Paul Mason Strains on a Gnat, But Swallows A Camel - Swallowing A Camel (5 of 8)

Paul, on the one hand, wants to deny the existence of virtually any Nazis in Ukraine, because he wants to justify giving his support to the Ukrainian regime in its war with Russia, which would sit oddly with his current concern at the growth of fascism worldwide. At the same time, he has to admit that the Ukrainian government has formed an alliance with Nazi paramilitaries and enabled them to create their own Azov Battalion, which is financed, trained and armed with the latest NATO military hardware! To reconcile that, he has to refer to the Azov Battalion as “far right” rather than describing them as what they are, self-admitted, “Nazis”, and to claim that the alliance with the government is simply a means of “controlling them”!

But, it is, then, a very strange form of control. The equivalent would be if the US state were to form an alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, or the Proud Boys, inviting them to form their own battalions within the US armed forces, and then allowing them to operate with their own commanders, decking out their military vehicles in white supremacist regalia, and then to launch attacks on non-white areas of the US. It would be as if, in order to “control” these white supremacists, the US state had then financed and trained them, and provided them with the latest military equipment. The same would be the case if, for example, the British state approached Column 88 or other British paramilitaries to be “controlled” by forming their own battalions within the British Army, so long as they agreed to be financed, trained and provided with the latest NATO weaponry!

That is the kind of situation that would have been required if Paul's narrative about the January 6th abortive coup were to have any traction, and, yet, the reality is that on that occasion, the US state far from forming an alliance with the Nazis, quickly crushed them, and has been continuing to break up their organisation ever since, even though Biden and the Democrat establishment has singularly failed to confront them, and defeat them politically, and, has, in fact, created conditions that facilitate their resurgence!

Of course, as stated earlier, armed forces, always contained a disproportionate number of racists, nationalists and fascists, and so, in the US, there will be a significant number of supporters of the Klan and the Proud Boys in its armed forces, just as there are a significant number of BNP supporters, and even supporters of fascist paramilitary groups in the British armed forces, and police. But, they do not have their own separate organisation as the Azov Battalion has, in Ukraine, They are actually contained and controlled within the overall hierarchical structure of the US and UK military, whose function, currently, is to suppress the aspirations of the fascists, which are a threat to the ruling class, as opposed to the situation in Ukraine, where the ruling class and its state is quite happy to utilise these fascist gangs to promote its interests, particularly in Russian majority areas such as the Donbass.

Paul himself admits that, since 2014, the time when the Azov Battalion was created, and from when Ukraine should have recognised and provided autonomy for the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, under the terms of the Minsk Agreements, there have been 14,000 deaths in those regions. That is not deaths caused by Russia, or Russian militia, who are seeking to actually implement that autonomy, but is deaths caused by the actions of the Azov Battalion, and its allies within the Ukrainian army that have been shelling it, and undertaking ground offensives ever since, as they have tried to suppress the right of these Republics to even exercise the autonomy the government had previously conceded, on paper. That is not Russian propaganda, as Paul would have us believe, in his narrative that increasingly has seemed like it comes from the Ukrainian Ministry of Information, but is the findings of international bodies such as the OSCE and Human Rights Watch, on the ground in those regions. And, indeed, they have reported a quadrupling of the shelling by the Ukrainian forces in recent days and weeks, preceding the Russian invasion.

And, here, Paul's positions are contradictory. In 2014, Paul was an advocate of Scottish independence, seeing the nationalists as being part of some vague progressive coalition. In his reporting from Spain, Paul has also seemed sympathetic to the separatist sentiments of the Catalans. But, for Marxists all such separatist tendencies are reactionary. If the existing bourgeois nation states have represented a fetter on the rational development of capital for more than a century, let alone the creation of Socialism, then the dismemberment of those existing nation states into even smaller units represents an even greater fetter, and reactionary development.

Back To Part 4

Forward To Part 6