What Does the Crisis In Ukraine Have to Do with the Fight for Multi-Racial Democracy in the US?
Lessons from the Spanish Civil War + gender and authoritarianism + two extraordinary movies
We had other plans for The Platypus this week, but our hearts are heavy with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For some American progressives, this war may seem a distant concern, locked as we are in a struggle for the future of democracy in our country. But the struggle for democracy is global — and Vladimir Putin’s brutal war to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government is a dramatic escalation in the global authoritarian movement that has consequences for everyone. And, as James Risen writes in a crucial piece in The Intercept, “Will the GOP’s Trumpist Wing Persist in Its Embrace of Putin,”
Today, much of the American right is in thrall to Putin and other autocrats, and a segment of the extreme right now harbors a hatred for Western democracy. The new American right somehow sees Putin as a guardian of white nationalism who will stand up to the “woke” left in the West. They don’t seem to care that he is a murderous dictator who has launched a war in the middle of Europe.
We do not have to condone the many blunders and crimes of U.S. foreign policy, past and present, to recognize as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it that “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” We can be against war and be internationalist in our commitments. The great challenges of this century — climate change, immigration, racial and gender justice, economic justice, and the struggle for democracy — are inherently global. Only an unequivocally internationalist left can rise to the moment. So, we stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. (Today’s photo is from a demonstration Harry attended on Thursday in support of Ukraine at the Russian Consulate in New York City).
This issue features a few incisive articles that make sense of the Ukraine crisis and a timely review of a new book about the International Brigades, volunteers who traveled from all around the world to defend the Spanish Republic from fascist assault in Europe nearly a century ago. The lesson of that heroic defeat is that authoritarianism unopposed inevitably metastasizes. No one is safe from it. We close the issue with the justly famous farewell speech by Spanish left leader Dolores Ibårruri, known as “La Passionara,” to the International Brigades when they left Spain. May it inspire us in our own long global struggle for democracy.
Also in this issue of The Platypus
The deadline to apply for Executive Director of Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, a new institution committed to developing and training people of color, women, and folks from low-income, working-class and LGBTQ backgrounds, has been extended until March 15th. Please spread the word!
Refuge for Ukrainian academics: Our friend Anya Paretskaya writes, “If you know of any scholars in Ukraine (regardless of discipline) fleeing the country and in need of assistance, please have them contact me (aparetskaya@newschool.edu). I might be able to help organize institutional support through the New University in Exile Consortium based at the New School.”
In the Delights and Provocations section, we feature a review by Dan Kaufman of Gilles Tremelet’s new book The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War.
The new Pedro Almodovar movie Parallel Mothers, one of his best, brilliantly insists that the work of remembering fascist atrocities in the past is the predicate for a viable future for democracy.
We recommend this piece about the latest and perhaps the most heinous assault yet on trans youth by Chase Strangio in The Nation, “Texas Is Terrorizing Trans Youth.”
We insist that you watch Writing With Fire, an extraordinary Oscar-nominated film about Dalit women journalists, the first Indian documentary to ever play in U.S. theaters. It will be available on demand and shown on PBS-Independent Lens in March. (We bow in gratitude to our friend and Co-Executive Producer of Writing with Fire, Anurima Bhargava).
We highly recommend this book published by Convergence, Power Concedes Elections: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, with contributions by some of the best organizers in the country, now available for preorder.
In the latest episode of the Reinventing Solidarity podcast, produced by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU), Deepak interviews his SLU colleague Heather McGhee about her brilliant book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.
Readings on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
In The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson and Ryan Cooper talk with the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven, who says Putin’s invasion is “Worse Than a Crime; It’s a Blunder.”
Meyerson: If they attempt to depose the Zelensky government and put their own people in, wouldn’t they have to then continue a military occupation in Ukraine? I don’t know how such a government could be sustained absent Russian troops.
Lieven: They would have to keep a massive military presence permanently. And they will also have to be prepared to use that military to repress what I think would be very serious popular protests by the population of Kyiv and central Ukraine. Before 2014, after all (after 2014, things have got more mixed), this area was solidly Ukrainian nationalist.
And this has deeply sinister implications both for Russia and for Ukraine. Repression in Ukraine would be required, but this would replicate both the Russian and the American experience in Afghanistan. It would replicate the American experience in South Vietnam, it would replicate the Soviet experience in Eastern Europe. You would have a client government that could only survive in the massive presence of your troops. . .
