Ukraine’s fascist 3rd Separate Assault Brigade pose with their German-Israeli MATADOR grenade launchers, field-tested by Israel on Gazans in 2009

From History is What's Happening

by K. C. Sinclair
June 15, 2026

Sholem Schwarzbard, Simón Radowitzky, and Nestor Makhno were three of the most infamous anarchists to ever come out of Ukraine. What do their lives, which were lived in a different historical period and under distinct conditions from our own, have to tell us about the Russia-Ukraine war of the past couple of decades, and what does their struggle as anarchists have to tell us about the relationship between militarism and fascism?

Schwarzbard’s relevance to the ongoing war was implied as recently as December of 2025, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky bestowed an honourary name on the army’s 152nd Separate Jaeger Brigade, the reverential name in this case being that of the historic Ukrainian nationalist military leader Symon Petliura, whom Schwarzbard assassinated in France in 1926 as retaliation for mass pogroms that included the murder of almost a dozen members of his own family.

Schwarzbard had also been brought up back in April of 2022, in the context of the Russian escalation of the war into a full-scale invasion, when a group of anarchists from various parts of the United States mentioned him at the end of their article titled No War But Class War: Against State Nationalism and Inter-Imperialist War in Ukraine.

That article provoked a reply by a person either too slippery or too uncommitted to their own viewpoint to even bother coming up with a pseudonym. Their response, titled “In the Spirit of Sholem Schwarzbard”: Addressing Confusion about the War in Ukraine, was published that same month, in this case at the Russia-based anarchist/anti-antifascist website, Avtonom. Due to the author’s casual decision to go nameless, and the lengthy title of their piece, I will refer to them throughout this article as “the Coward,” for simplicity’s sake.

I don’t intend here to systematically address each point made by the Coward in their article, because there are wider matters to discuss, there are many things that they omitted, and most of what they write consists of outright lies, distortions, and manipulations. It will suffice to point out some of the Coward’s most egregious falsehoods, for example, the very first line of their article, in which they claim that the writers of No War But Class War were “decrying support for anarchists in Ukraine who are fighting against the Russian army,” as if the authors in question were pacifists, as if fighting from within a state army was the only way anyone has ever fought throughout history.

Right off the bat, we find that the Coward is an anti-anarchist propagandist, and that the main purpose of their diatribe is to deflect from anarchist anti-militarist and anti-fascist critique, and from Schwarzbard’s main claim to infamy, that being that he, on his own (as far as we know), not while fighting as part of a state army, assassinated the pogromist Petliura, who is still honoured by the Ukrainian state and its army today.

In 2023, the Coward’s article was recommended by the CrimethInc collective in their tribute to their comrade, the state soldier and statist propagandist Dmitry Petrov. The collective falsely describe the Coward’s piece as “a discussion of the complexities of formulating an anarchist anti-war strategy that does not effectively cede the field to state militarism.”

In reality, the Coward’s tract is much the opposite. It does nothing to help formulate an anarchist anti-war strategy and instead simply makes excuses for participation in imperialist war while suggesting that we eventually figure out some alternative, keeping our mouths shut in the meantime unless it’s to cheerlead for the appropriate side, that of the West. It seeks to hide anarchist participation in fascist organizations and it doesn’t so much address confusion about the Russia-Ukraine war as it seeks to create more of it.

In short, the Coward’s article is an exercise in campism, and if you replaced Ukraine as the subject with Iran, many Western anarchists would immediately decry it as such and say that nothing, not even Israeli and American attacks, could ever justify direct participation in such a regime (as it turns out, Ukraine is openly on the side of Western aggression against Iran and is arming the Gulf states to help facilitate that aggression, in keeping with Ukraine’s longer history of buying Israeli weapons, arming Saudi Arabia, and helping America and the United Kingdom occupy Iraq.)

CrimethInc were either too stupid to realize all this or too dishonest to admit it. A few other anarchist sites (such as The Anarchist Library) and distros (such as Scrappy Capy) have also uncritically featured the Coward’s article, which otherwise wouldn’t warrant much of a response.

Meanwhile, in their own article paying tribute to Petrov, CrimethInc admit that they don’t even agree as a group on anti-militarism in the first place, since some of them believe that serving in a state military can advance the anarchist cause, at least in this case, while other members don’t. Why the dissenters go along with the militarists within the collective is a mystery for the ages. Clearly their anti-militarist principles aren’t very strong. The anarchist unity of means and ends is apparently arbitrary and open to compromise.

In February of 2022, CrimethInc had already published an article titled War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine, in which the authors admit that some anarchist and anti-fascist volunteers for the Ukrainian army had “even joined the Azov battalion and the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists),” both of these being fascist organizations. As the anarchist writers in Ukraine further detail, “the reasons were mundane: they joined the most accessible troops,” and “consequently, some people converted to right-wing politics.”

CrimethInc, editorially, brushes this aside, taking the easy way out by adding a note stating that “obviously any supposed anti-fascist or ‘anarchist’ who joined a fascist-organized militia was never really an anarchist in the first place.” CrimethInc usually admonish us to “listen to voices,” but in this case they actually tell us up front that the voices they themselves are amplifying are in fact wrong and that they as Americans know better than the anarchists in Ukraine, despite the distance and the fog of war!

As it turned out, it was CrimethInc who were wrong and the voices who were right, but the situation was even worse than the anarchists in Ukraine were letting on, and would only get worse as time dragged on.

How It All Began

What CrimethInc never mention, either in War and Anarchists, their subsequent tribute to their statist friend, or anywhere else, is that Petrov’s so-called Anti-Authoritarian Platoon was started with the help of Yuri Samoylenko, a commanding officer in the fascist and OUN-associated Right Sector Volunteer Corps, that Samoylenko had used his crucial position within the military hierarchy to facilitate Petrov’s project. The Solidarity Collectives in Ukraine now admit that Samoylenko’s military position was important to the platoon project but neglect to mention that it was a position within the fascist Right Sector specifically. However, this is public knowledge in Ukraine, since the army is not a secret organization.

This is also likely what Petrov had meant in 2022, when he wrote that “I have concluded that we, as revolutionaries, should not be squeamish about making contacts within state institutions,” and when he said, in a separate interview with The Final Straw podcast, that “we need to collaborate somehow with the state military structures.” To my knowledge, none of his comrades have ever addressed let alone challenged these openly statist remarks. Nor do CrimethInc or any other anarcho-warmongers ever mention anywhere that Petrov later publicly supported conscription in an interview with the German media outlet Taz in 2023.

Petrov’s aesthetically “anti-authoritarian” platoon was associated with the so-called Resistance Committee, that being little more than a branding exercise and a social network among soldiers, with a statist manifesto demanding, among other reforms, more militarism in Ukrainian society.

The Coward, in their disinformation piece, claims that “if the Resistance Committee had meaningful ties to fascists, you would think we would already have heard about it from other anarchists in Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia.” In reality, anarchists in Ukraine had already vaguely admitted to such ties in War and Anarchists, and in fact, the term “ties” is quite the understatement, since Samoylenko was a commanding officer in the fascist Right Sector and was using that position to help set up Petrov’s platoon. Eastern European anarchists, at first, purposely concealed the full extent of their fascist connections in Ukraine in order to keep the donations coming in from abroad. Once they realized that prominent Western anarchists were soft on fascism, the same level of subterfuge was no longer necessary.

In November of 2022, a few months after the Coward’s disinformation piece was published, the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) of Dresden, Germany, wrote an article admitting that “some comrades, trying to get a place in the military ranks, directly joined units that are connected with Ukrainian fascist groups.”

As they further explain, “some of the comrades unfortunately went into denial mode and tried to downplay the political organization of Azov, Right Sector and other fascist military-political groups.”

ABC Dresden clarify that they personally don’t want to support people in right-wing military formations, but they will accept others doing so through them, noting that “if you want to donate for anti-fascists and anarchists in right-wing units despite all contradictions, just write it in the donation note.”

According to ABC Dresden, some of the donations that had already been made by anarchists abroad had been taken by the Ukrainian army and allocated to other units that don’t have anarchists in them. It’s not clear why this wasn’t anticipated, since the Ukrainian state and its army are not anarchist organizations who need to follow anarchist principles or even basic standards of decency.

In the space of only a few months, the Coward was proven wrong about the anarchist-fascist connections in Ukraine, and in the time since, things have only gotten worse, and have been revealed as having been worse than we knew at first. Yet, we have never heard from the hit-and-run artist the Coward ever again, and why would we? They are not a principled and committed anarchist but a con artist and a statist.

In the end, Petrov’s aesthetic anti-authoritarian platoon went nowhere, given the ultimate decision-making power of the state military hierarchy, and so it was disbanded, while its members, in some cases, were assigned to far-right military units such as Brotherhood (Bratstvo), whose members Petrov died fighting alongside.

If there was a lesson to be learned from Petrov’s experience it would be the time-honoured negative example of a person thinking they could change the system from within only to end up being changed by that system instead.

If anarchists want to avoid being assigned to far-right military units and being deployed as cannon fodder, it’s best to do what one can to avoid the armies that feature them, rather than “freely” enlisting and then doing propaganda for such armies, as Petrov did. Even if there’s no option but to join the army, there’s always the option to not do a side interview endorsing conscription and state collaboration. By CrimethInc’s own logic, they should disavow their friend Petrov as having been “never really an anarchist in the first place,” or, at the very least, a gullible type whose path is to be avoided at all costs.

It should also be noted that beyond Azov and the Right Sector there are several other openly fascist parts of the Ukrainian army, some of which even name themselves after various Nazi Germany military components (such as the Luftwaffe and Nachtigall) and adorn themselves with assorted Nazi Germany insignias. The Ukrainian army’s fascist 3rd Army Corps, which grew out the Azov movement and battalion of the same name, and is led by the notorious white supremacist Andriy Biletsky, now has some 20,000 soldiers and is expected to grow to 40,000.

