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On May 17, the World Socialist Web Site published an exposure of the International Socialist Leagues support for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and its fascist shock troops, under the banner of a fight against Russian imperialism in defense of democracy in Ukraine.

The WSWS wrote:

The false conceptions of Russian imperialism and democratic Ukraine must be rejected by Marxists. The Russian and Ukrainian states have fundamentally common characteristics as the reactionary product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Both are ruled by bankrupt capitalist oligarchiesthe descendants of the Stalinist bureaucracy and inheritors of the stolen property of the Soviet statewhich are fundamentally unable to assert their independent interests from imperialism.

The ISLs rotten orientation to the Ukrainian bourgeois state and NATO is not merely platonic. Their supporters in Ukraine sit at negotiation tables with imperialist agents, make commitments to far-right politicians and build their constituency among the fascistic paramilitary forces.

Unsurprisingly, the ISL has provided no response whatsoever to this exposure.

But subsequent developments have fully borne out this analysis. Over the past two weeks, Oleg Vernyk, the head of the Ukrainian group of the ISL and the Zakhyst Pratsi (Labor Defense) union, has made several posts on Facebook glorifying the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) by Stepan Bandera.

On May 24, Vernyk shared a post of the 1948 pamphlet Who are the Banderites and what are they fighting for, along with a lengthy excerpt. The quote from the pamphlet, written in the vein of fascist national socialism, said that the Banderites were fighting For building a classless society, for the genuine destruction of the exploitation of man by man ... For democracy, against dictatorship and totalitarianism, for freedom of speech and assembly ... For ensuring that the national minorities of Ukraine have all rights.

In line with the efforts of the imperialist powers to break up the Soviet Union along national lines and restore capitalism, the pamphlet called on the Enslaved peoples of the Soviet Union to join the liberation struggle against the Bolshevik oppressors.

On June 5, Vernyk shared another post with a passage from a book by Danylo Shumuk, a former member of the Communist Party in West Ukraine (KPZU), who, disoriented by the crimes of Stalinism, joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the paramilitary wing of the OUN, in 1943. The post from Shumuks memoirs describes his transformation from a supporter of the CP to a member of the UPA, calling the latter a movement of democratic forces fighting on behalf of the common people. The post states: The KPZU and the OUN are us, these are our people of the [19]20s and 30s.

In yet another post, from May 26, Vernyk shared a comment glorifying a 1953 uprising in a Soviet labor camp (Gulag), which was led by Shumuk and other members of the OUN and UPA who had been imprisoned by Soviet authorities.

Vernyk shared all of these posts on both his personal profile and the group of his trade union without any comments. They speak volumes about the ISLs right-wing political orientation.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, founded in Vienna in 1929, was an outright fascist, terrorist organization whose ideology was shaped above all by anti-communism, extreme nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism.

Most of its early members were former soldiers of the army of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic founded by Symon Petliura, which fought the Red Army after the October Revolution of 1917 and participated in some of the biggest pogroms of the civil war in 1917-1921. Overall, an estimated 200,000 people were murdered in pogroms during the civil war in Ukraine. It was the biggest mass murder of Jews before the Holocaust, and it was only ended through the victory of the Red Army against the imperialist powers and regional nationalist forces.

Throughout the 1930s, the OUN committed terrorist attacks against members of national minorities and political opponents in what was then Poland. In the words of Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, the OUN regarded assassination as a means of propaganda, and it carried out 830 violent acts against Polish and Polish-Jewish citizens in 1937 alone. As they were carrying out these terrorist attacks, the OUNs members and publications received state-backing from Nazi Germany and the right-wing dictatorship of Antanos Smetona in Lithuania.

In 1940, the OUN split into two wings, one headed by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B), the other by Andrey Melnyk, both of whom had been long-time leaders of the OUN. Both of these wings collaborated intensely with the Nazis, who had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and occupied Soviet Ukraine until 1944, resulting in the deaths of at least 27 million Soviet citizens, between 5 and 7 million of them in Ukraine. The OUN carried out large-scale massacres of both Jews and Poles, murdering tens of thousands, and terrorized Ukrainian civilians who opposed the Nazi occupation.

