As the American news cycle shifts between mass shootings, tornados, and the indictment of Donald Trump on the least of his crimes, the U.S.-Russia proxy war in Ukraine rages on, killing hundreds of human beings every day. Thanks to this epic bloodbath, into which the United States has poured more than $75 billion dollars the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently put its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than it has ever been. 

This isn’t Bolivia and Paraguay tussling over water rights. This is two imperial gangster states with enough nuclear weapons between them to blow the world up a hundred times over. [And one of those gangster states, Russia, is fighting what it considers an existential war on its own immediate and long southwestern border, a border that has been invaded with mass death resulting twice in modern history.]

[Does anybody here doubt that the United States would be threatening to use nuclear weapons if Russia and/or China were arming and funding a war in northern Mexico or southern Canada?  What if Russia and/or China floated some missile-carrying ships down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes? How about China putting its latest state-of-the art aircraft carrier in the Caribbean?]

Now, the minute we as actual socialists and communists and therefore as actual anti-imperialists start criticizing the U.S. role in Ukraine, some liberal or centrist and even an occasional leftist calls us apologists for Vladimir Putin. They say we don’t support the people of Ukraine.

Bullshit. Let’s get serious here. The advanced military hardware and intelligence that “our” government is pouring into Ukraine is not about about advancing or protecting democracy. And it sure as fuck isn’t about helping Ukrainians. The U.S. top general Lloyd Austin said it early on: it’s about weakening Russia.  It’s about weakening an imperial rival on its own immediate border by prolonging a conflict that has made life precarious and miserable for Ukrainians while tipping the world closer to nuclear war and ecological catastrophe.  

U.S. democracy promotion? Know any other good jokes? What, like in Saudi Arabia, where the most reactionary government on Earth relies on U.S. dollars and weaponry? What, like in the judeo-fascist apartheid state of Israel and dozens of other authoritarian regimes that are backed by Uncle Sam? Like right here at home, where money talks and bullshit walks  and what’s left of democracy is trumped by racist women-hating neofascism on a regular basis?

Say the chant with me: 1,2 3,4, slavery, genocide and war.  5, 6, 7, 8, America was never great.

Now, there are some folks who call themselves socialists and anti-imperialists who parrot the language of Putin. They support his criminal and murderous invasion of Ukraine. [I call them “the RT left.”]

That’s NOT us. We are quite aware that we live in the belly of the beast of the most dangerous and aggressive military superpower in human history. [We know well what the American Empire did to the Philippines and Korea and Central and South America and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, all the rest. We know from a documentary that came out last week that but for the antiwar movement in 1969, Richard Nixon was going to attack the people of Vietnam with nuclear weapons. We know about all the dictators and despots the American Empire has long backed and installed the world over. We know about the U.S.-Saudi nexus and the U.S.-Israel nexus and the U.S.-Central American death squad nexus. We don’t need any lectures on all that.]

We don’t need any lectures on U.S. imperialism. At the same time, we don’t support other capitalist-imperialist gangster states just because they aren’t America or just because Washington is fighting with them for wealth and power in the world system. 

So let’s be clear. We denounce Putin’s invasion. And anyone who thinks that the neofascistic Putin regime is some kind of virtuous anti-imperialist force is living in a dream world.

But here’s the thing: Russia is not our responsibility. We don’t live in Russia. The Russians need to overthrow their own gangsters. They need to make another Russian Revolution. Our responsibility is to take down our gangsters, our fascists, our capitalists and our imperialists right here in the USA.  Really, our task and that of the people of the world is to take down the whole damn capitalist system. This system, this unelected and interrelated dictatorship of capital, is imperialist by its very nature and that’s true whether you are talking about the top dog United States or China or Russia or England or France or Turkey or India. Our task here in the U.S. is to make a real North American socialist revolution.