The OUN’s fascist history in Ukraine is extensive. During World War II, they publicly pledged to work with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Germany, also reaching out to Benito Mussolini in Italy and Francisco Franco in Spain. Most seriously, they committed major pogroms against Jews and Poles during the war. According to historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Franco, arch-enemy of the Spanish anarchists, offered the OUN leader Stepan Bandera sanctuary and met with OUN leader Yaroslav Stetsko more than once.

Today’s anarchist apologists for militarism and fascism in Ukraine not only spit on the memory of past Ukrainian anarchists, on all the anti-militarist and anti-fascist anarchists of the past, but also on the anarchists who died in Spain at the hands of Franco and Joseph Stalin during that country’s Civil War (and after).

An Eye for Thousands of Eyes

Before I go any further, let’s look a little more closely at Schwarzbard’s life. As mentioned, he was a Jewish anarchist from Ukraine, and he twice fled to France, where, ultimately, he assassinated the Ukrainian nationalist military leader Petliura in Paris in 1926. Schwarzbard told the court that he’d done it “to avenge the death of the thousands of pogrom victims in Ukraine who were massacred by Petliura’s forces without his taking any steps to prevent these massacres.” As mentioned, several members of his own family had been killed in those pogroms. Despite his admission of guilt, the French jury sympathized with Schwarzbard and set him free.

In today’s Ukraine, however, it’s not Schwarzbard who is regarded as the hero. Just the opposite. He is slandered and bad-jacketed by the Kyiv Independent as a secret operative of the authoritarian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), despite the fact that he was an anarchist. He couldn’t possibly have had his own personal and political motivations to oppose a pogromist, even if it concerned his own family, according to modern-day Ukrainian nationalist propagandists.

Instead it’s Petliura who is celebrated and even officially lauded with street names, statues, official military patches and now, as mentioned, the honourary naming of a military brigade after him, signed by Zelensky himself. The Coward of course mentions none of this. In the latter case of the 152nd Symon Petliura Separate Jaeger Brigade, their honourary name was bestowed so recently that it couldn’t have been included in the Coward’s 2022 article anyway, but a mea culpa seems highly unlikely to be forthcoming.

The official lionizing of the porgromist Petliura is far from unique in modern-day Ukraine. Even more recently, in May of 2026, Zelensky heaped praise upon the Nazi collaborator and Ukrainian fascist, Andriy Melnyk, as his corpse was taken from Luxembourg to be official reburied and honoured in Ukraine at the National Military Memorial Cemetery. Zelensky also that month bestowed upon a special forces unit of the army the honourary title of “Heroes of the UPA” (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia), which was the armed formation of the OUN, the pogromists and Nazi collaborators mentioned previously.

In 2023, when a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran of the Nazi SS Division Galicia, Yaroslav Hunka was given a standing ovation in Canada’s parliament, Canadian society was still sensitive enough to fascism and World War II for it to be a scandal. But back in Ukraine, in the Ternopil region, the response was just the opposite. Hunka was honoured with an official medal, received on Hunka’s behalf by one of his relatives, this particular medal being named after the Nazi collaborator and OUN official Stetsko.

Justifying Fascism and Colonialism With Militarism

The Coward makes much of the fact that Schwarzbard enlisted in the French Foreign Legion during World War I, as if mere individual service, whether “freely” enlisted or conscripted, was the question, instead of militarism and fascism as systems and ideologies (which in turn form part of a global system of imperialism and capitalism). What the Coward deflects from is the crucial fact that Schwarzbard assassinated a pogromist, autonomously (as best we know), instead of officially honouring pogromists, as the Ukrainian state does, or fighting alongside and commemorating open fascists, as some self-proclaimed anarchists do from within Ukraine’s military today.

The Coward even bemoans the possibility that Schwarzbard, during WWI, could have fled France instead of joining its army, because that would have been “leaving the entire battlefield (and their hapless neighbors) to other forces.” Instead, we’re supposed to believe that defending the French colonial empire was actually the proper thing to do! The Coward does not prioritize the defense of those colonized by France from the occupying French Empire, but rather the protection of the loot of the French colonizer from his fellow colonizers, as the prominent anarchist Peter Kropotkin and his flunkeys also advocated at the time, much to the rejection of the majority of the global anarchist movement.

The Anarchist Black Cross of Galicja, Poland, and the Seditionist Distro of the United Kingdom also recently invoked Kropotkin’s pro-imperialist stance on WWI, starting out a book on the war in Ukraine by quoting Kropotkin’s incoherent statement that anti-militarists should join the French army to defend the empire from invasion. Not even the current day genocides in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, or the ongoing struggle in Kanaky are enough to shame European anarchists away from supporting European colonialism. Instead, they brazenly uphold it as the only way forward.

The Coward also seems to forget that imperial Russia was on the same side as France in WWI, so if the ultimate anarchist principle is that you should always fight against Russia, even if you have to join the state army, Schwarzbard actually made a big mistake by joining the French military that was allied with Russia at the time, allied with the very government that had just repressed him in Ukraine, causing him to flee to France the first time around.

One of the reasons that the Jewish Lithuanian-American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman opposed Kropotkin’s stance on WWI was that Russia was one of the Allies, and Russia was repressing various peoples within its vast empire. In the end, it was not the Allies’ ultimate victory but Russia’s battlefield defeats that in part led to the 1917 revolution in Russia and Ukraine.

And what did the other Allies end up having to show for their win in the War to End All Wars but the continuation of murderous colonialism, the rise of fascism, a Second World War and the creation of a new colony, Israel, that still scorches the earth today? Schwarzbard, though he claimed not to be Zionist, expressed his desire to leave France and settle in Palestine, which, at the time had come under the mandate of British imperialism, a factor of no importance to someone like the Coward (as it turned out, the British rejected Schwarzbard’s request). Schwarzbard did not want to stay in France (and help prevent another potential German invasion), he wanted to escape antisemitism by going elsewhere, exactly what the Coward and CrimethInc tell us is the wrong thing to do.

According to the Coward, who brings up Rojava and the fight against the Islamic State to prove their point, “sometimes you do not have the choice to opt out of war,” as if Black and Native peoples in America, Palestine or Kanaky are incapable of being aware of this fact, as if fleeing or being forced to move to adjacent territories can be reduced to simply “opting out of war.”

If such was the case, then war is precisely what Schwarzbard eventually opted out of, at least the second time he fled Ukraine to France. War between Russia and Japan, and Russia’s defeat, is also part of what had led to the Revolution of 1905 in Russia and Ukraine, and the repression of that revolution was what Schwarzbard had fled the first time around. Another invasion of France, whether he knew it was coming or not, is exactly what Schwarzbard didn’t stick around to help build up France’s military defenses against. Instead he left for the US.

If the Coward’s message is that defeating Russia and defending the French Empire are the most important things in the world, WWI seems like an extremely bad example, both because Schwarzbard fought on the same side as Russia (and its regime was replaced by another one that also invaded Ukraine) and because the Allies’ victory didn’t prevent France from being invaded again just over two decades later.

Imperialist war doesn’t appear to be a means of ending imperialist war but only of perpetuating it. The Coward wants you to be confused about all this, but it’s not really that hard to follow along.

Conscription and Insubordination

The Coward ridiculously complains that the No War But Class War writers “conscripted” the names and histories of Schwarzbard and Rosa Luxemburg in order to “legitimize” an anti-fascist and anti-imperialist polemic regarding the war. It’s not the actual conscription, as violent as it is, carried out by the Ukrainian state that concerns the Coward (who never mentions it), it’s the mere fact that some anarchists were inspired enough by Schwarzbard’s action against racist Ukrainian nationalism and Luxemburg’s anti-imperialist analysis to commemorate their names. We see that the Coward is not only a con artist but also a clown.

Unsurprisingly, the fact that Petrov went on to tell German media that Ukrainian conscription is an unfortunate necessity in the fight against Russia didn’t prompt any new articles from the Coward either. Their mission was adding disinformation to the mix and providing cover for the normalization of fascism in the Ukrainian anarchist scene, and that mission has been completed. They just have to hope that anarchists abroad continue to not pay attention to what’s actually happening in Ukraine, how their “own” governments and corporations are involved in it, and how that reverberates back here.

The Coward concedes that it’s not “anarchist” to participate in a “state military mobilization,” but justifies it by pointing out that “under duress, anarchists do all sorts of things that are not anarchistic, that do nothing to advance any anarchist project—laboring to enrich capitalist bosses, for example, or paying rent to landlords.”

“If we can understand why workers alienate their labor in return for a wage in order to survive, we can understand why they might join a state military in hopes of resisting an invasion, as well,” the Coward explains.

However, the difference is precisely that anarchists typically don’t do propaganda for their bosses and landlords portraying work done for a boss or rent paid to a landlord as a righteous component of the overall anarchist struggle. The army anarchists in Ukraine today didn’t just enlist and then keep their mouths shut, focusing on the task at hand, fighting Russia. They created, with the help of anarchists abroad, a whole propaganda campaign of support for the war effort, demanding donations both from other anarchists and from NATO’s weapons stockpiles, denouncing anti-militarist anarchists, normalizing fascism, and portraying militarism as a glorious component of anarchism.

The Coward portrays themselves as the truly knowledgable one regarding Schwarzbard’s life, in contrast to the No War But Class War authors. But here we see that their knowledge is used in the service of lies, not in clarifying details. The issue was never whether one person should or did join an army at some point. The issue is that Schwarzbard was one person who didn’t tolerate his family and his people being genocided and took action against it, in contrast to today’s anarchists in Ukraine who serve in an army that has a unit named in honour of the exact pogromist Schwarzbard took his revenge against.