When it became clear that German imperialism, upon which the Ukrainian fascists had pinned their hopes for the creation of their own, ethnically pure nation-state, was losing the war, the leaders of the OUN quickly established contact with representatives of US, British and Canadian imperialism. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the paramilitary wing of the OUN, began receiving intelligence, logistics support and funding from the US and Canada, in particular, to wage a war against the Red Army and Soviet authorities in Soviet Ukraine that lasted well into the 1950s. According to historian Rossolinski-Liebe, the OUN-UPA killed some 20,000 Ukrainian civilians in this civil war, most of them workers at collective farms and peasants whom they suspected of supporting the Soviet authorities.

The 1948 pamphlet that Vernyk shared was printed as part of this imperialist-backed propaganda campaign aimed at presenting the mass-murdering Ukrainian fascists as a democratic liberation force fighting to free the Ukrainian people from communism.

Vernyks promotion of this material is not just a matter of disseminating and legitimizing the OUNwhose propaganda was, in fact, strikingly similar to the current NATO propaganda talking points over the waras supposedly left-wing. Like other pseudo-left organizations in Ukraine that support the NATO proxy war against Russia, the ISL and Vernyks trade union Zakhyst Pratsi (Labor Defense) are actively encouraging their members to join the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine, the official umbrella for hundreds of paramilitary detachments that are now playing a major role in fighting the Russian army on behalf of NATO and the Ukrainian state. Many of these battalions are run by far-right nationalists and outright fascists.

On its website, the ISL posted a video of one of its members, Kirill Medvedev, masked and in body armor, who is identified as a member of the UVO, a detachment of the Territorial Defense Forces. The group Sotsialnyi rukh (Social movement), which likewise supports the NATO war as a struggle against Russian imperialism, has also on its social media posted pictures of members who have joined these paramilitary forces.

In the Facebook group of Vernyks Zakhyst Pratsi union, another member posted a call for the dismemberment of Russia. This is the official line of the Ukrainian neo-fascist Svoboda Party, with which the ISL also maintains ties, and the objective logic of the imperialist intervention in the region and in Russian politics.

These ties and the apparent political and ideological identification of Vernyk with the fascist OUN reveal the class character and political orientation not just of the ISL but the pseudo-left internationally.

The ISL and Vernyk are closely connected to these various tendencies across the Americas and Europe. The ISL itself was co-founded by several petty-bourgeois nationalist tendencies in Turkey and Latin America, including the Turkish Sosyalist Emekiler Partisi (Socialist Laborers Party, SEP in Turkish acronyms), the Venezuelan Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide, MS) and the Argentine Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers Movement, MST).

The MST is one of the leading parties of the Argentinian pseudo-left electoral coalition FIT-U (Workers Left Front-Unity), which combines a number of Morenoite and Pabloite organizations, including the Partido Obrero (Workers Party, PO) and the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialista (Socialist Workers Party, PTS). Some of its members are giving full support to the US-NATO led war and are openly promoting the Ukrainian fascistic paramilitaries at its front.

That is the case of the Morenoite Partido de los Trabajadores Socialista Unificado (Unified Socialist Workers Party, PSTU), a member of the International Workers League-Fourth International (IWL-FI). As it sent representatives from Latin America to Ukraine to politically back up their military operations, the IWL-FI wrote a piece titled Ukraine and Russia: On Fascisms and Fascisms. In the article they faithfully reproduced the arguments of the defenders of Bandera in order to claim that Ukraine far-rights record is nothing but a myth. Downplaying, if not outright denying, Banderas collaboration with the Nazis, they state: Banderas figure was probably inflated by Stalin to justify the repression, as it is inflated today by Putin to justify the aggression against Ukraine.

While the PO and PTS seek to somehow distance themselves from the ISL and the IWL-FI, posing as opponents of US and NATO, neither one of them has answered the exposure made by the WSWS of their partners ominous connections to fascistic forces in Ukraine. In fact, the role being played by the PTS is to actively cover up the FIT-Us open support for NATO and the Ukrainian fascists, painting it as legitimate polemic within the Trotskyist left!

Vernyks Zakhyst Pratsi union is also listed as a member organization of the Progressive International which was co-founded by the Sanders Institute of Bernie Sanders in 2018. It includes, among others, outlets such as The Nation and Jacobin, the magazine affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a faction of the Democratic Party. It also includes the Diem25 umbrella organization of the pseudo-left in Europe, which encompasses the Greek MeRA25 (a split-off from Syriza) and the Polish Lewica Razem. The DSA and Razem are explicitly supporting the arming of Ukraine with the money and weapons of US imperialism .

