The USC say,
“This is not to deny that Ukraine has a huge problem facing up to the role played by some of some of its citizens in the Holocaust, as is the case in Poland, Romania, Russia and other East European states. The political elite are split on the issue.”
You don't say, and as the WW reported last year.
“Eighty years ago, they [Ukrainians] rescued Jews,” president Zelensky told the Israeli Knesset last week - words that caused members to turn away in disgust. “If Zelensky’s speech was given … in normal times,” one noted, “we would have said it bordered on holocaust denial.”
And that pretty much sums up the approach of the social-imperialists who have apologised for the reactionary, and anti-Semitic politics of Zelensky and his regime, many more instances of which are given in the WW article, as soon as they heard the sound of gunfire, in a way that they would never – hopefully – have done in other circumstances. War is politics by other means, and any politician that adopts a different position simply on the basis of the commencement of shooting is an opportunist, and not deserving of the name socialist.
The USC continue,
“It should be added that there are marked fascistic features in the so-called breakaway ‘People’s Republics’, where the dominant ideology is Orthodox, conservative, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Roma in orientation.”
That is simple whataboutery in the service of apologism. Its trying to excuse the reactionary nature of the Ukrainian regime to which it has offered unconditional support, by trying to claim its not as bad, or no worse, than other reactionary regimes and forces involved in the conflict, as though that is of any relevance at all to the position that any principled socialist should adopt! It sums up their idiot anti-imperialism, lesser-evilism, and adoption of the mantra “my enemy's enemy is my friend”.
The whole point of the Marxist position is a recognition of the awful, anti-working class nature of nearly all of these different forces, formed into two opposing capitalist camps, and consequently a refusal to support any of them! Our task is only to support truly revolutionary forces both in Ukraine, in Russia, and in the breakaway republics, and to insist on the need for them to maintain independence from these other groups. Those revolutionary forces are tiny, and with their backs up against it, but that is all the more reason not to paint the enemies of those forces in false progressive, let alone revolutionary, colours.
The same is true with the USC's response to the racist measures banning the use of the Russian language. The most it can say is that socialists oppose it, but unfortunately for the USC, and this apologism, socialists have very little role or influence within the Ukrainian regime, and even less within the Ukrainian state! The question is not whether a small number of Ukrainian socialists do what you would expect in opposing such a law, but what it says about the nature of the Ukrainian state, and regime itself, a state and regime which the USC is giving unconditional support to! The argument of the USC, in this respect, is reminiscent of the argument of the Lexiters within the EU referendum, as though their feeble voice could ever be heard above the din of the reactionary bandwagon to which they have attached themselves.
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