Ilhan Omar Vows to Continue Speaking Out Against Israel's Abuse of Palestinians

The House GOP's vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee came hours after Israel launched its latest bombing campaign in the occupied Gaza Strip.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks to reporters on February 2, 2023 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON
Feb 03, 2023

Rep. Ilhan Omar vowed Thursday that the House GOP's vote to remove her from the chamber's foreign affairs panel would not stop her from criticizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians, a pledge that came after the Israeli government carried out its latest bombing campaign in the occupied Gaza Strip.

"My critique of our foreign policy, Israel's policy towards Palestinians, or that of any foreign nation will not change," Omar (D-Minn.) wrote in a Twitter post following passage of a Republican resolution forcing her off the House Foreign Affairs Committee—a seat she has used to speak out against human rights violations and demand accountability for war crimes, including those committed by the U.S. and Israel.

"As a person who suffered the horrors of war and persecution," Omar added, "my advocacy will always be for those that suffer because of the actions of governments."

The House vote was held hours after Israel's far-right government launched a series of airstrikes in the densely populated "open-air prison" of Gaza, bombings that came a week after Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians at a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. When two rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza in the wake of the massacre, Israel bombarded the enclave, reportedly hitting a refugee camp at the center of the strip.

During the floor debate ahead of the GOP resolution's passage, Republican lawmakers made clear that Omar's criticisms of Israeli policy—which are frequently conflated with antisemitism—were a driving force behind the effort to remove her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) specifically cited Omar's past characterization of Israel as an "apartheid" state, calling the description "appalling"—even though mainstream organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have offered the same assessment of Israel's decades-long occupation and brutalization of Palestinians.

"Rep. Ilhan Omar was booted off of the House Foreign Affairs Committee today for one reason only: her firm and unequivocal opposition to Israel's brutal apartheid rule over the Palestinian people," wrote Josh Ruebner, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and the former policy director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

"All other pretexts," Ruebner argued, "are just designed to obscure this fact."

"Israel has long attempted to silence findings of apartheid with targeted smear campaigns, and the international community allows itself to be cowed by these tactics."

The House GOP passed its resolution kicking Omar off the powerful committee as rights groups warned that Israel is ramping up its assault on Palestinian rights and livelihoods.

“This circus is happening while the Israeli government is escalating an entirely new phase of state violence against Palestinians," Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, told The Intercept's Akela Lacy, who argued Thursday that congressional Democrats "paved the way" for the GOP's attacks on Omar.

“If you actually look at what the Israeli government is doing right now," Miller said, "the mask is off completely."

Over the weekend, Israel moved to seal—and signaled plans to demolish—the West Bank homes of two Palestinians suspected of deadly attacks against Israelis. Human Rights Watch condemned Israel's response as an act of "collective punishment."

“Deliberate attacks on civilians are reprehensible crimes," Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Thursday. "But just as no grievance can justify the intentional targeting of civilians in Neve Yaakov, such attacks cannot justify Israeli authorities intentionally punishing the families of Palestinian suspects by demolishing their homes and throwing them out on the street."

Amnesty International noted earlier this week that Israeli forces killed 35 Palestinians in January alone. Last year was one of the deadliest in decades for Palestinians in the occupied territories.

"The devastating events of the past week have exposed yet again the deadly cost of the system of apartheid," said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty's secretary-general. "The international community's failure to hold Israeli authorities to account for apartheid and other crimes has given them free rein to segregate, control, and oppress Palestinians on a daily basis, and helps perpetuate deadly violence."

"Apartheid is a crime against humanity, and it is frankly chilling to see the perpetrators evade justice year after year," Callamard added. "Israel has long attempted to silence findings of apartheid with targeted smear campaigns, and the international community allows itself to be cowed by these tactics. Until apartheid is dismantled there is no hope of protecting civilian lives, and no hope of justice for grieving families in Palestine and Israel."

Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar Kicked off Key Committee due to Criticism of Israel

February 3, 2023 

US Lawmaker Ilhan Omar. (Photo: Lorie Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons

By Palestine Chronicle Staff

Following days of intense debates and right-wing media rhetoric, Republicans have finally managed to oust Democrat Ilhan Omar from her committee post in Congress, on Thursday.

The vote in favor of the unusual move was championed by Republicans who now constitute a majority in the US House of Representatives.

Omar was removed from her post as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, allegedly due to her strong position and previous comments on Israel.

Omar, along with a few other Democrats in Congress, has adopted a strong position against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and has called on the US administration to hold Israel accountable for its actions.

Republicans, and even some Democrats, have protested such positions and comments as antisemitic.

Omar, and other Democrats, however, said that the vote was “revenge after two Republicans were ousted from committees in 2020 when Democrats held a House majority,” the BBC reported. It also conveyed comments by Omar where she suggested she was being removed because she is a Muslim woman who immigrated to the US as a refugee.

“Is anyone surprised that I am somehow deemed unworthy to speak about American foreign policy?” Omar reportedly said shortly before the vote.

At the vote, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bounced “on her feet with rage”, accusing the GOP leadership of having no greater motive than “targeting women of color in the United States”, the British Guardian reported.

“There is nothing consistent with the Republican party’s continued attack, except for the racism and incitement of violence against women of color in this body. This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Another Congresswoman, Cori Bush, called the action to kick Omar off the important committee, offensive. “Republicans are waging a blatantly Islamophobic and racist attack against Congresswoman Omar. I have said it before, I will say it again: The white supremacy happening is unbelievable. This is despicable,” Bush said.

(The Palestine Chronicle)

 

Rep. Dean Phillips: Omar committee ouster was 'reckless' and 'dangerous'

Tom Crann and Megan Burks

MPR
February 3, 2023 

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, who is Jewish, butt heads with Rep. Ilhan Omar over her past comments on Israel. But he defended her ahead of a vote this week to remove her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Before the U.S. House voted along party lines to oust Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee Thursday, several of her colleagues spoke out against the move, including Rep. Dean Phillips.

“She has never posted a video depicting herself decapitating and killing fellow members of Congress. She does not wonder if school shootings in America are staged. She has never equated vaccine mandates with Adolf Hitler. And she has never, ever expressed support for executing leaders of the United States Congress,” Phillips said, alluding to social media posts by some far right members of Congress.

Listen: Rep. Ilhan Omar responds to committee ouster

They’ve since apologized for the posts, or tacit support of such posts by others. And so has Omar, who faced criticism — including from Phillips — for statements on Israel that many interpreted as anti-Semitic.

Phillips joined All Things Considered host Tom Crann Friday to talk about why he defended Omar this week.
As a a critic of the remarks then, what changed to have you support her so firmly yesterday?

To draw some comparison or false equivalency between Ilhan Omar and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar is a disservice to the Congress and to the country.

