some of this year’s panelists did (I’ll mention them in a minute).
At least part of the reason might be “Generation U” — the new layer of young, often queer, activists driving the new unions. The Starbucks and Amazon unions were a major presence — not only were many of their activists there, but they were the equivalent of labor “celebrities” — cheered at every chance. And we know that younger people are far more likely to be deeply critical of capitalism and open to socialism.
Powerful Contradictions …
But this conference was a showcase for powerful contradictions in this layer of the labor movement — especially around politics.
People were grappling with the problem of the Democratic Party. At multiple sessions, activists raised major, and crucial, critiques of the Democrats — a party that has betrayed, constantly, the labor movement. The highest pitch of that critique came from Joe Burns, at a panel on his new book.
There, for example, Burns pointed out just how toothless and cynical the Democrat promises of the PRO Act are. Those promises face the combined power of U.S. judges who side with the ruling class, not workers. Even if that law could be passed — it almost certainly can’t be — judges are standing by ready to interpret it in the narrowest, most useless way possible. And the Democratic Party came up again in a workshop about organizing and bargaining around abortion rights. Several attendees brought up being let down for decades by the Democratic Party, and the need for a mass movement, led by the labor movement, to win abortion rights in the United States.
But there’s a deep reluctance at the top of our unions to take this logic to its natural end — calling for cutting our unions’ ties to the Democrats and building an independent party for the working class. At a panel that Sara Nelson facilitated, the room was again overflowing. People stood and crouched for lack of chairs in a massive space that could hold hundreds. At one point Nelson blasted the Democrats. She pointed out just how badly Democrats and Republicans both had betrayed labor.
So a comrade of mine in Left Voice put out the obvious point: If the Democrats are so awful to labor, let’s cut ties, let’s create our own, independent party! It was an idea that was met with mad clapping and shouts of agreement.
Nelson grabbed the mic — and waffled. “Workers don’t need their own party. If they have more power over production, the parties will come to them!”
But this is astonishing. It flies in the face of history. Even when unions were much bigger — in the 1950s and 1960s — Democrats worked overtime to co-opt, limit, restrict, and betray the movement. For just one example: Democrats and Republicans stood arm in arm in 1947 to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which radically undercut and hemmed in the ways unions could legally strike.
We see the same contradiction in the fact that, at this meeting for labor rank-and-filers, the LN staff spent so much time and energy preparing for speeches by a Democrat — Bernie Sanders.
Bernie is definitely a reason many young people to socialist ideas. He surely has their ear. But that situation is full of contradictions, too. Despite all this, he serves a party that has refused to lift a finger for labor, that helped usher in the neoliberal revolution against labor, that champions the bombing and murder of working-class people around the globe. In 2020 his run for president helped gather these radical forces on the U.S. Left — but only to endorse Biden, who opposes key working-class struggles: for police abolition, to put up a real fight for abortion rights in the streets — and on and on. Whether he wants to or not, Bernie is helping keep this dynamic going, helping pull radicals into the the Democratic Party, the graveyard of social movements.
And we see a contradiction in how Labor Notes relates to union bureaucracy too. Labor leaders have played a major role in tamping down real rank-and-file struggle — exactly the kind of struggle Labor Notes exists to stir up. And far from shrinking in recent years, that bureaucracy has been exploding in size and power over rank-and-filers.
Surely that bureaucratic system has major contradictions of its own. Nelson isn’t the same kind of leader as the late Richard Trumka. In fact, it was Burns — in the leadership at AFA-CWA with Sara Nelson — who criticized most labor leaders during his panel (and in his book Class Struggle Unionism). But even though the idea of union democracy was much discussed — as it should be! — the critique of bureaucracy, what it is, how it exerts its power, how it tries to control the rank and file — was curiously muted in most of the sessions I went to, as it is on the pages of Labor Notes too.
But all this shows that something important is happening — symptoms of something much larger.
… and Powerful Possibilities
What’s most important in all this isn’t just the lack of imagination in even a stirring, brilliant speaker like Nelson, or the limits of Sanders.
