Since 1565, the Philippines has been in the grip of one imperialist power after another. Even after independence, the archipelago remains a kind of functional US colony. Now, territorial conflict in the South China Sea could turn the Philippines into a battleground for US-China war. Josua Mata joins Solidarity Without Exception to discuss the Philippines long history of colonization and resistance.

Production: Ashley Smith
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

Ashley Smith:  Welcome to Solidarity Without Exception. I’m Ashley Smith, who, along with Blanca Misse, are co-hosts of this ongoing podcast series. Solidarity Without Exception is sponsored by the Ukraine Solidarity Network and produced by The Real News Network.

Today, we’re joined by Josua Mata to discuss the Philippines, a country caught in the crossfire between the US and China over hegemony in the Asia Pacific. Josua Mata is the General Secretary of the Filipino labor federation SENTRO, which organizes workers across many sectors in the country.

The Philippines has long been a battleground between empires fighting for dominance over the Asia Pacific. The US replaced Spain as the country’s colonial overlord in 1898 through President William McKinley’s Spanish-American War. The US used that war to seize control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, projecting its imperial power over the Americas and Asia. Japan drove out the US during World War II, imposing its own brutal dominance over the country, only to be replaced after its defeat by the United States.

Ever since, Washington has used the Philippines as a base to project its hegemony in Asia. Today, the country is caught between the intensifying conflict between the US and China in the region. The Philippines elite has historically been a willing collaborator with the US.

Washington backed the country’s dynastic families, including the notorious dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, until it was overthrown in the People Power Revolution in 1986. Because the uprising did not have a party of its own to lead a thoroughgoing transformation of society, the liberal elite were able to hijack the revolution. While they did reestablish democracy and kick out the US military bases, they enacted Washington’s neoliberal reforms that have driven the country into debt and devastated the living standards of the working class and peasantry.

They also collaborated with the US in challenging China’s construction of military bases in the South China Sea. China established those bases to project its regional power, control shipping lanes, and secure access to fisheries and drilling rights to the undersea oil and natural gas reserves.

The Philippines challenged Beijing’s encroachment into what it regarded as its sovereign territory, winning a case under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in The Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration. China has not recognized or obeyed that decision, stoking what has become a semi-militarized conflict between China and the Philippines.

But amidst spiraling poverty, the masses of the country grew disappointed with the liberal elite, opening the door to the return of authoritarian forces. Far-right populist Rodrigo Duterte won election in 2016. He launched his so-called war on drugs that massacred tens of thousands of people, escalated the government’s brutal repression of the Muslim separatist groups in Mindanao, and tilted the Philippines toward China in the hopes of securing investment as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

After the end of his term in office, Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte, ran as the vice president on the presidential ticket of Marcos’s son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr. Their joint dynastic ticket won handily, but the pact between the families has fallen apart. Marcos has tilted back to the US and permitted the International Criminal Court to arrest Rodrigo Duterte and place him on trial in The Hague for the mass killing he carried out in his so-called war on drugs. Now Sara Duterte is mobilizing protests against Marcos, thrusting the country towards political conflict between dynastic elites.

Amidst this conflict, the Marcos government is whipping up nationalism against China’s ongoing encroachment on its seas. The Trump administration is pouring fuel on the fire. It dispatched Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the Philippines, and elsewhere in Asia, to escalate the US confrontation with China. He promised to back the Philippines, Taiwan, and other countries in the region against Beijing. Thus, the Philippines has become yet another flashpoint between the US and China in their ongoing rivalry.

In this podcast, Josua Mata lays out an alternative approach for working people. He advocates progressive internationalism. He calls for the demilitarization of the region, international solidarity from below against both imperial powers as well as the region’s elite, and the transformation of the contested seas into a commons to be shared by the region and developed in the interests of the people and our planet.

Now, onto the discussion with Josua Mata.

The Philippines has been a battleground of empires, various imperial powers, really, for centuries. And I really couldn’t help but think about that when President Trump in his inaugural address referred to President McKinley and the Spanish American War, which the US used to take over the Philippines and impose a brutal occupation and semi or direct colonial rule of the country for decades. So what is the history of the Philippines’s experience of colonization by different imperialist powers, and how have Filipinos resisted?

Josua Mata:  Well, we normally would start the history of the Philippine labor movement by tracing it all the way to the time that we were struggling against pain. In fact, the working-class hero, Andrés Bonifacio, is considered as a working-class hero, primarily because he was the one who founded the revolutionary organization that fought Spain after 300 years of colonial rule.

And to be honest, that revolution had already won almost all the territories in the country except for Manila, particularly the fort, the walled city of Manila, and some small parts in the provinces. But primarily, the Katipunan, which was what it was called then, was already able to liberate most of the areas from Spanish colonial rule.

However, that was also the time when the American colonial project started, and it started with the coming of Commodore George Dewey and where they staged a mock naval battle in Manila Bay. And then they took over Fort Santiago, pretending to have a firefight with the Spaniards, just to give them the semblance that they are really fighting for their dignity, when, in fact, it’s really a mock bottle.

And then they started fooling the Filipino forces by telling them that they came to the Philippines to help the revolution. Of course, the Philippine Republic was already declared as an independent country then. But then, as soon as George Dewey was able to amass enough reinforcements coming from the US, then they started to have this really brutal fight with the Filipino revolutionaries.

Eventually, of course, we were overtaken by more superior technology and much better trained American soldiers who were fresh from their experiences in practically decimating the Native American Indians in North America. So, a lot of the things that they did here in the Philippines were actually efforts to perfect what they had learned in killing the Native American Indians. And in turn, what they learned from the Philippines are exactly the same things that they brought with them to Vietnam.

So, to answer your question quite clearly, how was the Filipino experience when it came to American imperial control? Well, the simplest answer is that we were the first Vietnam. So Japan came in, and then the Americans, of course, came back with MacArthur’s promise of, “I shall return.” And he did return, but unfortunately, when he did, he was more interested in making sure that the elites that he had befriended when he was still the security advisor of Manuel L. Quezon, that was the first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, he was more interested in making sure that the elites are able to regain their power, their prestige, and even their economic wealth, to the point that he was so eager to pardon everyone who practically collaborated with the Japanese.

And that is so unlike the practice that he demonstrated. That’s so unlike what he did when he was the proconsul of Japan, where he literally punished everyone who had ties with the military’s Japanese empire –- Except of course, the Japanese leaders who have very strong ties with those who amass so much wealth plundering every country in this part of the world. So, the so-called Yamashita gold, this actually historical reality, and it is suspected that MacArthur readily pardoned many of the Japanese war criminals in exchange for some share of that looted gold. So, those are two very different approaches.

So for example, as soon as they returned to the Philippines, one of the first things that the US government did was to help the elite destroy the armed Huk Rebellion, which is essentially an armed group controlled by the old Communist Party, who were fighting with the peasants who wanted, of course, to have control over the land that they have been historically cultivating. That’s so contrary to what MacArthur did in Japan, where one of the first things he imposed was punishing undergoing agrarian reform in order to dismantle, partly, also to dismantle the Zaibatsus that armed the imperial government of Japan. It’s a contrasting way of dealing with a colonial country, and, obviously, it has to do with the loyalties of MacArthur to the elites in the Philippines.

Ashley Smith:  So, in the wake of World War II, the Philippines eventually achieves a nominal independence, but with serious control by the United States through military bases, through economic domination.

Josua Mata:  That’s right. And that’s one of the biggest problems, the so-called parity rights that Americans imposed on the Philippines, wherein American capitalists would have the same rights as Filipinos in running their business in the country, or even in exploiting our natural resources. And that was one of the nastiest things that made sure that even if we have nominal independence, the country practically continues to serve as a colony, a new colony of the US, if you like.

Ashley Smith:  So, now we’re in a situation where the United States is still the predominant power in Asia, but it faces a rival for its dominance in the form of China. And the Philippines is caught in the middle of this conflict between the US and China. And China in particular has been trying to assert its control of the South China Sea, and with that, islands, fisheries, undersea natural resources, oil, natural gas, and shipping lanes. And the Philippines has been caught in between the US and China. So, what is the character of this conflict between the United States and China, and what impact has it had on the Philippines?

Josua Mata:  Well, clearly this is a fight between two imperial powers, and the Philippines is being caught between them, and that’s not a good place to be. On the one hand, the US, because of its historical ties to the country, and because it has an existing mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, it is dangling this promise that they would come to the aid of the Philippines if it is attacked militarily by a foreign aggressor, in this case, for example, China.

But interestingly, actually, for many presidents in the past, it was so difficult for them to be very categorical about coming to the aid of the Philippines, to the point that you’re not really sure whether the US would actually support the Philippines or not. And with Trump around, many are, obviously, now having a problem because nobody knows if Trump would actually lift a finger to help Filipinos. Why would he, when he’s so preoccupied with ejecting everyone who is not a white American in his own country? Why would he then spend time, energy, and resources and American lives to save Filipinos? So that’s a big question mark.

Now, that is putting the current government in a quandary because it [cast] its lot with American power, and it started having a much more robust, if you like, stance to US intervention and intrusion, if you like, in our part of the world.

Now, that’s problematic for them because now they have been supported by the previous government of the US, the Biden administration, to stand fast, fight back. Now they’re not so sure whether the Americans would really come to their support. And I think that clearly is the problem because, in the first place, why did they decide to side with the US in this conflict and eventually be used as a pawn of one imperial power against another rising imperial power?

Now, having said that, China, on the other hand, is obviously keen on making sure that it can exercise its own manifest destiny in this part of the world. They have been very, very clear, if the US run the Americas throughout history as if it’s its own backyard, they should have the same “right” to do that, which then puts Filipinos, particularly the fishermen who have traditionally been going out to those parts of the South China Sea, which we now call the West Philippine Sea, in order to do their livelihood. And prior to this conflict, it has been said that Filipinos, Taiwanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, even Indonesians were all free to gather resources peacefully and in coexistence when there was no conflict. But then, now that’s not possible because China was asserting its nine-dash line, which is now back to 10-dash line, in a very, very aggressive manner.

But in the meantime, rather than call for sobriety and call for making sure that there’s no potential for any flashpoint that could lead to war, unfortunately, my country, the government, my government opted to bring in and invite more military arrangements, not only with the US, but also with several other countries like Japan, Australia. Now they’re forging another agreement with New Zealand. They’re trying to forge an agreement with Germany as well as India.

And what would that mean? It means that this would only lead to more militarization of that part of the world. And with more naval forces loitering in that area, then you have an ever-increasing possibility of having a flashpoint that could lead eventually to war. So, this is a very, very dangerous moment for all of us.

Ashley Smith:  One thing I wanted to get you to talk a little bit more about was the Philippine elite and how it has vacillated. The Duterte government, which was the predecessor to the current Marcos Jr. government, tilted seemingly towards China, and then Marcos has swung back to the United States pretty decisively. And what explains this vacillation, and also how is it related to the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Filipino government itself and its rule over the country?

Josua Mata:  Well, first of all, to be clear, while we have always called the country a democratic country, we have very, very little experience in actual democracy in this country. Ever since we gained our “independence” from the American empire, our nominal freedom, if you like, we’ve always been ruled by the elites who are much more subservient to the US empire than to anyone else. And the US empire has always been happy to keep them happy, our elites happy, as long as they allow the US bases to continue untouched in this part of the world, for the longest time. That changed somehow when we finally managed to kick out the US bases. But then, the economic ties are still so strong.

So let me put it out first. We don’t have much experience in democracy in this country. That’s the first point. The second point I want to say is that our economy has always been designed to serve the needs of capital, particularly, specifically US capital. And most of our elites have almost always directed their economic transactions to be part of the US global capitalist system.

However, with the rise of China, it gave an opportunity for some parts of the elites in the country to have their own entry to global trade. But that’s a very small part of the elite, but that was given much more space when Duterte came to power. But let’s not forget that Duterte came to power primarily because he was supported by China, not just financially, but also politically. And the reason is — And this is where it gets weird — The reason is because Duterte is the kind of leader that actually fits perfectly well with the kind of politics that we have in this country, which is a highly personalistic kind of politic, where our politics is essentially dominated by personalities, specifically by family dynasties.

For example, in this current Congress, more than 85% of all congressmen are actually part of the political dynasties. Our mayors, about 68% of our mayors, are part of political dynasties. We have a president who is a Marcos, his sister is a senator, his son is a congressman, and he’s got several uncles and nieces and cousins who are congressmen and mayors and local government officials. That’s the kind of political system that we have. And Duterte came into the picture when these political dynasties started asserting themselves once again in our history with a vengeance. It’s like having political dynasties on steroids at that point in time.

But you see, Duterte has had a really bad experience with the US, and because he takes things personally, when he was applying for a visa, he apparently was rejected being given a visa, and that he took that personally. And since then, he has become anti-American and [is] packaging his anti-Americanism as part of a nationalist position in the Philippines. Which is funny, because while he keeps claiming that he is nationalist, the first thing he did was actually, after he declared that he’s no longer with the US empire, he then shifted immediately and told Xi Jinping himself, of China, that now he would depend on China [Smith laughs]. So that’s really incredible. And I told you, that’s where it gets funny, because here’s the personal preference of a president that is essentially affecting the entire country.

But that link goes deeper if you look more closely, because his family is suspected of having very, very deep links with Chinese businessmen, particularly those who are operating in the shadow economy of China, which means the underground economy, specifically the drugs trade. So, there’s that very strong suspicion in this country, that they’ve always been linked to the Chinese triads. And that’s why he had that preference of being with China.

So, you have here the personal interconnection of political clan who is now using, who is now intent on using their power in order to deepen that connection and to favor the economic interest of their family.

But then, we only have one term for presidents in this country, and that was specifically designed to prevent a dictator from ruling us, so that means he only had six years to be a dictator [both laugh]. So there’s a natural limit for dictatorship in this country [both laugh].

So when Marcos won by running a campaign where both the Duterte family and the Marcos family are in close unity, and they call themselves UniTeam, as soon as he won, I don’t think he had any intention of moving away from China. In fact, what we now know is that he had all the intention to keep going, to keep the relationship going with China.

The problem is, he felt insulted after China promised exactly the same things that they promised to Duterte, but they never delivered. So, all the billions of investments that Xi Jinping promised to Duterte, none of it actually materialized. Even the official development programs that they promised, of all the many things that they promised, including massive railway infrastructure, none of that materialized. The only thing that materialized are two bridges that were built by China. So Marcos felt insulted by that, and that’s, from what I heard, that’s one reason why he immediately shifted to the US.

But I also think it’s because the Marcoses have always been close to the US. They’ve been trained. The children of Marcos Sr. were trained in the US. They never graduated, but they can claim that they have actually stepped inside a US university like Princeton, but I’m not so sure what they learned [both laugh]. But the outlook has always been closer to the US as a family more than anything else.

But more importantly, he has also to contend with the fact that the military infrastructure in this country, the military personnel, the ideology, as well as the doctrines that they’re using are all developed using the US influence. So, the military has always been pro-US. So that’s also one reason why it’s not that difficult for Marcos to shift to the US away from China.

So that’s how things are, if you look at why the elites would vacillate between the two countries.

But now, it’s important to talk about, so what do the people really know about this conflict? Because the way it is being presented to the public is that this is a fight for national sovereignty. This is a fight for our own freedoms. But the elites, and even parts of the left, has been failing to explain the fact that one of the things that pushed the Philippine government to file a case [with] the UN was primarily because those who have commercial interests, the Filipino oligarchs who have commercial interests to drill the fossil fuels that are supposedly found in those areas, and they failed to drill because China has been preventing them. That is actually what pushed the country to file an arbitration case.

Now, we all know what happened when the Philippine case was heard, UNCLOS made a decision that favors the Philippines, but now their problem is how could they have it enforced when China doesn’t recognize that decision? And that’s why we are now in this situation, because parts of the elites, parts of the oligarchs, wanted to get their hands in the fossil fuels buried in that part of the world. And yet, they’re mobilizing people’s sentiment to support what is necessarily a nationalist position to defend our territory. And that we find very, very dangerous.

Ashley Smith:  Now, let’s talk a little bit more about the conflicts that are happening in this clash over the islands of the so-called South China Sea. Are we headed towards a conflict between the Philippines backed by the US with China? How close to an actual military conflict? Because it seems like it’s gotten close, and then both have backed off, and then it’s gotten close again. And so we’re feeling like we’re at the edge of a military conflagration.

Josua Mata:  To be honest, I don’t think China wants to start a war. It doesn’t help them. It just won’t help them. And I don’t think the US wants to have a war as well. Not even the Philippines. So nobody wants to have a war. But let’s not forget that’s exactly the attitude of most world powers before World War I. Nobody wanted World War I, but then it was too late when everyone realized that European powers were actually sleepwalking into a World War, so that’s exactly what we have right now.

I don’t think anyone wants to have a war, but the fact that you’re increasing militarization in that area, where China has built its artificial islands and then put up naval bases and air facilities for their air forces, and then the Philippines started arming itself as if we have all the money to do it when we can’t even feed our people properly. Now, we’re even looking at the possibility of buying submarines.

So I really don’t understand what’s the plan here, because do we intend to arm ourselves to the teeth, thinking that we can actually frighten the Chinese away? Where is the end game if you try to militarize? And now you’re inviting everyone, all your allies to have military arrangements with you.

So all this militarization is the problem, and unfortunately there’s no pushback that I can see, nor do I hear it, even among the progressive elements of the society. It’s as if everyone just accepted that there’s no other solution to the problem but to try to arm ourselves and come up with more military arrangements so that we can all push China out of those islands, and that’s very, very dangerous.

Ashley Smith:  So, what impact has this increasing military budget, this sleepwalking dynamic into a military conflagration, what impact has that had on the domestic politics of the Philippines? What impact has it had on working people, both at the ideological level, what people are thinking, and also on the economy of the country and the experience of working-class life?

Josua Mata:  Well, let’s start with economy, which is the simplest thing to explain because we’re not a rich country, despite the way many of our economic mismanagers would try to brag that we are almost at the middle income level. We are still a poor country. We still have many people who don’t even have access to electricity or access to sanitation. So we still need resources in order to develop the economy so that we can provide [the] material needs of our people. Now you have to funnel a huge chunk of that money to military expenditures in order to modernize, supposedly, our military forces.

And so, what’s the concrete impact? This year, in 2025, the government just signed, the president just signed a budget, a trillion peso budget. Now it’s like ₱5 trillion pesos, if I’m not mistaken, and there’s zero budget or zero subsidy for Field Health. Field Health, that’s the universal health system in this country. Zero subsidy, so that they can now use it in order to put more money and more resources into militarization.

But more importantly, because this is an election period, then politicians would want to have a capacity to dip their hands into the coffers so that they can actually buy their way back to power. So that’s the economic impact. We have to shift a lot of our resources, much needed resources, away from social expenditure into military expenditure.

Ideologically, for me, the bigger problem is that there’s a stark increase or there’s a tendency to encourage nationalist thinking, which, again, is very dangerous because, for me, it means that you put a premium on your own country, and therefore, it prepares everyone to fight anyone else outside of the country. And that, obviously, is the foundation for war. That’s the psychological preparation for war, if you like.

And who would suffer first and foremost in a war? It’s the working class, specifically the women and the children who are all unarmed, the civilians. And whose interests would this war be waged for? Well, obviously, this is what the oligarchs and the powers that be are not explaining, it’s actually in the interest of the oligarchs who wanted to drill fossil fuel in that part of the world.

So that really is what the government is not explaining to the working class. And that is what we in SENTRO are really explaining to the workers. And we are trying to tell everyone that militarization is not the only solution. In fact, militarization is the worst solution that you can ever think of, if it is called a solution in the first place.