And as I said in my floor speech yesterday, I believe in the human capacity to learn from mistakes and to make amends, and that atonement should be rewarded not punished. Rep. Omar and I disagree regularly on policies, both domestic policy and foreign policy. She has made statements that have been hurtful, painful and we spoken about those. I do not believe that's grounds for removal from a standing committee in Congress.

In fact, as I also said on the floor, if there were more voices like Ilhan Omar's when my father went to Vietnam in 1969, I think that would have saved lives. And that's why I believe dissent is important, even if you disagree with the fundamental perspective of another member of Congress. I think it's reckless. I think it's dangerous.

And last of all, and most importantly, the Republican House leadership, which does not include a Jewish member as far as I'm aware, has weaponized anti-Semitism in a very dangerous and, I think, disingenuous and, frankly, despicable manner. And that's why I spoke out so strongly yesterday.

What do you mean by that?

Anti-Semitism is real and I want every listener right now to recognize that we must mobilize to defend all human beings, no matter their faith, their skin color, their socio-economic status, their political perspectives. There is anti-Semitism on the left and there's anti-Semitism on the right.

And what I mean by weaponization is what I said in the very last paragraph of my remarks on the floor yesterday, which is: “If people really want to understand how to be an ally to the Jewish community, people really wish to defeat anti-Semitism in the United States, please ask the community what it needs. Don't impose. Don't remove people from committees arbitrarily. Don't tell us, if you will, what needs to be done. Ask us, and listen and learn. “

I've had to do that time and time again. And every time I do I learned something. And I think that's what our country more broadly should be doing right now as it relates to so many of the challenging issues that we face, as we hope to be the best America we can. And that is to protect everybody, including my Jewish community.

Republicans say that they removed Rep. Omar from the foreign affairs committee because of anti-Semitic remarks. What do you think is really going on?

She has made remarks that are damaging and hurtful and painful. And we've spoken about those. I believe she's listened to those concerns. She has addressed those. She continues to learn from those.

And Rep. Omar and I come from very different backgrounds. Tom, she was born in Somalia and spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before coming to this country. So her world experience is different than mine. I have a great love for Israel despite its fallibilities. She is deeply troubled by Israel, for reasons I think she has expressed. But that's different than hardened anti-Semitism.

I believe and I think this was a very dangerous and misguided effort to use that as the reason to remove her despite the fact that 90 percent of the Jewish members of the United States House of Representatives voted to maintain her on the Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday.

And I said also that, to me, grounds for removal should be predicated on people who threatened violence against fellow members, against others. She has never done so. She has never done the more obnoxious and despicable things that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar have done, including supporting an insurrection against the United States of America. I draw the line quite differently. Most of my colleagues do, as well.

I just hope that this political tit for tat, if you will, is done and that the United States Congress can start behaving as an adult institution moving forward, because this was an embarrassing week for it.

You sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee. What does it lose?

I have to say, I defend Israel despite grave concerns on occasion about its policies and its government.

My Republican colleagues effectively removed a voice of dissent, if you will, from a committee and an institution that is predicated on providing different voices and providing different perspectives. And what the committee has lost is one of those voices, despite it being a voice that I did not like all the time.

I'm not gonna lie. I did not like her perspective on Israel and on some other issues that came before our committee. But my goodness, if we become a country that cancels or silences or removes people because they don't see things the same way we do or they didn't live the same life experience, they don't share the same perspective, then we have undermined the entire system of governance that our founders set up and that has served this country remarkably well for almost two and a half centuries.
This is a new GOP majority. Do you think this is an indication of how this coming session will go?

No. In fact, this might surprise listeners. I want to be complimentary to those in the Republican party in the House that have, to me, a much more effective and efficient manner. And over the past three weeks, our votes are starting on schedule, they're ending on schedule. The Republican side has allowed what we call “open rules,” which allow members of Congress from both sides to offer amendments to bills that come to the House floor.

I call it like I see it. Sometimes the Democratic side is right. Sometimes the Republican side is right. I'm pleased so far with how the House has operated except for this egregious misdeed, if you will, by the removal of Rep. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

89 ORGANIZATIONS CONDEMN VOTE TO REMOVE REP. ILHAN OMAR FROM HFAC


By Peace Action Posted February 3, 2023

Peace Action joined 88 other organizations to condemn yesterday’s vote in the House removing Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. You can read the statement below.

Joint Statement in Support of Representative Omar

The vote to remove Representative Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), following the partisan decision to keep Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell off the House Intelligence Committee, lacked any legitimate justification and marks a disgraceful opening to the 118th Congress. In pressing ahead with the resolution of removal, Speaker McCarthy has robbed HFAC of a member of Congress committed to universal human rights, international justice and diplomacy, and the defense of democracy, while stirring up hate against a leading Black woman and Muslim member of Congress. We, the undersigned organizations, condemn this vote and affirm our intent to continue engaging with Rep. Omar as a leader in shaping U.S. foreign policy.

In the last four years, Rep. Omar has used her position on HFAC to center human rights and democracy, support critical humanitarian assistance to conflict-affected and disaster-stricken communities, combat hate and authoritarianism, and promote international justice. Her signature efforts include the Pathway to PEACE, a package of seven bills that would block arms sales to human rights-abusing governments, redirect funds from the Pentagon’s overseas slush fund to global peacebuilding efforts, and enhance congressional oversight of the executive’s sanctions authorities. She co-led the Combating International Islamophobia Act, which passed the House in 2021. She has led or co-led congressional letters expressing solidarity in defense of Brazil’s democracy, urging the creation of a Loss & Damage Finance Facility to help developing countries recover from climate catastrophes, and supporting the rights of migrants and refugees at every turn.

The partisan decision to remove her from HFAC as she becomes the first African-born ranking member of its Africa, Global Health, and Global Human Rights subcommittee is particularly egregious. Her formation of the U.S.-Africa Policy Working Group is an example of her willingness to push for a U.S. foreign policy that prioritizes partnerships with civil society and social movements. Her support for international accountability mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court, and close scrutiny of U.S. military operations in Somalia, the Sahel and elsewhere, are a needed corrective to policymakers who believe that the United States should be allowed to play by a different set of rules, thereby trying to preserve the integrity of international laws and norms.

In addition to uplifting her substantive contributions to HFAC, we cannot let this moment pass without condemning the obvious anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant sentiment behind this decision. Until this vote, Rep. Omar was the most senior Black woman serving on HFAC, in addition to being its second most senior Black member and its only Muslim member. Speaker McCarthy’s resolution is the latest in a line of attacks animated by unapologetic and vile Islamophobic smears that seek to marginalize Black and Muslim perspectives. Previously, these attacks have encouraged death threats against Rep. Omar. In addition to ginning up further hate, this latest vote is another in a string of efforts to silence her and others who share her background from determining and influencing key U.S. policies.

We vow to continue to engage with Rep. Omar on U.S. foreign policy, and we will work to ensure that policy discussions in Congress and throughout the country make room for her views and voice.