What’s important is that people like Nelson and Burns, and Bernie too, are bellwethers — or canaries in coal mines, or tuning forks — registering something bigger than them, that doesn’t quite have its voice yet — something new, and possibly powerful, at work in a dark way inside labor itself.
It’s true that unions’ bureaucratic leaders have spent many decades in a love affair with Democrats. But this is true even of a more leftward union leader like Nelson, who endorsed Biden in 2020. Still, the fact that Nelson did not champion the Democrats at the conference is a kind of ripple, on the surface, of a force from below requiring her to shift. Labor Notes became — in many cases despite the official programming — a place to critique the Democrats and, at least here and there, tentatively, to think about alternatives.
And the same goes for Labor Notes as a whole. The big, roiling mass audience was constantly surging past the more restricted, narrower limits of Labor Notes as an organization. Here we see a hidden power struggling inside the most energized layers of unions.
Something is stirring inside labor. The goal now is for us to fight to help give it shape and expand its power: for a radical, militant force in the labor movement, breaking free from all capitalist political parties, struggling for radical, bottom-up control of unions — to build a labor movement that could really fight for the overthrow of this rotten system and the building of socialism.
The post Something Big Is Stirring: Report from the 2022 Labor Notes Conference: appeared first on Left Voice.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is waging a full-scale war on modernity. On Friday, the court’s six conservative justices ended the constitutional right to abortion that had allowed American women to enjoy full citizenship and equality (at least in theory) for nearly 50 years. We often talk about legal efforts to undo abortion rights with the phrase “setting back the clock.” That understates the radical project that today’s Supreme Court is undertaking.
To justify overturning Roe v. Wade, the conservative majority argues that abortion is not a right grounded in our history and traditions. Because the right to abortion rested largely on the guarantees of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted in 1868, Justice Samuel Alito notes in his majority opinion that the morality of the 1860s should be applied to pregnant people today.
“By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow,” he writes. Alito then takes his time machine back to 13th century England to build his case that abortion is not, historically, part of our tradition.
It doesn’t take a genius to poke holes in the logic here, or even question this framework. As the three dissenting liberals on the court point out, women were purposefully excluded from both the Constitution and the 14th Amendment by the men who wrote them. “Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights,” the dissent states. “When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.”
In other words: the majority’s reliance on the laws of centuries yore is not a bug, but a feature. Alito and his fellow conservatives on the court have embraced “history” to justify their decisions. History here belongs in scare quotes because the goal of a historical test for the court here seems to be to pick and choose the artifacts they want.
Alito and his fellow conservatives on the court have embraced “history” to justify their decisions. But the goal of a historical test for the court here seems to be to pick and choose the artifacts they want.
Alito did not choose, for example, to understand the 14th Amendment as a rejection of the forced pregnancies of enslaved people. There is ample historical evidence that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended the text to bestow upon freed Americans the right to choose when and with whom to create a family after slavery’s practice of rape, forced birth, and family separation. Nor did Alito choose to interpret English law from the Middle Ages that banned abortion after about 18 weeks gestation as pretty comparable to Roe’s viability framework; instead, illogically, he framed this history as a reason to overturn the right to abortion.
On Thursday, just 24 hours before the court overturned the 49-year-old Roe, the conservative majority invalidated New York state’s century-old law regulating licenses to carry concealed guns. Though New York’s law was enacted in 1913, apparently it was too modern for this court. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that this old law did not fit the nation’s history, then set out a new test for gun legislation that must be based solely in history; his chosen “history” apparently starts and ends sometime before 1913. Once again, “history” is a self-serving exercise in cherry-picking. Thomas himself virtually admits to that by dismissing laws he deems too old and others that simply contradict his view. Within 24 hours, this cherry-picking has led to the contradictory situation of Thomas dismissing 13th century British common law to overturn a gun restriction, followed by Alito citing 13th century cases to justify overturning Roe.
