It's not an honest discussion of the border crisis without bringing in the Soviet Union. Yes, I refer to that much-maligned country that was destroyed by external and internal forces over a generation ago, but who absence is strongly felt in so many areas of our struggle to this day. And because it has been so maligned - for very deliberate, political reasons - it's hard to even bring up its name let alone suggest - as I will - it's significant and power role in geopolitics in general, the migration crises here in the US and in Europe in particular.
The left has done us a great disservice co-conspiring in the campaign of lies and vilification of that Bolshevik experiment. In doing so, it has harmed itself and, by extension, the people it presumes to be fighting for: the working class, Blacks and racial and ethnic minorities, lesbians and gays, the poor.
Because by not appreciating the role the USSR had overall, any analysis to what is happening in any realm of our political life is sorely lacking and plays into the very hands of our captors.
The escalated erosion in the labor movement, for one, can be directly connected to the disappearance of the Soviet Union, as can the brazenness of Western wars for resources, and internal attacks on women's rights. Recall its was just months after the collapse of the USSR that Bush I had the US invade Panama and kidnap its head of state to stand trial in the US on supposed drug charges.
As Fidel noted in his initial speech to the United Nations General Assembly, "the purpose of the United States is the monopolies." That is, the US government functions as the Wise Guy, the errand boy, the fixer for all that is state capitalism and its need for cheap labor and cheap accessible resources.
This meant that any given global South country where the US was doing its dirty business, it required what state department functionaries call "stability." Stability is code for sure and open markets.
Free elections, grassroots organizing, and trade-union movements are existential obstacles to US goals - which are the goals of domestic corporations and the global order. The US liked to employ various tactics to ensure this "stability." Having grassroots and trades-unionists jailed or murdered was not beyond the US scope. Rigging elections was a norm. Having militant, left-wing political parties made illegal was another tactic. Assassinating or removing presidents. And of course invasion and occupation if needed.
Additionally, the US and Europe implemented an immigration policy during the so-called Cold War that annually took in swathes of the global South in order to ease any social tensions in the respective countries.
Where would these social tensions escalate takes us back to the role of the Soviet Union. Because just as the US had its involvement in these countries, the Soviet Union acted as a spiritual, ideological, and material fund for the global South.
All of the post-World War II liberation movements in Africa, including and especially the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, can trace material and ideological support from the USSR and the East Bloc countries, like the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and even the DPRK [North Korea].
It was part of Cold War realpolitik that the US and Western Europe - the former empires - employed all the tactics I just named, and included taking waves of migrants from their former colonies. This was also a propaganda ploy to those former colonies that they too could aspire to immigrate to greener pastures of the West and, thereby, reject the "menace" of communism as a viable alternative.
Since the early 1990's fall of the Soviet Union, not coincidentally, we've seen a synchronized demand to end immigration and a rise in nationalism and white racism in the West. This white racist nationalism has gotten more open, more brazen, more outspoken and more defined. We hear once liberal leaders make excuses for this phenomenon and campaign to it. National leaders, left and right, have all lurched to the right in accommodation of this disturbing tendency.
But the resurgence of white nationalism makes perfect sense.
Ostensibly, disgruntled peoples of the global South no longer present the existential threat to the global market system of the Western countries. There is no longer a need for the safety valve. Ostensibly, without that material and ideological assistance of the Reds, these desperate peoples are no threat.
(As you should see, this view is itself racist since it presumes the global South only took commands from Moscow - the US State Department line, by the way - and that it had no natural impulse of its own to rid itself of colonial domination.)
The Western elites now are perfectly happy feeding the fires of white racism and nationalism because they themselves no longer see a value in that Cold War release valve. So they are perfectly happy keeping migrants of any kind in inhuman camps, on slave auction blocs, and drowning in the Rio Grande or the Mediterranean.
To underline my point, consider what lost in World War II was not fascism broadly but rather German, Third Reich fascism. The fascism of the rest of the Western countries - easily seen in pronouncements and policy of the French, British, and US governments in favor of Hitler - thrived on only to the point it was curbed by the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union disappeared, the fascism of the rest of the Allies resumed unobstructed.
Sadly, the left I referred to above will not appreciate this because it has abandoned the class war for making accommodations with these national governments and their global market system in order to make gains. This means it keeps getting into bed with some unsavory sorts; worse, it does so and brings nothing to the working class.
This means this left cannot and will not call a spade a spade. It has to pretend and convince the masses that the fascists that comprised the rest of the Allies in WWII are in fact democrats. This left has had to compartmentalize the postwar retaliation against the Communists and Socialists, student activists, Black and Brown and Native activists, and union militants as if it did not come from the same corroded place.
This also implies, and requires a essay on its own, the leaders of the leftist groups and parties must have the mental capacities of intellectual nincompoops, dull blades, butterflies reverse-developing into worms. This is a must because you cannot have this objective analysis within the left any more than you can acknowledge the role of the USSR generally. The left I refer is ultimately but an appendage of the Democratic Party and these liberal movements, which means it's a cohort of state power. Lenin might have already said something about that. Whether they forge a circuitous path or a straight line, it is the same anti-communist liberal Democratic Party that is the default position.
That is why our left organizations are imploding one after another. They are led by the simplest, anti-intellectual thinkers: you need only compare the nonsense they write and say, the strange positions they take, with the leaders that led these movements before the collapse of the USSR.
Nevertheless, the coming chapters of these border crises have already been foretold in the Third Reich. That's why our discourse must be precise and not be led down winding paths to nowhere by people who have nothing to say. The West sees no utility in these Third World peoples, cares nothing about their conditions in their countries of origin, and has been resorting to installing former generals turned presidents to ensure the "stability" the US and Western Europe care about. Rather than hitch our wagon to their death trains, we must be reminded in our internationalism that our common task is as workers, that the injuries done to them today await us tomorrow and will befall other workers the next day, and that left or right capitalism will not resolve this.
