Back brave LGBT comrades in Ukraine

There have now been a series of attacks on LGBT organisation in Ukraine by the far right. Back in June, following comments backing the right to demonstrate by the President, the Kyiv LGBT Pride March went ahead but it was then attacked by the far right. One of the police officers protecting the marchers was seriously injured.

Then last month a march in the Southern city of Odesa was banned and the offices of the local LGBT organisation attacked with firecrackers. Despite the threats activists in Odesa held a flash mob without incident. The banning of the march was criticised by the US Embassy.

Last week we learned that the county's human rights strategy had been drawn up without any mention of LGBT people. And last week a party and home in Kryvyi Rih was attacked and several people badly injured.

In occupied Crimea and in the Donbas, where homosexuality has been recriminalised, of course the situation for LGBT is far worse.

Maxim Eristavi wrote last year about how gay people were part of the Maidan demonstrations that overthrew the corrupt government of Yanukovych. Eristavi counted seven gay people among the 'Heavenly Hundred' murdered by Berkut/Russian special forces. He also wrote about the spinelessness shown by the EU on LGBT rights in their negotiations with Ukraine - a fact which has gone unreported and completely undermines Russian propaganda.

One of the basics of being in the EU is anti-discrimination laws but although LGBT were included in a draft law drawn up last December they were dropped from subsequent versions, reportedly as a result of pressure from churches. So the trade agreement with the European Union will start at the beginning of next year without such protections.

The unbanning of the Kyiv Pride march after Mayor Klitscho blocked it 'in time of war' shows that Western pressure can have an effect.

LGBT must not be sacrificed in the name of solidarity with Ukraine or in the name of national solidarity.

Western supporters of Ukraine and Western LGBT rights groups must keep on the pressure and must put a boot up the backside of the EU. Ukraine has no excuses, none, and must be firmly told that.

As many have commented, the deaths of three young soldiers outside the Ukrainian parliament last week during the violent demonstration by the far right was a sharp reminder to the government that it is past time to ensure that the same far right forces also attacking LGBT people are put back in their box.

According to a report put out earlier this month by the Equal Rights Trust on inequality in Ukraine:

LGBT rights have become a fragile off-shoot of a pro-European choice: “we’d rather have a gay pride in the streets of Kyiv than Russian tanks”, a Kyiv resident told the Trust.

This underlines why we must have the backs of our brave comrades in Ukraine, like these people who protested openly in Kyiv last Sunday.

Translation courtesy Olena Shevchenko. Reblogged with permission from Insight.

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LGBTQI public action-performance was held in Kyiv aimed at protecting the rights LGBTQI community, titled "I will disappear soon." The event took place at 1 PM at the Kyiv city administration with the participation of the NGO "Insight" and other activists.

One activist performed a performance, during which she was lying on the ground covered with rainbow flag and a banner: "I will disappear soon." Other participants were standing around, holding banners: "For freedom of speech", "All Different All Equal", "not ashamed to be gay" and others that you can see in the photos.

"We are trying to say that we live in this country, we are as citizens, we live here and now, and we demand freedom - the same as other people. We want freedom not only for ourselves but for each and every one of us. We say that the right to freedom of expression, the right to peaceful protest, the right for self determination is violated in Ukraine.

We believe that this is a right time to begin to deal with it. We believe that this requires laws and mechanisms as well as education on human rights.

We call for tolerance towards all of us, and we are against violence. We are not afraid - we will go further, and will fight for human rights," said the head of the NGO Insight, Olena Shevchenko.

Loud music from speakers in front of the Kyiv City administration muffled speech. But no one can force us to shut up.

• Insight
• Gay Alliance Ukraine 
• The struggle for progressive politics in Ukraine: #KievPride's impact  
• IGLHRC: LGBT Activism in Russia and Ukraine
• Equal Rights Trust: Report on Inequality in Ukraine

Don’t link to CounterPunch

If you are a progressive then the chances are you will have seen a link to the online magazine Counterpunch - or even posted one yourself.

In a staggering expose Elise Hendrick may make you think twice as she shows that white supremacist and racist authors far outweigh the odd Jeremy Scahill or Noam Chomsky piece. She convincing argues that the website's history demonstrates that it is a far right 'entry' project. She says:

In writing for, and sharing articles published on, CP, Leftists are unwittingly helping to promote the agenda of the far right.

