PEOPLE, BE VIGILANT!
Esteemed Comrades,
We have gathered here on the Island of Freedom at a difficult time. Analysis of the international situation shows that:
–the forces of international imperialism, the sharks of globalization brutally exploiting the working people and states, having trampled underfoot the principles of peaceful coexistence, resort to any methods and in fact act as instigators of the Third World War. The tragedy is that the reactionary forces make active use of Neo-Nazism and Neo-Fascism to achieve their goals.
— radicalization of the aggressive neo-colonial policy of imperialism has dramatically sharpened its modern contradictions in two areas:
- the ideological – between the US-led imperialist West and Communist China which, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, they consider to be “an empire of evil,”as well as Vietnam, Cuba, the DPRK, and Laos where the communists preside over practical construcion of socilaism;
- and the inter-imperialist –The USA seeks to preserve its hegemony and the world order under which it plays the dominant role.
It is to this end that the USA is creating new miliary blocs in Southeast Asia, stoking up tensions in the Middle East and North Africa, and is pursuing an aggressive policy in using Ukraine in military confrontation with Russia, and Taiwan against China.
The provocatie visit of Pelosi to Yerevan and her pledges of support for Armenia inevitably lead to a widening of the conflict in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The situation in Central Asia gives grounds for concern (recent conflict between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan).
These, and many other events, give us the right to declare that the former Soviet republics of Cental Asia and Afghanistan are being prepared for a strike against the RF in order to dismember it.
After the breakup of the USSR it was the USA and Britian that set about creating a neo-Fascist state on the territory of the former Soviet Ukraine and became the main sponsors and beneficiaries of it.
The reforms they were foisting on Ukraine put capital in control of all the spheres of society’s life and ensured total control of transnational corporations over the country’s socio-economic life and as a result created the material basis for the advent and establishment, as a reuslt of an armed coup in February 2014, of the power of the most reactionary forces: the comprador bourgeoisie allied with Neo-Fascists and organized crime.
It was these forces in Ukraine that were instrumental in destroying all the socilaist gains, economic sovereignty and bringing about a profound lumpenization of society.
It is through these forces that the USA formed a puppet vertical power structure and introduced external control of the country.
It was through these forces that the USA uleashed in Ukraine a fratricidal civil war, a war against the citizens of Donbass who are upholding their constitutinal rigths and freedoms. It was these forces which, at the instigation of the US ruling circles, brought about a development of the civil war in Donbass into a war against Russia.
Considering that the USA, Europe and NATO are providing the Ukrainian regime with modern weapons, military experts and mercenaries we should, on behalf of our forum, warn the world that humankind has already been effectively dragged into a new world war.
I would like to draw one of the many tragic parallels.
During the Second World War, the war against the USSR, Europe was working for Hitler and was complicit in the Nazi crimes against humanity. Today, acting in the interests of the USA, Europe is supplying weapons to the pro-Fascist regime in Ukraine, is strengthening it financially and is supporting its crimes politically and information-wise.
The continuation of this policy will inevitably lead to the spread of the theatre of hostilities to the territory of the EU.
The aggressive attempts of some new European countries, notably Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states, to revise the post- World War II borders will merely speed up this process.
I urge the communist and workers’ parties of Europe to conduct coordinated protest actions against the final destruction of peace in Europe achieved on the basis of the Helsinki agreements of 1975. The events involving the cynical destruction of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia should be a lesson for all of us.
The former Foreign Minister of Romania, Marga, recently said without mincing words: “Ukraine is within unnatural borders. It should cede territories: Transcarpathia to Hungary, Galicia to Poland, Bukovina to Romania. These are the territories of other countries.”
US senator Lindsey Graham said cynically that with American weapons Ukraine will fight Russia to the last man.
In supporting the Fascist regime in Ukraine the USA and NATO are pursuing a policy whose final goal has been bluntly outlined by former US Senator Richard Blake: “We don’t care how many Ukrainians will die. How many women, children, civilians and military. We don’t care. Ukraine cannot take the peace decision. The peace decision can only be taken in Washington. But for now we want to continue this war, we will fight to the last Ukrainian.”
At the last meeting in Izmir I warned that the threat of a fascist onslaught is real.