Fascism, though largely derivative of militarism, imperialism and colonialism, is not exactly the same thing as them. It’s quite possible to have enlisted in the army at some point but also be so opposed to fascism, or a particular racist nationalist, that one puts their own life on the line to make that opposition as strong as possible, like Schwarzbard did.

It’s also possible to have joined the army, but then later recognize how much of a mistake that was, and take action against it, as the principled American anarchist and air force member Aaron Bushnell did, only to be mocked as a coward and lied about by the actual cowards within CrimethInc.

It’s equally possible to appreciate one or more things that a historical figure did but disagree with other things they did. We can appreciate Kropotkin’s writings on communism and mutual aid while firmly rejecting his militarist turn. We can appreciate Ricardo Flores Magón’s steadfast anti-militarism (which he died for in a US prison), while firmly rejecting his sexist and transphobic tendencies. There’s no reason we can’t do the same for Schwarzbard, rejecting his participation in WWI but appreciating his action against antisemitic Ukrainian nationalism. The Coward, however, is not interested in reality, or in principles or analysis, only gotcha journalism and the kind of whataboutism popularized, ironically, by the USSR.

The Coward also complains that the No War But Class War authors invoked Luxemburg given that she was a Marxist and a determinist, and considering that, supposedly, “as an anarchist, Schwarzbard had no recourse to determinist frameworks like Luxemburg’s.” Part of the Coward’s implicit tactic here is to deflect from the fact that Luxemburg was Jewish like Schwarzbard, and therefore was less likely to side with the Ukrainian pogromists and their commemoration than today’s gentile anarchists in the Ukrainian army have shown themselves to be.

But the other point is to deflect from the fact that the most notorious of all anarchist turncoats, with regard to militarism and imperialism, was Kropotkin, and he also happened to be a determinist like Luxemburg, but unlike, say, the anarchist Errico Malatesta, who stood by his principles when WWI broke out. The Coward is either very unfamiliar with anarchist history or a bald-faced liar.

To the Coward and CrimethInc, militarism against Russia is of such a top priority that it eclipses all other concerns, such as those that Bushnell and Schwarzbard held. It even overrides the need for honesty. But this is not a stance all anarchists need to follow, as a further look at anarchist history confirms.

Perseverance Against Repressive Power

Radowitzky was another Jewish anarchist, and as a teenager in Ukraine he had taken part in strikes, riots, and the Revolution of 1905. In fleeing the imperialist repression of Russia, he went to Argentina, where he continued to take part in the class war. He did not stay and fight Russian power until the last Ukrainian fell, he moved forward, so as to carry on the struggle elsewhere.

In 1909, Radowitzky assassinated the federal police chief Ramón Falcón in Buenos Aires, in retaliation for his murderous repression of striking workers. Radowitzky was subsequently sentenced to between 20 and 25 years in prison. In 1918, Chilean and Argentinian anarchists helped him escape by boat from the remote southern prison of Ushuaia, but he was quickly recaptured.

Radowitzky eventually served a 21 year sentence, but despite this unimaginable hardship, he didn’t give up the fight, traveling to Spain to join the International Brigades and the revolutionary struggle of the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. He didn’t stay and fight until the last man in Spain either, but instead fled to France. There he was interned, and again, he did not stay and fight in WWII, but rather fled to Mexico.

Does all this fleeing mean Radowitzky was a coward? The question is beyond insulting in its stupidity. Radowitzky represents a level of anarchist commitment and bravery that would be basically impossible to find among today’s anarchists, and most certainly could never be found among the CrimethInc collective or the anonymous Coward, who don’t even have a minute’s worth of the strength of their own self-proclaimed convictions, let alone the strength to persevere for two decades through real material hardship as a convict in a remote prison.

Batko and his Disobedient Stepson

Makhno was the most infamous of all the anarchists from Ukraine, even if others like Maria Nikiforova, Olga Taratuta, or Sophie Kropotkin deserve as much recognition but have yet to receive it. A gentile who spoke Russian but not Ukrainian, Makhno led the autonomous and anti-statist Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, which, at various points fought against the Russian White movement, the invading Austro-Hungarian and German forces, and the Bolsheviks.

At other points, Makhno’s forces allied with or temporarily subordinated themselves to the Bolsheviks, but this ultimately led to betrayal and repression. If the lesson the anarcho-warmongers want us to learn is that joining state forces is legitimate and indeed the only way to advance our cause, Makhno seems like a poor example. Furthermore, what the war boosters also want you to forget is that Makhno, like Schwarzbard and Radowitzky before him, didn’t stay and fight until the last Ukrainian, but instead fled west, ending up in France, like Schwarzbard. There, Makhno even wrote an article claiming that the British Empire was the worst in the world (rather than, say, the new empire of the USSR, which had just forced him into exile).

Some say Makhno advised Schwarzbard not to kill Petliura, doubting the latter’s responsibility for pogroms and the usefulness of assassination. Aside from that, was Makhno a coward or fool for not remaining in Ukraine and fighting to the death? The question is almost as ridiculous as the one regarding Radowitzky. Yet, CrimethInc, the Coward and their fellow anarcho-warmongers pose sticking it out in the current war as the only option, as precisely the justification for anarchists enlisting in the army and doing propaganda for it, even as more the five million refugees have already fled Ukraine since 2022.

Alternatively, if one wanted to blame conscription as the reason that enlisting is the only alternative to fleeing, it’s strange to then tolerate a person like Petrov actually doing propaganda on behalf of violent state conscription and throwing under the bus all the people who are resisting themselves or their relatives being thrown into busses by agents of conscription.

CrimethInc and the Coward don’t want you to recognize that the real coward is not the one who flees, refuses to become a murderer for the State, and lives to fight another day. The real coward is the one who, from the sidelines, at no threat to themselves, advises others to go to war on behalf of the liberal Ukrainian state.

The Coward and CrimethInc don’t want you to fully remember Schwarzbard, Radowitzky and Makhno’s lives, much less properly honour them. They want you stuffed in a cannon and shot toward the enemy lines, or at least cheering in the stands when it happens to others, and begging your government for more NATO weaponry for Ukraine (they never address that Ukraine has been buying Israeli weaponry for years.)

Schwarzbard, Radowitzky and Makhno’s lives show us that it takes courage, effort and perseverance to carve out one’s own path, that staying put and following orders can be the easy way out, but it’s not the only way. The strength of these comrades will forever stand in stark contrast to the sniveling propagandist without so much as a pseudonym, or the CrimethInc collective, who’d rather try to revise history than own-up to any of their own mistakes. To lie to the people is the work of the politician, not the anarchist.

The Further Adventures of Fascism

The war in Ukraine has also seen anarchists other than CrimethInc and the Coward publicly promote militarism or downplay the threat of the Ukrainian fascists.

American anarchist pundit Peter Gelderloos recently downplayed fascism in Ukraine by saying that “there are far more neo-Nazis on the Russian side,” and that “Russian society on the whole, since the days of the Soviet Union, has been extremely rightwing.”

What he fails to mention is that some of those Russian fascists are fighting for the Ukrainian side! Gelderloos also neglects to consider that the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are, in a significant sense, “our” Nazis more so than the Russian ones, given that “our” governments in the US and Canada are more directly and extensively supporting the Ukrainian side, including the fascist branches of its military (Canada also indirectly and to a lesser extent supports the Russian side through various business ventures already mentioned in my 2025 article The Downward Spiral of Militarism). Gelderloos admits that there are right-wing nationalists in Ukraine but says that “Russian influence on media and social media exaggerated their importance,” failing to consider that US and Canadian media have also downplayed their importance.

Furthermore, the fact that one side in a war may exploit a point for propaganda doesn’t mean that point is entirely untrue. For example, during WWII, Nazi Germany cynically produced several movies about British oppression of the Irish. The conclusion to draw from this is not that the British never oppressed the Irish but that the Nazis were insincere and opportunist! The same goes for today’s war in Ukraine, as some supposed anarchists are using Russian propaganda as an excuse to liberal-wash the Ukrainian state and its fascist military units.

In March of 2022, Gelderloos had either mistakenly or intentionally portrayed anarchists in Ukraine as being in autonomous formations that only formed an alliance with the state military (as for example Makhno’s forces had, to their detriment), rather than being subsumed within and subordinated to the state, which is the reality. By the time he’d written his article, Saša Kaluža had already published one of their own explaining that “initiatives such as the Resistance Committee are formed within the military structure of the Ukrainian state”, and further clarifying that “they are not anarchist initiatives, even though most of the participants are anarchists”.

ABC Dresden soon confirmed this in their November of 2022 article where they stated that “there are no independent units.” Gelderloos never bothered to correct his mistake, to my knowledge.

The self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian Solidarity Collectives in Ukraine, in their 2025 year in review, included, without commentary, a photo that features the red-and-black (horizontal bars) blood-and-soil flag of the fascist Right Sector, a design that pays homage to the flag of their fascist forefathers, the OUN. This was not as out-of-character as one might hope, since the Collectives, and the supposedly anti-authoritarian Resistance Committee, have previously accepted Russian fascists and Ukrainian apologists for fascism into their ranks, persons quite open about either their involvement in or their support for fascist organizations.

In particular, I refer to the Ukrainian former prisoner Oleksandr Kolchenko, who repeatedly posts praise for the fascist UPA on his own facebook account (as for example he’s done on International Women’s Day), and who regurgitated the propaganda of the fascist Azov Regiment in a 2022 interview with the media outlet The Insider. In the CrimethInc-published War and Anarchists article, Kolchenko was lauded as an “anarchist.” Again, if CrimethInc really believed in their own straightedge-inspired position of “if you’re not now, you never were,” they would have disavowed Kolchenko. Instead, we hear only crickets.