As the International Committee has warned for many years, these forces are not left, much less socialist or Trotskyist. Rather, they represent privileged and fundamentally nationalist sections of the petty bourgeoisie whose social interests tie them to the capitalist state apparatus and imperialism.

Amid the early stages of a new world conflagration, and in the face of a resurgence of the working class internationally, these layers are driven ever further to the right, up to and including an embrace of outright fascist forces. The imperialist proxy war in Ukraine exposes them for what they are: bitter enemies of the working class that are prepared to line up with fascists and take up arms to fight on behalf of the interests of imperialism.

WSWS Review

What is the pseudo-left?

This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.

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The ISL's Oleg Vernyk promotes Ukrainian fascist Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - WSWS

The following is one installment of Feinbergs Lavender & Red series on the intersection of LGBTQ+ and socialist history; this installment appeared Aug. 18, 2007, in Workers World newspaper. The 120-part series was published between 2004 and 2008 and can be downloaded free at workers.org/books. Some of the language that follows is from English translations that do not necessarily reflect current usage.

I want to bring the revolutions humanity to those aspects of life that it hasnt reached because of old prejudices, said Mariela Castro Espin who has worked hard to eradicate prerevolutionary prejudices about same-sex love, transgender and gender variance in Cuba. (Reuters, June 29, 2006)

Workers World Party delegation with staff of CENESEX in their Havana office, July 24, 2007. Photo: Namibia Donadio

Castro Espin is director of Cubas National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), which has accomplished a great deal in a relatively short time to replace prejudices about same-sex love and transgender with positive attitudes.

CENESEX created its own internet website http://www.cenesex.sld.cu shortly after the 16th World Congress of Sexology met in Havana in March 2003. The Spanish-English site incorporates a section on sexual diversity, offers basic information and gives opportunities to consult with experts and to voice personal opinions.

The site gets right to the point about its objective to overcome the taboos and prejudices that persist about same-sex love: Being homosexual or bisexual is not a disease; it is not synonymous with perversity, nor does it constitute a crime.

Homosexuality, the website makes clear, is a sexual orientation that is not caused by seduction at any age; it is not contagious and is not acquired by educational defects or negative examples in the family environment. . . .

Work accomplished, work to do

Castro Espin said in the summer of 2004 that these developments are the result of an effort of more than 30 years, and now we are seeing its fruits more clearly. When asked by a BBC reporter in September 2006 whether perceptions about homosexuality had changed in Cuban society, Castro Espin answered, I think so; it has changed very much.

She told interviewer Eduardo Jimenez Garcia: I do believe that since the 1990s, there is greater acceptance of the presence of homosexuals by some portion of the population and public institutions. That does not mean that the contradiction has been resolved for all individuals at all levels of society. (Alma Mater, Journal of the University of Havana, reprinted in Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004)

Castro Espin added, I think we are at a good moment to implement policies that are more explicit about the defense of the human rights of homosexuals, so that we are better prepared to confront any manifestation of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. I see this very humanistic attempt to achieve greater respect for the rights of homosexuals as the waging of a battle of ideas in our society. I believe this notion has to be part of the cultural and political battle, because that would mean a cultural, social and political strengthening for the Cuban Revolution. . . .

The Cuban Revolution has been possible because of the participation of all men and women, of all Cubans who have identified with the conquests and dreams of that social project. Among all those who have participated, there are also people of diverse sexual orientations.

Dont measure with imperial ruler

As earlier articles in this series documented, the CIA, Hollywood and corporate media try to deflect resistance to U.S. imperialisms covert war against Cuba and to the domestic discrimination, police brutality and bashing of same-sex-loving and gender-variant people commonplace in the U.S. by focusing on the onerous tasks Cubas revolution faced in uprooting centuries of prejudice about same-sex love. Of course, each poisonous seed had been planted and cultivated by U.S. capitalism and, earlier, Spanish colonialism.

Today, the Cuban Revolution has made enormous strides in raising popular consciousness about sexual liberation, including same-sex love. Building ties of unity between the lesbian, gay, bi and trans movement in the U.S. and the Cuban Revolution requires conscious leadership of the most resolute anti-imperialist activists in the liberation movement for LGBT and other sexually, sex- and gender-oppressed peoples.

