[News] Ukraine: A New Consensus on Whiteness?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 *Ukraine: A New Consensus on Whiteness?*
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/ukraine-new-consensus-whiteness>
Ajamu Baraka <https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/ Ajamu Baraka, BAR
editor and columnist>
20 Apr 2022

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[image: Ukraine: A New Consensus on Whiteness?]
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2022-04/ukraine-far-right-rtr-img.jpg>
A march of the Azov Battalian, Svoboda, and other far-right radical groups
in Kiev, October 14, 2017. (Photo: Reuters / Gleb Garanich)

*The Biden administration and corporate media cover up the existence of
white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. They are disappeared from the
official narrative in order to get public buy-in for U.S. policy.*

In 1999 US and NATO forces bombed Serbia for 78 days, ushering a new
century further characterized by war and militarism. With no negative
consequences of military overreach, especially after the dismantling of the
Soviet Union, the U.S. unleashed war in its various forms (from direct
attacks to sanctions, drones, and subversion) with a wanton disregard for
its human and political consequences. Yet, even when massive numbers of
U.S. troops were deployed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and other
ancient cities whose names are in the great religious texts of the world,
and reduced them to rubble, the awful reality of war was carefully hidden
from the U.S. public.

U.S. propagandists had learned from the Vietnam experience that it was much
safer to shield the public from the brutality that their troops were
dishing out to poor villagers, students, ordinary workers, and anyone who
dared to resist the military might of the U.S. military on a daily basis.

But the Ukraine war, at least the portion that began with the Russia
“special operation” in February, was one of those instances where exposure
to the dehumanized reality of war was welcomed.

Why?

The images of the burnt-out buildings and frightened refugees crossing the
frontiers of the nations that border Ukraine served an especially important
purpose. It was to generate public support for war. War in support of
Ukraine and revulsion against the Russian “invaders!” And it did not hurt
that the victims were white!

An important lesson was learned from the U.S. and NATO wars to dismember
Yugoslavia in the 1990s and it was that white victims made selling war
amazingly easy– especially when framed as a humanitarian mission to rescue
people from tyranny.

We know what emerged from this discovery. The ideological weapon of
humanitarian intervention and the mantra, “responsibility to protect”
became invaluable to justify imperialist war, even when the victims were
not white, because an appeal could be made to another powerful force –
liberal white saviorism!

However, in this short essay I want to address something even more
insidious and dangerous than the general propaganda efforts to generate
support for the war against Russia, and that is: in the process of building
support for war,  the white supremacist, ultranationalist, and neo-Nazi
elements in Ukrainian society and in the state were downplayed, if not
ignored.

That whitewashing, coupled with the inordinate attention given to the war,
with the inevitable sympathy for the white victims of this war – a war
motivated by the desire of Ukrainians to join Europe, to “defend
Europeanness,” and European “civilization” – revealed a contradiction that
has always been present at the heart of the emergence of what became
Europe. That contradiction was the hyper-valuation of white lives, of
“whiteness,” in relationship to the racialized “others,” a contradiction
that I refer to as the “white lives matter more movement.”

This whitewashing of Ukraine is particularly dangerous because it is
occurring at a historical moment of deep crisis for the global capitalist
order, producing proto-fascist movements across Europe that are becoming
more visible and bolder. As I said in previous writings
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/ukraine-afghanistan-model-consolidation-global-white-supremacist-movement>
on this subject, U.S. authorities and the U.S. and Western European press
understood that Ukraine had an active problem with white supremacist
ultranationalists and literal neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, in order to engender
support for Ukraine and to set the stage for the performance of a lifetime
by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s actor president, Ukraine had to be
recreated, minus the ultranationalist influence and Nazis.

Herein lies the danger for non-Europeans.

The coup in 2014 saw for the first time since the second world-war, literal
neo-Nazis serving in the government of a European state. Moreover, even
though the ultranationalists and neo-Nazis did not have a commanding
electoral base, their non-state presence controlling the streets of major
cities and towns across Ukraine was significant. They were notorious
<https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-lgbt-event-disrupted-azov-chernivtsi/28062749.html>
for their attacks on LGBTQ populations, anarchists, non-Europeans, and Roma
peoples.
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/26/ukraine-fatal-attack-roma-settlement>
Their violent opposition to communists and communism and socialism of any
sort was officially amplified with repressive legislation that outlawed and
repressed most left political tendencies.

