Abstract: Modern America was founded in violence; first slavery and genocide of natives, then revolution against mother England, then war as the modus vivendi in the quest for world domination. This essay, presented at the 3rd International Conference on the Decline of the United States, focuses on the US civil war and the genocide in Cambodia as a result of the war in Vietnam, and their relevance to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
1.1 US civil war 1860-1864
1.2 Compared to Ukraine
1.3 Russia’s carpetbaggers and two civil wars
1.4 Counter-intuition
1.5 Staring down the monster
2.1 Cambodia in 1975
2.2 Differences between Ukraine and Cambodia
2.3 Perspectives
I am struck by the parallels between past US wars and their aftermath, and their relevance to understanding the present war in Ukraine. In particular, the US civil war against the South, and the Vietnam war aftermath, when Pol Pot carried out a genocide.
The genocidal nature of US imperialism is an enduring truth, which has culminated in the current US-EU destruction of Ukraine, the US-Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, and its determination to destroy Iran through crippling sanctions and invasion. War and genocide are the modus operandi of both the US and Israel from their beginnings (US 1776, Israel 1948) and their current joint imperialism in the Middle East. Israel plays only a peripheral role so far in Ukraine so my focus here is on the US. The actions of both are uniting the world against them and portend the decline of US-Israel as the chief enemy of the world, accelerated by Trump-Netanyahu.
Reading The great big book of horrible things (2012), which lists the 100 worst disasters in history, I came to the American civil war. Bloody, but well down the list at #65. It was in the works since the founders agreed to pretend that ‘liberty’ was consistent with slavery and genocide. Anything to unite the settlers and get on with making lots of money without the mother country, which was already frowning on slavery. There was no time to lose as the 1772 Somersett case in Britain established that slavery did not exist in English law, and Britain would go on to outlaw the slave trade in 1807. Brother fighting brother over a defense of the equality-of-all vs white nationalism. Messy and cruel, in the end a war of attrition, with the industrial engine of the North flattening the ‘enemy’, the South. 600,000+ killed (far more than all the other US wars combined), the ‘winners’ losing more men, but then they mobilized almost twice as many soldiers.
The Union under Lincoln was initially spurned by both Britain and France. Schadenfreude for the British and Napoleonic fantasies for the French. Britain lined up with the apartheid South, even though slavery was abolished in 1833 (no one in politics has a monopoly on hypocrisy), seeking revenge against the revolutionaries and to favour the southern cotton plantations, necessary to feed the textile mills of Lancaster, which Britain used for its empire (to bankrupt Indian industry and make lots of profit).
Revolutionary France at first was just happy to see the US weakened, so didn’t take sides, but when Britain sided with the South, France favoured the capitalist North. It had no real economic interests in American cotton. The British aristocracy was pro-South but the empire’s merchant rulers wisely didn’t take sides openly. As the North eventually appeared likely to win, the South was abandoned by all. Literally, as it never really recovered, even today, still mired in its past. A cold peace was enforced by the North, ensuring blacks would have the same rights as whites, though it took another 100 years till that was sort-of realized.
So today we have Ukraine, like the US South, a rogue racist state battling to secede from the centuries-old ‘union’ past (Imperial Russia-Soviet Union), now as a breakaway nominal republic, obscenely corrupt, a plaything of the West, with a big neonazi problem, treating its Russian speakers as second class citizens or traitors, threatening them with ethnic cleansing, threatening Russia with a hostile NATO. Russian Ukrainians, increasingly without rights, in desperation broke away and have been tormented, killed in the 10,000s ever since. Russia, like the US North, is far larger and stronger, so by brute statistics alone, it is winning and should win, but also like the US North, at a terrible cost.
Historical comparisons are compromised by the different contexts. American racism was baked into the revolution. The founders knew it would have to end but they were eager to separate from Britain, so they put the issue off, made a pact with the racist devil which ended up bringing the entire independence project close to collapse a century later.
The context for Russia was different and yet similar. The Russian revolution of 1917 was defiantly anti-racist and anti-capitalist, shocking the complacent imperial, capitalist order. No hypocrisy a la 1776 ‘liberty’ and pursuit of profit/ private property. But a la 1776, Russia had to fight off the imperial powers, including the newbie US, to preserve its revolution. The Soviet Union faced all these powers as their enemy, right until its collapse 74 years later. But that’s another story.
