Left and Right extremes merge in support of Vladimir Putin

Leaders of Italy’s Lega Party and Austria’s Freedom Party have publicly fawned over Putin, writes Jack the Insider. Pictured: Lega Party leader Matteo Salvini addresses supporters. Picture: AFP

There is very little certainty in politics but one principle you can take to the back is that if the extreme left and the hard right agree on something, then it is invariably a very bad idea.

Earlier this month, 70,000 people took to Wenceslas Square in Prague to protest cost of living increases, rising energy prices and a shortage of affordable housing.

Those who spoke at the protest included the leader of the hard right Freedom and Democracy Party, Mark Rutte, and the leader of the Czech Communist Party, Katerina Konecna.

While the protesters had genuine concerns, the FDP and the Communists pushed a laundry list of grievances including the nation’s membership of the EU, NATO and the government’s support for Ukraine.

Strange bedfellows, you might think.

We are seeing the confluence of the hard right and the extreme left, falling over themselves in loud agreement, play out across Europe.

Leaders of Italy’s Lega Party and Austria’s Freedom Party have publicly fawned over Putin, portraying Russia as a bastion of sovereignty, identity, and cultural conservatism against the forces of liberalism destroying Europe.

The UK has been perhaps the most outspoken critic of Putin’s adventurism, but the denunciations always come from the political centre. Former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn uses the Stop the War rallies to push for the west to stop arming Ukraine. Corbyn is the deputy president of the Stop the War coalition, alongside Andrew Murray, a former communist who joined Labour when Corbyn became leader.

Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Picture: AFP

The common theme of both extreme left and hard right utterances is opposition to NATO and military aid for Ukraine.

It’s an intriguing world where every piece of leftist propaganda or right-wing ultranationalist demand is not mere political fantasy. There is always a kernel of truth for the sake of vague credibility. Beyond that, the pro-Putin sentiments leap into the bizarre.

The Left is generally more voluble while the Right seem to acknowledge now is not the time for bold pro-Putin assertions. For them, praise for Putin takes a back seat to bemoaning economic hardship as a form of recruitment drive. I dare say they are a bit smarter.

Marxists refer to Putin as a ‘Bonapartist’ – a lavish term where autocrat would do. Marxists always think in contrived isms. In this case the term is designed to distract from the obvious blind spot that Marxist ideology inevitably produces tyranny and totalitarianism in reality.

If you bother to read Marxist musings on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (I did so you don’t have to), the first impression is that Marxist commentators can peer through the fog of war. Guarded assessments on the conduct of the war driven by the scarcity of independent reporting are not for them. Complex military strategies are foreseen weeks and months in advance where they play four-star generals shuffling men and munitions about on gigantic maps in their London pieds á terre.

If we have learned anything about the pointy end of political extremism it is that assumptions might be the mother of all screw ups but it’s dad who is rolling out the death squads.

The journal of the International Marxist Tendency is an online scribble-athon punched out by an assortment of old men and women none of whom could fight their way out of a wet paper bag. They clung to the delusion of historical materialism and its related mechanisms to drive class conflict and ultimately revolution by labour against the means of production when they were 20 and see no reason to stop now.

Thus, Ukraine’s manoeuvring in and around Kherson in Ukraine’s southeast was a feint to distract from the real counteroffensive, according to Marxists catching up with all the news on their tellies made from the blood, sweat and tears of exploited workers.

Both Left and Right see Volodymyr Zelensky as a risk taker, a ‘desperate’ gambler who directed Ukraine’s counteroffensive through Kharkiv and Izyum all the way back to the Russian border. Reclaiming 5000 square kilometres of Ukrainian turf was not a stunningly successful military operation. They would have you believe the counteroffensive was a propaganda exercise designed to keep European and American arms and alms support for Ukraine in place.

Meanwhile, Putin lives under the delusion that he is a strong man when really, the Marxists claim in amusing mixed metaphors, that he has feet of clay while living in a Kremlin bubble (it can be one or the other, but it can’t be both, guys) where the only news he hears is good news.

The real enemy is neither Putin nor Zelensky but the imperialists in the West who have armed Ukraine. Marxists view the war in Ukraine as a distraction from a bigger game. They say they are there merely to chronicle it with absolute moral certainty while waiting to sweep the ruling classes off for re-education.

Those with a decent grasp of logic might have noticed one or two holes in their argument. If the imperialist west did not aid and help arm the Ukrainian military, then the conflict may well have been over now or at least Ukraine would have been utterly devastated. It seems Marxism has no problem with larger nations invading smaller ones. Nationalism is a political construct designed to protect capitalism after all.

But their gritted teeth denunciation of Putin is all for show. The Marxists pine for the good old days of “second to none” Soviet military intelligence. Had Putin remained a communist all would be well. He could have seen Ukraine’s counter offensive coming. Putin’s failing, according to Marxists, is his disinclination for total war. Meagre troop numbers now are compared with Stalin’s glorious liberation of Ukraine where a 2.5 million strong Red Army (most of them Ukrainian units) expelled the Nazis, split the Wehrmacht’s Army Group South in two and set the timing for the D-Day landings at Normandy.

Just don’t mention Holodomor where an estimated seven million people perished due to Stalin’s insane policies a decade earlier.

As the northern winter approaches, there will be heightened pressure in Western Europe to drop its support for Zelensky and Ukraine. Putin will put bribes on or under the table for those countries who ponder cutting economic sanctions. What the extremes of the Left and the Right share is a view that Putin can be appeased.

Arguably, the hard right is less convinced about Putin than their Marxist bedfellows, but both have become so addled they portray NATO as the aggressor even while Russian artillery pounds Ukraine.