Colonizing Others to Pre-Empt Your Own Colonization

By Stephen Gowans

September 12, 2023

Brendan Simms, a Cambridge University professor who specializes in the history of international relations, has written an article for The New Statesman that comports in large measure with positions I’ve taken in connection with the war in Ukraine. Given the resonance of Simms’ views with my own, I wanted to build on his article by presenting his major themes through a Marxist lens.

The history of relations among states is a history of ruling classes attempting to expand the domain over which they accumulate wealth and appropriate the product of others’ labor. Imperialism is Janus-faced. Every ruling class strives to encroach on the wealth-accumulating sphere of other ruling classes, but at the same time acts to defend its own sphere. This means a state can be both anti-imperialist (defending itself against the encroachment of other ruling classes) and imperialist (impinging on other states). Indeed, a ruling class may even seek to enlarge its domain (act imperialistically) in order to more successfully defend itself against the imperialist designs of other ruling classes.

In discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I’ve pointed to parallels with Imperial Japan. The Japanese developed and articulated an accurate critique of Western imperialism, and used its critique to present itself as a leader of oppressed peoples in the struggle against Dutch, French, British, and US imperialism in East Asia. But Japanese anti-imperialism was at the same time imperialist: East Asian countries that had been exploited by the West would be folded into a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere under Japanese leadership. That Japan’s anti-imperialist rhetoric was no more than a cover for its own imperialist machinations, was revealed in its use of the word “leader.” As the self-appointed leader of the oppressed peoples of East Asia, Japan elevated itself above the countries it claimed to be liberating. In reality, Japanese imperialism would simply replace the imperialism of the West.

Simms’ focus is not on the parallels between Russia’s use of anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify its own imperialism and the commensurate conduct of Imperial Japan, but on the similarities of Putin’s foreign policy with that of Hitler in its aims and methods. Unfortunately, because the zeitgeist understands Hitler as sui generis (in a class of his own), comparisons with the Nazi leader tend to be dismissed out of hand. That’s unfortunate, for while the magnitude of the genocide Hitler perpetrated against Jews, Slavs, and Roma may be unprecedented, genocide, conquest, plunder, and aggression are hardly unique. History abounds with Hitler-like figures, almost of all whom remain, unlike Hitler, greatly admired, among them Alexander the Great, Julius Caeser, and Napoleon.  Saint Augustine accurately described Alexander as a rogue with a global appetite for plunder. Dante relegated him to the seventh circle of his Inferno along with other thieves, murderers and tyrants. Julius Caeser and Napoleon, both of whom admired Alexander and measured themselves against him, fit in the same class. One reason tyrants who plunder and murder on a grand scale are admired is because we’ve come to accept tyranny, genocide, and conquest as a Hitler-monopoly, with the consequence that the grand crimes of his equivalents and epigones tend to be overlooked.

That’s not to say that Putin sinks to anywhere near the depths of Alexander, Caeser, Napoleon, or Hitler, and nor does Simms say he does. Instead, Simms is concerned only with examining the similarities in foreign policy and use of anti-imperialist rhetoric between Putin and Hitler. Simms thesis is that “both Putin and Hitler were anti-colonial colonisers. Their treatment of Ukraine has a common root: they saw – or see – themselves as colonising others to pre-empt their own colonisation.” Both used anti-colonial rhetoric.

Putin recently “told the assembled Brics dignitaries and delegates from the Global South that his attack on Ukraine had been a response to Western ‘neocolonialism – the same colonialism in a new package’.” Simms observes:

We tend, for good reason, to think of Adolf Hitler as the quintessential coloniser. In fact…not only was Hitler also an anti-colonialist (of sorts), but his imperialist project was driven by his fear of being colonised. Throughout the early 1920s, Hitler repeatedly claimed that Germany had been “enslaved” by the Jews, the forces of international capitalism and the victor powers, especially the “Anglo-Saxon” British and Americans. He claimed that they sought to break down “national states” because they represented an obstacle to “international money powers”. “World enslavement”, Hitler said, meant “world stock exchange”. 

Hitler’s concerns anticipate Putin’s anxieties about defending national states and traditional values against globalists, liberalism, and international money powers.

