To the Matthew Millers of the world

Israel and Ukraine. Western liberals and their Russian allies.

I can see you smile and say: what good will that do? Revolutions are not made by shame. And my answer is that shame is a revolution in itself. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.

—Karl Marx

In August 2024, American lawyer Ralph Nader estimated that 300,000 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli army since October 2023, based on a range of empirical, historical, and clinical records. In February 2025, it grew to 400,000.

When Trump came into power, there seemed to be a decrease in bombings of Gaza. But soon, of course, Trump reverted to the great bipartisan passion of American politicians - murder.

The main reaction to this, of course, is indifference. Many millions have been killed by Washington and its Civilized friends over the centuries. Most people are quite content to ignore the ambient murder their tax money funds, even though social media has made this holocaust far more visible than, say, the time when the US army killed a comparable number of Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century.

There are still plenty of reactions. There is no shortage of western journalists to be found that justify the Israeli military one way or another. Now, on the one hand, one might say that all such legitimizations are equally reprehensible. But personally, there’s one that particularly disgusts me.

It’s one thing for the likes of Republican Senator Mike Huckabee to praise Israel. This is quite in line with his messianic devotion to global western hegemony. The Bible talks about Israel, hence ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian’.

Huckabee, US envoy to Israel

Such people are honest genocidal maniacs that are fairly open about their dedication to global military domination by the ‘Civilized World’ - europeans and their descendants. What I find truly revolting are those Democrats who pretend to be otherwise.

An example of such shamelessness is Biden state department spokesman Matthew Miller. After a year spent smirking at the small group of journalists who brought up his administration’s full-throated support for Israeli genocide, he now righteously condemns Trump’s role in the slaughter.

Why the long face, Matthew?

Trump is certainly not opposed to Zionism. However, the attempt by Democrats to launder the reality of their reign is ridiculous. For their part, the Times of Israel wistfully recalls the days of the Biden presidency in a June 14 article on US reactions to the latest Zionist attacks on Iran:

the Jewish Democratic Council of America criticized Secretary of State Marco Rubio for insufficient support of Israel’s actions. The first official US statement in the wake of the attack, by Rubio, did not praise Israel’s success and emphatically sought distance, calling it “unilateral” and saying that it did not coordinate with Israel. (By contrast, the Biden administration praised Israel’s attacks on Iran last year and emphasized coordination.)

I spent a significant part of my life surrounded by the likes of Matthew Miller. I have always found their psychology puzzling. I don’t know how they live without intense shame.

Is it naivete, is it cynicism, is it stupidity? These people obviously aren’t naive, despite their best attempts to appear so. Their cynicism often seeps through quite clearly. Stupidity? I find that one harder to answer. Regardless, when one is in charge of a state conducting mass murder, intelligence levels don’t affect responsibility.

Still, where did this come from? There is something deeply strange and unsettling about that generation of American liberals born in the 1960s and 70s. Miller, for his part, was born in 1973. They seem to have internalized self-confident Anglo-Saxon moralism more than any other generation I know of. Previous generations lived through Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, one that was hardly popular domestically. They also fought in foreign wars - a reliable inoculator against imperial moralism.

The generation born in the 60s and 70s grew up at the peak of US economic prosperity and cold war propaganda. Naturally, that left its marks.

But they were also children during the Vietnam war. However, they merely internalized the righteous atmosphere, but without engaging with the theoretical principles of adult activists at the time. Many of the latter knew that what was at stake wasn’t some abstract struggle ‘against human rights abuses’. They knew that what was at stake was the struggle against western imperialism.

Some of this generation, like Hillary Clinton, were more or less adults then. But what she and the other Matthew Millers of the world have in common is the following formula: plenty of righteousness of the 60s, none of the materialism. An excellent formula for those interested in becoming the new defenders of empire.

