Nikos Mottas – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{Image credit: IDC}}

_{Reposted from In Defense of Communism}

The 4th of April marked the 75th anniversary since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty by 12 countries in Washington DC. The pretext for the foundation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the protection from “Soviet aggression” as well as the – supposed – consolidation of peace in the severely injured by the Second World War European continent. However, as history showed, the actual reasons behind the alliance’s establishment had nothing to do with defense or peace.

Although NATO was officially created in 1949, the idea of its birth had already been prepared several years ago. In fact, in his emblematic speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill set the basis for the formation of an anti-communist military “Holy Alliance” against the Soviet Union and the socialist countries. Talking about the “Iron Curtain which lies across Europe”, Churchill had underlined that “the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization” (1).

A year later, on 12 March 1947, in a speech before the U.S Congress, President Truman presented his famous doctrine over American foreign policy that pledged “US support for democracies against authoritarian threats”. Concerning the significance of the Truman Doctrine, the notorious Henry Kissinger wrote: “Had Soviet leaders been more aware of American history, they would have understood the ominous nature of what the president was saying. The Truman Doctrine marked a watershed because, once America had thrown down the moral gauntlet, the kind of realpolitik Stalin understood best would be forever at an end, and bargaining over reciprocal concessions would be out of the question. Henceforth, the conflict could only be settled by a change in Soviet purposes, by the collapse of the Soviet system, or both” (2).

Days before the official foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Soviet Union had warned about the alliance’s aggressive character. On 31 March 1949, in a memorandum addressed to the governments of the United States, Western Europe and Canada, the Soviet Union was pointing out the following conclusions (3):

1) The North Atlantic Treaty has nothing in common with the aims of self-defense of the states parties to the Treaty but on the contrary, this Treaty has a clearly aggressive character and is directed against the USSR.
2) The North Atlantic Treaty not only does not contribute to the strengthening of peace and international security which is the obligation of all members of the United Nations organization but is in direct contradiction with the principles and aims of the UNO Charter and leads to the undermining of the United Nations Organization.
3) The North Atlantic Treaty is in contradiction with several agreements signed between the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Great Britain and France in 1942, 1944 and 1945 under which the signatory parties agreed “not to conclude any alliance and not to participate in any coalition directed against one of the Contracting Parties.” (3)

From their side, the U.S and their allies never provided an answer to the Soviet concerns about NATO’s actual character. On the contrary, they set in motion a multifaceted propaganda of presenting the North Atlantic Treaty as a “project of peace”. From his side, Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first General Secretary, is credited as having said that the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the American in and the Germans down”.

Based on the above, the obvious question that arises about the foundation of NATO is the following: If the North Atlantic Treaty was indeed created as a counterbalance of the capitalist states to the “Soviet threat”, then why it wasn’t self-dissolved after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the de facto cancellation of the Warsaw Pact?

What was the purpose of NATO’s existence after 1990, as long as the socialist camp ceased to exist? The answer is simple: NATO was never a “defensive alliance” but an imperialist organization, aimed at safeguarding and expanding the interests of its capitalist member-states throughout the world. In 1916, more than four decades before NATO’s establishment, V.I. Lenin had described the prospect of an imperialist alliance: “The imperialist tendency towards big empires is fully achievable, and in practice is often achieved, in the form of an imperialist alliance of sovereign and independent—politically independent—states. Such an alliance is possible and is encountered not only in the form of an economic merger of the finance capital of two countries, but also in the form of military “co-operation” in an imperialist war” (4).

The victory of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the beginning of 1990s provided the “green light” for the new, more aggressive role of NATO. Imperialism, led by the United States and its allies, proceeded to a new phase of interventions and wars, something that was expressed in the infamous “New World Order” proclaimed by U.S President George H. W. Bush. This “new order” essentially reflected the common strategy of the U.S and Western Europe bourgeois classes to reap the fruits of counterrevolution, to extend the rule of monopolies in new regions, to find new natural resources and new cheap labor for exploitation.

Dictatorships and Fascist Coups

NATO’s bloodstained history isn’t marked only by imperialist wars. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is supposedly based among others on the ideals of “democracy” and “liberalism”, bears significant responsibility for supporting, or at least tolerating, the imposition of fascist regimes in a series of states, including some of its members! The cases of Portugal, Greece and Turkey are indicative.

