Thread by @DavidNorthWSWS

Cohen's description of Putin as a communist is a mixture, typical of NYTimes writers, of deceit and ignorance. 1/

https://twitter.com/NYTimesCohen/status/1496440959080583170

Putin's Monday speech opened with a vitriolic attack on the 1917 October Revolution, Lenin, and the founding principles USSR, which sought to uphold the rights of national minorities and protect them against Great Russian chauvinism. 2/

Cohen, who is obviously ignorant of Soviet history, seems to have entirely missed the import of Putin's attack on Lenin. Putin holds Lenin and the Bolsheviks responsible for recognizing the existence of Ukraine as a nation. 3/

Putin, the Great Russian chauvinist and anti-communist, despises Lenin for leading a socialist revolution that shattered the old Tsarist Empire and sought to liberate the oppressed nationalities, including Ukrainians. 4/

Lenin, much to Putin's continuing outrage, insisted on the right of national minorities to secede from the USSR. The maintenance of the USSR as a socialist republic depended on a voluntary union, based on internationalist working class solidarity. 5/

Denouncing Lenin's defense of the rights of national minorities, Putin said: "When it comes to the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples, Lenin’s principles of state development were not just a mistake; they were worse than a mistake, as the saying goes." 6/

Putin knows very well that Lenin - the Marxist and revolutionary socialist internationalist - was an implacable enemy of Great Russian nationalism. Lenin's hatred of all forms of chauvinism was an essential element of his irreconcilable opposition to imperialist oppression. 7/

Lenin's defense of the rights of nation minorities within the framework of the newly-established USSR led to the last great struggle of his political career -- his fight in 1922-23 against Stalin's chauvinist attack on Georgian communists. 8/

Lenin identified Stalin as a despicable social type: "that truly Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, or, in essence, a scoundrel and aggressor, which, in fact, the typical Russian bureaucrat is." Had he not fallen fatally ill in 1923, Lenin would have destroyed Stalin. 9/

The ignorant Mr. Cohen knows nothing of this. But it is not only ignorance that is involved. He fully shares not only Putin's anti-communism and hatred of Marxism. Cohen is himself a chauvinist, though his loyalty is to American imperialism. 10/

Finally, Cohen jokes about the inability of "communists" [sic] to "predict the past." Actually, this phrase was originally used by Marxists to describe the Stalinists' on-going falsification of the historical record to accommodate their immediate political actions and needs. 11/

But the same can be said of Cohen, and virtually all the hack journalists employed by the corporate media, who are themselves engaged in relentless revision and blotting out of history. 12/

Cohen denounces Putin's invocation of threatened ethnic Russians in Luhansk and Donetsk as a pretext for an attack on inviolable Ukrainian sovereignty. But in the 1990s, Cohen - as the NYT's Balkan correspondent - ardently supported the NATO bombing of defenseless Serbia. 13/

Cohen backed the extraction of the province of Kosovo from Serbia, and its creation - abetted by US bombing - as an independent country. The cultivated journalist offers no explanation why, having backed Kosovan secession, he denies that same right to Donetsk and Luhansk. 14/

Limitless hypocrisy! Totally absent from denunciations of Russia in the capitalist media is a single reference to the crimes committed by the United States, resulting in well over one million deaths, in the wars that it has waged over the last 30 years. All is forgotten. 15/

Only socialists can advance a principled
opposition to the chauvinism of the Russian
capitalist government. The denunciations of Putin's regime in the pro-imperialist and warmongering press consist of nothing but crude and lying justifications for US/NATO militarism. 16/16