The purpose of a good investigative writer is to explore what others ignore. What constitutes newsworthy items is not always determined by the mainstream media. Sure, the latter guarantees widespread exposure for issues it deems important, but also ignores those topics which shed light on the machinations of imperialist-corporate power.

I have deliberately chosen not to write too much about Syria just yet. That is not because the toppling of the former Ba’athist government in Syria is inconsequential, but because there has already been extensive coverage of the topic, accompanied by mandatory celebratory pictures of the downfall of a brutal regime.

I also do not wish to participate in the interminable, emotionally draining inter-Left debate on Syria which only recycles cliches on road trodden by numerous commentators in the past.

The Nazification of Arab nationalism

I never begrudge anyone their release from prison. Opening up the dungeons of the Ba’athist regime is a relief to its victims. Please, let’s stop using the word Assadist – there is no such thing. What I am concerned about, and was waiting for, is the anticipated Nazification of the Ba’athist regime and its leaders, both Hafez and Bashar Al-Assad. It is easy, and lazy, to deploy the Hitler analogy when an authoritarian leader is overthrown, and it plays directly into a view of the world our corporate-managerial masters want us to adopt.

Alois Brunner (1912 – 2001 or 2010) was an Austrian SS officer responsible for the deaths of thousands of European Jews. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, he fled accountability for his crimes, and settled in postwar Syria. The Ba’athist government gave him sanctuary, and he spent the rest of his life in that nation. He is buried in Damascus.

Our toadying corporate media, sensing an opportunity to kick the Ba’athist party while it is down, gave publicity to this sordid episode. Making the Arab-Nazi connection even more explicit, Al Jazeera claimed that Brunner advised Syrian security forces in setting up prisons and torture techniques.

Making the Arab-Nazi connection serves to further the false claim that Arabs – and Palestinians in particular – oppose the Israeli state on the basis of irrational antisemitism. The Ba’ath party advocated a pan-Arab nationalism which respected the rights of non-Arab ethnic minorities. It proposed the building of a socialist economy, not Soviet nor Marxist. Its ideological mix of pan-Arabism and ethnic inclusivity made it inhospitable to the racialist, ethnically paranoid hypernationalism of the Nazi party.

One wonders what the reaction of the mainstream media would have been if Syria, or another Arab nation, had provided sanctuary for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Actually, we do not have to look too far for such a scenario. Canada provided safe haven for thousands of Ukrainian (and Eastern European) wartime Nazi collaborators, who were the recipients of Ottawa’s considerable largesse.

Worthy refugees

When Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian man who served in the Waffen SS (Galician) was given two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament in September 2023, it was inadvertently providing the tip of an iceberg. Thousands of Ukrainian SS troops were quietly provided sanctuary by successive Canadian governments after the Second World War. One of the Trudeau government’s most prominent figures, Chrystia Freeland, is herself a grandchild of Mykhailo Chomiak, a propagandist for the Ukrainian Nazi administration during the war.

No, we cannot hold the grandchildren responsible for the sins of the grandparents. Freeland, who has used her ethnic background as a platform to climb the ladder of Canadian politics, has never distanced herself from her white supremacist grandfather. Indeed, Chomiak helped a white supremacist regime massacre the grandparents of today’s Holocaust survivors.

Trudeau and Freeland should face the consequences of the Hunka affair. They should admit the ethical bankruptcy of Canadian foreign and domestic politics – turning away Jewish refugees from Europe during the war, but then providing sanctuary for their white supremacist killers, is the height of moral decrepitude and cynical political expediency.

Both Trudeau and Freeland are intelligent, articulate politicians. Trudeau specifically has marketed himself as a reasonable centrist, removed from the rancorous, divisive Left vs Right paradigm. He should have known better than to sweep criminal and shameful episodes of Canadian history under the carpet.

We must highlight the words of Judi Rever, journalist from Montreal who wrote that:

Freeland knows full well that soldiers from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) collaborated with the Third Reich and took an active part in the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland. She would also know that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a paramilitary group, carried out massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and hunted down and killed several thousand Jews during that period. More than any other Canadian politician today, Freeland knows this history. Canadians should ask what was going through her mind as she bestowed praise on a man who fought the Russians during that pivotal time, a man we now know was part of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS whose troops were involved in the mass murder of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians in the 1940s.

Canadian politicians, including whomever replaces Trudeau and Freeland, should read a new book that explores this underreported chapter.

Published in 2024, Peter McFarlane is the author of a new book called Family Ties: How a Ukrainian Nazi and a living witness link Canada to Ukraine today. The author elaborates the history not only of Ukrainian Nazis, but their Jewish victims as well. For instance, traveling to the Eastern European town of Brody, a city in Western Ukraine, McFarlane found that out of a prewar Jewish population of 10 000, only 88 Jewish persons survived.

There is a museum in Brody today, which does commemorate the Second World War. No, not the Holocaust victims – the Holocaust is not even mentioned. It is a memory lane for the Galician Division; its history, uniforms, insignia, Nazi-aligned personnel and conduct. The government in Ottawa provided refuge for these personnel, but subjected Jewish refugees to bureaucratic obstacles and official resistance.

War crimes trials are something we regard as quite remote, from the Australian perspective. Indeed, our direct experience of war crimes relates more to the cruelties inflicted upon Australian and British soldiers by Imperial Japanese troops. We are more likely to remember the Burma death marches and the thousands of died building the Thai railways, rather than Auschwitz.

We are reasonably free in liberal democratic Australia, and I can do what I want in my front garden. How would it be if I erected a statue to former Japanese emperor Hirohito, in my front yard? Am I not exercising my right to free speech?

I raise this hypothetical example to highlight the similar kinds of issues being debated by antifascist Canadian communities today. No single person can be an expert on every historical issue. We do expect our political leaders, however, to exhibit better conduct and be held to a higher standard. The foreign and domestic policies of Anglophone nations are allegedly motivated by respect for the law, and not by manipulative and deceitful political calculations.

Lack of accountability is a poor lesson to pass on to future generations, especially when covering up shameful episodes from recent history.

Scientific literacy is a skill to which all of us nonscientists can aspire. I was good at science and mathematics at school; but not so outstanding as to consider a career as a scientist. As we age, we regard science as something for students, children and boffins at universities. This is rather disturbing, because all of us are impacted by the findings and applications of the sciences.

If you regard scientific issues as outside the purview of the general public – think again. It is true that scientific research is nonpolitical – the physicists examining the nature of subatomic particles are far removed from the everyday thrust-and-parry of parliamentary politics. Nuclear power, however, is not.

