The
Great Israeli Real Estate Event” in London was part of an international
roadshow that previously visited Toronto and New York City, encouraging
prospective buyers from the United States, the UK and South Africa to
“explore the best Anglo neighbourhoods” and find their “dream home”.
The
self-serving reassurances issued by Labour government ministers and
rail executives are aimed at preventing accountability. The
investigation is assigned to the Rail Accident Investigation Branch,
whose function is to examine the causes, not assign blame, establish
liability or pursue prosecutions.
In
a conversation recorded on the margins of the G7 summit, Brazilian
President Lula assured the IMF’s managing director and German Chancellor
Friedrich Merz that he had "never" been a leftist.
DSA
member Janeese Lewis George won D.C.’s Democratic mayoral primary on a
wave of working class radicalization—which her election will serve to
contain and misdirect, not advance.
Chicago
nurses at Prime Healthcare's Saint Mary of Nazareth voted
overwhelmingly to unionize. The win against a for-profit chain with a
long record of obstruction opens a longer fight over the road ahead.
The
results reflect not a popular mandate but the determination of Peru's
ruling class and Washington to prevent even a hint of social reforms
that could feed the class struggle.
In
an transparent effort to silence opposition, UAW Local 699 officials
intend to hold the vote inside the plant where a worker was fired for
criticizing a UAW rep during a contract rollout meeting.
On Saturday, Iran’s military command declared the Strait of Hormuz
closed once again. It charged that the United States had broken its
commitment to carry out the first clause of the memorandum and that
Israel had refused to withdraw from southern Lebanon.
The US
military denied that Iran controlled the strait and said traffic
continued to flow. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said 67 tankers had
passed through on Saturday, up from 55 two days earlier, with oil
volumes “about equal to where we were before the war.” Roughly 20
million barrels of oil cross the waterway each day.
Israel
continued its assault on Lebanon over the weekend. Israeli strikes
killed 83 people in southern Lebanon on Friday, according to the
Lebanese health ministry, and more than a dozen more overnight into
Saturday. Hezbollah fired over 50 rockets at Israeli troops.
On
Sunday, Trump threatened to renew the bombing of Iran. “Iran must
immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing
trouble,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very
hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!” He told Fox News
that Iran “won’t have a country” if it closed the strait.
As the
deal was on the verge of falling apart, the Sunday talk shows became a
forum for demands within the US political establishment for escalation
against Iran. Leading Democrats joined the Republicans in a warmongering
attack on Trump’s agreement, arguing, de facto, that the war should
resume.
*****
Oil prices had fallen sharply after the deal was signed. But after
Iran declared the strait shut again on Saturday, US crude climbed back
above $78 a barrel, with traders warning that a sustained closure of the
Gulf would drive it back toward the $118 it reached during the war.
The
unanimity of the condemnation of the agreement within the US political
establishment makes clear the bipartisan character of support for global
war. Both parties fault Trump for halting the war short of victory, and
both are pressing for it to resume on harsher terms.
Any
agreement—if an agreement is even reached—will only be the prelude to
further US military escalation, whether targeting Iran, the broader
Middle East, or Russia and China.
On
May 1, the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), Local 3350 of the
American Federation of Teachers, extended the old contract with the
University of Michigan and announced no plans to strike for a new
agreement.
A
former United States Postal Service electronics technician says he was
exposed twice to muriatic acid at USPS’ massive Avondale, Arizona
processing hub, according to reporting last week by the Arizona
Republic.
A
parliamentary committee has been given evidence of the lack of medical
care and other shocking conditions for detainees on the remote Pacific
island.
Kast's
program represents a social counterrevolution targeting first the most
vulnerable section of the population—some 337,000 irregular immigrants
and refugees.
See the world: an ilustration from US Army recruiting website looks eerily similar to a view one might see above San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge... AI generated?
Efforts are underway to expand all branches of the US armed forces.
These include lowering recruitment standards, loosening age restrictions
and expanding the pipeline from middle and high schools through the
Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC). Most significantly,
there are advanced preparations to reinstate the military draft.
