Socialism

On November 19, the People’s Forum in New York City hosted a panel discussion: “The Real Path to Peace in Ukraine.” The speakers were a rogues’ gallery of tankie royalty: Claudia De La Cruz, co-executive director of the People’s Forum; Noam Chomsky; Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin; the Green Party’s Jill Stein, M.D.; Brian Becker from the ANSWER Coalition; Eugene Puryear of Breakthrough News and the Party for Socialism and Liberation; and Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Institute.

You may notice that none of these speakers is Ukrainian. People’s Forum co-executive director Manolo de los Santos neatly sidestepped this difficulty: “You don’t have to be Ukrainian or Russian to call for peace. You have to be willing to be a human being.” That’s a lovely sentiment. Still, how would he react to a panel discussion on Black Lives Matter with no Black speakers, or a panel on LGBTQ issues with no LGBTQ speakers? Maybe the People’s Forum was simply unable to find a Ukrainian willing to sell out their country.

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The notion that Chomsky & Co. don’t want Russia to achieve its “maximum goals” is laughable. Their “peace plan” requires Ukraine to surrender huge swathes of its territory. What will Russia have to give up? That’s left unclear. A protester standing outside the event told Ukrainian-American journalist Oliya Scootercaster that “peace” groups like Code Pink always talk about what Ukraine “has to concede…what Ukraine needs to do; it’s always about what Ukraine needs to surrender, what Ukraine needs to give up, how many [Ukrainians] need to be sacrificed….” Another protester said that The People’s Forum event was “basically…designed to tell Ukrainians to surrender, and advocate for Russian success in Ukraine.”

The people who are now calling for negotiations are the same people who were calling for Ukraine’s surrender earlier. Zelensky has declared that there will be no further negotiations until Russian troops have withdrawn from Ukraine. The world must respect that decision. And if Ukraine should decide to negotiate before then, then the world must respect that decision as well.

The speakers also demand an immediate halt to weapons shipments which they say prolong the war. Strangely, it’s only arms for Ukraine that prolong the war; tankies say nothing about disarming Russia. Cutting off arms to Ukraine would result in a bloodbath and the country’s destruction. Therefore, the Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity Campaign demands that the US, UK, and Ukraine’s other allies continue arms shipments to Ukraine.

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Tankies insist that NATO expansion from 1999 to the present spooked Putin into invading Ukraine, which NATO was going to absorb. Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, sums up the tankies’ position as: “A bunch of neo-Nazis run by a Jewish president one day were going to get a nuclear weapon, and join NATO, and attack and devour Russia.”

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In tankie fantasies, the Ukrainians themselves are incidental. Tankies see this as a “proxy” war between the US and Russia. The US is “fighting to the last Ukrainian” in order to advance US imperial interests. Tankies don’t grasp that the people of Ukraine aren’t anyone’s pawns. Ukrainians are fighting for their lives and Ukraine’s survival as a nation.

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While Putin sees Russia and Ukraine as a single people, this most definitely does not mean that Ukraine and Russia are equal. Putin clearly regards Russia as the senior partner which is entitled to rule over the Ukrainians who are too pigheaded to admit that they are really part of Russia.

All this is so daringly nutty that one scarcely knows how to respond. It should suffice to point out that Ukrainians don’t want to be ruled by Russia. To anyone who believes in national self-determination this should be enough to establish Ukraine’s right to exist.

The People’s Forum declares that “People power will end this war.” They’re right. They just don’t realize that the people are Ukrainian.

[Edit typo.]