Alan Woods promotes genocide denial, shills for Russian imperialism

In a not entirely surprising development, the International Fascist Tendency has just published another article by the Dear Leader himself, Alan Woods, who at this point I think we can consider a paid agent of the Russian government. To this man I would like to extend my thoughts and prayers at this trying time. The Kremlin’s recent military reverses in Ukraine must be very disappointing to him. After all, he assured us all back on 24 February that Ukraine’s collapse was imminent and that the Ukrainians had no intention of fighting for their country:

The Ukrainian army is in disarray, being taken hopelessly off guard by the suddenness of the attack. In any case, it was in no position to resist the might of the Russian army. The moment the West announced that it did not intend to send troops to defend Ukraine, the matter was settled in advance.

The assertion that there is no panic in the capital is belied by television pictures that show long lines of cars fleeing Kiev.

…It also paints a picture of demoralisation and lack of motivation in at least part of the Ukrainian forces, which contradicts the picture that has been peddled by western propaganda. Russia now has every incentive to move as fast as possible to seize the capital.

What a dazzling display of dialectical foresight. Now, the old fool will have to eat his words. Let us see the mental gymnastics that this cretin will perform to explain away this disaster.

Woods credulously repeats Russian state propaganda about how the retreat from Kiev is but a mere ‘tactical withdrawal’. He dismisses reports of the Russian army’s defeat as ‘imperialist propaganda’. All the evidence we have, however, shows that the Russians have been forced to retreat as a result of mounting casualties caused by a fierce Ukrainian defence.

Woods tries to be wise after the fact when he concedes that the Russians underestimated the Ukrainians:

A far more serious mistake was Russia’s underestimation of the power of resistance of the enemy.

Before the Maidan coup, the Ukrainian army was a weak and dilapidated force, hardly worth considering as a serious factor. However, since then it has been reorganised on the basis of NATO support and training. In addition, it has received valuable experience of battle during the eight-year-long civil war in the Donbas. This fact had clearly not been fully appreciated by Putin or his generals at the start of the war.

But there was also another factor, which is harder to quantify, but of great importance in any war. Napoleon once remarked that, in war, the moral is to the physical as three to one. The Ukrainians saw themselves as fighting a defensive war to ‘save their Fatherland’. And defence is always a more tenable option than offence.

Zelensky – going against the advice of the West – did not flee the country, but stayed in Kyiv and called for a national defence, galvanising the resistance of his army and parts of the Ukrainian population.

Too bad Woods’ dialectical foresight did not allow him to see this back in February, when he was crowing about an imminent Ukrainian defeat. Woods goes on to tell us that the Russian attack on Kiev was simply a feint, not a serious attempt to take the city:

Once it became clear that a quick knockout blow to the capital was ruled out, the Russians changed their tactics. From that moment, the movement towards Kyiv assumed an entirely different character. What was originally intended as an assault on Kyiv was transformed into a manoeuvre that is known in military parlance as a feint.

Of course, the Russian attack on Kiev may well have been a feint, designed to draw Ukrainian troops away from the south and east of the country, which Russia now says is its main focus. But it is an odd kind of feint which sees the Russians sending in some of their best troops, in particular their paratroopers, into the line of fire, allowing them to be decimated in repeated attacks on Hostomel airport and other targets. Woods gives the incompetent Russian army far too much credit, when we have mounting evidence of the manifest incapacity of the Russian forces to execute basic military tactics. We have reports of retreating Russian troops abandoning their vehicles and deserting the field of battle in disarray. The sheer quantity of troops committed to the manoeuvre, and the thousands that Russia has lost on the battlefield, make this ‘feint’ explanation look less plausible. It is perfectly possible that the Russians are simply giving explanations after the fact to explain away their defeat. They were arrogant enough to think that Ukraine would fall easily. Woods himself concedes that this supposed ‘change of plan’ was necessitated by fiercer than expected resistance by Ukrainian troops – the same Ukrainian troops whom he boasted would easily capitulate to Russian pressure.