Be that as it may, let’s focus on a recent and worrying development. The new authorities in Syria, from the fundamentalist organisation Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) have revised school textbooks and curricula by removing all references to evolutionary biology, and the Big Bang, the current paradigm for the origin of the cosmos. The new HTS regime wants to repudiate the more secular platform advocated by the previous ruling party in Syria, the Ba’ath organisation.

It is their country, to be sure, and the Education ministry can modify the curricula at all levels of education if it so decides. However, there have been strong protests by ordinary Syrians against this revision of the curricula. This measure, deleting evolution and Big Bang, places the HTS authorities squarely in the same camp as the fundamentalist religious right in the United States, who intend to replace scientific theories in biology and cosmology with creationism and its modernised cousin, Intelligent Design.

Of course there is debate about evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin was extremely worried about the reception of his theories by the scientific community. The most preeminent paleontologist of his time, Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873), world-renowned expert on the natural history of life, strongly opposed evolution. When Agassiz spoke, people listened. Darwin and his supporters in the scientific community responded to all the objections launched at evolutionary biology. Agassiz, the ‘great man’, was proven wrong, back in the nineteenth century.

The material, natural causes of the biological and geological worlds has been a sore point for many religions since then. Darwin was not the first, nor the last, to navigate what is broadly termed the culture wars.

Being a materialist, in the philosophical sense, does not automatically make you correct. There is currently a strong materialist explanation for the origins of human behaviour – DNA. The claim ‘it’s in the genes’, has become a standard explanation for every aspect of human social behaviour, from war-making to mathematics. As we can all see, attributing human and animal behaviour to genes is seductively simple, yet wrong. Ok, if the word wrong is too strict, let’s say simplistic instead.

The late Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), American paleontologist and historian of science, wrote regular science and natural history columns which, among other things, attacked the genetic reductionist view of human nature. Originally called sociobiology, and now repackaged as evolutionary psychology, Gould heavily criticised his fellow scientists, such as Konrad Lorenz, for falling into a genetic determinist trap.

The sociobiology trend went against the rising demands for gender and social equality advocated by the Left in the 1970s and 80s. Sociobiology’s proponents, such as the late great Edward O Wilson (1929 – 2021) responded to critics by suggesting that they were motivated by preconceived political prejudices, not pure science. Gould demonstrated that the practice of offering supposedly scientific rationales for existing inequalities goes back centuries.

Gould’s approach to science could hardly be labeled anti-scientific. He helped to communicate biology and natural history to the public.

Abiogenesis, the origin of life itself, is not part of evolutionary biology. It is however, a growing topic of interest to biologists and geologists. While the first materialist, nonsupernatural explanations for the origins of life go back to Ancient Greece, it is the work of Soviet Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin (1894 – 1980) that must be singled out here.

Working on the origins of life from chemical processes, he was the pioneer in formulating a scientific approach in explaining how pro to life forms could arise in the conditions of life in the Earth’s early history. Amino acids formed from the chemical and highly volatile conditions prevalent on Earth – the prebiotic soup – was the theory formed independently by Alexander Oparin in the Soviet Union, and J B S Haldane, a British scientist investigating the same topic. Known as the Oparin-Haldane theory, it blazed the trail for other scientists to follow.

Oparin’s initial findings got a recent boost, when researchers recreated the high levels of radiation and electrical energy conditions of the early Earth in a laboratory. The gradual changes of lifeless chemicals into self-replicating nucleotides, combined with enzyme catalysts, has been reproduced by researchers.

American scientists from the 1950s were able to recreate the spark of life – the famous Miller-Urey experiment. Recreating the conditions that gave rise to the earliest organic molecules is no longer in the realm of science fiction. Scientists are now looking for life in places which we would initially consider too hostile for organic matter to form. Hydrothermal vents, located at the bottom of the ocean, are a place where mineral-rich fluids bubble up and interact with CO2, and that combination forms long chains of fatty acids.

When examining science news, it is important to remember that no single person can be an expert in every branch of scientific endeavour. We can however, aim for a scientifically literate population, and make ourselves immune to rampant misinformation circulating in the toxic ecosystem of social media. No one person possesses the gateway to an ultimate truth. All of us must come together with the scientific community for the purpose of reaching greater understanding.

When examining the Holocaust, a recurring and important question arises; ordinary Germans knew what was occurring in the death camps, so why did they do nothing? The full horrors of the industrialised mass slaughter in the camps were publicised by scholars, escapees, journalists and other anti-Nazi figures. Why did ordinary people remain complacent?

That question acquires contemporary importance and relevance when we examine the details of the Israeli government’s genocidal violence against the Palestinians of Gaza. While the criteria of what constitutes genocide may be subject to debate, there is no question that Israeli actions amount to genocide.

Amnesty International is just one of numerous human rights organisations that has used the description of genocide to reflect what West Jerusalem and its Zionist supporters are committing in Gaza. Indeed, multiple statements by current Israeli government politicians reveal the genocidal intent of Zionism with regard to Gaza. Threatening to cut off water, food, electricity and medicine to the Palestinian population in Gaza is a very clear statement of genocidal intent.

The very suggestion that the Israeli military is carrying out a genocide in Gaza prompts a furious reaction from Zionist supporters across the world. Indeed, Zionism’s partisans have become effective Holocaust deniers, excusing and rationalising the crimes of Israeli forces in a manner reminiscent of traditional Holocaust revisionists of old.

The late Raul Hilberg (1926 – 2007), the great Viennese-born historian and pioneering scholar in the field of Holocaust studies, examined this politics of memory in his 1996 memoir. Denouncing those who persisted in Holocaust denial, he engaged in documenting the sophisticated bureaucratic machinery of mass killing in Nazi Germany.

Yet, Zionism’s fervent supporters, including their followers in Australia, respond with vitriolic fury at the mere comparison of Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza and the Holocaust.

Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian American scholar and writer, travelled to Gaza to write an on-the-ground report about what was happening there. She described Israel’s scorched earth tactics as comparable to the Holocaust of World War 2. Her article, originally commissioned by The Guardian US, was denied publication. The main objection of the Guardian’s editors was Abulhawa’s use of the Holocaust as a comparison with Israel’s ongoing attack against the Palestinians of Gaza.

Here is where I get a bit confused. Hilberg made quite clear, in his magisterial books on the Holocaust, that the industrialised mass killing of people involved numerous and meticulous bureaucratic measures, without which mass murder of an ethnic group would be impossible.