Today it is obvious that the US-led collective West is using Fascism and the Fascist regime in Ukraine to dismember and destroy Russian statehood by military means, to destroy the independence and sovereignty of Byelorussia. The war in Ukraine is a war exclusively in the interests of the USA imperialists.
In their imperialist frenzy, the political mafiosi of Europe and the USA, cynically manipulating public consciousness, including the consciousness of the workers, funnel billions of dollars into the production of lethal weapons and ammunition. The USA and its satellites are cynically promoting the thesis that the time has come, like in 1945, to use the nuclear weapon. The former British Prime Minister Liz Truss said she would be ready to use it.
I call on the participants in the meeting to resolutely come out against the concentration of huge numbers of NATO troops and military hardware on the Ukraine-Byelorussia border, and to come out against NATO military exercises in order to prepare and use the nuclear weapon.
The imperialists turn a blind eye to the fact that Zelensky’s pro-Fascist regime is ruthlessly doing away with political opponents. Any manifestations of free thinking are quashed by punitive units. The crimes of Hitlerites and their accomplices during the Second World War who burned people alive in Oswiecim and who staged Gernica and Khatyn massacres are being glorified.
The monuments and graves of Soviet soldiers who gave their lives to have the flames in the furnaces of Nazi death camps doused are being destroyed.
This happens not only in Ukraine but all over Europe. The Moloch of glorification of Nazi criminals devours minds, turning homo sapiens (“the wise man”) into a “mad man.”
Neo-Fascists do no only hush up the verdict of the international Nuremberg Tribunal, but openly and cynically pursue the policy of having it revised and canceled.
The process of creating a semblance of the Nazi Third Reich is under way.
The Fascist regime in Ukraine, like its prototype nurtured by transnational capital, American and British corporations, is building the Ukrainian “Reich” on the ideology of the superiority of the so-called “indigenous” race. Russians throughout the country’s territory have essentially been proclaimed to be outcasts. |
Since February 2014 Ukraine, under USA tutelage, has traversed the distance from Maidan to Majdanek.
Comrades,
In view of what is happening in Ukraine, I would like, on behalf of the UCP-CPSU parties, to draw your attention to the fact that unfortunately, there is no consensus among communist and workers’ parties on the nature of the armed conflict in Ukraine, its causes and consequences for the world community. Nor can we agree with the political charges leveled at the CPRF of renouncing the Marxist approach in assessing the character and causes of the military confrontation, i.e. support of an imperialist war.
This amounts to accusing the CPRF of opportunism.
The communists of Greece, like the communists of Russia, Portugal, Spain, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Byelorussia, Moldova and many others, have voiced a resolute and principled support for the position of the UCP in the struggle against the Fascization of Ukraine, especially after the US-initiated military coup in February 2014, and the turning of the ideology of integral nationalism into a state ideology and the formation of a Fascist state. The communists of Ukraine appreciate your solidarity.
But I cannot accept it when, in making insulting assessments of the position of the CPRF, hence the positions of all the 20 UCP-CPSU parties, the leadership of the Communist Party of Greece, and the parties which have backed them, have ignored Lenin’s behest to us to be dialecticians, have ignored the principles of party, comradely discussion, inter-party dialogue. That is, in working out a position on this pivotal issue of the modern stage of class struggle, the real threat of a Third World War, to take counsel with the comrades in the communist movement, before making these political assessments public. In publishing these assessments, to which you are fully entitled even when not only the problems of Greece are at issue, I believe that we are duty-bound to be responsible for the possible damage to the communist movement. Unfortunately, your position does not unite but divides our movement.
Personally I am saddened that in stating their position and sticking political labels in the process, our comrades from the CPG did not bother to seek the opinion of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the communists of the rebellious DPR and LPR, did not ask the internationalist communist from Columbia, Alexis Costillo, who died on October 28, 2022, what he had been fighting for in Donbass since 2014. May his memory live forever.
Reading the text of the CPG Statement, I asked myself, how, after such assessments, the communists of Ukraine, the DPR and LPR are supposed to act. The Fascist regime of Ukraine has banned their party, stripped it of freedom of expression, democratic rights and freedoms and is physically destroying them. Where do we go from here? I did not get an answer.
I am supportive of all those who are worried about the threats of opportunism in the communist movement in all the areas of class struggle. No less dangerous for us is Trotskyism which causes great harm under drum-thumping jingoistic slogans.