Next, there is the Russian neo-nazi Sergey Petrovichev, who was a member of fascist organizations in Russia, fought for the fascist Right Sector once in Ukraine, and posted pictures on his own facebook account of himself wearing a fascist UPA t-shirt and hanging out with fellow fascists under a banner for White Rex, the well-known Russian fascist brand, whose mastermind, Kapustin, is also fighting for the Ukrainian army, where he founded its Russian Volunteer Corps. The Solidarity Collectives, among others, even commemorate Petrovichev as a fallen “anarchist,” banking on the ignorance of their audience.

Finally, there is the Russian fascist Alexey Makarov, who in a media interview admitted to being a member of the fascist National Bolsheviks in Russia and the far-right Christian nationalist Brotherhood (Bratstvo) party in Ukraine before he joined the real Ukrainian army and the primarily aesthetic Resistance Committee. Makarov, in his interview, does not have a single negative word for these far-right groups he had belonged to, let alone renounce or denounce them, which you’d think would be the bare minimum for peer acceptance into the anarchist scene.

In 2024, American anarchist space cadet William Gillis wrote an article in which they downplayed the creep of fascism into the anarchist scene in Ukraine, seemingly referring indirectly to CrimethInc’s War and Anarchists article when they wrote that “no one in the west can speak to the details or extent, rumors are rumors, perhaps it is only a handful of the usual suspects who have embraced full nationalism,” when the reality was much worse (as the ABC Dresden article had already partly confirmed), and when an open fascist like Petrovichev was being (and still is being) hailed as an “anarchist” hero by the scene in Ukraine.

Gillis also describes as “quite decent” an anarchist panel in Switzerland in 2023 that had a moment of silence for the fascist Petrovichev and other state soldiers. Gillis further regards as “true” the misleading statement made during the panel that “it’s a strange world where anarchists tell fighting people to lay down their weapons,” despite it being the opposite of the truth. State soldiers don’t have their own arms to lay down in the first place, and anarchist anti-militarism is not pacifism, it’s not a rejection of all use of weapons. However, Gillis has a well-known penchant for confusing fantasy for reality, as well as not doing the research, so this is not particularly surprising, just exceedingly gullible, if not outrightly deceptive.

A few months after Gillis’ article was published, the Resistance Committee announced and mourned the death of Roman Legar, who they admitted had died while fighting as a soldier in the fascist Azov Brigade. The Resistance Committee no longer felt the need to hide their fascist connections, given the fluffing they’d received from some American and European anarchists. It’s been crickets instead of correction from Gillis ever since.

In a 2023 article, the Belarusian-Polish anarchist historian Aleksander Łaniewski openly praised the fascist Azov Brigade, saying that they “showed incredible heroism during the defense of Azovstal,” and that they had undergone “an ideological transformation unlike the couch-potato anarchists.”

We see in these examples, with striking clarity, that the anarcho-warmongers in Ukraine and their boosters abroad do not take Ukrainian fascism seriously, let alone oppose it. And why should they? They are not the Poles or Ukrainian Jews who suffered pogroms at the hands of the OUN/UPA or Petliura. They are not non-white persons in North America who have to be concerned about fascists attacking them or their family based merely on the colour of their skin.

Furthermore, it’s not only NATO training and weapons or the Hunka scandal that connects fascism in Ukraine to fascism in North America. The growing fascist Active Clubs movement in North America is largely inspired by Kapustin’s White Rex brand and the Ukrainian fascist movement.

American Active Clubs co-founder Robert Rundo, who has been imprisoned and released after violent attacks in the US, explained to a right-wing podcast back in 2017 that with regard to Ukraine’s Azov movement, “this is always my whole inspiration for everything.”

Rundo furthermore referred to Azov as “the future.”

“They really have the culture out there,” he detailed, “they have their own clubs, they have their own bars, they have their own dress style.”

Rundo, however, didn’t just talk about Ukraine but actually went there to spend time with and learn from his fellow fascists. The many fascist units in the Ukrainian army provide a training ground for fascists from other parts of the world.

Rundo at one point even co-hosted a podcast with White Rex Kapustin, who’s now a star in the Ukrainian army, as previously mentioned (and as Gelderloos told you not to worry about).

Fascism and Free Land

With regard to Canada, the militarist and fascist connections with Ukraine go far beyond both the Active Clubs movement and the Hunka scandal.

Canada has long had one of the world’s largest Ukrainian diasporas, in part because settlement by Ukrainians was encouraged by both the Canadian government and the Ukrainian professor Joseph Oleskiw, who wrote the pamphlets, On Free Lands and On Emigration in the 1890s. Land on the prairies was newly “free” for the Canadian government to advertise and give away because they’d just stolen it from Indigenous peoples with overwhelming military force during the Northwest Resistance of the 1880s.

After WWII, numerous Ukrainian fascists were given refuge (and commemoration) in Canada, which is when Hunka came in.

Ukrainian immigration, however, has not had entirely reactionary results, given that, for example, Ukrainian-Canadian senator Paul Yuzyk is known as the “father of multiculturalism” for his work in getting Canada to adopt the Multiculturalism Act of 1988 and saving the country from even further descent into official dual Anglo-Franco ethno-nationalism.

Since 2015, both Canada’s colonial police and army have been training their counterparts in Ukraine. One of the Canadian army regiments involved has been the Royal 22e, which is the regiment that laid siege to two Mohawk communities within Canada in 1990, sparking a cross-country Indigenous uprising and a growth in Indigenous sovereigntist consciousness. The Canadian army is no liberator of nations from invasion but is itself an occupying force teaching imperialist methods to its allies.

Beyond the colonialism, Canada’s army also has its own history of unofficial fascist and white-supremacist activity (see the Somalia affair of 1993). The Canadian army’s initial training of fascists in Ukraine’s Azov units seemed like it might end up a scandal, but this ultimately fizzled out. Since then, the Canadian army has continued its contacts with members of the Azov Brigade right up to the present.

Canada’s former Deputy Prime Minister (and Minister of Finance), ironically named Chrystia Freeland, is the granddaughter of a Ukrainian propagandist for Nazi Germany, Michael Chomiak, a fact which she at first dismissed as Russian propaganda, despite knowing it to be the truth. Freeland was at one point seen holding a red-and-black blood-and-soil Ukrainian scarf at a solidarity demonstration, and was a big proponent of the business opportunities opened up by war with Russia (Canada, for example, now supplies all of the uranium used in Ukraine’s remaining nuclear reactors). In 2025, she was appointed as a special representative for the reconstruction of Ukraine, and in January of 2026, Zelensky appointed her as an economic development advisor for his government (she resigned from the Canadian government a few days later.)

For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit here that two of my grandfathers fought for Canada and the Allies against the side that Freeland’s grandpa was on in WWII. I’m no more free of bias than anyone else.

In October of 2025, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) interviewed a trainer with the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade in Ukraine but blurred out the prominent swastika tattoo on one of his arms in order to liberal-wash his part of the army.

Ironically, during the recent Minneapolis immigration raids, the Ukraine/NATO side of the war that American anarchists like CrimethInc and Gelderloos have been supporting really did come home to them, in this case in the form of the armoured vehicles made by Roshel, a Canadian company with both Ukrainian and Israeli connections. Run by a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, Roman Shimonov, the company has been profiting off sales to the Canadian government for aid to Ukraine and re-investing in expanded production for American law enforcement, including immigration enforcement. Even more recently a Roshel armoured vehicle was spotted before an anti-ICE protest in Portland, Oregon.

The future that a brave few anarchist anti-militarists warned us about in 2022 (and prior) is already here, and the CrimethInc collective and their sycophants are still none the wiser. They have never once acknowledged that America-based arms companies are producing for Ukraine and Israel at the same time (and one after another), using the increased capacity developed to support Ukraine to up the support for Israel, and vice versa.

Militarism Manifested and Contested

One might be tempted by all the above to say that militarism and fascism seem to go hand in hand. Instead, one could say that fascism is derivative of militarism, imperialism, colonialism and nationalism, even of liberalism, and that the latter easily develop into the former.

Some of the Spanish anarchists who fought in their country’s Civil War in the 1930s proclaimed that “for us, the military is an integral part of fascism.”

“The army is the characteristic instrument of authoritarianism,” they further clarified, showing up Petrov’s much later Anti-Authoritarian Platoon of the Ukrainian army as a basic contradiction in terms.

As the infamous Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti put it, “the military-fascist provocation of July 19 [1936] gave rise to an authentic and indisputably popular movement which definitively condemned, among other things, hierarchical military organization and the Code of [Military] Justice…” Like other anarchists before him, Durruti wasn’t just opposed to this or that army, but the inherently hierarchical form of every military, because anarchists are against hierarchy.

This was a point that Malatesta had also made back in 1902, when he wrote that “for us, it is truly the very existence of the army that we want to destroy, however it is organized.”

As he further explained, “it is loathing for the role of soldier — the role of slave and cop combined — that we must inspire in the spirit of the people and especially of the youth.”

Yet, today’s warmonger anarchists promote just the opposite, subservience to the military hierarchy and tolerance of fascism. Everything is to be sacrificed in the fight against Russia, because everything else can only be considered a lesser evil, even if one lives in a country where NATO or Israel is the more direct oppressor. The unity of means and ends that distinguishes anarchists from marxists and liberals is to be tossed in the trash bin of history, perhaps to be dumpster-dived and dusted-off later, according to these turncoats. Russian authoritarianism can supposedly be fought with authoritarian means.