In covering the issue of Beijing’s policies towards the Uyghurs in China, the imperial governments of Washington, Ottawa, London and so on quickly and forcefully made clear their contention that Beijing is guilty of genocide. Why? Beijing is accused of carrying out forcible sterilisation of Uyghur women. Whether that is true or not, I do not know.

What I do know is that Washington, Ottawa and London immediately accused Beijing of genocide. No, Uyghurs are not being rounded up, stripped of their clothes, force-marched and shot, such as the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza.

Yet, the imperialist trio had no hesitation in launching the politically and emotionally charged claim of genocide at Beijing. It appears the charge of genocide is to be used as a political football against governments deemed hostile to Washington’s interests. However, the mere suggestion of a using the word genocide to describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza elicits a furious reaction from Zionists and their supporters.

In Hilberg’s preeminent study, Perpetrators, Victims Bystanders (1992), he provided useful and necessary categories of participation when examining genocide. He elaborated on those communities and persons who, while not actually pulling the trigger in shooting people, carried out the policies and actions which facilitated the Holocaust, and comparative genocides such as the Armenian mass killings of 1915.

Keep in mind the categories described by Hilberg, when considering the following news item. The Dutch government released the names of 425 000 Nazi collaborators during the German occupation of their nation. These archives were released in early January this year.

The Dutch authorities promised to release the relevant documents from the archives back in 2023. They kept their pledge, in an effort to confront the distressing aspects of their own complicity in the genocide of European Jews.

We regard these collaborators as accomplices, helping to grease the wheels of the genocidal Nazi war machine. What does it say about the governments of Washington, London and Ottawa who consistently and unfailingly supply weapons and armaments to the Israeli authorities, enabling the latter to prosecute their genocidal campaign in Gaza?

As Joe Biden’s term in office comes to an end, it is important to reflect on his legacy – as an enabler of genocide. During his presidency, he never hesitated to send millions of dollars worth of armaments and ammunition to West Jerusalem, thus assisting Netanyahu’s government in its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

In December 2024, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSN), released a report highlighting the prospect of famine in northern Gaza. With the total blockade of food aid to northern Gaza, FEWSN warned that 75 000 Palestinians were at risk of undergoing famine conditions, and all the diseases consequent of mass starvation. The FEWSN is an organisation funded by the US Agency for International Development.

Not only did the Israeli government of Netanyahu denounce the FEWSN report and its findings, it demanded – along with the US government – that the original report be retracted. Its demand was granted earlier this month. I thought only totalitarian dystopian regimes, such as Stalinist Russia, engage in famine denial?

It is incumbent on all of us to meticulously document and expose the genocidal policies of the Israeli state, and expose the deceitful rationalisations offered as excuses by Zionism’s mouthpieces. We must condemn the governments which act as accomplices to genocide. Demolishing the entire conditions of life, and undermining the ability of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza to live and sustain itself, qualifies as ethnic cleansing.

We have all heard of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519) the great Italian inventor, painter and scientist. That is the way it should be; there is no doubting his unparalleled genius. But how many of us know that the person, who can rightly be called the father of automation predated Da Vinci by two hundred years, and was a Muslim? Ismail Al-Jazari (1136 – 1237), a mechanical engineer and scientist, laid the foundations of automation and robotics through his prodigious inventions.

In fact, it is more chronologically correct to call Da Vinci the Al-Jazari of Europe. Today, we worry about robots taking our jobs, and automation has definitely undermined the need for manual workers in many industries. Anxieties about automation go back centuries, and indeed, Al Jazali invented machines that were not just playthings for the rich, but devices with practical applications.

First, we need to make some observations about our own Anglophone culture, so we can better approach an enormous gap in our understanding of science and society.

In our Anglophone nations, we regard ourselves as the products, and inheritors of, western civilisation. We have defined our origin story from the philosophical and cultural legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome. We like to think that our contemporary philosophy, for instance, traces its origins back to the thinkers of ancient Athens and Greek city states.

That is all well and good – and we have gained numerous insights from the cultural and scientific contributions of Ancient Greece. Marx and Engels themselves were fascinated by the achievements of Greece, and the associated Greek city states that made up Ionian civilisation. However, this point of view completely ignores the historic and no less remarkable contributions of non-European and nonwhite civilisations.

In our time, if there is one nonwhite culture that is demonised and vilified, it is the Islamic world. Maligned by harmful stereotypes of bearded fanatics waving guns, the Muslim communities in the West are targeted as an ‘enemy within.’ This rampant Islamophobia, heavily promoted by a corporate media owned by a financial oligarchy, blinds us to the incredible innovations, both scientific and philosophical, of the Islamic civilisation.

Ismail Al-Jazari, a mechanical engineer by trade, lived through turbulent political times as a loyal servant of the Artuqid dynasty. The latter was a 12th century Islamic Turkmen dynasty that ruled in what is today central southern Turkey, northern Iraq and Syria. Al Jazari’s birthplace, Diyarbakir, was a central stronghold of the Artuqids.

Every car driver today can tell you all about the crankshaft, a crucial feature of the internal combustion engine. Al Jazari was the first to design a basic crankshaft, elaborating the mathematical principles in converting reciprocating motion into rotational motion. His purpose in designing such a device was to come up with an effective water-drawing machine to assist farmers with irrigation.

Using a wheel which set in motion several crank pins was an innovation of Jazari’s. While wheels and crank pins had been used for centuries, it was Jazari’s connection of transforming rotary motion into linear movement that was crucial for the future emergence of steam engines as well as the internal combustion engine.

It is true that Jazari built upon the inventions of his predecessors. He was familiar with engineering techniques in China, Persia and so on. But it was his unique mindset and toolkit that made possible innovations which had a lasting impact. He documented his extensive efforts in a book of knowledge that has survived and been translated down the ages.

He also invented what can be regarded as the world’s first ‘robot’ – a musical device that automated the different functions of a musical quartet. Well, okay, he designed four robot musicians; a flautist, a harpist and two drummers. Much like a modern day music box – prior to digital music and Spotify – Jazari’s contraption could be programmed to play different melodies and tunes. This musical robot band, operated by hydraulic switching, is the earliest example of a ‘programmable’ instrument.

He also designed a water-driven hand washing device, with humanoid type servants offering soap and towels. The ‘peacock fountain’ was a hydraulic automaton, an early ‘robot’ to assist in the function of handwashing hygiene. A major portion of Jazari’s Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices was devoted to fountain mechanisms.