I don’t think we are in a situation where we only need to choose between Beijing or Washington. These are false choices. These are imperialist powers who wanted to have the upper hand in the global competition for resources, for markets, et cetera. And both of them will not do anything good for the Filipino people. But then, the elites are forcing the Filipino people to take sides, and these binary choices that they’re presenting are all false choices.

I think the more appropriate response should come from an international response, particularly from the labor movement, where the first question that all workers should ask is, what is it that we can do to make sure that there is no war?

Ashley Smith:  One of the things that is clear in the US China rivalry, in particular, is that every corner of the earth is affecting every other corner of the earth. You can’t separate any region of the world geopolitically. They’re all interrelated. And in particular, the impact of what happens in Europe has an impact on what happens in Asia.

So right now, Trump is trying to foist a pro-Russian imperialist deal on Ukraine, which basically forces Ukraine to give up 20% of its territory, no security guarantees, which means there’s likelihood for more war. But Trump has pushed for that deal. And many in Asia have thought if Ukraine falls, Taiwan’s next, and then there’s lots of other countries that are in the path. Because what it’s affirmed is an annexationist imperialism by these great powers, the United States under Trump, Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China.

On the other hand, people have also said that Trump is trying to strike a deal over Ukraine to redeploy forces of the United States to Asia for a sharper confrontation with China.

So, like you said earlier, it’s a little bit hard to figure out what Trump is really up to. What’s the plan behind this deal in Europe and what’s its impact going to be on China.

So what’s your take on what is going on there in Europe and what impact it’s going to have on Asia?

Josua Mata:  Well, to be honest, as I said, many are now wondering, could the country actually rely on the US? Because the country, as I said, it’s locked with the US, but now with Trump and his extremely volatile positioning and highly unpredictable way of conducting foreign policy, nobody actually knows what would happen. So that’s what people are wondering about in this part of the world. I think that’s a natural result of the strategy when you start casting your lot with the US. So, now you’re in that dilemma precisely because you did what you did.

Now, having said that, I think Trump’s positioning in Ukraine right now, whether it pans out or not, already sends a very strong message to everyone else that you cannot rely on the US, you cannot rely on Trump. That’s also the reason why I think the Philippine government, particularly the president, is starting to figure out how to recalculate things.

And this is where his statement about, remember we have Typhon missiles here that were deployed by the US. Now, I’m not so sure if we have nuclear weapons here, nuclear warheads here. Hopefully not because that’s unconstitutional. But we both know that the US, it’s not the first time. If ever the US deploys a nuclear weapon in a country with constitutional bans against nuclear weapons, it’s not the first time. They did it with Japan, right? Without the Japanese government actually knowing about it. So I wouldn’t be surprised.

But having said that, now Marcos is saying, oh, I’d be happy to return the Typhon missiles, provided that China, you will stop harassing us and you will respect our rights, et cetera. So to me, that’s a signal that he’s trying to recalibrate his own positioning, knowing fully well that he can no longer rely fully on what the US will do. So that’s one impact, at least that I can see.

But the worrisome thing for me is that it also tells us that weak countries have no say in solving the problems of this world, even if these problems are the ones that are faced by these weak countries. I cannot imagine how Ukrainian people right now feel. Their future is being decided by two superpowers without them having any voice at all.

And that’s, I think, also the message to everyone in this part of the world. Whether Trump would launch a much more militarist front, whether Trump would be much more militaristic in dealing with China when it comes to the West or the South China Sea or Taiwan or not, the fact is, it is very clear that he will make the decision without thinking of consulting, whether the Taiwanese people or the Filipino people who would be affected by his decision, and that that’s just not good for anyone.

Ashley Smith:  So now, let’s turn to what progressive forces in the Philippines and what the left and the trade union movement can do. You’re one of the leaders of one of the key unions in the Philippines. So, how should the labor movement, oppressed people, workers more broadly, the peasant movement in the Philippines, position themselves in this sharpening rivalry, this instability, the unreliability of the United States? What are the traps that should be avoided, and what are the solutions that the working class movement in the Philippines should put forward?

Josua Mata:  That’s one of the questions that we have been trying to grapple with for many, many years now, since this whole thing started. And we’re still developing our ideas, but one thing is very clear for us at the onset: We can never respond to these problems coming from narrow, nationalistic thinking. That, for us, is a disaster.

Which, unfortunately, is what the elites are peddling in order to gather more support for their position. And, unfortunately, many in the left in the Philippines, many in the progressive movement, including the left in the Philippines, who are also so steep into nationalist thinking even in their own ideological moorings, because of their own steep nationalist thinking, they are finding it very difficult to step away from that. But that’s the biggest trap, if you like, if you get into this nationalist thinking that we should wave the flag and defend those islands as our own. That’s just going to lead to war.

Now, that was very clear for us from the very start. It was also very clear to us that the key issue here is the fossil fuels that are supposedly buried down there. But we’re in the midst of a climate crisis, and this is a real climate crisis. So, are we saying that we’re going to wage a war and kill each other only to dig up those fossil fuels so that we can burn the planet even more? That’s just absurd. So, people should also sit back and think very clearly, is that the way you want to make use of these resources?

Now, obviously we would have to burn some fossil fuels if you want to lift people from poverty, of course. But then, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we be thinking along the lines of how do we do this in a way where we can minimize the impact on climate? And isn’t it better to think about these resources as something that all of us in this part of the world can use, and not just the Filipinos?

I’m a socialist. As a socialist, I’ve always been raised with the thinking that resources are things that we should be sharing with everyone, no matter what your nationality is. The second thing that we thought of immediately, is that why can’t we think of these islands as regional commons, where everyone who’s had any claim on it, let’s just all sit down and let’s all agree on how we can make sure that we can make use of these resources in an equitable way?

And then, finally, clearly, the solution to prevent the intensification or to prevent any potential military conflict, I think the solution is simply to call for a complete demilitarization of that area. And this is where we don’t have any support, even among the progressive groups in this country. Again, it’s because I think of this one-track thinking, that the only solution or the only response that you can present to a bully like China is to present a military solution. That, again, would only lead to disaster.

So these are some of the key things that we’re trying to develop at this point in time. But the problem here is that we still have yet to develop a broader constituency for this thinking, because there are very, very few people who would subscribe to this idea in a situation where nationalist thinking, nationalist solutions are so powerful, even among the left in this country.

Ashley Smith:  A couple of final questions I wanted to ask you. First about this moment, because this moment that we’re living through has both these interstate conflicts and interimperial conflicts, but it also has been 15 years of explosive struggle from below: pro-democracy movements, national liberation movements, revolutionary uprisings, especially in the Middle East. And a lot of them have not broken through and rebuilt the society in a progressive way — Yet.

And one question, because of the Philippines’s history of intense pro-democracy struggles, explosive pro-democracy struggles, in particular the People Power movement that toppled the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos’s father, Ferdinand Marcos, what lessons do you think the left in the Philippines, and more broadly and globally, should people draw from the experience of these struggles, and in particular in the Philippines, from the People Power movement?

Josua Mata:  It’s a perfect question to end this discussion, and I’d like to remind you that, in a few days’ time, we will actually celebrate or commemorate the EDSA Revolution. And then this current government, the Marcos government, is trying its darndest best to make sure that people actually forget it [laughs]. So, I think that our first job is to make sure that people don’t forget. That’s the first job. And as we have often heard, the battle, the fight against authoritarianism, dictatorship, is actually a fight against forgetting. It’s a fight to make sure that our memory is not left behind or it’s not forgotten. It’s a fight for memory. It’s a fight for historical memory.

And that is the first thing that I think we lost as a progressive movement, as part of the left in the Philippines. And so that’s one lesson. Many people no longer have the idea that the Marcos dictatorship was a really dark moment in our history. Most people may have heard of that and they have probably read of that in our textbooks, but they have no clue on what it actually means. To the point that workers, 61% of voters even voted for Marcos during the last election.

Now, that really is frustrating because most of these voters are working-class people, and they have forgotten that when the father declared martial law, the first ones that he arrested were not the politicians — It was the trade union leaders. The first thing that he tried to destroy was not just the democratic systems that we have, but the labor movement that can potentially be an opposition to his martial law. So, the battle for memory, I think, is something that we need to keep fighting for.

The second lesson that we can learn from the People Power, the failed People Power Revolution in this country, is that it is always important to make sure that there is an organized mass, an organized force that can provide the backbone, if you like, for the continuous push for social transformation. What we had in the EDSA Revolution was a political moment, a moment where we had the potential to transform society by ushering a thoroughgoing social reform, a social transformation, if you like.

The problem is People Power Revolution was largely led by people who were unorganized. And the only organized forces that you can imagine, that you can see during that period where the military and the politicians, the elite politicians, they were the only ones who had the machinery, the organization to make sure that the gains of the revolution could be pushed towards their agenda. Because the dominant left at that point in time made a mistake of ignoring People Power Revolution because they have this sectarian belief, this Stalinist belief that the only way to wage a revolution in the Philippines is only through armed struggle, nothing more.

So that effectively sidelined the Communist Party, which then led to… That was the historical error that led to them being sidelined. Maybe I should say it this way. My political upbringing was when I joined the EDSA Revolution. I was still a student then, and I was a working student. And I distinctly remember when there was a call for people to come to EDSA. And at that time, many of us didn’t realize what was happening. Many of us didn’t know until much, much later that EDSA was actually started when a coup d’etat, a military coup d’etat of General Ramos and the secretary of defense minister at that time, minister of defense at that time, Enrile, they were planning a coup d’etat against Marcos because he knew he was dying and they were afraid that it’s the wife, Imelda, now together with General Ver, who would take over. Nobody knew that at that point in time.

And that plot, that coup plot, which they wanted to launch in 1984, was postponed to 1985 because the Americans managed to convince Marcos to hold snap elections. So they postponed it, but then they wanted to do it again, they were discovered by the Marcoses, and that forced Fidel Ramos and Enrile to come out in public, have a press conference and declare that they’re no longer supporting Marcos.

The funny thing is, a funny footnote, actually, is that Imelda and General Ver could have nipped that [inaudible] in the bud had one of the aides actually had the gall to disturb them during a party they were having [Smith laughs]. No, it’s true, this is true. I think it’s a wedding party. They were having a wedding party and nobody wanted to disturb them. And then by the time they found out about it, it was too late [both laugh]. Enrile and General Ramos were already able to start mobilizing support for them for their rebellion, if you like.

But people heeded the call of Cardinal Sin, who supported Marcos for a long time but then eventually turned away from him. These are people who are like me at that point in time, who were not organized. And we were there out in the streets. We didn’t sleep, we didn’t take a bath. You don’t eat much, except when there’s food, except that you can always rely on someone giving you food in the streets when we were manning the barricades.

And then when we heard that finally Marcos had left, everybody was so jubilant, everybody was crying, dancing, laughing, and then the first thing that we thought of, we should sleep. So we all went home, we slept, not knowing that the elites were up constructing the new system, so by the time that we woke up, welcome back, we woke up to a government that’s once again run by the oligarchs [laughs]. That is the biggest lesson. You don’t wage a revolution, and then on the verge of your victory, you go to sleep [both laugh].

Which means it only brings us back to what many of us who are practitioners of professional revolutionaries, if you like, it only brings us back to the point that we always know that nothing beats people being organized, knowing fully well not just what they are against but what they really want. Because if we don’t have that organization with a very clear vision and strategy on how do we want to transform society, then someone else will step in and hijack what we have started.

Ashley Smith:  Exactly. So this podcast is entitled Solidarity Without Exception. So I wanted to ask you about what you think about the popular struggle in the Philippines and its relation to similar ones in Palestine and Ukraine. Because so often, progressives fall into a trap of selective solidarity, siding with some popular struggles but not other popular struggles because of the camp that those struggles happen in, either a Russian or Chinese camp, or an American camp, and people don’t have universal solidarity with progressive struggles from below. So, in the context that we’re in of rising interimperial antagonism, increasing national oppression, and, with that, growing popular struggle of various kinds from below, how do we build a new internationalism that practices solidarity without exceptions? And what are the openings for that kind of internationalism today?

Josua Mata:  I think the problem in the Philippines, for us in the labor movement, is not the kind of problems that you’re facing that you just mentioned. Our problem is that there’s not much solidarity among the Filipino working class and the labor movement, simply because people are so tied up with their day-to-day struggles.

But don’t get me wrong, when I started the labor movement three decades ago, one of my first international works was actually supporting Burma — It wasn’t called Myanmar then — So I was supporting the Free Burma Coalition, not as an individual, but as part of the labor movement. I was then working as an education officer of the hotel unions, and I was very, very proud that we were providing spaces for the Burmese, the exiled Burmese leaders. Whenever they come to the Philippines, we actually host them so that they can meet quietly in one of the hotels that we organize. So, it’s so easy for us to be very, very involved in that kind of solidarity.

But then, looking back, one wonders, so, why are many trade union leaders then were very supportive of the struggle for Burma, but then when we asked them to look at the situation of the Muslims in Mindanao who were also waging their own war for their freedom, and who were, for the longest time, were being treated as if they are our own Palestine, then why is it that it’s so difficult for them to support that?

And that was really a nagging question that led my organization to actually have a program to combat the prejudice that many Catholics, if you like, Christians, if you like, against Muslims. Because in the first place, that fight for freedom of the moral people was never a religious fight. It was a completely secular fight for the freedom of people who have never agreed to be part of the country.

So, we realized that it’s not easy for people to readily provide solidarity to them because they have been fooled into thinking that this is a religious war. So within our organization we had to launch a massive education campaign to address the prejudice and make sure that, at the minimum, the labor movement should at least be able to ensure that its membership is a constituency for peace. So, that’s the lesson we draw [from] that.

But the problem for us now is that it’s so difficult for us to get the people to support, for example, the struggle of the people in Ukraine or even in Palestine. We hold rallies, we hold activities, we hold actions, but it’s this small community of activists and believers and not the general public. That is the challenge that we have right now. And I attribute that to the fact that people are so burdened with day-to-day living that’s just difficult for them to… The bandwidth for solidarity, if you like, is so limited. And that is a challenge that we have to figure out, now, how do we address that?

So yes, having said that, I completely believe that real solidarity is the solution to the problems that we’re facing, even in the West Philippine Sea or the South China Sea. The starting point in our efforts to develop [a] working-class narrative to the so-called China question has always been to understand the workers of China. We firmly believe that there’s no way we can build solidarity with the Chinese working class unless people understand that they, like us, are workers who are suffering not just the atrocious behavior of capitalists, but they’re also suffering from [the] dictatorship of the Communist Party of China.

Unless Filipino workers start thinking along those lines, the elites would always have the power to sway them, to wave the flag and wage a war against the Chinese people. And that’s going to be a war that will decimate the working class only to profit the oligarchs.

Ashley Smith:  Thanks to Josua Mata for that revealing discussion of the Philippines, its working-class struggle against the country’s dynastic rulers, the necessity of the country’s left opposing the US and China’s militarism in the Asia Pacific, and advocating for regional demilitarization.

To hear about upcoming episodes of Solidarity Without Exception, sign up for The Real News Network newsletter. Don’t miss an episode.

Editor’s note: This episode was recorded on March 4, 2025.

In Syria, Assad is gone, but the country’s challenges remain. Over a decade of civil war and foreign intervention has devastated the country’s economy and politics, but a fragile optimism still exists. Joseph Daher and Ramah Kudaimi join this second episode of Solidarity Without Exception for a discussion on Syria’s long journey from the 2011 revolution to today, and what solidarity with the Syrian people should have looked like then, and could look like now.

Pre-Production: Ashley Smith
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Music Credits: 
Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |
https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusic
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

Ashley Smith:  Welcome to Solidarity Without Exception. I’m Ashley Smith, who, along with Blanca Missé, are co-hosts of this ongoing podcast series.

Today, we’re joined by Joseph Daher and Ramah Kudaimi to discuss the toppling of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

Joseph is a Swiss Syrian socialist, professor, and author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God; Syria After the Uprisings; and Palestine and Marxism. He recently returned from a visit to Syria only to find out that he has been fired from his university post for organizing in solidarity with Palestine.

Ramah is a Syrian American activist and the campaign director for the Crescendo Project at the Action Center on Race and the Economy Institute. Ramah was previously the deputy director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, where she led and supported BDS campaigns in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.

In this episode, we’ll discuss Syria’s revolutionary process, which began in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, when people revolted against the autocratic governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In Syria, people rose up against Assad’s regime in a mass revolutionary struggle for democracy and equality. In response, Assad launched a counter-revolutionary war on his people to defend his rule. There is no doubt that he would have fallen without the military support of Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Together, they jailed, killed, bombed, and terrorized the country’s people, driving millions into exile and internal displacement.

Nevertheless, Assad lost control over whole sections of the country. Rebels led by the Islamic fundamentalist groups like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham that dominated the military resistance seized control over some sections of Syria, while Kurdish-led forces in the Syrian defense forces declared a liberated zone in Rojava.

The US intervened in Syria against ISIS when the group took over whole swaths of the country. Washington did back some Syrian rebels, including the Kurds, but restricted them to fighting ISIS, not the regime. In fact, the US wanted to preserve the regime as a bulwark of stability in the region, at best, hoping for a more pliant ruler to replace Assad. With that not in the cards, states throughout the region and world began to normalize relationships with Assad.

But the regime’s days were numbered. It had little to no domestic support, and its foreign backers became weakened and preoccupied. Israel bombed Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah as part of their expansion of its genocidal war on Palestine. Meanwhile, Russia got bogged down in its own imperialist war on Ukraine. Without support from these regional and imperialist powers, the regime began to teeter and was finally toppled by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, and local popular militias.

This has opened a new day in Syria, one that offers hope to rekindle the dreams of the original popular uprising, but also dangers posed by the Islamic fundamentalist forces now in power and the schemes of regional powers like Turkey and Israel.

These two possible trajectories have been on display after this episode was recorded. On the one hand, the country’s new Islamic fundamentalist regime deployed its security forces in Latakia against holdout supporters of Assad in the mainly Alawite community. That encouraged sectarian attacks against the Alawite community that killed hundreds of people and drove many more from their homes in the worst sectarian violence since the fall of the regime. On the other hand, the new regime reached an accord with the Kurdish-led Syrian defense forces, which controls about 30% of the country. They agreed to unite their forces, declare a ceasefire, recognize Kurds as an indigenous community entitled to citizenship and constitutional rights, and oppose attempts to sow sectarian strife between Syria’s different ethnic and religious communities.

This accord is an enormous step forward for the Syrian people and a devastating setback to both Turkey and Israel’s attempt to divide the country. Thus, the future of Syria hangs in the balance between hope and horror, between an inclusive, democratic, and egalitarian future, and another of sectarian division, violence, and social decomposition. What the masses of the country’s people do will determine whether the original hope of the revolution encapsulated in its slogan, “The Syrian People Are One”, will be fulfilled.

Now, on to the discussion with Joseph and Ramah, who provide crucial context for understanding the country’s ongoing struggle for liberation, democracy, and equality.

So obviously the biggest news out of Syria is the toppling of Assad’s regime. And I think everybody around the world, and obviously the overwhelming majority of Syrians, were overjoyed about the overthrow and end of his horrific rule in power. So just to give us some background on the nature of his regime, and also about the impact of the regime on the country’s people, and how people responded to the fall of his regime. Maybe we could start with Joseph, because I know you were just in Syria, so you can give us an on-the-ground sense of that.

