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Ukraine Invasion Day 622: continuing combat and an assassination [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-07
Description
With Olena Lyubchenko, Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen and Trevor Ngwane
The Russo-Ukrainian war drags on, as a bloody and destructive war of attrition, deepening the geopolitical fracture in the international state system. But the efforts by Washington and Brussels to brigade the ‘international community’ against Moscow have been undermined by the opposition of many states in the Global South and the expansion of the BRICS group as a counter to an overweening West. In this seminar we explore the meaning of imperialism and anti-imperialism today for a left that this war has deeply divided.
Olena Lyubchenko traces the competing interests behind justifications of the war. If Western and Ukrainian state discourses describe Ukrainian resistance and Europeanization as a path from being 'colonized by communism' to being 'de-colonized', 'de-communized’ and ‘de-Russified’, Vladimir Putin used a ‘de-communization’ and decolonization rhetoric to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In both cases, the language of anti-colonialism has been divorced from the anti-capitalist project of self-determination.
Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen then explores Ukraine’s civilizational political visions for national survival from the lenses of its wartime diplomacy in the South, with attention to Vietnam and Indonesia in particular. She asks whether Ukraine’s survival must merely rest on becoming ‘part of Europe’, which reproduces an exclusionary worldview that obscures Ukraine’s inherent commonalities with victims of the other imperialist wars, conflicts, and economic and social crises.
Trevor Ngwane finally offers a perspective from South Africa, recently host to the latest BRICS summit, where both the government and the main left forces have taken Russia’s side. Not only does this lose sight of the rival imperial and sub-imperial interests involved; the faith attached to the BRICS as an alternative to Western domination loses sight of a genuinely anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist agenda.
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