European civilisation is threatened with destruction yet again!  And yet again Britain is to the fore in defending it by getting others to fight for it.  But this time Ireland stands four square with it against the barbarians.

Russia is to the fore, threatening civilisation this time.  Last time it was the force that saved civilisation.

Roots Of The Conflict

When Britain made war on Germany for the second time, in 1939, for the purpose of saving civilisation from Germany, for a second time, Ireland refused to play any part in the mission.  It had, in 1938, acquired sufficient independence to be able to stand apart from a British war, and it did so—for the first time.  It did not see civilisation at stake just because Britain—which had been collaborating actively with Hitler since he consolidated his power in 1934—decided suddenly in March 1939 to make war on him.  As things turned out, Hitler greatly increased his power by defeating the bungled British effort at war-making, and the British withdrew its forces from the continent.  However, it remained in fear that Hitler would put an invasion force across the Channel.

What saved Britain—but did not save European civilisation—was the German decision to attack Russia with the intention of destroying it.

Communist Russia was the common enemy of Imperial Britain and Fascist Europe.  The general understanding in the West was that the rise of Fascism in the early 1920s had saved capitalist Europe from subversion by Communism.

But Britain capriciously declared war on Germany in 1939, after helping it to restore itself to the status of a great Regional Power in  1934-38, and in 1941 it allied itself with Communist Russia against Germany, allegedly in order to save itself.

Leaving aside this British anomaly, the substance of the Second World War, from June 1941 to May 1945 was the War between Communist Russia and Fascist/bourgeois Europe.  Fascism lost, leaving the bourgeois Europe, which it had shielded from internal dissent, in a miserable condition.

The post-War division of Europe was based on the Ceasefire line on which the War ended.  The reason that Ceasefire line ran through Germany was that the United States entered the War in Western Europe in 1944 and fought its way through strong Nazi resistance into Germany—where its armies were to meet the forces of its nominal ally but fundamental enemy, the Soviet Union.

If the United States had not insisted that Britain must re-engage with the War in France—which it had deserted in 1941±the Russian liberation/conquest of Europe would probably have carried through to the Pyrenees.  

The Second World War destroyed everything that could be called European Civilisation.  The First World War had undermined it.  The Second finished it off.

The 1945 settlement was a stand-off between the incongruent allies of 1941-t, with the US re-making the bourgeois remnants of Western Europe into a passable resemblance to nation-states.  The “rules-based order”, resting on the twin pillars of Communist Russia and all-out Capitalist United States, was a war waiting to happen.

That is how it appeared from the vantage-point of independent Ireland, which held out against both British and American attempts to intimidate it into joining the War—first the War against Germany, and later the Cold War against Russia.

But Ireland no longer views the world from that independent standpoint.  It is now closely aligned with Britain in the effort to prolong the War in the Ukraine, to prevent it being settled on ethnic grounds, and to push for a reconquest of the part of it that has been lost to Russia by Plebiscites and by War.

Birth Of A Nation?

Effective Ukrainian nationalism is a very recent affair.  It flared up superficially in brief spasms in 1918 and 1941—in alliance with Germany—and it was actively anti-Semitic on both occasions.  On the second occasion it played an active part in the Holocaust.  On both occasions it proved to be entirely incapable of constructing its feelings into a viable State.

The present Ukrainian State was not constructed by Ukrainian Nationalism.  It is a Russian construct, which became independent when the Soviet Union dissolved itself—the only Empire that ever did such a thing.  Russia took no measures to protect itself against the possibility of the Ukraine with powerful enemies against it.  It even left its fleet within the territory of the Ukraine.

The only excuse for these irresponsible actions is that there was no sign of a resurgence of Banderite Fascism in 1991, and that Gorbachev believed that the propagandist statements made by the West were something that could be relied upon!

The Ukrainian State in the 1990s was an independent state that had not gained its independence through nationalist struggle.  And what is a nation-state without nationalism?

It had to locate itself in the world and identify itself, and Russia under the chaos of oligarchic democracy was unable to monitor it as Britain monitored Ireland after conceding it independence.

Though Russia saved—or conquered—Europe in 1941-5, and enabled it to assume a veneer of being what it used to be, it was not regarded as being itself European.  It was seen as an Asiatic horde that had destroyed the Fascist order of Europe but remained alien:  The Asiatic horde succumbed to the ideology of civilisation without becoming civilised.  Under the force of that ideology it hived off the Ukraine and left it to its own devices.