The young radical Hillary

The stage was set for the crop of human rights warriors of the 1980s and 1990s, those utterly independent recipients of USAID, NED, and Open Society Foundation grants who did their best to draw attention to the horrendous ‘human rights abuses’ committed around the world.

Of course, to avoid sanctions or invasions, the best medicine is pro-American policies. One need only look to Egypt, which has managed to stay in the top three recipients of US military aid ever since its 1978 capitulation to US-Israeli interests. This, despite the fact that it has been just as consistently ruled by brutal dictatorships. According to western media, the military junta holds over 60,000 political prisoners in its brutal jails. More on political prisoners in various countries later on in today’s article.

Plenty of America’s starry-eyed liberals even admit that the US isn’t without its black spots. But the evil alternative, of course, is far worse. Those barbarians in Moscow and Tehran… At least we’re trying to make the world a better place! Sometimes we make some mistakes, but at least our intentions are good.

Now that their party is no longer the one committing the genocide, these Democrat hacks can now claim to be against ALL invasions, to support ALL oppressed nations. Both Ukraine and Palestine will march to victory under the rainbow banner of human rights activism.

The most obvious obstacle to that is absolutely real: the United States sends hundreds of billions of military aid to Israel and Ukraine. Why should Palestinians ally with those killing them? Especially when the Ukrainian government, for its part, constantly refers to Israel as its state-building model.

Such fanciful ideological constructions as Ukro-Palestinian alliance, however, are much less common outside of twitter and the imperial core.

Imperial ideologists need to put a great deal of effort into making their rhetoric appear to be universal. That’s natural, given their pretensions to global domination. But the imperial proxy - the avant-garde of western civilization, as they call themselves - need not pay attention to such facades. They are engaged in a life or death battle with the ‘axis of evil’. They don’t need to pretend to believe in human rights. They can readily declare that their aim is the extermination of barbarian orcs, of ‘biomatter’.

So I decided to have a look at how pro-Ukrainian liberals in the post-soviet world feel about Israel. Naturally, they believe that both are fighting the same war - against the barbarism of the non-western world. No wonder Ukrainian neo-nazis and liberals are such tight friends. The 1941 rhetoric of Evropa versus oriental savagery doesn’t need an iota of modification.

I took a photo in March 2022 of this Nazi poster from 1942 that had been adapted in west Ukraine. Read more about it here.

Today, I’ll be looking at prominent pro-Ukrainian Russian liberals living in the west. Their views on Israel are somewhat simpler than ordinary Ukrainian liberals. The latter have their share of jealousy towards Israel, since they believe they deserve military aid from the US more than Israel.

Source

They also feel they are a more effective form of Israel than Israel itself. I’ll treat these entertaining debates in a future article. For now, Russia’s brave warriors against Putinist dictatorship.

Russians

Let’s begin with a true classic of the Russian liberal scene - Garry Kasparov. This former chessmaster heads a formidable array of organizations that support everything good and are against everything bad.

Let’s have a look at Kasparov’s democratic army. First of all, the Renew Democracy Initiative. Truly, when I think Martin Luther King, John McCain just springs into my mind.

I have to admire Kasparov’s dedication to the grift, by the way. The latest tweet by the RDI is plugging his latest substack, which aims to convince the reader of the need for American-led military regime change in Iran and Russia. Maybe I should set up a few NGOs and hire some interns to advertise my substack through them?

Next, the Human Rights Foundation. Naturally, it has a focus on ‘authoritarian regimes’, which happen to coincide with countries not aligned with NATO. Honestly, I found it difficult to figure out what the HRF actually does, but its website does feature a great deal of projects aimed at boosting bitcoin in the interests of ‘financial freedom’.

Finally, the World Liberty Congress. I like their cover photo, nice and to the point - a white man bringing freedom to the oppressed third worlders.

Moving onto Yuliya Latynina. Lately, she has been more and more skeptical of Ukraine, but she is still legally considered a ‘foreign agent’ in Russia, and resides abroad. She and her Ukrainian friend Alexey Arestovych have been trying to market themselves as the ‘true east slavic MAGA’ to Trump, so far with no clear success.

