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Ukraine: the testing ground for the USA's own fascist terror campaign

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One of the most ominous chapters in history is the Jakarta Method. This was the campaign that the CIA carried out during the Cold War in which millions of people involved in the global class struggle were murdered. Starting with the mass violence effort orchestrated by the military dictatorship that U.S. imperialism installed in Indonesia, the Method was exported to Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and the other Latin American countries in which U.S. coups took place. In Indonesia, the violence was the most indiscriminate, and for this reason ended up taking hundreds of thousands of lives. Anyone who was even vaguely suspected of holding socialist sympathies got hunted down, and either murdered or put into a concentration camp. Ethnic minorities like the Chinese were subjected to genocide.

The bodies of the targets were all disposed of away from public life, which had been fully taken over by a regime obsessed with stoking anti-communist paranoia. The trauma the country had experienced was buried, the records of the atrocities fully censored for decades. These crimes, and the crimes elsewhere that they served as a model for, were instrumental in making capitalism win the cold war. As inequality intensifies, and as fascism rises again throughout the Euro-American countries, a version of the Jakarta Method will soon be replicated in the core of imperialism.

Ukraine's anti-communist suppression model

Those who've gained class consciousness, and therefore become at risk of being targeted by such a purge, may consider drastic options for survival: fleeing the country, resorting to guerrilla struggle so they can escape the state's jurisdiction, taking one's political work fully underground. (The latter won't protect you, as in the digital age all of your past online sentiments are seamlessly archived to be used against you.) Perhaps the militant-resistance option will become optimal at some point. But we must not react to this threat we face by doing what the uncommitted U.S. communists of the McCarthy era did, which was panic and fully disband without even bothering to continue their work in clandestine form. We must carefully study the nature of the danger, and respond accordingly.

Part of this is recognizing that America's equivalent of Jakarta will not be precisely like the Jakarta Method. It will be something subtle, something insidious, something that the untrained individual can't detect until it's already too late for them. Our conditions in the core are different from those of the neo-colonies, and therefore will prompt a distinct type of counterinsurgency from the ruling class.

We can get a relatively accurate picture of what this counterinsurgency will look like by examining the fascist paradigm within Ukraine. Since the 2014 U.S. coup, the Ukrainian people have been demobilized. The rise of the neo-Nazi militias, and the Odessa Massacre of May 2014, have left the country in a state of trauma that blunts any kind of revolutionary organizing. The banning of the communist party, and ultimately of all the other anti-fascist parties, has been easy. When communists, Russian speakers, Jews, Romas, anti-fascist journalists, and the LGBT community have been getting violently targeted with impunity, there's a sense that fascism can't be challenged. The Banderites are able to rewrite history so that their movement's Nazi-collaborationist roots get glorified, and the country can be modified into an ideal location for NATO proxy-war efforts.

The great similarity between the fascism that U.S. imperialism is cultivating in Ukraine, and the fascism that it's cultivating in the core, is that both thrive on destabilization. Ukraine's descent into failed-state status has enabled the rise of the Nazi militias, which aren't held in check by law enforcement and can only be eliminated by Russia's special operation. As the U.S. becomes ever more of a failed state itself, its public services deteriorating as society fails to absorb upsets like the pandemic, our own fascists are exploiting the crisis. In our age of climatic collapse, biopolitics, endless neoliberal austerity, and imperial decline, the capitalist world is in a process of collapse, and fascist paramilitarism is filling the emerging power vacuums. As the system unravels, the ruling class creates proxy forces to suppress revolution.

We've seen this in all the countries that have been torn apart by imperialist wars, and that have seen the rise of U.S.-created terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, ISIS, or Boko Haram. In these destabilized zones, which are constantly growing, the imperialists seek to perpetuate chaos so that they can keep waging war and looting the occupied areas. When conditions in the United States deteriorate enough, this model for proxy warfare will be imported to the core, as always happens with the violence that empires perpetrate abroad.

What makes this counterinsurgency insidious is that it's based within infiltration. It uses psychological operations to distort revolutionary theory into ideological weapons for reaction, to recruit people with revolutionary potential into themselves being agents for reactionary intrigue. That's the terrifying subtlety of the American Jakarta: it's a fascist terror campaign that disguises itself as the opposite, that convinces its targets to support and work for the campaign's leaders.

Weaponizing the left against itself

Even on a surface level, psyops play an indispensable role within America's fascist movement, and the same applies to European countries with resurgent fascist presences such as Germany. In both of these places, QAnon has gained a wild amount of influence. This psyop, which has been amplified and quite possibly created by members of the same "deep state" its followers decry, fills the role of the fascist manipulation tactic that leverages public anger at systemic failures. Chris Hedges has written about these reactionary efforts to tap into popular discontent: "The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice... As in the past, these new fascist parties cater to emotional yearnings. They give vent to the feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, despair and alienation. They promise unattainable miracles. They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories including QAnon. But most of all, they promise vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed the nation."

This psychological attack method, in which the ruling class creates appalling conditions and then uses the pain caused by those conditions to sell its ideological poison, is behind the perpetual explosions in violence that our society experiences nowadays. Whether directly or not, our government is creating these mass shootings. It's taking the despair and anger that so many feel towards the world, and diverting it towards hypermasculine, ultraviolent fantasies. The militaristic propaganda that Americans are saturated with, and the lack of constructive social outlets under a decaying neoliberal order, combine to make violence feel like the only recourse for angry men. These are the social sicknesses that create a perfect environment for far-right stochastic terrorism, in which demagogues use racist rhetoric to radicalize growing amounts of these men to murder fascism's targets.

That's how we've gotten the initial stages of American Jakarta, where neo-Nazis are massacring people of color while wearing Ukrainian paramilitary insignias. In time, Ukraine could become a more direct source for U.S. white supremacist terrorism, because there's a years-long-running pipeline of American Nazis going to Ukraine to gain combat experience. U.S. imperialism is engineering a global feedback loop of violence that could end with America experiencing its own Odessa. The courts have already set a precedent legalizing right-wing vigilantism against protesters.

That's only the most detectable aspect of the threat. And given how aggressively liberals whitewash Ukrainian Nazism, it's not even fully perceptible without first doing the work to reject imperialism's narratives. The more insidious aspects are the ones in which the psyops exploit revolutionary discontent, and use it as a tool to manipulate us into aiding counterrevolution.

What does this look like? We can see it abroad every time leftists get won over towards supporting one of imperialism's terrorist organizations under the impression that they're fighting for liberation. The anarchists who've joined Azov regiments because they're fighting against Russia; the anarchists and other western chauvinist leftists who've embraced Rojavan "socialism" when Rojava has carried out ethnic cleansing; the Maoists who uncritically support the insurgents in the Philippines when these insurgents are being weaponized against China; all of these examples show how leftists will inevitably be used against themselves when they aren't operating based upon principled Marxism.

Even those who call themselves Marxist-Leninists aren't immune to the counterrevolutionary ideas that imperialism nurtures. As Professor Derese G Kassa has written about the counterrevolutionary consequences of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front's rule, under which Ethiopia became an apartheid state:

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Rainer Shea is writing articles that counter the propaganda of the capitalist/imperialist power establishment, and that help move us towards a socialist revolution. Donate to me on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744

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