But the contradiction is not the point. Rather, it’s what this hypocrisy demonstrates: that the Supreme Court will use whatever means necessary to take away what makes the United States a modern, functioning democracy. History is the tool, but only when it serves that goal. In his concurrence overturning Roe, Thomas explicitly called for overturning settled decisions that grant a right to contraception, intimate sexual relations, and same-sex marriage—all part of what makes us a modern society rather than a 19th-century style theocracy.
This is not a new project. Nine years ago, Justice John Roberts gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This law is the lynchpin that actually guaranteed the right to vote to Black Americans, arguably helping America live up to its democratic potential. That right has been in retreat ever since.
It’s not just modern individual rights but also our modern government that are now on the court’s chopping block. Next week, the Supreme Court will decide a case about the federal government’s ability to fight climate change. That the Supreme Court is even considering this case is a prime example of its radical agenda and the haste with which it is already ushering it into existence.
At issue is the Clean Power Plan that President Barack Obama’s administration wrote but that is not being implemented any longer. Normally, you need an injury or at least a threat of one to be able to even bring a case to the Supreme Court. Yet this Supreme Court is expected to rule against a policy that isn’t injuring anyone since it is not even in force, in order to take a swing at the modern administrative state.
Suing to stop a policy that literally no longer exists, Republican attorneys general are asking the Supreme Court to limit the Clean Air Act and Congress’ authority to delegate policy decisions to the Environmental Protection Agency. It sounds boring and wonky, but the basics are these: With this case, the court is poised to roll back what federal agencies can regulate, including threats as existential and enormous as climate risk. It’s a regular theme for this court, and this case was clearly so tempting to the conservatives that they took the case even when it should be, as the justices like to say, moot.
This attack on the administrative state may sound small. But it heralds an ominous shift. At its founding, the United States did not have much of an administrative state. Certainly no EPA, not even a Justice Department. Over the last 200 years, Congress has slowly created agencies with the power to function as a modern government overseeing a large and complex country. While bureaucracy is imperfect and frustrating, it funds the vaccines we need during pandemics, ensures our rights, protects our air and water, regulates industries, collects taxes—the list is long, all the way down to trying to save the continued habitability of the planet. A government with a weak and shrunken administrative state cannot protect you—not the air you breathe or your right not to face discrimination or your ability to vote.
Yet with each new opinion, narrowing those protections seems to be the goal. The six conservatives on the Supreme Court will go as far back as they have to—to the 13th century even—to peel away the rights and structures that underpin modern life.
The Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade on Friday, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion. The decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, reversed 50 years of precedent to return the question of abortion rights back to the states.
The ruling has immediate impacts: 26 states are likely to move quickly or immediately to ban abortion; half of those states already have “trigger” laws set in place to ban it as soon as today. Experts worry that without the option of safe, legal abortions, women will die as a result of unsafe terminations or pregnancy complications.
The ruling also throws other fundamental rights into question. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly called on the court to reconsider rulings on contraception, marriage equality, and the criminalization of same-sex relationships.
Far-right activists were ecstatic with the ruling. They immediately began to look forward to enacting the rest of their agenda, eager to implement a nationwide abortion ban, further Christian nationalism, and roll back LGBTQ rights and women’s rights.
Andrew Torba, the far-right Christian nationalist founder of Gab, posted a meme that read, “SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR ABORTIONS WHORES.” An image of Justice Brett Kavanaugh with red lasers coming out of his eyes accompanied it. Torba followed that misogynist celebration with this message: “The Christian takeover of our Christian country has begun.”
Known for his antisemitism, he quickly went on to identify what else he wanted to ban. “Next we need to ban the barbaric act of circumcision, which is also a Jewish sacrament that was imposed on our men outside of their will as mere babies,” Torba declared.
Far-right congressional candidate Laura Loomer—who has said that her white nationalist views will help her get elected to Congress—managed to tie her white nationalism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry to the overruling of Roe. “Forget about the race baiting ‘holiday’ of Juneteenth. Today should be a national holiday instead,” she wrote on Telegram. “And I can’t think of a better way to end the degeneracy of PRIDE month than by overturning Roe vs Wade.”