These
measures are in line with the January 2026 National Defense Strategy,
which calls for “nothing short of a national mobilization,” likening it
to the buildup for World Wars I and II.
Current
deployments are already stretching US forces to their limits. As Donald
Trump contemplated a US ground invasion of Iran last February, military
sources noted they were straining under the largest Middle East buildup
since 2003, alongside continued operations in Latin America and the
Caribbean.
This crisis was addressed in a 2025 report, “Drafting a
Solution: Overcoming the Existential Crisis of the Selective Service
System,” by John Markel of the West Virginia University College of Law.
The report cites war-gaming by the Center for a New American Security
(CNAS), a Democratic Party–aligned national security think tank, to
simulate a mass mobilization needed for a “large-scale combat operation
against a near-peer adversary” such as China. Based on the Selective
Service’s own planning figure that 500,000 induction notices would be
required to yield 100,000 conscripts within 193 days, CNAS found that
even under “best-case” assumptions, the current system would fail to
provide the necessary manpower.
*****
Three years ago, the World Socialist Web Site reported
on a sharp military recruitment shortfall and the role of school
authorities in forcing tens of thousands of students into the Junior
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) through mandatory, and often
illegal, enrollment.
That crisis has officially “turned around.”
Every service met its 2025 quotas, but the ruling class has responded
not by relaxing the pressure, but by intensifying it. For fiscal 2026,
Congress raised end‑strength targets by some 26,000 troops, pushing the
active force past 1.3 million—its highest level since 2023—even as
recruiters were ordered to find still more.
What Trump officials
are now crediting to a “resurgence of pride” in a Hegseth-run military
is, in fact, the product of economic coercion: the lowering of
standards, a pay raise pegged to the wages of the working poor and,
above all, the deepening of the “economic draft.”
The mechanism the Army credits most is the Future Soldier Preparatory
Course, launched at Fort Jackson in 2022 and dubbed “Army Fat Camp.”
The program offers recruits who fail academic or fitness standards up to
90 days of remediation.
Having insisted for years it would not
lower standards, the military simply moved the threshold. In December
2025, the Pentagon’s own inspector general found that the Army and Navy
had enlisted more low-scoring recruits than the law permits, with the
Navy using “off-the-books academic and physical fitness development
programs” to lift scores past the legal cap.
As of April 2026, the
Army also raised its maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42 and
eliminated a prohibition against applicants with a marijuana or
drug-paraphernalia conviction.
The second lever was money. The
FY2025 NDAA raised junior enlisted base pay 14.5 percent—designed to
make service “financially competitive” with big-box retailers. The
military is outbidding Walmart for the labor of young workers.
*****
The collapse of options under capitalism, riven by economic crisis,
debt and social inequality, is at the heart of the matter. Youth today
face stagnant wages amid rapidly rising housing, education and living
costs.
Recent data show that unemployment among 16–24-year-olds in
the US is around 9–10 percent—roughly twice the overall rate—with even
higher rates for minority youth. Housing surveys find that majorities of
people in their 20s and early 30s spend more than 30 percent of their
income on rent. Many are convinced they will never be able to buy a home
or afford children.
Over the past decade and a half, living
standards for broad sections of the working class have been eroded as
union leaderships accepted tiered labor systems, permanent “temporary”
status, frozen or reduced wages and sweeping cuts to pensions and
healthcare to preserve corporate profits and their own institutional
position.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the Obama‑engineered
auto bailout, in which newly hired autoworkers—disproportionately
young—were brought in on a second tier with wages roughly half those of
older workers, locking an entire generation into far lower pay and worse
conditions than their parents had enjoyed.
*****
In this landscape, the military’s offer of a guaranteed
paycheck, housing allowances and education benefits operates as a
mechanism of economic conscription, drawing heavily on working class
youth who see few comparable routes to stability in civilian life.
*****
The expansion of JROTC is one of the clearest mechanisms of this
economic and political conscription, tying K-12 schools into the
recruitment system. The program, which already encompasses half a
million students in some 3,475 units, with the Army alone running about
1,700 units and 275,000 cadets, is being aggressively expanded. These
programs are immensely important to the military, as an estimated one in
four cadets enlists or commissions.