The anarchists of today have forgotten Malatesta’s insight from 1901 that “for a people that goes to oppress another, for anyone who performs work of violence and injustice, it is truer to say, ‘woe to the victors,’” than “woe to the defeated.”

“An English victory would be the victory of militarism and would prepare the ground for the suppression of English freedoms,” Malatesta reminded us long ago, and this still applies to all imperialist countries today.

Elsewhere, I’ve already discussed some the disturbing details of the militarism and junior partner imperialism of the Ukrainian state (see my 2025 article The Downward Spiral of Militarism.)

Since then, Ukraine has only gotten worse in that regard, just like it’s gotten worse on official commemoration of Nazi collaborators and pogromists. Recently Ukraine, for the first time, voted at the United Nations to support the cruel US blockade of Cuba. Zelensky has in the past months been meeting with the Gulf monarchies to seal weapons deals in support of Israeli, American and Gulf monarchy aggression against Iran and Lebanon.

Never mind that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is also backing the genocide carried out by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan. Ukraine, at least at first, didn’t have enough scruples to stop arming the state of Myanmar as it committed the Rohingya genocide; and it didn’t have a problem arming one of the richest countries in the world, Saudi Arabia, to attack one of the poorest, Yemen; why would it scrounge up principles about a genocide in Sudan with a UAE intermediary in between them?

Zelenksy has even been meeting recently with the son of the former Iranian Shah. In 2022, Zelensky met with former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, who resided over the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Chiapas. Resistance to invasion or not, there’s no accounting for taste. Russian aggression may be problematic, but genocidal aggression by other regimes is not a barrier to collaboration for those in the Ukrainian government.

From Colonialism to Fascism and Back Again

Much as the first fascist movement, that of Mussolini in Italy, was grounded in militarism, including the disgruntled former soldiers and the supposed “mutilated victory” of WWI, fascism is also based in colonialism.

When the fascists took power in 1922, Italy already had colonies in Libya, and was hungry for more. Like Israel would do later, Italy portrayed the colonization of Africa as simply a return to a place they’d already been and had unjustly been cast out of, referring to the Roman Empire of old. Before WWII, the world stood idly by as Italy committed genocide in Libya, although the elder Omar al-Mukhtar fought as valiantly as he could against the fascists.

Then came the invasions of Ethiopia and Albania. The rest of the world didn’t have to imagine what fascism would be like, it was already happening before their eyes, it just wasn’t happening yet to them.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany came to Franco’s aid, as the rest of the world continued to sit on their hands, aside from the USSR with their intrigues that only undermined the struggle. The USSR, furthermore, had already been supplying Italy with oil and didn’t fully cut off trade with the fascists until 1941. The other Allies supplied Italy, Germany and Japan with crucial materials and technology just prior to the war as well.

In 1941, the OUN in Lviv declared the Restoration of the Ukrainian state, explaining that they would work with Hitler, and then took part in pogroms against the Jewish community. In today’s Lviv, the blood-and-soil flag of those same pogromists flies outside the army recruitment center. A fascist would have no problem enlisting in such a place, would even feel welcomed, and wouldn’t need to be violently shoved into a van by conscription agents, as the former anarchist Petrov supported, to the ongoing silence of his anarchist friends and comrades.

I contend that part of the reason that modern day anarchists like CrimethInc, Gelderloos and Gillis have such a poor analysis of fascism (and are soft on it) is because they have such a poor analysis of (and a lack of negative experience with) its parent ideologies, militarism and colonialism (and by extension, liberalism).

In contrast, as the fellow traveller of anarchists George Padmore wrote in 1936, “the fight against fascism cannot be separated from the right of all colonial peoples and subject races to Self-Determination.”

And as the Spanish anarchist labour federation newspaper Solidaridad Obrera put it that same year, “the struggle against fascism, which at this time has a clear international character, must advise us to try with all our means to foment a healthy atmosphere of rebellion in the communities of the Riff [in Morocco].”

Zelensky’s current day glad-handing with colonizers and genocidaires is not an aberration but part of the long history of collaboration between liberals and fascists, and the evolution of democratic liberal militarism and colonialism into fascism itself.

Schwarzbard, Radowitzky and Makhno deserve much better treatment than the Coward, CrimethInc and other supposed anarchists are capable of, but they also point to how unnecessary and unproductive current day anarchist warmongering is. Militarism and fascism cannot be used against themselves. It’s not necessary or even useful to sacrifice principles for pragmatics. Imperialist war has only ever bred more wars and genocide, and the unity of means and ends is not only an anarchist principle but also an increasingly practical stance.

***

Sources

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The 152nd Jaeger Brigade “Symon Petliura”

https://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2025/12/7/165529/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/152nd_Jaeger_Brigade_(Ukraine)

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Four Months in an Anti-Authoritarian Platoon in Ukraine (Petrov)

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Finbar Cafferkey, an Irish fighter who served in the far-right Bratstvo Battalion alongside Petrov in Ukraine

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The Downward Spiral of Militarism (Sinclair)

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Anarchist Organization in Times of War and Crisis in Ukraine (Kaluža)

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Annual Report of Solidarity Collectives 2025, featuring fascist Right Sector / OUN flag without commentary

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Kolchenko regurgitates fascist Azov propaganda

https://theins.press/en/politics/251492

Myths and the truth about the enemies of our enemies, on Petrovichev and others (Lukáš Borl)

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Best friend of Petrovichev says his friend was part of the right-wing movement in Russia

https://graniru.org/War/m.285949.html

Resistance Committee tribute to the fallen Russian fascist Petrovichev where they admit he was a member of a right-wing group in Russia but without mentioning it was right-wing

https://web.archive.org/web/20220909135036/https://t.me/theblackheadquarter/297

Interview with the Russian fascist Alexey Makarov of the Resistance Committee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_keZb-0Y5_0

How America is sometimes in line with the “struggle against power everywhere” and why a Russian fascist in Ukraine should be honoured with a moment of silence because anti-fascist values are secondary to anarchist coalitions (Gillis)

https://c4ss.org/content/59554

Resistance Committee tribute to Roman Legar of the fascist Azov Brigade

https://t.me/rescom_ua/752

Łaniewski on how he prefers the militant fascists of Azov to principled anarchists

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aleksander-laniewski-resistance-and-mutual-aid-rather-than-doctrinarism-and-defeatism

Rundo, White Rex Kapustin, Active Clubs and Azov

https://time.com/5926750/azov-far-right-movement-facebook/

https://www.propublica.org/article/robert-rundo-denis-nikitin-hooligans-europe-hate-group

https://www.vice.com/en/article/neo-nazi-fight-clubs-how-the-far-right-uses-mma-to-spread-hate/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/two-infamous-white-nationalists-still-have-a-platform-for-their-podcast-somehow/

Oleskiw advertises Native land as free for Ukrainian settlers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Oleskiw

Paul Yuzyk entry at the Canadian Encyclopedia

https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/paul-yuzyk

Royal 22e commander in Ukraine training soldiers on how to fight against Indigenous peoples

https://www.thesudburystar.com/2016/05/01/tim-arsenault-making-a-difference-in-ukraine

Canadian soldiers engage in white supremacy in Somalia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia_affair

Officer with Ukrainian unit linked to neo-Nazis received military training in Canada (David Pugliese)

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/officer-ukrainian-unit-linked-neo-080020744.html

Freeland and her Nazi grandpa Chomiak

https://breachmedia.ca/chrystia-freelands-denials-grandfather-complicit-nazi-genocide/

https://web.archive.org/web/20231104171031/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/freeland-knew-her-grandfather-was-editor-of-nazi-newspaper/article34236881/

CBC blurs-out Ukrainian’s army trainer’s Nazi tattoo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uevoW6Z5LOE

https://web.archive.org/web/20251027144944/https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/neo-nazi-fascism-canada-democracy/

Roshel armoured vehicles from the battlefields of Ukraine to the streets of Minneapolis and Portland

https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/local/what-we-know-about-canadian-company-buying-springfield-international-facility/article_a6bd3b5c-2e13-412f-8d04-c3aa69f1dbc7.html

https://bsky.app/profile/dmbmeg.bsky.social/post/3mdbahkestc2s

https://bsky.app/profile/inlovewthemooon.bsky.social/post/3mksw6vlv5223

Militians, Yes! But Soldiers, Never! (Spanish anarchist militias)

https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2022/05/31/militians-yes-but-soldiers-never-1936/

The Durruti Column Responds to the Militarization Decree (Durruti)

https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/post/2025/11/20/the-durruti-column-responds-to-the-militarization-decree-buenaventura-durruti-1936/

Against Militarism (Malatesta)

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-against-militarism

Ukraine votes to continue strangling the people of Cuba

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/4052995-ukraine-votes-against-lifting-us-embargo-on-cuba-for-first-time.html

Zelensky meets the president of the UAE

https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2037807460845502619

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/75956

https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/why-uae-involved-sudans-bloody-civil-war

Ukraine arms Myanmar

https://www.justiceformyanmar.org/stories/ukraine-is-arming-the-myanmar-military

https://burmacampaign.org.uk/ukraine-arms-genocidal-myanmar-military-while-asking-for-uk-support-against-russian-aggression/

Zelensky meets with the son of the Shah, twice

https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-meets-iranian-opposition-reza-pahlavi/

https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-meets-exiled-iranian-opposition-figure-reza-pahlavi/

Zelenksy meets Zedillo of the Acteal Massacre and The Elders

https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/82294/

Fourth Shore: Italian Colonization of Libya, 1974, pg. 22 on the return to Ancient Roman territory (Segrè)

https://search.worldcat.org/title/1451115

Omar al-Mukhtar (Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_al-Mukhtar

Italo-Soviet Pact (Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo-Soviet_Pact