The Ukraine, not having struggled for its independence, did not quite know what to do with it.  Being a nation-state, it had to do something with itself.  It had all those marvellous colour revolutions in which it was hard to find a meaning.

Russian Recovery

After a dozen years of destructive oligarchic democracy, made functional by American economic connections, the Russian State began to be restored.  The restoration began by forcing the Oligarchs to pay their taxes to the State and imprison them if they refused.

The Ukraine, having become a borderland of both Russia and the West, decided to make Trade Agreements with both.  The industrialised areas of the country were Russian-speaking, so that approach made sense.   

The EU accepted that approach:  in expansionist mode it insisted on having an exclusive trading relation with the Ukraine.  Spurred on by the US, It used its influence to organise dissent in Ukraine.  The events in Maidan Square in 2014 built up into a massive demonstration directed towards coup d’etat.  Strange Banderist elements, fiercely purposeful, began to appear in the demonstration, and there were sniper shootings.

The EU, having stirred things up until then, tried to cool them down again, with the idea that links would be maintained both with Russia and the EU.  Washington said “Fuck the EU!”, and the coup d’etat was carried through with fascist vigour.

That was the practical origin of Ukrainian nationalism as a creative political force.  It acted on a situation that was nominally  national but was actually nondescript, and gave it purpose.

The appeal of Banderist nationalism in the Ukraine must have been very like Arthur Griffith’s declaration of the necessity of the nation against the Empire when the Home Rule movement had been reduced to dithering.  Griffith asserted the necessity of the nation unconditionally but, in the event, he baulked at carrying it through in that spirit.

The Banderists were made of sterner stuff.  If the project of the nation required World War, so be it.  Zelensky made his first political appearance as a conciliator but, urged on by Britain—in opposition to the USA—he is now a Banderist.  If the reclaiming of the Russian-speaking Crimea and Donbas involves World War. so be it.

National Socialism

Banderism is national socialism, also called fascism.  Petlyura—the ideological founder of Ukrainian nationalism—was part of the Russian Social Democracy but in 1917, when the Tsarist Empire collapsed, he reacted against Lenin’s international socialism—which took the Empire as the base for a full international development—and asserted that the nation was the medium in which socialism must develop.

Consider Griffiths’ statement, which came as a revelation to many:

“Between the Individual and Humanity stands, and must continue to stand, a great fact—the James Connolly,Nation“. 

 The general mass of humanity is not a body politic that is capable of political action.  Humanity has a practical political capacity in its national divisions.  The classes on which political parties are based arise within nations and their effective sphere of action is the nation-state.  The export of capital does not produce a working class beyond the framework of nationality—a cosmopolitan working class.  The Second International, which had seemed to be so influential before the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, melted away in the first week of the War.

James Connolly, who had been prepared to engage in international class action against war, adapted easily to the collapse of the International.  He had already located the nation as the medium of working class development, committed his party to active participants to the development of the nation, and commended the national socialism of Pilsudsky’s Polish Socialist Party.

Insofar as internationalism seemed to have actual political existence it was as Imperialism, especially in the oldest capitalist Empire, the British.

The British working class deplored nationalism as divisive, even though it was intensely nationalist itself!  Its living standard depended on immense quantities of goods being brought in daily from the Empire, and it saw that the British Labour Party was founded during the 1914-18 War by Arthur Henderson, an extreme war-monger, who was a member of the War Cabinet that executed Connolly and Casement.  The small Independent Labour Party, which tried to campaign against the War, had to be protected from the workers by the police.

In Russia Lenin had constructed a small socialist party on international grounds.  It was partly drawn from the small Russian working class but was not immersed in the spontaneous working class movement.  When the Tsarist superstructure collapsed, Lenin’s party was the best organised and more purposeful political force in the situation.  It took command and dominated the chaos with the object of holding out as an internationalist force waiting for international working class action in Germany and France.  In the meantime it planned to hold the former Tsarist regions together.  Lenin’s expectations, as expressed in State And Revolution in 1917, were Utopian.  But Utopian expectations on the part of rulers were not unprecedented in Russia.