In addition to the authors relied on by CP for its left cred, ‘America’s best political newsletter’ also regularly publishes ‘independent investigative journalism’ by a wide variety of white supremacists, including Paul Craig Roberts, editor of the white nationalist website VDare, Ron Paul (who poses for photo ops with neo-Nazis and warns of ‘race war’), and Alison Weir, holocaust denier Israel Shamir, and that perennial saboteur of the Palestinian solidarity movement, Gilad Atzmon, author of the racist The Wandering Who.

Although there are some who have expressed concern on this problematic mix, when I have raised this issue in discussions with others in left activist circles, I have often found that it is dismissed as a triviality. In these discussions, the white supremacist contingent tends to be attributed to an unwillingness to bow to ‘political correctness’ or a mere desire to ‘piss off liberals’, and generally believed to be an insignificant deviation from an otherwise clear leftist editorial line, the sort of thing only an ‘ideological purist’ could get excited about.

My own research into the editorial practices at CounterPunch shows otherwise. Not only have white supremacist authors long been a fixture at CP; their ideology is shared by members of the editorial collective. All in all, it is entirely reasonable to say that the formation of a Querfront (an alliance between the far right and the left) is a longstanding project of the newsletter, consistently endorsed by the decisions taken by CP editors and their own stated positions. In the following, I will examine the relationship between the CP editors and the racist Right via individual case studies and several statistical investigations.

More: CounterPunch or Suckerpunch? « Meldungen Aus Dem Exil

And there's lots more about CounterPunch at the Jews Sans Frontieres blog.

The fascists in Russia's hybrid army

Type 'fascist Ukraine' into Google and the first dozens of results all refer to the Ukrainian government and those forces fighting the Donbas separatists.

You will be hard pressed to find any references to the presence of fascists in Russia's hybrid army in Ukraine. Ones like those pictured above in an astonishing piece of detective work by Dajey Petros.

Petros is a Dutch blogger who has been doing great work using similar tools to those employed by Eliot Higgins' Bellingcat. Taking content from social media and using various tools to tell a story from it - like the story of the Russian missile which shot down the Malaysian Boeing.

Far right and fascist groups both in Russia and throughout Europe are backing the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk 'People's Republics' (DPR/LPR) in word and deed. They are raising money for them, despite the sanctions. They hold mass rallies and other events. They send representatives to the Donbas to endorse the 'Republics'. And they send Russians - and sometimes other Europeans - to join the fighting. All with the tacit approval of the Kremlin.

Gubarev

That approval was most sharply on display in March when Europe and Russia's far right groups came together in a conference in St Petersberg. It was organised by the Rodina party whose leader is a Russian Deputy Prime Minister.

The event's star was Alexei Milchakov, the leader of the 'Rusich' group of rebel fighters. Milchakov is infamous for photographs of him with a Nazi flag and a puppy he had allegedly killed. He has also posed in front of the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.

Naming the separatist fascists

Many fascists were involved in setting up the DPR/LPR, such as Pavel Gubarev, the self-proclaimed first 'People's Governor of Donetsk'. His press secretary, Aleksander Kriakov, was described by Donetsk city Chief Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski as "the most famous anti-Semite in the region."

When separatists took over TV broadcasting towers last year they boasted that:

Here, from Sloviansk, we are inflicting a powerful information conceptual blow to the biblical matrix ... to Zionist zombie broadcasting.

They then presented a lecture by former Russian Conceptual Party Unity leader Konstantin Petrov, who the European Association for Jewish Culture (EAJC) describe as a "anti-Semitic neo-pagan national-Stalinist sect."

In March last year Josip Zisels, Chair of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities in Ukraine, noted that pro-Russian organisations' websites "have published many anti-Semitic materials which were meant to instigate hatred against the Maidan as being allegedly inspired by the Jews."

Former DPR Prime Minister Aleksandr Borodai was a writer for the Russian fascist newspaper Zavtra. He opened the DPR's first foreign 'consulate' on the premises of the Moscow branch of the Eurasian Youth Union (EYU), the youth wing of the Eurasia Party, headed by fascist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin has openly called for genocide against Ukrainians.