To quote Metternich, the Russian invasion was worse than a crime—and undoubtedly it is an enormous crime—but it was also a blunder, because it wasn’t necessary from a Russian point of view. Ukraine wasn’t really going anywhere, actually.
And Russia would be nailed to this indefinitely, because at that point any compromise would become almost impossible. It would require Russia to abandon its allies in Kyiv. I can’t see the West ever agreeing to recognize a Russian puppet government in Kyiv. . .
At least in the short and medium term, this is a disaster for the struggle against climate change. Gas is the least disruptive of the fossil fuels from the point of view of climate change. Coal is the worst, but the most secure because 70 countries produce it. Germany produces huge quantities; so does Poland. In the short and medium term, I think you’ll see a flight back to coal. In the longer term, I think you will see European moves to reduce dependence on Russian gas in favor of imports from America, but that will take a lot of development of infrastructure, which will take a number of years.
In Just Security, Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel argue that “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is Essentially Not About NATO.”
So why was 2014 so concerning to Russia that it chose to invade? Given Putin’s rhetoric about Euromaidan as a Western-backed plot, the most obvious conclusion is that he was afraid that regime change and democratization in Ukraine might reach – – or at least set an example for — Russian society and destabilize Putin’s increasingly consolidated authoritarianism. Research on the color revolutions and on the third wave of democratization in the region shows that this neighborhood effect was real. In other words, it’s not NATO at its doorsteps that’s so concerning to the Kremlin, but political competition, because it threatens authoritarian stability and introduces prospects of democratization.
In The New Yorker, Masha Gessen agrees, arguing in “The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine” that Putin’s invasion is about destroying the possibility of a viable alternative to autocracy.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, both Russian and Ukrainian societies struggled to forge new identities. Both contended with poverty, corruption, and growing inequality. Both had leaders who tried to stay in office by falsifying the vote. But in 2004 Ukrainians revolted against a rigged election, camping out in Kyiv’s Independence Square for weeks. The country’s highest court ordered a revote. Nine years later, when the President sold the country out to Russia—agreeing to scrap an association agreement with the European Union in exchange for fifteen billion in Russian loans—Ukrainians of vastly different political persuasions came to Independence Square again. They stayed there, day and night, through the dead of winter. They stayed when the government opened fire on them. More than a hundred people died before the corrupt President fled to Russia. A willingness to die for freedom is now a part of not only Ukrainians’ mythology but their lived history.
Many Russians—both the majority who accept and support Putin and the minority who oppose him—watched the Ukrainian revolutions as though looking in a mirror that could predict Russia’s own future. The Kremlin became even more terrified of protests and cracked down on its opponents even harder. Some in the opposition believed that if Ukrainians won their freedom, Russians would follow. There was more than a hint of an unexamined imperialist instinct in this attitude, but there was something else in it, too: hope. It felt something like this: our history doesn’t have to be our destiny. We may yet be brave enough and determined enough to win our freedom.
On Monday, Putin took aim at this sense of hope in his rambling, near-hour-long speech. Playing amateur historian, as he has done several times in recent years, Putin said that the Russian state is indivisible, and that the principles on the basis of which former Soviet republics won independence in 1991 were illegitimate. He effectively declared that the post-Cold War world order is over, that history is destiny and Ukraine will never get away from Russia.
In Foreign Affairs, Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks offer a brilliant gender analysis of authoritarianism: “Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women.” We hope, if it hasn’t been already, that it gets translated into Ukrainian and Russian (as well as Hindi, Turkish, and many other languages).
The pantheon of autocratic leaders includes a great many sexists, from Napoléon Bonaparte, who decriminalized the murder of unfaithful wives, to Benito Mussolini, who claimed that women “never created anything.” And while the twentieth century saw improvements in women’s equality in most parts of the world, the twenty-first is demonstrating that misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing ills. Throughout the last century, women’s movements won the right to vote for women; expanded women’s access to reproductive health care, education, and economic opportunity; and began to enshrine gender equality in domestic and international law—victories that corresponded with unprecedented waves of democratization in the postwar period. Yet in recent years, authoritarian leaders have launched a simultaneous assault on women’s rights and democracy that threatens to roll back decades of progress on both fronts.