The “‘left-wing’ Strasser faction of the Nazi Party saw Germany as leading a ‘League of Oppressed Peoples’ in alliance with Russia, Morocco, Persia, India and other victims of Western imperialism. ‘The fragmented, martyred, exploited and enslaved Germany,” Otto Strasser argued, ‘was the natural protagonist and ally of all national liberation fighters’, whether they were ground down by ‘French tyranny, British imperialism [or] American financial exploitation’.”

We hear echoes of Strasser in many leftwing voices today, not least Caleb Maupin’s Strasser-like Patriotic Socialists, who believe that because Russia is against French tyranny in Africa, British imperialism, American financial exploitation, and the US military alliance NATO, that it is the natural protagonist and ally of all national liberation fighters, and cannot, therefore, be an imperialist state itself.

Simms continues:

Hitler, by contrast [to Strasser], saw Germany’s salvation not in solidarity with the other wretched of the Earth, whom he despised, but in establishing its own colonial project. He envisaged an overseas empire not in the Anglo-French style as attempted by Wilhelmine Germany, but as a vast land grab in eastern Europe contiguous with the old Reich. This, he argued, would give Germany the critical mass and resources necessary to survive against the force of Anglo-America and international capitalism. The demand for “living space” or Lebensraum – which Hitler first voiced in the mid-1920s – was thus both a colonial and an anti-colonial project.

Similarly, Putin is attempting a vast land grab in Eastern Europe contiguous with the Russian Federation and commensurate with the old Russian Empire to give Russia the critical mass and resources necessary to survive against the forces of what Putin calls “the collective West”, international capitalism, and the liberal order.

Today, the supposed heirs of Marx and Lenin see international relations more as Hitler did than as Marxists have. “For Hitler,” observes Simms, “the battle against the British empire was an international class struggle, which pitted classes of nations against each other, rather than a Marxist conflict between transnational classes,” the latter perspective being one Hitler was resolved to expunge for all time (my emphasis). Many contemporary Marxist-Leninists likewise see the war in Ukraine as a war between two classes of nations (the United States as imperialist and Russia as anti-imperialist) and are as dismissive as Hitler was of the view that conflicts between states are conflicts between transnational classes. They tend to dismiss the Marxist view of the war as Trotskyism and accept the Hitlerite view as anti-imperialist (which, indeed it is, though in the Hitlerite, and not Marxist, sense.)

Then as now, there was “no solidarity between working classes.” Instead, many Marxist-Leninists today, as Hitlerites did then, promote “a common cause between the ‘have-not’ nations against the ‘haves’,” that is, between the BRICs against the US-led West, as part of a project of promoting “multipolarity.” “The Second World War was thus framed not just as a German war of national liberation against British domination of the Continent, but as a global insurrection against Anglo-American capitalism and imperialism,” just as Russia’s war on Ukraine is framed today as a Russian insurrection against US capitalism and imperialism. The Axis powers, with Hitler in the lead, were as much advocates of multipolarity as are many Marxist-Leninists today.

In June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. The invasion of the Soviet Union was avowedly colonial in design because it envisaged the seizure of land, particularly in Ukraine, to be settled by German emigrants. But the attack was also anti-colonial in conception because Hitler believed that only possession of an empire of its own would enable Germany to emancipate itself from Anglo-American and international capitalist subjection. It was, in his mind, a case of dominate or be dominated.

Simms argues that like Hitler, Putin employs anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify Russia’s own imperialism.

Over the past 15 years or so, [Putin] has inveighed against the ‘imperialism’ of the ‘collective West’ and sought to preserve Russian power and sovereignty in the face of what he regards as the West’s universalising claims in favour of democracy and human rights. In Putin’s eyes the protection of Russia requires hegemony over her neighbours; the emancipation of Russians means the subjection of others.

At first, he sought to dominate the wider Eurasian space through a combination of market measures, such as the establishment of a Eurasian Economic Union, and military interventions such as the invasion of Georgia. More recently, the Russian president moved to direct territorial aggression, beginning with the annexation of Crimea and culminating in the attack on Ukraine last year.