Sincerely,

198 methods

Amazon Watch

America Indivisible

American Friends Service Committee

Americans for Indian Opportunity

Americans for Peace Now

Arab American Civic Council

Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance

Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project

Borderlands for Equity

Bridges Faith Initiative

Center for Economic and Policy Research

Center for Victims of Torture

Civic Ark

CODEPINK

Colombia Acuerdo de Paz NGO

Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES)

CommonDefense.us

Council for a Livable World

Council for Global Equality

Defending Rights & Dissent

Demand Progress Education Fund

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)

Demos Action

Femena

Foreign Policy for America (FP4A)

Foreign Policy In Focus

Freedom Forward

Friends of the Earth

Giniw Collective

Global Zero

Greenpeace USA

Hindus for Human Rights

Human Rights First

Indivisible

Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti

Institute for Policy Studies Climate Policy Program

Institute for Policy Studies, New Internationalism Project

Islamophobia Studies Center

Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society

Jetpac Resource Center

Jewish Voice for Peace Action

Just Foreign Policy

Justice Democrats

Keystone Progress

Lansing Area Peace Education Center

Latin America Working Group (LAWG)

Libyan American Alliance

MADRE

Mennonite Central Committee U.S.

Minneapolis DFL

Movement Voter Project

MPower Change Action Fund

Muslim Community Network

Muslim Counterpublics Lab

Muslim Public Affairs Council

Muslims for Just Futures

National Iranian American Council Action

National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies

National Religious Campaign Against Torture

Our Revolution

Pacifica Strategies

Pax Christi USA

Peace Action

Peace Action New York State

Physicians for Social Responsibility

Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Poligon Education Fund

Progressive Change Campaign Committee

Progressive Democrats of America

Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)

Rethinking Foreign Policy

RootsAction.org

School of the Americas Watch

Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign

Social Security Works

SOUTH ASIAN NETWORK

South Dakota Voices for Peace

The Advocates for Human Rights (a Minnesota-based organization)

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)

The Black Hive @ M4BL

The People’s Justice Council

The Quincy Institute

Tunisian United Network

UltraViolet

US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO)

Win Without War

Wind of the Spirit Immigrant Resource Center

Women Cross DMZ



February 3, 2023
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, Flickr

Rishi Sunak on the 'Hindu concept of dharma'

Prime minister says he was brought up by parents who had come to Britain with an 'immigrant mind set'


Amit Roy | London | Published 04.02.23

Rishi Sunak spoke of the Hindu concept of “dharma” when he was interviewed by the high profile TV presenter Piers Morgan on the occasion of his 100th day as Britain’s first Indian origin prime minister.

Rishi said that when he resigned as Boris Johnson’s chancellor last summer and after he had been defeated by Liz Truss in the Tory leadership contest in the autumn, he had thought he was returning permanently to the backbenches and “that my career in frontline politics had come to an end”.

Morgan cut in: “Which begs the question, why on earth did you want to do this?”

Rishi said he was brought up by parents who had come to Britain with an “immigrant mind set”.

“There’s no point sugarcoating it,” Rishi agreed. “It’s not an easy situation. And, you know I do ask myself the same question on occasions. For me, it’s about duty. And actually, there’s a concept in Hinduism called dharma, which roughly translates into duty. That’s how I was raised. It was about doing the things that are expected of you, and trying to do the right thing. And even though it was going to be a nightmare job for all the reasons that you outlined, I felt that I could make a difference. And I was the best person to make a difference at that moment, especially given the challenges that people were facing.”

He gave Morgan the chance to come back in a year and check whether he had kept the five promises he had made – halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce the national debt, and cut NHS waiting lists and illegal migration by boat.

He had been dismissed by his critics as a “geek” and a “nerd” without the qualities of leadership. “I was reflecting on it. But what does that mean? To me that means somebody who is getting up early, who’s working hard, who’s on top of things, who’s trying to actually solve problems, and be diligent about that and throw themselves at it and give absolutely everything they’ve got day and night to try and do it. And sure, that is who I am. I’m not going to run away from that. And quite frankly, that’s what the prime minister should be. That’s what the country deserves.”

It is odd that Rishi chose to give an interview to the Rupert Murdoch-owned TalkTV which has a small audience though Morgan himself makes sure he is always in the public eye, for example with his obsessive attacks on Prince Harry’s wife, the erstwhile Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex.

Should she be invited to the coronation?

Rishi did not fall for that one: “You know I can’t talk about the royal family. One of the great privileges of this job is spending time with the monarch and also championing what is an amazing British Institute…. King Charles does an incredible job, we’re lucky to have him. The coronation is going to be superb. And we’re going to have a great time.”

At the end of the interview, “Uncensored”, conducted near the kitchen in 10, Downing Street, Morgan stood outside the famous black door, and declared: “I don’t know what you thought of him, but I felt he was more candid and open in that interview than I’ve ever seen him before. I also think that he means it when he says he’s determined to fix our problems.”

Rather like a headmaster, Morgan, who is 57, concluded by telling 42-year-old Rishi that he liked his ambition: “Prime Minister, wish you all the best. I want you to succeed. I think most people would like you to succeed. We have had enough chaos, enough failings. We need this country back on its feet, and I hope you are successful.”

Rishi would not tell him just how rich he was – “I’m financially fortunate”.  But he did get Rishi to confirm he would be releasing his tax returns.

“The tax filing deadline’s (January 31) just passed,” Rishi said. “So they’re just being prepared and they will be released.”

It was an interview aimed wholly at a domestic audience, so Morgan didn’t touch on the BBC documentary on Narendra Modi or what Rishi made of his Indian counterpart or how the negotiations for the Free Trade Agreement were going.

He asked Rishi about the pay demand by nurses and why they were charged for parking when they went to hospitals to save lives, the would be immigrants arriving in small boats across the channel from France, controversial colleagues who were causing him trouble like Suella Braverman, Nadhim Zawahi and Dominic Raab, and whether he would supply fighter jets to Ukraine.

Morgan, however, was focused on what he considered more pressing issues.

“We share a love of cricket,” he began. “And I don’t mean this as an insult, prime minister, but when it comes to your wife (Akshata Murty), you’re batting above your average. Would you agree?”

“Yes, 100 per cent,” concurred Rishi.

He reminded Rishi that one interview had got him into trouble with Akshata  “because (you had said) you’re tidy, she’s messy, you’re organised, she’s not,  you’re teetotal (he is addicted to the Mexican brand of Coca Cola made with sugarcane), she likes to drink – did opposites attract?”

“You’re probably better off to ask her,” advised Rishi.

He revealed: “We got engaged in a place called Half Moon Bay (in California). It was a place – we were students that we met when we were studying together in the States – that we used to walk in this area and because of this nice fancy hotel that we never could stay in and then I surprised her and we did go and stay there. But before that we went for a walk along the cliffs and we were alone and that’s where I proposed.”

“Bended knee?”

