An Eyewitness Account of the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014
An unflinching and critical account from within the demonstrations that toppled the Ukrainian government in 2014.
In November 2013, protests broke out in Kyiv against the government of Viktor Yanukovych, then president of Ukraine, in response to Yanukovych prioritizing economic and diplomatic ties with Russia. Demonstrators occupied Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), employing tactics familiar from previous movements in Egypt, Spain, and Turkey. In response, Yanukovych ordered police attacks and the government introduced repressive anti-protest laws. This situation came to a head in February 2014 with clashes in which police killed over a hundred people.1 Yanukovych lost control and fled to Russia; a new government took power in Ukraine, seeking to shift Ukrainian economic and diplomatic ties toward the European Union. In response, Vladimir Putin’s government ordered the seizure of Crimea, precipitated a civil war in eastern Ukraine, and ultimately launched a wholesale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The sequence of global uprisings that led up to the Ukrainian revolution had begun with the anarchist-initiated insurrection in Greece in December 2008. Over the following five years, this momentum had spread around the world, from the so-called “Arab Spring” and the Occupy movement to Brazil and Bosnia. The uprising in Ukraine drew on some of the same sources of discontent and used many of the same tactics. Yet in Kyiv, fascists established a foothold within the uprising, forcibly sidelining anarchists.
Crossing the line … a mass picket confronting police at Bilston Glen, Scotland in 1984. Photograph: John Sturrock/reportdigital.co.uk
In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ’intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
God Knows
Don’t talk to me about us losing Don’t tell me what we should have done Don’t give us points because it wasn’t like a game We didn’t go through all that Hell for fun
Don’t write about us in statistics We are more than numbers on a roll We are individuals with our own hopes and dreams Not machines that hew the Nation’s coal
In this world where money is the yardstick People seem expendable today Makes you wonder where this so called progress is to lead Who’s the planet meant for anyway
If we have been beaten by the system If the wheels of progress crush our pride We can hold our heads up as the closures seal our fate They may win, but God Knows, we have tried
The 12th of March of this year marks the 40th anniversary of the British coal miners strike, the longest and largest industrial strike in the history of the country, ending only on the 3rd of March of 1985. We observe the anniversary not to mourn the strike’s failure, but to register its political and social consequences and to try still to listen to its resonances. And the strike can only be judged finally as a failure if it is altogether forgotten.
We want to thank +972 Magazine for the generous permission to publish an article on the Israeli authority’s assault against Jenin’s (West Bank) Freedom Theatre and the broader Israeli war on Palestinian artistic expression.
+972 Magazine is unquestionably one of the most important sources of news from Palestine-Israel for English language readers, to which we are much indebted.
Art world takes the stage to defend a Palestinian theater
After an unprecedented response to Israel’s latest raid on Jenin’s Freedom Theatre, there will be no going back to show business as usual.
Dana Mills February 15, 2024
In the early hours of Dec. 13, Israeli forces raided the offices of the Freedom Theatre, a world-renowned bastion of artistic expression in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. The soldiers ransacked the building and defaced it with graffiti bearing Jewish symbols, before violently abducting three members of the theater’s community from their homes: artistic director Ahmed Tobasi, producer Mustafa Sheta, and a graduate of the theater’s performing arts program, Jamal Abu Joas.
One day, [Noah] clothed himself in sackcloth and covered his head with ashes. Only a man who was mourning [the death of] a beloved child or his wife was allowed to do this. Clothed in the garb of truth, bearer of sorrow, he went back to the city, resolved to turn the curiosity, spitefulness, and superstition of its inhabitants to his advantage. Soon he had gathered around him a small curious crowd, and questions began to be asked. He was asked if someone had died and who the dead person was. Noah replied to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: “Tomorrow.” Profiting from their attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words: “The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that has been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed. When the flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And so there will no longer be any difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be too late.” With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That evening a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: “Let me help you build an ark, so that it may become false.” Later a roofer joined them, saying: “It is raining over the mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false.”