Those Who Make War Possible, from Spain and the World

https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/post/2026/03/19/those-who-make-war-possible-spain-and-the-world-1938/

Act of restoration of the Ukrainian state, in which the OUN pledges to work with Hitler then does pogroms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_restoration_of_the_Ukrainian_state

How Britain Rules Africa (Padmore)

https://search.worldcat.org/title/How-Britain-rules-Africa/oclc/883985

The Right of Peoples to Determine Themselves (Solidaridad Obrera)

https://historyiswhat.noblogs.org/2023/11/29/the-right-of-peoples-to-determine-themselves-solidaridad-obrera-1936/

Comments

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 21:22

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

You can't make this shit up. A pseudonymous writer calling someone else a coward for not picking a pseudonym. Speaking of cowardice, here is the article that has been living rent-free in the head of this pseudonymous author for fully four years and two months. Everyone should read it, if only to get under the skin of the cowardly, pseudonymous "corrector."

https://avtonom.org/en/news/spirit-sholem-schwarzbard-addressing-confus…

Corrector (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 22:34

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

It's funny how you didn't bother to check to see that the article you link to was already linked to in the article you're complaining about, how you're too stupid to realize that the critique wasn't about anonymity but the lack of effort in coming up with a pseudonym, and how you didn't read the article to see that it also refers to things the Ukrainian government has done over the last half year, not just things the special untouchable anonymous author wrote about in 2022. You don't even have the bravery to click control f, but you're calling other people cowards. Can't make this shit up. Almost like you're a lying troll who doesn't care what's true or not.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/02/2026 - 19:43

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

If your crush just doesn't think highly enough of you to even pick out a pseudonym for your online grudge match, it's time to move on.

Their loss, I'm sure.

Billy (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 04:56

Apart from almost completely ignoring the fact there really are more fascists and neonazis in the Wagner Group and the Russian army, what does this article suggest people do?

Run away and reject technology? I understand why some people have and I wouldn't blame them.

As for everyone else, purity testing them for being liberal and not anarchist enough, fine, I'd expect that.

It's just that in a situation like this, Russia is going to continue to invade other countries to enslave, murder, loot resources and colonize. It just is going to do that if it's military doesn't collapse.

Estonia, Finland, the rest of Europe, it will keep going. It's fascist mercenaries in Wagner guard slaver mines in Africa. The tankies who support them do open propaganda mocking anarchists who talk about this as dumb hippies and pretending it's not real.

Tankies are already online trying to manufacture consent for the Russian army to invade Estonia, where it's soldiers will murder, assault, rob and enslave people as they've done to Ukrainians. Tankies like Verso Books writers in England are trying to mock those who would oppose this as being uncool and unfun and trying to pretend that it's fine because Estonians are all a bunch of right wingers and probably Nazis anyway. They'll pretend to be anti-war while working to manufacture consent for Russian soldiers to murder and assault women and children. This is what marxists are doing, this is what English Marxist twitter is doing, the upper class trust fund Marxists are enjoying this, they take pleasure in it and they find it funny. They'll claim they are antiwar publicly sometimes. They don't care that Russia is a genocidal imperialist state, they don't care that communism is not coming back, thank fuck. They want war and murder to stick it to the 'liberals' and because they get off on it, and some of them have private investments and interests in Russia. They've chosen their side. They want Russia to win. They are fine with children abducted by the Russian army and sold into domestic slavery on websites internally in Russia. They will try to call anyone who talks about this liberals or the CIA or fascists. They will try desperately to rationalize what Russia is doing because they just like Russia more out of nostalgia for it's gulags and secret police and aesthetic, and they enjoy what Beria did in his torture chambers. They are all in on Marx and will defend the murderers of the working class as Marxists always do.

The third reich is not coming back if Ukraine wins and neither is the Soviet union.

If anarchists want to survive then rejecting the technology of the war machines today and hoping you can survive their drones and missiles is not going to cut it.

Malatester (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 09:24

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

You are right, conventional war is the only solution. WWI really would have ended all wars if it wasn't for the anarchists naysaying it. Same with WWII (see those evil anti-tankie anarchists in War Commentary) and the current war in SWANA. The only thing for anarchists to do is to cheerlead for their local arms company's development of new mass murder technology and their government's military aid to other countries. That way we will own the tankies, even if the earth gets scorched in the process.

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 09:50

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

The solution is to fight as anarchists in an anarchist organization, not as statist lapdogs. The Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine wasn't subordinate to any national army, but an independent organisation that collaborated and fought other armies on their own terms. Furthermore, your 'Run away and reject technology?' spiel is dumb. The RIAU was also a war innovator with the introduction of the tachanka. There is no reason why an independent anarchist force couldn't come up with new armaments for itself.

We are anarchists; instead of voting right or left we do things ourselves. Instead of choosing a domestic or invading army, we should build our own.

Billy (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 12:17

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

The chances of people actually organising and successfully creating an anarchist militia anywhere in Europe that has enough autonomy, firepower and numbers to do this is extremely low. Creating it's own munitions? Doing this at any kind of scale in Europe today? Getting away with it and then staking some sort of claim to territorial autonomy? If you did that within any of the new warzones that Russia wants to create you'd end up forced on one side or the other. You'd be too small not to become either isolated or imbricated.

It's not that I am unsympathetic to the idea in principle. Far from it.

Is this idea a realistic prospect today? Is this something that could actually work?

I am not in Eastern Europe and can't pass judgement on that. I am still very sceptical. Here in the west however it's definitely never happening. People are sitting inside immersing themselves in videogames, which is most of what politics is for them today. A VR gossip column.

If you're talking about small decentralised forms of organisation - there's possibility there. But recreating older forms like the ones you mention? I am extremely sceptical.

I find the situation today very disheartening. The tactics that look viable seem closer to small networks of something closer to survivalism plus mutual aid under precarious labour conditions. We're not going back and can't revive the anarchism of the russian revolution period.

Anarchism here is a mess. Nowhere left to squat, little seriousness, small scenes mostly infiltrated. I don't hold out much hope.

Wayne Price@ (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 18:42

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I agree with the critics of the article who ask what the author proposes? He seems to be strong on the right of anarchists and others to escape in the war. I don't reject this alternative for individuals, but the whole of Ukrainian working class cannot get away from the war or the threat of Russian occupation.

"To fight as anarchists in an anarchist organization" is not much help. Theoretically it would be best, but realistically, under current conditions, it would be harder to build such a force than to build a separate anarchist regiment in the regular army! (Which is not possible.)

I understand the principled argument for anarchists staying out of the regular army (although Malatesta was open on that). What then? The author does not make clear even if they want the Ukrainians to win, or whether they support the Ukrainian people (not the state) against the Russian imperialist invason. *If* they do, are they for doing other things? Perhaps doing medical support (non-military) for refugees? Perhaps feeding people? Supporting unions against the bosses? All the while, finding ways to propagandize for international anarchist-socialist revolution? Or do they rule even this out due to the nature of the Zelensky government and the fascists in the army?? If so, I strongly disagree.

Malatester (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 22:41

In reply to by Wayne Price@ (not verified)

You should really try reading Malatesta before you talk about him because you keep making a fool of yourself. He was not unconditionally "open on" anarchists joining the army. He said they should only join if their intention is of "making propaganda among soldiers and setting an example, when the case arises, of refusing obedience and open rebellion."

He further explained that "the essential thing is that, within or outside of the army, one always keeps aflame his hatred against the institution, always keeps alive the spirit of propaganda and sacrifice."

Charlatan! One more effort if you are to be a qualified Malatesta referencer!

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-military-servi…

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/17/2026 - 21:43

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

This understanding of the political situation is purely western propaganda and is part and parcel why anarchists have found themselves in trouble. The Russian state isn't on a drive to "enslave" and conquer Europe. That is not what this war is over and the acceptance of that as the starting point of the conflict is exactly why western anarchists have been so confused and ridiculous. The Russian invasion was over the imperialist expansion of NATO. That is the principal cause of the conflict. A secondary cause is also that the Russian state is no longer as weak as it was after the capitalist class seized power. So the state refused to be treated as a secondary power anymore. But the primary reason is over western expansion.

The question then isn't about supporting the Ukrainian state -- which is a state formed and promoted by fascists -- but about how do anti-capitalist forces move in a world that is getting more complex. The only way that will happen is if people stop reading ny times and the guardian and start actually learning about the complexities of these conflicts.

Billy (not verified) Thu, 06/18/2026 - 05:22

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I disagree.

You come close to the Russian imperial propaganda rationalisation for why Russia just 'had' to invade Ukraine. It wasn't about murdering people to loot resources and seize Ukraine's agricultural and industrial sectors for the profit of Russian oligarchs and to be able to control their vast export system that feeds much of Europe and would allow Putin to control the supply and jack up prices or cut off supply all together to European nations that didn't bend to his imperial will. Apparently it was all just forced on poor Russia. They had to do it because of NATO expansion. Yet the majority of Ukrainians want to be in NATO. It was the Obama admin that made them disarm their nuclear programme. It is perfectly understandable why Ukrainians felt it was safer to join NATO. The fact they didn't made Russia's invasion much easier.

Was NATO going to invade Russia? No.

And there was never going to be an anarchist army in Ukraine that could have fought off both NATO and Russia.

There are MORE neo Nazis in Russia, in it's armies and in the Wagner group. The fact there are some Nazis in Ukraine is used as a propaganda justification for firing missiles at the same men women and children that these Nazis prey on.

I could say 'oh there are Nazis in the southern USA, so if we don't drop bombs and fire missiles into houses there the Nazis will take over.' If I said this, I would quite literally be justifying murdering the black people and non fascist white people who live there, the same people those American Nazis hate and attack.