Rep. Paul Gosar—who asked former President Donald Trump for a pardon after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol—was eager to give Trump, who nominated three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, credit for overturning Roe. Gosar claimed “there is still so much more work to be done to return this country to God.”
“Let’s keep our momentum and push ever forward. For Him,” he tweeted, adding an emoji of a cross. He followed that tweet with this declaration: “We’re just getting started. Welcome to the New Right. Welcome to America First.”
Gosar is friendly with the white nationalist America First movement.
Other far-right actors began fearmongering about abortion rights groups’ reactions to the ruling. After an extreme group calling itself Jane’s Revenge vandalized anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers,” far-right actors painted the picture that riots and attacks on churches are inevitable. Other far-right activists fearmongered about “antifa”—conservatives’ shorthand for anti-fascist activists. (As the Intercept noted, it’s unclear who is behind Jane’s Revenge.)
While it’s “not a non-zero threat,” DFRLab Resident Fellow Jared Holt described far-right messaging around potential riots as “capitalizing on one group to encourage widespread panic.”
Among those painting this picture of chaos was Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “known primarily for creating and amplifying viral disinformation campaigns.”
“Protect the churches!” Jack Posobiec posted on Telegram at 10:16 a.m. He spent the morning prior to that message posting photos of protests at the Supreme Court, and describing one individual there as an “Antifa pedophile.”
Prior to the decision, Posobiec flooded his social media feed with posts about a “Night of Rage.” He returned to that message while hawking MyPillows shortly after the decision in a bizarre attempt at trolling. “Hi libs! Mad that you can’t kill babies anymore? Don’t have a Night of Rage, have a Night of Slumber with MyPillow.com promocode Poso!”
Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh took up that same vein of attack. “It’s a good thing the Supreme Court affirmed our right to conceal carry right before this ‘night of rage’ you guys are planning,” Walsh wrote.
White nationalist Nick Fuentes took to Telegram to spread this message as well. “DEFEND YOUR CHURCHES TONIGHT!” he wrote, echoing Posobiec. The previous day, he displayed both his male supremacism and his white nationalism in apparent reference to abortion, writing, “Women gave us original sin and White Genocide.”
Fuentes—who believes women in the United States should be treated like they are under the Taliban—shared a message from Tyler Russell that said today’s ruling was not enough. “Time to go further right, Then even further,” the message read. “We’re just getting started. Christian Nationalism is the future.”
“God Wins,” Fuentes wrote. “We are going to ban abortion and open up the flood gates for God’s grace and our inevitable plan will be completed.”
The post What Follows Roe’s Reversal? The Far Right Calls for Christian Nationalism appeared first on Right Wing Watch.
U.S. Capitol Police in riot gear are seen in Washington, D.C., following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.
Photo: Bill Clark/AP
Given the makeup of the far-right Supreme Court, it has for some years been clear that Roe v. Wade would fall. Following Friday’s 6-3 decision to destroy all constitutional abortion rights, 22 states will enact their readied trigger laws for total or near-total abortion bans, with more expected to follow. Fascistic anti-abortionists have won in the courts, but they are already making clear that a victory in law is nothing to them if the laws are not brutally enforced to forge a Christian-nationalist nation through and through.
With the end of Roe achieved, the fascist right is setting its sights on shutting down and criminalizing all crucial sites of abortion solidarity and assistance that reproductive rights networks are fighting to build.
To get a sense of their expansive, draconian agenda, we need only look at the model legislation drafted by the National Right to Life Coalition — the sort of laws that Republicans in state houses will be no doubt swiftly proposing.
“Traditionally, abortion laws relied on criminal enforcement to make pro-life laws effective,” the powerful anti-abortion organization wrote. “However, current realities require a much more robust enforcement regime than reliance on criminal penalties.”
That is, for these groups, criminalization of abortion providers is not fascistic enough.
For these groups, criminalization of abortion providers is not fascistic enough.
The model legislation would seek to use Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations — or RICO — laws against anyone with any involvement in someone accessing an abortion. People could come under criminal suspicion for offering telehealth appointments; mailing or transporting abortion pills across state lines; potentially giving advice online about how to self-administer an abortion; or even “hosting or maintaining a website, or providing internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion.” All these activities would fall under “aiding and abetting.”