We are concerned here with 1991, the collapse of the Russian revolution, and its aftermath. The collapse was also hailed as a revolution but it was really a counterrevolution – a return to the bourgeois capitalist order. Russia 1991 was supposed to be like 1776, embracing capitalism, creating a new Russia and newly independent ethnic states which had made up the Soviet Union. But in fact it was more like post-civil war US, a humiliating defeat and dismantling of the Soviet economy.
In post-civil war US, the South was plagued by northern ‘carpetbaggers’, when the devastated South witnessed rich northerners (i.e., capitalists and Jews) coming to the South and buying up property and otherwise taking advantage of the wrecked economy. This is what the exSoviet ‘nations’ experienced after 1991, the same humiliation and trickery to steal their wealth. The ‘founder’ of the Soviet collapse, Boris Yeltsin, is seen in retrospect in a negative light, as he ‘sold the farm’, privatizing virtually the entire economy, which in the capitalist world meant giving it to the same ‘carpet-baggers’ – foreigners (northerners, now the ‘collective West’) and Jews – that exploited the US South in the aftermath of the civil war a century earlier.
Russia has in effect experienced two civil wars in the past four decades: the 1991 collapse of communism and the 2014—2025 civil war in Ukraine, which morphed into the current Russia-Ukraine/NATO war of attrition. Given the international context of US world hegemony, any major conflict by definition involves the US. Ukraine is especially important to the US, given the large fascist Ukrainian diaspora in US and Canada, which meant that when the SU collapsed and borders opened, the descendants of these fascists moved in quickly and worked to undermine the weakened Russia and revive Ukraine’s shameful fascist history.
US triumphalism in 1991 was all about looting and pillaging the fallen Soviet monolith, which received no help from the West, unlike Poland and the other exsocialist countries, which were also pillaged but were given help in transforming into a workable capitalism. This sadly makes perfect sense, as the West’s goal was to absorb eastern Europe and to keep Russia weak and vulnerable to invasion and collapse, so it too could be safely incorporated into the imperialist world order. They were also quickly incorporated into the EU and NATO. Ukraine was the last piece of the puzzle.
The parallel with both the post-1991 collapse of the SU and the current Russia-Ukraine/NATO war of attrition is clear: in both cases, the US and EU are duplicating the role of Britain in 1860, and the rest of the world is duplicating the role of France in 1860, recognizing the right of Russia to reassert its control over the exSoviet space (Ukraine), to which it is indelibly tied through history, culture and family ties.
Imperial Russia supported the US North in the civil war at least partly out of moral conviction, unlike craven France. True, Britain was Russia’s enemy (initiating the Crimean war in 1853) but Tsar Alexander II was enlightened and went on to free the serfs (quasi-slaves) in 1861, inspired by Lincoln. Sadly, there are no friends in politics, and the US under Biden ignored the past friendship with imperial Russia and the US-Soviet alliance against German (and Ukrainian) fascists in WWII; instead, provoking Russia and instigating the current Russia-Ukraine/NATO war, eager to destroy resource-rich Russia, slavering for more pillage and looting.
The US and EU are reviving their own imperial character and their current imperial interests today. In the new neoimperialist world order, the exploitative nature of centre-periphery relations is usually masked via financial means; however, the revival of the fascist Ukrainian movement of yore, which glories in old-fashioned militarism, has meant that Russia has had to revert to a military fight, much like the US civil war of a century earlier.
Fascism means racism, national chauvinism, which Ukraine is experiencing in spades, with the banning of Russian language and culture, which is ridiculous, as Ukrainian culture is a subset of Russian culture. Ukrainian authors, composers, artists all wrote and otherwise have relied on Russian language and education for centuries. Not only ridiculous but violating basic decency and the rights of Ukrainian Russians. Almost half of Ukraine is Russian-speaking. On this human rights issue alone, Russia is justified in its fight to protect Russian-speakers now persecuted in Ukraine. But neoimperial US-EU see events through their imperial lens and hide their perfidy by labelling Russia imperialist.