All this groundbreaking work and innovation in the field of mechanical automata make a strong case for regarding Al Jazari as the ‘father of robotics.’

Before any readers through seemingly clever yet monotonous retorts my way – ‘what about Al Qaeda?’ is one screaming red herring that gets tossed around when talking about Islam – denunciations of jihadist groups is not my concern. If you wish to condemn Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram – be my guest. You may find shrill denunciations of these groups in the mainstream media echo chamber provided by Fox News and Murdoch’s News Corp propaganda outfit.

In our Anglophone community, the Global South is largely ignored, or treated as just a passing curiosity. Sure, we hear about Israel in the Middle East, particularly in the context of that nation’s military attack on Gaza. Maybe South Korea and Japan get a mention, because they are integrated into the US military apparatus.

This deliberately manufactured systemic cultural ignorance deprives Anglophone audiences of information regarding the accomplishments of nonwhite cultures. Redressing this imbalance is a necessary component of challenging the dysfunctional role of the corporate media in our hyper-consumerist society.

No disrespect is intended to Leonardo Da Vinci. Let’s give Ismail Al-Jazari the credit he deserves.

Rebranding is a PR/marketing strategy that has taken the world by storm. Obviously the corporate sector is most impacted by rebranding. As the media-political world has become increasingly privatised and subject to shareholder interests, PR and marketing strategies have made their way into the political-media arena as well.

Today, we are all familiar with Amazon; do a quick Google search and you will seen thousands of results regarding the company. Funny how we have forgotten the actual rainforest in South America with the same name.

The purpose of this example is not to make us feel ashamed, but to emphasise an insidious effect of rebranding. It makes us see what the corporation wants us to see as consumers, and to forget those things that are important to us as people, but unimportant to the transnational corporation.

In Australia, and similar Anglophone nations, immigration is a hot button issue. It arises at every election time, and politicians make immigration – or rather anti-immigration – a political football. The mainstream parties attempt to outdo each other on being perceived as ‘tough on immigration.’ That stance usually leads to the conflation – and apportionment of blame – for crime on immigration.

Just as a matter of interest, conservative politician Peter Dutton, who is currently angling to be the next Australian version of Donald Trump, failed to stop criminal activities when he headed the relevant government department as its minister. Dutton, as head of the conservative coalition, makes securing our borders a top priority. He failed to achieve that as Home Affairs minister.

Diaspora existence

What gets lost in the noise regarding immigration is the sequel – diaspora communities and intermixing. Diaspora existence is the inevitable consequence of migration, and that experience requires further examination.

Across the world, successful examples of diasporan assimilation abound. Consider the nation of Brazil. In the Anglocentric nations, Brazil is hardly on the radar, yet it has numerous similarities with other settler-colonial nations. Outstripping its former colonial master, Portugal, in both geographic size and population, Brazil is home to the largest Lebanese community outside of Lebanon. It is also home to the largest diasporan Japanese community.

Lebanese in Brazil

Numbering around 7 million, more than in Lebanon itself, Lebanese Brazilians have established a bustling, thriving economic and social community. Arriving in Brazil in the 1870s and 1880s, these Syrians (today considered Lebanese) were mostly from the Maronite Catholic faith. These Lebanese/Syrians soon established themselves in the economic and political life of the nation. There are Lebanese-descendant Brazilians in the national parliament.

Let’s also highlight the two million Japanese-descendant Brazilians, who have also contributed to the melting pot culture of modern day Brazil. Arriving in the early 1900s from Okinawa, the Japanese descendant population has made its own imprint in Brazil. Okinawan language and culture has not only survived, but thrived in its new Brazilian home. Japanese influence is evident in the culinary sphere, technology, and the visual arts.

Ukrainians in Canada

Whenever a politician raises anti-immigrant sentiments, the most obvious and recent example being Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs, a response from pro-immigrant parties is to raise examples of migrant and refugee success stories. Pointing to high profile examples of migrants who have ‘made it big’ in their adoptive homeland, it is hoped, will undermine the anti-immigrant attitudes and prejudice. Attacking xenophobia by highlighting the inspirational journey of successful migrants is one tactic in defending migrant communities.

Exposing the lies and fakery of xenophobic politicians is always commendable. Sharing migrant success stories is one way of uplifting the spirits of those who are marginalised by anti-immigrant parties.

Ukrainians in Canada are an example of a migrant success story. They have assimilated very well into the corridors of economic and political power in their adopted nation. Ukrainians in Canada were labour organisers and workers. After the end of World War 2, the Canadian government flung its doors open to members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an ultranationalist and Nazi collaborationist group, whose members fought for an ethnically uniform Ukraine.

Rebranding Nazi collaborators as ultra-patriotic freedom fighters

Ethnically cleansing those regions of western Ukraine occupied by their Nazi German allies, these ultrarightist collaborators were surreptitiously given sanctuary in Canada (and other Western nations) as a bulwark against the Left. Their crimes as members of the Waffen SS were overlooked, as they formed effective right wing shock troops in their adoptive homeland.

In a remarkable example of rebranding, Ukrainians who committed crimes against Jews, Poles, Russians and socialist Ukrainians were transformed into freedom-loving ultra-patriotic anti-Stalinists. Gaining control of community organisations, these Ukrainian ultranationalists, with the help of the Canadian authorities, established newspapers, sports clubs, folkloric dance, scouting groups and a historical perspective which whitewashed their previous criminal activities.

I am not here to attack multiculturalism; every ethnic group has the right to settle and live in peace. I am not interested in promoting one type of nationalism over another. I am highlighting the fact that in Canada, statues of Nazi collaborators did not emerge out of nowhere. They were erected in an ultranationalist conservative community cultivated by Ottawa in a cynical exploitation of multicultural sentiments.

Let’s draw a rough parallel example; if the main source of French migration to Australia were Vichy French Nazi collaborators, and statues of Marshal Petain popped up in Sydney, what kind of message would that send to the next generation? We cannot express our support for multiculturalism while at the same time denying the validity of other marginalised groups.

National self-determination is a fundamental principle of international and domestic politics. Every nationality has the right to determine its own future. Every politician pays lip service to national self-determination; even Adolf Hitler, in the 1930s, loudly supported that right – of the Sudeten Germans. Employing agents within that particular community, he used the Sudeten Germans as a cudgel to break apart Czechoslovakia.

Diaspora communities must not become transformed into political auxiliaries, but allowed to articulate their grievances without their cynical manipulation by big powers.

