Putin’s justifications for the invasion of Ukraine – to bring a halt to the genocide of Donbass Russians by the Ukrainian military and para-militaries, de-Nazification and the defence of Russia –, a war for which he has not hesitated to call upon private soldiers, including Chechen and Syrian mercenaries. And on the Ukrainian side, in addition to those who are simply endeavouring to defend their country or home, are Ukrainian nationalists, from the extreme right to the left, anarchists, foreign nationals covering the same range of political views, including South Americans joining the war on the side of the Ukrainians in the name of a war on “communism” (The Guardian 20/03/2022).
This Babel of political ideologies is testimony to both the total alienation of ideology from the density of social life, here and elsewhere – reality simply does not correspond –, and the violence of ideology as the task of forcing social life into ideological fetters is fully assumed.
Historical distance helps to try to understand events in Ukraine, but always with the modesty dictated by distance. We share below an essay detailing the recent history of Ukrainian politics.
How Refugees Can Continue Revolutionary Struggle in Foreign Lands
Eleven years ago, on March 15, 2011, protests broke out in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Over the following years, a revolution took place, wresting much of the country from Assad’s control. Yet as governments around the world intervened to support various factions, the struggle became more and more violent, culminating with the rise of the Islamic State, on one side, while the Russian government stepped in on the other side to enable Assad retain power at a tremendous cost in human lives. Millions of Syrians were forced to flee.
In Paris, some exiles from the Syrian Revolution founded the Syrian Cantina, a community center providing a space for social movements and organizing events to bring together revolutionaries and grassroots organizers from around the world. In the following interview, the participants recount how they were politicized in the course of the revolution, describe the challenges of becoming organizers in a new country, and analyze the roots of a false “anti-imperialism” that silences the voices of the people whose interests it claims to defend. As millions are driven into exile from Afghanistan and Ukraine to Sudan and Haiti, this is an invaluable document about how refugees can continue their organizing in new contexts, how locals can help to make this possible, and the meaning of international solidarity.
News that the Syrian government is recruiting soldiers from its own army to join the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a reminder – for those who may have forgotten – of Putin’s earlier and extremely bloody intervention to help put down the Syrian revolution. (The Guardian 11/03/2022) And while Syrians who still resist in the remaining pockets of rebel held territory may feel solidarity with Ukraine, it is tempered by the knowledge that their resistance against Russia and their own government has never benefitted from the same assistance from the “international community”. (The Guardian 02/03/2022, 15/03/2022)
The vantage point of geopolitics, however significant, is inevitably a view from above, condemned to the blindness that results from focusing on state and inter-state actors. What is left out are the realities and possibilities of understanding, acting, contagion and effective solidarity across and against borders.
March 15th marked the 11th anniversary of the Syrian revolution. We return to it as an event not only of our past, but of the present, and for its resonances beyond its “failure”, and for Ukraine.
We share a text below authored by Yassin Swehat and published at Al-Jumhuriya (English) on the 1st of March.
Olenin had entered into the life of the Cossack village so fully that his past seemed quite foreign to him. As to the future, especially a future outside the world in which he was now living, it did not interest him at all. When he received letters from home, from relatives and friends, he was offended by the evident distress with which they regarded him as a lost man, while he in his village considered those as lost who did not live as he was living. He felt sure he would never repent of having broken away from his former surroundings and of having settled down in this village to such a solitary and original life. When out on expeditions, and when quartered at one of the forts, he felt happy too; but it was here, from under Daddy Eroshka’s wing, from the forest and from his hut at the end of the village, and especially when he thought of Maryanka and Lukashka, that he seemed to see the falseness of his former life. That falseness used to rouse his indignation even before, but now it seemed inexpressibly vile and ridiculous. Here he felt freer and freer every day and more and more of a man. The Caucasus now appeared entirely different to what his imagination had painted it. He had found nothing at all like his dreams, nor like the descriptions of the Caucasus he had heard and read. ‘There are none of all those chestnut steeds, precipices, Amalet Beks, heroes or villains,’ thought he. ‘The people live as nature lives: they die, are born, unite, and more are born—they fight, eat and drink, rejoice and die, without any restrictions but those that nature imposes on sun and grass, on animal and tree. They have no other laws.’ Therefore these people, compared to himself, appeared to him beautiful, strong, and free, and the sight of them made him feel ashamed and sorry for himself.
To read Mykhailo Drahomanov’s detailed articles and essays from the latter half of the 19th century on the history of Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Poland, on anarchist-federalist pan-Slavism and the place of nationalism in broader radical democratic politics, the failures of “western” social-democrats before the political violence of “eastern” Europe, and at this time when Russia is invading Ukraine yet again, is of great value. This is not of course because history repeats itself, or because we would agree with everything that he wrote today, but because the depth and sensitivity of his understanding provides what the French Annales historians called la longue durée, a perspective that helps to understand the present events in ways otherwise impossible; especially when the media is saturated with the words of suddenly “humanitarian” politicians and “geopolitical experts”.
If “one of the most treasured aspects of the political culture of Ukraine, historically – the legacy of the Cossack hetmanate of the 17th century – was anarchism” (The Guardian), it is not amiss to endeavour to understand the sources and vicissitudes of this political culture beyond the usual, though important, references to the Makhnovschina.
Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-1895) was an ethnographer, geographer, political theorist, journalist, political activist and anarchist. What we share below is a short selection of his writings from the larger collection posted by The Anarchist Library and originally published in English, in The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S., Vol. II, Spring, 1952, No. 1 (3).