The FY2025 NDAA authorized
JROTC units at Job Corps centers for at-risk youth ages 16 to 24 and
lowered the minimum required to establish a unit. The bipartisan SERVE
Act would go further, providing recruiters with students’ names, birth
dates, phone numbers, email addresses and student-aid filer lists,
designating “military-friendly schools” and proclaiming a “National Week
of Military Recruitment.”
The Trump administration’s fascist
blueprint, Project 2025, demands mandatory Armed Services Vocational
Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) military-entrance testing for every student in a
federally funded school.
It should also be noted that ROTC,
operating at colleges and universities, has about 20,000 Army cadets and
is its largest source of officers. Campus reports consistently note
that “many” or a “vast majority” of cadets are also coerced
economically, dependent on ROTC “scholarships” to avoid student loan
debt.
*****
The offensive against youth is not just a Pentagon initiative, but a
bipartisan policy and an international trend among the imperialist
powers.
*****
... As the WSWS reported,
the German Bundeswehr made 2,013 school visits in early 2026, sending
“youth officers” into classrooms and running war-simulation games for
students nearing conscription age. The German parliament passed a
military service law in December 2025, with Defense Minister Boris
Pistorius threatening “partial conscription.”
France’s defense
chief said the country must be ready to “lose its children” in a war
with Russia. Canada’s recruitment has hit a 30‑year high amid youth
unemployment near 14 percent, while Britain openly urges jobless youth
into uniform.
*****
Anti-war sentiment among young people has erupted into mass
protests during the last two years on a scale not seen in decades. In
Germany, a sustained school strike movement against the reintroduction
of conscription has seen tens of thousands of students walk out in over
90 cities. In the United States, the “No Kings” protests against the
Trump administration drew at least eight million into the streets—with
solidarity actions in Canada, Mexico, Germany and Italy.
At every
demonstration, alongside signs opposing ICE raids and dictatorship, the
slogan “No ICE, No wars” rivaled “No Kings” in frequency, reflecting a
deepening consciousness that war abroad and repression at home are two
sides of the same class policy.
The International Youth and
Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) urges young people to join our
ranks and take up the following demands:
• The immediate repeal of
automatic Selective Service registration, and the rejection of any
conscription for the war against Iran or any other imperialist conflict.
•
The immediate withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East and an end
to the war against Iran—and to the bipartisan drive for global
domination, the arming of Israel and the escalation against Russia and
China.
• The abolition of the standing army and the dismantling of
the military-intelligence apparatus—the Pentagon, the spy agencies, the
global network of bases and the machinery of surveillance—built to wage
war abroad and repression at home.
• An end to the “economic
draft,” under which the young are driven into the military by poverty,
debt and the impossibility of affording an education. Every young person
must have the right to a decent job, free education, healthcare and
housing.
• Redirect the resources squandered on war to urgent
social needs: universal healthcare, free public education, affordable
housing and secure, well-paid jobs for all.
Every
sentence of the lead motion presented at the congress is formulated in
such a way that it combines mild criticism of existing conditions with a
policy that is compatible with that of the federal government – and in
stretches also with that of the far-right Alternative for Germany.
To mark the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa—Nazi Germany’s
invasion of the Soviet Union and the start of the most barbaric war of
annihilation in history—the World Socialist Web Site republishes an article that originally appeared on the on the 80th anniversary.
*****
There had previously been horrific wars with millions of victims. The
cannons of the First World War had been silenced just 23 years earlier.
The blood-soaked fields of Verdun and the Marne, on which the flower of
German, French and British youth were mown down by machine guns, were
considered a monument of human barbarism.
But the attack on the
Soviet Union went much further. From the outset, it was planned as a war
of annihilation. It was not only a war for territory, raw materials and
markets, but also a war driven by racism and ideology. The destruction
of Bolshevism, the extermination of the Jews and the creation of living
space in the east, which Hitler had been proclaiming for 20 years, was
now put into practice.