“Of course.”

“You are a little romantic!”

Morgan also asked him: “What does love mean to you?”

Rishi pondered the question: “Love? What does love mean? Well, I mean, there’s lots of different aspects to it.. over the past couple of months, in the past couple of years, I wouldn’t be able to do his job without her love and support.”

Inside the Global Fight for White Power

White nationalists around the globe are working together to disrupt multicultural societies and Western democracies.

Weapons training at the Russian Imperial Movement’s Partizan paramilitary camp. 

Credit: Screenshot from vk.com/partisan_kurs / ruspartizan.com

 Reveal

February 4, 2023

From Russia to Sweden and the United States, there’s a growing network of White nationalist groups that stretches around the world. The reporting team at Verified: The Next Threat investigates how these militant groups are helping each other create propaganda, recruit new members and share paramilitary skills.

We are updating this episode, which first aired in July 2022, to reflect recent activities by the Russian Imperial Movement and other White supremacist groups around the world.

We start with the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM. Its members are taking up arms in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which they say is a battle in a much larger “holy war” for White power. Scripps News senior investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt interviews a leader of the group who says RIM’s goal is to unite White nationalists around the world. The group even runs training camps where White supremacists can learn paramilitary tactics.

Russia’s White nationalists are making connections with extremists in the United States. Greenblatt talks with a neo-Nazi named Matt Heimbach, who was a major promoter of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon after Charlottesville, Heimbach invited members of RIM to the U.S. and connected them to his network of American White power extremists.

We end with a visit by Greenblatt to the State Department in Washington, where he interviews two top counterterrorism officials. They say they’re aware of the growing international network of White supremacists, but explain that White power groups are now forming political parties, which makes it more difficult for the agency to use its most powerful counterterrorism tools.
Dig Deeper



Listen: Verified: The Next Threat

Credits

Reporter: Mark Greenblatt | Editor: Taki Telonidis | Associate producer: Jess Alvarenga | Production manager: Steven Rascón | Sound design and music by: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Additional music: Allison Leyton Brown | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Sarah Mirk | Episode art: Screenshot from vk.com/partisan_kurs / ruspartizan.com via Verified: The Next Threat podcast trailer | Executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

Special thanks to Susanne Reber, Ellen Weiss, Bruce Edwards, Natasha Del Toro, Sean Powers, Lauren Knapp, Riin Aljas, My Vingren and Alexey Veselovskiy.

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Inasmuch Foundation.

The U.S. Christians Who Pray for Putin

The mystical connection between white Southern nostalgia, the global family values movement, and Russia.

Vladimir Putin in orthodox cathedral in Astana.
Image: The Kremlin

Bethany Moreton
March 11, 2022


Last weekend a far-right group called America First held a political rally in Orlando. At one point, organizer Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist also involved in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, invited attendees to cheer for Russia. Soon the audience was chanting “Putin! Putin!”

Without context this may seem puzzling. Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom?
White racist fantasies portray Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles.

In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump’s attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party.

More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin.

In the following vignettes, I explore how these connections came to exist, and what they reveal about the transnational currents of U.S. conservatism and white nationalism.

In the summer of 2018, the white supremacist League of the South debuted a bold new initiative on its website: in Russian, the neo-Confederates invited “the Russian people” to understand themselves as “natural allies” of white U.S. southerners in the fight “against the destructive influence of globalism.”


As descendants of white Europeans, we come from the same genetic pool. As heirs of the European cultural tradition, we share the same values, traditions, and way of life. And as Christians, we worship the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and our common Faith binds us as brothers and sisters. We Southerners believe in a society built on real organic factors such as Blood, Culture, and Religion.

If we are looking for historic roots of this imagined commonality between U.S. white nationalists and Russians, a good place to start is the 1975 address of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn to the New York chapter of the AFL-CIO labor union.


There’s a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don’t know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally for one whole year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. . . . [T]hey set her free. Although she didn’t have a rough time in this country, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts.

The Nobel laureate’s vituperation seems like a bizarre digression in a speech primarily devoted to denouncing the West’s weak, short-sighted capitulation to the ruse of Soviet détente. But in fact it was a window onto a fast-coalescing relationship between Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Christian nationalism and the new post-Civil Rights politics of whiteness of his American hosts.
Orthodoxy was marketed as an alternative for conservative Christians who were growing disillusioned by what they interpreted as liberalizing trends in their churches.

The U.S.S.R’s defectors and escapees had helped shape U.S. definitions of freedom since the onset of the Cold War, but Solzhenitsyn was unique. Born the year after the October Revolution into a propertied and educated family whose land was collectivized, Solzhenitsyn later wrote that he began to lose faith in the Soviet system after witnessing Red Army war crimes while serving as an artillery officer during World War II. Letters critical of Stalin landed him in the infamous Lubyanka prison in 1945. In a politically tinged decision, the Nobel committee awarded him its prize for literature in 1970, and Soviet authorities handed the West a cause célèbre when they denounced the writer as a dupe of Western reactionaries. In 1972 he announced his faith in an open letter addressed to the Moscow Patriarch. Two years later, after the first volume of his massive, quasi-historical The Gulag Archipelago (1974) was published in the West, he was deported.

The first in the U.S. evangelical right to recognize Solzhenitsyn’s political utility was North Carolina’s white supremacist senator Jesse Helms. Helms was at the time involved in supporting Rhodesia’s ruling white minority as a bulwark against communism. Intrigued by a 1973 report from the World Anti-Communist League, Helms pursued the dissident writer, inviting him to North Carolina and proposing that Congress grant him honorary U.S. citizenship. When Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to the United States in 1975, Helms dispatched his own translator as interpreter and escort. The Nobel laureate’s first stop was the senator’s suburban Virginia home, where the two compared notes on their respective Christian faiths and the paramount necessity of religious freedom to all other human freedoms. Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to speak to the AFL-CIO during the same trip came from its conservative leader, George Meany. Meany’s enthusiasm for the dissident writer derived from the labor leader’s Catholic sexual conservatism, his support for the Vietnam War, and his decades dedicated to purging left tendencies in the U.S. labor movement.

Solzhenitsyn’s visit was a success, and his message was passed among evangelical champions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Evangelical periodicals lauded his denunciations of U.S. moral degeneracy alongside Soviet criminality. He was soon swept up into the pantheon of Christian intellectuals claimed by evangelical activists dedicated to the suffering church in Russia.

