Guest post: Accusations from a groupuscule
Guest post by Jonathan Gallant
Below: an excerpt from an article in the Democratic Socialists of America website:
We should support an immediate cease fire, large-scale humanitarian aid, global support for rebuilding Ukraine, and negotiations to achieve a compromise settlement of what is an underlying conflict between the United States and Russian imperialist interests. In a future socialist world there should be no role for spheres of interest for large countries. However, in the capitalist world we live in, a viable settlement of this conflict would have to accept Russia’s right to have security guarantees in its neighborhood. A Ukraine settlement that includes neutrality for Ukraine along with U.S. and Russian guarantees of Ukraine’s independence and security could avert further bloodshed and bring some stability to the region.
The Left should continue to point out the role of U.S. imperialism in pushing a NATO expansion policy that was bound to lead to a costly and dangerous conflict, while also noting the responsibility of U.S. imperialism for its role in creating the retrograde oligarchic Putin regime that severely oppresses its own working class while also imposing a deadly war on working people in neighboring Ukraine.
So, the DSA charges the United States with: (a) the transparently false pretext the Putin regime uses for its imperial aggression against Ukraine; and (b) the even more far-fetched accusation of creating the Putin regime itself. Unaccountably, DSA fails to denounce the US for the failure of the USSR, the drying up of the Aral Sea, and the dismal weather of Siberia. We can expect these accusations from another groupuscule, Democratic Flat-Earthers of America. DFEA will no doubt also proclaim “resistance” against airlines, shipping companies, and academic Geography departments for their adherence to the view that planet earth is round.
Look, if you’re going to get mad about imperialism, a position with which I tend to agree, PERHAPS THE FOCUS SHOULD BE ON THE LARGE COUNTRY THAT SENT ALL THOSE TANKS OVER THE BORDER INTO THE SMALL NEIGHBOURING COUNTRY.
And any similarities between Vlad Putin and Vlad Dracula are purely coincidental.
I am sure that Vlad Putindracula would agree that the only real guarantee of Ukraine’s permanent neutrality would be permanent Russian boots on the ground to enforce it. Plus, of course, gulags for any who oppose his perfectly reasonable solution. As a former Marxist, I now maintain that the really important fight is for liberalism, and its maintenance against the many vested and ideological interests that seek to rid the world of it, country by country. And to keep it out of countries where it has never existed, like those of the former Tsarist Empire that the said Putindracula is presiding over the restoration of; from his seat in the Kremlin at the biggest desk in the world.
It pays to keep all suppliants at a distance, lest they try to take you by surprise. Not that he’s paranoid. He is a goddam realist, and a judoka as well.
Oh, dear. What appalls me very much about Undemocratic Socialists like this lot is the mixture of blindness to what is real, the inability to think seriously, their absolute conviction that what they say must be true, and the infantile assertions that constitute what they suppose is truth.
Like the guarantees they did get in exchange for giving up their nukes? We have seen how much they were worth.