Yet some activists in the U.S. still argue that Cuba wont have passed the test until lesbians and gays are out in Cuba with their own autonomous organizational formations.

Lesbians and gay men in the U.S. and other capitalist countries are out in order to unite against shared and/or overlapping mechanisms of oppression.

Castro Espin stated categorically to journalist Mary Lamey via a translator, There is no official repression of lesbians and gays in Cuba. What remains are social and cultural reactions that must be transformed, the same as in many other countries. (Canada.com, The Gazette, July 29, 2006)

Cubans defining their own liberation

In a capitalist country, being out is not only an assertion of individual identity and personhood. The movement to end the oppression has to be out and independent as well.

That is because of the LGBTQ+ movements relationship to its own ruling class in capitalist countries. In the class struggle, it is imperative for the movement to break free of its own capitalist bosses and their ideology. In that case, the movement is only as powerful as it is independent.

But what about a socialist country in which the laboring class rules and is trying to build socialism in the liberated turf of a workers state? What would Cuban men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and bisexuals and transgender Cubans gain by identifying away from their own class?

Castro Espin addressed the question of organizing for change in Cuba in her 2003 interview with Eduardo Jimenez Garcia. I think the greatest difficulty is that there is no unifying and convincing project, because male and female homosexuals are as heterogeneous as heterosexuals, she said. Yet, I dont see this as an obstacle; I see it as a complicated reality.

I believe that male and female homosexuals should participate more in different loci of social and political discussion, despite the prejudices, so they can make their truth, their real need for equality, their beliefs known, in order to gain support from the scientific community, and in that way bring to bear arguments that can effect the changes that are necessary in society and see that they are just.

However, an international network of both LGBT social democrats and those far to the right of them has developed in the imperialist countries, particularly the U.S. and Britain. It makes an appeal to Cubans, and others in countries menaced by imperial powers, to identify first and foremost based on what is presumed to be an identical and shared sexuality. In turn, this network asserts its readiness to defend gay and lesbian Cubans and others but only against their own people, culture and national liberation struggle.

When aligned with overall and sometimes specific imperialist interests, such a position can offer a left-cover for regime change through covert and/or military intervention.

Defend Cuba!

Cubans are defining their own liberation.

The Cuban Revolution merits the support of progressives and communists around the world, without demands that it measure up as perfect using an imperial ruler. A socialist revolution is a process, not a single act. Solving the economic and social problems that the capitalists cannot and will not tackle is the dynamic forward motion of revolution.

Regarding the revolutions efforts to eliminate old prejudice against homosexuality, Fidel Castro concluded during a 1988 interview with a Galician television station: Given that we can make mistakes, we obsessively follow the idea [of] what is just, right and best for the people and what is most humane for our people and our society. However, the task is not easy I think that each time we get closer to the right criteria for making the world we want. Nonetheless, I think that we still have many faults, and that future generations will have to continue to perfect this new world.

Bringing revolutions humanity to all aspects of life

The whole population of Cuba of all races, sexes, genders, sexualities, ages and abilities does not need to be defended against its own culture or its own revolution. It needs and deserves defense against the U.S. blockade of its island and every other illegal act of imperialist war, overt and covert, which impedes revolutionary progress.

International support for Cubas right to sovereignty and self-determination will allow the islands population to spend more time, energy and resources on socialist construction, rather than on defense.

It is the LGBT movements in the imperialist citadels that have to break with their own ruling classes in order to build bonds of genuine international solidarity. Its a hard position to take. It requires ideological valor: the refusal to remain silent about the emperors new clothing.

In order to move forward toward their own liberation, the LGBTQ+ and other progressive movements in the U.S. and other capitalist countries have to combat anti-communism which is, in the long run, a defense of capitalism and develop a powerful anti-imperialist current that can extend its solidarity to Cuba and all countries fighting for their sovereignty and self-determination against finance capital.

The Cuban Revolution has had to take up the tasks that history presented it, including the eventual eradication of the legacies of racism, sexism and anti-gay bigotry. Revolutionary Cuba the hope of the hemisphere has done a better job dealing with its own tasks.