Drawing attention to the model law on Twitter, historian Thomas Lecaque noted, “IT DOESN’T STOP THERE THIS IS A BLUEPRINT FOR A CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST SURVEILLANCE STATE.”
The model legislation also makes clear that the route to enforcement should be vigilantism, following the lead of Texas’s vile Senate Bill 8. The law permits anyone to file a civil suit against any person who could be deemed to “abet” an abortion — potentially including an Uber driver who takes someone to an abortion appointment, or a therapist or pastor who has counseled a person on ending a pregnancy. The plaintiff need have no personal connection to the abortion seeker or fetus at all. The Texas law incentivizes anti-abortion crusaders to act as bounty hunters, promising $10,000 to those who bring successful suits against abortions performed in violation of the law.
We can expect a spate of such laws to pass in red states, and without Roe on the books, they can no longer be challenged on constitutional lines. The enemies of abortion access, in other words, won’t be letting up anytime soon — and reproductive rights will continue to be stripped from more and more people.
The Texas law was not built on a new concept. White supremacist, patriarchal rule in this country has always relied on the coalition of government forces, official police, and state-endorsed vigilantism.
There are many examples. The Jim Crow South, for instance, depended on the threat of lynching and mob violence to enforce white rule. From the fabled Texas Rangers to Klansmen to today’s right-wing militia groups armed with assault weapons, vigilantes have worked in tandem with immigration enforcement agents to hunt down and round up immigrants trying to cross the border. Before Kyle Rittenhouse shot dead two anti-racist protesters, he was thanked by police for his heavily armed presence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Federal agents were advised by the Department of Homeland Security to publicly support the right-wing teen and claim that he “took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.”
As with the intersecting enforcement of racial hierarchy, we are seeing the shoring up of patriarchal power through a most American vigilantism, both outside of and inscribed into law.
We can be certain, too, that anti-abortionists will not wait to see whether all aspects of their bans and criminalization plans stand up in federal court before enacting them. The right makes laws realities through violence, and violent realities through law.
The right makes laws realities through violence, and violent realities through law.
S.B. 8 went into law while Roe was still on the books, despite being in clear violation of its now-dead protections. And a 26-year-old woman was arrested in Texas on murder charges in connection to a “self-induced abortion.” The charges were dropped, since no such murder statute currently exists in the state, but the incident highlighted the ways in which zealous law enforcement already polices and criminalizes abortion. This will only get worse, and poor women of color will suffer the most under the right’s forced-birth regime.
This is not to say that bold legislative efforts in abortion-protective states cannot work in effective opposition to block some of these Christo-fascist fantasies. The end of Roe, as a forthcoming and crucial paper in the Columbia Law Review notes, brings about an entirely new battleground of interstate juridical conflict. States that support access rights will move to pass laws that protect abortion providers who treat out-of-state patients, while anti-abortion states will seek to pass laws to prosecute out-of-state providers.
Legislators in Connecticut, for example, recently passed a bill designed to protect abortion providers who assist patients seeking refuge from abortion-ban states. Those of us in other blue states must push our legislators to do the same. The far right’s plans to criminalize interstate travel and online abortion solidarity must be forced to contend with robust protections for those activities where such protections can be made into law.
As is all too clear, however, when it comes to Congress and the federal government — and most any case that reaches the Supreme Court — the fascists have the upper hand against feckless Democrats. The ever-steeper uphill battle for universal abortion access will thus rely on the wisdom, experience, and cunning of those who have already been fighting on the front lines for reproductive justice, in the legal gray areas, in the streets and by the side of anyone seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy, in the collective struggle for lives worth living.
The post With the Corpse of Roe Still Warm, Far Right Plots Fascistic Anti-Abortion Enforcement appeared first on The Intercept.
Joan Walsh
Mitch McConnell teamed with Donald Trump to pack the Supreme Court and make sure gun owners’ rights are protected—and women’s are not.
The post This Fascist Gang Can Shoot Straight After All appeared first on The Nation.