by Yorgos Mitrialis

United but desperately alone! United in their slaughter, their bloodshed and their loneliness. And united, too, in the same relentless resistance for life, liberty and national self-determination. The martyred Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples united…against the same executioners united. Indeed, wasn’t it one of them who warned us, back on December 28, 2023, that “Israel’s stated aims in its current operation against Hamas militants in Gaza seem almost identical to those of Moscow in its campaign against the Ukrainian government” ? (1)

This sentence from a year ago should have prepared us for today’s misfortunes. Especially since the person who uttered it is not just anyone. It was Sergueï Lavrov, Putin’s right-hand man and eternal Foreign Minister. Lavrov was even quick to point out that Netanyahu’s objectives in Gaza “seem similar to the ‘demilitarization’ and ‘denazification’ that Moscow has been pursuing in Ukraine since the launch of its offensive in February 2022”! In short, the same genocides and the same genocidaires…

Unfortunately, no one paid the slightest attention to Mr. Lavrov’s assertions, despite the fact that he made them in a wide-ranging interview with the highly official Tass and Novosty agencies, and despite the fact that this interview appeared for a long time on the very first page of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website! Unsurprisingly, the deafening silence that has always surrounded them was due to the fact that those who support Mr. Netanyahu’s crimes in Gaza don’t like to be associated with Mr. Putin’s crimes in Ukraine, and those who support Mr. Putin’s crimes in Ukraine don’t like to be associated with Mr. Netanyahu’s crimes in Gaza. In other words, a not so unnatural alliance between all those who had an interest in keeping quiet about truths that could only expose their hypocrisy…

left: Mariupol; right: Gaza City. Silence means assent. Almost all capitalist regimes are united in supporting one war crime or another… or both.

But we have to admit that when we wrote that, in asserting “that Russia is doing nothing more in Ukraine than Israel is doing in Gaza”, Mr. Lavrov was “first and foremost addressing the American establishment… trying to make it understand that Russia is not an adversary but rather a friend, the two having common interests”, we couldn’t imagine that a US president would translate Mr. Lavrov’s words into action just one year later! And yet this is exactly what Mr. Trump is currently doing, when he supports – with chilling zeal – the genocidal wars against the Ukrainian and Palestinian peoples of the criminals called Netanyahu and Putin…

However, it’s not just Mr. Lavrov’s thunderous declarations that are in the spotlight. It also sheds light on several others made by Mr. Putin himself. Like, for example, the astonishing and “incomprehensible” statement he made in February 2024 that it was Poland that had… forced Hitler’s Germany to attack him, thus triggering the Second World War! At first sight bizarre and “incomprehensible”, Mr. Putin’s assertion becomes understandable when read in its entirety in the light of the most burning news of recent days: “the Poles had not ceded the Danzig corridor to Germany, and they went too far, forcing Hitler to trigger the Second World War by attacking them. Why did the war start against Poland on September 1, 1939? Poland proved intransigent, and Hitler had no choice but to start implementing his plans with Poland”! (2)

In reality, what Mr. Putin wanted to tell us by rewriting the history of the Second World War in this way is that Ukraine today, invaded by Mr. Putin’s army, is like the Poland of 1938, invaded by Mr. Hitler’s Wehrmacht. And that these two countries are responsible for the military aggressions they have suffered, because they provoked them by refusing to give in to the territorial and other claims of their invaders! It’s no coincidence, then, that the master of the Kremlin uttered these monstrous enormities during a major interview with Tucker Carlson, star of the Fox news channel, who is very close to Mr. Trump and therefore ideally placed to make Mr. Putin’s assertions known to American far-right circles, who moreover… share them.

Once again, it’s clear that Mr. Putin’s cynical stance in favor of the rights of the strongest has struck a chord with the American far right. The proof is that, once reinstalled in the White House, Mr. Trump was quick not only to take up all the Russian president’s “arguments” in favor of his invasion of Ukraine, but also to take advantage of the situation to… actively participate in the plundering and destruction of Ukraine alongside his Russian accomplice!

So, what is the nature of Trump’s association with Putin? Is it a casual alliance, or a much stronger elective affinity? Again, it was Putin who first gave the beginnings of an answer when he addressed his compatriots at length on the day his army invaded Ukraine. And although systematically “forgotten” by his friends and enemies on the right and left alike, his anti-communist diatribes on that fateful day, as well as his violent attacks on the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks and, above all, Lenin himself,(3) shed light beyond any doubt on both his political and ideological credentials and the nature of his alliance with Trump.

In short, what currently unites Putin and Trump is the community of their ideological references, everything that makes them reactionary, obscurantist, sworn enemies of the weak, the poor, minorities, socialists, feminists, ecologists, workers and workers’ unions. It’s their adoration of raw violence, virilism and the most exacerbated authoritarianism, of billionaires, oligarchs and dictators, it’s their visceral hatred of democracy.

So, no doubt about it, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Musk, Milei and their friends around the world don’t represent a simply harsher version of neoliberalism, as some irresponsible people continue to claim. They represent a mortal danger to us all, to humanity, to democracy and to the planet. A danger similar to that posed by fascism and Nazism 80 years ago. They represent the Brown International of our time. So let’s all take action before it’s too late. Because this time there will be no second chances…

Additional information from Oaklandsocialist:

Countries which voted against the resolution
Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria (Note: This gives a hint of what direction the new Syrian regime will take, and it is not a good sign.)

Countries which abstained
Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Congo, Cuba, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, Togo, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.

We see here that the myth of independence from imperialism is just that – a myth. Capitalist regimes will dance to the tune of one dominant imperialist power or another… or try to qvoid coming into conflict with any of them.

Notes

1. Sergei Lavrov: “Sergei Lavrov: “Israel Pursues Objectives Similar to Those of Russia” : https://againstthecurrent.org/
2. More Putinists than Putin! – Why do Putin’s supporters systematically censor his words?: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/
3. Putin: “Lenin is the author of today’s Ukraine” – Or how all this is the fault of…Lenin and the Bolsheviks! : https://www.europe-solidaire.

NOTE from Oaklandsocialist: We could not agree more strongly with the call to take action now, before it is too late. The question is what sort of action. To answer that we have to look at where Trump‘s most vulnerable point is, and that point is in the food production industries, where there is a huge immigrant workforce. Many thousands of those workers are undocumented immigrants, and we are seeing reports that many of them are already staying off of their jobs for fear of ice raids. So we think the best way to resist the Trump mask co-presidency would be to organize amongst those workers, and who has the actual power to do that organizing if not the labor movement? The problem is the supine union leadership, which is already being conciliatory towards the Trump. Musk cop presidency. So we urge, the courageous and thinking union activist to demand that their unions organize amongst those workers with the call for:

• Full citizenship rights for all workers
• Full union rights for all workers
• A $30 an hour minimum wage
• Social Security, paid medical benefits, and a pension for all workers
• End the ice raids and deportations

Since many immigrant workers are already starting to stay home from work, we think the unions could and should organize immediate strikes for those demands in the food, production industries, including agriculture, and meat packing. If they did so, food would disappear from the grocery store shelves in a matter of days, and the Trump must cope presidency would be forced to retreat. A serious Campaign aimed at the unions around this issue could have as part of its strategy, the intent to start organizing around such a program with or without the union leadership. Stay tuned for more.

Note: if you find this and similar articles to be helpful, we urge you to subscribe to Oakland socialist. Subscribers email addresses are not shared with anybody else I use for one reason and one reason only: to get an email each time a new Oakland socialist article is published. Coming soon: “The Trump Musk co-presidency: Fascism, Bonapartism, or democracy?”