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PRIDE in Cuba: Bringing revolutions humanity to all aspects of life - Workers World

In his new book, Terreur en Bevryding, historian Leopold Scholtz tells the story of how the South African Communist Party (SACP) was one of the Soviet governments most loyal foreign cells, outperforming all other communist parties in adherence to Moscows dictates.

Scholtz further elaborates how the SACP was, and quite possibly remains, the intellectual leader in the tripartite alliance consisting of the ANC, SACP and labour federation Cosatu. Relatively recent speeches and commitments by people such as ministers Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Thulas Nxesi clearly indicate that the ANC still has some love lost for socialism.

We are poorer for it.

It is certainly true that the ANC tends to talk socialism more than deliver socialism; it has had a pragmatic flare since the 1990s. But since the Zuma years and this has become more intense during the Ramaphosa era the ANC has increasingly grasped at socialist straws to expand government power and attempt to secure its electoral future.

The agenda of expropriation without compensation is the most visceral example of this phenomenon, but South Africas global record-setting unemployment rate is perhaps its clearest consequence.

Economist Ludwig von Mises argued that it was precisely government interference in the economy that leads to unemployment. Where there is no artificial, external market interference, the market wage rate tends to settle at a point where both wage-earners and employers are willing and eager to work, with the former always opting for employment over unemployment, and the latter opting to employ rather than suffer from a labour shortage. Unemployment remains for as long as the government and its union allies are successful in the enforcement of their fiat.

Studies have borne this out as true.

Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess, in a 2004 study of labour regulation in India, conclude that regulations ostensibly meant to benefit employees in the labour market have acted as a constraint on growth and poverty alleviation. Such regulations lead to decreased investment, employment, and productivity, as well as pushing economic activity into the informal (black and grey market) sector.

Research by Juan Botero, Simeon Djankov and others, also from 2004, confirm that people opt to trade in the informal market when there is excessive labour regulation. They additionally note that there is higher youth unemployment in societies with more protective employment laws. While intuition tells us that such labour laws are ostensibly meant to protect and advance vulnerable economic classes, empirical studies show that there are worse labour market outcomes where the government is more actively involved in labour regulation.

South Africas burdensome labour laws and how they are applied are infamous among domestic and foreign investors, who rather choose to take their money elsewhere.

Every year that the Fraser Institutes Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index is published, it reinforces a lesson that our government appears determined to ignore: the poorest people in a freer market are about eight to 10 times wealthier than the poorest people in a command economy, where government actively intervenes economically in the public interest.

Some would be quick to point out that labour regulation is not indicative of socialism. But socialism concerns public (but in practice, government) control and ultimately ownership of the means of production, with labour being one of the most important means of production. The more regulation, the closer the government is to de facto ownership, even of labour.

As economist Russell Lamberti explained during a Free Market Foundation seminar, the new, evolved form of socialism that succeeded its cruder Cold War variant, is technocratic socialism.

Technocratic socialists are eager to distance themselves from the heaps of corpses and economic devastation that communism left behind in Ukraine, Russia, China and Cambodia. Technocratic socialists saw the untold prosperity that even a little bit of free enterprise brought to the disenfranchised masses of the world. Knowing their economic narrative alone will therefore fail, technocratic socialists shifted their focus away from pure economic class to race and gender, a narrative all too well-known in South Africa.

Technocratic socialists have also to an extent but in South Africa, not necessarily entirely abandoned the idea that the state must directly own the means of production. Instead, indirect ultimate control (through taxes and regulations) of the means of production is easier to attain and seems more respectable on the surface. In this respect, Lamberti argues, socialism learned a great deal from its more reviled cousin, fascism.

The ANC has opted South Africa onto the technocratic socialist path. Since 2000, South Africa has slid down the EFW rankings. With a few exceptions, such as the ridiculously disastrous discourse about land, the government seeks to control the means of production through regulation, while still allowing private owners to bear the costs of the governments mismanagement of their property. When it comes to labour, unemployed people bear the unaffordable cost of the government directing how, when, and where they may work.

The Cold War ended more than three decades ago. That period of history showed decisively that socialism, at a country scale, is unsustainable. In fact, it is socially and economically devastating.

What is described as capitalism also has its pitfalls, to be sure, but most of these imperfections will accompany any system that places value on individual autonomy. Nonetheless, the free market, unlike socialism, does not kill or destroy. All the apparent examples of economic freedom killing people yearly malnutrition, unsanitary water are usually prevalent in societies where the government tries to take a leading role in society and the economy, and goes out of its way to stifle the private sector.