Beginning in 2014, white supremacists from throughout the European world
traveled to Ukraine, with over four thousand “volunteers” traveling to
Ukraine recently to fight in response to Zelensky’s call to help fight the
Russians. It did not matter to Zelensky or the European nations supplying
weapons and paying the salaries of these “volunteers” that most of them
were self-identified white supremacists.

Again, we do not need to make the case of the presence of these forces in
Ukraine. That has already been done, here
<https://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/10/nyt-discovers-ukraines-neo-nazis-at-war/>
, here,
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/14/ukraine-investigate-punish-hate-crimes>
and here
<https://forward.com/opinion/416751/why-does-no-one-care-that-neo-nazis-are-gaining-power-in-ukraine/>.
The political issue is that the sanitizing of the right-wing Ukrainian
state has strengthened the far-right not only in Ukraine but globally. The
whitewashing by liberals and the liberal/left in the U.S. that transformed
these elements into “moderate” Nazis is having the effect of legitimizing
their proto-fascist racialized politics, a politics that is emerging across
the white world. There is a reason Marine LePen has a chance to defeat
Emmanuel Macron, even after he moved further to the right after being
elected.

Liberals pretend to be opposed to the right, but they do not because they
aligned themselves with the neo-liberal right more than two decades ago.
The right will never defeat the far-right – the dilemma of the democratic
party in the U.S. But in embracing the illusion of being in opposition and
conceding ideological terrain in the elusive quest for “bipartisanship” the
far-right is further legitimized and emboldened.

The whitewashing of the right in Ukraine in order to support its
U.S.-backed government will have domestic political consequences. For
example, the liberal and left/liberal argument for opposing Trump was that
his supporters were infected with racism and his movement represented a
proto-fascist political development in the body politic of the U.S. The
political and ideological challenge now is to square this support for white
supremacists in Ukraine with their opposition to Trump. How do you condemn
Trumpian racism after embracing a government and society infested with
white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis?

What is the answer? Liberals and left/liberals are forced to whitewash the
white supremacist threat in both places. The blatant appeals to European
unity and unspoken but, nevertheless, acknowledged assumptions of the
civilizational superiority of the “West” – that discourse around the
Ukrainian issue – poses an existential threat to the non-European world. By
not challenging this discourse, with Ukrainian president Zelensky being the
main spokesperson for, is creating a dangerous ideological foundation for
the legitimation of a cross class white supremacist alliance to defend
something called “European values” and the interests of Europe, interests
that will be poised as one in contradiction to the interests of the
non-Western global majority.

*NATO and White Supremacy: How Can a Self-Respecting African Support
Ukraine?*

The images of Africa and other global-South peoples desperately trying to
flee the war in Ukraine only to be met with the dehumanizing white
supremacy that is such a normal element throughout Eastern Europe but in
particular in places like Poland and Ukraine, cannot be erased, nor should
they be. Outside of the urbanized socialist, communist and LGBTQ
communities, the Azov-enforced social conservatism of the right in Ukraine
has more of a grip on the consciousness of Ukrainian society than most
people outside of Ukraine and Eastern Europe understand.

That is why, with the defense of the white supremacist NATO structure and
the objective social situation of normalized racism and oppression in
Ukraine, it is absolutely bizarre that self-respecting African/Black
peoples would be giving unqualified support to Ukraine. Doing so puts them
in alignment with the imperialist agenda of the U.S., an agenda whose main
objectives are to keep Europe subordinated to U.S. capitalist interests by
disarticulating the European market from Russia, but also, and more
importantly, to weakening the Russia-China strategic partnership.

This agenda does not represent anything close to the needs and interests of
the African working class in the U.S. In fact, with this conflict (that I
lay completely at the feet of the U.S), it is now the working classes and
poor around the world, and especially for us in the U.S., that are being
asked to pay the price for this agenda through increased fuel and food
prices and a capitalist imposed inflation that amounts to a pay-cut for
workers.

One of the many lessons of this Ukrainian situation that Africans and the
colonized are learning is that we cannot depend on most of the European
left in the U.S. and Europe. What we have seen is that the assumptions of
ethnocentric universality (the worldviews of the white West are only views
and standpoints that matter) connect significant elements of the white left
to liberalism and blind both the white left and white liberals to the
impact of Western policies on the non-European world. This lack of
self-consciousness is one of the components of the psychopathology of the
white supremacist mind-set and a threat to the decolonial movements around
the world.

It is also why that, while no one wants to see war and we all fight to
preserve peace, it would be tragic for the global South, and especially for
African people, if Ukraine was able to maintain itself in its present form
– as a bastion of white supremacist reaction.

*Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and
an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka
serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership
body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the
Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.*
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