“Contrary to the belief of many in the
West, Hitler did not blunder into the war in the east,” wrote the
historian Stephen Fritz in his landmark work Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East.
“For him, the ‘right’ war was always that against the Soviet Union, for
to him Germany’s destiny depended on attaining Lebensraum and solving
the ‘Jewish question.’ Both of these, in turn, hinged on destroying the
Soviet Union. Which of these aims was most important? Given Hitler’s
views, it would be artificial to attempt to prioritize or separate them.
For him, the war against ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ and for Lebensraum was
comprehensive and of whole cloth.”
When 3 million German soldiers, 600,000 vehicles, 3,500 tanks, 7,000
pieces of artillery and 3,900 aircraft invaded the Soviet Union at 3
a.m., they brought with them detailed orders and plans to physically
exterminate millions of people. The invasion was accompanied by four
Einsatzgruppen (operational units) whose members had been carefully
selected and trained by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security
Agency. The task of these 3,000-member units of “stormtroopers of
genocide” (Ian Kershaw) was to immediately kill any communists,
partisans, Jews and Sinti who came into their possession.
*****
For his part, Stalin was totally surprised by the German invasion,
even though he had been warned by his own and Western intelligence
agencies. The communist spy Richard Sorge even supplied the entire plan
of attack from Japan, including the timetable. But Stalin ignored all
warnings and trusted in the non-aggression pact, which he had agreed
with Hitler in August 1939. He was convinced that Germany, which was
already at war with Britain, would not risk a war on two fronts. After
the invasion, Stalin disappeared from the scene for days, leaving the
Soviet Union practically leaderless.
But the October Revolution
remained alive in the Soviet working class. Stalin may have murdered its
leaders, but he had not destroyed its achievements: the state ownership
of the means of production and the planned economy, which now proved to
be tremendous advantages. The Wehrmacht soon realized that they were
not fighting this time against the Tsar’s army of forcibly recruited
semi-serf peasants, but against the motivated army of a workers’ state,
which despite the terror did not capitulate, and instead developed a
remarkable energy and readiness to sacrifice.
Trotsky, who had
built the Red Army, also predicted this in 1934. The Red warrior differs
sharply from the czarist soldier, he wrote. “The cult of passivity and
of submissive capitulation before obstacles has been supplanted by the
cult of political and social audacity and technological Americanism. …
Should the Russian Revolution, which has continued ebbing and flowing
for almost thirty years—since 1905—be forced to direct its stream into
the channel of war, it will unleash a terrific and overwhelming force.”
Although
the war continued for over three-and-a-half years, and over 6 million
soldiers were either killed or severely wounded on the German side, it
was already clear after the first several weeks that the Wehrmacht had
no chance of victory. “Long before the first snows of winter began to
fall, however, and even before the first autumn rains brought most
movement to a halt, in fact as early as the summer of 1941, it was
evident that Barbarossa was a spent exercise, unavoidably doomed to
failure,” wrote the military historian David Stahel.
*****
After Germany’s defeat, nobody wanted to be responsible in Germany
for the war of annihilation. There were only victims and people
following orders—no perpetrators. Hitler was to blame for everything.
The Second World War was “Hitler’s war.”
Adolf Hitler, who shot
himself shortly before the Wehrmacht’s unconditional capitulation,
possessed extraordinary powers and was personally involved in all major
political and military decisions. Despite that, he was merely supplying a
product demanded by capitalist society. The answer to the question of
how this failed Austrian artist and embittered war veteran could rise to
the position of Germany’s “Führer” inevitably leads to the conclusion
that he had powerful backers in the elites of business, politics, the
military, aristocracy, culture and the universities.
One of his
most well known promoters in early years was the general Erich
Ludendorff, the second-in-command of the army during the First World War
who co-led the 1923 coup attempt in Munich with Hitler. Others included
the industrialists Fritz Thyssen and Erich Kirndorf, Crown Prince
Wilhelm of Prussia and Cosima Wagner, the widow of the famous composer.