Joseph Daher:  To tell you honestly, since the 8th of December, it’s been kind of a dream following the fall of the Assad dynasty, a family that ruled Syria for 54 years. And obviously, there are a lot of challenges for the future of Syria. But as I’ve been saying, the ability only to speak about these challenges is a big way forward. For the vast majority of the Syrian population, the ability to organize, the ability to organize conferences. For example, when I was in Syria, I was able to visit Damascus, Suwayda, Aleppo, and just the ability to go back to Syria. For a lot of people, it was not a [inaudible] of possibility. I never thought I would be able to go back. I was saying there was this Syrian women political movement doing their first press conference. There have been a lot of local popular organizations — We’ll come back to this — So there’s a lot of dynamism.

But this is not to deny as well the huge challenges for a country that suffered 13 years of war, massive destruction. 90% of the population live under the poverty line. Still, the influence of foreign forces. And obviously the new actor in power that is far from being democratic — And I know we’ll come back to this — Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham.

Now, coming back to the nature of the — And it’s very nice to be able to say this — To the former regime, the Assad regime, it was, again, Hafez al-Assad built a new patrimonial state which was authoritarian, liberalizing the economy slowly. And there was an acceleration after Bashar al-Assad, but he put the basis, if we want, or the pillars of authoritarianism, despotism. And for the first time in decades, Syrians were able, for example, to celebrate or to commemorate the massacre of Hama that killed tens of thousands of people openly in ’82. So there was a complete oppression and criminalization of all forms of opposition.

Bashar al-Assad completed, if you want, the patrimonialism of this regime, the centers of power concentrated within a small group, and this was only deepened with the war. And this is one of the reasons why, actually, the Assad regime fell as a house of cards, that no one wanted to defend a regime in which oppression was the rule, exploitation was the rule, and 90% lived under the poverty line. Soldiers did not fight. There were no major confrontations in the fall of the Assad regime. And this regime was completely dependent on foreign powers, Russia and Iran, so that, when they were weakened, therefore, the regime vanished.

Ramah Kudaimi:  Yeah, it’s wonderful to be in convo with both of you and really happy, Joseph, you got to go to Syria. I’m still trying to figure out when to go myself. But yeah, that beautiful joy that people had, that continues to be had, is something just so awe-inspiring. And the shift of even how I’m able to have conversations with my family there. Immediately, the shift happened. It was very shocking that people are immediately like, yeah, let’s openly talk about everything now, after decades of being afraid to say much about anything over WhatsApp or other ways we have been staying in contact.

So that stuff really was deep in so many people across the country, and we saw that fear break. We saw that fear break early on in the revolution. And then what we’ve been seeing, I think, these last two months is that continuous joy and bringing us back to those early days of the revolution when people were just happy to be out in the street making demands.

And I think some of what Joseph talked about in terms of like, oh yeah, people are having political conversations, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is really a big deal in Syria. I think that’s something I would want to remind people [of]. When we’re talking about authoritarianism, we’re really talking about a brutal, violent dictatorship, that there was no opposition whatsoever, not like in other countries in the region where there was a controlled opposition. Here that wasn’t even accepted, that there was a controlled opposition. It was just complete fealty to the regime, and specifically to the Assad family themselves.

I think that’s another thing we need to remind ourselves of, what the regime was like. It was really out for themselves for decades. The disappearances and the torture that we saw during the last almost 15 years of revolution were happening decades beforehand. All those pictures and videos of people being released from the prisons, it wasn’t only people who were released just from the start of the revolution, we’re talking about people who spent decades of their lives there. So that context is also important to understand why there is so much optimism and joy in this moment, even though we don’t know what’s going to necessarily happen next.

Ashley Smith:  Right. I think one thing we’ve got to do is start with the most recent wave of revolt, because you both have just talked about [how] this has been a decades-long struggle for the liberation of the Syrian people from this regime. But the most recent wave of revolt really began back in 2011 as part of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings. What precipitated the uprising in 2011 in Syria? Who participated in it? How was it organized? What were people demanding?

Ramah Kudaimi:  So much has happened since the end of 2010, 2011 that people forget what sparked all of this and we get bogged down into, well, the US versus Russia, Saudi versus Iran, all the geopolitics. And what happened was this moment in time where people across the region were inspired to make a simple demand, that people want the fall of the regime. And that demand we saw go from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Bahrain to Yemen to Syria and beyond, to Iraq, there were protests early on, et cetera.

And so I think that’s such an important context that we need to really delve into, and how important that moment was, particularly because it came almost a decade after the start of the global war on terror and the US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and really a moment in time that was very dark for the region. We were having the Palestinian Second Intifada at the time as well.

And so this was a moment where people were like, no, actually, we can make our own demands of these regions. We aren’t just being played by this geopolitical power versus this other one and whatever regime is wanting to do.

And so, particularly in Syria, it started the famous protests of youth in Daraa, who saw what was happening across the region and decided to paint these freedom slogans on the walls of their city, and they were immediately arrested and tortured. The army person who was in charge of their torture actually just recently got captured, thankfully. So we can talk more about the need for accountability. But their torture then sparked more protests by folks in Daraa and were eventually met with even tanks and further violence, which then brought out protests against cities across the country. And there’s how this revolution sparked.

So there’s that sparking of it. And obviously there’s things like the economic situation was not that good at the time: There was a drought happening, there was high unemployment. Bashar al-Assad had really opened up the country in terms of neoliberal policies, which meant slashing of subsidies and rising expenses. And none of that was necessarily new. But that with the moment of protests happening across the region with, again, if we think by February, March, 2011 when things started picking up in Syria, by that time Ben Ali had already fled in Tunisia, Mubarak had stepped down in Egypt, so that was two huge processes that brought down regimes that had been in power for decades. Of course people are going to then be like, why can’t this happen to us too?

Joseph Daher:  I think what Ramah explained is key. And the images also of seeing people protest in Tunis and especially in Tahrir Square, I think the fall of Mubarak was a key turning point. Without forgetting, obviously, what happened in Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya.

And I think the roots, while every country has its own specificities, has to be found in, obviously, the absence of democracy, but also the particular, if you want, capitalist dynamics in the region, where you have, for the past decades, a form of blocked economic development focused on sectors of economy with short-term profits such as luxurious real estate, financial services, trade, while productive sectors of the economy, such as agriculture and manufacturing industry, were very much diminished or undermined through the neoliberal policies. And obviously this increased also as well the level of corruption.

So contrary to what a lot of academics and the US discourse, more neoliberalism or economic liberalism did not bring democracy out [inaudible]. It brought quite the opposite, a form of upgrading authoritarianism, what we witnessed throughout the uprising.

So yes, there were specificities in each country, but again, I think they all had similar characteristics when it came to absence of democracy, absence of social justice, blocked economic development, and a willingness of the popular classes to basically participate in the future of the country, to decide their own future.

Now, when it came to the Syrian uprising, what was interesting was the form of organization. Very rapidly, we had local coordination committees at the level of neighborhoods, cities, region, starting to organize, protests, forms of civilian resistance. But the local coordination committees had democratic aspirations, I would even say some socioeconomic aspirations as well, talking about the issue of social justice and inequalities. Because if you look at the geography of the uprising in Syria, it’s very much the poor neighborhoods of the big cities, rural areas, midtowns that suffered mostly from the neoliberal policies, the austerity measures that Ramah mentioned.

And afterwards, as the uprising continued, also the regime withdrew from certain areas. And this is important to say that we had forms of double power, meaning that you had a key challenge to the center of power and people self-organizing through local councils. And obviously we shouldn’t romanticize all experiences. Some of them were not completely democratic, the role of armed opposition forces was also problematic. But there were attempts in large areas of Syria to self-organize, to manage their own life.

And afterwards, unfortunately, we had militarization that was imposed on the Syrian population. There were harsh debates among Syrian protest movements on the issue of militarization. We forget now, but there were harsh debates, [there were] not easy solutions. And very often at the beginning it was civilians taking up arms to defend their own neighborhoods. And this is how the Free Syrian Army developed afterwards, unfortunately, the level of violence was so heavy, so high on the protesters. Also the level of foreign intervention increased massively.

So we had a popular uprising that turned into foreign interventions from all sides. First of all, on the side of the regime, Hezbollah of Lebanon, Iran, very early on, even mid to end of 2011, and afterwards, Russia, 2015. On the other side, the so-called Friends of Syria, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar played also a very reactionary role by supporting the most, I think, reactionary sectors of the Syrian opposition. While most of these actors, in the first six months of the uprising, were trying to reach a deal with the Syrian regime at the time, we forget this, and they were quite big economic investors in Syria prior to 2011, for all of them were close allies. We forget that Erdogan and Bashar al-Assad used to spend their vacations together prior to 2011.

So all this made that, until recently, the roots, if you want, of the organization of the Syrian popular uprising suffered massively. First of all, because of the repression, the deadly repression of the Syrian regime, its attempts to sectarianize from the beginning, eliminate every kind of democratic opposition, and the rise of reactionary Islamic fundamentalist forces, the rise of foreign interventions, and militarization. And there were only a few pockets I would see a continuous, I would say, roots of the popular uprising.

But the key dominating aspect, unfortunately, since 2015, was the military aspect, in which it’s very hard for democratics and progressives to express and organize.

Ashley Smith:  So let’s talk now about how Assad was able to withstand this revolutionary uprising. What enabled the regime to survive one of the most mass popular uprisings of any of them that happened in the Middle East back in 2011 with the most democratic self-organization? What kind of regional and international powers intervened to help save the regime? And what was the impact of the counterrevolution on the country? Maybe we can start with you, Ramah, on this.

Ramah Kudaimi:  It’s interesting because I think, for people who are into conspiracy theories, a lot of times it’s like, well, this was a conspiracy against the Assad regime. And the reality is I think many people will tell you no, actually the global conspiracy was against the revolution itself. So we have the obvious actors that came in to support the Assad regime, which Joseph talked about, in terms of Iran, Hezbollah, Russia. And we have to understand too, it wasn’t just the official armies of these folks, but Iran, for example, backed a lot of militias, whether it’s militias from Iraq or militias of people that they sent from refugee camps like Afghan, Pakistanis, refugees in Iran that they would send to fight on their behalf in Syria, which is absolutely ridiculous that they would be able to get away with this.

And the fact that they did it with such ruthlessness. We’re talking the bombing of hospitals was just a normal thing. Something we obviously spent the last year watching Israel do in Gaza, Assad normalized it to such an extent across Syria. The use of chemical weapons, the torture, the imprisonment, the siege, all tactics to destroy the uprising and all, again, supported by various international powers — And even, frankly, by the so-called Friends of Syria at one point and another, where there could have been more, potentially, ways to hold Assad back that different regimes refused to do, did not want to do. Because at the end it became, I think, very clear, especially by 2013, 2014, that the preservation of the regime was much more important than the people actually succeeding in their revolution.

And then we saw that, as Joseph was talking about, as folks took up more arms and it became more of an armed resistance against the regime, sometimes that’s just going to be the reality of what’s going to happen when you have activists who are imprisoned, killed, or forced to flee, when you had geopolitics becoming the dominant discourse. So that was what became the issue in Syria versus, again, what do the everyday people want?

And that’s such an important part of the conversation we need to have in terms of how we move forward. And the future of Syria is to always remember who actually had the Syrian people’s future and their goals in mind. It was no one other than the Syrian people. It was obviously not those who came in support of the Assad regime. It was not the United States, who was supposedly against the regime. It was not any of the various Friends of Syria that came together. It was not the United Nations and other international bodies. Let’s be very clear. So I think that’s a very important part of the conversation as we talk now and then in the future.

Joseph Daher:  Well, I totally agree with Ramah. I’ll just add very few things. As I mentioned before, in the summer of 2012, half of Syria was outside the control of the regime. This is where you had extension, increase in the assistance given by Iran, Hezbollah, and the militias supported by Iran. In 2015, Russia intervened. And it was from this period they were able to reconquer territories. First of all, Eastern Aleppo in 2016, after the Damascus countryside, Daraa.

But even with this, it wasn’t enough. And militarily, the regime needed Iran and Russia, but also politically and economically. And this is how they accumulated a huge debt, especially to Iran, the $30, $50 billion. I think this is something that should be taken more by, especially the authorities, but the Syrian democrats, is that we have an odious debt, so we don’t need to pay it to the Iranians. And the fact that this debt was made consciously against the interests of the Syrian people, and Iran was participating in the massacres and keeping this regime in place.

Plus, and it’s important also, as Ramah was saying, that everyone was against the fall of this regime, basically. There was a normalization that was started [in] 2018. The US and Russia were having deals, how do they share Syria? It was clear that Israel, from the beginning and for the past decades, saw as a threat the fall of this regime. And the day after the fall of this regime, the best proof of this is that they bombed massively Syrian state capacities, armed capacities, and extended the occupation of Syria the day after the fall of the guardian of the border with Israel.

So we had a normalization period, et cetera. And the fall of the regime came from an initiative, from an armed group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, but even there was a green light given by Turkey. Turkey also entered the normalization process with the Syrian regime. So none of them wanting it. But because this regime was so weak and dependent on foreign actors, Iran and Russia most especially, and when they were weakened, again, as I said, because it had no popular support, it vanished. So here we see, really, the key issues of foreign actors within the Syrian revolution process. And throughout the past five years, I would say, whether the so-called Friends of Syria or Russia and Iran on the side really wanted to reimpose a form of authoritarian stability in the region, which included Assad.

Ashley Smith:  So let’s talk a little bit about how the US got involved, because both of you just touched on this. And it seems to me that the real turning point for significant intervention was after the rise of ISIS, which took over whole sections of Syria and Iraq. And the US then started intervening quite intensively. So what were its aims in doing so? What was the US really up to in Syria?

Joseph Daher:  Well, and again, I think it’s important, especially now that it’s been more than a decade, and also speaking [about] this in Syria with people that are a generation, 20 years old, and asking them how they joined the revolution, et cetera. And I think we have to have [a] similar kind of discussion outside, how the Arab uprisings or the uprisings in the region started and it wasn’t a conspiracy or et cetera.

And in the case of Syria, again, looking at the role of the US, I will always remember Hillary Clinton from, I think, the first few weeks of the uprising saying, you know, Bashar Assad is a reformist, he’s not like his father. It was two or three years before Obama reopened the embassy in Damascus. There was willingness to cooperate. And the Syrian regime of Assad, father and son, had a long history of cooperation with US imperialism. I think it’s important to remind everyone.

And it was clear from the beginning, they said, we will not have any Libyan scenario in Syria. They were not interested in any kind of destruction of the Syrian regime. Rather, they were seeking maybe to replace the head with another head that would be more submissive to their own political interests. But because of the nature of the Syrian regime, this was very difficult to do, the patrimonial nature, concentration of centers of power. But they definitely didn’t want the uprising to see a full completion of the ancien regime, they were more in a controlled transition. This was the main aim of the US.

And with the rise of ISIS, this challenged also the interests in the region, and especially in Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, with the leadership of Barazan as a key ally. And they saw ISIS as creating, when it established its so-called Islamic Emirate from Mosul to Raqqa, as a threat to the regional order. And this is when they intervened. They did not intervene in a manner to serve the interest of the Syrian population, but to serve their own political interests.

And therefore there was never any real intervention against the Syrian regime. There was one offensive made by Trump in the first presidency following the massacre, the chemical massacre of Khan Shaykhun, the city up north. But even then, the attack they did was really symbolic, and they had actually told the Syrians and Russians that they would attack this particular military base area. So it was very clear for the US they always wanted a very clear control transition that does not create more chaos to the region, especially to Israel, Jordan, which is a key ally of the US as well. So here, I believe the main role of the US, it was never to challenge, actually, the Syrian regime.

Ramah Kudaimi:  The only other thing I’d add is just the context of, again, this continuing global war on terror and the excuse that that has given various presidents since 2001 to go in and go after “the terrorists”. So I think, obviously, Obama declared that the war on terror was over in 2013. That obviously was not true because a year later he’s going into Iraq and Syria against ISIS. Biden claimed, well, I withdrew the troops from Afghanistan in 2021. That hasn’t stopped, necessarily, various drone strikes, especially in parts of Africa particularly. And then, obviously, what we’ve seen again with Israel and Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023.

And I think that’s just part of the conversation as well in terms of when the US and their allies truly intervened, it was to, again, fight who they were considering as terrorists. And it was to ensure these — We agree these are reactionary forces — Were destroyed. But it also happened around a time where the Assad regime was being very weakened, and what did that mean in terms of, in this moment of time, where you chose to intervene was not against Assad but against ISIS.

Ashley Smith:  Right. So let’s turn a little bit to the questions about the later stages in the run-up to the toppling of the regime because one of the key powers in the region that started to intervene that we really haven’t talked that much about is Turkey. And Turkey played an increasing role, largely in opposition to the rise of a Kurdish revolutionary process within Syria, including establishing a regional autonomous area, Rojava. So why did Turkey increasingly intervene and become a player in Syria despite the deals that Joseph talked about the Erdogan regime making with Assad?

Joseph Daher:  Again, it’s important to remind everyone that Erdogan and Bashar Assad were great foes. There were commercial free trade agreements between both countries that now they want to also revive that would be catastrophic in economic terms for Syrian national production, especially manufacturing industry and agriculture.

So in the first six months of the uprising, Turkey pushed for a deal between the Syrian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood that was refused, and they cut relations completely. And this is where the Turkish state started supporting sectors of the opposition, especially in the beginning, Muslim Brotherhood welcoming a lot of Syrians.

And throughout the years, as the Syrian regime with the help of its foreign allies, Turkey saw it was unable, basically, at this period, to overthrow the regime, turned more and more to concentrate on trying to put an end to what it perceives as a continuation of its national threat or national security threat, the Kurdish issue. And especially the fallout of the peace negotiation.

So therefore, from there on, this concentrated more and more on the Northeast, which is controlled by the autonomous administration of the Northeast, which is dominated by the PYD, a sister organization of PKK. So Turkey saw it as a continuation of its basically national security threat around the Kurdish issue. And this is how we understand the increasing intervention of Turkey in Syria.

Also, it was to preserve its influence through the support of what is called its proxy, Syrian National Army, which is composed of tens of thousands of soldiers paid by Turkey, that serve their interests.

And also, lastly, there was the issue of the Syrian refugees that became an internal factor of instability for the AKP and rising racism against Syrian refugees. So they wanted to also push them back to Syria. So I think these are the key, until recently, until the fall of the regime.

Ramah Kudaimi:  Turkey, like every other regional player, has its interests, and those interests changed throughout the last 10, 12 years. And I think that’s an important, again, part of the conversation of what it means for those of us outside of the region, what solidarity looks like, to be thinking about these things. It’s not just always a clearly like, here’s the formula of what it means to be a leftist, because I think that’s what a lot of times we’re looking for, instead of being like, things are going to shift very dramatically, we have seen, and we need to be always on top of these shifts and understand when there are moments that, yeah, there came a time when Turkey was very supportive of the revolution and was providing a lot to refugees, what does that mean? And then they flip, obviously, because they have their own concerns in relationship to their power and the Kurdish question, as Joseph was talking about. And now this flip-flop back of, oh, can we… Now the people we like are in power.

Ashley Smith:  So if you think about where we stand over the last year, before the last year, before the Israeli genocidal war, Assad is in power, he’s normalizing relations with all these regional powers, but the country is not entirely controlled by Assad. There’s the Kurdish region, autonomous region, there’s sections of the country controlled by HTS, and the regime only has a narrow base. So what changed in the region, and who are the forces that toppled the regime?

Joseph Daher:  First of all, it’s important to remember that the Assad regime had a couple of changes to seek or to be able to guarantee, in a way, the survival of its regime by entering a form of transitional phase that was very symbolic. Because before its fall, the resolution 2254, UN resolution, was seen by the regime in Russia… Basically, the demands were being constantly undermined since 2012 as the regime was normalizing. But the regime never sought, first of all, to restructure its own institutions, to seek, even to guarantee some of the interests of actors they were normalizing with.