Portugal was already under the “Estado Novo” dictatorship, led by Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, when it became one of the founding signatories of NATO in 1949. Despite the deeply authoritarian character of the Salazar dictatorship, the Portuguese government didn’t experience isolation from the western capitalist states. On the contrary, acknowledging the role of the Portuguese dictatorship as an ally in the Cold War against Communism, the country became one of the 12 founding members of NATO.

Greece, which was a focus point of the Truman Doctrine, became a NATO member on 18 February 1952. The imposition of the seven-year Junta, following the April 1967 military Coup, didn’t affect the country’s NATO membership at all. Furthermore, the imperialist alliance tolerated, if not indirectly encouraged, the Turkish invasion in Cyprus in July 1974 which led to the partition of the island.

Like Greece, neighboring Turkey joined NATO on February 1952. For the U.S and its western European allies, Turkey had been a valuable ally mainly due to its strategic location at the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union. That explains why NATO remained silent towards successive authoritarian governments, including the one of Adnan Menderes and the 1980 military Coup by General Kenan Evren.

NATO is certainly not free of blame for a series of imperialist involvement, mainly led by the United States, in forced regime change in various countries. Some of the cases include: Congo-Leopoldville (1960-65), Dominican Republic (1961), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965-66), Chile (1973), Angola (1975-91), East Timor (1975-1999), Argentina (1976), Chad (1981), Nicaragua (1981-90), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989-94), etc.

Imperialist barbarism “from Vancouver to Vladivostok”

On the 50th anniversary of NATO, the Washington Summit held in April 1999, at the height of the criminal bombing of Yugoslavia, ratified a revised version of the alliance’s “Strategic Concept”. According to the then Secretary General, Javier Solana, the Washington Summit was based “on the lessons learned by NATO from the management of complex crisis, such as the ones in Bosnia-Herzegovina and more recently in Kosovo. It will reflect the experience we have gained in developing highly complex models of communication an cooperation with literally all the countries located in the Euro-Atlantic region which stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok”. In fact, the new Strategic Concept extended the activity of NATO far beyond “Europe’s safety”, turning the alliance into a global sheriff of imperialism.

In Spring 1999, NATO committed the last massacre of the 20th Century; the imperialist intervention and bombing of Yugoslavia, where more than 2,000 civilians were killed. Two years later, the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 in the United States provided the necessary pretext (“War against Terrorism”) for the imperialist attack in Afghanistan, a war that lasted almost 20 years and led to thousands of dead civilians, millions of displaced people and the destruction of a whole country. Following two decades of NATO’s devastating military presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban recaptured Kabul in 2021. Another country which experienced the imperialist barbarism of the North Atlantic alliance was Libya in 2011, a war which resulted to more than 30,000 deaths, 4,000 missing persons and more than 50,000 wounded civilians.

The process of NATO’s transformation into a global watchdog of western imperialism’s interests has been reflected in the decisions of several important summits; in the 2002 Prague Summit seven states, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were invited to begin accession talks, while the alliance set the basis for the planning of the NATO Response Force (NRF). The following Summits, especially those of Istanbul (2004), Riga (2006) and Lisbon (2010) contributed to the further enhancement of NATO’s aggressive military capabilities by elaborating and finally adopting a revised “Strategic Concept”.

The continuous expansion of NATO to the East has led to the rapid sharpening of the inter-imperialist competition with Russia and China, which are the two major powers of the Eurasian imperialist camp that is being formed. The ongoing war in Ukraine is a reflection of this competition, while NATO continues to concentrate military forces and perform military drills in Eastern Europe, the Nordic countries and the Baltic Sea thus adding more fuel to the fire of the confrontation. The recent accession of Sweden to the alliance is definitely an extremely negative development, the effects of which will become visible in the upcoming future.

NATO’s leading powers also bear huge responsibility for the bloodshed that currently takes place in the Middle East, mainly by encouraging and actually supporting Israeli government’s massacre in Gaza, leading to more than 32,000 dead Palestinians since October 2023. The extremely dangerous situation that has been formed for the region’s peoples is a result of the imperialist plans for the “New Middle East”, which have been designed for years by the Euro-Atlantic powers.

Unyielding struggle against NATO

Today, 75 years since the foundation of NATO, the struggle against the imperialist alliance is more timely than ever. More and more people throughout Europe and the world understand that NATO isn’t a force that produces “peace and democracy” but the armed arm of Euro-Atlantic monopoly capitalism. Therefore, the struggle against NATO shouldn’t be simply a slogan but a contemporary and necessary revolutionary task, not only of communists, but of every honest working man and woman who loves peace and people’s prosperity.