Once again, on behalf of the UCP-CPSU parties I call on the CPG and the parties which have backed their assessments, to consolidate our efforts in the struggle against imperialism, the capitalist system and their Fascist underlings.
Because any confrontation, especially a military one, has its specific features, the Marxist’s prime task is to reveal their class character and give them a class-conscious assessment.
I maintain that he civil war of the people of Donbass against the Kiev regime is a national liberation struggle, essentially a war for independence from the ruling Fascist regime on issues of local government policy, for the right to a broad autonomy, for the right to one’s own vision of history, for the right to speak their native (Russian) tongue and not to follow the anti-Russian course imposed by the USA.
In other words, proceeding from the Marxist theory, the military conflict between the citizens of Donbass and the Fascist regime in Kiev cannot be seen as an imperialist war. Likewise, the armed confrontation with Russia provoked by the Fascist Kiev regime on USA directive, is not an imperialist war in the direct sense of the word, it is Russia’s struggle against an external threat to its national security stemming from the expansion of NATO (today Ukraine is already a de facto NATO member) and Fascism.
Eight years ago the people’s militia of the Donbass republics single-handedly resisted the foreign-armed, NATO-trained many thousand-strong Ukrainian army.
For eight years Fascist shelling of peaceful Donbass cities claimed the lives of old folks, women and children and destroyed infrastructure, deprived people of water and electricity.
Meanwhile throughout the eight years the USA, Europe, and NATO backed the Fascist Kiev regime politically, financially and militarily.
The so-called champions of democratic values were silent and the “free” journalists of the bourgeois press ignored the woes and suffering of Ukrainian citizens living in Donbass.
By the end of 2021 a many thousand-strong army of Ukrainian nationalists commanded by American and NATO instructors and generals from Washington had developed a detailed plan of destroying Donbass.
The implementation of that plan and the defeat of the people’s militia of Donbass would have inevitably led to the total annihilation of the multi-national population, the majority of whom were Russian-speaking, and many of whom had already become Russian citizens
of their own accord.
One has to bear in mind that since 2011 Neo-Fascists, considering the residents of Donbass to be second-rate Ukrainians, publicly spoke about their programme of building a Ukraine without Donbass and Crimea, about the need to surround Donbass with a barbed wire fence, and about dropping an atom bomb. Such are the realities.
Throughout the eight years the USA, EUROPE and NATO covered up their aggressive and cynical policy of using Ukraine in their interests by paying lip-service to a peaceful settlement of the Donbass conflict even as the Kiev regime used the army, tanks and heavy artillery against its own citizens in violation of the Constitution.
The participants in this Meeting will know that the negotiating process in the framework of Minsk (2015) agreements approved by the UN SC was deliberately sabotaged by Kiev with the consent of and on directives from at the USA and the European Union. Germany, France and Poland refused to comply with their obligation to be guarantors of the implementation of peaceful settlement plans they had signed in February of 2014, 2015 (Minsk agreements) and 2019 (the Steinmeier formula).
Since 2015 the UN SC did not see it fit to demand compliance from the signatories of the Minsk agreements.
Faced with the real threat of destruction of Donbass and meeting the request of the DPR and LPR to defend Donbass, Russia delivered a pre-emptive strike, partly to ensure its national security in the face of NATO’s aggressive policy.
As further developments showed, the establishment of peace in Ukraine and the preservation of Ukraine as an independent state is not part of Washington and NATO plans.
In the light of the above, the position of the CPRF, in the shared opinion of the UCP-CPSU, is quite reasonable and politically congruent with the communist party.
In supporting the draft final Declaration of our Meeting, the UCP-CPSU proceeds from the assumption that the increasingly reactionary character of modern imperialism has been made possible by a range of factors which led to the decline of the workers’ movement and the weakening of communist and workers’ parties.
In determining the tactics of our actions and the main areas of struggle we should proceed from the premise that the modern balance of forces in the world has shifted in favor of reaction, which is using Fascism.
I believe that this balance cannot be changed in favor of the working people without new approaches to coordinating our work, new approaches to the consolidation of the efforts of communist and workers’ parties and without working out concrete proposals for the transformation of the world.