Günther Anders, cited in Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mark of the Sacred, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Stanford University Press, 2013), 203. (cf. e-flux journal, 09/2020)
The recent references to nuclear energy as green or alternative energy, prefiguring the so-called “ecological transition”[1] by European authorities or the Dubai conference, require that we come back to it seriously; and this includes the massive French recovery plan as well. On the other hand, the war between a state which possesses nuclear weapons and another which has six nuclear power stations on its soil revives all the forms of disaster inherent to its existence since 1945. This is the subject of the following text in eighteen theses, a text that proposes to return to the essence of nuclear power in order to propose a critical theory of it.
A painting drawn by artists is seen at a house destroyed by Israel, in recent Israeli-Gaza fighting, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip June 13, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
In December, Hudia, a refugee in Rafah, kept a diary of the horrors Israel has been visiting upon Gaza since October. This is testimonial 18 of the Palestine Uncensored series published on the Verso Books Blog.
Gaza City and northern Gaza are completely annihilated, with only rare media coverage. The central part of the Gaza Strip is now annihilated by hunger, and high prices; its supplies of vegetables and goods were cut off after the south was separated from the central governorate.
In addition, it is being bombarded relentlessly day and night. Khan Yunis – the southern section of Gaza – is also being destroyed by displacement and continuous bombing. Rafah is bombed around the clock (I’m counting 8-12 seconds between bombs) and has received newly displaced people from Khan Yunis, but where are they supposed to go?
People sleep in tents and in the streets or in the shadows of shuttered businesses. The sounds of artillery, air and sea bombardment, and tank shells echo across the Gaza Strip from Rafah to Beit Hanoun. It’s a constant rush in your ears. There is no escape.
This situation requires no political, military, or strategic analysts. No sermon about steadfastness from leaders and media are going to help us right now. Gaza is absolutely no longer fit for life and it makes sense because I don’t think we are alive. We are ghosts and we should go and haunt the world, revealing what has happened to us.
Whole families have been tossed grieving along the streets. Shelter centers and schools are overflowing with broken, displaced people. Most stores have shut their doors because they’re empty of any supplies. What remains is small and non-essential. Prices are astronomical and crazy.
Lines from wherever there are any goods at all – long, long lines where you are stuck waiting for half the day.
Exhausted refugees are wearing filthy clothing (where can we wash dirty laundry?) Most of the women are in their prayer dresses. Wood burning stoves fill the main streets. Everything is cooked on wood fires now and they fill the air with smoke. The ground around them is blackened and people’s faces are blackened. This is a preview of the apocalypse: yes, right here in Gaza you can witness what the end of the world will look like.
As you walk, you pass faces of those who used to be proud and generous but are now humiliated and betrayed. They half-whisper, brokenly, in your ear: “I swear, I am not a beggar. But I was displaced from my home here and here. My family and children have nothing to eat. If you give me five shekels…”
This is only part of the picture, which is getting darker, more unbearable, and more painful every day with the siege and death. I do not know if death is worse than what people are experiencing now. What new, unthinkable circumstance will be thrown our way tomorrow? It’s too horrible to contemplate. I want to run away…
An Anarchist from Jaffa on the Necessity of Anti-Colonial Strategies for Liberation
Four months into the assault on Gaza, the Israeli military has forced over a million refugees to the edge of the Egyptian border and is now bombing them while threatening to mount a ground assault against them. In the following text, Jonathan Pollak, a longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, explains why we should not look to international institutions or protest movements within Israeli society to put a stop to the genocide in Gaza and calls on ordinary people to take action.
A shorter version of this text was rejected by the liberal Israeli platform Haaretz—an indication of the diminishing space for dissent in Palestine and within Israeli society.
… [The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem offered] … the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society – not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims. Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by “good society,” and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors. He was not at all, as one witness called him, a “Landsknechtnatur,” a mercenary, who wanted to escape to regions where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst. What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of “good society” as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler – whom he and his comrade Sassen had agreed to “shirr out” of their story; Hitler, he said, “may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million. . . . His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.” His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which “good society” everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him.
