It's the Left's Victory!

If you’ve been following the recent events in the Ukraine, you will have heard a lot of talk about the Second World War. Kremlin apologists have been quick to seize upon the influence which the Ukraine’s far right exerted in the protests and in the new configuration of political power. Defenders of the Euromaidan protests have retorted by linking Putin’s anti-Western, illiberal, ‘Eurasianist’ political philosophy with Nazism. The folks who have taken over Crimea’s parliament and main airport have been reported as brandishing black and orange ribbons – the colours apparently commemorate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.

This sort of thing isn’t limited to the Russia-Ukraine dispute. Slobodan Milosevic was fond of reminding the West of Serbia’s support for the Allies, and of slandering his Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar opponents for the fact that some of their countrymen collaborated with the Axis. Israel and its defenders are always using the Holocaust to excuse or downplay the Zionist regime’s crimes, and some love to note the role that Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the then-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, played in raising Arab volunteers for the overseas divisions of the SS.

Yes, there were Ukrainian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Palestinian collaborators with the Axis – but every nation and ethnicity has its share of knuckle-dragging right-wing nutjobs. The more fundamental problem with the Nazi analogies is this: the fight against the Nazis was the Left’s.

It was we of the Left who fought the fascists on the battlefields of Spain. It was we of the Left who went underground to resist them. It was left-wing partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Warsaw Ghetto who fought the good fight when Washington and Whitehall would have been happy to make a separate peace with someone like Hess or Göring and use the Nazi state as a bulwark against the Soviets. It was our Revolution in 1917 and our economic policies which gave the Stalinist regime the industrial base and skilled workforce it needed to repel the German invasion – against Tsarist Russia, the Nazi war machine would have overrun Stalingrad and been in Vladivostok by lunchtime.

Every time a right-wing political actor, right-wing political movement, ethnic group, or capitalist state does something and justifies it by citing anti-Nazism, they are stealing the Left’s birthright. The fruits of victory belong not to this or that Eurotrash ethnic group, but to the Left and to the global working class.

Crimea has a Russian majority and its transfer to Ukraine in 1954 was a ridiculous idea. Its inhabitants ought to be able to secede and join Russia, and particular heed should be paid to the wishes of the Crimean Tatars, expelled in 1944 as part of Stalin’s genocidal deportation policies. The United States and its ‘post-racial’ president should also not be supporting the formation of a government backed by far-right demagogues like Svoboda and Right Sector.

But the allusions to the Second World War that are being thrown about by the pro-Russian side of Ukrainian politics are off-base. Fascism emerged as a response to the rise of the Left – a fascist regime is simply capitalism run by different people than the traditional bourgeoisie, like a Silicon Valley corporation in which straight-laced shareholders hand over day-to-day management to a Birkenstock-wearing CEO. There is nothing specifically ‘German’ about fascism, and Russians are not destined by fate to be its victims; indeed, some interesting historical research has been done about the key role played by White Russian émigrés in far-right circles in Munich during Hitler’s formative political years.

When Russian nationalists slag off the new Ukrainian government as a ‘Bandera regime’ (in reference to the wartime collaborationist Ukrainian leader) or evoke the spectre of ‘neo-fascism’ in response to the events in the Ukraine, they are doing the same thing that Israel did in 1961, when it indicted Adolf Eichmann for ‘crimes against the Jewish people’, or that a right-wing Polish leader did in the mid-2000s, when he argued that Poland should get more seats in the European Parliament to make up for all the extra Poles who would be alive if Germany hadn’t killed them all. That is, they are turning a universal ideological struggle into an ethnic bitch-fight, and seeking to monopolise the fruits of victory for their own ethnic group.

The Spanish Republicans, the Greek and Yugoslav partisans, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, and Sophie Scholl did not shed their blood for Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. The cause of anti-fascism was and is the Left’s, and the Left’s alone.