The media empire of the German nationalist industrialist Alfred
Hugenberg, who was economy minister in Hitler’s first cabinet, played a
major role in his rise. In January 1932, an appearance by Hitler at the
Düsseldorf industrialists’ club secured him the political and financial
backing of the most important circles of big business.
Hitler did
not have to violently seize power; it was offered to him on a silver
platter. At the time of Hitler’s accession to power, the Nazis were in a
deep political and financial crisis. In the Reichstag election of
November 1932, the party received just 33 percent of the vote—4 percent
less than in July and 4 percent less than the two large workers’ parties
combined—the Social Democrats and Communist Party. Hitler even toyed
with the idea of suicide.
The decision to appoint Hitler as
Chancellor in January 1933 was ultimately taken by a small circle of
conspirators representing the interests of the state and big business
around the elder statesman President Paul von Hindenburg. Two months
later, with the Communist Party banned and the concentration camps
filling up, all bourgeois parties voted for the Enabling Act, making
Hitler a dictator.
During the war, Hitler then found thousands of willing assistants in
the officer corps who carried out his murderous orders; among state
officials, who terrorized the population and selected the Jews for
extermination; in industry, which increased its profits through war
production and forced labor; among professors, who gave race theory and
arbitrary justice the appearance of science, and many more.
The
war of annihilation did not emerge from “the will of the Führer,” who
unquestionably desired the war. The ruling elites promoted Hitler and
placed him at the head of the state because they wanted and needed the
war. It had deep objective causes in the irresolvable contradictions of
the capitalist system.
*****
Already during the First World War, German imperialism sought to
subordinate Europe to its interests, and failed. It now attempted this
for a second time.
The First World War was an imperialist war in
which all of the major powers fought for the redivision of the world and
the subordination of the world economy to their hegemony. German
imperialism played an especially aggressive role, because capitalism
developed belatedly due to the delayed bourgeois revolution, but thanks
to modern technology enjoyed a tremendous dynamism. Confined to Central
Europe, confronted with the British and French colonial powers, and an
even more potent American rival, it could only rise to become Europe’s
dominant power and secure access to raw materials and markets by violent
means.
Germany lost the war. Weakened and heavily indebted due to
the Treaty of Versailles and shaken by class struggles, all of the
problems that drove German imperialism into the First World War were
posed with renewed sharpness. In addition, in the east, the main area of
German imperialist expansion, a workers’ state now existed which served
as a revolutionary inspiration to workers in Germany.
The only
way out of this blind alley open to German imperialism was the use of
methods that were more brutal and barbaric than anything ever before
experienced....
*****
The United States, Britain and Germany’s other capitalist opponents
in the Second World War also fought for their imperialist interests, and
not “against fascism” and “for democracy.” Only the Soviet Union fought
for its very survival. A German victory would have meant the
destruction of the workers’ state and its transformation into a slave
colony.
As long as Hitler’s regime was directed mainly against the
German working class and the Soviet Union, it enjoyed considerable
international support. Among the admirers of Hitler was the American
industrialist Henry Ford, Britain’s King Edward VIII, and his American
spouse Wallis Simpson. After Edward’s abdication, the pair visited
Hitler at his Berghof. During the People’s Front government of 1936, the
French bourgeoisie even advanced the slogan, “Better Hitler than Blum”
(Léon Blum was Prime Minister in the People’s Front). Germany’s rapid
victory over France was more a product of the defeatism of the French
generals than of the technical superiority of the Wehrmacht’s weapons.
The Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain immediately reached an
understanding with Hitler.
But American and British imperialism
could not merely look on as Germany rose to become the ruler from the
Atlantic to the Urals. In alliance with Japan, it would have become a
deadly opponent of American imperialism. This led to the United States’
intervention into the war against Hitler, which only occurred after
Germany was already on the defensive at the battle of Stalingrad.
*****
The lessons of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union are
of contemporary relevance. The same contradictions of world
capitalism—the irreconcilability of the capitalist nation state and the
private ownership of the means of production with the social and
international character of modern production—threaten to plunge the
world into the inferno of a third world war.