The patriarchal backlash has played out across the full spectrum of authoritarian regimes, from totalitarian dictatorships to party-led autocracies to illiberal democracies headed by aspiring strongmen. In China, Xi Jinping has crushed feminist movements, silenced women who have accused powerful men of sexual assault, and excluded women from the Politburo’s powerful Standing Committee. In Russia, Vladimir Putin is rolling back reproductive rights and promoting traditional gender roles that limit women’s participation in public life. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un has spurred women to seek refuge abroad at roughly three times the rate of men, and in Egypt, President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi recently introduced a bill reasserting men’s paternity rights, their right to practice polygamy, and their right to influence whom their female relatives marry. In Saudi Arabia, women still cannot marry or obtain health care without a man’s approval. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s victory has erased 20 years of progress on women’s access to education and representation in public office and the workforce.
The wave of patriarchal authoritarianism is also pushing some established democracies in an illiberal direction. Countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders, such as Brazil, Hungary, and Poland, have seen the rise of far-right movements that promote traditional gender roles as patriotic while railing against “gender ideology”—a boogeyman term that Human Rights Watch describes as meaning “nothing and everything.” Even the United States has experienced a slowdown in progress toward gender equity and a rollback of reproductive rights, which had been improving since the 1970s. During his presidency, Donald Trump worked with antifeminist stalwarts, including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, to halt the expansion of women’s rights around the world. And despite the Biden administration’s commitment to gender equity at the national level, Republican-controlled states are attempting to reverse the constitutional right to abortion, which is now more vulnerable than it has been in decades. . . .
In the past seven decades, women’s demands for political and economic inclusion have helped catalyze democratic transitions, especially when those women were on the frontlines of mass movements. Democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia during the 1980s and 1990s were driven in part by mass popular movements in which women played key roles. Our research shows that all the major resistance movements during the postwar period—those seeking to topple national governments or to win national independence—featured women in support roles, such as providing food, shelter, intelligence, funds, or other supplies. But these movements differed in the degree to which they had women as frontline participants—those who took part directly in demonstrations, confrontations with authorities, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of noncooperation. Some, such as Brazil’s pro-democracy movement in the mid-1980s, featured extensive women’s participation: at least half of the frontline participants were women. Others, such as the 2006 uprising against the Nepalese monarchy, featured more modest frontline participation of women. Only one nonviolent campaign during this period seems to have excluded women altogether: the civilian uprising that ousted Mahendra Chaudhry from power in Fiji in 2000.
In the first half of the twentieth century, women played active roles in anticolonial liberation struggles across Africa and in leftist revolutions in Europe and Latin America. Later, pro-democracy movements in Myanmar and the Philippines saw nuns positioning their bodies between members of the security forces and civilian activists. During the first intifada, Palestinian women played a key role in the nonviolent resistance against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, organizing strikes, protests, and dialogues alongside Israeli women. In the United States, Black women have launched and continue to lead the Black Lives Matter movement, which is now a global phenomenon. Their organizing echoes the activism of forebears such as Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and other Black American women who planned, mobilized, and coordinated key aspects of the U.S. civil rights movement. Two women revolutionaries, Wided Bouchamaoui and Tawakkol Karman, helped lead the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Yemen, respectively, later winning the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring about peaceful democratic transitions through nonviolent resistance, coalition building, and negotiation. Millions more like them have worked to sustain movements against some of the world’s most repressive dictatorships, from tea sellers and singers in Sudan to grandmothers in Algeria to sisters and wives in Chile demanding the return of their disappeared loved ones outside Augusto Pinochet’s presidential palace.
It turns out that frontline participation by women is a significant advantage, both in terms of a movement’s immediate success and in terms of securing longer-term democratic change. Mass movements in which women participated extensively on the frontlines have been much more likely to succeed than campaigns that marginalized or excluded women. Women have been much more likely to participate in nonviolent mass movements than in violent ones, and they have participated in much greater numbers in nonviolent than in violent campaigns. To explain why women’s frontline participation increases the chances that a movement will succeed, therefore, one must first understand what makes nonviolent movements fail or succeed.
The article continues with a fascinating examination of why nonviolent movements with the strong involvement of women offer the best chance of rolling back the global rise of autocracy.
Delights & Provocations
We just saw the astonishing documentary Writing With Fire, which has been nominated for an Academy Award and echoes the gender analysis of Chenoweth and Marks quoted above. From the press release:
Writing With Fire shares the story of Khabar Lahariya, the only news network in India run by women. With wit and grace, this fierce band of Dalit women serve as an anchor for truth and justice, and a pillar of democracy. Together, they defy the bounds of gender and caste, and redefine what it means to be powerful, in their homes and for the world.
The film is screening in theaters nationwide, as the first Indian documentary to ever play in US theaters. It will be available on demand and shown on PBS-Independent Lens in March.