This is one thing also, and despite the fact that Russia and Iran were saying to some extent, not harshly, to the Syrian regime, try to give a bit to guarantee a bit. But more importantly, first of all, you have the weakening of Russia following its imperialist war against Ukraine. It was not able to be able again to intervene as it was before. Iran and Hezbollah were definitely weakened by the sequence of events that followed the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. Israel was more and more, and with the total support of the US, because this genocide has been ongoing mainly because of US support, and obviously European, but mainly US, especially military and economically. So it weakened Hezbollah massively in the war of Lebanon and Iran in Syria.

And you had even other areas outside the control of the region such as Suwayda and, partially, Daraa in the South. And these two actors, actually, military actors from these regions when HTS, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — And again no one was seeing that they were top of the regime.

First of all, I think even them, their main objective was to have a better position in future negotiations by taking the countryside of Aleppo, possibly Aleppo, but not the whole. But when they were continuing the attack, it was actually armed groups from the South that entered first Damascus. And you had also part of a popular dynamics protest that is important to remember.

First, and after, let Ramah, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, we have to acknowledge that it went through major ideological political evolution from starting as a branch of Daesh in 2012, Jabhat al-Nusra, then falling out with Daesh, joining Al-Qaeda, falling out with Al-Qaeda. And basically because of the material reality they’re living in, they had to, in the Northwest, basically rule an area.

So they’re not anymore a transnational jihadist organization. They’re very pragmatist, and they’ve been very pragmatist for a while. It’s not new. Does that mean they’re a democratic organization? No, far from it. They want to consolidate now their power and authoritarianism, neoliberalism, et cetera. We can come back to this later. The Syrian National Army, as I said, is acting as a main proxy of Turkey, really. And this is a key asset for Turkey. And Turkey today is the most important regional actor within Syria.

Ramah Kudaimi:  I’ll also say that I think we can’t forget that, even though it was under this banner of HTS, this offensive started right after the end of November through Dec. 8 when Assad fled. We have to remember Idlib, as a region, housed Syrians from across the country. Idlib was where everyone would escape to when there was a deal made, when Assad would lay siege on an area, and then the UN would intervene. And in order to end the siege, the deal would be that these folks would hop on what became known, these green buses that everyone saw these images of, and then take the fighters and their families to Idlib.

And I think that’s an important part of the conversation. A lot of these fighters that were part of this offensive were fighters who were returning to their homes, reuniting with their families. And so when they went to Halab, when they went to Hama, when they went to Homs, it was people returning to their homes. And I say that because I think that is a very different narrative than, oh, these HTS reactionaries brought down this “secular regime”, which I think is something that certain parts of the internet is trying to push, this narrative, which is just not true.

I think it’s important to have these facts in place as we talk about what the future of Syria is, and also to inspire us when we talk about… So many struggles across the globe are about returning to the homeland. We’re witnessing an opening now of people returning to their homelands.

Ashley Smith:  I think that really captures the dual dynamic of the toppling of the regime, that it had this very mass popular element to it of people within the country feeling liberated and HTS trying to consolidate its rule.

I want to ask about now the post-revolutionary situation and the trajectory of things in Syria. So what is HTS trying to do in consolidating its transitional government? And how are the popular forces, the popular classes, responding to that? And how does this connect to the original goals of the revolution in 2011?

Ramah Kudaimi:  It seems like every day something new comes up, which is exciting, it is really exciting that it’s like, oh wow, things are not set in stone? I think people continue to be optimistic. I know I actually surprise myself when I’m like, oh, this is interesting. That pragmatism that Joseph was talking about is really coming through a lot in ways that, at times, I found unexpected. And my hope of hopes is that that continues even though we know, again, it’s not like some leftist socialist project is being born in Syria at this moment in time, let’s be real. That is not what is being born at this moment. But that does not also mean that the opening isn’t there for the future of that.

And I think that’s the biggest thing, to me, to keep in mind. These openings are so important because, again, under these decades-long, under the Assad regime, those openings were not absolutely there. So even if the folks who are in power now, these folks who are former HTS fighters, who are reactionary in many of their politics, et cetera, that is not necessarily the ideal actor that the majority of Syrians would be like, yes, this is who we want to take over.

And yet, under what we’ve been seeing these last two months is there continues to be openings for these conversations and these discussions and people being out and having these things very publicly, again, back to the early days of the revolution, these demands being made.

I do think there’s three things that really are important for us to continue to push on for those original goals of the revolution: One, how do we get accountability for all the war crimes? So obviously, first and foremost, Assad and his cronies. And we’re seeing some people have been getting arrested. I think there was an official demand made of Russia to hand over Assad recently. So what does that mean? But the reality is when you have 10, 12 years of war, all kinds of actors have committed war crimes, whether it is HTS, whether it is SDF, so many of these rebel groups.

And what does accountability mean? Not accountability like everyone needs to be punished, but what is the process in order to get us to a point when we can actually rebuild this country, recognizing all the different pain and suffering all sectors of society went [through]?

The other one, I think there’s been a lot of demands and protests by the families of the disappeared. And I think that’s one thing that actually has disappointed a lot of people is that, well, Sharaa now officially being the president of Syria has yet, to my understanding, to meet any of the families of the disappeared. That’s been something that, I think, across the board, has been a disappointment [for] many folks.

And then, I think there is this question of there’s a terrible economic situation in place, and also the political situation. There’s this question of what do you tackle first? Do you go all-in to try to fix the economy because that’s what people need to survive? But does that then mean that the political situation of the basics of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech and how [that can] get subsumed into this economic solution? And I think those are the discussions that need to continue, and hopefully there continues to be space for that as we see various people take their positions in power now.

Joseph Daher:  I think I will start where Ramah finished: the issue of the space to organize. And again, I think this is a principle for leftists. We see what the country, society, what is the space to organize for workers, for popular classes? And it’s undeniable that, since the fall of the regime, this space has increased massively. And this is, again, a victory for anyone thinking and gaining interest for the popular classes, working classes. Moreover, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham is still unable, because of the lack of human capacities and military capacities, to completely and fully dominate the country, which is a chance again for the Syrian popular classes.

Does that mean it’s transformed automatically in the future democratic social society? No, it’s a race now. It’s basically a race between the ability of the Syrian popular classes, working classes to organize democratically, socially, et cetera.

And on the other side, a clear, I think, willingness that has been proven for me since day one nearly, or the day after the fall of the regime, that HTS is seeking to consolidate its power. The first transitional government they established was from one color, all the same ministers from Idlib, establishment of a new army only with their members. Now they want to integrate people from the Syrian National Army — And some of them are true criminals, Abu Amsha and others that are known assassins — Establishment of new security services by the right hand of Julani, Ahmad al-Sharaa, designation in various professional associations and trade unions of new leadership. For example, the Lawyers Association and the members opposed it and demanded free elections. So there’s a clear attempt.

And also on other levels, they have no legitimacy, for the moment, to decide on the future of the economic trajectory of the country. They already made various statements regarding this and a clear neoliberal path: privatization of state assets, ports, airports, transport networks, et cetera, and wanting to put an end to various forms of subsidies: bread obviously, electricity, et cetera.

Now, I think what Ramah was saying is one of the key issues. I will just add regarding transitional justice, it would be key also to struggle against sectarian tensions, I believe so. Without transitional justice, it will be very hard, as well as ethnic divisions within the country. And we’ve seen in the past few days and weeks militia campaigns by HTS in rural areas of Homs that have killed dozens of people. We’re seeing rising tension. This full transitional justice, I think, can be also tackled, but I think democratic and social rights will have to go together.

I’m very afraid that if there’s no economic improvement — Because again, 90% of the population live under the poverty line — Massive destruction. For a large section of the Syrians, obviously they’re happy because the regime is stopped, but their socioeconomic situation has not changed. So they still have to deal on a daily basis how they’re going to be able to live. And if we’re not able to improve their condition, they will not. It’s not because they’re unwilling, but they will not be able to participate in democratic debates or issues of citizenship, et cetera. There’s a fear that we transform this issue in elitist discussions, issues of citizenship, if we’re not able to bring them with socioeconomic issues.

And here, I believe the role of trade unions, professional associations, should be key, asking for free elections within it, starting to be active in its workplace, et cetera. So again, there are a lot of challenges. But as I started, the discussion, the ability to think about these challenges, to live them, is already a victory.

Ashley Smith:  I want to end with one final question, which is really the theme of the entire podcast that we’re doing, which is called Solidarity Without Exception, with all democratic uprisings throughout the world. And one of the things that’s striking in a discussion about Syria is how much of the progressive left didn’t extend solidarity to the Syrian revolution, but did extend solidarity to the Palestinian liberation struggle. And really the question is, why did that happen? And how should we think about solidarity globally, with the Ukrainian struggle for self-determination, with the Syrian struggle for the transformation of their society, with the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and their relationship between one another?

Ramah Kudaimi:  I think I’ll start with saying that it also wasn’t necessarily a given that the left would be so in support of Palestinian liberation. I think that took decades of struggle as well. I think we all have been part of that struggle, and I think that’s just, unfortunately, being a leftist doesn’t mean that automatically you have the right politics. This is struggle that we’re having and organizing and needing to do. The importance of political education and organizing is important.

And yes, of course it makes sense why, particularly in the West, leftists would be very clear about their solidarity with the Palestinian people since it is the Western countries, particularly the United States, arming the genocide for decades now.

But I think what continues to be so infuriating is why that somehow is seen as requiring then Western leftists to, say, shill for Putin or shill for the Assad regime when they were still in power. And also having to realize that imperialism, Islamophobia, the war on terror, these are not just Western projects at this point. These are projects of China, these are projects of Russia, these are projects of the regional powers across the globe. And it’s so important that we, again, as I was saying earlier, it’s not just like, here are the three leftist positions. No. We have principles as leftists, and then we understand how we look at a situation based on our principles and our values, and then decide this is what it means to be in solidarity with the oppressed people.

And I think we’ve seen, similar to how liberals spent 2024 telling us we have to throw Palestinians under the bus in order to ensure that the greater fight against the right wing prevails — I.e. we have to support the Democrats in order for Trump to be defeated — I think leftists have had that position towards Syrians for years now in terms of the greater fight is an anti-imperialist fight. Assad somehow falls in that, and so that is why the Syrian people need to be sacrificed. And what we’ve learned is allowing genocide and massive war crimes to continue actually just leads to fascism and right-wing politics, whether it’s in Syria or US support for Israel.

And I think we have to really push ourselves as leftists this idea that whataboutism is not a politic. Calling out liberal hypocrisy is not politics. We are losing as leftists, to be very real. And seeing, like it hasn’t even been two weeks of Trump, and I’m like, we are in trouble. And one of the reasons we are in trouble is because a large part, again, of the left has failed at understanding what our project should be and putting out a vision of what our project is that is not in and of itself a hypocritical vision, just like what liberals have done with conservatives and the right wing.

I think in this moment, I think there’s a lot that we can, again, be inspired by the Syrian people. And for us it’s like, what can we do at this moment? We still have an opportunity to change the way we interact with the Syrian revolution. And so things like demanding the lifting of sanctions [are] going to be very important. So how are we pushing that the sanctions get lifted? And how are we doing more grassroots support and donating as the grassroots left across the globe so that these institutions in Syria who are trying to rebuild are not only dependent on the neoliberal capitalist world system that we are, obviously.

And then the misinformation and the disinformation, the propaganda, we need to continue to watch for it and continue to trust the people of Syria. We’ve seen Syrians over and over again uprise when they need it, whether it’s from the regime. Syrians who were living under HTS in Idlib had no problem going out and making demands of HTS.

So I think that’s a reality we can’t just succumb to of just like, well, now this reactionary force is in power, then that’s it, it’s all over. No. Trust the people. And again, because for those of us in the US, the arms embargo demand around Israel continues to be top, not only, obviously, for Palestinian liberation, but we saw what Israel did immediately after the fall of the regime: go in, take more land, destroy all the planes and all these things that they somehow did not do while Assad was in power, and now, all of a sudden, take out all the military assets of the state. So I think that continues to be another important demand, and why we cannot separate our solidarity with Palestine from the solidarity of everyone else in the region.

Joseph Daher:  It’s great, Ramah, because I always want to start where she finishes. It’s amazing.

No, regarding the direct demand based Ramah in the US, you in the US, me in Europe, is we can see direct links between the solidarity campaigns with Palestine and Syria. First of all, oppose Western imperialism and especially regarding sanctions. I was opposed against the general sectoral sanctions on Syria prior to the fall of the regime based on the fact that these sanctions were hitting massively the same population and impoverishing them partially. And I’m opposed also today because it’s definitely a political card used by Western imperialists, especially the US, to pressure any kind of government. Today it’s HTS, hopefully tomorrow it’s not anymore. Maybe a bit afterwards. But it’s a card of pressure, and this is unacceptable. [It] goes against the interest of Syrian population, just as the genocide was allowed and permitted and supported by Western imperialism, just as the war in Lebanon, and expansion, occupation, and destruction of [the] Syrian state [inaudible] and military capacities by Israel. So all of this, we can see the common demands regarding Israel as genocide, continuous occupation, et cetera.

And I think more broadly, our work is also because the significance of campism is also the inability to project a political alternative built on socialism from below. The ability of the people to change radically a political situation, a political framework from mass participation from below.

This idea came back at the beginning of the uprisings in the MENA region after Tunis, Egypt. It was lost partially because of the counter revolutions. And I think it’s also something that, throughout the world, this ability to change from below a political framework has been lost partially. We have to rebuild this issue of socialism from below, internationalism that runs against a view by campism that because change from below is not possible, we will basically put our politics in geopolitical dynamics, and we hope that the enemy of my enemy is partially kind of my friend. So basically Russia, China as opposed to the US, therefore maybe we could find an opportunity to improve our own situation, regardless of the fact that these regimes are authoritarian, neoliberal, patriarchal, et cetera.

And it’s putting also false hopes in these kinds of… It’s wrong hopes, wrong strategy, completely, to believe that these regimes — That have very good relations, by the way, with Israel — That they not challenge the capitalist system, they just want a bigger part in it.

And similarly with the so-called Axis of Resistance. How can we trust regimes or political parties that oppose their own popular classes, that repress them, that participate in a system of oppression?

So again, I think the key issue is bringing back this issue of socialism from below, internationalism, and that basically our destinies are connected. The liberation of Palestine is connected to the liberation of the popular classes of the Middle East and North Africa, and of the support, the international support, internationalist support of leftist popular classes against the complicity of their own state in a genocide and an apartheid state. And this is what we have to work with, to believe, once again, that our destinies are linked regardless of the borders and knowing the different situation. But really, it’s through internationalism, socialism from below that we believe that we can liberate Palestine and the further region internationally.

Ashley Smith:  Thanks to both Joseph and Ramah for that eye-opening discussion of Syria’s revolutionary process. Clearly, a new day has dawned in Syria, one that offers hope for a truly democratic transition, but also challenges posed by Islamic fundamentalists in power as well as regional and imperialist powers.

Stay tuned for our next episode on Solidarity Without Exception, hosted by Blanca Missé, where she will discuss Puerto Rico’s ongoing struggle for national self-determination and its class struggle against the island’s elite, with state senator and activist Rafael Bernabe. To hear about upcoming episodes, sign up on The Real News Network newsletter.

As we cross the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia has launched its largest drone attack in Ukraine to date, and Israeli tanks are rolling into the Occupied West Bank for the first time in decades. US President Donald Trump has issued repeated threats to “take over” and “own” Gaza, “buy” Greenland, and “absorb” Canada as the “51st state.” Even the fiction of the US-enforced “rules-based international order” has collapsed, and a new, terrifying world disorder—one that more closely resembles the geopolitical periods preceding World Wars I and II—is emerging. 

This new era is characterized by heightening inter-imperial conflicts between great powers like the US, Russia, and China, and emerging regional powers, the rise of far-right and authoritarian governments around the globe, and the accelerated drive of those governments to annex and take over other countries, deny their populations the right to self-determination, and plunder their resources. But this tectonic shift in 21st-century geopolitics has, in turn, provoked growing struggles for self-determination and national liberation. From Palestine to Puerto Rico, from Ukraine to Xinjiang, how can working-class people in the United States and beyond fight for a different future and an alternative world order founded not on imperial conquest, war, and capitalist domination, but on solidarity without exception among all poor, working-class, and oppressed peoples who yearn to live freely and peacefully? 

This is Solidarity without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network, in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network, hosted by Blanca Missé and Ashley Smith. In the inaugural episode of this series, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joins Missé and Smith to dissect how the world order has changed in the three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and how the simultaneous unfolding of the war in Ukraine and Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Palestine has revealed both the centrality of anti-occupation struggles for self-determination in the 21st century, and the need for global working-class solidarity with all oppressed peoples waging those struggles.

Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Blanca Missé, Kayla Rivara, Ashley Smith
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Music Credits: 
Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk | https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusic
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

[CLIP BEGINS]

Rafael Bernabe:  My support for the Ukrainian people to self-determination doesn’t mean that I necessarily support the policies or even support the government of Zelenskyy. What it means is that it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide what government they have — Not for Putin to decide that or anybody else but the Ukrainian people. That’s what self-determination means. They decide what kind of government they want to have, which is what we are also fighting for in Puerto Rico, which is what we are also fighting for in Palestine and everywhere else.

[CLIP ENDS]

[THEME MUSIC]

Maximillian Alvarez:  This is Solidarity Without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and I’m sending my love and solidarity to you, to all poor and oppressed people around the world, and to all who yearn and fight to live freely.

Blanca Missé:  And I’m Blanca Missé. I teach at San Francisco State University. I’m with the Ukraine Solidarity Network and the Labor for Palestine National Network, and I also organize with Workers’ Voice. I’m really excited to start this podcast because we see the old world order crumbling, and we need to figure out how to put forward principle politics to defend working people’s rights and struggles in the US and all over the world. And we want to share with you all the discussions we’ve been having with Ukraine activists, Palestine solidarity activists, immigrant rights activists, and labor folks in the US.

Ashley Smith:  I’m Ashley Smith. I’m a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and also a member of the Tempest Collective. I think this podcast is incredibly significant, especially with Donald Trump’s assumption of power in Washington DC, because I think it’s accelerating the development of what we could call a new world disorder; of a stagnant world economy; heightening interimperial conflicts, especially between the US, China, and Russia; and a rise of far-right governments and authoritarian governments all around the world, which is accelerating an annexationist drive to take over countries, deny them the right of self-determination, which is provoking struggles for self-determination and national liberation in response.

So the questions that we want to address in this podcast is how do we oppose all imperialisms from the US to Russia to China, but most importantly in the US, how we oppose US imperialism without extending support to its rival imperialisms? How do we build solidarity with all oppressed peoples and nations fighting for self-determination, from Puerto Rico to Ukraine to Xinjiang? That is, how do we build solidarity without exception, not only with struggles of national liberation, but also struggles of working-class people and oppressed people from below throughout the world.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Reporter 1:  Good evening, and we’re coming on the air at this hour with breaking news. After the US warned all day of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, that it was imminent, Vladimir Putin has just addressed the Russian people moments ago, announcing what Putin called the start of a military special operation, in his words, to demilitarize Ukraine.

Reporter 2:  The Russian president says A military operation is now underway in Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has declared a state of emergency.

Reporter 3:  The full-scale invasion that intelligence officials had been warning about for weeks is now underway, and there are reports of explosions and attacks at several major Ukrainian cities.