Another prominent Russian fascist in the Donbas is Gennadiy Dubovoy, whose colleagues are shown in the top and left photos participating in some sort of bizarre Nazi ritual. (See lots more whacky photos.)

Yuli Kharlamova

Participating in the ritual are several women and one is Yuli Kharlamova, a presenter on the Russian TV channel ANNA- News and an FSB (Russian security services) agent.

There are many other individual as well as organised Russian fascists who have been documented from social media engaged in leading roles among the separatists. As Petros puts it "in Russia's [hybrid] army the Nazis structurally and openly belong to the core and they train others." Not only that but Russian soldiers who have been captured have been found to have Nazi tattoos.

Here are the patches for five fascist militias in that separatist hybrid army (there are others):

Free anti-fascist prisoner Alexander Kolchenko

Alexander Kolchenko is a left-wing social activist and antifascist who is being held in captivity by the Russian authorities. Along with renowned film director Oleg Sentsov, he was kidnapped by the Russian FSB (ex-KGB) and detained following the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula,. He is held as a political hostage in Lefortovo jail in Moscow and has been charged with committing “acts of terrorism” and “belonging to a terrorist community”.

A call to action has been organised by the French 'Active Generation: The web activists network' and the International Solidarity Campaign For Alexander Kolchenko.

Only strong and massive pressure on the Putin regime, protests around the world would give a chance to set our comrades free. We demand their immediate discharge and the end of their prosecution.

Why is Alexander Kolchenko in jail?

Alexander, who has undeniably proved his antifascist stance over many years, is facing preposterous accusations of belonging to Right Sector, a radical Ukrainian right-wing organization, whose real role in Ukrainian events is blown out of proportion by Russian official propaganda. In modern Russia any activist — left-wing, anarchist or liberal — can be slandered as a member or sympathizer of Right Sector. This situation is comparable to the hunt for nonexistent 'Trotskyists' under Stalin, or the McCarthy witch-hunt for communists.

Putin’s authoritarian and nationalist regime, which uses in its propaganda everything from religious prejudices and conspiracy theories to outright racism, shamelessly steals “antifascist” rhetoric. And yet anyone who is considered bothersome is called a “fascist”, even if he/she stands on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

The case against antifascist Alexander Kolchenko and civil activist and film director Oleg Sentsov (investigators enrolled them into the same “terrorist” group) is political. It is meant to intimidate inhabitants of Crimea and prevent any resistance on the peninsula.

The most authoritarian of methods are now used in annexed Crimea to repress all discontent. Many people were obliged to leave Crimea because their life and freedom were threatened: lawyers, left-wing activists, students and trade union activists, anarchists, antifascists and Crimean Tatar activists who have fallen victims of ethnic discrimination.

Sentsov (left), Kolchenko (right)

What threats does Alexander Kolchenko face?

A terrible prison sentence of up to 20 years threatens Alexander for a non-existent “terrorist attack” in which he was not involved. Kolchenko and other Ukrainian political prisoners (such as the more famous Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda (Nadia) Savchenko) are detained only in order to demoralize opposition by show trials. Their freedom is directly linked to the stability of the Putin regime: if we can shake the confidence of Putin in his impunity, the prisoners will be set free.

• There is no hope that Kolchenko, Sentsov and others will be judged fairly by the law. 
• Their arrest was unlawful.
• The charges against them are far-fetched.
• It’s not a mistake, the regime knows what it’s doing.

Both men have refused to take part in their trial, which Sentsov called a "concert". He said at the opening of the trial:

Your Honour, I have already stated that I do not consider this court to be legitimate. We are citizens of Ukraine who were arrested on the territory of our country, and we are being tried on fabricated charges. I don’t, however, feel any animosity to you and other parties to this trial.

A lot of lies have already been spoken here and I therefore feel it necessary to clarify certain things, but I do not plan to later take part in these proceedings.

I consider myself a Maidan activist, but that does not mean that I am a criminal. Maidan was the main deed that I have carried out in my life, but that does not mean that I’m a radical, burned ‘Berkut’ riot police or drank anybody’s blood. We drove out our criminal President. When your country occupied Crimea, I returned there and engaged in the same volunteer work as on Maidan. I spoke with hundreds of people. We considered what to do next but I never called on anybody to carry out actions that could have led to deaths.  I did not create terrorist organizations, and I certainly had nothing to do with ‘Right Sector’.