Also haunting Washington that summer was Chuck Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon who’d recently been released from prison after serving time for trying to obstruct the Watergate investigation. Now freed, he was feverishly assembling his prison conversion narrative, Born Again (1976). Colson had been a key architect of the new Republican electoral coalition forecast by strategist Patrick Buchanan in 1973—the white, Christian, conservative Silent Majority that combined the former “Dixiecrat” wing of racist Southern Democrats with the second- and third-generation children of white working-class immigrants. In the Nixon White House, Colson had been responsible for wooing Catholic and Eastern Orthodox “white ethnic” union members away from their New Deal allegiance to the Democratic Party—including, specifically, by building a relationship with AFL-CIO President George Meany. Colson had also been instrumental in promoting Nixon to Christian conservatives by staging church services in the White House. Shortly before his arrest in 1974, Colson had been converted to Christianity by the CEO of the defense contractor Raytheon Company, an influential member of the secretive, politically potent D.C. Christian organization The Fellowship Foundation, best known for organizing the annual National Prayer Breakfast that is obligatory for sitting presidents.

For Colson and his colleagues on the right, Solzhenitsyn was not only a celebrity “Slav”–one of the major European immigrant ethnic groups they courted as an alibi for “white”—just as “crime” and “welfare” were being inscribed on Black and Hispanic Americans. More specifically, he represented a way to control the narrative about who got to be called a political prisoner. At stake was the legitimacy of the “law and order” politics that had won white ethnics to the Silent Majority. The War on Poverty was transformed into a “war on crime” by shifting resources and responsibility for social programs to law enforcement. Social protest was managed through massively expanded incarceration.
The Christian right wanted to replace Attica with the Russian gulag.

But behind bars, members of the Black Power, New Left, and Puerto Rican independence movements embraced an identity as political prisoners and called their prisons “the fascist concentration camps of modern America.” Prison uprisings exploded, peaking at forty-eight in 1972. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was bombarded with appeals for U.S. carceral systems to be subjected to international law. Andrew Young, the first African American ambassador to the UN, acknowledged that there were “hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people I would call political prisoners” in the United States. The most internationally recognizable was Angela Davis.

In speeches, editorials, and his book Loving God: The Cost of Being Christian (1983), Colson undertook a kind of counterintelligence campaign, promoting Solzhenitsyn as the paradigmatic political prisoner, a white man who had been persecuted for his anti-communist politics and his Christian faith. Over the next four decades, Colson’s Prison Fellowship ministry helped reframe the national conversation around criminal justice: arguing that rehabilitation could only come from the inner drama of religious conversion, Prison Fellowship justified the removal of secular, publicly funded services like GED classes, job training, and drug treatment from U.S. prisons.

In the contest over the meanings of captivity, Solzhenitsyn served the Christian right’s efforts to replace Attica with the gulag. American evangelicals leveraged his moral status to amplify the message: the people really suffering, in the United States and globally, were white Christians being crushed by the hands of godless government.

During the 1990s, the former Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan played political John the Baptist to Trump. Having delivered the Reagan Revolution, his wing of the GOP was resolute: they would not give up the ground they had gained for white Christian influence in the 1970s and ’80s. Via a 1992 insurgent presidential campaign, the “paleoconservative” made clear that rank-and-file Republican votes could be captured by populist white moral fervor. Speaking at the Houston convention that year, he declared a blood-and-soil “war for the soul of America” that clashed with the preppy monotony of the nominee supported by the party’s staid investor wing, former CIA director George H. W. Bush.

Buchanan’s jeremiads took particular aim at what he called “illegal” immigration. Wielding the slogan “America First,” he called for a “Buchanan fence” along the Mexico–U.S. border, and his best-selling book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2001), did little to conceal the racial content of paleoconservative sentiments—nor did the movement’s flagship magazine, Chronicles, edited by a founder of the neo-Confederate League of the South. In its pages paleocons outlined the threat to the nation’s “Euro-American cultural core” posed by non-white immigration. “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people,” declared Chronicles paleocon Samuel Francis in 1994.
Neo-Confederates invite “the Russian people” to understand themselves as “natural allies” of white U.S. southerners in the fight “against the destructive influence of globalism.”

For more than twenty years, the chief sponsoring foundation behind paleoconservatism was the Rockford Institute, under the presidency of historian Allan Carlson. In 1995 Carlson was invited to Moscow by Anatoly Antonov, professor of family sociology and demography at the prestigious Moscow State University, to discuss their shared concern: declining rates of marriage and fertility. Many post-Soviet nations saw their life expectancy and birthrates plummet in the 1990s as neoliberal “shock therapy” destroyed social safety nets in the name of liberating market competition, and Antonov’s was already a public voice of concern over small families. Carlson’s writings had intrigued him with the argument that an “androgynous ideal” was replacing the fertile, male-headed “traditional family” and concrete policy recommendations for privileging larger families.

Antonov introduced Carlson to like-minded Russian academics, politicians, and priests, and their shared vision became the World Conference of Families. On the U.S. side of the relationship, Carlson cultivated longstanding allies such as the Utah-based Sutherland Institute, led at the time by Paul T. Mero, whose work included penning a report called How Congress Supports and Funds Organized Homosexuality for the office of California congressman Bob Dornan.

Carlson spun off the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society in 1997 as the U.S. center of this new superpower partnership for the “natural family.” According to its 2007 manifesto, the movement “seek[s] to liberate the whole world—including dying Europa—for light and life, for children.” WCF’s U.S. communications director was even blunter about where American children should, and should not, be coming from: in a 1998 article on the prospect of Puerto Rican statehood, Don Feder opined, “We need more non-English speakers in this country like we need more welfare recipients, higher crime rates and an alien culture—all of which we’ll get” if we grant statehood to this “Caribbean Dogpatch.”

However, it was the Russian branch of the organization that assumed international leadership, complete with a private laser show in the Kremlin for its 2014 Moscow meeting. Its stature was bolstered by a novel “family values” wing of the Russian Orthodox Church advising Putin-era family policy and by patronage from representatives of Russia’s flamboyant business class. The meeting took place while the European Union was sanctioning the meeting’s host, private equity financier Konstantin Malofeev, for funding illegal military units in support of ethnic Russian separatists in Crimean areas of Ukraine.

The public face of this ethnopolitics are anti-LGBTQ policies, the result of many years of cross-fertilization and strategizing among WCF partners. The “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” laws currently sweeping through Republican-dominated U.S. state legislatures, for example, echo Russia’s 2013 parliamentary ban on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” That is no coincidence: the Russian bill relied in part on U.S. junk social science, some of it funded by the American right.

The connections do not stop at the level of ideology; they are also thoroughly institutional. As reporting by Imara Jones reveals, the blitz of bills targeting trans athletes, gender-affirming medical treatments, acknowledgement of homosexuality and trans identity in schools, and first trimester abortions are being crafted for their Republican legislative sponsors by, among others, the Alliance Defending Freedom. The ADF is the legal juggernaut of Dominionist Christian fundamentalism, advocating for literal Christian authority over education, religion, family, business, government, entertainment, and media. This is the outfit that platformed Trump’s Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for years and that won constitutional protection for religiously-justified discrimination in the Supreme Court cases Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It is also a member organization of the World Congress of Families, and has been well represented at the organization’s Russian meetings.
White nationalists applaud Putin’s aggressive promotion of Orthodox traditional values and racial nationalism in the fight against “anti-Christian degeneracy” and the erosion of white power.

