Chicago

Right Sector Fascist Provocation at Leftist Event on Ukraine

An April 12 meeting in Chicago in opposition to U.S./NATO provocations over Ukraine was the target of a sinister mobilization by supporters of the Ukrainian fascists. A screaming mob of some 30 reactionaries, among them sympathizers of the neo-Nazi Right Sector, amassed outside the meeting, carrying that organization’s red and black flag with trident emblem. Three fascists made it inside, but no effort was made to alert those at the event until Spartacist League members found out. At which time, the event organizers—Workers World Party (WWP), Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and various liberal coalitions—refused our demands for the fascists to be ejected.

Instead, the WWP moderator, Eric Struch, launched a vitriolic tantrum threatening to remove our comrades if they did not stop “interrupting.” He was seconded by a spokesman of the American Party of Labor, who had been invited to speak on…the history of Ukrainian fascism! Expelling our comrades from the meeting would have meant sending them into the heated mob of fascist scum out front.

One woman then interjected: “Eric, relax. I know it’s tense with fascists in our midst.” She added that our comrade was “asking a perfectly valid question, why are there fascists here?” When our comrades refused to back down, the reactionary goons themselves prepared to leave. Extending an olive branch to the vermin, Struch told them: “If you guys want to listen, that’s fine. We just don’t want any disruptions. That’s what the issue is. Have a seat.” To which one fascist replied, “Thank you, I appreciate that.” Our comrades, however, were not “fine” with this arrangement, as the fascists are not about debate but about terror, and we continued to protest energetically until the three withdrew from the meeting.

In an attempt to whitewash its abject capitulation in the face of the fascists, WWP published a fabricated version of the events, titled “Chicago Anti-War Meeting on Ukraine Beats Back Fascists” (workers.org, April 15). Noting that “a handful of fascists and extreme nationalists got into the meeting,” the article makes it seem as if the event security team “forced all of them out.” Although the bulk of the reactionaries were blocked from entering by that team, it was our comrades who saved the situation on the inside. For its part, the FRSO simply disappears the fascist presence in the meeting in its account in the online FightBack!news (15 April).

The attempted disruption by the fascists on April 12 came after a March 22 International Day Against Fascism and Racism demonstration that began outside the Ukrainian Consulate in Chicago. There WWP, the FRSO and others ran up against a hostile crowd of over 100 Ukrainian nationalists and fascists. At the time, the FRSO criticized the International Socialist Organization (ISO) for refusing to join in chants against the fascists. But two weeks later when fascists showed up at their meeting, WWP and the FRSO were more inclined to have a civil dialogue with them than to drive them out.

If they had been in Ukraine, the ISO on one side and WWP and the FRSO on the other would have been viewing each other through rifle sights. The ISO called for workers to join the mobilizations in Maidan square in Kiev, which provided the shock troops for the fascist-led Ukrainian coup in February. Meanwhile, WWP and the FRSO opposed the coup and denounced U.S. and European Union (EU) support to the Kiev regime and sanctions against Russia.

Despite their differences over Ukraine, what unites WWP, the FRSO and ISO at bottom is their reformist political perspective: They seek to pressure the capitalist parties, centrally the Democrats, to shift their priorities and carry out policies that benefit the workers and oppressed. However, the bourgeoisie is not about to abandon its drive to dominate the world and to squeeze out its great-power rivals, any more than it will cease to exploit labor for profit. Like the ISO, both WWP and the FRSO gave backhanded support to presidential candidate Barack Obama on the basis that he would supposedly be more susceptible to mass pressure than his Republican counterpart. Now that Obama is the main imperialist patron of the Ukrainian fascists, WWP raises the inane slogan: “Money for jobs, not fascist mobs!”

Virulently anti-Jewish, anti-communist, homophobic and anti-Russian, the Right Sector is led by Dmytro Yarosh, who has railed, “I wonder how it came to pass that most of the billionaires in Ukraine are Jews?” From the start, the new Ukrainian government issuing out of the Maidan protests was a nest of fascists, including Svoboda party leader Andriy Parubiy as head of the National Security and Defense Council, and Yarosh as his deputy. Amid Ukrainian military moves in the heavily Russian provinces of eastern Ukraine, Yarosh recently moved his party headquarters to the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk and created a battalion to help suppress pro-Russian fighters in the region.

Like Svoboda, the Right Sector harks back to Stepan Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which collaborated with the Nazi occupiers during World War II and slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles and Jews. After the war, the Banderaites continued, until their defeat in the early 1950s, to fight the Soviets. Many of them fell into the waiting embrace of the imperialists, helping to swell the ranks of hardcore anti-Communists in the West. Many surviving members of Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists fled to the U.S. with the aid of the CIA. Once there, they transformed themselves into the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) and were harbored by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. In the 1980s, some UCCA members occupied posts in the Reagan administration.

We opposed the recent U.S.-backed Ukrainian coup that was spearheaded by the fascists and stand in opposition to the Kiev regime’s provocative military forays in eastern Ukraine. We oppose U.S./EU sanctions against Russia and the U.S./NATO military presence in the Baltics and elsewhere in East Europe. While giving no political support to Vladimir Putin’s Russian-chauvinist regime, we supported Russia’s intervention in Crimea, which allowed the people of that region to exercise their right of self-determination through reunification with Russia.

In WWP’s recounting of the April 12 event, they hail their fictitious eviction of the fascists as “paving the way for future cooperation between anti-fascist forces.” Such dishonest posturing is counterposed to an effective defense against reactionary forces like the Right Sector. The fascists must be stopped from spewing the kind of filth that they were spreading outside the meeting, such as a Right Sector leaflet extolling the need for Ukrainian “living space”—an allusion to the Nazi displacement of “inferior” peoples.

With the pro-Maidan fascists feeling the wind in their sails, there clearly is a need to physically defend leftist events from these thugs. But its militant pretenses to the contrary, WWP coddled the fascists inside their own meeting! In general the reformists politically undercut the struggle against fascism by breeding illusions in bourgeois democracy.

Since capitalism gives rise to and sustains the fascist scourge, the struggle against this scum must be linked to the fight to overthrow capitalist rule. The working class has both the interest and the social power to sweep the fascist enemy off the streets. To the extent of their limited influence, reformists like WWP represent an obstacle to imparting this lesson and to winning workers to the understanding of their historic role as gravediggers of capitalism. Our perspective is, through political struggle against all stripes of reformism, to forge a workers party that fights for socialist revolution.