Reporter 4:  Ukraine’s president has been calling on civilians to fight, appealing for help while this assault is unfolding across Ukraine. Global leaders are responding with stronger sanctions.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  February of 2022 was an intense time in the world, and there was a lot going on in the world before Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February. Here at The Real News in January through February of 2022, we were covering stories like the electoral victory of Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Borich and the Canada “trucker convoy”. We were covering this incredible story of Mexican autoworkers at a GM plant in Silao, using the provisions of the renegotiated NAFTA to wage this heroic effort to vote out their old, corrupt union and vote in a new, independent union. And I was interviewing folks involved in that struggle from Mexico.

The Starbucks union wave was really kicking into high gear at that point. I was interviewing workers at stores here in Baltimore and around the United States. And I had just conducted what would become my first of many, many interviews with railroad workers here in the United States — And that was after I learned that a US district court judge had blocked 17,000 railroad workers at BNSF railway from striking on Feb. 1.

So that’s where I was and where we were as a news network leading into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. But when that invasion happened, there was this real chilling sense of history, that something was changing, something irrevocable had been broken, and that things were never going to be what they were on Feb. 23, 2022.

Ashley Smith:  I guess I was shocked but not at all surprised, because, I think, if you go back now three years, it was really clear that the world was changing rapidly. And I did a lot of on-the-ground organizing through all the years Trump was in power. And then we were a year into the Biden administration. And what really struck me is this massive wave of struggle that swept through the United States under Trump, lots of it was co-opted, neutralized, and taken over by the Democratic Party, and the movements collapsed around us.

In particular, Black Lives Matter really went from one of the biggest social uprisings in US history to dissipating before our eyes. The Democratic Party successfully co-opted that big, enormous wave of struggles behind a project that I saw as hardcore imperialist in its very nature, a project to rebuild US capitalism and rally Washington’s allies for a great power confrontation, in particular with China and Russia.

And during that time, I was writing a book about all of this with several co-authors called China and Global Capitalism that was an attempt to explain this developing period in history that we were living through. And we were writing that book right when China and Russia struck their friendship without limits agreement. And that showed from the other side of the interimperial rivalries that another camp was forming in opposition to the US.

So then when Russia invaded Ukraine soon after that friendship pact, I really wasn’t surprised by it at all. And really because the war had been going on since 2014, the actual beginning of the war wasn’t three years ago in 2022, it was back in 2014 when Russia took over the sections of Donbas and the Crimea and had been trying to figure out how to annex the rest of the country.

And Putin was doing this for clear reasons that had to do, in part, with response to NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but more importantly, I think, in response to the democratic uprising within Russia itself, the pro-democracy movement, the attempt to address the class and social inequalities inside Russia itself. And so Putin turned to increasing authoritarianism at home and an explicit imperialist project abroad to reclaim not the Soviet Union’s project, but the great czarist project of the 19th century. It’s not an accident that his big heroes are czars of that period.

And I totally agree, Max, I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine ushered in an epochal shift in world politics that has shaped everything in every corner of our globe all the way through till today. That is a new epic of annexation imperialism which is coming from Russia, from China, from the US, smaller regional powers. And in response to that, it’s triggering a new epic of struggles for national liberation and self-determination, which are going to be at the heart of all international political discussions.

Blanca Missé:  When I tried to rewind to February, 2022, many of us here were, I mean at least I was coming out of a big fight against austerity measures in my university after COVID. The preunfolding of what we’re seeing a little bit with this massive attack to the Department of Education, to public universities, there’s been a long time coming of a restructuring of social services and an attack on free speech, academic freedom.

So I have to say I was shocked and stunned by the February invasion. I agree with Ashley that the war technically had started in 2014. But I’m from Europe, I’m Catalan, and I’m in conversation with my family in Barcelona, friends in France, in Italy, in Portugal, and for all of us Europeans from the old world to see tanks back invading territory and trench building and alarms for bombs and people going into the refuges, it sounded like a real situation, like we’re back to the 20th century wars, which a lot of the US propaganda in Hollywood is telling us that the wars are going to be driven by drones and precision weapons, and there you have all this huge human capital and life being murdered, slaughtered at the front.

That was a huge shock to me, and I started rethinking what is happening. Many of the first explanations were Putin has gone crazy. This guy is out of control. And this explanation of one person just being crazy in power, it does not hold long enough to explain this war. And you see, it’s pretty clear that since Putin arrived to power, he radically transformed the Russian state. He turned the Russian state into an imperial state. He concentrated all of the power, all of the industries, he squashed all of the opposition, and he needed to preserve this area of influence to sell its gas, its oil, to extract resources, to submit all of these areas of Belarus, the Baltic states, Ukraine, with huge debt deals. And any attempts to contest that, like it was in Maidan in Ukraine, or even the beginning of the opposition in Russia, prompted him to invade Ukraine.

When you start understanding more the geopolitical, social, economic history of this part of the world, then the invasion makes total sense. I thought there was a beginning and an after because this war kept going on and on, and many of us thought this is going to just be two, three months and they’re going to negotiate. And we’re in year three of this war. And this was compounded also with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which was restarted last year after the October events.

And so I do agree fully with Ashley that the way I was processing this, first I joined the Ukraine Solidarity Network. It was crucial for many of us active to have conversations with Ukrainians and with Russians who were also educating us and exchanging with us their views about what’s happening in the world. So we were trying to form a collective, internationalist viewpoint so we could process things across countries.

And also I started reading a lot of history, maybe because I’m a nerd, and I realized that our world right now is not anymore this “stable” US hegemonic world. As Ashley was saying, it looks more and more like the pre-World War II world with rising empires competing with each other and trying to steal land and colonies — At the time they were colonies, today they’re not, they’re supposedly independent countries — But they’re trying to annex them to put them under their thumb for control of their resources, of their markets, of their populations.

So I am still processing the war, and the war is getting more and more complicated because it is enmeshed in this world mess. How could you explain that we have North Korean troops fighting today on the Russian front? We need to be able to unpack all of this mess and be able to explain it clearly to working people so we can find a sense of direction, a sense of understanding of our history, and a sense of agency. And I think the goal of our podcast and also doing this reflection is how we can win back agency in this country to stand up for our rights.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, and it is very much the soul of this podcast series. That really is our goal here, is to help you all navigate what has become such an unnavigable, or seemingly unnavigable, terrain, where you have these competing allegiances and things pulling at your heartstrings, when we want to lead with a basic humanitarian principle of defending life, defending people’s right to national sovereignty.

I wanted to take us back down to February of 2022 and what people were seeing and what was making sense and what wasn’t at that time. For most people — And the national polling really bore this out at the time — The question of who the bad guys were here, who the good guys were, and what the evil deeds were seemed pretty apparent on its face: Russia violating the national sovereignty of Ukraine, Russian troops entering Ukrainian territory, opening fire on Ukrainians, and committing the basic war crime of invading another country. And again, on its face, this is what people were seeing, this is what was being reported, and the question of who deserved our solidarity and why was seemingly pretty clear cut.

But as you guys already alluded to, there was an immediate discourse battle unfolding here where a lot of complicating factors were being introduced, whether they be the role of NATO expansionism and the US involvement in the 2014 coup, where you guys pointed out this war really started in 2014. The US had a lot of direct involvement in that. There were facts circulating about the far right neo-Nazis. Putin himself was claiming that this was a campaign of de-Nazification in Ukraine.

And so all of these interceding points start coming into the basic vision of your average person who’s seeing a sovereign country being invaded by its powerful neighbor. And these interceding factors served, at best, to complicate the official US narrative about the war. But at worst, they served to justify what Russia was doing. And I think somewhere in the middle, for many, the point was to essentially justify a lack of solidarity with Ukraine and a basic conviction that this was not our problem.

Ashley Smith:  I think the surface, gut-level response of most people to seeing a country invaded was of solidarity with the victims of such an invasion. And I think it’s very important to affirm that gut instinct of solidarity because that provides a guiding light for people through the points of confusion about the origins of the war, the nature of Ukraine, the politics of Ukraine, and the nature of its struggle for self-determination.

And a few things about that. There is no doubt that NATO expansion set the stage for this, in part. But as I said earlier, the motivations of Putin were laid out numerous times in speeches that he gave over and over and over again that said this war was about proclaiming and reclaiming a Russian empire, and that entailed the eradication of an entire national state and national people: the Ukrainian people.

Now, those Ukrainian people rose up in resistance, legitimately so — Not just the government but the vast majority of the people — All the way back in 2014 and then again in 2022. And one of the things that’s very important to say about the so-called coup in 2014 was that it wasn’t a coup, that this was a national popular uprising of the vast majority of people against a government that was essentially aligning itself with Russia, and therefore threatened the people in Ukraine with an authoritarian regime that they fundamentally rejected.

And when the government attempted to crush the protests in opposition and brutalize the population, it transformed into a national popular uprising that drove the government from power. Which to Russia felt like a threat because what it showed is the agency of people to fight for their rights against an authoritarian regime, which, back in Russia, was ominous for Putin. So Putin had the ambition from the very beginning to set an example for the Russian people that if you rise up against the dictates and program and project of Putin’s regime, it will be crushed in blood.

And the more you read about Ukraine, the more clear it becomes that this is a genuine progressive struggle for national liberation. Now, that doesn’t mean that there are not lots of complexities within Ukraine, but frankly, there’s lots of complexities in every single nation state around the world.

And sometimes when I heard people talk about the right in Ukraine, I was like, oh my God, we live in the United States where we had Donald Trump, so it was a bit rich to hear people pick points about the politics of Ukraine. And the more you read about the actual politics inside the country, the more marginal, actually, the right is in the society. That doesn’t mean it’s not a threat, but it’s the Ukrainian people’s fight to deal with their own right wing, which is our responsibility here in the United States to deal with our own right wing.

And the final thing I’ll say about this is you don’t have to have perfect victims to grant solidarity to people. And I think this is a very important point that Mohammed El-Kurd makes in his new book, Perfect Victims, about the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation, because they don’t have to be perfect victims to have solidarity extended to them, nor should Ukrainians. We should be in solidarity with Ukraine’s struggle and Palestine’s struggle for self-determination, with all the complexities of their societies recognized, and understanding that only Ukrainians and Palestinians can deal with those problems, and it shouldn’t mean that we deny them our solidarity.

Blanca Missé:  When you see a country being invaded, you have your gut reaction to say, I side with them. And I think in the United States we have several added complexities. I think we have maybe different guts or different ways of feeling that are compounded because, on the one hand, most of the folks who maybe are indifferent or are questioning whether we should support Ukraine, they don’t deny that what is happening to Ukrainian people is horrible.

The hesitations come from the fact that, in the United States, we have such a long history of our US government leading wars at home and abroad. So then suddenly when they see a bad actor doing a bad thing, but they see the US government taking the side of the victim, they’re saying, maybe there is something fishy here. And that is an understandable conflict.

And then because one logic would be the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that’s something we’re trying to unpack here. The enemy of your enemy doesn’t have to be your friend. It can also be another enemy that is going to come after you.

And so this very mechanical gut reaction when you have these two competing things, I think — And that was a case for all the racialized populations in the United States, that they were feeling maybe less identified with the plea of the Ukrainian people, not because they’re not human, but because they were suddenly surprised and, actually, angry that their own government, who has been oppressing their communities and their own people at home, suddenly wanted to drop everything and find money that supposedly we don’t have; we don’t have money for schools, we don’t have money for social services, we don’t have money for healthcare, and then send all of this money to Ukrainians. So that didn’t help.

And so this is why it’s so important, and it has been so important for our Ukraine Solidarity Network work to do everything from a standpoint of independence from the US government, independence from the Trump and Biden administrations, because we’re not here about backing any government or state. We’re here about building working-class solidarity from below, direct worker-to-worker, people-to-people connections.

And the other thing I want to add here, when there was this reaction of not a problem, most of the time working people in the US — And this is particularly white people — It’s not their problem what happens in the world, right? It is their problem when it comes to their pockets. But there is a socialization about we around the world, we are the ones who deserve all the wealth, and we can extract the wealth of the rest of the world and make all these cheap products abroad for slavery wages, and plunder the resources of the world so we can have a way of living. [This] makes it that we don’t care about what happens in the rest of the world because in everyday life we have to care about what happens to the working class in the world. We could not sleep for the nightmares that we would have about what our standards of living and our consumption conditions require.

So there is also something, there’s two perverse ways in which the US capitalist system and the US state has socialized us and desensitized us not to care. One is because we are US-centric, born and raised to be US-centric and not care about the rest of the world and not spend money abroad when there are needs at home. And the other thing is that we also have a lot of folks who have been so much damaged, tortured, aggressed, harmed, hurt by the US empire, that their first gut reaction is to be against any cause the US government supports.

And we have to deal with all of this mess, of all of this. And it’s important to call it gut reactions and say how we start unpacking, validating the way people think, of course, but then start showing them the way other people are feeling and thinking, and trying to put these two things together so we can build internationalism and solidarity for below.

It is difficult work, but this is why we’re doing this podcast, because we think this work must be done, and it can be done together if we have productive conversations across the different sectors of our class internationally.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Another condition that your average working person in America is in, living in the heart of empire, being subject to a capitalist dominated society and an imperial war machine installed in our government. People, over ,get really, really tired of getting jerked around and lied to and feeling duped. And the better angels of their nature are being exploited by the people in power to justify doing awful things. And I think that that’s where also you get this malaise that so many of us feel.

One of the, I think, other factors to consider is that, for your average person, the decision about what to think about this was also broken into two choices: Is my duty here to do something to stop this, or is it to have the right position on it? And I think that that’s actually symptomatic of the broad powerlessness that we are raised to feel in this country when we sense that we have so little influence over the power structure that we are finding out has had a hand in NATO expansion, that has had a hand in creating the crisis that we’re watching unfold on our televisions, our impulse is just throw our hands up and say, I don’t want to associate myself with this crap. And in that position, you can gravitate towards the one thing you do have, which is the righteousness of your own perspective.

And so when you’re in that mode, you latch onto these reasons to not care, to not give your heart so willingly to a cause like we did after 9/11, like we did in Vietnam, like we did in Desert Storm. People remember what it felt like to learn how wrong we were in those days gone by, and we don’t want to make that same mistake again.

And so when we hear that there are far-right Nazis in parts of Ukraine, that’s enough of an excuse to write off an entire population. When we hear that, once again, the US has had a strong hand over years and decades in creating the crisis that is unfolding now, we throw up our hands and say it’s the US’s fault. We don’t want to deal with it.

So I think that that reaction from a lot of folks is more symptomatic of our learned powerlessness in a craven, imperialist society that is constantly looking for our emotional validation of its imperial exploits and people refusing to give it, but doing so by writing off an entire population that needs our solidarity.

Ashley Smith:  I think what you’re saying, Max, is really important because there’s a healthy knee-jerk suspicion of the US government that is the legacy of the absolutely criminal history of US imperialism, all the way back to the 19th century, from the Spanish-American war to today, in which they lie, cheat, and steal to make profit through plunder of other countries and military dominance and manipulation of debt and gunboat diplomacy and fake alibis for wars, et cetera. So there’s a good knee-jerk suspicion of the US government, and I think that’s particularly concentrated, rightly so, among progressives.

But then it can lead to the kinds of problems that you’re describing, of not thinking our lives are bound up with people in Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian people don’t deserve our solidarity and support.

And I always come back to Martin Luther King’s famous statement as part of his opposition to the Vietnam War when he said that a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I think we have to internalize that because I think we need a healthy knee-jerk anti-imperialism towards the US government, but also towards other governments and imperial powers throughout the world.

In this case in particular Russia, because I think Russia set a precedent that is now spreading, that is that you can have an imperialist war to annex and eradicate an entire country that first started in Europe, the first ground war in Europe since World War II. Now you’re seeing that spread with Israel and its using a logic of colonial annexation that’s eerily familiar from what Russia said about Ukraine. Because if you put what Netanyahu says right next to what Putin says about each country they’re annexing and colonizing, they’re eerily similar. And if you look at what Trump is now saying about Gaza, the ethnic cleansing and seizure of Gaza — Not only Gaza but Greenland, Panama, and if God can believe it, Canada as the 51st state.

So there’s a whole logic of a territorial imperialism and annexation that Russia’s war initiated globally, and it’s why our interests as working people and progressives here in the United States are bound up with Ukrainian people’s struggle for self-determination. Because if they lose in their struggle, that sets a precedent for powers to go after other subject peoples and nations all around the world.

And what’s most eerie right now is that Trump is rewarding Russia’s aggression and saying, sure, you can have 20% of Ukraine. That’s fine. We’ll sit down and make a deal over the heads and without the involvement of Ukraine’s government, let alone its people. That is eerie. That’s what Netanyahu and Trump are doing about Palestine. Who knows what’s going to happen between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump about Taiwan. Who knows what’s going to happen in Latin America and Panama and Greenland. We’re entering a very ominous phase, and it began, really, with the invasion of Ukraine. That’s why, whether we like it or not, our lives and destinies are bound up with the struggle of the Ukrainian people.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Exactly. And to even look backwards at the Biden administration’s handling of this, again, I think what you’re describing with Trump still puts your average American in a similar position because we had just clearly stated evidence that, under the Biden administration, that while we may, from our gut impulse, want to support Ukrainians fighting against this imperialist aggression, defending their national sovereignty, their lives, their communities, and that was the official line that we were hearing from Washington, DC, throughout the media. But then you also get these media clips from then Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who, in April 2022, told reporters:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin:  We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So right there you have, in the center of those two statements, you have your average working person trying to square that contradiction: Is this about supporting Ukrainians fight for their lives or is this about putting them in the firing line as cannon fodder so that our enemy Russia weakens itself slaughtering the people that we are in solidarity with? What is your average person supposed to do in that situation? What are they supposed to think?

And so you have those contradictions swirling around in general, but you also have other contradictions that clash, I think, are the deeply held principles of people who might describe themselves as on the left or having more leftist and progressive principles that they try to live by that are in seeming conflict in a situation like this and our clear-cut principal opposition to Nazis anywhere. So yes, of course if there are and where there are Nazis in Russia, Ukraine, anywhere, fuck them. But they are not the entire population, just like the Nazis who are literally marching on the street right now in the United States of America do not represent the entirety of the US population.

But you also had, for instance, within Ukraine, necessary critiques of the Zelenskyy government, of the wartime policies that have squashed labor rights, that have sold off more resources and terrain within Ukraine to other countries and private firms that are looking to take advantage of this situation. And so again, if you are, say, someone more on the left than not and you support unions and workers’ rights, and you are seeing them be violated in Ukraine by its own government, you have this difficult question to untangle. And I actually thought that in this great interview that Bill Fletcher did for us at The Real News in September of 2023 where he spoke with Olesia Briazgunova, the international secretary of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, she actually puts this into great perspective. Let’s play that clip.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Bill Fletcher Jr.:  I’d like you to explain to US workers who might say something like this: The Zelenskyy government is neoliberal, it’s reactionary. Yes, I don’t agree with the Russian aggression, but I don’t agree with the Zelenskyy government. I don’t think we should give any support to anybody. What would you say to someone that raises that?

Olesia Briazgunova:  I want to emphasize that there are two different issues: Issues of war, genocidal war that includes massive killings of people, mass graves, torture, killing of children, deportation of children, people who are activists, human rights and labor activists under the threat of captivity in the occupied territories. So it’s two different issues. Yes, we need the support in this direction of fighting for decent work and labor standards. We need your solidarity. But to fight for workers’ rights, we need to survive. We need to survive and ensure that workers’ right to life is ensured. And then, of course, we will fight for better working conditions and decent work. And maybe in peaceful time, it would be more easy to promote our agenda within the social dialogue.