There are no absolutely free markets in the world, and there are no absolutely controlled economies either. But practically without exception, the closer a society moves to a freer market, the more prosperous it is, and the closer to a controlled economy it moves, the less prosperous.

In other words, even a regulated free market like Chile proves the capitalist case correct, compared to the controlled Venezuelan economy. The lesson to be learned here is not that a society must strive for a mixed economy but rather for a free economy, as the closer one gets to economic freedom the better the outcomes for everyone, particularly the poor.

It is also true that not all economic regulations in themselves destroy economic activity. But taken together, they represent a huge burden for individuals who simply wish to eke out a living. It is cold comfort to someone who has been unemployed for years that there are a mass of labour laws out there that protect them, while they hungrily beg for money at the roadside, rather than working for an amount that socialist political elites dont approve of.

This means that while good intentions might underlie any new proposed government intervention in the economy, it is usually best to not pursue it, because history has shown that once you cede the principle that economic activity must be free from interference, that body of interventions will only grow and stifle growth and innovation. The temptation to interfere in the affairs of other people must be resisted if a flourishing and prosperous society is our goal.

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OPINION| ANCs socialist thinking is crushing South Africas future - Mail and Guardian

Farming is difficult, grueling work that is essential to our economy and our very existence as a species.

On top of that, most farmers operate on thin profit margins far from the bounty of giant agribusiness. They are beholden to the vagaries of weather and the twists and turns of the global economy, and unforeseen difficulties can lead to the sale of local farmland to developers or corporations.

Therefore, it is appropriate for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release nearly $200 million to Washington farmers who lost crops due to natural disasters in 2020 and 2021. The grant, announced last week, is part of approximately $6 billion in disaster relief for farmers and will be paid through a new Emergency Relief Program to offset lower yields and value losses.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said: Last years extreme heat wave and drought was devastating for our farmers and ranchers in the face of a worsening climate crisis, the federal government needs to step up for the Washington state growers and producers who keep our shelves stocked. . . . Im glad we could bring back some badly-needed federal dollars to help our farmers and ranchers during a really tough time.

The aid is necessary, but it also raises several questions about politics in this country.

One is whether critics who recklessly throw around the word socialism will apply it to this situation.

Of course, socialism is grossly misapplied in American discourse. Merriam-Webster defines it as any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Few people in this country advocate for the collective ownership of production and distribution, but any social program designed to provide assistance for Americans is decried as being socialist. Aid to farmers is not socialism, but it represents the kind of program that is criticized when it is directed toward cities.

Another related issue is the fact that subsidies to farmers ballooned under President Trump throughout his failed trade war with China.

After Trump imposed tariffs on some Chinese goods, the United States economic rival responded in kind. The result was diminished markets for much U.S. agriculture, and the federal government responded with payments to offset the impact. Federal subsidies to farmers went from just over $4 billion in 2017 to more than $20 billion in 2020.

That doesnt mean that all farmers were bailed out by the federal government or that all farmers needed assistance. But a government policy that requires $20 billion in annual mitigation payments can only be viewed as a failure.

And yet we have buried the lead. With a $6 billion disaster relief program aimed at farmers, there is reason to question where it will end. Climate change delivered record temperatures through Washington last year, including a day that reached 115 degrees in Vancouver.

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports: Temperature changes can cause habitat ranges and crop planting dates to shift and droughts, and floods due to climate change may hinder farming practices.

Those practices already have been hindered by a changing climate, and evidence suggests that the impact will only grow over time.

Helping farmers to continue providing food for our families will require vast attention to climate change.

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In Our View: Aid for farmers needed, but where will it end? - The Columbian

The great writer and moralist George Orwell began his literary career as a disciple of G. K. Chesterton. Even after Orwell explicitly diverged from some of Chestertons views in the 1930s, under the influence of socialist ideas and hopes, Chestertons assumptions and political and ethical conceptions continued to shape him.