Next, Tamara Eidelman. A long-standing fixture on the Russian liberal scene. She considers herself a historian. One of her historical feats, for instance, is justifying the actions of the Nazi collaborator Andrey Vlasov - allying with Hitler was pardonable, given that the enemy was Stalin. For the Russian speakers following me, I recommend this take-down by the great historian Egor Yakovlev:

Of course, for Eidelman, support for Israel is not only pardonable, but absolutely necessary. She has particular disgust for the ‘humanists’ who attempt to draw attention to the ‘Hamas lies’ about dead Palestinian children.

Next, Leonid Volkov. The current leader of the late Alexei Navalny’s ‘Anti-Corruption Foundation’.

Volkov and Navalny (right)

While every second Russian liberal (including members of my family) migrated to the peace-loving Israel in 2022 because ‘they couldn’t bear living in militaristic Russia’, Volkov only saw fit to mention Israel once in the past two years. He did so on October 10, 2023. Here are some of the highlights of his long post:

Of course, there’s no need to say again that my heart is entirely with Israel. My friends are there. So much of what matters to me is there. There’s immense pain from all the horrifying videos and testimonies. A terrorist attack comparable only to 9/11 — ruthless and cynical, with indiscriminate mass killings and hostage-taking — a wound that will not heal for many years to come. A world that will never be the same. (And even the old world wasn’t exactly a paradise.)

Of course, he then tried to make the show of warning Israel not to discredit itself by mass murders. A ‘warning’ which he concluded with the Zionist ‘Am Yisrael Chai’, a phrase IDF maniacs enjoy shrieking out when blowing up another residential apartment block:

And in this unique moment, it seems to me (from the outside! I make no claim to expertise here!) that Israel’s military and political leadership is likely to go down the path of “paving everything over with asphalt.” They have a carte blanche from most of the population, of course — after all, every soul in this small country is walking around with an open wound. But I fear this is a road to nowhere.

…

And so, not to end on too dark a note: I believe that eventually Israel will find a way to become better. It will find a way out. Because it is, for all its problems, a democratic country — a country capable of national self-reflection. There will be commissions and investigations, all the uncomfortable questions will be asked — and answers will be found. There will be forward movement — because Am Yisrael Chai!

Don’t forget - Israel is a democracy, unlike its barbaric neighbours! Ukrainian liberals adore this parallel when explaining Ukraine’s relationship with Russia (and the relationship between Ukrainian liberals and working class Ukrainians).

Still, Volkov is certainly by far the least enthusiastic supporter of Israel among Russian liberals. I am sure he would be lynched by his fellow freedom-lovers were he to say such things while in the Promised Land.

Now onto Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Having escaped a Russian penitentiary facility for Europe last year during a prisoner exchange, he hasn’t been particularly interested in Israel. He has, however, called for excluding the most populous country on earth for the UN, because he is just ever so worried about those poor Chinese Muslims. Vietnam and Cuba are also absolutely intolerable in his eyes. I’m sure he would rather they learn from Ukraine’s great lessons in democracy-building.

No doubt the less Asians, Africans, and Arabs in the UN, the more democratic it is.

His role as a liberal activist also involves constantly calling for regime change in Russia. How this can be achieved without western military intervention, he does not explain. He clearly doesn’t care, as long as he can be in charge of some clump of land in the future hypothetical ‘former territory of the Russian Federation’. On this topic, I recommend Moss Robeson’s article on the alliance between neo-nazis and liberals in the drive to ‘decolonize’ Russia.

Of course, American bleeding heart liberals can’t get enough of Mr Kara-Murza. No doubt they are also looking forward to the lucrative consultancy opportunities in a ‘democratic’ Russia, just like those they received in the democratic Russia of the 1990s.