This revolutionary task shouldn’t, in any case, be handed over to various reactionary groups, like the Taliban or Hezbollah, which are linked, one way or another, to imperialist interests, or to bourgeois, anti-communist regimes, like for example Putin’s Russia or Khamenei’s Iran. The working masses must not be entrapped in deeply erroneous, opportunistic, anti-leninist theories which treat imperialism as an aggressive foreign policy and deliberately underestimate, or even ignore, its economic essence, that is the monopoly.

The perception of “supporting the least aggressive imperialist” is a blatant distortion of Lenin’s theory and against the popular interests. Indeed, NATO is the most criminal, the most barbaric imperialist alliance since the Second World War with dozens of bloody interventions in the Middle East, the Balkans and North Africa. Indeed, the U.S governments, with the complicity of the EU, have been and remain the number one enemy for human peace. Yes, the struggle against the imperialist alliances of NATO and the EU is more timely and necessary than ever. But all these do not negate, for example, the objective role of capitalist Russia as a powerful imperialist power that competes with the Euro-Atlantic bloc. And as such, an imperialist power, Russia is also an enemy of the people’s interests.

The contemporary struggle against NATO and the Euro-Atlantic imperialism cannot have a generalized and vague “anti-imperialist” context focused merely on foreign policy but must contain an anti-monopoly, anti-capitalist direction. It can’t be detached from class exploitation. Only the organized struggle of the working people towards the overthrow of capitalist barbarism can lead to the defeat of imperialism. In the 21st century, Lenin’s words remain more timely than ever: “Only a proletarian communist revolution can lead humanity out of the deadlock created by imperialism and imperialist wars. No matter what difficulties the revolution may have to encounter and in spite of temporary failure of waves of counter-revolution the final victory of the proletariat is inevitable. (5)”

_{(1) Iron Curtain Speech, 5/4/1946: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/}

_{(2) Henry Kissinger, Reflections on Containment, Foreign Affairs, 01/05/1994: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1994-05-01/reflections-containment}

_{(3) Text of the Soviet Memorandum on the Atlantic Pact, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/040149nato-soviet-text.html}

^{(4) V.I. Lenin, A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism, The Example of Norway, 1916, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/carimarx/4.htm}

_{(5) The 1919 Lenin Program of the CPSU (Bolsheviks). https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol22/no04/rcpb.html}

_{Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.}

_{^{Photo via IDC}}

_{Reposted from In Defense of Communism}

This February marked the tenth anniversary since the so-called “Euromaidan” events in Ukraine and the subsequent coup d’ etat which, backed by the US and the EU, led to the overthrow of the then pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Apart from the rise of far-right, reactionary forces in Ukraine’s political leadership, the 2014 coup became the starting point for the 2022 Russian military invasion and the ongoing imperialist war.

The Euro-Atlantic forces have since tried to present the 2014 events in Ukraine as a “democratic revolution” against Yanukovich government. Officially the then events are called as “Revolution of Dignity”. However all facts point that Euromaidan was nothing but a flagrant intervention of the US, NATO and EU in Ukraine’s internal affairs, as a part of their broader inter-imperialist competition with capitalist Russia. This intervention was the spark that ignited a chain of events that led to the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the so-called “Special Military Operation” in February 2022.

The background and the coup

Socialist Ukraine, formally the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. Since then, the emerging bourgeoisie, made up by capitalists, neo-oligarchs and various counterrevolutionaries, was divided into two major sections: One part linked its interests with the Euro-Atlantic bloc while another one decided to side with capitalist Russia.

This intra-bourgeois competition, which escalated through the 1990s and 2000s, reached a peak in November 2013 when pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from signing the association agreement with the EU and instead accepted a trade and bailout deal with Russia. Back then, the pro-western opposition political forces, led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko – who had been prosecuted for corruption, bribery and misuse of public finances – reacted fiercely demanding the immediate resignation of the President.

The situation was an ideal opportunity for the EU and the US to interfere more actively in Ukraine’s internal affairs in order to serve their own geo-strategic interests in the region. The Euro-Atlantic intervention followed the known pattern of the so-called “Colour Revolutions” and the “Arab Spring”, covered behind supposedly “spontaneous”, but in fact very well elaborated, protests which subsequently turned violent. The center of these protests was Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s Independence Square.