[CLIP ENDS]

Blanca Missé:  The US government, the Biden administration has been weaponizing the principle solidarity American people felt for Ukraine, to actually use it against Putin, the Russian state, and weakening it. But it is even more perverse than that because all of these aid packages that were presented in Congress, which supposedly is money that we are sending to support Ukraine, if you look at the fine print, a third of each of these packages was just to restock the US military with more advanced weapons, giving huge contracts to the major war corporations. Another third was to boost NATO, to boost the CIA, to boost international surveillance. Only a third of what remained was to send material aid to Ukraine, which mostly what they send are the old weapons that are not really useful so much in combat today. Not the most advanced ones, not the airplanes, the ones they need to discard.

So they have been using the Ukraine war in two ways. One is, as you were saying, Max, to use the lives of Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken the Russian economy. They have also weaponized the war to impose sanctions on Russia to make it more difficult for Russia to upgrade its industry, its military production. But they also have been lying to American working-class people, telling them that this is about Ukraine [when] this is about boosting their own war machine.

And we have to be honest, we have to explain what’s happening. That does not mean we do not stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian working class. That does not mean we oppose material aid. But we need to explain the aims of this material aid. We need to explain the strings that come attached while we are on the material military side of the Ukrainians, and we fully agree that they need airplanes, weapons, tanks, anything they need to protect the sovereignty of the territory.

As Denys Bondar said in Episode 1, you cannot fight an invasion with pillows. You need weapons. That’s absolutely true. I think the perversity of the US imperial agenda went a step further, and we’ll talk about it later today when we talk about what happened once we combined what’s happening in Ukraine, what is happening with Palestine. Because the last aid package for Ukraine that was proposed by Biden was proposing the same package with aid for Israel and for the militarization of the border to further criminalize and repress immigrants in the United States. So the cruelty, the cynicism, the twisted mindset of the US empire that is supposedly here to support Ukraine, but is, in fact, using this war and the Ukrainian people and the working-class folks in the US to further its imperial aims, it’s absolutely disgusting and outrageous, and we need to be able to denounce it while we build solidarity for Ukraine.

And one of these things you were saying, Max, about this split between being a commentator of what’s happening versus being actively involved, we see that in a lot of the movements here, and I think it has to do with the fact that working people in the US feel really politically disempowered. I think the biggest manifestation of that is in what is supposed to be the most democratic country in the world, the political life is dominated, since the Civil War, by two huge parties which are controlled by money and by major corporate America, and working people don’t have an outlet. There is not a worker’s party. There’s no independent political parties. You go anywhere in the world, you run for elections, you have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 parties. You have coalition governments. Here in the US, folks have kind of accepted that they have to be ruled by one of the two evils.

And when you have interiorized that there is no good that could come from politics, that you have no political agency, that we cannot be in charge of running our country, but we have to defer to one of the two evils, it is logic that the mentality of the lesser of two evils gets applied to read the rest of the struggles, always speaking the less of the two evils.

And I think that’s important to remind ourselves that when we’re doing all of this work to stand in solidarity without exceptions, the first duty we have in the US is to stand in solidarity with ourselves, with working people in the US, to start challenging this imposed hegemony of the bipartisan system in our country so we can finally begin to articulate, one day, independent working-class politics for working people in the US too, not only for the struggles of the oppressed abroad.

I think these things are connected. Our incapacity, most of the time, in the US to read and understand the complexities and the class struggle dynamics of the wars and the conflicts and the national liberation movements and the democratic movements abroad is linked to our conditions here in the US and our political life in the US, which is really poor, and is made poor by the US state to make sure that we do not have a rich political life of debate or struggle of experience with the system so we can eventually liberate ourselves one day.

Ashley Smith:  We should never underestimate the cynicism of the US government, whichever party is in power. I always think of the great quote from the American socialist John Reed who said, Uncle Sam never gives you something for nothing. He comes with a sack of hay in one hand and a whip in the other, and the price will be paid in blood, sweat, and tears by the oppressed.

I think we should keep that in mind always when we talk about the US government because the quote you read from the general, Austin, explains very clearly what the US is about, which is totally different than what the Ukraine Solidarity Network and movement is about. The US wants to use Ukraine for its own purposes to weaken Russia and to impose its agenda on Ukraine, which is not in the interest of the Ukrainian people. Because one of the things, to add to what Blanca said about the aid packages, they all came with debt attached to them, and the price of neoliberal restructuring and privatization of the Ukrainian people’s government, social services, and economy, and opening it to the plunder of multinationals, including US multinationals, which Donald Trump drew the logical conclusion by saying that he wants to buy half the country’s minerals — Or not even buy it, just get it through plunder.

So I think there’s the cynicism of what the US is up to we need to be clear-eyed about. Because as we oppose Russian imperialism and its annexationist drive in Ukraine, we should have absolutely no illusions of what the US government is about in Ukraine or anywhere on the planet. They don’t respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, whether under Biden or Trump. They’re after their own interests, not the interests of the Ukrainian people. And they have supported Zelenskyy, who is a neoliberal, who wants privatization, restructuring, and has agreed to all these debt deals for his own corporate backers’ interests.

And that’s why our solidarity is always with working people, with oppressed people in Ukraine and everywhere on the earth, because they have a different project than the capitalist governments and corporate rulers and far-right governments that rule over them, and that’s about liberation. And so our project is collective liberation from below with no illusions in any imperial power or in any existing government anywhere on the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that you both really importantly hit upon one of the common causes of our intellectual incapacity to see the world for what it is and see what’s right in front of our eyes. We reduce entire populations to the figureheads in their state houses and the official policies reported in the media, and we lose all ability to see things like class, to see the different power structures in a given society that don’t mean that because Zelenskyy said X every Ukrainian believes it and is undeserving of our solidarity. This top-down enforced hypocrisy has been so viciously on display from the time that Russia invaded Ukraine till now, and even before.

And before we head into the break, I wanted to play this clip from then President Biden, which was from April of 2022, that really makes the point here.

[CLIPS BEGIN]

President Joe Biden:  I called it genocide because it becomes clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian. And the evidence is mounting. It’s different than it was last week, the more evidence is coming out of literally the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine. And we’re going to only learn more and more about the devastation. And we’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies, but it sure seems that way to me.

Reporter 5:  Good evening, and thank you for joining us. At dawn local time, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented and large-scale surprise attack targeting dozens of locations in Israel. Right now, Israeli authorities say at least 200 people in Israel have been killed. The Gaza Health Ministry says 232 Palestinians are dead.

Reporter 6:  The death toll across Israel and Gaza has topped 1,300 as the bloody conflict stretches into its third day. Israel today announced a total blockade on Gaza, including food, water, electricity, and fuel. Over 800 people have been killed in Israel, over 500 in Gaza. Thousands more have been injured on both sides of the separation barrier. Hamas says it’s taken over a hundred hostages, including civilians and Israeli army officers. The Israeli prime minister has told Gazans to leave, though it’s unclear where they’d be able to go, vowing to all but decimate the besieged territory.

[CLIPS END]

Maximillian Alvarez:  Now, we’ve already mentioned earlier in this discussion Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, particularly on the besieged open-air prison of Gaza, which really rose to new heights after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. We are going to discuss that in more depth in the second part of this episode, and it’s going to be baked into everything that we’re discussing over the course of this series, which itself will end on the anniversary of Oct. 7 with an episode concluding this series focused on Gaza-Palestine.

Right now, in this episode and in this series, we’re trying to walk ourselves and our listeners from the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, all the way up to present day. And in that vein, I think in the period between Feb. 24, 2022, and before Oct. 7, 2023, we were already seeing, and many were calling out, the apparent double standards and the political and humanitarian inconsistencies that would really come to a head when both of these wars were playing out simultaneously in front of the global public.

And from the jump, these double standards were blisteringly, almost shockingly apparent in the way that many mainstream news outlets were covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Of course, there was the infamous example when Charlie D’Agata of CBS News really said the quiet part out loud in the early days of the invasion:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Charlie D’Agata:  But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — City where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  And that was by no means an exception. This was a pervasive, racist double standard that was so taken for granted that the people expressing it apparently felt no reserve or shame in just saying these “quiet parts” out loud. Like Daniel Hannan, as well, of The Telegraph, who wrote at the time, “They — ” Meaning Ukrainians — “seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. […] War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”

Now, of course, these double standards were being called out immediately. And in fact, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association released a blistering response to this pervasive coverage that we were seeing at the time. And that statement reads, in part, “AMEJA condemns and categorically rejects orientalist and racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilized’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict. This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected. 

“Newsrooms must not make comparisons that weigh the significance or imply justification of one conflict over another — Civilian casualties and displacement in other countries are equally as abhorrent as they are in Ukraine.”

This double standard was pervasive not just in mainstream media, but it was even leaking into social media and the discourse that we were having at the time of the Russian invasion before the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s genocidal, scorched earth response.

You even had viral videos of a young Palestinian, of the famous Ahed Tamimi, who was arrested at age 16 in an altercation with an IDF soldier. That took place in 2017, she was actually in prison for eight months in Israel after that. But you saw a viral video, which was viewed more than 12 million times on TikTok alone, of Tamimi confronting this IDF soldier, but people were showing it as a Ukrainian girl standing up to Russian troops. And that also highlighted not just the racist double standard in the mainstream media, but the media illiteracy of users of social media who couldn’t even understand the double standard that they were embodying in holding up a Palestinian woman as an example of a Ukrainian standing up to Russians.

But it wasn’t just the media, of course. The racist double standards that were really coming to the fore after Russia’s invasion and before Oct. 7 were also made grimly apparent in the treatment of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian refugees who were fleeing the war.

Just to give you a few examples, in March of 2022, we republished this piece by Adam Bychawski, which was titled “’19th-century Racism’ at Ukrainian Border” and reads, and I quote, “Indian students in Ukraine who spent days stranded at the Polish border have told of ‘19th-century racism’ as they watched Ukrainians’ pets allowed to cross before they were. ‘It all comes back to black and white’ said medical student Muhammad, speaking from a hostel in Lviv on Tuesday. ‘They are Europeans and we are just Indians.’ Muhammad, originally from New Delhi, said he and hundreds of other foreign students had been denied access to the Polish border and forced to return to the city, 40 miles away, a few days earlier.”

There was also this example from another piece that we published at The Real News in March of 2022 by the great Molly Shah who wrote about Yemeni students who were fleeing Ukraine. And she writes, “The journey out of Ukraine for both Ahmed and [Mohammed Talat] Al-Bukari was incredibly difficult. They faced racist discrimination at many points during the journey, something that Jarhum — ” Who works with the group Yemenis and Ukraine — “says is a common thread running through most of the stories from Yemenis she worked with. ‘The discrimination on the border was… crazy,’ she said. ‘They prioritized women and children and Ukrainians over all other nationalities.’

“After a 26-hour bus ride from Kharkiv to Lviv, followed by a six-hour bus ride to the border, Ahmed was shocked when he was told he would not be allowed to cross. ‘They asked us if there were Ukrainians in the bus and there were no Ukrainians, [so] they forced us back seven kilometers to the gas station where non-Ukrainians congregate,’ he said, describing the Kafka-esque series of steps he went through before finally being permitted to cross the Polish border. ‘We waited in line for 18 hours, no sleep and no bathroom.'”

And of course, it wasn’t just people trying to enter Poland and nearby countries to Ukraine. NPR reported from here in the States in July of 2022 “Thousands of Afghans that were promised US visas remain on the run from the Taliban. The Biden administration, however, quickly cleared red tape for Ukrainians after Russia invaded Ukraine.” Highlighting again the horrific, racist, and hypocritical actions of our government to selectively sympathize with white Ukrainian refugees while leaving the Afghans that the US had already promised visas to, leaving them out in the cold while seizing on the political opportunity to welcome Ukrainians, thus again pitting people’s natural solidarity for one over the other.

Blanca Missé:  I want to say something about this double standard because double standard in the media, it’s a nice way to put it. I want to go back to what I mentioned about the second aid package for Ukraine that was conditioning aid to Ukraine to aid to Israel and aid to the border. Because, in fact, it’s not just a double standard like, oh, we give money to these, but we don’t give money to them. It is even more perverse and cruel. It is if you want to save the Ukrainian people, you need to sacrifice Palestinian lives and immigrant lives. It’s the lives of those ones in exchange for the lives of these ones. And that is, in a nutshell, the core of imperialism, the core of the politics of any imperial state that is not only putting populations in competition but is asking those who are in need, if you want my help, it needs to come at the expense and sacrifice of these other parts of the population.

And so it’s not only the divide and conquer, it’s as if we need to become each other’s the transactional tool to legitimize the genocide of another people to prevent the genocide of one people. This is also the logic of austerity. This is a zero-sum game. There is not [enough] for everybody.

And what we’re trying to say all over and over is that, yes, we can save everyone. Yes, we need to stop all of the wars. Yes, we need to stop all of the genocides. But the system makes it impossible for us to do that because to stop all of the wars, all of the genocides, and have resources for everybody, will require that we working people take control of the system so we can dismantle it, so we can be in the driving seat.

And so in order to even prevent this question from being raised, the framing is a framing of double standard, but even worse, one in exchange of the other. It’s either this, either that. And I think that’s exactly the logic that we are trying to fight back against so we can put forward a true logic of solidarity without exceptions.

Ashley Smith:  I just wanted to add to what Blanca was saying about the hypocrisy of the United States and Joe Biden, the idea that, at the same time he’s posturing as in favor of a rules-based order that he’s defending, in the case of Ukraine, he’s enforcing, collaborating in a joint genocidal war against Palestine. And what I think that blows up is the idea that we have anything that could be called a rules-based international order. If you really think about it, the US rules-based international order had Vietnam, had the countless invasions of independent countries by the United States: Panama, Haiti — Many times in Haiti — The war on terror, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And what the US has done in Palestine in particular is such an obscenity and has really delegitimized anything that could be called a rules-based international order.

And imperialists and autocrats all around the world are taking advantage of that and display a similar kind of hypocrisy and double standard. So if you think about Russia posturing as against what is being done in Palestine while it does the same thing in Ukraine, all the powers of the world have these systematic examples of hypocrisy.

And I think the worst is around the question of migration. The racism of the border regime cannot be overstated. It’s impossible to overstate. You look at what the US is doing on the US-Mexico border and the selective treatment of Ukrainians versus the treatment of people from all over the world, especially from Global South countries and, in particular, racialized countries. The racist double standards are there for all to see. The European Union does the same thing. If you look at what the European Union does in the Mediterranean, it’s guilty of mass murder of North African refugees fleeing for sanctuary.

One of the things that struck me most powerfully is when I did an interview with Guerline Jozef, who’s a leader of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and she looked at the double standard that the US applied between Ukrainians and Haitians on the US-Mexico border, and she said very simply, of course Ukrainians should be let in, but so should Haitians. We should be treated with the same standards of respect and dignity of every other human being. And the conclusion of that is the border regime should be smashed. We should have open borders and the free movement of people until we can really challenge what is a fact, is the free movement of capital at the expense of workers of the world.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s beautifully put, Ashley, and beautifully put by Guerline. Again, the response to seeing this racist double standard by which white Ukrainians are welcomed into the country while Haitian migrants, Latino migrants, migrants who are not white Ukrainians are treated horrifically and counted as lesser than human. The response is not to then say Ukrainians should be treated that way too, it’s that we should all be treated to the same universal standard of humanity. That should be the conclusion, but so often we are pushed and prodded and encouraged to feel the opposite.

And I think, honestly, that is the way that the United States and Israel, at the top echelons of their imperial governments, were expecting people to react after the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza that has been going on ever since. They were probably, I think, expecting that Americans especially would feel the same way towards Palestinians and Israelis as we’ve always been taught to feel. But that, of course, is not how things went.

And so I want to ask by way of getting us up to Oct. 7 and up to present day, how you guys feel the unfolding of the war in Ukraine, the unfolding and public display of these racist double standards, how do you think all of that set the stage for how people were going to perceive what was to happen in Palestine, in Israel in October of 2023?

Blanca Missé:  In the particular case of Palestine and Israel, the US state had been funding the state of Israel since its inception, and socializing among the US population the fact that we are identified with Israeli people, they’re a legitimate people too, in a state, they are a nationality there, and they’re one of us. They’re the only democracy in the Middle East. We keep hearing this and this. There’s coded language: They’re the only white people like us in the Middle East.

So we are already predisposed by all of these layers of ideology, of discourse, of double standards to immediately extend our solidarity with any Israeli victims and deny humanity and solidarity to Palestinian victims and survivors. The very fact that we are already, even before the Oct. 7 attacks and what happened, we have been supporting the war machine, the occupation, the apartheid regime, and the genocide, the ongoing, slow genocide that Israel has conducted on Palestinian people without ever having any qualms or any major public debate in the US.

When the US was supporting the war in Vietnam, there was a big discussion in the US started by the anti-war movement about who the US should privilege and support. But this discussion has never really happened at the mass level in the United States. There has been a Palestinian solidarity movement that has been reinvigorated since the Second Intifada with the radicalization of youth around the creation of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, the tremendous success of the BDS campaigns. So there has been a beginning of an incipient resistance among specifically younger people who have been questioning these double standards.

But we cannot see that the majority of the US population has been seeing this as a double standard. They have rather considered that almost an Israeli is closer even to them than a Ukrainian. And I think that was the framework that was already in place, that people were, again, having these gut reactions to what happened on Oct. 7.

Ashley Smith:  I think that there have been two responses to Israel’s genocidal war. There’s been the establishment response: bipartisan lockstep support for the eradication of the Palestinian people. This is a genocidal war, it’s a joint genocidal war by the US corporate military imperial establishment and Israel’s state, and there has been no debate about it across the political spectrum at the top, or only a handful of people dissenting.

Down below, I think we’ve seen a sea change within the US population towards Palestine, and I think it’s the expression of 15 years of radicalization that people have undergone at the base of society in opposition to all the problems: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, The [Red State Revolt], solidarity with Standing Rock, another wave of Black Lives Matter, and all the Palestine solidarity that kept flashing up through that period from the Second Intifada on and the BDS movement, all of this converged.

And, I think, in particular, Black Lives Matter and the growing consciousness among a new layer of Black radicals about the Black Palestine solidarity that has gotten organized, intellectual expression, people like Angela Davis writing books, drawing attention to it.

So there were the preconditions among a new generation that has been born of the radicalization since the great financial crisis of 2008. That was the preconditions for the explosion of solidarity with Palestine.

The other thing is the deep cynicism about the US government and what it does in the world born of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The deep suspicion among working-class people too, because the number of people that came back maimed, wounded, permanently impacted, and their families permanently impacted by the tens of thousands of soldiers deployed to that war meant there was a bedrock of suspicion.

And so people could see the hypocrisy. Not in the majority, as Blanca rightly says, but a surprising, much larger minority including of Democratic Party voters under a Democratic Party administration that was for a ceasefire. So I think there were preconditions that were built up from below that challenged the establishment’s commitment to this genocidal war, and it gives you tremendous hope.

The thing that’s striking is that there was very little crossover in terms of mass popular consciousness of sympathy with Palestine and sympathy with Ukraine because people saw the manipulation that the US was doing in the case of Ukraine and were suspicious of it in the case of Palestine. They saw the manipulation and fundamentally opposed it. And I think what we’re trying to do in this podcast is get people to see across that division and see the common bounds of solidarity between all oppressed, occupied, and terrorized populations, from Ukraine to Palestine.