The centre of the
preparations for war is the United States, which will spend $753 billion
on its military in the coming budgetary year, more than the next 10
states. Some $25 billion is earmarked for nuclear weapons, and $112
billion for the research and development of new weapons systems.
The
US emerged as the real winner from the Second World War, and its
economic power—together with the suppression of revolutionary struggles
by the Stalinist bureaucracy and Social Democratic parties—enabled it to
temporarily stabilize European capitalism.
But the weight of the
US in the world economy has declined consistently since then, and
Washington is attempting to compensate for this decline with military
force. The US has been waging war almost uninterruptedly for 30 years.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, they, with their allies, have
destroyed entire societies.
The US war machine is now targeting
China, which is officially defined as a “systemic rival.” The US wants
to prevent at all costs that China overtakes it economically and rises
to become a world power. US strategists now consider a war with China to
be unavoidable.
German imperialism has not accepted its defeats in the two world wars.
The German government is pursuing the official goal of expanding Europe
into a political and military world power capable of confronting China
as well as the United States. This is intensifying conflicts within
Europe, especially with France, which is Germany’s rival for hegemony
within the European Union.
*****
A
central component of the revival of German militarism is the
trivialization and historical revision of the war of annihilation.
The
Alternative For Germany (AfD) sits in parliament, describes the Nazi
regime as mere “bird sh*t in over 1,000 years of successful German
history,” and is embraced by all other established parties.
The
Berlin-based historian Jörg Baberowski stated publicly as early as 2014
that Hitler was “not a psychopath” and “not vicious.” One year later, he
claimed the war of annihilation was imposed on the Wehrmacht. The
Wehrmacht soldiers on the eastern front were “involved in a murderous
war of partisans.” They had “no other option” but to “adapt to the
partisans’ combat style.” He continued, “The war became independent, it
freed itself from the original goals that were the pretext for the
conflict.” Numerous similar citations can be found in the works of the
right-wing extremist professor.
When the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei and its youth organization IYSSE criticized these and
similar statements, giving expression to the widespread opposition in
the population to the return of fascism and militarism, the media and
political establishment defended the right-wing extremist professor.
A third world war would mean the end of human civilization. But not a
single established party is opposing the drive to war. Like the
situation prior to the First and Second World Wars, they are lining up
all the more closely behind the warmongers as the inter-imperialist
divisions deepen. The so-called peace movement has totally collapsed.
The German Greens, which emerged from this movement long ago, have
become the most disgusting warmongers. Eighty years after the invasion
of the Soviet Union, they are leading the agitation for war against
Russia.
A renewed relapse into barbarism can only be prevented by the
international working class, which must link the struggle against
militarism and war with its source in the capitalist system, and take up
the struggle for a socialist program. This is the perspective of the
International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections,
the Socialist Equality Parties.
The diplomatic crisis over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s
promotion of anti-Polish Nazi collaborationist forces during World War
II is stripping away the political lies in which the NATO imperialist
powers have shrouded their proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. The
NATO-backed regime in Ukraine is not a defender of democracy and
national independence but a tool of imperialism resting upon far-right
forces.
In late May, Zelensky issued a decree giving a serving
military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA.” This referred to
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with
Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The OUN and its members in
the Nazi auxiliary police participated in the genocide of Soviet Jews,
including the 1941 Babi Yar massacre in Kiev. Many of these men went on
to form the UPA, which hunted down pro-Soviet partisans in Ukraine and
carried out a genocide of Poles in Volhynia in present-day western
Ukraine.
On June 19, far-right Polish President Karol Nawrocki
stripped Zelensky of Poland’s highest state honour, the Order of the
White Eagle, which Poland awarded Zelensky a year after the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, in 2023. Nawrocki said that after he “repeatedly
signaled” his government’s concerns to the Zelensky government, its
“position has not changed.” However, he added, “facts are not subject to
negotiation” and “at least 100,000 Polish citizens were murdered by the
UPA.”