Euromaidan protests became the stage of activity for fascist and neo-Nazi groups (e.g “Right Sector”, “Ukrainian National Assembly”, “Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists”, Banderites, etc) and was openly endorsed by NATO and EU member-states’ embassies. US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador in Kyiv Geoffrey Pyatt played a key role in supporting the Euromaidan coup on behalf of the Obama administration. The desire of the US government to have full and unchallenged control of the situation created by Euromaidan was perfectly captured in Nuland’s words during a phone conversation with Pyatt: “You know, fuck the EU”.

_{^{Fascist groups in the streets of Kyiv}}

On 21 February 2024, following days of violent clashes, over 100 deaths and the mediation of European governments, mainly France and Germany, Yanukovych government and the leaders of the opposition signed an agreement which, among others, promised return to the 2004 constitution, early elections and withdrawal of security forces from the center of Kyiv. The negotiation process as well as the agreement were closely witnessed by the Russian government as well. Nonetheless, things didn’t go as President Yanukovych expected. He was overthrown while he was on a planned trip to Eastern Ukraine and the new temporary coup government under Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was immediately recognized by the EU and the US.

Yanukovych found refuge in Russia and, at the same time, pro-Russian protests erupted across Ukraine, especially in the south and eastern parts of the country, including Crimea. Armed fascist and nationalist paramilitary gangs undertook the responsibility to suppress the riots by unleashing a wave of violence against the pro-Russian population. Within their terrorist activity, on 2 May 2014 Ukrainian fascists committed a horrendous crime in Odessa, burning alive more than 100 protesters in the Trade Unions House.

The Minsk agreements

Despite the orgy of violence and terrorism exercised by Ukrainian fascist paramilitaries, the Russian-speaking population in Crimea and the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk (that is the majority of the people in the Donbass region) refused to accept the new coup government formed in Kyiv. Under the pretext of protecting the Russian-speaking population from an imminent extermination, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula and then annexed it. At the same time, following weeks of clashes with Ukrainian state and paramilitary forces, pro-Russian separatists in Donbass proclaimed the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic as “independent states”.

In order to avoid any further escalation in Donbass, France, Germany and Belarus initiated a round of negotiations which led to the signing of the so-called Minsk Agreements, the first on 5 September 2014 and the second on 12 February 2015. The agreements consisted of a package of measures, including ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, release of prisoners of war and constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government – not independence though – to specific areas of Donbass.

***_{^{Massacre in Odessa, 2 May 2014}}***

The Ukrainian government failed to implement its own commitments and, on the other hand, Moscow used Russian separatists as a “trojan horse” for the promotion of its influence in the region. In fact, none of the two parties really wanted the implementation of the Minsk Agreements but, instead, they pushed their own agendas on the expense of the working people.

The failure of the Minsk Agreements was accompanied by a ferocious military assault of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and fascist paramilitaries (e.g neo-Nazi Azov battalion) against the people of Donbass. This attempted genocide, which had the silent approval of the West, namely NATO and the EU, provided to Putin administration the necessary pretext in order to launch the “Special Military Operation (SMO)” and the invasion that took place two years ago, on February 2022.

Ten years later…

Ten years since the Euromaidan events and two years after the Russian invasion, a full-scale disastrous war is being waged against the people of Ukraine and Russia. As we have stressed out in the past, It is a war that takes place between two adversary imperialist blocs, the Euro-Atlantic one (USA, NATO, EU) and the emerging Eurasian bloc led by China and Russia. The division of mineral wealth, energy, territories, labour force, pipelines, transport routes of commodities, geopolitical footholds and market shares lie at the heart of the military conflict.

The reactionary government of Volodymir Zelenskiy has been used as a pawn on the chessboard of this inter-imperialist rivalry and, sooner or later, will be thrown in the dustbin of political history by its own masters.

The peoples of Russia and Ukraine, who had been living in peace and prospered together under the Soviet Union, have no interest in siding with one imperialist or another, with one alliance or another that serves the interests of the monopolies.

The interest of the working class and the popular strata in every country requires to chart their own independent path against monopolies and bourgeois classes, for the overthrow of capitalism, for the strengthening of the class struggle against imperialist war, for socialism which remains as timely and necessary as ever before.