A few million Russians died an early death in those years according to the British Medical Journal, but what does that matter - about as important as a few hundred Palestinians dying. It certainly wasn’t the likes of Kara-Murza dying of hunger and unemployment, or his fellow western consultants.

Source

Prisoners

Let’s return to the supposed root causes of Israel’s valiant struggle for the defense of western civilization.

Israel supporters claim that an infinite number of Palestinians can be killed as long as Israeli hostages are held in Gaza. Currently, that number stands at 53, half of whom have probably been killed by Israeli terror bombing.

The Palestinians, for their part, captured these hostages in 2023 because it wants Israel to release the 9,619 Palestinian political prisoners it holds. Over 5,000 of them were imprisoned in the past two years. Thousands are imprisoned without charges:

there were about 4,450 Palestinian “security prisoners” in Israel in April 2022, including 160 children, 32 women, and 530 administrative detainees; all were incarcerated without charge or trial.

Imprisoned Palestinians are treated to the most horrific torture imaginable. The Euro-Mediterranean human rights monitor has reported on the widespread Israeli use of dogs to savagely bite and rape Palestinian civilians and prisoners. The western press is even sometimes obliged to report on it.

The Washington Post, July 2024:

Muazzaz Obayat, 37, could barely walk when he left Ktzi’ot, in southern Israel, last week. He was arrested in the aftermath of Oct. 7 on suspicion of ties to Hamas, but no charges were ever brought against him.

His curly black hair and beard were unkempt; his cheekbones jutted out, and his eyes were sunken.

At a clinic in the West Bank town of Beit Jala where he was receiving medical care, he said he wasn’t sure how old he was or the ages of his five children.

“I know nothing but imprisonment,” he said.

Once an amateur bodybuilder, he said he’d lost more than 100 pounds in nine months.

He whispered as he described a guard sexually assaulting him with a broom. His doctors said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress and malnutrition.

CNN, May 2024:

CNN spoke to three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp, which holds Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza…

They paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.

According to the accounts, the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.

…

The same whistleblower also said he witnessed an amputation performed on a man who had sustained injuries caused by the constant zip-tying of his wrists. The account tallied with details of a letter authored by a doctor working at Sde Teiman published by Ha’aretz in April.

There was also the case of renowned Gazan surgeon Adnan Al Bursch - raped to death in an Israeli prison last year:

A new report on Thursday revealed chilling new details of the circumstances surrounding the killing of the famous Gaza surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh in an Israeli prison in May.

A captive at Israel’s Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank told Sky News how Israeli forces left Dr Al-Bursh, who had been severely tortured, to die alone in agonising pain and naked from the waist down in the prison’s yard.

The captive, who previously knew Dr Al-Bursh in Gaza, provided details in a deposition to lawyers from the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked.

"In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body.

"The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr Adnan Al-Bursh (was dead)."

Dr Al-Bursh was then taken to the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev, which whistleblowers and former inmates have likened to a concentration camp.

Reports of physical, mental, and sexual abuse are widespread at Sde Teiman, with instances of rape so severe that prisoners have been died and seriously injured.. Dr Khalid Hamouda, a former inmate of the Sde Teiman camp, told Sky News that many of the prisoners held there were medical professionals.

It is here that Al-Bursh underwent brutal torture, being viciously beaten by Israeli guards. The full extent of his torture is not known.

"He thought he may have broken ribs," Dr Hamouda said. "He was unable to even go to the toilet alone."

Israeli prison authorities in turn denied responsibility for his death. In July 2024, there were mass riots in Israel because Zionists were outraged at the possibility of arresting guards who raped Palestinian prisoners. An Israeli poll found that the majority of Jewish citizens opposed criminal prosecution for the rapists:

In a remarkable example of imperialist sophistry, Reuters ‘fact-checked’ claims that the poll showed Israeli support for raping Palestinians:

However, the three answers relate to how Jewish Israelis believe soldiers who commit abuses should be disciplined, not whether abuses are acceptable.