The Zelensky regime responded by denouncing Warsaw and
doubling down on its promotion of genocidal pro-Nazi forces. Zelensky
mailed his medal back to Poland. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of
military intelligence (HUR) now head of the presidential office, said on
June 20 that he had renounced Poland’s Golden Officer’s Cross of the
Order of Merit, charging that in Poland, “the flywheel of hatred is
unreasonably and artificially spun against our citizens.”
As a result, today, on the 85th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union, a full-throated propaganda campaign is underway defending
Zelensky and the UPA. Former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor
Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko have all vowed to return their Order of
the White Eagle honors in solidarity with Zelensky. Ukrainian Foreign
Minister Andrii Sybiha denounced Warsaw’s criticism as a “strategic
mistake from which only Moscow benefits.”
*****
Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, was the
most horrific expression of imperialist counterrevolution against the
October revolution and the working class. It was a war of annihilation,
planned to create Lebensraum for German imperialism by annihilating
“Judeo-Bolshevism” through starvation, slave labor, and mass murder of
Jews, partisans and communists. By the time the Nazi war machine was
crushed, 27 million Soviet citizens were dead.
Zelensky can defend
and legitimize Nazi collaborationist forces in the Soviet Union only
because he knows that he has the support for this operation from the
major NATO imperialist powers. At the same time as Washington, Berlin
and the other NATO powers poured billions of dollars into the Ukrainian
regime, in the years preceding and following the 2022 Russian invasion,
the Ukrainian regime systematically rehabilitated the fascist
collaborators of World War II.
*****
The intensifying glorification of fascism is an expression of the
deepening crisis of the NATO proxy war and the collapse of the regime’s
popular support. In these conditions, the ruling oligarchy doubles down
on a falsified national history to manufacture a chauvinist mythology
with which to drive workers and youth into a catastrophic war.
The
turn to the heroes of the OUN goes hand in hand with the turn to
dictatorial forms of rule. Zelensky’s own legal mandate as president
expired in May 2024, yet he clings to power under martial law, having
banned opposition parties, suppressed independent trade unions and
outlawed any opposition to the war from the left.
While the Zelensky regime builds a pantheon of Nazi collaborators, it
imprisons those who oppose the war from the left. Bogdan Syrotiuk, a
young Ukrainian Trotskyist and a leader of the Young Guard of
Bolshevik-Leninists, was seized by the Security Service of Ukraine in
April 2024 and charged with high treason, which carries 15 years to
life, for articles published on the World Socialist Web Site.
He opposes the war from a socialist and internationalist standpoint,
against both the NATO-backed government in Kiev and the Putin regime in
Moscow. More than two years later he remains in pre-trial detention in
Nikolaev, his health deteriorating, while the state that jails him
honors the murderers of Volhynia as national heroes.
Across Europe the imperialist ruling classes are rehabilitating the
collaborators of the Nazis, reviving militarism and falsifying the
history of the 20th century to prepare new wars. The same process is
underway in Germany, which launched the war of extermination against the
Soviet Union in 1941 and is once again rearming and reviving its
militarist traditions.
Students, workers and intellectuals who
oppose the genocide in Gaza are branded antisemites, hounded from their
campuses, fired from their jobs, arrested and deported. The charge of
antisemitism has been weaponized into a bludgeon against all opposition
to imperialist war. Yet the same governments that level this smear
against opponents of mass murder are pouring weapons into a regime that
erects monuments to the men who carried out mass murder.
The conflict between Warsaw and Kiev is a falling-out between two
capitalist governments, both subordinate to NATO and both enemies of the
working class. Emphasizing that, for now, everything must be
subordinated to the joint war effort, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk
recently stated regarding the controversy “Co-operation serves the
interest of both our states and nations, while conflict serves Moscow’s
interests.”
Workers can defend neither the Zelensky regime nor its
Polish and NATO patrons. Against the rehabilitation of Bandera and the
persecution of socialists, the international working class must advance
its own program: the unity of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and all workers
against their own ruling classes and the imperialist war they are
waging. This is the fight led by the International Committee of the
Fourth International, which demands the immediate freedom of Bogdan
Syrotiuk. The fight against war and fascism is the fight for socialism.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