Woods then denounces Western propaganda for claiming that the Russians are killing civilians indiscriminately, quoting a Newsweek article from 22 March which argues that the Russians are actually ‘holding back’ from killing more people. I guess we should be grateful that Putin has to decided to focus his murderous actions on the south and east of the country – after all, as Woods tells us, it could be so much worse.

Woods then tells us that due to the Ukrainian practice of placing weaponry in civilian zones, they are guilty of encouraging the killing of Ukrainian civilians. That is funny, when you consider the fact that when Israel hits back at the Palestinians for their periodic bombardments against Israel civilian centres, Woods and his Marxist friends denounce Israel for killing ‘innocent civilians’, despite the fact that Hamas happily places its weaponry in civilian areas. At least the Israelis warn the civilians in the area before dropping their bombs and launching their missiles. Russia could care less. Is it me, or is there just a touch of anti-Semitism and hypocrisy in Woods’ attitude? Woods leaves unmentioned the fact that the Russians have been only too happy to use Ukrainian civilians as human shields in the areas where they are stationed. He wants to paint a picture of moral equivalence between Ukraine and Russia, so as to further what is actually his objectively pro-Russia agenda. But, as Marxists are fond of saying, there is no equivalence between an oppressed nation and their oppressors. The Ukrainians are justified in doing everything necessary to save their country from genocidal annihilation.

Besides, most of the civilian deaths, as that Newsweek article itself indicates, have not been from bombs, but from urban warfare, which inevitably leads to civilian deaths, whether intended or not. Woods thinks that this somehow mitigates the crime of Russian invasion. We also know that Russian soldiers have been carrying out atrocities against the population. Whether Putin intended to kill civilians or not is irrelevant. What is clear is that at the very least, he doesn’t care. Russian propaganda has spent years constructing a dehumanising narrative about ‘Nazi Ukraine’, and it is unsurprising that Russian soldiers, whether under official sanction or not, have been terrorising the populace since the invasion began. Certainly there is no reason to believe that any Russian soldier will be punished for killing, raping or stealing from the local population.

The genocidal intentions of the Russians towards the Ukrainians have been clear for years. Putin has made it his aim to destroy the Ukrainian nation entirely. In Mariupol, over a hundred thousand people have been ‘evacuated’ from the city by Russian occupiers and sent to Russia, in what can only be described as Nazi-style ethnic cleansing. If Russia has so far been relatively ‘restrained’ in killing civilians, it is not because Putin or his government have any sympathy for Ukrainians, but because they need a relatively intact puppet state to be left in place in the event that they do manage to force Ukraine to terms. Besides, genocide does not have to mean physical annihilation. It can also mean cultural annihilation. Putin wants to erase Ukrainian national identity and turn Ukrainians into Russians. If this requires killing all of its leading intellectual, cultural and political figures, removing large numbers of Ukrainian people from their territory and destroying entire cities, he will happily do so. It is not ruled out that if he feels he cannot force Ukraine to terms, he will choose to destroy the whole country, so that the rump state left behind will not be able to join NATO or the EU. As Stephen Kotkin has explained, it will be a situation of ‘If I can’t have Ukraine, you can’t have Ukraine’.

We should apparently be thankful that Putin has ‘held back’ his air force and is largely bombing areas where battle is taking place, even though in these areas, much destruction has been wrought, especially in Mariupol, which has been utterly obliterated. Yet Woods tells us that to say that Russia is smashing everything in sight, without regards for civilian casualties, is simply ‘propaganda’. This is obviously not true for the south and east of the country, where the Russians are killing without conscience.

Woods then whines about Ukrainian military censorship of the news – as if any government being invaded by an imperialist power wouldn’t have the right to control the media as part of the war effort. Woods then repeats the most disgusting genocide denial about the Bucha killings:

To commit mass murder and then leave the victims lying on the street to be found by the enemy does not seem to be the most likely tactic for the Russians, who would not benefit from it in the slightest degree.