Ah, well that clears things up. The poll doesn’t show that 65% of Israeli Jews think that raping Palestinians isn’t a crime - it simply shows that 65% of Israeli Jews think that raping this particular group of Palestinians isn’t a crime. Fact: checked!

Now, back to our equally valiant Russian liberal oppositions. They are also quite preoccupied with prisoners.

First, some context. They have been finding life quite difficult abroad of late. Their beloved Biden gone, the new Big White Man in Washington not particularly enthusiastic about indefinitely continuing the proxy war against Russia. The prospect of a world without the ongoing killing of hundreds of thousands in an unwinnable war is quite sad indeed for the likes of Kara-Murza, Volkov, and Eidelman.

The main cause they have nowadays is ‘releasing Russian political prisoners’. Now, I certainly won’t argue that it is quite sad indeed that plenty of young - barely adult - Russians have been given lengthy prison sentences due to their participation in political protests organized and encouraged by Navalnites living in Europe.

But it’s still worth taking a look at this pet cause of theirs, since they constantly shriek about it whenever even a hint of Russia-Ukraine peace talks begin. Why? Because they believe that no peace should be signed without the release of these political prisoners.

In other words, they cynically use these imprisoned individuals as a way to prevent any end to the war in Ukraine. No proxy war against Russia means far fewer western grants for the brave Russian warriors for democracy. In fact, they have been complaining heavily the past year over the grant cuts for democracy warriors abroad instituted by the cruel Orange Man.

And how many political prisoners are there in Russia? According to one of the main Russian liberal organizations, Memorial, there are currently 524 political prisoners in Russia (excluding those imprisoned for religious reasons). Back in October 2024, that figure stood at 769.

Russian liberals interviewed by Radio Free Europe claimed that this was merely the minimum number, but failed to give an estimate beyond ‘possibly thousands’. According to another Russian liberal organization, ‘FSIN Archipelago’. there were 1198 political prisoners as of October 2024. The highest estimate I found comes from OCD, which claims that 1588 political prisoners are currently in jail. Clearly, more well-known organizations like Memorial believe that some of those included in this number are not true political prisoners.

What about Ukraine?

I’ll reproduce something I wrote about this back in 2024:

Besides the war, I want to bring attention to those who are unjustly killed, tortured and imprisoned in Ukraine. Like Dnipro’s leftwing activist Oleksandr Matyushenko, kidnapped by Azov on the spurious, unproven grounds of ‘guiding Russian rocket fire’ on March 26, 2022. His brutal beating was approvingly shared to social media. His supposed cooperation with the Russian army was never proven, and he was later sentenced to prison on a different charge - the thought crime of ‘questioning Ukraine’s territorial integrity’. He remains imprisoned.

The telegram channel ‘Repression of the left and dissenters in Ukraine’ published this information and much more. It found, for instance, that public records showed that 34,323 Ukrainians had been criminally charged with collaborationism, ‘encroachment on territorial integrity’ and other political thought-crimes from February 24 to July 15, 2022.

Volodymyr Chemerys was soon after visited by the Secret Services (SBU). They were accompanied by masked rightwingers, who broke one of his ribs. He was then charged with state treason. Their main claim - that he managed the ‘repression of the left’ telegram channel.

According to the Guardian in February this year:

Ukraine’s SBU security service says it has opened more than 8,100 criminal proceedings “related to collaboration and aiding and abetting the aggressor state” and Ukrainians convicted on these counts are only held in certain prisons, where they are kept away from other inmates.

The article illustrated its coverage with a photo of a person who had had ‘orc’ carved into their head. Note how casual the article itself is. And how all those imprisoned are described as industrial workers, cleaners… In a word, people who don’t speak English and hence can’t be classified as ‘Ukrainian voices’ in western media.

The latest update I know of came from the BBC in August 2024 - almost 9,000 imprisoned for political crimes:

Collaboration offences range from simply denying the illegality of Russia’s invasion, or supporting it in person or online, to playing a political or military role for the occupying powers.