Do they have support from NGOs?

The renowned Russian human rights organisation Memorial has condemned the trial and stated that it considers both men to be political prisoners. Amnesty International is also concerned.

Film director Sentsov has received support from the UK Culture Secretary John Whittingdale and widely within the film industry. Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in May dedicated its opening event to Sentsov.

The main prosecution witness, Gennady Afanasyev, has confirmed that his ‘confession’ had been extracted through torture. The sole other witness, Oleksy Chirniy, told the Ukrainian consul and his lawyer that his testimony was given under duress. Kolchenko and Sentsov also say they were tortured. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group has suggested that Afanasyev's retraction may mean that he is now in danger.

Kolchenko admits taking part in a failed firebombing of the office of the United Russia party. However, says Memorial, 'terrorism charges are "incommensurate both with the damage caused, and with standards of Russian practice."

Says Memorial:

We assume that Right Sector is being foisted on the indictment in order to create a primitive media image of a nationalist threat in Crimea.

Russian has imposed Russian citizenship on the pair and they are being prevented from seeing the Ukrainian consul and from being defended by a Ukrainian lawyer.

How can you help Alexander Kolchenko?

We’re asking international left-wing and libertarian forces for help. You can organize and lead actions of protest and solidarity, write letters to Kolchenko, send donations for lawyers and food parcels, help his family. It is also important to spread information about his case. Most of all, we need to dissociate ourselves from any forces that support aggressive expansion of Russian nationalism, even if they cover it up with 'leftist' and 'anti-imperialist' rhetoric. Putin’s regime is doing just fine without your sympathy, better save it for those who have become its victims.

When to start?

You can start right now by helping us to spread this text, translating it into other languages and sending it to comrades. We also strongly encourage you to organize demonstrations in support of Alexander Kolchenko and other political prisoners jailed in Russia.

Only strong and massive pressure on the Putin regime, protests around the world would give a chance to set our comrades free. We demand their immediate discharge and the end of their prosecution.

• Sign the on-line petition: Free Kolchenko Petition
• Take action via Amnesty International 

For case updates check the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group website.

This text has been adapted from The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.

Edited to add: As the trial opened in a tiny courtroom in Rostov Sentsov made the following powerful statement:

On extremism, jihadism and counter-jihadism

Reblogged with permission from BobFromBrockley.

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This post is prompted by David Cameron’s recent speech setting out a new agenda on addressing the threat of Islamist violent extremism, and also by the recent launch of a whole series of “counter-jihadi” initiatives on the British right, including the planning of a Mohammed cartoon exhibition in London in September. The latter has been the subject of a report by the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate (HnH). My friend Sarah made some sympathetic criticisms of that report at Harry’s Place, for which she got some sharp criticism on Twitter. This whole topic is one which frequently inflames irrational passions and generates more heat than light. This post, therefore, is an attempt to set out a series of propositions on these issues as an attempt to cut through some of the hysteria.  I didn’t mean for it to get so long!

“Extremism” is not a helpful framing of the problem

 

Cameron frames his approach to Islamism in terms of the wider generic problem of “extremism”, noting that Islamism is just one of many forms of “extremism”, along with that of the far right. Cameron is right to note that other ideologies constitute a threat, and there are certain similarities between the Islamist far right and the British nationalist far right. However, the term “extremism” creates more confusion than it solves, especially when the border between extremism and terrorism is blurred, as it was in Cameron’s speech, and in fact can do damage.

The idea of “extremism” implicitly contrasts these ideologies to the “normal”, acceptable politics of the centre ground, of the mainstream status quo. The concept of “extremism” criminalises the desire for change. It stops us from looking carefully and critically at the ideologies caught in its remit – which closes down debate, imagination and criticism, and stops us from engaging “extremist” ideologies and challenging them politically. The concept of “extremism” can make minor, marginal ideologies seem more dangerous than they often are – and therefore can sometimes make them seem glamourous and exciting. 