The international working class revolution never happened.  The inconclusive ending of the War in Germany, and the divisive British settlement following its destruction of the Hapsburg State led to a multiplication of national centres of development, in which all sources of traditional authority were deliberately scotched.  At the same time the large Jewish population dispersed around the Hapsburg state was deprived of its Imperial patron and found itself in small, prematurely established, nation-states with which it had little sympathy and within which they appeared to be an imposed obstacle to the development of native middle classes.

In Russia most of the territory was held together.  It was only in the Western Ukraine that there was a nationalist challenge to it.  That challenge was national socialist.  It rejected Lenin’s decision to hold the components of the fallen Empire together as a state for socialist purposes.  It formed an alliance with Pilsudski’s national socialism to make war on Leninist internationalism/imperialism. Lenin’s path to spread the revolution to Europe was blocked by that War, and the Polish State was extended to include the Western Ukraine.

Ukrainian nationalism was national socialist because it was socialist.  And it was anti-Semitic, as were all the new nationalisms in regions where Jews—committed to keeping themselves a people apart—had found a mode of existence as the commercial class or stratum of the Hapsburg or Tsarist Empires.  When those Empires fell, or were destroyed, it was only in the Leninist state established across the territory of the Tsarist Empire, that the Jews had a secure existence.

Petlyura’s  nationalism—supported by the militant Zionist, Jacobinsky, was put down soon after the Polish/Russian War.  Petlyura went into exile.  He was assassinated as an anti-Semitic exterminationist.  The French jury found the assassin Not Guilty.

The exercise was repeated in 1941.  It seems that the peasantry, resentful of the collectivisation, held the Jews responsible for it as agents of the Bolsheviks.  Extermination pogroms were conducted in Kiev in expectation of the arrival of the German National Socialists.  In 1918 the Jews had been killed as landlords’ agents.  In 1941 they were killed as Bolsheviks.  The spontaneity of Jew-killing in the Ukraine, and in the Baltics, encouraged the SS, and close collaboration between the two continued during the State-organised Holocaust—even though Hitler did not all the Ukraine nationalists to form themselves into a state, as the Kaiser had done.

After the War Stepan Bandera went into exile.  Like Petlura, he was assassinated.  But the West German jury did not find the assassin Not Guilty.

In 1918 three armies fought for control of the Ukraine:  Nationalists, Anarchists, and Bolsheviks.  The Bolsheviks gained control, saw off the Whiteguard interventionists, and formed the Ukraine into a state of the Union.

Ukrainian nationalism was put down again when the Germans retreated in 1944.  This time it seemed to have been scotched at source by the disgrace of its participation in the Holocaust.  

The Ukrainian state, while remaining a state of the Soviet Union, was a founding member of the United Nations.

Two generations later, when Moscow was deciding to dismantle the Soviet Union, there seemed to be no strong reason to impose conditions on it, in case it should turn nationalist and align itself with the West against the Russian Federation.  Anyway, had not the West said it had nothing but good intentions towards Russia!

Such was statesmanship in the Gorbachev era!

But a nation-state without nationalism is a monster.  It is something contrary to nature.  Independent Ukraine had not come into being by winning a conflict against Russia, and it was not the creation of an outside force—as were the Versailles States.  So why did it exist?  Why had Russia abandoned it?  It must find a cause for its national freedom, otherwise its freedom would be mere emptiness.  It must revive historic grievances which it had forgotten.

The contrast with Yugoslavia is striking.  European experts, favourably disposed towards Yugoslavia as a form of anti-Russian Communism, were convinced in 1990 that the internal nationalisms had all dried up and were forgotten—but they all sprang back into active existence the moment the validity of the State was called into question by the EU.

It took the Ukrainian freedom ten years to work up a genuinely-felt sense of grievance, based on the assumption that it had been a nation oppressed by Russia throughout the ages, had struggled for its freedom, and had finally achieved it.  And, as soon as it got that feeling, it set about getting rid of the large Russian minority that was alien to it.

In the course of the street agitation worked up in Kiev by the European Union against a Ukrainian 2014 trade deal with Russia, that feeling of nationalist fervour in fascist form came into play, frightening off the EU.  But Washington said:  Fuck the EU!  It has never been bothered by association with Fascism, or Jihadism, or Tribalism, or anything that serves its interest in the moment.  And now the EU is comfortable with it too.  The German Chancellor says it’s OK for the Swastika to be raised in Kiev again.

Banderism was apparently rooted out in the Ukraine, but found an exiled home in Canada.  And Banderist scholarship produced in Canada a Ukrainian Encyclopaedia of a scale and quality that has never even been attempted by the Irish State and its Universities.