In the New York Review of Books, Dan Kaufman movingly reviews Gilles Tremelet’s new book The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War. The International Brigades consisted of thousands of people who traveled from all over the world to defend the Spanish Republic against fascism.
[They] eventually comprised some 35,000 men and women from sixty countries and more than two dozen colonies, protectorates, and other nonsovereign nations, along with roughly 7,000 Spaniards. The largest contingent came from France, followed by Italy, Germany, Poland, the United States, Great Britain, and the Balkans, but volunteers came from as far away as China, Indonesia, and Chile.” . . .
It offers an implicit reminder of the importance of leftist internationalism as a political force and of its current absence, even as democratic governments around the world, including in Spain, come under attack from neofascist political parties. . . .
While Spain’s Francoist past retains a pernicious hold on the country, events closer to home reminded me how far the Spanish Civil War’s legacy reaches. It seemed ominous that Donald Trump was elected months after Delmer Berg died; Trump supporters scrawled a swastika on a monument to the International Brigades in Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2017. But I also remember another image from that summer: the red, yellow, and purple flag of the brigades, a peerless symbol of solidarity and antifascism that had been all but forgotten in this country, unfurled by protesters facing off against a crowd of neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Pedro Almodovar’s genius is on full display in the movie Parallel Mothers, which insists that remembering, not forgetting, the fascist atrocities is necessary work if we are to build stable, democratic societies.
On October 28, 1938, the spokeswoman for Spanish Republican forces, Dolores Ibárruri, bade farewell to the International Brigades who had fought to save her country from the Franco dictatorship.
It is very difficult to say a few words in farewell to the heroes of the International Brigades, because of what they are and what they represent. A feeling of sorrow, an infinite grief catches our throat – sorrow for those who are going away, for the soldiers of the highest ideal of human redemption, exiles from their countries, persecuted by the tyrants of all peoples – grief for those who will stay here forever mingled with the Spanish soil, in the very depth of our heart, hallowed by our feeling of eternal gratitude.
From all peoples, from all races, you came to us like brothers, like sons of immortal Spain; and in the hardest days of the war, when the capital of the Spanish Republic was threatened, it was you, gallant comrades of the International Brigades, who helped save the city with your fighting enthusiasm, your heroism and your spirit of sacrifice. – And Jarama and Guadalajara, Brunete and Belchite, Levante and the Ebro, in immortal verses sing of the courage, the sacrifice, the daring, the discipline of the men of the International Brigades.
For the first time in the history of the peoples’ struggles, there was the spectacle, breathtaking in its grandeur, of the formation of International Brigades to help save a threatened country’s freedom and independence – the freedom and independence of our Spanish land.
Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Republicans – men of different colors, differing ideology, antagonistic religions — yet all profoundly loving liberty and justice, they came and offered themselves to us unconditionally.
They gave us everything — their youth or their maturity; their science or their experience; their blood and their lives; their hopes and aspirations — and they asked us for nothing. But yes, it must be said, they did want a post in battle, they aspired to the honor of dying for us.
Banners of Spain! Salute these many heroes! Be lowered to honor so many martyrs!
Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are stanched; when the memory of the sad and bloody days dissipates in a present of liberty, of peace and of wellbeing; when the rancor have died out and pride in a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards, speak to your children. Tell them of these men of the International Brigades.
Recount for them how, coming over seas and mountains, crossing frontiers bristling with bayonets, sought by raving dogs thirsting to tear their flesh, these men reached our country as crusaders for freedom, to fight and die for Spain’s liberty and independence threatened by German and Italian fascism. They gave up everything — their loves, their countries, home and fortune, fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters and children — and they came and said to us: “We are here. Your cause, Spain’s cause, is ours. It is the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.”
Today many are departing. Thousands remain, shrouded in Spanish earth, profoundly remembered by all Spaniards.
Comrades of the International Brigades: Political reasons, reasons of state, the welfare of that very cause for which you offered your blood with boundless generosity, are sending you back, some to your own countries and others to forced exile. You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality in the face of the vile and accommodating spirit of those who interpret democratic principles with their eyes on hoards of wealth or corporate shares which they want to safeguard from all risk.
We shall not forget you; and, when the olive tree of peace is in flower, entwined with the victory laurels of the Republic of Spain — return!
Return to our side for here you will find a homeland — those who have no country or friends, who must live deprived of friendship — all, all will have the affection and gratitude of the Spanish people who today and tomorrow will shout with enthusiasm.
– Long live the heroes of the International Brigades!