On Thu, Feb 2, 2023 at 09:37 PM, Mark Baugher wrote:

Why Ukraine and not Russia? Why shouldn't class-conscious workers and youth around the world demand an immediate end to political and civil repression in Russia?

Many have, and those who haven't, should. The two former Soviet states much resemble each other and restrict political and civil rights in the interests of their often corrupt oligarchs and their reactionary nationalists in peacetime as well as war. 

It's practically always the case that political, civil and personal rights are curtailed when a country is at war or has been invaded, in the case of Ukraine.

It’s unfortunately a measure of how far adaptation to Ukrainian nationalism has progressed on the list that the Ukrainian state's quashing of democratic and trade union rights is treated with indifference. Would we have been equally blasé about the repression of Debs, the IWW, and other socialists and pacifists when the US entered WW I? Was the internment of Japanese citizens in WW II justifiable because the country was at war? Was the use of the Smith and McCarran Acts against Communists and Trotskyists "understandable" during wartime and the Cold War red scare? The absence or curtailment of democratic and independent trade union rights in the USSR, China, Cuba and other anticapitalist states was also subject to criticism, even as they were invaded or threatened with invasion by imperialist powers.

Fact is that all warring states have justified repression by insisting that their antiwar opponents are agents of a foreign power, as the Ukrainian state did in banning nine left-wing parties as “pro-Russian”. The scurrilous labelling of all critics of the present war as “pro-Putin campists” by the more fervent supporters of the Ukrainian side is within this tradition.

Nobody on this list has labeled "all critics of the present war as pro-Putin campists". The one being scurrilous here is you, Marv. 

On Fri, Feb 3, 2023 at 6:34 PM Marv Gandall <marvgand2@...> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 2, 2023 at 09:37 PM, Mark Baugher wrote:

Why Ukraine and not Russia? Why shouldn't class-conscious workers and youth around the world demand an immediate end to political and civil repression in Russia?

Many have, and those who haven't, should. The two former Soviet states much resemble each other and restrict political and civil rights in the interests of their often corrupt oligarchs and their reactionary nationalists in peacetime as well as war. 

It's practically always the case that political, civil and personal rights are curtailed when a country is at war or has been invaded, in the case of Ukraine.

It’s unfortunately a measure of how far adaptation to Ukrainian nationalism has progressed on the list that the Ukrainian state's quashing of democratic and trade union rights is treated with indifference. Would we have been equally blasé about the repression of Debs, the IWW, and other socialists and pacifists when the US entered WW I? Was the internment of Japanese citizens in WW II justifiable because the country was at war? Was the use of the Smith and McCarran Acts against Communists and Trotskyists "understandable" during wartime and the Cold War red scare? The absence or curtailment of democratic and independent trade union rights in the USSR, China, Cuba and other anticapitalist states was also subject to criticism, even as they were invaded or threatened with invasion by imperialist powers.

Fact is that all warring states have justified repression by insisting that their antiwar opponents are agents of a foreign power, as the Ukrainian state did in banning nine left-wing parties as “pro-Russian”. The scurrilous labelling of all critics of the present war as “pro-Putin campists” by the more fervent supporters of the Ukrainian side is within this tradition.