Some of these individuals and organizations have won official status at the United Nations, allowing them to influence policy. But the public connections are only part of the story: a 2014 hack of emails revealed that WCF’s Russian funders also secretly promote a pro-Russian geopolitics through far-right anti-immigrant parties such as Italy’s Liga, France’s Front National, and Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs. From their standpoint, the logic is self-evident: an “anti-civilization” aimed at the “physical extinction of people” is underway through the “sodomization of the world,” and only Russia can save the day. It is no surprise that last week Putin cited the need to defend the traditional family as a reason for invading Ukraine.

For English-speaking audiences, WCF documentaries on “Demographic Winter” paint a dire picture of falling white birthrates, brought about by the sexual revolution, easier access to divorce, and the end of the traditional family. “The most common boy’s name in Amsterdam is Muhammad,” WCF’s media director tells the viewer—all you need to know, that is, about the apocalyptic consequences of white women’s selfish refusal to reproduce. “Certain kinds of human beings,” one of the talking heads explains, “are on their way to extinction,” unless we can orchestrate a “return to traditional values: patriarchy, properly understood.” The paleocons voiced their explicit fears of non-white immigrant “invasions”; their new institutional platforms transmute white nativism into pro-natalism.

In the YouTube video, an SUV full of bearded men in cassocks explain that they are on a road trip to South Carolina to explore the surprising growth of the Russian Orthodox Church in the land of “barbecue, country music, moonshine, fireworks, rednecks, and much more.” Their first stop is the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. First the museum curator dismisses the myth that the prominently displayed Confederate battle flag has any “modern political meaning.” He then addresses the question of Orthodoxy’s attractiveness for southerners: “I think there’s a very manly appeal. . . . It’s not just that you guys have cool beards like I do. It’s simply there’s challenge to the faith. . . . There’s discipline and high standards and something to aspire to. . . . Tradition.” To be sure, the video puts an optimistic face on the statistically tiny trend of white Southern conversion to Orthodoxy; converts are still probably not quite half of the congregants making up the various Eastern Orthodox churches in the United States, and Orthodoxy can claim less than one percent of Americans, versus evangelicals’ 25 percent. But the phenomenon has important symbolic value for the larger network of both conservative white evangelicals and neo-Confederate “traditionalists.”

In the spring of 1987, American Orthodoxy experienced one of the largest mass conversion events in its history. Two thousand American evangelicals were incorporated, parish by parish, into the Antiochan Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Men who had spent years in the central institutions of conservative evangelicalism and Pentecostalism—the Campus Crusade for Christ, Dallas Theological Seminary, Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), Oral Roberts University, Wheaton College—led their flocks into full communion with world Orthodoxy, and were themselves transformed into its priests and bishops. The mass defection—the culmination of more than a decade’s seeking by a loose network of self-proclaimed “Evangelical Orthodox” churches—helped raise awareness of Orthodoxy as an alternative for conservative Christians who were growing disillusioned by what they interpreted as liberalizing trends in their churches. Just as the New Christian Right was at the zenith of its political and cultural power, some of its most committed adherents abandoned its churches for the exotic alternative that few had ever encountered in the flesh. This sudden influx of converts altered the landscape of the Orthodox Church, and laid the ground for the racist right’s appropriations in the twenty-first century.

This dramatic Reagan-era mass evangelical defection to Orthodoxy paved the way for a small but significant hemorrhage. Several Christian celebrity converts have kept the issue alive in conservative Christian circles. The typical conversion narrative starts with an extremely self-aware religious “seeker.” This believer appreciates the fervent search for communion with Christ and clear rules for right living, but finds evangelicalism flaccid where it should be militant, insipid where it should be imposing, relaxed where it should be rigorous. Particularly disturbing are the seeming compromises with gender liberalization: church feels like another place where men’s authority and basic nature are unwelcome. Often in their telling, the converts are driven to Orthodoxy by a dramatic apostasy by mainline Christianity or the culture more generally: Episcopalians allow gay priests, Methodists allow women as pastors, abortion remains legal, the Supreme Court makes gay marriage the law of the land.

In these conversion scenarios, the tradition that Orthodoxy offers is one that is forthrightly patriarchal and masculine. “There is something in Orthodoxy that offers ‘a deep masculine romance,’” explains a convert priest. “’Most romance in our age is pink, but this is a romance of swords and gallantry.’”

Southern traditionalists see the former slave states as a particularly promising mission ground alongside the original Pacific Coast efflorescence of evangelical defection. “Like the planter class of the South,” writes one former Catholic convert to Orthodoxy for the neo-Confederate Abbeville Institute, “the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church recognizes how irrevocable institutional change can be, and has therefore been wary to allow it.” Among such ill-considered sudden changes he includes the “radical and immediate emancipation” of enslaved Southerners which the rational, principled planters opposed.
“Some [Orthodox] priests openly display Confederate symbols on their Facebook timelines.”

Similarly convinced by the paleoconservative tradition was white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, who founded the hate group Traditionalist Workers Party and converted to Orthodoxy, citing the Eastern church’s subdivision into Greek, Russian, and other geographically rooted patriarchates as evidence that “[r]egional and racial identity is a fundamental principle of Christianity.” He applauded Putin’s aggressive promotion of Orthodox traditional values and racial nationalism in the fight against “anti-Christian degeneracy” and the erosion of white power. “Russia is our biggest inspiration,” Heimbach asserted. “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.”

Heimbach was a principal organizer of the deadly 2017 Charlotteville rally, at which he appeared as a spokesman to the press. A number of other right-wing Orthodox communicants helped on social media to organize the event, as well. Despite credible reports of this activity by anti-racist Orthodox believers to their regional clergy and bishops, none of the American Orthodox jurisdictions took steps to distance the Church or denounce the white supremacist and anti-Semitic recruitment. After all, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—the body that speaks officially for the fourteen Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States—had responded with alacrity and clarity to denounce gay marriage and lament the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Why did Charlottesville not merit an equally speedy and unequivocal national statement?

The Orthodox bishops finally released a statement on Charlottesville itself, but the larger problem would not go away. “Some of our priests openly display Confederate symbols on their Facebook timelines,” charged an open letter on the scholarly Canadian site Orthodoxy in Dialogue in early 2018, adding that at least one Orthodox seminarian was actively posting white supremacist materials under an alias. More than 150 priests and laypeople signed a letter forcefully requesting “a clear, unambiguous public condemnation of white supremacy, racism, and xenophobia” from the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—to no avail. Matt Parrott of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party blasted back, asserting that “AltChristianity’s Church Militant is steadily and quietly working its way through the seminaries and sinecures just like the leftist radicals and homosexuals did in the 20th century.”