Reflections on Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest
Alain Parrau
From The Last Stage, the very first fiction on Auschwitz filmed in 1947 in the camp itself by Wanda Jakubowska,[1] to Son of Saul by László Nemes in 2015, and The Conference by Matti Geschonneck in 2023, cinema has never ceased to confront the event of the camps and the genocide, to construct and disseminate images of a reality largely deprived of images.[2] Ignoring the prohibition based on the metaphysical motif of the unrepresentable, of which Claude Lanzmann had become the vigilant guardian, many directors have deliberately chosen to respond to a desire to see, a desire whose problematic nature, and the questions it raises, lie at the heart of any reflection on the relationship between cinema and history.
The way Jonathan Glazer’s film provokes and organises this desire to see, the way he directs it and tests it, is at the heart of the director’s aesthetic, as well as his ethical and political choices. We must therefore describe as accurately as possible what this film shows, the cinematographic techniques it uses, and at the same time question the act of seeing, what this act entails in terms of our relationship to knowledge and imagination, on the risks it bears. The Zone of Interest, fundamentally, allows us to ask this essential question: under what conditions seeing can help us to better know our history?
Last September, some Italian anarchists published a collective letter criticising Ukrainian anarchists for defending themselves and their movement against Russian imperialist aggression.
The argument is based on both ethical and factual points. I will start by commenting on the latter, as unfortunately it seems like these comrades have fallen into an alternative reality, shaped by Russia Today and other Russian-sponsored social media disinformation.
There is de facto a single state between the Jordan River an the Mediterranean Sea: Israel, as an occupying settler-colony, is the only state that exists in this territory. What remains under anything describable as a Palestinian authority are a series of non-self-governing territorial islands in the West Bank and the ruins of the Gaza strip/concentration camp.
To the permanent crisis that is Israel’s domination, expulsion, murder and erasure of the Palestinians, a two state solution can only be a fiction, a political fiction of a return to something that no longer exists, if it ever did or could have existed and, more nefariously, the political fiction that serves to mask a single apartheid state.
Before this reality, there is only one just and reasonable political response-demand that is possible: a single, democratic state in the territory of Palestine-Israel.
The NOT BORED!journal collective continues to generously share with us their tireless work of translating situationist and situationist inspired texts, for which we are grateful. On this occasion, it is a historical essay by Maurice Fréchuret convering the contribution of “exiles” to the practical-theoretical work of the Situationists.
Skip the first section if you want to go straight to the conflicts and changes I think we should be paying attention to. And please keep in mind, analyzing geopolitics requires analyzing the actions of major states and capitalists from the perspective of their own interests, which is a pretty gross headspace to get into. I’m going to make this caveat once to avoid clogging up the whole essay: “good for the US” and “good for investors” means bad for life, bad for the planet.
The Maidan Diary of Dmitry Petrov
From the CrimethInc. collective (20/02/2024) …
An Eyewitness Account of the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014
An unflinching and critical account from within the demonstrations that toppled the Ukrainian government in 2014.
In November 2013, protests broke out in Kyiv against the government of Viktor Yanukovych, then president of Ukraine, in response to Yanukovych prioritizing economic and diplomatic ties with Russia. Demonstrators occupied Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), employing tactics familiar from previous movements in Egypt, Spain, and Turkey. In response, Yanukovych ordered police attacks and the government introduced repressive anti-protest laws. This situation came to a head in February 2014 with clashes in which police killed over a hundred people.1 Yanukovych lost control and fled to Russia; a new government took power in Ukraine, seeking to shift Ukrainian economic and diplomatic ties toward the European Union. In response, Vladimir Putin’s government ordered the seizure of Crimea, precipitated a civil war in eastern Ukraine, and ultimately launched a wholesale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The sequence of global uprisings that led up to the Ukrainian revolution had begun with the anarchist-initiated insurrection in Greece in December 2008. Over the following five years, this momentum had spread around the world, from the so-called “Arab Spring” and the Occupy movement to Brazil and Bosnia. The uprising in Ukraine drew on some of the same sources of discontent and used many of the same tactics. Yet in Kyiv, fascists established a foothold within the uprising, forcibly sidelining anarchists.
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