Accompanying punishments are tough too, with jail terms of up to 15 years.

They include a school principal jailed for accepting a Russian curriculum - his defence, his lawyer says, was that although he had accepted Russian materials, he didn’t use them. And in the Kharkiv region, we heard about a sports stadium manager facing 12 years in prison for continuing to host matches while under occupation. His lawyer says he had only organised two friendly matches between local teams.

In the eyes of the United Nations (UN), these collaboration convictions breach international humanitarian law. A third of those handed down in Ukraine from the start of the war in February 2022 until the end of 2023 lacked a legal basis, it says.

“Crimes have been carried out on occupied territory, and people need to be held to account for the harm they’ve done to Ukraine - but we’ve also seen the law applied unfairly,” says Danielle Bell, the head of the UN's Human Rights Monitoring Mission in the country.

Ms Bell argues that the law doesn’t consider someone's motive, such as whether they are actively collaborating, or trying to earn an income, which they are legally allowed to do. She says everyone is criminalised under its vague wording.

“There are countless examples where people have acted under duress and performed functions to simply survive,” she says.

The article gives an example of one ordinary woman imprisoned for the following crime:

Before the full-scale invasion, Tetyana used to liaise with local officials to provide her neighbours with materials such as firewood.

Once the new Russian rulers were in place, she says she was convinced by a friend to also engage with them to secure much-needed medicines.

“I didn’t co-operate with them voluntarily,” she says. “I explained disabled people couldn’t access the drugs they needed. Someone filmed me and posted it online, and Ukrainian prosecutors used it to claim I was working for them.”

After Lyman was liberated, a court was shown documents she had signed that suggested she had taken an official role with the occupying authority.

However, such dangerous individuals as Tetyana aren’t only imprisoned to protect the endangered Ukrainian nation. The Ukrainian government has other goals as well - it has been ‘exchanging’ Ukrainian citizens imprisoned for ‘collaboration’ with Ukrainian prisoners of war held by Russia. Here’s what CNN wrote on this at the start of June:

According to the Ukrainian government, 70 Ukrainian civilians convicted of collaborating with Russia were released as part of the 1,000 for 1,000 prisoner exchange between Kyiv and Moscow last month.

Ukraine said all of them went into exile voluntarily, as part of a government scheme that gives anyone convicted of collaborating with Russia the option of being sent there.

But human rights groups and international lawyers say the scheme is problematic, contradicts previous statements made by the Ukrainian government, and could potentially put more people at risk of being snatched by the Russians.

“I completely understand the sentiment, we all want the people (who are detained in Russia) to be released as quickly as possible and Russia has no will to do that… but the solution that is offered is definitely not the right one,” said Onysiia Syniuk, a legal analyst at Zmina, a Ukrainian human rights group.

The program, called “I want to go to my own,” was launched last year by Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the Ministry of Defense, the Security Service and the parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights.

So, to sum it all up. Ukraine, a country with a population of 20-30 million people, has around 9,000 political prisoners. Russia, a country with a population of 140 million people, has 500 to 1,200 political prisoners. Israel, with a population of around 12 million (including the Gaza strip), holds 10,000 prisoners.

Today I’ve mainly been writing about Russian liberals. But now, consider yourself in the position of a western citizen dedicated to fighting human rights abuses. Would you push for your own government to force its allies to release political prisoners?

Or would you join your Russian friends in exile by calling for a foreign state that your government is at war with to release its political prisoners?

Personally, it seems to me that your own government is more likely to listen to complaints by its tax-payers.

However, the Matthew Millers of the world and their ‘non-government organization’ allies had other ideas during the Biden administration. It was much better to focus energy on angrily demanding things from Vladimir Putin.

According to them, it was easier for the US to affect change in Russia than in countries with a US-funded army.

Now, they change their tune. Hopefully their true nature won’t be forgotten.