But for the Ukrainians, who, despite all the absurd bombast, now find themselves in an increasingly desperate position, the benefit of such propaganda is of immeasurable importance. It would add far greater weight to the pleas for more military help that Zelensky has once again repeated on the floor of the UN Security Council. Oh yes! This is worth an entire shipment of anti-tank rockets for a man with his back to the wall.

In the absence of firm proof from absolutely impartial and trustworthy sources, we must withhold judgement as to the validity of these claims. Time will tell who was lying and who was telling the truth.

This is the tactic used by Holocaust deniers. Because there is no ‘smoking gun’, all the circumstantial evidence pointing to Russian responsibility for this crime is to be ignored. Eyewitnesses are to be dismissed – after all, they are probably paid agents of the Ukrainian government. Woods insists that Russia, a thuggish, fascist, imperialist invader, would have no interest whatsoever in killing civilians, despite their openly genocidal proclamations about Ukraine. But Woods would have us believe that the Ukrainians (led by democratically-elected politicians who have human decency) would happily kill their own people, a staged attempt to encourage outside intervention. Disgusting slander, and an absolute low for this senile charlatan and his degenerate organisation. Rest assured, the ‘absolutely impartial and trustworthy sources’ Woods insists upon do not exist. There is no such thing as an absolutely impartial source. All sources are necessarily imperfect, but evidence is evidence, and all the evidence points to Russia. Woods handwaves the evidence as tainted, whilst insisting on his own, evidence-free speculation as the more likely possibility! The absurdly impossible standards demanded by Woods for evidence of Russian genocide contrasts with his abysmal credulity in believing practically everything that comes out of the Kremlin. The fact that we have photos of dead bodies in Bucha two weeks before the Russians withdrew is to be ignored.

Woods then makes a lot of noise about Ukrainian war crimes. Shock, horror, atrocities happen in war, on both sides. Yes, some Ukrainian soldiers have acted wrongly, and the Ukrainian government is committed to punishing those people. It does not change the fact that the Ukrainians are in the right in this war, just as the Allies were in the right during WWII, even if we accept that Allied troops were sometimes guilty of atrocities in their fight against the Germans. The biggest atrocity was perhaps the mass rape of Germans by Soviet troops in 1945. This goes unmentioned by Woods.

Woods then equivocates about the meaning of the word ‘genocide’:

The word ‘genocide’ has been bandied about repeatedly in recent weeks. Zelensky is particularly fond of using it to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine – although Joe Biden seems not to share his enthusiasm for that word. But what exactly is genocide?

The usual definition is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group, such as the murder by the Nazis of six million Jews, or the mass extermination of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda. But what relation does that bear to deaths in Ukraine?

In all wars, civilians are killed, often in large numbers. But not every war is regarded as a war of extermination. What kind of figures are we talking about in Ukraine? Up to 3 April, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded a total of 3,455 civilian casualties in the country: 1,417 killed and 2,038 injured.

Yet, as I have explained earlier, genocide is not necessarily physical in nature. It can also be cultural, as we are seeing with the Uyghurs in China, who are being brainwashed in concentration camps to become Han Chinese, and being deprived of their culture and their heritage. Moreover, what we are seeing in Bucha and elsewhere is just the beginning of what Putin plans for Ukraine. We know that prior to the invasion, the Russians had drawn up plans for mass killing of prominent Ukrainians in politics and civil society, as part of a plan to decapitate the Ukrainian nation and assimilate it to Russia. The 121,000 civilians evacuated from Mariupol to Russia will be brainwashed to become Russian and abandon their Ukrainian identity. The areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation will be subject to similar treatment. Woods says that because relatively few people have died so far, there is no genocide! If you had confronted Woods in 1941 with evidence that thousands of Jews and Slavs had been killed by Nazi Germany, and labelled this genocide, he would have dismissed it by saying ‘What genocide? Only a few thousand people have died!’ According to Woods, a genocide-in-progress doesn’t really count as a genocide. An utterly absurd proposition. The Holocaust did not only become genocide in 1945, when six million had been killed. It was genocide from the beginning. Article II of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as the following:

1. A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
   • Killing members of the group
   • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
   • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
   • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
   • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

What is happening in Ukraine fulfills both of those criteria. We have the open proclamations of the Russian government that Ukraine is not a real nation and should be restored to Russia – the mental element of genocide. Then there is the physical element, which we are seeing now. What is happening in Ukraine is clearly genocide, or at the very least, a preparation for it, and Woods and his pro-Kremlin lies will not disabuse anyone of that fact. These same idiots accuse regularly Israel of ‘genocide’ towards the Palestinians when a handful of Palestinians are killed in limited conflicts between Hamas in Gaza and the Israeli government. The hypocrisy is sickening.

Woods continues to insist that Russian victory is near:

This represents a critical moment for the war in Ukraine. The encirclement and destruction of a large part of the country’s regular armed forces will have a catastrophic effect and quite likely lead to a collapse of morale. That would render the capture of Kyiv unnecessary, just as in 1940, the German army did not have to besiege Paris once the French army in the field had been encircled and decisively beaten.

…Zelensky understands better than anyone that the war must end in negotiation. He must also understand that by prolonging the agony of his people, the final settlement will be still worse than before.

Woods does not take into account the possibility that Ukraine could fight Russia to a draw, securing its independence from Russian imperialism. He believes, and desires, that Ukraine will surrender, despite their string of successes. They have no reason to do so. The war will become yet more costly for Russia. The Ukrainians are fighting for their very survival. Even if Russia manages to hold on to its gains in the south and east, it will have done so at an appalling cost, and left the Ukrainian nation more united and battle-hardened than ever before. It will have failed in its maximal goals – the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and its reduction to a puppet state. It will also have destroyed its economy. It will have lost the war. But this is a denouement to painful for Woods to consider.

Woods makes sure to cover his preposterous backside by hedging his bets in the following fashion:

All perspectives of necessity have a conditional character. This is truer still of any prognosis for the outcome of war, which – as Napoleon once remarked – is the most complex of all equations.

I have based my analysis on the available facts at my disposal. But in wars, there can be many sharp and unexpected turns. There will be many ups and downs before the final denouement. But insofar as it is possible to judge, the facts point in one direction.

Given his lamentable past predictions, this is probably wise. If his false prophecies are once again falsified, he can at least say that he never insisted that x would necessarily happen, merely pointed to what was likely to happen. (That is to say, what he wanted to happen.)

But the outcome will not necessarily be as quick or as straightforward as I may have presented it here. To begin with, the encirclement of the Ukrainian forces in the Donbas is a huge and complicated manoeuvre, which may take weeks, maybe longer, to fully accomplish.

There is reason to doubt that Putin has the military capability to surround the Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas. He can barely manage a proper encirclement of smaller targets like the major cities, let alone the encirclement of an armed force in the field. Even the encirclement of Mariupol has been haphazardly executed. Woods may believe that he is gifted with a great military mind, but he is really just an amateur and an ignoramus. In another month from now, I predict that Woods will give us another long article in which he tries to explain away his recent failures of ‘dialectical foresight’. The people within the organisation, who continue to stand by this genocide-denying dimwit and cult leader, should consult their consciences before going any further with this wretched political project. They should know that they are members of a sect which can count itself as being in the same moral category as Holocaust deniers.

Woods dismisses the impact of sanctions:

The sanctions have, of course, had some effect on Russia – but not at all the catastrophic effects that the West had hoped for. They have infuriated the people and turned them against the West, without having the slightest effect on Putin’s actions or the war in Ukraine.

As if we should care about the hardships to which the fascistic, genocide-supporting Russian population are subjected by sanctions. Woods wants us to feel sorry for the people baying for the blood of their neighbours and putting ‘Z’ logos on their cars and clothing. No thank you. Frankly, we should sanction them even more.

This disgusting article concludes with a quote from the great Dutch Jewish philosopher, Spinoza, who would hardly be supporting the fascistic Russian campaign of genocide going on in Ukraine right now. But Woods’ depravity knows no bounds.