The Bermuda Triangle…..ships that disappear without trace…….the Loch Ness monster……the Kraken…..the Devil’s Sea. Maritime mysteries, whether they be ships that have curiously vanished without trace, or mythical tentacular squid-like monsters from the deep, have fascinated us for centuries.

It is impossible to comprehensively cover and debunk each and every maritime legend that has emerged throughout human history in one article. However, we can make a foray into the maritime mystery world with a basis of philosophical skepticism.

If there is a case to be made for convergent evolution in mythology, we can see it in the evolution of maritime folklore, due to time, migration, and living with an aquatic environment. Scandinavians have the mythical beast, the Kraken; the Japanese have Umibozu, a sea creature/spirit that swallows the ships whose crews displease it.

The Leviathan, originating in various Hebrew biblical references, has become widely known in the English-speaking nations. In the book of Enoch, included in the apocrypha, leviathan is a female sea monster, while behemoth, the male counterpart, is exiled to east of Eden.

The treacherous waters of the Bermuda Triangle are arguably the best known maritime mystery trap in the world. It does have its evil twin in the Pacific, the Devil’s Sea. Notorious for its dangers, the Bermuda Triangle has claimed its share of disappeared ships, and airplanes, throughout the decades.

Bounded by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, the Bermuda Triangle has been the subject of numerous TV specials, shockumentaries and pulp publications. But does all that hype match the reality?

The US Coast Guard does not actually acknowledge the putative triangle as a particularly distinctive or disturbing source of maritime hazards. They have analysed the physical losses of maritime traffic, and apart from natural causes, there are no mysterious nonphysical or spiritual-energy forces making the said triangle an unusually hazardous region.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in conjunction with the US Navy, have conducted extensive tests regarding maritime traffic in the alleged triangle. They have stated that there are no supernatural causes, no negative energy or demons, making ships disappear.

The fantastical speculations regarding the Bermuda Triangle trace their modern origins to the 1960s, with writer William Gaddis to first coin the term in 1964. Since then, pulp magazines and putatively scientific TV programmes have jumped on the bandwagon.

Most tropical storms and hurricanes in that part of the world travel through the region of the Triangle, making for dangerous conditions. But that is neither better nor worse than other seas and oceans. The Gulf Stream, a powerful ocean current which produces sharp changes in the weather, passes through the Bermuda Triangle. Once again, a factor that increases hazards for maritime traffic, but nothing extraordinary or unusual.

The depth of the ocean in the region of the triangle varies – some areas are 1500 metres deep; in others, such as the Puerto Rico trench, the depth is 8230 metres. However, that variation in depth is nothing unusual in maritime environments.

It is not just in the Atlantic Ocean that we confront maritime mysteries. In the Pacific Ocean, thanks to paranormal advocate and New Age spiritualist Ivan T Sanderson, we have the Devil’s Sea. A maritime region south of Tokyo, the Devil’s Sea became the Pacific counterpart to the more famous Bermuda Triangle. Known as the troublesome sea by Japanese sailors, the infamy of the Devil’s Sea exploded in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a maritime twilight zone.

Sanderson, a British biologist with a strong interest in the paranormal and cryptozoology, began writing essays and making media appearances regarding his favourite pseudoscientific hobbies. He expounded, for instance, on how UFOs can be piloted, and presented numerous theories on cryptozoology, the search for extinct and/or fantastical, legendary animals.

The Devil’s Sea, a tectonically and weather active region of the Earth, presented a wonderful opportunity for Sanderson to expand on his paranormal hobbies. To be sure, there have been maritime mishaps and accidents in the region known as the Devil’s Sea. A Japanese scientific research vessel disappeared in that region in 1952. The entire crew of 31 people died.

At first, Japanese investigators were stunned – how did an entire ship vanish? Was the Devil’s Sea aware of the original purpose of the mission, and deliberately target the vessel to protect its secrets? Actually, there is a physical explanation. An underwater volcano erupted, just as the ship reached its destination. The incredibly hot water caused the vessel to lose its buoyancy, and tragically the ship sank.

However, as with the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea has an unlimited capacity for making facts, and rational thinking, disappear without trace.

I would be remiss if I did not include a section of this article on the world’s most famous cryptid, the Loch Ness monster. Nessie, as she is affectionately known, has fascinated the mystery-loving public for generations. Sure, there have been numerous cryptids in the past – creatures known only through eyewitness testimony and fragmentary ‘evidence’. The Sasquatch is one such creature, (Bigfoot) currently roaming the forests of Northern America.

However, it is Nessie, inhabiting the murky waters of Loch Ness, Scotland, who has exercised the imaginations – and drained the pockets – of the cryptid’s devotees since the 1930s. It is near impossible to prove something does not exist. You may believe, if you want to, that a leprechaun inhabits my refrigerator and is detectable only when the door is closed. I will go on my merry way, because there is no point in expending time and energy to disprove the existence of leprechauns, unicorns or martians.

There are Loch Ness investigators, who invite members of the public to submit any information or evidence they think they have to buttress the claim for a Loch Ness monster. However, there is no factual basis for Nessie; even the famed black-and-white photograph showing a dinosaur-like creature in the lagoon is a hoax.

In our age of social media influencers, it is easy to be influenced by memes, viral videos, and celebrity-endorsed products. Philosophical skepticism, while an ancient practice, still has modern day applications. The persistence of maritime mysteries is one area of population culture where a healthy dose of skepticism would provide an antidote to the highly speculative and fantasist stories that envelope the culture in which we live.

US President-elect Donald Trump has made his contempt for immigrants, particularly from nonwhite nations, explicit. His extreme nationalism provides a platform for the expression of anti-immigration sentiment in the most vulgar, ignorant terms. In October this year, prior to the US election, he recycled ideas about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genes. Claiming that migrants from Latin American countries possess ‘bad’ genes predisposing them to murderous criminality, Trump made clear his proto-fascistic ideas about race.

Back in 2016, Trump, who never ceases to remind his audiences about his intellectual greatness, attributed his superior intellect to his German background. Expressing his pride in his German blood, he placed himself in the same camp as those Germans who share similar pride in their allegedly superior bloodline.

Overt racism, a central pillar of Trump’s worldview, is odious. In fact, his ideas regarding the purported genetic inferiority of nonwhite immigrants frequently find expression from his political allies and campaign supporters. His claims about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genes have their origins in eugenics, a large body of beliefs which basically holds that humanity can be improved by breeding out the less desirable traits, while promoting those traits which improve the human stock.