But meanwhile other devotees continue to build the mystical connection between aggrieved white Southern nostalgia, Putin’s authoritarian Russia, and Orthodox leadership of the global family values movement. At southernorthodox.org, the faithful quote Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and the neo-Confederate intellectuals of the Abbeville Institute. In the pages of Patrick Buchanan’s paleocon magazine The American Conservative, celebrity convert Rod Dreher advocates for an Orthodox seminary in Texas. And as new research by anthropologist Sarah Riccardi-Swartz shows, converts in Appalachia add another wing to the edifice of authoritarian white Christian nationalism. At the much broader level of institutionalized ambitions to “dominion,” the Russian partnership has proved invigorating to the American right’s overlapping agendas of white supremacy, masculine authority, and anti-democratic Christian authority. If Putin’s cooperation with the Moscow Patriarchate is a model for emulation, American theocrats are telling us what they seek here at home. We would be foolish not to take them at their word.

Bethany Moreton is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her book Slouching towards Moscow: American Conservatives and the Romance of Russia” (HUP) is forthcoming.

Putin Is Attempting to Center Russia as a Hub of the Global Right Wing

By Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher 

March 31, 2022
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Source: Truthout

In the current crisis, the left needs a full and thorough understanding of Vladimir Putin and his aspirations for Russia. We have been troubled by some of the statements from the U.S. left concerning the invasion of Ukraine. It seems when confronted with a complex array of contradictions, too many have lost an ability to sort out and grasp the principal contradiction: the Putin regime’s effort to subjugate Ukraine, end its sovereignty and deny its right to exist independently.

“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia. This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917,” Putin said in a televised address in February. “As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archive documents…. And now grateful descendants have demolished monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. This is what they call decommunization. Do you want decommunization? Well, that suits us just fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunization means for Ukraine.”

Putin here is clear enough: “Ukraine has no national rights that Russians are bound to respect. Prepare for reunification, reabsorption, or some other euphemism for subaltern status with Mother Russia.”

The difficulties among our left, however, are still understandable, given there are other major contradictions in this terrain. NATO’s expansion and press toward Russia’s border is a prominent one. The tension between the U.S. and the European Union regarding military expenditures in their respective budgets is another. Then there is the rise of pro-Putin right-wing populist parties in most European countries, with an echo in the U.S. right wing as well. The EU’s conflict with the Global South, both in military campaigns and refugee crises, also come into play. And in Ukraine, there are also the actual fascists of the Svoboda party and its armed militia — though their influence was sharply reduced by the recent election of Zelenskyy. And in both Russia and Ukraine, there are class and democratic conflicts with corrupt oligarchs among ruling elites.

Getting clear for the sake of both strategy and tactics will require a deep examination of Putin’s Russia and its political character and direction.

It is well known that Putin entered Russian elite circles as a KGB officer. Less well known are the circumstances of his rise. House of Trump, House of Putin, by Craig Unger tells the story: As a working-class youth in the old USSR, Putin’s sole ambition was to be an intelligence officer. The KGB told him to go to law school first, where he did well. After his KGB training, he was stationed in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to a mid-level position. When “the wall” came down and the USSR broke up, he was out in the cold. He made his way back to St. Petersburg, driving a cab to survive and hanging out in martial arts gyms, since he was reportedly good at judo. Along with sport and social solidarity, the gym crews also ran a lucrative drug trade, selling heroin from Afghanistan, among other contrabands. Putin used his money and connections politically, getting connected, first, to the city’s mayor, and later, to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. At every step, he brought his judo friends with him. They served as a “security” force and were rewarded with escalating levels of corruption in taking over the country’s wealth via trade and buyout deals. They remain with him today as the core oligarchs in his inner circle. It is said that Putin’s political rule is a three-legged stool — his loyal gangsters, the new intelligence operatives and state bureaucrats.

Under Yeltsin, the new Russian Federation was in considerable turmoil. U.S. neoliberal think tanks held sway for a time with a “privatize everything” policy that soon produced the ruling order accurately named a “kleptocracy.” It caused living standards to fall, along with life expectancy. Chechnyan fighters were wreaking havoc. On his way out, Yeltsin put Putin in charge, and to Putin’s credit, he got an economy functioning via central control of Russia’s immense oil and natural gas wealth. He also brutally crushed the revolt in Chechnya. Putin gained a popular majority for himself, if not for the semi-gangster crew around him.

After the Yeltsin years, the Russian Federation settled into a “Presidential Parliamentary” system, wherein the elected president picks the prime minister and cabinet. He can dismiss both, but parliament can only dismiss the prime minister. This shifts primary power to the executive, and Putin has made much use of it. After being elected as an independent, he oversaw the formation of his United Russia Party, which has always won solid majorities, partly because serious opponents have been jailed or otherwise forbidden to run. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) serves as a sizable but still second-place loyal opposition to United Russia, while the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) serves as a more secure backup to the otherwise dominant United Russia. The LDP, as many wryly note, is neither liberal nor democratic — nor is it much of a party. Its politics are a mixture of right-wing populism and a monarchism connected with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin, closely aligned with the church, embraces the right-wing populism of the LDP as well. But his “conservative” politics have deeper roots. Some might think that as someone who was both a KGB operative and trained through a USSR law school, Putin might have some underlying fidelity to Marxism. If so, they would be wrong. How so? Note that Putin, as a KGB officer, had intimate knowledge of how the USSR actually worked. Then in the Yeltsin period, he watched the sweeping theft and privatization of vast state resources by the top sectors of the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) elites and their criminal hangers-on. If he had any illusions, they quickly evaporated.

Putin took charge in 2000. A few years later, in 2006, he visited the Donskoy Monastery cemetery in Moscow. He placed flowers on the new graves of three prominent Russians he had reinterred there: Gen. Anton Denikin, philosopher Ivan Ilyin and writer Ivan Shmelev. Many leftists will recognize the name Denikin, a military leader of the counter-revolutionary “whites” who tried to overthrow Lenin and restore reactionary rule. Shmelev is a lesser-known individual to us, but he was a popular Russian writer who joined the “whites.” (“Whites” was the term used during the Russian Civil War to denote the myriad counter-revolutionary forces. The “Reds,” of course, were the Communists.)

Ivan Ilyin is the most obscure and most important today. Ilyin was a Russian nationalist philosopher in Lenin’s time who turned fascist, even moving his work to Germany under the Nazis in the 1930s. Putin now has his officers studying Ilyin, along with Ilyin’s follower today, Alexander Dugin, a modern Russian fascist and favorite of Steve Bannon, formerly of team Trump. Both Ilyin and Dugin are theorists and advocates of “Eurasianism,” a worldview asserting that dominance of the central land mass “homeland” of both Europe and Asia is the key to world hegemony.