So really I think the Palestine radicalization is one of the things that has torn the cover off of US imperialism and torn the cover off of the so-called democracy in the United States. Look at what has happened to Palestine solidarity activists on campuses, in cities, and communities across the country. We are being criminalized because of the threat this movement poses to the US government’s sponsorship of the genocide and its use of Israel as its local cop to police the Middle East to make sure that the US controls the spigot of the world’s largest reserves of oil in the world.

So I see the Palestine solidarity movement as one of the tremendous hopes for anti-imperialism in the world, but not without challenges politically that we need to overcome, in particular on overcoming any selective solidarity within the movement, and instead winning a method of solidarity without exception.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk about that a little more by way of bringing us around the final turn here, and talk about how the need for this podcast series itself really came roaring out of the contradictions that we were feeling, seeing, hearing, experiencing in the moment that we’ve been in over the past two years, when Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and Russia’s imperialist invasion and war on Ukraine have been occurring simultaneously on the same timeline in the world that we inhabit. Because this is, again, made complicated for your average person who may be seeing and hearing on the news quotes like this from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaking to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Copenhagen on Oct. 9 of 2023:

[CLIP BEGINS]

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:  These days, our attention is focused on the Middle East. No one can ever forget what the terrorists did in Israel, thousands of missiles against peaceful cities, shooting people in cars on the roads, men, women, children. No one was spared, streets covered in blood. Israelis themselves, Israeli journalists who were here in Ukraine, who were in Bucha, now seeing that they saw the same evil where Russia came. The same evil. And the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine. The intentions declared are different, but the essence is the same. You see it, you see the same blood on the streets, you see the same civilian cars shot up. You see the same bodies of people who have been tortured.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  Now, of course, there’s a political reality here where Ukraine is dependent on US support to maintain its war effort to stop the Russian invasion. And so by default, if not by ideology, the Ukrainian government is going to have to jump on whatever side it thinks that the United States is going to be on in this Israel-Palestine “conflict” so that it doesn’t mess up its one lifeline to keep fighting its fight against the Russians. And so we want to name, there are multiple reasons why Zelenskyy would make this claim.

But for your average person who’s hearing that claim, again, it forces your soul into this sort of your car stalling out and you don’t know where to go because you have the president of Ukraine effectively trying to square this circle and compare the plight of Ukrainians fighting against the Russian invasion with the plight of Israelis who are, in Zelenskyy’s own terms, the ones who are being victimized by this terrorist invasion coming from Gaza, coming from Palestine.

And perhaps in years past that may have been an easier sell, but it wasn’t this time. That was not a line that, in fact, like you guys were saying, a lot of regular people were not buying this comparison.

Ashley Smith:  I think the shortest thing to say about Zelenskyy’s statement is he has it precisely upside down and backwards because the analogy is between Ukraine and Palestine, not between Ukraine and Israel. The analogy on the other side is Russia and Israel. Those are the annexation aggressors in this circumstance. Russia on its own invading and annexing and occupying Ukraine, and in the case of Palestine, the US and Israel invading in a genocidal war against the Palestinian people. So the analogy and the solidarity is the exact opposite of what Zelenskyy said.

It’s important for us in the Ukraine Solidarity Movement to say that because Zelenskyy did a disservice to international anti-imperialism by making it that upside down and backward analogy. If he had said the right thing, then there would’ve been more sympathy with Ukraine’s plight from the insurgent movement from below. And that points to the importance that our solidarity is not with Zelenskyy’s government, but with the people in Ukraine.

And that said, I think there are a couple of things that we have to do to explain where Zelenskyy’s position comes from. First of all, he’s Jewish, and that’s important for all this stuff about Ukraine being a Nazi country. It’s got an elected Jewish leader of the government, so there’s a predisposition to identify with Israel and Zionism. There’s also the fact of a large migrant population, settler community of Ukrainians in Israel, one of a large population there.

That said, Ukraine traditionally has respected the sovereignty in the UN of Palestine and has advocated, whatever you think of it, a two-state solution for Palestine. That’s been the official position of Ukraine — Which I disagree with. I think we should have a secular democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all and the right of Palestinians to return.

I think the most important thing, though, is what the Ukrainian left did in response to this, which was to issue a statement of solidarity and opposition to the genocidal war conducted by Israel. And Commons Journal produced that, distributed, large numbers of Ukrainian intellectuals, trade unionists, and activists, and leftists signed onto that, and they did webinars to try and articulate a different position that gets the bonds of solidarity correct between Ukrainians and Palestinians against the aggressors that they face.

But that just shows that politics is not simple. You’ve got to work at it, and you’ve got to orient people and win arguments. And there’s a live debate in Ukraine about all this that has gotten better over time as the war in Gaza has exposed itself to the Ukrainian population. More people in Ukraine are more sympathetic with Palestine than at the start of the war when Zelenskyy made this upside down and backward statement.

Blanca Missé:  Actually in the US, our Ukraine Solidarity Network put out a statement in solidarity with Palestine. And actually, we didn’t put only one statement, I think we [put out] three or four statements. And the importance of that is that as we saw the use of this country rising against the genocide, taking tremendous risks in the campuses, including on my campus, the only condition for us to link up the struggles is to assert from the beginning solidarity with without exceptions.

And the first question the Palestinian movement is going to ask is, OK, I will support your fight against Russian invasion, but will you support my fight for Palestinian liberation? Will you support our demand to end all USAID to Israel now? If you want aid for Ukraine, will you support the demand to end all USAID to Israel now? Because in the same way your people are dying under the bombs of Putin, our people are dying under the bombs of Netanyahu. But the crime is that the bombs of Netanyahu, they’re paid for by the United States, they’re fabricated, they’re built in the United States, many in the state of California where I work and live.

So to be able to, as Ashley says, in many ways, move away from these very top-down, simplistic, opportunistic narratives, to rebuild a more complex, but in the end, also connecting what we were saying with a universal and simple feeling of solidarity. There is a lot of unpacking to do, but most of the unpacking we need to do is to destroy and undo the compartmentalization of struggles that has been put in our heads and reconnect with some fundamental feeling and sense of solidarity, of compassion, of being together and say, I see you struggle. You see my struggle. We might not speak the same language, we might not have the same appearance, but we do understand that we’re going through each other.

What Zelenskyy said and did, it’s tremendously opportunistic, but he’s not the first leader to do that. It might seem as a shock to us, but during the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, there were also opportunistic sectors of the petty bourgeois elite, the Black elite here who were rooting for Japan because they wanted to be against the US. But rooting for Japan meant sacrificing the national liberation movement of the Chinese, and we had a huge Chinese immigration community in the US. So that position was also separating the Black movement from the Asian movement.

Or even worse, during World War II, the Egyptian elites were trying to figure out whether they will support the Nazis or they will support the British because they were calculating who might win the war. But those were opportunistic self-interest positions of these national leaders, elites, economic elites who, like our imperialist governments, they don’t believe in solidarity without exceptions. Nobody from below could in their right mind say, fine, let’s side with the Nazis. Fine, let’s side with Putin’s invasion. Fine, let’s side with Israel’s genocide. That will not be a defensible position ever. But these elites are training us to be calculating.

And again, I go back to this thing: can we save our lives at the expense of these others? Is this a trade we’re willing to make? And this calculating mindset is the number one mortal enemy of the struggles of solidarity. And that’s the point we’re trying to make over and over in our movements. And that’s also the main reason behind this podcast. Instead of calculating, let’s start thinking and let’s start feeling what we have in common to fight for a common liberation.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and as you both said, in so many ways, the need for that message, the need for this series and the need for folks to hear the voices they’re going to hear, the discussions they’re going to hear over the course of this podcast series really emerged out of not only the conflict between people’s solidarity with Ukrainians that was not being equally applied to Palestinians after Oct. 7, but also in the other direction within the growing movement of folks who were in solidarity with Gaza, with Palestinians, was not equally applied back to Ukrainians. And so that itself presented a clear case for why we needed to talk about this and figure out why.

But on that note, I think one thing that we’ve mentioned here that maybe we don’t have time to go into in as much depth on this episode, but has clearly been a major factor over the past two years in public opinion shifting on Israel and really shifting towards solidarity with Palestinians. A lot of that we saw happen in real time.

We saw mainstream Western journalists who were all stationed in Israel while all the Palestinian journalists were being slaughtered in Gaza, and journalists were not being let into Gaza. And so you had this Iron Dome attempt to maintain the long hegemonic narrative of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, as the United States’s permanent ally, as Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims in general as less than human, the terrorist aggressors who hate us and hate democracy because of who they are. You saw that line be enforced and reinforced in the ways that the media was covering the Oct. 7 attacks, the lies that were spread all the way from our White House down the Hasbara propaganda that was being unthinkingly regurgitated through Western outlets, through the mouths of Western diplomats and politicians.

But it didn’t hold, it didn’t have the command over the public mind that it would have in years past. And a big part of that was because regular people were seeing the counter evidence on their phones over social media. They were seeing the livestreamed genocide unfolding in Gaza, on TikTok, on Twitter, on Facebook, you name it.

But there really were insurgent realities, insurgent narratives, like breaking apart that US-Israel media-enforced consensus over the past two years. And when people in this country, people I know, people I grew up with, people like myself who, for years, for our entire lives, never questioned that line about Israel, about its rightness, about its right to defend itself, all that stuff. Here in the United States, you had so many members of the population finally be ready to ask about the other side, to learn about the other side in a way that we’ve never been before.

And when we were ready to finally see that other side, to finally admit that perhaps we did not know the whole situation, people had a wealth of literature, of interviews, of coverage of BDS and Palestine solidarity movements to learn from when they were finally ready to take advantage of them. I don’t think that folks had that when it came to Ukraine as readily available to us if and when we started asking similar questions.

But all of that is to say that in the two years since both Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza and Russia’s continued war in Ukraine have been occurring simultaneously, in as much as the openings that have presented the opportunity for people to feel more solidarity with their fellow workers and human beings in Palestine, what does that look like for Ukraine? What does that look like for Haiti? What does that look like for other parts of the world where the story’s not going to be the same?

And in fact, there was, I think, a really important point made by Daria Savrova in a panel, a Haymarket panel on Ukrainians who were in solidarity with Palestinians, asserting that we do not need equivalence for solidarity. We don’t need the situation in Ukraine to be exactly like the one in Palestine to feel that solidarity.

Ashley Smith:  Yeah, I think, Max, you’re entirely right. There doesn’t need to be an equivalent experience of exploited and oppressed people to have the basis of solidarity. I think that point that Daria made is really important because if you look at what Russia has done in Ukraine, it’s horrific, like the mass murder in Bucha, the destruction of an entire city of Mariupol, the bombing of hospitals, the bombing of schools, that’s horrific. It’s not on the scale of what Israel has done in Palestine. And a lot of other wars and other experiences of countries under national oppression and experiencing exploitation aren’t identical, but you don’t need to have the identical experience to identify with people undergoing exploitation and oppression.

And in fact, that’s the hope of humanity, is that those of us down below among the working-class majority, the oppressed majority of the world, we have a basis for solidarity and common struggle and common identification. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this catastrophic moment in global capitalism that we’re living in, in which the scale of the crises and the problems and the wars from Ukraine to Palestine to Congo to Sudan to you name it. We are in an existential moment, and we have to have the hope and the trust in the workers of the world, the majority of the world’s population, that we can forge bonds of solidarity that can challenge all the governments that stand above and enforce this order. In particular, the big powers, the Europeans, the US, China, Russia that stand atop this mess. But that’s the hope of humanity is the bonds of solidarity which don’t require equivalence and identical experience.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and as we’ve already said in this episode, the need for that robust sense of solidarity, that durable sense of solidarity, the ability to know what we’re fighting for in a world that is spinning increasingly out of control is more necessary now than ever because we are living in that existential moment, as you said, Ashley, where it is a new and terrifying era in which the violability of national sovereignty is fully back on the table — And that’s not to say that it was off the table before. The US has been violating countries’ national sovereignty since our settler ancestors came here and genocided the Natives who were here, to say nothing of the wars in Iraq, the wars in Vietnam, the coups in Latin America, all across the world. We’re not negating that.

But we are saying that we are definitively in a new geopolitical era in which even the fiction of the US-enforced international rules-based order has fully collapsed. We are living in a time where Donald Trump can say that he wants to absorb Canada as the 51st state, that he wants to take over Greenland from Denmark, that he wants to turn Gaza into a real estate development, that he wants to retake the Panama Canal. Again, it is not just the United States that is making these kinds of proclamations, it is a world breaking apart under multiple competing imperialisms. This is the reality of what we call living in a multipolar world.

But for that reason, the question of what national sovereignty, what the right to it and the right to defend ourselves and our lands really means in a time like this. I wanted to ask if you guys could say a little more about what listeners who are living through this monstrous moment that we all are living through, what they’re going to get out of this series and why it’s important.

Blanca Missé:  We are in a new world order that is still evolving and reconfiguring itself. It’s not like we know the shape it’s going to have, but we know there’s a huge geopolitical crisis. And I think in the midst of this turmoil, we need to be able to resist against all the regressive politics, the wars, the genocides, our own government, the US government, is going to carry out at home and abroad, and at the same time oppose all the regressive politics, wars, genocides that rival powers like China and Russia are going to carry out. And not only China and Russia — We also have the rise of regional powers that are collaborating with them and also oppressing people abroad.

And so when we talk about solidarity without exceptions, first, we need to have an understanding of what brings us together and how to articulate this solidarity. And more importantly here in the US, we need to also provide avenues for working people in the US to stand in solidarity with other struggles without relying on their government, without siding with their government. Obviously refusing to side with sponsoring wars, genocides, sanctions, tariff wars, but also being suspicious of some supposed aid packages and good aims they might have abroad. And the only way to do that is by developing a mutual understanding from below of what solidarity means.

And this is why we’re going to be bringing guests who are international guests, some of them are US-based, who are knowledgeable about the struggles of liberation, who have been active in the struggles of liberation, and also have been thinking through the complexities of developing solidarity without exceptions. And we’re all going to be learning together how, in the midst of this turmoil, how to collectively rethink from below what international solidarity is with a working-class perspective.

Ashley Smith:  I want to go back to the moment that we’re in, because I think Trump has ushered us into a whole new phase of geopolitics, that he’s declared an American-first imperialism, a kind of unilateral annexationist, frankly, colonial imperialism that we haven’t heard articulated from the White House in a long, long time. And it’s not isolationist, it’s certainly not pacifist. It’s essentially saying might makes right — The US is going to use its hard power all around the world to get its way in an authoritarian fashion at home and a brutal, unilateral imperialist fashion abroad.

Max went through the list that Trump ticked off. He does want to annex Panama, Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, take over Gaza. These are not just idle threats. He’s really trying to implement them as policies. And this kind of authoritarianism is growing in every country all around the world, particularly in the historic great powers and the new powers. We are really headed for a global clusterfuck of interimperialist antagonisms unlike we’ve seen except in the run-up to World War I and World War II. More annexation, more war, more conflict, more militarism, increased military budgets all around the world. That’s going to produce increasing authoritarianism at home against our rights as working-class people and oppressed people like we’re seeing under Donald Trump, and more aggression abroad like we’re seeing under Trump. But not only Trump, all the other powers are doing the same kinds of things.

And what we’re going to be exploring is how we can bind together through a politics of solidarity, the national liberation struggles, the struggles for self-determination of oppressed peoples, and the struggles of working-class people politically throughout the world. So we’ll be exploring all these themes.

In the first round of episodes we’ll be talking about Ukraine, which we’ve been discussing today in detail, but we’ll do it with special guests from Ukraine about Ukraine’s struggle. We’ll also be then following up with Puerto Rico and then with Syria, with people who’ve actually just come back from the Syrian people’s victorious toppling of the Assad regime. But these episodes are going to be a part of many unfolding over the next year that are going to explore the politics of solidarity and solidarity without exception, which I think has to be the bedrock, the first principle of our collective liberation globally.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. Well, I cannot wait to listen to them. And Ashley and Blanca, it is such an honor and a privilege to be producing this series with y’all. For everyone listening, you can find new episodes of Solidarity Without Exception right here on The Real News Network podcast feed. Get it anywhere you get your podcasts. Keep an eye out for those new episodes that Ashley mentioned, which will be coming out every two weeks from now.

And then we’re going to take a little break, and then we’re going to bring you a new batch of episodes. But again, this series is going to be continuing over the course of this year. Please let us know what you think of it. Please share it with everyone that you know, and please support the work that we’re doing here at The Real News Network so we can keep bringing you more important coverage, conversations, and series just like this. Ashley, Blanca, solidarity to you.

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Ashley Smith says Assad and the international players in Syria share a common goal: undermine popular revolt

