Gaza, Odessa, Donetsk: Genocide Continues. “Wars Mean Profit”

We are all shocked by the images of genocide suffered by the people of Gaza. Despite attempts to censor the truth about Israeli crimes, that truth breaks through to Western public opinion, arousing spontaneous opposition what we have seen in the last couple weeks on the street all over the world,  but I remember very similar crimes that I saw with my own eyes nine years ago.

How the War in Ukraine Has Started

In May 2014, as a Polish journalist, I observed the presidential elections in Ukraine. I also went to Donetsk to see the first manifestations of the Russian-speaking population of Donbas, which, immediately after the pro-Western coup, was deprived of the right to use the Russian language in offices, schools and all social life.  Just after the election day, I was at the railway station in Donetsk, observing the daily bustle. There were no protests that day, just crowds of people got off the trains to get to work. Then Ukrainian helicopters arrived. Without any warning, without any summons, Ukrainian soldiers started shooting at people in the streets, had fun flying low, chasing people away from the buildings they wanted to hide in. They fired rockets onto the rails, aiming at trains that were hastily trying to leave the station with panic crowds on boards.

With my own eyes, I saw the dead bodies of women, children, and workers who did not attend the schools, didn’t go to the factories that day, did not start their shift in the mines, and did not return home. Throughout the day there was chaos in Donetsk, with bodies lying everywhere, there was not enough space in hospitals, and Ukrainian troops and Nazi militias attacked Russian speakers throughout Donbas. In the evening, we listened to the speech of the newly elected President Petro Poroshenko, who announced the launch of the “Special Anti-Terrorist Operation”.

Nazi Ukrainian State

Image: Stepan Bandera (Source: Silent Crow News)

Sounds familiar, isn’t it?  Donetsk then looked like Gaza today.

The war in Ukraine, which many people in the West heard about only in 2022, has been going on since 2014. And that’s not all. And the genocide of the Russian-speaking minority has been ongoing since 2014 too. On 3rd May in Odessa the unforgettable smell of burnt human bodies hung over the city. The day before, Nazi militias burned alive 42 residents of this wonderful, open, multicultural city. Odessa is the pearl of the Black Sea. Its inhabitants speak their own unique version of the Russian language and are known for their own regional identity and independence. 

That was enough for the oligarchs to pay Nazis and hooligans to terrorise the internationalist capital of southern Ukraine. It is no coincidence that one of the first decisions of the new authorities, approved by the Western powers in Kiev after the coup in 2014, was the declining of the law on regional and minority languages…  This mainly affected the Russian-speaking population of southern and eastern Ukraine. It was in fact declaration of war, a war against own citizens. Its next stages included an attack on the Orthodox Church. Nazi militias supported by the police occupied the main eastern temples, including the legendary Kiev Pechersk Lavra, attacked and beat believers, forcing them to join a new religious organisation founded by the state administration and worshiping Nazi criminals, such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, as saints.

And it’s still not the end. In Zelensky’s Ukraine, the activity of independent trade unions is banned, workers’ rights are limited, employers, mainly oligarchs and Western capital, were given the right to lockout, and strikes are actually banned. Opposition political parties, socialist, communist and regional, are banned. Step by step, under the protection of the Anglo-Saxon powers, the Nazi state, the new Reich, is being built just next to the borders of the European Union!

75 Years of the Genocide in Palestine

And this is not a coincidence. Zelensky’s Ukraine is neither the first nor the only modern Nazi state. The Zionist, criminal experiment in Palestine has been going on for 75 years. 75 years of ethnic cleansing, 75 years of genocide, 75 years of permanent war.  The ideological basis of the state of Israel was fascism, groups such as the Shtern Gang or Jabotinsky’s party of Zionist-Revisionists referred directly to fascism. It is no wonder that modern Zionism is a racist doctrine, based on apartheid and intolerance. Intolerance not only towards Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, but also towards Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, who oppose Zionism. Anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is real anti-fascism today. We are  anti-Zionists because we are anti-Nazism, because we are against the holocaust of the Palestinians.

Nazism and Zionism are two sides of the same coin. Ideologies of intolerance, which serve one goal: maximising the profits of global capital. This isn’t just killing for killing’s sake. The war in Ukraine, the war in Palestine, tomorrow maybe the war over Taiwan – these are the convulsions of global capitalism. On the one hand, they are opportunities to sell a huge number of weapons, and banks provide billions of subsidies to the regimes in Kiev and Tel Aviv, half of which probably immediately goes back to corrupt Anglo-Saxon politicians.

 The UK delivered £2.3bn in military aid to Ukraine in 2022 and the Prime Minister has pledged to do the same in 2023, with further support to be delivered in the coming weeks and months. Is this money for war victims? For Ukrainian widows and orphans? Of course not, that money creates the profits of arms industry and  increases fortunes of Ukrainian oligarchs. The British government says it is providing humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza. However, if Westminster had not supported the Zionist regime with its policy of ethnic cleansing, no aid would have been needed because Palestine would have been secure and sovereign, just as the United Nations promised the Palestinians in 1947.

Wars Mean Profit

Wars mean financial transfers, but war is also a great performance. This is a great opportunity for imperialists and capitalists to hide the symptoms of another great crisis. To evoke nationalistic emotions, to excite the masses with the smell of blood or to rename the perpetrators as the victims and find moral justification for further crimes.

110 years ago no one believed in the threat of world war, it seemed that the progress of humanity had completely eliminated this option, and conflicts could only occur in distant, wild countries in the colonies or in the Balkans. On the fields of Somme, and at Verdun our forefathers quickly saw how wrong they were.  Perhaps in a few years the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East will be remembered as our grandparents saw the Spanish Civil War and Japanese aggression against China, as the early stages of a world war. If we do not clearly say NO today to Nazism in Ukraine, to Zionism in Palestine and to global capitalism, which sponsors both,  another world war is only a matter of time.

During a world war no one thinks about the financial costs. Nobody cares about benefits. Nobody cares about the climate or the environment. Only capitalist accumulation matters. Rivers of blood are just flows of capitalists’ profits. While demanding peace in Ukraine and Palestine, we also support the peaceful transformation of the Nord/West, against the plutocracy and oligarchy that dominate this part of the globe.  We should want a peace for Ukrainian, Russian, Palestinian and Israeli children because we want a better future for everyone.

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Konrad Rękas is a regular contributor to Global Research.