The point? Far from wanting to be a “new Stalin,” Putin’s dreams are more in tune with wanting to be a new Tsar of the Eurasian ”Third Rome.” The first “Rome,” naturally, was Rome (i.e., the Roman Empire), and the second was Constantinople (i.e., the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church). When that center of the Byzantine Orthodox world fell to Islam, the Orthodox church moved north and eventually settled in the Moscow of the Tsars, thus the “Third Rome” to save the Orthodox church and all Christendom. Today’s Russian Orthodoxy, as well as Putin, see the main challenge to the church in the values of Western liberalism and the corrupting ideas of the Enlightenment, especially notions of equality that extend to the defense of LGBTQ+ people, the right to abortion and related causes. Putin’s jailing of the feminist rock group Pussy Riot is a case in point. A good number of U.S. Christian nationalists also look to this side of Putin as today’s anti-liberal chief defender of Christendom worldwide.

Putin claimed these departed anti-Lenin and anti-Soviet “whites” were “true proponents of a strong Russian state” despite all the hardships they had to face. He stated, “Their main trait was deep devotion to their homeland, Russia; they were true patriots” and “they were heroes during tragic times.” He also placed red roses on the grave of the prominent Russian monarchist, writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was also laid to rest there.

“Eurasianism,” as the term suggests, stretches from the Great Wall of China to the coasts of the United Kingdom. To unite “the homeland,” then, requires purging all of Europe, especially the West, from the “Atlanticist” influence of the U.S. and the U.K.

“Proponents of this idea,” write Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn in Foreign Affairs, “posited that Russia’s Westernizers and Bolsheviks were both wrong: Westernizers for believing that Russia was a (lagging) part of European civilization and calling for democratic development; Bolsheviks for presuming that the whole country needed restructuring through class confrontation and a global revolution of the working class. Rather, Eurasianists stressed, Russia was a unique civilization with its own path and historical mission: To create a different center of power and culture that would be neither European nor Asian, but have traits of both. Eurasianists believed in the eventual downfall of the West and that it was Russia’s time to be the world’s prime exemplar.”

The task of purging Europe of Atlanticism — its various forms of liberalism, socialism and social democracy — requires Putin allies within each country concerned. Hence over the past decade or so, we have watched Putin’s growing support, both financial and political, for a variety of right-wing populist parties and politicians. The Pew Research Center in 2017 published a study examining the trend of Europeans who favor right-wing populist parties being significantly more likely to express confidence in Putin. “The largest increases in confidence were in Germany and Italy, where 31% of the public in each country expressed confidence in Putin in 2016 compared with 22% of Germans and 17% of Italians in 2012,” the study says. “Notably, the survey was fielded before revelations of Russian hacking in the U.S. presidential election and the subsequent increase in anxiety ahead of European elections.”

It continues:


Within these countries, those who hold favorable views of right-wing populist parties — like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) or Italy’s Northern League — are more likely to express confidence in Putin than those who hold unfavorable views of those parties. Just about half of those who give positive ratings to the AfD and 46% who favor the Northern League say they are confident Putin will do the right thing regarding world affairs.

In France, those partial to the right-wing National Front (FN) are about twice as likely as those with negative views of the FN to say they are confident in Putin’s leadership (31% vs. 16%). And those who view Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom favorably are nearly three times as likely as the party’s detractors to express confidence in Putin (26% vs. 10%).

Putin may have miscalculated in his invasion of Ukraine, not only in terms of underestimating Ukrainian resistance, but also in terms of the response by forces on the political right around the globe. Putin seems to have underestimated the force of national identity among those trying to assert national identities and sovereignties of their own that they see challenged. This has traditionally been a difficulty for forces on the far right internationally, i.e., how can one be an internationalist when one is a fervent right-wing nationalist? As Jason Horowitz writes in The New York Times:

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party — which received a loan from a Russian bank — declared Russia’s annexation of Crimea was not illegal and visited Mr. Putin in Moscow before the last presidential elections in 2017. While she opposes NATO, Ms. Le Pen denounced Mr. Putin’s military aggression on Friday, saying, “I think that what he has done is completely reprehensible. It changes, in part, the opinion I had of him.”

Her far-right rival in the presidential campaign, Éric Zemmour, has in the past called the prospect of a French equivalent of Mr. Putin a “dream” and admired the Russian’s efforts to restore “an empire in decline.

Like many other Putin enthusiasts, Zemmour doubted an invasion was in the cards and blamed the United States for spreading what he called “propaganda.” Horowitz runs through a number of other European countries and their rightist leaders with similar results.

At least one voice on the U.S. right is standing firm. Pat Buchanan has written a string of columns backing both Putin’s nationalist and religious “traditionalism.” Even with the invasion unfolding, he explains, “Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.” He favorably compares Russia’s takeover of Ukraine to Teddy Roosevelt and Panama. (Roosevelt’s administration orchestrated the secession of Panama from Colombia and blocked Colombian troops from putting down the rebellion.)

Tucker Carlson on Fox News has been carrying on in a similar vein with more half-baked notions. Carlson, who has been accused of being “one of the biggest cheerleaders for Russia” during the conflict, asked viewers whether Putin had called him a racist or promoted “racial discrimination” in schools, made fentanyl, attempted “to snuff out Christianity” or eaten dogs. “These are fair questions,” claimed Tucker, “and the answer to all of them is ‘no.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that, so why does permanent Washington hate him so much?”

So, what does this tell us?

For much of the left, exclusive opposition to U.S. imperialism is equivalent to being on the “right side” of history. This is frequently articulated in terms of the notion that the priority for the U.S. left must be opposition to U.S. imperialism.

The problem here is that, first, it ignores that the U.S. is not the sole source of global violence and oppression on this planet and, second, that there have been times when the U.S. left has had to focus elsewhere, e.g., support for the Spanish Republic in 1936 in the face of a fascist uprising and the intervention of Italy and Germany. This reality coexists with the fact that the U.S. had not ceased to be imperialist.

What our examination should remind us is that Putin is part of a global right-wing authoritarian movement that seeks to “overthrow” the 20th century. In Putin’s specific case, we are looking at a complete repudiation of the founding principles of the USSR, most particularly, the notion of the right to national self-determination. But what is also underway is the positioning of Putin-led Russia as a pole for the global right. Opposition to socialism, for sure, but also opposition to constitutional rule as a whole.

A mistake made by several anti-imperialists, in the 1930s and early 1940s, was to see in Imperial Japan a savior from Western colonialism and imperialism. It is to the credit of communists such as those of the Viet Minh in Vietnam, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of China that they could see through the alleged anti-imperialism of Japan and recognize that what was being introduced through the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not “co-prosperity” but capitalist domination under Japan and a racial subordination of entire populations.

We should ponder this history as we reflect on Putin’s obsession with Eurasia and the white supremacist, homophobic, sexist, religious intolerant politics that rest behind that one term.


Carl Davidson is a socialist writer and educator. He was a leader of the New Left of the 1960s. Today, he resides in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, where he was born and raised. His current projects include the Online University of the Left and Beaver County Peace Links.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime trade unionist, international activist and writer. He is a past president of TransAfrica Forum and was a cofounder of the Black Radical Congress.