To rethink war, what does it mean? To learn to look at the world strategically. The news, rights, the laws, the speeches, the images… To take them as operations, as forces (of occupation or resistance): not only what they say, but also what they do (with us).
Is it exaggerated? Don’t we live, here in Europe at least, in peaceful societies? Societies pacified rather, in a truce. But the truce is not peace, but the continuation of hostilities by other means.
What war is it about? The war to dominate the entire earth in the name of economic benefit: to subject life, knowledge and bodies, the countryside and the city, to calculation, to conquer in extension and intensity, to demolish everything that – inside or outside of ourselves – does not fit, to make a desert of it all.
War, said a German philosopher who understood this for a while, is a test of both strength and translation. What did he mean? On the one hand, it is a matter of violence: fear, repression, threat of physical destruction. On the other hand, it is a matter of meaning: to win is to convince, to install the categories of the dominant in the dominated.
Does thinking about war makes us soldiers? That only happens if we think of war as a mirror, war as defined by the other, the strong. But we can be deserters, practice guerrilla warfare, think defensively and not offensively, take on war without losing our tenderness, fight to live and not to die, to make a forest.
What is the war of those who do not have or want power, the war of those who do not want war?
The current war in Ukraine is difficult to grapple with and not only for those of us with friends and comrades who are over there, fighting or surviving, or who have already fled and now find themselves homeless, many of them for a second time, in the case of the many refugees who had taken shelter there over these last several years.
We Are Anarchists. We Occupy this property in protest against Putin and his world. This mansion is owned by a Russian Oligarch, Complicit in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Do we need to remind you why Putin Sucks? The invasion of Ukraine is only the latest episode in a long series, from the support of Assad in Syria to the neo-nazi Wanger militia assistanting dictatorship, concentration camps for LGBT+ people, ecosides, brutal wealth inequality, far right troll farms and so on.
By Occupying this mansion, We want to show solidarity for the people on Ukraine but also for the people of Russia who never agreed to this madness. We want to show our sympathy to the brave protesters who have been in the belly of the beast, and suffer unjust imprisonment for staying up to Putin.
Finally a few words for the elites here in the UK, who have been Putins Minions for years. You received bribes, you managed Oligarch’s property, you even adopted Putin’s authoritarian attitude to protest and decent. FUCK YOU TOO.
This mansion will serve as a refugee support, for people of Ukraine and people of all nations and ethnicity.
SQUAT OLIGARCH’S PROPERTIES EVERYWHERE
A report on the occupation from The Guardian can be read here.
Does hegemony require a grand design? In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheiks, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds. What I find most remarkable about these strange days – as thermobaric bombs melt shopping malls and fires rage in nuclear reactors – is the inability of our supermen to validate their power in any plausible narrative of the near future.
A reflection on anti-militarist politics before nation state war, before the russian invasion of ukraine, by Àlex Guillamón, for El salto diario(09/03/2022).
Whoever invented the term nation-state surely did not intend to describe reality so literally. But, certainly, today it is not the nations that own states, but the states that own their nations. The path from the Soviet Union to the current Russian Federation is a clear example: no matter how radically its political, economic and ideological wrapping has changed, the hard core of authoritarian state nationalism has preserved the historical continuity of Great Russia. We don’t have to go that far though, for we also have examples much closer to home.
The hard cores of the nation-states appear on the scene whenever it is necessary to “continue politics by other means”. They are sanctuaries in the shadows where the flame of supreme authority, unscrupulous and merciless violence, highly concentrated patriarchy, are cultivated and reproduced. Reasons of state allow them to retain ownership of the nation at any price.
Syrian Exiles on How Their Experience Can Inform Resistance to the Invasion
In March 2011, protests broke out in Syria against the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Assad turned the full power of the military against the ensuing revolutionary movement; yet for some time, it appeared possible that it might topple his government. Then Vladimir Putin stepped in, enabling Assad to stay in power at a tremendous cost in human lives and securing a foothold for Russian power in the region. In the following text, a collective of Syrian exiles and their comrades think through how their experiences in the Syrian Revolution can inform efforts to support the resistance to the invasion in Ukraine and the anti-war movement in Russia.
So much attention has been focused on Ukraine and Russia this past month that it is easy to lose track of the global context of these events. The following text offers a valuable reflection on imperialism, international solidarity, and understanding the nuances of complex and contradictory struggles.
Portraits of Putin and Assad look on as armed soldiers patrol the ruins of Syria.Continue reading →
A very long winter
Putin’s justifications for the invasion of Ukraine – to bring a halt to the genocide of Donbass Russians by the Ukrainian military and para-militaries, de-Nazification and the defence of Russia –, a war for which he has not hesitated to call upon private soldiers, including Chechen and Syrian mercenaries. And on the Ukrainian side, in addition to those who are simply endeavouring to defend their country or home, are Ukrainian nationalists, from the extreme right to the left, anarchists, foreign nationals covering the same range of political views, including South Americans joining the war on the side of the Ukrainians in the name of a war on “communism” (The Guardian 20/03/2022).
This Babel of political ideologies is testimony to both the total alienation of ideology from the density of social life, here and elsewhere – reality simply does not correspond –, and the violence of ideology as the task of forcing social life into ideological fetters is fully assumed.
Historical distance helps to try to understand events in Ukraine, but always with the modesty dictated by distance. We share below an essay detailing the recent history of Ukrainian politics.
Continue reading →