Story Transcript

SHARMINI PERIES, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. The United Nations says it is resuming the humanitarian aid convoy to Aleppo after its initial attempts were bombed several days ago which killed at least 20 people. The announcement comes just days after the US dropped bombs on the Syrian army which killed over 60 soldiers. The Syrian government responded with saying it will no longer adhere to the ceasefire negotiated by the US and Russia earlier this month. The US says the attack was a mistake. Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Associated Press, I don’t believe the United States will be ready to join Russia in fighting terrorist in Syria. Assad also said that peace won’t come until Turkey, US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar stop supporting terrorism in Syria. And in his final speech to the United Nations, President Barack Obama told the general assembly that the conflicts throughout the Middle East including Syria are the product of an oppressive political elite. This is what he had to say. BARACK OBAMA: There, so much of the collapse in order has been fueled because leaders sought legitimacy not because of policies or programs but by resorting to persecuting political opposition, or demonizing other religious sects, by narrowing the public space to the mosque, where in too many places perversions of a great faith were tolerated. These forces built up for years, and are now at work helping to fuel both Syria’s tragic civil war and the mindless, medieval menace of ISIL. PERIES: Joining us now from Burlington, Vermont to discuss the geopolitics of Syria is Ashley Smith. Ashley is a researcher for the Center for Economic Research and a member of the International Socialist Review Editorial Board. His most recent article on Syria is titled The Ceasefire That Will Increase War in Syria. Ashley good to have you with us again. ASHLEY SMITH: Thank you for having me again. PERIES: So let’s take up these recent remarks by both Assad and Obama. Assad says the conflict is fueled by external forces while Obama says the conflict is a result of state repression and sectarianism. Your opinion on who and what is fueling this war in Syria. SMITH: Well let’s start first with the comments from the dictator Bashar al Assad. It’s a bit rich when you think today the combined forces of Russia and the Syrian regime are bombing relentlessly, civilian targets in the city of Aleppo and its liberated areas. This is part of an ongoing counter revolution that the Assad regime launched from the very beginning of what was one of the most important popular revolts that occurred back in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring. Assad’s whole strategy since that revolt was to try to defy and conquer the resistance. First by repressing it with the barrel bombs that have obliterated whole sections of Syria and then by releasing sectarian jihadist, Islamic fundamentalist that he had jailed in his own gulag that he runs as part of his own dictatorship in Syria to try and create a 5th column within the revolt of sectarian terrorist that would go after the [all-white] Christian and other religious minority populations so that then Assad could paint the entire opposition, the entire revolution as a terrorist one. That’s been Assad’s essential strategy and he’s tried to paint the whole situation as a confrontation between his regime and terrorism. One in fact that’s been a counter revolution against one of the most important popular revolts that happened back in 2011. So it’s complete hypocrisy and deflects the blame from the main culprit of the problem in Syria which is the regime itself. Now of course other international powers have intervened some on the side of the Assad regime. Others on the side of various Islamic fundamentalist forces and they’re all poles of the counter revolution against the popular revolt that happened. In responding to the Obama administration, it’s unbearable hypocrisy from Obama again. What you think about what the US does domestically right now we’re seeing the national guard deployed in the city of Charlotte to repress the population there that’s protesting another horrific example or racist police murder of an innocent black man sitting in a car reading a book. This is a whole string of police murders that we’ve seen. And that’s on top of what’s an ongoing elite that is engaged in repression of the population of the United States. So Obama is a hypocrite at home. He’s also a hypocrite abroad. When you think about who one of the biggest forces has wrecked the Middle East, it’s certainly the United States. Both directly through its war on Iraq and then indirectly by it itself backing their various forces of counter revolution within the region. Most importantly one of the most sectarian fundamentalist and reactionary states on the planet, Saudi Arabia, which Obama is promising now a giant new arms deal even as Saudi Arabia carries through a horrible sectarian war on the people of Yemen. So he’s a hypocrite on that front. Finally, he’s a hypocrite when he’s supporting many of the regimes that he’s criticizing like Sisi’s regime in Egypt which is engaged in a horrible campaign of oppression and repression of trade unionists, democratic activists, and anybody that dissents with the regime and one that embraces Sharia law. So this is a complete hypocrisy and I think they have little to stand on. Including they support the Iraqi state which is one of the most sectarian Shia fundamentalists states in the region. Final thing I’d say about Obama, it’s a bit of liberal Islamophobic line to say that Mosques are somehow at fault for the development for Islamic fundamentalism. I think we have to say that’s a liberal form of Islamophobia to equate Mosque with Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism is both a creature that the US helped spawn into being through direct support of the Saudi regime and it’s blow back from the various forms of American intervention, beginning in Afghanistan, on through the rest of the Middle East. So really both Obama and Assad are two poles of counter revolution, along with many other poles of counter revolution from Iran to the Russian state, all who have Syrian blood on their hands and have no moral high ground to be preaching to the remnants of the popular revolt which are still struggling for a democratic order in Syria. PERIES: Now Ashley, I will be a great critic of Assad and some of what he’s doing in his own country. What he said there about Saudi Arabia, the US and Qatar funding terrorisms directly or indirectly is appoint to be taken. How do respond to that? SMITH: Of course. But you have to begin with the reality that the mass bulk of the people who’ve been massacred, the people who’ve been displaced, have been displaced and massacred by the Assad regime. We’re talking about half a million people. 11 million people displaced overall and 5 million people driven from the country and most of that are people who are trying to fight for democratic order. So the beginning point is a condemnation of state terrorism by Assad’s regime itself and then other powers have gotten involved. Saudi Arabia’s one, Qatar is another, Turkey is another, who see have their own regional imperial ambitions as well as Russia and the United States. All of them as I said earlier are counter revolutionary. People on the left should oppose all the various forces that are intervening in Syria because they are all counter revolutionary, reactionary and have played nothing but a negative role and should be standing on the side of what had been a popular democratic revolution against a horrible tyrannical dictatorship had oppressed and repressed his people and used all sorts of instruments of torture to maintain control over what was a horrible neoliberal state. PERIES: Ashley you argue that it’s incorrect to describe the US policy in Syria as a pursuit of regime change despite repeatedly calls of Assad to go by high ranking officials such as John Kerry. In that case what is actually going on in terms of US involvement in Syria? SMITH: Well we have to go back and remember that the Bush administration did have a policy of rolling regime change that it wanted to begin with its intervention and occupation of Iraq and it did want to go on to Syria and Iran as the access of evil, as the horrible Bush administration called the various regimes, it’s opponent regimes although you could name many of the countries that Bush supported as part of an axis of evil tyrannical dictatorship. Nevertheless, that was the ambition of the Bush administration was to take down the regimes and impose client regimes. But as we know, the Bush administration’s war and occupation blew up in its face and the US suffered perhaps its worst defeat since the Vietnam war. Since then both the second term of the Bush administration and the Obama administration have been retreating from any policy of regime change for a policy of trying to stabilize the existing state system. You can see that in how Obama responded to the Arab Spring. He first responded by trying to support the existing regimes. And then when that became obtainable in the face of a mass popular uprising throughout the region, he adopted a strategy of orderly transition in which the idea would be to get rid of the head of state but retain the existing regime with little modification. A kind of facelift to the regime so it could maintain the state system because it drew the conclusion that the worst thing that you can do in the Middle East is leave a power vacuum by destabilize the system of existing states. So the policy that’s been very forthright and honest and in many diplomatic documents that you can read from the Obama administration, our policy throughout the Middle East has been in some cases to get rid of the dictator and maintain the state with little modification and corporation of obedient lackeys it can integrate into the existing state. In some cases, support the existing state structure. In the case of Syria, his position was that we would want to get rid of Assad. We being the American empire would want to get rid of Assad but retain the state as it exists. He’s retreated from that even more. Especially in the most recent negotiation, the so called ceasefire which is actually not a ceasefire. It was a strategy to try and get Assad and Russia on board with an ongoing war on terror against what has been called an Nusra Front and ISIS. So they went so far as to even open collaboration with the Assad regime in what can only be called a political Freudian slip. John Kerry went so far as to say the US would approve the bombing runs of Assad against the Nusra Front and against ISIS. So you can see that the administration has retreated from any policy of regime change to actually regime stabilization and in some cases getting rid of the head of the regime but retaining the core of the state to impose stability. That’s even more so in the case of Iran which the US has no policy of regime change. In fact, the US is trying to reach an accommodation with Iran. You can see with its deal over nuclear weapons to its collaboration with the Iranian state in the war against ISIS in Iraq. The US main strategy is to stabilize the Middle East, even if that means cutting deals with previous enemies and engaging in common efforts with so called enemies. There’s no permanent friends, no permanent enemies in imperial politics. There’s permanent interests and the US thinks its permanent interests is served by cutting deals right now and stabilizing the system and certainly not through regime change which it fears will destabilize the entire order which is already rocked to its foundations in the Middle East right now. PERIES: And recently in mainstream media and of course analysts are often referring to what’s going on in Syria as well as what’s going on in Ukraine as a resumption of the Cold War between the United States in Russia. Particularly when it comes to Syria and Ukraine. In Syria, are they at odds or are they working together? Because, because of all the proxies and people that they’re negotiating on behalf of, the situation is kind of confusing. SMITH: Well I think there are two things to say about that. First there’s no doubt the case that after the defeat the US suffered in Iraq combined with the economic crisis and the political deadlock in Washington, DC, the US has suffered a relative decline as an imperial power and in that circumstance, new imperialist powers have risen and are increasingly challenging the United States for power in regions and internationally. The most obvious being China and the other being Russia. Especially regionally in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East which Russia’s increasingly assertive as an imperial power. So you see the development not of a unipolar world order but what I call an asymmetric multipolar world order in which the US is still the number 1 cop on the planet but there are other cops which are contending for regional and international power. There are many of them regionally and internationally. But the most important is that three quartered fight between the US, Russia, and China. In any inter-imperial dynamic, you have cooperation and conflict. Famously Karl Marx said, that the capitalists were a band of warring brothers and I think that makes it very clear. They’re brothers in a sense of they’re all capitalist powers that exploit workers and oppress nations. But they’re also contending for power within a world system. So that helps explain the seeming incoherence of American policy towards Russia in this case. In Ukraine and Crimea, the US and Russia are at loggerheads. In Syria, they have been at loggerheads but Russia has also salvaged the US from mistakes it might have made in terms of destabilizing the country even more. Think back to when the Assad regime dropped the chemical weapons as it’s been doing in an ongoing way onto the people of Syria and Obama had called that a redline. But Russia quickly stepped in and cut a deal with the Assad regime and the Obama administration quickly backed down. So there’s been a cooperative and confrontational relationship between the US and Russia in Syria. And I think that was very clear in the ceasefire where you both have a dynamic where the powers seem to be on a verge of cooperation towards a new escalated war on terror to go after the Nusra Front and ISIS. On the other hand, they’re angling for the best deal in the counter revolutionary piece that they’re all headed for in Syria. So there’s competition and collaboration going on which is characteristic of inter-imperial conflict in the whole history of capitalism. PERIES: Finally, Ashley I’m just going to take you up on this issue of the chemical warfare. There’s been a lot of debate in the left among people as to whether there’s evidence of chemicals used by Assad against his own people. What are your references here and how do you know for sure? SMITH: Well certainly there is Fog of War in all these debates. But we have to remember these are dropped from the air. The vast bulk of the chemical weapons. They’re being dropped from the air. There’s only one real air force that’s inside Syria, that is the Syrian regime itself. So they’re the only ones with the technical capacity to drop the barrel bombs and drop the chemical weapons on the civilian population. Of course there’s the Russian air force that’s there and the American air force as well as its other coalition allies, “coalition allies” are engaged in bombing runs mainly targeting ISIS and Nusra Front. But only really the Syrian air force that has the capacity and the interests to massacre the population with chemical weapons that resistance, the revolutions have no interests in gassing and killing their own people. These are attacks that have happened inside the areas where the Free Syrian Army and other rebel forces have been operating. They’re not going to bomb their own popular support against the regime. So I think we can get into the technicalities of which many people have written and know the details inside and out. I think a pretty conclusively proven that chemical warfare has been conducted by the Syrian regime and not the rebels or the resistance. PERIES: Alright Ashley, thank you so much for joining us today and look forward to having you back. SMITH: Thanks so much. PERIES: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

Researcher Ashley Smith and People’s Action Campaign spokesman Jacob Swenson-Lengyel debate whether Senator Bernie Sanders’ decision to run as a Democrat is the best way to advance a progressive platform.

Story Transcript

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. Well, you’ve probably heard that Independent U.S. senator Bernie Sanders is running for president. The self-described democratic socialist will be running on the Democratic ticket, and it has some progressives wondering if he should. He recently appeared on ABC’s Sunday program This Week with George Stephanopoulos where he discussed his campaign and what he would do if he lost the Democratic nomination. Let’s take a listen.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But if you lose in this nomination fight, will you support the Democratic nominee? BERNIE SANDERS, D-VT: Yes. I have in the past as well. STEPHANOPOULOS: Not going to run as an Independent? SANDERS: No. Absolutely not. I’ve been very clear about that.

DESVARIEUX: Sanders says that he will not run as an Independent, but some think he should. Here to make that case is Ashley Smith. He joins us from Burlington, Vermont where he is a researcher at the Center for Economic Research, and he’s currently on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review. And here to debate him is Jacob Swenson-Lengyel. He joins us from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jacob works as a communications lead for National People’s Action Campaign. Thank you both for joining us. JACOB SWENSON-LENGYEL, NATIONAL PEOPLE’S ACTION CAMPAIGN: Thank you. Thanks for having me. DESVARIEUX: So Ashley, let’s start off with you. Can you just map out exactly why you think Sanders is making the wrong move here by running as a Democrat? Let’s go point by point. ASHLEY SMITH, CENTER FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH: Well, I think the first thing to say about Sanders’s campaign is he’s really electrified a layer of newly-radicalizing activists and people on the left, because he’s articulating things that certainly Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party in general doesn’t talk about. Capitalism, class inequality, the horrible corporate hijacking of elections. So he’s really hitting on all the key notes, and I really identify with all the people who’ve been galvanized by his campaign. But I think he’s making a mistake in running inside the Democratic party, because he is trying to win the nomination of a party that opposes everything he stands for, and has through history shown that it’s incapable of being transformed by the left getting involved in the campaign. Instead, Sanders and the rest of the left need to build an independent political alternative that challenges both the corporate parties as a way to give an electoral expression to the newly-radicalizing movements. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement. All those things that are going to be the motor force of change. And getting back involved in the Democratic party is a way for those movements to get co-opted, demobilized, and really defanged. So instead of challenging the corporate parties and their system that they defend, we’ll end up getting co-opted and made ineffectual, and really mounting the challenge that we should be bringing. That’s why it’s a real mistake and a tragedy that Sanders is running as a Democrat. DESVARIEUX: So Ashley, you’re saying he should be running as an independent. Jacob, you clearly disagree. Why do you think that he should run as a Democrat? SWENSON-LENGYEL: Well you know–I mean, I think Sanders’s campaign is exciting for just the reasons that Ashley laid out. He’s energizing folks and getting people excited. And I think it’s important that he run as a Democrat because there’s a war right now for the soul of the Democratic party, and this isn’t just any moment in history. We’re seeing folks like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Keith Ellison in the House really igniting this base and fighting for core principles that matter. And by running as a Democrat, Sanders isn’t just herding progressives into the Democratic fold, he’s actually bringing our agenda and putting it on the table. DESVARIEUX: So I’m trying to get a sense of that. What about Ashley’s point about the history, though? That eventually Democrats, if you go and are on the Democratic ticket, the movement gets co-opted by the corporatists in the party? SWENSON-LENGYEL: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s an important point. And what’s going to be important is how Sanders carries out what he’s been calling his political revolution. And so in order for Sanders to be successful where other people have failed, it’s really going to be about energizing a strong base, and mobilizing hundreds of other downballot candidates to join him in fighting Wall Street Democrats. So if this is just limited to the Sanders campaign then I think it’s not likely that he’ll succeed. But if he really does follow through with what his stated aim is, that is a political revolution in this country, I think that’s where he can succeed where others have failed. DESVARIEUX: Okay. What do you make of that, Ashley? Do you think he could energize enough of the base where you would be able to persuade those Wall Street Democrats to finally get on board with the more progressive agenda? SMITH: No. I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Democratic party. All the way back to the slavery period this has been a party of the American elite, of the American ruling class. From the slave owners to the corporate billionaires that dominate and control the party today. The left attempt to take over the Democratic party has failed for over a century. It was first really pioneered in the modern era by the labor movement in the 1930s, and it failed back then. It eventually led to the defanging of the labor movement, first by Roosevelt, then by Truman, and then McCarthy when he–under the Republican party, but with the collaboration of the Democrats, conducted a witch hunt. The same strategy was attempted in the 1960s by the new left, and it failed then, and people drew the conclusion they had to break from the Democratic party. It was again attempted in the 1980s by the Jackson campaign when the left was much bigger, much stronger, and the impact of the Jackson campaign was the opposite of what Jacob is arguing. Instead of galvanizing and mobilizing a real challenge to transform the party, it delivered all those activists and all the left into the hands of corporate dead-enders like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis that Jackson both endorsed and also, people should know, Bernie Sanders has endorsed every single corporate Democratic candidate since the 1980s. And so I don’t think it’s going to play the role of galvanizing and transforming the party. Instead it’s going to play the role of co-opting a new left that is developing that has got to learn from history and has got to understand that we need a mass movement independent of both corporate parties, and a political challenge to them both that articulates our demands as part of not only its electioneering advertising, but as the core project that it’s trying to pursue. And the Democrats have shown by history that they’re not interested in our project of putting people first, of changing the inequalities of our society, and certainly not conducting a political revolution in America. The Democrats are absolutely opposed to that, hook, line, and sinker. DESVARIEUX: Jacob, what’s your response? SWENSON-LENGYEL: I’d say this. I think I agree that it’s really important that we build a new left pole in American politics. We need folks that are independent of both political parties. Both political parties at this moment are controlled by corporate capital. But where I disagree is whether independents always need to be running outside the party. And one of the things I’ve tried to argue is that the primary is a really important tool where a small and energized base of folks can have an outsized influence in politics. And so I think the primary is a particularly strategic place, and the Democratic party can become a field of struggle as the new left works to become more powerful. DESVARIEUX: What do you make of that argument, Ashley? I mean, Sanders is going to be up on stage with Clinton. Will he be able to sort of push her more to the left? SMITH: I think Hillary Clinton is overjoyed that Bernie Sanders is running in the Democratic party nomination, because it actually re-legitimizes a party that’s lost all credibility in the eyes of the vast majority of working-class people. And people in general. Look at all the enthusiasm that Obama mobilized back in 2008, only to become the, really the third and fourth term of the Bush administration. Bailing out the banks, conducting drone warfare. Supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and on and on and on. This is a party that has a credibility problem. That’s why nobody’s voting. The last midterm election had one of the lowest voter turnouts since the 1930s. So I think that Sanders running in the Democrats really is a blessing for the Democratic party, because it’s going to get all those new leftists, all those new activists in Black Lives Matter, climate justice, in Occupy and the new labor movement. Instead of looking to fighting on their own behalf and building a political alternative of their own, they’ll join in a party that’s opposed to their interests in a fundamental fashion. And so Sanders is going to legitimize a party that has no credibility, that’s a pro-corporate, pro-capitalist party and is bankrolled by the billionaires of Wall Street. He’ll give them a facelift. Hillary Clinton in the debates will say yes, Bernie, you’re right. I agree with you. Maybe you’re taking it a little bit too far, but I agree with you. And then they’ll get a few planks in the platform. Sanders will lose. And then he will deliver all those energized activists to Hillary Clinton, who will then be presented as a lesser evil candidate compared to whatever troglodyte and Neanderthal the Republicans end up nominating for the presidential election, and we’ll be left in a traditional American political situation of a great evil and a lesser evil, both of which are evil and none of which are an option for the working class in the United States, the new activists, people fighting for Black Lives Matter, et cetera. So I think Sanders has made a real strategic mistake, and the rest of the left should not follow it. They should argue it’s a mistake, and to really build an independent credible alternative not as the key thing for social change, but as an articulation, expression of the movement’s demands that can then enliven the movement. Because that’s where we’re really going to win all the changes. Not through the ballot box, but by strikes, demonstrations and struggle. DESVARIEUX: But Ashley, let me jump in, because I want to pivot and talk about the other party, the Republican party. Because this interesting point is how the Tea Party has really operated within the Republican party, and you’ve seen for example with Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, he lost his primary to a Tea Party-backed candidate who won. So I’m going to ask you both, but Jacob, is that sort of the model that you are expecting from more progressives, to be able to sort of be the Tea Party in the Democratic party? SWENSON-LENGYEL: Yeah, I think that’s a fair comparison. I mean, obviously the Tea Party had, and has had, some extreme backing from the corporate elite. But it’s also diverged from them, and I think it’s a genuine populist movement. What we really need is a people-powered movement on the left. And I think we, I agree with Ashley that we need to take the momentum, the momentum and energy that we’re seeing right now around Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and other populist movements, but channel that to holding Democrats accountable. Creating tension with folks like Hillary Clinton, pushing them left. And so I do think the Tea Party is a great model for us to look to. DESVARIEUX: Ashley, what about you? Do you agree with that? SMITH: Yeah, I think the Tea Party is not a model of a populist movement at all. It was a creature created by the core of the Republican party that wanted some street heat against the Obama administration to try and stop the health care reform. But as soon as the Tea Party got a bit out of control, the corporate establishment that runs the Republican party, just like it runs the Democratic party, quickly neutralized them and pushed them to the side. So they now, they’re really a bit player. And all they are is shock troops for the mainstream corporate agenda that the Republican party supports. And the tragedy of the left pointing to that as a model is really pointing to the futility of trying to take over a party that is run by corporations. It shouldn’t be our model. Instead we should say, we need a party of our own. We need to do what the Greek people have done in creating Syriza. To really challenge the political establishment as it exists. We need to do what the Spanish people are doing in creating a new political party called Podemos. We need to build a party of workers and the oppressed and the social movements, and then we need to put the emphasis on the social movements themselves. So I don’t think it’s a very good analogy of what the left should do with an extreme right-wing phenomenon that was sponsored by the core of the Republican party, not an alternative to it. Instead we should be building a genuine mass movement and a political alternative that can fight for its interests at the ballot box. And that is not the Democratic party. DESVARIEUX: All right. Ashley Smith and Jacob Swenson-Lengyel, thank you both for joining us. SWENSON-LENGYEL: Thank you. SMITH: Thank you. DESVARIEUX: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.