On March 17, 2022, the African People's Socialist Party conducted a press conference featuring Chairman Omali Yeshitela, who put forward the official position of the African Revolution regarding the side we must take in Russia's defensive war in Ukraine against global colonial powers.
The February 2014 CIA inspired or initiated and led coup in Ukraine was a crucial event contributing to Russia’s defensive war being fought in Ukraine.
However, the event most significant to this war was the invasion of Russia following the 1917 revolution that resulted in the establishment of a socialist state stemming from an international movement to destroy the global parasitic capitalist system.
It was this invasion of Russia by all the colonial powers of the world, including the U.S. and Japan, that the African People’s Socialist Party recognizes as the critical event that should contribute to an African position of the current war being fought in Ukraine. This was the beginning of the colonial war against Russia that it is fending against today in its Ukrainian iteration.
The invasion of Russia by colonial powers in 1918 was an invasion to protect the colonial mode of production that was begun with the attack on Africa more than 600 years ago. The threat of what would become “Soviet” Russia, as revolutionary abettors, and examples for the emancipation of workers and the oppressed of the world, could not be tolerated by the colonialists.
I would remind everyone that the 1918 invasion of Russia did not occur in a vacuum. The meaning of our definition of the colonial mode of production that Russia, independent of its will, was fighting against, is crystalized by the fact that the invasion of Russia was initiated during the same time of the 11 million strong anti-colonial Garvey movement stretching around the globe, demanding Africa for Africans at home and abroad.
It was the timeframe of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata’s revolutionary work in Mexico and of the FSLN in Nicaragua. 1915 was the year that the US Marines invaded Haiti and stole all the gold in its treasury and forced the Haitian government at gunpoint to change its constitution, allowing whites to own land for the first time since its 1804 revolution.
Of course all this colonial aggression by the US was a normal reflex for a country that was itself founded as a settler colony no different than South Africa and Israel, a country whose economy was built on stolen Indigenous land and stolen African labor, earning its special place within the colonial mode of production defined by the same means and relations of production globally that are reflected domestically in the US.
This was the basis and context for the united white nationalist invasion of Russia in 1918 and the ongoing economic quarantine intended to break the back of the Soviet state. This is also the basis for the 1949 creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), explicitly created to contain and crush Soviet Russia.
The existing world order, led since 1949 by the international colonialist bloc known as the Atlanticists, achieved its current political and economic anti Russia configuration during this period of the 1940s. In the 1980s the US government under the regime of James Earl Carter, with the leadership of Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, drew the Soviet Union into military conflict in Afghanistan to overthrow its government that was allied with Soviet Russia and to extend NATO’s borders closer to Soviet encirclement.
A host of “color” revolutions and related struggles, aided by opportunism -- the desire to join the white colonial world of Europe and the U.S. in partaking the flesh of the colonized and to experience the standards of life common to other white people to our disadvantage -- has led to the expansion of NATO to now include 30 different countries arrayed against Russia.
Since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union the U.S. has escalated its efforts to contain Russia. According to one online source: “Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the NATO military alliance has extended its borders 800 miles to the east, incorporating Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. In 2021, NATO officially recognized Ukraine itself as an “aspiring member,” and Sweden and Finland are also considering joining the anti-Russia alliance.
While many have been forced to recognize the existence of colonialism as it relates to individual countries, the African People’s Socialist Party has determined that the initial 15th century European colonization, begun in Africa, developed into a mode of production, a colonial mode of production, that continues to define the political landscape of the world. Western European white colonial identity and the existing colonial mode of production enveloping the world were achieved during this period.
Unlike most of Europe, Russian development from feudalism did not go through the colonial mode of production but is a product of the Russian socialist-led revolution of 1917. This is why Russia today, although it makes no pretense of being communist or revolutionary, has been able to briefly enter into the colonial mode of production on its own terms, free from the absolute dictates of the U.S.
Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russia has become an active, aggressive opponent of the unipolar world domination of the US. This confounds and challenges the strategic equilibrium of the colonial mode of production, contributing to the crisis made manifest within the U.S. domestically and fracturing US-dominated hegemonic unity of the Atlanticists globally.
The 2014 CIA engineered coup to put a puppet in power in Ukraine on Russia’s western border, along with the imposition of a puppet government and fascist-filled military and the murder of an estimated 13,000 ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the eight years since the coup, was the beginning of a comprehensive intensification of the 100-year-long war against Russia that has resulted in the existential defensive war being fought by Russia against the global colonial ruling class and its minions.
Thus, it is absolutely necessary for Africans and all the victims of European colonialism to take a definitive stance in solidarity with Russia which, independent of its own consciousness, is fighting against the power of colonial slavery that has dominated the life of Africa and Africans for 600 years.
Vanguard up!
Watch the entire press conference, delivered as an official Address to the African Nation.
Subscribe to The Burning Spear TV YouTube channel for the African Internationalist analysis on the Russia/Ukraine war.