Putin and his fascists are smarter and more sophisticated than much of the left, who swallow their propaganda. They know they can find white Nazis and then inflate their threat in order to justify invasion.

Consider the case of Germany, Putinists secretly funded the German Green Party to go on an anti-nuclear power campaign. Some of the people on this campaign were anticapitalist leftists. They were successful. Now, why did Putin fund them? Not because he gives a shit about reducing c02 emmisions, but because he wanted to be able to sell Germany the polluting gas and oil that he knew they would have to switch to when the idiots who dismantled a successful non polluting form of energy won.

Nothing I am saying here is anti Russian. Many Russians joined the Ukrainians, one shot a Russia military recruiter, some sabotaged trainlines. Many are in jail and were tortured or murdered by the Putinist state.

Any serious anticapitalism must be able to analyze the ways in which it's own rhetoric is weaponized and manipulated by capitalist power today. If it doesn't do that, it is useless idealism.

GO3 Thu, 06/18/2026 - 07:01

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

This is too meta. You need to look at what actually happened after the Maidan. The anti-communism, the russophobia and the attacks on the separatists in the breakaway republics. This is what led to Russia crossing the border. Ukrainian nationalists refusing to let go of the breakaway Republics. We don't even need to talk about Nazis, plain old nationalism is bad enough.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/18/2026 - 12:02

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

The facts are not Russian propaganda. All the information confirms the main purpose of the war was NATO expansion. In fact, when the first negotiations happened this was practically the only demand Russia had to stop the war. This isn't saying Russia had to do anything but it is the cause of the conflict. If it was merely to loot Ukraine the negotiations and arguments would have been totally unnecessary.

Saying there are more nazis means effectively nothing. The current iteration of the Ukrainian state was founded by fascists and is buoyed by fascist military units. Hence that recent state ceremony for one of the icons of Ukrainian fascism that zelensky participated in. The argument that 'well they are fascist too' is remarkably weak.

Also it's not a matter of if NATO would instantly invade Russia. It's become clear to anyone paying the slightest attention that the western powers led by the US have become almost irrationally violent. The idea that that wouldn't be considered a security threat is absurd.

Theres a few questions here. Nobody is saying that the anarchist movement or whatever needs to align with Russian state interests or that Russia isn't making moves to strengthen its own power for its own ends. But your position is essentially, almost explicitly, cover for the Ukrainian state that is a force for US imperial interests.

And by effect, with the increasing belligerence, you become complicit in fast walking the world to a nuclear catastrophe.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/18/2026 - 12:05

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

Also the idea that Ukrainians wanted to be in the EU and NATO is propaganda. The people in the West largely did and the east did not which is why there was almost a civil war. This tension was exploited by the west and the Americans and is now part of anarchist propaganda to justify US imperial expansion.

GEF (not verified) Fri, 06/19/2026 - 10:27

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

"Consider the case of Germany, Putinists secretly funded the German Green Party to go on an anti-nuclear power campaign."

Wtf dude... that's just a baseless claim by pro-NATO fanatics. Same for when some US & Canada establishment cunts Russia-jacketed the whole anti-fracking movement. AfD is the party being funded by Putin... and they're a huge difference from the Green Party, that's got a consistent record of opposing environmentally-harmful industries for decades. GP also has taken a strong stance in favor of Ukraine and against the German rapprochement with Russia.

The interests behind this war are simple: to cash-in on both sides from the arms and military R&D industry, with an extensive, dirty war that's got no end in sight. Did it work? Yes. War industries on both sides have boomed.

Whoever side wins will be a win for fascists on either side. As the fascists appear to have learned a principle of geopolitics that too many anarchists and Leftists are still struggling with: "Winner plays both sides".

IMO, anarchists would better pick their own side, and develop transnational solidarity beyond language and borders. But for this, Western anarchists NEED to know who & what they're dealing with in foreign contexts they don't/can't experience.

This is why at least some of the "tedious arguments" on Ukrainian anarchists has been important, here and elsewhere. As there's many fakesters involved, and claims of "anarchism" are rarely backed with anything.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/18/2026 - 06:57

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

Billy here is downplaying the importance of fascist movements and groups in Ukraine. You've even had groups like White Rex that were active on both sides, as some of these thugs don't make such of a big deal of the Ukie vs Ruskie split. The Empire Never Ended has heavily researched on the subject and found out that it's just consistent with the fascists' glorification of war and militarism.

And here's a relevant news article from today, that blatantly shows how Western powers and their media are still equally downplaying the role of Neonazis in the Ukrainian struggle:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraines-azov-fighters-were-forced…

In the article, once again, there's absolutely zero reference on the politics of the Azov Regiment. This is the stuff being read by millions of common people, including Western military people as well as public officials, academics and reporters, i.e. those making the "public perception".

This feels like reading Western media back in the '80s glorifying the Taliban against the USSR.

Billy (not verified) Thu, 06/18/2026 - 10:40

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I'm not trying to downplay any of that.

You know what would have prevented the Taliban becoming as powerful as they did? The USSR not invading Afghanistan.

Go read about what Russian soldiers did to Afghanis in that war. It's right there in the Wikipedia.

Is it good the Taliban are a thing? No. Is it understandable that they took the USA's money and fought them back? Go read the wiki.

I'm not downplaying any Ukrainian Nazis. I never have.

While we all sit and have the same tedious arguments about this as if it means anything and we can make this conflict we are not in pure, the real war rages on.

Corrector (not verified) Thu, 06/18/2026 - 11:25

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

You very much are downplaying fascism in Ukraine because you're complaining about an article that corrected the record in regard to whataboutism by others who have been downplaying fascism in Ukraine. As if there can't be fascism in two different countries at the same time, and as if fascism in one country means that it doesn't matter that Ukraine has multiple official fascist units of its army, that the president of the country glamorizes a Nazi collaborator and openly fascist Ukrainian figure like Melnyk, and that fascists in North America are inspired by fascism in Ukraine and use it as a training ground.

Billy (not verified) Fri, 06/19/2026 - 00:05

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

Sigh.

I didn't downplay anything and I didn't say any of those things didn't matter. And I didn't say there couldn't be fascists in two countries at once, in fact I specifically said that there are for fuck sake.

This is utterly stupid.

Corrector (not verified) Fri, 06/19/2026 - 14:27

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

Almost as utterly stupid as backing up Gelderloos and others' downplaying of fascism in Ukraine and their failure to mention that some fascists from Russia see Ukraine as the better playground for their fascism, given all the official backing they get from both Ukraine and NATO.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/19/2026 - 17:26

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

It is indeed correct that some neonazis in Russia end up in prison... where in Ukraine they get given an assault rifle, uniform, drone, a decent pay and even international recognition... sometimes even by anarchist press! Sick joke but true.

Billy (not verified) Sat, 06/20/2026 - 02:13

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

And again, I did not say that.

Still baffled as to what people think can be done here. Try asking all the Nazis on both sides to stop I guess. Try asking people in the middle of a war to send some of their fellow soldiers home because they're neo Nazis. I'm sure those fighting to survive will care what you think.

It's clear a lot of this just comes down to bias and which side some people really want to win...

Corrector (not verified) Sat, 06/20/2026 - 07:19

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

The minimal things you can do is not whine when other people point out the official fascism going on in Ukraine and not back up other people who are trying to cover it up or minimize it. The fascism there is connected to the fascism here, so by covering up Ukrainian fascism you also aid fascists in North America. It's very simple and easy to not go out of your way in helping fascists with their propaganda and image.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 06/21/2026 - 01:43

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

Billy, don't bother trying to reason with the "corrector" (AKA a pseudonym picked by a scared little shrinking violet who nonetheless points a shaking little finger at everyone else and calls them "cowards"). There's no point.

The "corrector" is so incredibly toxic that his only idea of what counts as "success" for anarchists is for him to publish pseudonymous screeds accusing other people of crimes against anarchism. That's literally his only praxis.

Persuading such a person is pointless, because you can do nothing more with him on your side than you could before. Being comrades with such a person is pointless, because he will never do anything except pick fights with other people and eventually with you.

Trust one who has learned the hard way.

NONAME (not verified) Sun, 06/21/2026 - 06:32

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

There’s always some ignorant person who thinks they know more about other people’s lives and activities than those people themselves.

It’s like a mantra for these ignorant and condescending people. They keep repeating over and over: “Those others do nothing but write articles. Those others do nothing but write articles.” “Those others do nothing but write articles.”

By the way, the same stupid argument is also used against the Assembly collective from Kharkiv, without any of these ignorant people bothering to look into Assembly’s work, which helps people survive forced mobilization or escape Ukraine, where they face the threat of death.

Corrector (not verified) Sun, 06/21/2026 - 07:32

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

It's true, I'm pseudonymous, but anonymous somehow magically knows everything about my life and how that invalidates any critique of fascism or militarism. You'll never convince a person like me that fascism and militarism are cool, so it's pointless to try. Being comrades with me would be pointless, because when the neo-nazis show up I won't give them high fives and then paint tributes to them when they die fighting for our glorious state.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/02/2026 - 19:49

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

Is the person you're responding to really trying to convince people that fascism and militarism are cool? And you are the only anarchist to get to the bottom of it? Really?

Or is it possible that your perception of reality is just very, very different than most people's? Not to accuse you of lying, but just to use Occam's Razor here.

Reading the above text, one doesn't get the impression that you're able to follow a line of reasoning very far before getting drawn into a hall of mirrors of your own fashioning.