The imperial nature of the invasion was clear for all to see. Putin justified it by simply denying the nationhood and sovereignty of Ukraine, an internationally recognised state. In a series of speeches leading up to and following his attack, the Russian president declared the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to be one and the same. He attributed any suggestion to the contrary to the evil machinations of outside powers. Yet the wider context to his move was the desire to defend Russian sovereignty against supposed Western imperialism.

In Simms’ view, the parallels between Putin and Hitler are striking.

Both considered or consider themselves to be in a life-and-death struggle with Western capitalist imperialism, and in particular with the “Anglo-Saxons”. Both reject the Anglo-Saxons’ claims that they are imposing universal values, and both dismissed or dismiss the “rules-based” order – of the League of Nations and the liberal international order respectively – as self-serving hogwash. In response, both articulated projects that are both colonial and decolonising.

“You might think that the real Global South, then and now, would have given these ambitions short shrift, but you would be wrong,” remarks Simms. To this we could add that you might think that Marxist-Leninists, whose ideological forebears developed a detailed analysis of imperialism and the use, by imperialist leaders, of anti-imperialist rhetoric, would have seen Putin’s war and rhetoric on Ukraine for what they are, but you would be wrong.

The Nazi and Putin projects were and have been widely taken at face value by “subaltern” (in the post-colonial sense) actors for whom the main enemy was the West in both its imperialist and international capitalist guises. They had and have at least a sneaking regard for Hitlerist or Putinesque challenges to the prevailing order, which they felt and continue to feel shortchanges them. Many educated Arabs, Africans or Asians who had an issue with Western imperialism in the 1930s and early 1940s either welcomed the humbling of the British empire by the advancing Wehrmacht, or at least felt a frisson of satisfaction at the discomfiture of their masters.

Today, many educated Arabs, Africans and Asians, along with many Western Leftists, who have a legitimate grievance with Western imperialism, have either welcomed the advancing Russian army, or at least felt a frisson of satisfaction at Washington’s discomfiture.

As I have, Simms likens those who align with Russia on the grounds that Moscow is challenging US imperialism to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Subhas Chandra Bose.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem…was so outraged by British plans for Palestine that he endorsed Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies and urged Arabs to collaborate with the Third Reich. Further east, Subhas Chandra Bose, a long-standing critic of British rule in India, set up a legion that was eventually deployed to fight for the Germans in north-west Europe. Across the Middle East, Caucasus and South Asia, hundreds of thousands heeded these calls to serve the Axis powers militarily or politically and millions more sympathised with them.

“The ironies of the situation were and are obvious, even to the protagonists themselves,” writes Simms. “Anti-colonial agitators such as Bose and the Mufti knew perfectly well that Hitler held them in contempt, just as their successors today know that the nationalist discourse in Putin’s Russia is virulently hostile to people of color, and that his regime is far more murderously behaved towards Muslims and other groups in its neighborhood than the West, which it so persistently criticizes. In both cases, though, the overriding imperative was or is to confront the common Western enemy.”

We might add that the ironies of the situation ought also to be obvious to Putin’s Marxist-Leninist supporters, whose theory, practice, and aims Putin holds in contempt. The Russian leader reviles Lenin and the Bolsheviks, going so far as to blame the war on Lenin, yet some communist ignoramuses see Putin as the second-coming of the Bolshevik leader—a reflection of their predilection for understanding international conflict through the Hitlerite lens of the clash of different classes of states rather than the Marxist lens of the clash of different economic classes.

The Communist Party of Canada has has rejected the Marxist-Leninist perspective on the war as “not a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment.” As Hitler viewed his own aggression as an effort to preempt Germany’s colonization by Anglo-American forces, the CPC, not alone among many Leftist voices, favors the view that Putin’s aggression is an effort to preempt Russia’s colonization by the US empire. It is not only sad but deplorable, and a measure of how deeply parts of the Marxist-Leninist movement have decayed, that they not only align with, but celebrate a figure whose foreign policy stands in the same tradition of that of Hitler, and who, at the same time, dismiss the Marxist-Leninist class perspective theory of imperialism.