Trump has spoken of how immigrants from nonwhite nations are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country. However, we should not be too hard on Trump. His ideas, while reprehensible and reminiscent of eugenics, are not outside the mainstream in the United States.

Indeed, his ignorant rantings about genes are not his fault. If that sounds like a defence of Trump, well, in a way, it is. The United States (and Britain) have a long and tortured history of promoting eugenics – the educated classes have been the worst offenders. Trump and his supporters are the products of an political establishment, buttressed by scientific leaders, that has promoted and popularised the dubious theories of eugenics and race science for decades.

Let’s pause the discussion about eugenics there for a moment, and make an observation about immigration. Sonali Kolhatkar, wrote an article responding to the many untruths circulated by Trump about immigration. She makes the point that yes, dumping newly arrived refugees and asylum seekers into small towns with no plan for resettlement creates resentment and anxiety among people already struggling with unemployment, poverty and lack of access to services.

Kolhatkar notes that this is precisely what current US President Joe Biden has done to migrants from the Caribbean, Latin American and Asian and African nations. That procedure left the door open for anti-immigrant politicians like Trump to walk through. There was one exception to that policy – the handling of Ukrainian refugees. White European migrants from Ukraine were not simply taken by bus and left in a town to fend for themselves.

The US government coordinated with local authorities, provided a pathway for absorption and resettlement, and were allowed to work immediately. This made the assimilation of Ukrainian refugees smooth; in contrast to the demonisation of Hispanic and African migrants, who were denied work permits and abandoned once they arrived.

It is remarkable that immigrants, much like Schrödinger’s famous cat, can occupy two states simultaneously; they take jobs from ‘real’ Americans, but also lazily parasitise the welfare system, collecting unemployment benefits.

Eugenics has a long history in the US and Britain. If you think that eugenicist beliefs are confined to the idiotic bigots like Trump, think again. Nikola Tesla, (1856-1943), the famed Serbian American engineer and inventor, was undoubtedly a genius. He was also an advocate of eugenics. By 2100, he believed, eugenics would be universally accepted, and the ‘feeble-minded’ sterilised, thus improving the quality of the human race by eliminating the undesirables.

Tesla was not alone this view; conservative US politicians, judges, police officials, science fiction writers Robert Henlein and H G Wells – eugenics cut across political lines and occupations. Julian Huxley (1885-1975), the noted evolutionary biologist and geneticist, was a firm advocate of eugenics. The first head of UNESCO, who pleaded for the inclusion of science in the remit of the fledgling UN agency, was known as a eugenicist.

The point of the above examples is not to provide a list of notorious villains to be condemned; not every eugenicist was a Nazi or a fascist. However, the main point to make is that eugenics was firmly baked into the scientific and philosophical outlook of Anglophone societies.

Were there scientists who opposed eugenics? Absolutely yes. The Russian scientists, such Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay (1846-88), coming from a society that had a collectivist philosophy, rejected the ultra competitive individualism inherent in eugenicist ideology.

You may read about the details of Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay in my prior article here.

Miklouho-Maclay rejected the race science of his European counterparts, in particular that of evolutionary biologist Ernest Haeckel (1834 – 1919). The Russian scientist had worked among indigenous people, and refuted the supposed genetic inferiority of what were termed ‘lesser races.’

The topic of eugenics and discredited field of race science is not just a matter of historical curiosity.

I wrote about the resurgence of race science in this article in 2020. Earlier this year, The Guardian in cooperation with the English organisation Hope Not Hate, published an exposé of an entire network of far right activists and intellectuals, funded by a tech billionaire, reviving eugenicist and racial science beliefs.

Calling themselves the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), the group aims to resuscitate outdated and obsolete ideas regarding eugenics, and make palatable to the public. Rehabilitating the ideology of race science – the allegedly biologically inherent differences between races – has real world political implications.

When Trump speaks about good and bad genes, he is not regurgitating anything new or original. He is drawing from a longstanding reservoir of eugenics. His administration is sure to translate these ideas into official anti-immigration policies. Let’s be sure to know the nature of the enemy so we can confront it.

Over the last few months, I have referred to the importance of the 1974 discovery of Lucy, the australopithecine that revolutionised our understanding of hominin evolution. The fact that Lucy was bipedal is significant, because it indicates that the freeing of the hand was crucial in the emergence of modern Homo sapiens. I referred to the fact that Frederick Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx, made the critical observation regarding the freeing of the hand from locomotion duties in his 1876 pamphlet The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.

In a previous article, I stated that paleontologists and archaeologists will fill in the blank spaces, long after Engels death. The liberation of the hand made possible the beginning of practical labouring activities. That is the basis of what makes us uniquely human.

I was looking for a way to elaborate these points in an article. Well, you know the old saying “ask and ye shall receive”? Well, over the last few weeks, ample evidentiary confirmation of that proposition has been provided.

Dominic Alexander, writing in Counterfire, examines this very topic in an excellent article. It is labouring activity that is the basis of consciousness, tool making, and the emergence of modern humans. No, all these features did not emerge in a singular, explosive event. Bipedal locomotion preceded tool making behaviour by millions of years.

Be that as it may, Engels was correct to stipulate labour activity as the crucial component in the development of intelligence. It is through labouring that we modify and use our environment. The environment in turn influences our activities and ideas. No, humans do not ‘triumph’ over nature. Engels plainly stated that each supposed ‘victory’ over nature rebounds on us in the form of harmful ecological consequences.

To quote from Alexander’s article, he elaborates, beginning with Engels’ words, in the following manner:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us.’ Engels goes on to detail a number of environmental disasters in human history, starting with deforestation in ancient Mesopotamia, the impacts of the same in Greece and Italy, and their serious consequences for climate and soil fertility: ‘Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature … but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature.

The australopithecine fossil known as Lucy – Dinkinesh in Amharic – was discovered fifty years ago. Surely there are more recent findings that shed light on hominin evolution and bipedalism? Yes, there are.

Kenya’s Turkana region is well known for its rich fossil history. The Conversation magazine reported that a team of paleontologists have uncovered fossilised footprints of two bipedal hominin species. Homo erectus, one of our direct ancestors, and Paranthropus boisei, a distant and now extinct relative, walked and interacted with each other in the same region.

The Turkana region in East Africa is the place of numerous fossil discoveries. Since the 1970s, paleontologists have excavated the geologically rich soils, documenting the findings in the sedimentary trenches.

Why is this dual footprint discovery so important?