NONAME (not verified) Sun, 06/21/2026 - 06:22

In reply to by Billy (not verified)

Anarchists should definitely not care which side wins the war. They should care about the working class winning the class war against all sides—that is, against all states. That is precisely why anarchists support deserters from all armies. They support people who punch recruiters in the face in Ukraine, but also people who set fire to recruitment centers in Russia without simultaneously glorifying Ukraine. No matter who wins the war, the working class will lose. This simple fact means that we cannot support either Russia or Ukraine, but rather any autonomous action by the working class against both of these states.

The working class in Ukraine is dying under the bombs of the Russian army, but also because of the Ukrainian government's policies. https://antimilitarismus.noblogs.org/post/2026/02/24/biopolitika-valky-…

GEF (not verified) Sun, 06/21/2026 - 08:13

In reply to by NONAME (not verified)

Ah the Holy Working Class! I get the whole not-caring about either country winning this war, but a win for the Working Class also means a major loss for whoever's not within its dominant demographics, may it be non-White, migrant, queer or even female.

And it's like... the Working Class is some pure angelic elvish race, deprived of Ego and its desires, incapable of lowly human misconduct like hostility, sexual abuse, extorsion. etc. Can they even enjoy porn or get into even crappier lottery or telly sports addiction!? Dunno about how they are in UkWayne, but they also tend to hate the poor in developed countries...

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/02/2026 - 20:03

Love how the bibliography is just a list of random things, without any effort to even connect the claims to sources.

Two can play at the game of alleging that "most of what they write consists of outright lies, distortions, and manipulations." Is this case, that seems to be a projection.

Corrector (not verified) Fri, 07/03/2026 - 10:30

So your claim is that Sinclair is lying and the Obukhiv City Council in its tribute to Yuri Samoylenko don't really describe him as a company commander within the Right Sector Volunteer Corps? You might want to double check that link. Seems like you're the one who's lying in order to protect people who collaborate with and work for fascists.

https://obcity.gov.ua/2022/09/14/naviki-u-nashiy-pamyati/

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/03/2026 - 15:47

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

Did anyone say that?

This illustrates the same pattern in the text above—the so-called corrector can't resist fabricating false allegations out of the air. The whole text is full of such things.

Corrector (not verified) Fri, 07/03/2026 - 21:08

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Yes someone did, the commenter just above, and now you are repeating them, accusing someone else of making false accusations without pointing to anything specific. What specifically is the author lying about in the list of references? You point to nothing. Was Melnyk not really a Nazi collaborator (and fascist) and did Zelensky not recently sing his praises? Because there is documentation that Melnyk was and Zelensky did and the author provided a link for this and other references. You are simply lying about anarchists in order to protect Nazis. And you're mad that there's references proved to verify it.

https://forward.com/fast-forward/827281/ukraine-reburies-nazi-collabora…

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 07/04/2026 - 07:29

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

So it seems the pattern goes like.. some "anarchists" pay online lip service to Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian Neonazis in suppport of Ukraine... so that some gullible anarchists (maybe maybe) will enroll and get reduced to military slavery and killed by Neonazis in Ukraine. What a surprise.

Here's a cheap trick to avoid all this mess when you're anarchist: reject nationalism of any kind. Sure, there's a plethora of other mass scams, but nationalism has been a big one.

Corrector (not verified) Sat, 07/04/2026 - 12:31

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

"when you're anarchist," no, I think you meant "when you're a marxist." Falsely equating all nation-states (and even countries without a state like Palestine) as being exactly the same as each other in every way (besides the commonality of being capitalist states) and equating the struggle of Palestine for freedom to the Israeli struggle to commit genocides doesn't offer any help to real anarchists, who've always supported national liberation struggles. It's not gonna help you oppose NATO to ignore that it occupies Native lands and that Native people have resisted NATO. It's not gonna help you criticize the Ukrainian state to ignore that it buys Israeli weapons and votes against Cuba at the UN. It just makes you a pro-imperialist to ignore such things.

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 07/04/2026 - 18:42

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

"even countries without a state like Palestine"

Pffft! It's not a country and hasn't been since the East Roman Empire. Modern Palestine was 100% a product of British imperialism, and its official mandatory state. Sure, there's some historical evidence of an ethnic identity, but a country? Nope. If you can't rethink any political narrative critically this makes you a non-anarchist.

And btw there's plenty of Marxists that went full nationalist. Starting with the PFLP, for Palestine.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 07/05/2026 - 06:51

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

"some historical evidence of an ethnic identity"

such a lovely thing to see published on an anarchist website about a people presently undergoing ethnic cleansing and genocide as we speak.

very convenient to bring their identity into question while they are being killed in the tens of thousands.

Corrector (not verified) Sun, 07/05/2026 - 06:56

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

All countries are socially constructed, so a country doesn't become any less real if it's a product of imperialism, as plenty of countries are, all the settler colonial countries like the USA and Israel for example. The question for anarchists is not which country is real, Kanaky or France, it's which country is imperialist (France) and which people is oppressed (the Kanaks) by that imperialist country. And the fact that some marxists later supported national liberation struggles doesn't cancel out the fact that anarchists supported them first and that some marxists are class reductionist imperialists who oppose all national liberation struggles because they come from colonizer countries and want the colonization to continue. Harder to find historical anarchists who opposed national liberation struggles than it is marxists who did. And marxists love to lie about anarchist history.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 07/05/2026 - 09:36

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

"so a country doesn't become any less real if it's a product of imperialism"

Oh shit! That's some weird, stupid self-defeating chess move.

So yes it becomes a country. But the empire's country. Not the country of Palestinians or whoever else. Or so it is said in the Balfour declaration...

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

...and as a matter of fact, the so-called Liberation War of the Zionist movement was fought both against the Pan-Arab movement AND the British Empire, at least politically not militarily. They wanted independence from the British, who at the wake of WW2 couldn't afford the fight to maintain this colony, and they managed to declare it on May 14th 1948 after an intense war that involved the neighboring Muslim-dominated countries.

Sorry but the war was won. Yes, that's the bloody authoritarian way that states are being built, through warfare. But if the Pan-Arab factions would have won the war, this equally would have meant a continuation of the Holocaust, as these factions had openly called for a genocide of Jews. They were collaborators with the Nazi regime, just a few years earlier, and there was no reason to believe they had changed their stance. This was a matter of life and death. Which doesn't make Israel -what it has become- a bullshit country built on religious convictions.

Tho taking these more debatable considerations aside. the Palestine of 1917-1948 was clearly not the country of Palestinian Arabs.

Corrector (not verified) Sun, 07/05/2026 - 13:03

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

You seem to have missed the part where your bullshit Zionist opinions don't matter, never have mattered and never will matter to real (or at least coherent) anarchists. Free Palestine from Israel! Free Kanaky from France! Free all colonies from their colonizers! Completely irrelevant to anarchists whether a Zionist troll thinks Kanaky has been a country of the Kanaks from 1853 until now. All that matters is freeing Kanaky from France and freeing the world from imperialism, capitalism and all forms of oppression. Your nonsense is worthless and smells like shit.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 07/05/2026 - 19:37

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

Ok sure, like, whatever. Facts don't matter, we're still in Post-Truth age and "Free ______ (insert whatever national identity that's not Western except maybe Ukraine)" !!!

I wasted about half an hour rationally arguing with a dolt... :-(

Corrector (not verified) Mon, 07/06/2026 - 08:28

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Fact of the matter is that Palestinians and Kanaks resist their colonization and most anarchists have always supported national liberation struggles, including those of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, up to the present day. You can live in your post-fact marxist fantasy world where Indigenous peoples don't exist and don't resist if you want to, but that will never change the reality on the ground. No one is stopping you from being a delusional clown but that doesn't mean anyone has to believe your made-up bullshit either. Go sell your snake oil somewhere else.

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/06/2026 - 08:49

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

as someone who has just been lurking for this exchange, "most anarchists have" is not a fucking argument. if the ancaps somehow start outnumbering anarchists, will you start supporting capitalism? 

also, name calling might be tempting but is neither interesting nor convincing. keep in mind that neither of you is actually talking to each other, you're arguing for the people who are reading your comments. foror whatever that's worth.

Corrector (not verified) Mon, 07/06/2026 - 09:34

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

No, it very much is an argument, but what it's about is a mystery to you. "Most anarchists have" is not an argument that what those anarchists did is correct simply because most anarchists did it. Most anarchists have been racist against Indigenous peoples. This is wrong regardless of how many anarchists were racist. The one and only thing that "most anarchists have supported national liberation struggles" proves is that the marxist and anarchist-poser claim that "anarchists have never supported national liberation struggles" is wrong! The issue of the correctness of the position is distinct (though obviously related). The Anarchist Federation took a slightly different but related approach: only Bakunin supported national liberation struggles but he was wrong. Problem being, it was not ONLY Bakunin who took such a stance. Michel supported the Kanak resistance, for example.

SPEC OPS: THE LINE (not verified) Sun, 07/05/2026 - 15:10

In reply to by Corrector (not verified)

I like the breathlessness of the writing, really conveys the (full retard) perspective.

Who we supporting in Liberia? The former slaves or displaced natives?

Corrector (not verified) Mon, 07/06/2026 - 09:44

In reply to by SPEC OPS: THE LINE (not verified)

I like how you, being the ignoramus that you are, pose this as somehow a difficult or impossible question, as if historic anarchists hadn't already answered it, or as if we couldn't come up with our own rejection of the Quebecois (or Israeli) struggle against the Brits/Canadians due to the fact that the Quebecois are themselves colonizers of Mohawk, Cree, Mi'kmaq etc. land.

As Meltzer put it, correctly, in 1939, "the struggle must be against Imperialism first, against Zionism secondly, and lastly against the bourgeois nationalist government when created," the latter, I assume, referencing a future Palestinian government. Time for some of you to catch up, it's only been almost a century. I understand that marxists don't like learning new things, but don't be jealous that anarchists have better analysis then.

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