By Ronnie Kasrils

The recent hatchet job by Greg Mills and Ray Hartley in the Daily Maverick shows they believe it is their hallowed duty to strike down any voice daring to question the Western crusade against the evil Russian Empire.

Debate should always be encouraged, but the search for historic truth and a credible understanding of the facts is ill-served by a descent into a childlike morality tale of good versus evil.

In fact, Mills and Hartley, along with the rest of the increasingly shrill and at times hysterical pro-Western lobby in our media, should learn something from the much more sophisticated contributions that have been developed in the West in response to the USA-NATO belligerence, the crossing of bright red lines regarding Russia and China’s security, and the possibility of dire consequences. Learned American academics such as John Mearsheimer, Edward Curtin, John Bellamy Foster, and military intelligence specialists such as Scott Ritter and Jacques Baud, to name just a few prominent Western thinkers, have produced excellent analyses.

Contrary to what Mills and Hartley infer by twisting my words, I am by no means an uncritical fan of Putin or capitalist Russia. Of course, it is true that a strong legacy exists concerning the support the ANC and other fraternal liberation movements received from the former Soviet Union, but it is far more than that which inclines much of the Global South, to understand Russia’s security needs, and sustains its anathema for USA-NATO imperialist domination.

Indeed, the South African position on the conflict is hardly an outlier in the Global South. Brazil’s Luis Inazio Lula da Silva, for instance, has taken a similar position.

My article in News24 focused on the historical connection between the liberation struggle in South Africa and the Soviet Union because the publication specifically asked me to comment from my perspective as an Umkhonto weSizwe cadre who underwent military training there in 1964 – and in Odessa no less. I learned about Russia and the Soviet Union’s immense sacrifice during World War 2, and the people’s opposition to fascism in all its forms, including the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, and the Soviet people’s deeply-rooted commitment to world peace.

I also referred to the bellicose emergence of neo-Nazis in present Ukraine. Mills and Hartley have the temerity to cynically spin this factual observation and declare themselves “sickened” by my alleged inference that present-day Ukraine is “somehow a Nazi state”. I said no such thing. I wrote: “Little wonder that President Putin has stated that part of Russia’s objective is the de-Nazification of the Ukraine.”

The emergence of neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine became globally visible during the Maidan Square protests in Kyiv, which turned into a violent rampage in 2014. At the time, mainstream Western media highlighted the role of those Nazi gangs.

Since then, the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and their ilk have become embedded within the Ukrainian armed forces, adorned with Nazi symbolism, and involved in atrocities. Now the Western media has turned a blind eye.

It is a moral duty to point to the rising peril of neo-Nazism in the streets of Europe, the USA and elsewhere, and the broader populist appeal to white supremacism. I will not be quietened in pointing out how emboldened the neo-Nazis have become in Ukraine.

It is important for readers to be aware that the Brenthurst Foundation is hardly a neutral institution when it comes to an ideological worldview. It is funded by white mining capital and, as a casual look at its board and associates shows, deeply enmeshed in the Western military
establishment – apart from a handful of Africans.

There is so much that is factually incorrect, dangerous and superficial in the Mills and Hartley piece. Particularly revealing is what they studiously avoid, because it does not suit their case.

I turn only to some of their more obvious howlers and deliberate omissions.

The Kyiv regime, which they laud as an example of freedom and democracy, has banned the communist and socialist parties, several left-wing organizations, and the For Life parliamentary opposition platform.

The “democrat” Zelensky, has closed down all opposition television and media outlets and instituted crippling legislation against Ukraine’s trade union movement and civil liberties. No word of this from the Brenthurst duo.

They claim that Crimea voted in a referendum to leave the Russian Federation and join Ukraine. But they don’t specify which referendum and when. There was a referendum among Crimea’s people in 2014, which voted for inclusion in the Russian Federation. What other referendums have occurred other than at the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Those related to the independence of the former constituent republics.

At that time, in December 1991, the three Slavic republics – Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine – proclaimed the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). That was
not a referendum specifically concerning Crimea.

As to the sanctity of referenda or elections, there is no sound from the Brenthurst pair concerning the Maidan coup of 2014 which overthrew the democratically elected government of President Yanukovych, and the “color revolution” investment of the USA, Germany, Poland and others.

They state that in Africa a very limited number of countries were against supporting Ukraine. There were seventeen, including South Africa, that abstained from the UN General Assembly vote. As for African countries voting against Russia, President Ramaphosa has referred to South Africa being blackmailed and threatened to toe the US-NATO line.

I am accused of ranting about the “morality of US foreign policy, CIA-sponsored coups, punitive sanctions and blockades, military aggression and intervention globally”. Russia, they state appears exempt from my criticism “when it does the same — and far worse — in Africa under the brutal rule of Wagner military interventions that secure mineral wealth for oligarchs.”

The facts are that whatever the sins of Wagner, the most active and destructive mercenary groups that have plundered Africa and the Middle East are American, British and French. Their boots on the ground are numbered in the tens of thousands.

Wagner personnel are 6,000.

By Wikipedia’s broadest definition of military intervention, the US has engaged in nearly 200
since 1950 with over 25% occurring since 1991.

That explains why so many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America refuse to kowtow to the US-NATO-EU axis. When they do it is either because of fear of the consequences or they are infamous dictators installed by the CIA such as Mobuto Sese Seko, Pinochet, Bolsonaro or Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, loyal to their master’s orders.

As for elephants in the room which Mills and Hartley are silent about, any university undergraduates serious about historical events can point to:

• NATO expansion east to Russia’s doorstep since the collapse of the Soviet Union when it should have been wound up along with the Warsaw Pact;
• Numerous countries added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary;
• 15,000 mostly Russian-speaking people in the Donbas killed by Ukrainian forces between 2014 and February 2022;
• 42 massacred at the Odessa trade union building in July 2014;
• Atrocities committed by the Ukrainian forces and Neo-Nazis;
• US rejecting calls from Russia to respect its borders;
• US surrounding Russia with military bases;
• George W. Bush withdrawing the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty;
• Trump withdrawing the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty;
• The US asserting its right to a nuclear first strike;
• The US waging an economic war on Russia via sanctions for years.

Mills and Hartley venture into the realm of wild conspiracy theories and cheap insults in hallucinating state capture of our democracy by China and Russia “in politics, unions and business” and, following a now debunked US conspiracy theory, warn of Russia “disrupting elections” as a natural next step.

Whilst our government affirms the need for peaceful negotiations, the pro-NATO position of the Brenthurst duo follows the most dangerous hawks in the West by advocating escalation of the war and more lethal weapons for Ukraine at the risk of a nuclear conflagration.

It seems that Greg Mills has forgotten about Afghanistan. In his years in Kabul serving as ‘special advisor’ to a NATO commander, did he ever conceive of an ignominious reversal?

(This article was originally published in the Daily Maverick)