Finding the footprints of two different hominin species walking along the same lakeshore in Kenya provides evidence that human evolution was not a simple, linear progression. It was a branching, complex mosaic of interacting streams – a delta, if you will. Some streams rejoin, others eventually dry up.

No, we cannot discern the level of interaction between the two hominin species. Did they talk to each other? Just eye each other off? Use their hands to make signs? What is known is that they walked within hours of each other. At the very least, they cohabited. Paleontologists have found the fossilised footprints of other animals, including horse-like creatures and cow-like animals.

Our hominin ancestors coexisted with each other for thousands of years. That may seem like a bland observation, yet it is important for a good reason. In our billionaire-dominated society with its cult of individual entrepreneurship, we have allowed the billionaires (and the media they own) to define human nature. Surely hominins are inherently selfish, grasping creatures, willing and able to crush competition in the rise to the top?

Prehistoric findings such as the one above overturn our viewpoint of humans as naturally greedy, self-centred creatures. Cohabitation and cooperation were part of the evolutionary picture for thousands of years. In fact, we would not have evolved cognitive and intelligence faculties if it were not for social cooperation.

Do paleontologists know the intellectual capacities of Lucy? No, of course not. Do the latest footprint discoveries mean we can draw definitive conclusions about when and how consciousness emerged? No, it does not.

The emergence of tool making is marked by disagreements and controversies. Tool making, while a sign of cognitive development, underwent numerous stages – the Oldowan culture being an important example. Culture does not evolve in a one way, linear fashion, but in a weblike projection of various cumulative yet uneven trajectories.

The origin of consciousness as self-awareness is still a mystery, subject to disputes between psychologists and neuroscientists. We can make a number of pertinent observations here. Labouring activity is the prerequisite for the eventual development of tool making, intelligence and cognitive abilities. The mind, and its achievements, are not independently arrived at without a material basis.

The mind is definitely a creator – of ideas. The embodied self awareness of the mind has led us to invent multiple instances of disembodied minds – gods if you will – that possess and exercise the features of mind without a physical brain. The spiritual is a product of our minds, a projection of our self-conscious awareness into the non-physical realm.

Findings such as the fossilised footprints referred to above can help us discover our hominin roots, and fill in the picture of our emergent humanity.

In July this year, it was reported that Lieutenant William Calley Jr, the American soldier convicted of leading and carrying out the My Lai massacre in 1968, had died at the age of 80. He passed away while in hospice care in Florida back in April.

Calley led his soldiers, of Charlie Company, in March 1968 into My Lai village, as part of the American war in Vietnam. Initially informed that there were Viet Cong guerrillas in the area, Calley and his men found none.

Herding the Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, into ditches, the mass killing began. Elderly people were bayoneted, unresisting villagers were herded into huts and firebombed with hand grenades. Women and girls were gang raped. In all, 504 Vietnamese were slaughtered. There were no American casualties.

The massacre was initially covered up by the military authorities. It took the persistent efforts of witnesses, brave US soldiers such as Ron Ridenhour and Hugh Thompson Jr, and a then-young intrepid reporter Seymour Hersh, to bring this horrific massacre to light.

An investigation into the My Lai massacre was launched by the US military, eventually, where witnesses described the atrocities committed in nauseating detail. Calley was the only American soldier convicted of the crime, in 1971. His sentence was subsequently reduced by successive US administrations, and he was placed under house arrest. Charges against every other soldier who participated in the gruesome massacre were dropped.

Sentenced to life imprisonment, Calley was in jail a total of three days, before being placed under house arrest on the orders of then president Richard Nixon. Living on the base where he had been trained, Fort Benning, Georgia, Calley’s sentence was reduced to 10 years in 1974.

Fort Benning, named after a Confederate general, was renamed Fort Moore in 2023.

Calley was pardoned and released in 1975. Numerous pro-war politicians, both Democrat and Republican, waged a political campaign for Calley’s release, claiming that his conviction and sentencing were too harsh. Rehabilitating Calley’s actions was a particular initiative in rehabilitating the American war on Vietnam. The war itself was presented as something noble and righteous, blighted only by the unfortunate actions of overzealous patriotic soldiers like Calley.

Whenever a case like this comes to the attention of the international public, there are demands that international laws and conventions governing the conduct of warring parties be followed. For instance, if American soldiers were captured by the enemy (whether Vietnamese or other nationalities is unimportant) surely Washington would loudly demand that their compatriots be treated with respect and dignity?

There has been a multitude of books and documentary materials relating to the Americans held captive by North Vietnamese forces. Actually, there were no POWs left over after the Vietnam war finished in 1975, but that did not stop Washington from making the mythical POW/MIA an international cause célèbre for decades.

In fact, during World War Two, there was an infamous case of American POWs, after surrendering, were mercilessly gunned down along with cooperating Belgian civilians. The Malmedy massacre, as the incident is known, occurred in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, a major military engagement in Western Europe.

After a brief battle, surrendering American military personnel were killed by the Waffen SS. The German officers responsible for the actual killing, and those who gave the orders to kill POWs, were tried as war criminals in 1946.

Not only were the German soldiers who carried out the killings imprisoned, but also the commanding officers Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Peiper. This was the time of the Cold War, and West Germany formed an indispensable ally in Europe of the Americans. The West German government, though nominally committed to denazification, overlooked the wartime crimes of ex-Nazi officers. The latter infested the armed forces, police and legal apparatus of the West German state.

Dietrich and Peiper, though found guilty of the Malmedy massacre and imprisoned, walked out of gaol free men in the 1950s. These men, and their former Waffen SS colleagues, formed an organisation dedicated to rehabilitating the reputation of Nazi Germany and the wartime SS. American military veterans’ organisations strongly protested the release of Peiper and his associates.

There was a measure of justice in the end. Joachim Peiper lived quietly in France after his release. In 1976, his true identity was discovered – his house was firebombed, and Peiper perished in the flames. His assailants have never been found.

While Calley faced the consequences of his actions, the military and intelligence personnel who designed and rationalised the Vietnam War never faced any accountability. Who among us knows the name Wesley Fishel? A Michigan State University political science professor, he was active in military intelligence and the CIA.

An advisor to the American installed Saigon South Vietnamese regime, he worked closely with Ngo Dinh Diem, Saigon’s American subsidised satrap. Running a vicious dictatorship takes hard work, and Diem was ably assisted by Fishel in this regard. Diem’s secret police, trained and equipped by the United States, formed a feared prop of the Saigon dictatorship.