Imagine if Britain, France and Russia had jumped on the American South’s civil war bandwagon from the start, boycotted the North, swamped the battle fields with arms for Americans to kill each other? That probably would have defeated the North and the US would be a few, weak Canadas today, toadies of the British empire. That’s what the ‘collective West’ is trying to do to Russia.
Today, Russia is fighting the ‘bad guys’, fascism, singlehanded. Britain, France, the US — the real imperialists — are taking the side of the fascists, aka white supremacists. The pro-Ukraines are really just the latest endplay in Bush I & II’s new world order. Get the Russians’ cousins next door, half of whom are Russian anyway, to act as the Trojan horse for Russia’s colour revolution, opening Eurasia to EU aka NATO aka US empire. It’s the stuff of Marvel comics and video games.
The second forum of the Free Peoples of Russia in Prague in July 2022
This ’collective West’ is really just the same old imperial powers, with fantasies of empire. The US-EU. They’re arming their Trojan horse to the teeth right now. Yes, they. Except for Hungary and more recently Slovakia, the EU has turned out to be a bulletproof straitjacket, enforcing imperial edicts, with a compliant jingoistic media in tow.
And Ukrainian fascism is creeping into the EU and even the US. Slovakian Prime Minister Fico was shot and almost killed for his refusal to back Ukraine when elected in 2023, at the height of the conflict. Trump survived an assassination attempt by an American Ukraine-supporter in 2024. And now the EU is rigging elections in Rumania and Moldova to prevent anti-war candidates from winning and ending their role as puppets to US-EU plans to dismantle Russia. So today’s world is demonstrably less democratic, more dangerous, than the world of 150 years ago, when the US civil war was allowed to burn itself out with only marginal support for either side by Britain, France and Russia. Neoimperialist is even worse than imperialism (if that’s possible).
After the US, the strongest pro-Ukrainians economically, Germany and Japan, were trounced in WWII, losing their colonies and their war-making powers. Ironically, within two decades, they were richer than the US, ending up the real winners. That is, if ‘winner’ means providing a good living standard for the nation’s citizens.
And, big plus, without the arms industries sapping society and constantly whipping up more wars. Now this sensible worldview is being undermined, as the US-EU are madly increasing arms expenditures, looking forward to a long war of attrition with Russia, attempting to carry out Hitler’s plan to destroy Russia, even as planet Earth burns up from our frenzy of war and consumption.
The best case scenario would surely be a cold peace enforced by Russia, ensuring Russian Ukrainians have equal rights. Ukraine will never accept any new status quo. Another North-South Korea frozen conflict is in the works or maybe Vietnam-Cambodia (see below). That, or sayonara. Sorry, imperialists, Russia is here to stay.
Hopefully (i.e., better this than nuclear armageddon), Ukraine will be abandoned, like the American South, to remain a backwater, full of bitterness and resentment, for generations. It will probably sink the EU. Already ‘Ukraine fatigue’ is setting in and EU governments are toppling as their economies go into freefall.
The only country with any real interest, love for Ukraine is, sorry again, Russia, just like the American North deep-down has always loved the South – they are siblings, after all. ‘Novaya Rossiya’ (eastern Ukraine) will soon be humming along. Maybe wiser heads will prevail in Kiev and the two warring brothers will reconcile. And at least some of the 5m Ukrainian refugees in Russia can go home, along with the 6.9m refugees in the West, who have long overstayed their welcome, and are increasingly worrisome as potential terrorists.
The ‘collective West’ will just have to come to an acceptance of a status quo that includes Russia, not that despises or ignores it, as has been the case since 1991. Just as post-civil war US was welcomed by the world, post-civil war Russia-Ukraine will be welcomed by, in the first place, BRICS nations, which have no nefarious interests in the conflict, unlike the ‘collective west’.
When will the US realize that, after the initial rape-and-pillage fireworks, colonies in the long run are money losers? But then the British elite still looks back on its own Empire with nostalgia.
The lure of power and wealth is the great human weakness. Primitive slavery-era thinking. Except for loss of prestige, Britain was well rid of its pesky New England colonies. The US is finding that out now. Maintaining a huge military force for its new world order empire, aimed at destroying Russia, is getting more costly every day, tanking the ‘collective West’, even as environmental armageddon looms.
Eric’s latest book The Canada Israel Nexus is available here:
http://www.claritypress.com/WalbergIV.html