In sowing discord among the working classes, using puppet regimes, Neo-Fascists and Neo-Nazis, imperialism sharply increases exploitation of countries and peoples, and destroys the foundations of people’s democracy and a just world order,
diminishes the revolutionary significance of the principles of proletarian internationalism, undermines the cohesion of the working classes, including by creating a special “working” class of war which lives off the war and cannot imagine itself without it.
The sanctions policy initiated by the USA and Britain and its political satellites inevitably worsens the life of ordinary people, weakens the economic potential of states, provokes the growth of unemployment and consequently increases social discontent and, unfortunately, divides the workers’ movement.
What do we see today in Europe and indeed in the USA also? Prices and tariffs have grown many times over. Enterprises are shutting down, people demonstratively burn gas, electricity and water supply bills, stage protest actions against the policies of their governments, one of their demands being to stop the sanctions madness and the war in Ukraine.
I am convinced that the communist and workers’ parties are duty-bound to help the working people to concentrate their efforts on the struggle for their economic and social rights on the understanding that it is impossible to change their life and get rid of slavery without the struggle for political power. Without the struggle against the threat of Fascism and for a change of the social system that engenders it, that is, capitalism as such.
Today the progressive forces, let us face it, are losing the cognitive war, the war for the minds of people. It is our task to win it. This is the only way if we are to avert the catastrophe of a aThird World War.
Without struggle there will be no vitories.
- In this connecion I belive that in the context of the goals and tasks of our Meeting, considering the situation which has taken shape in the world and the need to struggle for an end to the war and establish a just world order, we, the communist and workers’ parties, should concentrate our efforts on the following areas:
- the srengthening of our solidarity, solidarity with other progressie forces in the struggle against Neo-Fascism and the instigators of a Third World War;
- organising a system of truthful public information about what is taking place in Ukraine today on the basis of a class assessment;
- explaining to people that the civil war in Donbass (2014-2022), is a national liberation struggle and the armed clash between Ukraine and Russia was provoked and unleashed by the pro-Fascist Ukrainian regime on the demand and in the interests of the USA in order to create a bridgehead for dismembering and destroying Russia as a geopolitical rival and to explain to people how it threatens Europe and humankind;
- stepping up the struggle against any attempts to glorify the Nazi ideology, restoring the true history of the Second World War;
- supporting (without going back on our ideological principles) those who come out for peace, against exploitation and the policy of neo-colonialism regardless of their political affiliation. settlement and an end to the war in Ukraine regardless of their political affiliation.
I also consider it necessary to bend every effort at the level of national parliaments and the European parliament to neutralise the provocative actions of the USA and its allies in the Asia Pacific Region against China. Combined with the war in Ukraine and the possible direct clash of nuclear powers, China and the USA, especially against the background of declartions about a Russian “nuclear threat” the worst forecasts may, unfortunately, become a reality.
Dear comrades!
The struggle to put an end to the fratricidal war in Ukraine unleashed by the transnational corporations and their stooges in the governments of European and not only European states, the war in which Washington-led NATO is a de facto side to the conflict (supply of arms, ammunition and training of Ukrainian armed forces, funding and controlling the military campaign) is the struggle for preventing a Third World War which is but a step away. We must do everything to prevent it.
Esteemed comrades,
The new tasks of our movement call for a new quality of organization of our work to coordinate and consolidate our efforts.
In connection with our decision on the new composition of the working group to prepare our annual international meetings, on behalf of the UCP-CPSU, I submit the following proposals:
– the permanent members of the WG should be the ruling communist parties, i.e. those of China, Vietnam, Cuba, the KDPR and Laos.
These parties, which have corresponding institutions, can enrich our work by offering theoretical perspectives on modern problems, real achievements in building socialism, developing real aspects of counter-propaganda in the struggle against bourgeois theories.
The relevant infrastructure of these parties could be used for the training of professional fighters, profound analysis of world problems and development of proposals concerning the coordination of our actions.
– to support the initiative on promoting an agreed candidature from parties of a concrete region, which would contribute to the working out of agreed proposals for discussion at the WG;
– to get rid of the practice of including in the WG members who “are closest to the Emperor,” let alone representatives of phantom parties;
– including in the WG parties which are today on the cutting edge of the class struggle against imperialism and have concrete experience of such struggle.
Once again, thank you for the opportunity to address the participants in this international Meeting and to wish new victories to the communists of Cuba and to express confidence of our victory.
Long live proletarian internationalism!