Fishel designed and advocated the concept of strategic hamlets, forcing Vietnamese villagers into designed camps, demolishing their homes and killing their livestock. The underlying rationale was to deprive the National Liberation Front of recruits. Political loyalties were closely monitored, and the large Buddhist community was targeted by Diem forces.

Fishel himself lived the secluded and luxurious life of a proconsul, keeping his distance from the natives he was supposedly protecting from communism. Indeed, South Vietnam was an American sponsored plutocratic dictatorship, a totalitarian entity that was precisely what they claimed to be fighting against in their communist adversary.

After the war, Fishel returned to the United States, and continued his academic career. His top boss, former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, took up the presidency of the World Bank.

It is high time that those who give the orders, seated behind desks and computers, face the consequences for making the decisions which lead directly to heavy loss of life and ecological damage.

James Bond, in his Pierce Brosnan phase, was a refugee supporter. At least, that is what we are led to believe from the character’s statements and actions in the 1995 movie GoldenEye.

Bond expresses the opinion that the forcible repatriation of Cossacks by the British government in 1945 from Allied-occupied Austria to the Soviet Union was a source of shame. The main villain of the film, played by Sean Bean, is the son of one of the repatriated Cossacks, who exacts revenge on the government that supposedly ‘betrayed’ his father, sending him to certain death in the USSR.

That makes for a fantastic movie scenario, full of action, crime and death-defying stunts.

The return of the Cossacks by the British government at the time has turned into a minor albeit important cause célèbre in Tory and conservative circles. Authors such as Nikolai Tolstoy, ultrarightist enthusiast, whose anti-Sovietism is something of an obsessive crusade, wrote books about the ‘betrayal’ of the Cossack soldiers. Remaking himself as a ‘revisionist historian’, his exercises in revisionism somehow always correspond to an ultranationalist reinterpretation of the events and outcomes of World War 2.

Ever willing to provide more grist to the mill of Britain’s paranoid Russophobia (complemented by Sovietphobia), Britain’s conservatives have turned the fate of the Lienz Cossacks into a historical epic, shrouded in a hypocritical ‘self-criticism’. Naughty us, we should not have done that.

There is just one problem with this narrative; the Cossacks who were forcibly repatriated by the British, under the terms of the Yalta agreement, were Nazi collaborators, ultranationalist extremists and war criminals. Formed as auxiliary units of the Wehrmacht and SS, the Cossacks were deployed by the Nazi authorities to combat the Yugoslav partisans, anti-guerrilla operations, and suppress the famed Warsaw Uprising.

Fighting for the Nazis, and maintaining ultranationalist views, is perfectly okay for the imperialist states, if you are an immigrant foot soldier for regime change.

The Cossacks are an East Slavic subset of the Russian-Ukrainian polity. Their history is complex, but they derive from the feudal-era conflicts and principalities in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. A semi-nomadic people, their name derives from the Turkic qazaq, meaning ‘adventurer’, though that is disputed by some historians.

Occupying the vast grassland steppe regions of the Don, Terek and Kuban regions of Russia and Ukraine, they are known for their distinctive fur hats, squat dance, and horseback skills. While they led numerous armed rebellions against the Tsar, the Cossacks became a feared paramilitary force, enforcing the laws of Holy Mother Russia with the whip and cudgel.

Employed as strike-breakers, the Cossack formations in the Tsarist Russian army were fiercely patriotic, espousing a virulent antisemitic Greater Russian nationalism, coupled with ferocious loyalty to the Orthodox Church. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Cossacks fought both for and against the Communist regime.

Numerous anticommunist Cossacks, maintaining their ultranationalist Russian nationalism, escaped to the West. The enforced collectivisation of Cossack lands in the 1930s, and the official de-Cossackisation policy, brought its own problems. Nevertheless, Cossacks joined the Soviet army and fought for the Bolsheviks in World War 2. Cossack units still march in the annual Victory Day parade in Moscow.

The monumental Soviet novel And Quiet Flows the Don, published in the 1930s, is an epic novelisation of the Don Cossacks and the impact of collectivisation. Its author, Mikhail Sholokov, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1965.

Cossack identity re-emerged in the wake of Gorbachev’s perestroika, and by the early 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted the Cossacks as a necessary prop for the Russian state. The ultranationalist outlook of the Cossacks found a corresponding home in the perspective of the Kremlin.

The rightwing Cossacks, having sought regime change during the years of Communist rule, have made their peace with the Putin administration. It is important to note that point, because there was a rather interesting article in Inside Story, denouncing the Cossack and Russian community in Australia for being a pro-Putin fifth column.

Denouncing the socially regressive and ultrarightist perspective of the Australian Cossacks and their Russian supporters, the author paints a dark picture of dastardly and nefarious forces at work, manipulated by the Kremlin. It appears that paranoid anticommunist fantasies of ‘reds under the bed’ controlled by Moscow have been updated and metamorphosed into new illusions of the Kremlin’s international influence.

Indeed, if there is a foreign power exerting a malign influence in Australia, look no further than Washington.

If the Cossacks in Australia are a repository of ultranationalist and militarist values, and upholding the social conservatism of the Russian Orthodox Church, then that should be no surprise. The imperialist states have nurtured, and provided sanctuary to, precisely the militarist and ultrarightist Cossacks for decades.

In fact, similarly to Nikolai Tolstoy and James Bond, you expressed remorse for having failed to provide sanctuary for Nazi-collaborating Cossacks, because they were appropriate cannon fodder for your regime changes fantasies. Imperialist states use extremist fighters, rebranding them refugees. Once their utility has expired, their extremism is used against them.

Indeed, the objection to the ultranationalist extremism of the Cossacks sounds hollow, because Washington and London (with Canberra in tow), willingly use and heroise ultranationalist Russians who work in line with regime change objectives.

In March of this year, Russian fighters, attached to and trained by the Ukrainian military, made a stunning public relations incursion into Belgorod, southern Russia. The anti-Putin soldiers, named the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russia legion, espouse white nationalist and racist perspectives, seeking to establish an imperial Russian society. In fact, these Russian groups are directly modelled on, and trace their ideological pedigree to, the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlasov, a Nazi collaborationist outfit which fought for the German army.

I have no interest in Cossack nationalism, or prioritising Russians over Ukrainians, or one nation over another. I am not interested in cultivating nationalist resentments. I am interested in exposing the monumental hypocrisies of the Anglo-Atlantic alliance, which perpetuates hatred in the service of war.