Putin says the Ukrainian regime established by the coup d’etat is fascist, and we see no reason to doubt it.  The EU says that it is a model democracy and that Putin needs to destroy it, lest it inspires discontent in Russia—which is incredible.

Europe has to deny that the Ukrainian regime is fascist because it was itself fascist not very long ago, and had its fascist order destroyed, not by internal forces but by war with Russia, and it has an existential problem with the word.

Putin has reason to use the word in accordance with Russian experience of it, and to see any regime that could be described as fascist as being damned.  The Europeans, if they had not disabled themselves from thinking about it, would say—out of their own experience—that in certain situations, in the transformation of the world into a system of nation-states, Fascism can be a necessary mode of development.

The Irish Intelligentsia, if such a thing existed, would know this best of all, because Ireland is the only country that springs to mind here a democratic government was subjected to a serious challenge by a fascist movement and warded it off democratically, i.e., without banning the fascist party—as is now being done in Germany and other European states to ward off an imaginary resurgence of Fascism.

The Party that made the spurious ‘Treaty’ settlement with Britain in 1921-2, and mad war, with British arms, on the Republic established in 1921, became a fascist party in 11933—after the Republicans defeated in the ‘Civil War; restored their dominance by democratic organisation.  The Treatyite fascists, who included the cream of the academic intelligentsia, studied the European situation, saw why the European states had become Fascist, and thought they saw that De Valera was a weak figurehead put up by the IRA, which was Communist, and that he would soon be set aside and a Communist regime established.  It prepared itself to deal that emergency pre-emptively, by organising itself as fascist, as Germany had just done.

And its British mentor had already set aside government by party conflict in favour of all-party National Governments, and was beginning its long collaboration with National Socialist Germany to build up its power.

De Valera held out against Fascism by demonstrating that it was unnecessary.  His only repressive measure was to ban the fascist uniformed militia.  For the rest he held the populace engaged with the democracy by committing the democracy to the achievement of independence—repealing the Treaty Oat and daring the Imperial Socialist, British Home Secretary J.H. Thomas, to do anything about it;  and conducting the Economic War with Britain (over the Land Annuities), and winning it, regaining possession of the Naval Bases which Britain held under the ‘Treaty’ and making it possible for Ireland to conduct its own foreign policy when Britain next decided to have another Great War.

Fascism had two distinctive hallmarks:  government by a single National Party, in place of the conflict of parties, for the purpose of establishing effective authority in the nation-state;  and the establishment of joint worker/capitalist Boards of Management (corporatism) in the management of the market economy.  It was the second point, class-collaboration, that most of all distinguished Fascism from Communism in inter-war Europe.

The first World War—Casement’s “Crime Against Europe”—disrupted Europe fundamentally, with the kind of punitive moralistic settlement insisted on by Britain compounding the damage done by the War.  Class collaboration was taken for granted in pre-War Europe.  It included a degree of conflict but basic collaboration was not questioned.

The Russian Revolution treated the antagonism of classes as obsolete, and presented the assertion of absolute dominance by the working class as the only way forward.  This involved the abolition of Capitalism, and of the Market.

The Russian Revolution exerted an immense influence on the shambles of post-World War One Europe.  Communist Parties sprang up everywhere.  The ideology of absolute class antagonism took root.  But the Communist Party never took over—possibly because what was done in Russia, where market development was flimsy, could not be done in Europe where it was profound.  If working class militancy, based on the conviction that there was an absolute antagonism of classes, could not lead to working class dominance in a non-market system, it could only lead to stalemate within the market system.

This matter was discussed in a poplar English magazine around 1920 by Churchill and some pre-Henderson socialists.  Churchill’s opinion was that the Parliamentary system could not cope with parties based on antagonism.  it could only work where the apparent antagonism of parties was froth on a basic consensus.

Where parties were based on real antagonism, their conflict would aggravate the antagonism and they could not be parts of a common system of government.

Fascism—which made the market functional by class-collaboration where it could not be abolished—was a movement from the Left inaugurated by Mussolini, who had been an earnest revolutionary socialist before the 1914-18 War.

I recall seeing a brief letter or note by Lenin, towards the end of his life when he was paralysed, expressing unease about Mussolini’s National Socialism.  He saw it as functional, but it was beyond him to do anything about it one way or the other.

Brendan Clifford