 

We know from history that the rubric of “extremism” is most often used against the left. In recent decades, for example, we have seen huge amount of resources put into the policing and surveillance of left-wing politics, with undercover police officers inserted into ecological, anti-fascist and anti-racist movements, sowing havoc and ruining lives. Anti-capitalist groups like Occupy are lumped together with al-Qaeda and the IRA in the category of “domestic extremism”. The language of the guidance on extremism given to universities effectively means that not just jihadism but also anarchism should be excluded from such institutions. We have seen the infiltration and disruption of the campaigns led by the families of victims of racist violence, such as Stephen Lawrence’s; collusion in the blacklisting of union activists; and acts of provocation to push non-violent activists into criminal activity.

Cameron is wrong to think that extremism in general is a conveyer belt to violent extremism and terror

 

Cameron claims that “many [terrorists] were first influenced by what some would call non-violent extremists”; Islamism, he says, “has often sucked people in from non-violence to violence”. This is true, as far is at goes, but it is also true that most followers of “non-violent” extremism do not get “sucked” to jihadist violence, just as most anti-immigrant racists and casual antisemites do not get “sucked” to violent fascism. Not making that clear is problematic. 

 

The evidence-based blogger Anonymous Mugwump has collated all of the research showing very conclusively that there is no necessary or straightforward step from extremism to violent extremism, no single pathway from Islamism to terrorism; his case is pretty conclusive. 

 

(Cameron’s mistaken emphasis on this connection is probably due to the emphasis on the government’s thinking of the thinktank Quilliam, who have long argued, with little evidential basis, that extremism in general leads to violent extremism in particular – although their position,  as Amjad Khan argues here, is more subtle than Cameron’s: non-violent extremism, they say, provides the “mood music” for terrorism.)

 

As Anonymous Mugwump notes, there may well be good reasons to oppose some forms of non-violent extremism – but its connection to terrorism is not one of them. The category of non-violent extremism is basically a form of “pre-crime” or thought crime; making it into a security issue is dangerous because it criminalises beliefs that are not in fact criminally dangerous; it is a licence for authoritarian over-policing, for policing without the consent of communities. As I will argue more fully below, while terrorism is a policing issue, non-violent Islamism is a political issue, which should be challenged politically, by all of us – citizens, communities – and not from above by the state. 

 

Cameron is broadly right to highlight ideology over “root causes”

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

"Think of Bane, the would-be dictator of Gotham in Batman, who promises an end to democratic corruption, weakness and loss of civic pride. He sought a revolution against the prevailing elites in order to gain total power unto himself."

[Crossposted from Little Green Footballs]

I posed this question to a few of my American friends because I had noticed that no one seemed to be asking it.

It seemed like it was verboten to even consider. Libertarian author Jeffrey A Tucker has thought it through though and his essay on the question got republished by Newsweek.

[Trump’s] speech was like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground and died grim deaths. I kept thinking of books like John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching, especially Chapter Ten that so brilliantly chronicles a form of statism that swept Europe in the 1930s. It grew up in the firmament of failed economies, cultural upheaval and social instability, and it lives by stoking the fires of bourgeois resentment.

Since World War II, the ideology he represents has usually lived in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it anymore. The right name, the correct name, the historically accurate name, is fascism. I don’t use that word as an insult only. It is accurate.

Though hardly anyone talks about it today, we really should. It is still real. It exists. It is distinct. It is not going away. Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.

You would have to be hopelessly ignorant of modern history not to see the outlines and where they end up. I want to laugh about what he said, like reading a comic-book version of Franco, Mussolini or Hitler. And truly I did laugh as he denounced the existence of tech support in India that serves American companies (“how can it be cheaper to call people there than here?”—as if he still thinks that long-distance charges apply). But in politics, history shows that laughter can turn too quickly to tears.

More: Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

Writing for Free Press Houston Nick Cooper notes that:

Right-wing, anti-immigrant fear mongering is quite familiar around the world, from parties like France’s National Front, The U.K. Independence Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Italy’s Northern League, and Germany’s National Democratic Party. These European parties are associated with neo-nazism and other forms of fascism, whereas Donald Trump is perceived by many Americans as a blow-hard who says some wacky things.

And, says, Cooper:

The historical precedents are being ignored. These two myths are familiar from fascist propaganda: a dead national dream can be revived by a heroic white male leader darker-skinned outsiders are coming to rape the women

Could be why a European like me looks at Trump and thinks 'Fascist'!  

H/T Steve M