Orwells biographers provide intriguing evidence. Bernard Crick tells us that Orwells first published essay appeared in Chestertons renegade Distributist magazine G.K.s Weekly on December 29, 1928, and that later Orwell was recorded as saying that what England needed was to follow the kind of policies in Chestertons G.K.s Weeklythat is, anti-imperialist, Little England policies. Gordon Bowker writes that as a teenager, Orwell gave someone Chestertons novel Manalive. He adds that Orwell loved Chestertons Father Brown detective stories. Robert Colls tells us that although Orwell's friends, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, accepted Orwells own characterization of himself from the 30s on as some kind of socialist, this characterization was in several ways anomalousnot only because of his Tory upbringing, private education at Eton, and accent, but also because of his traditionalist sensibility and the way in which he took his bearings from a natural and moral universe. This is a precise and pregnant comment.

Orwell has come to have a unique authority among English-language readers, mainly due to the great anti-totalitarian novels Animal Farm and 1984. But these works were also important in communist-dominated Eastern Europe from their publication until the fall of the Soviet communist empire in the early 1990s. In The Captive Mind, the great Polish dissident writer Czesaw Miosz tells us how 1984 circulated surreptitiously in Poland and Eastern Europe (including a Ukrainian translation), and how its readers were amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception of its life. One hopes that Orwells anti-totalitarian novels have also found readers in China and North Korea.

Literary and cultural critics have also argued that Orwell was indebted to Chesterton as a thinker and writer. Both the wise but now-neglected English writer Hugh Kingsmill and the eminent American critic Lionel Trilling saw Orwells social-cultural criticism as in a direct line from William Cobbett, through Dickens, to Chesterton. Orwells own longstanding interest in Dickens, evident in his substantial 1939 essay on Dickens, is clearly and explicitly influenced by Chesterton, who wrote two substantial books on Dickens and is perhaps his greatest commentator.

It is perhaps Orwells 1939 essay on Dickens that best begins to explain what Chesterton and Orwell had in common in philosophical, ethical, and political terms and why these common factors still matter today. Orwell tries to specify or pin down the ethical basis of Dickenss great fictional works, in addition to his transfiguring gifts of generous humor, characterization, description, narrative, and symbolism. He sees and says that Dickens was a believing Christian, that his morality is the Christian morality, and that despite Dickens's dislike of both Catholicism and ostentatious evangelical Protestant religiosity, he was essentially a Bible-Christian with a quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressor . . . on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere.

Throughout the essay, Orwell uses a word that has come to be identified with him as a person and writer: decency. He says that Dickenss whole message is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently, the world would be decent. Like George Bernard Shaw, Orwell is disappointed that Dickens did not adhere to socialism and was even unsympathetic to the trade-union movement: Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands, least of all by open violence. With some annoyance, Orwell asks, What does [Dickens] want? As always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing.

Despite Orwells criticism of Dickenss reformist, moralistic politics, he continues to insist that Dickens was neither superficial nor foolish: To say If men would behave decently the world would be decent is not such a platitude as it sounds. He adds: In the last resort there is nothing [Dickens] admires except common decency. Writing with great eloquence in the concluding paragraph of the essay, Orwell praises Dickenss devotion to human brotherhood and the idea of equality under God, with which all through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted. Orwell insists, against the ascendant fascists and communists, that the ordinary people in the Western countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of realism and power politics. Yet he concedes that they may come to do so, in which case Dickens will be . . . out of date. . . . [He] has been popular chiefly because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man.

With this emphasis we return to Chesterton, who wrote an influential 1906 book on Dickens and also introductions to each of the novels, which were published in Everyman editions and then gathered as a separate book in 1911. Chesterton saw Dickens as having an elemental, primitive, profound Christian vision of the human person and society. He believed in this vision, and worked against the spirit of his own agethe first third of the twentieth centuryin trying to recover, renew, and defend the Judeo-Christian Natural Law tradition that is the ultimate source of Dickenss worldview and Orwells, too: the very basis of Orwells own, dogged common decency.

Orwell himself intermittently saw this. His intellectual departure from Chesterton occurred partly because Chesterton became a serious Christianfirst an Anglo-Catholic and then, in 1922, a Catholicand tried to renew the central Christian tradition through thought, argument, and writing. The vaguely, residually Anglican but increasingly agnostic Orwell moved on to socialism. He vehemently opposed the Catholic Church and, in fact, all systematic thinking, especially Marxism (an education in Marxism and similar creeds consists largely in destroying your moral sense). His own socialism never favorably impressed left-wing intellectuals, who have always been his greatest haters and detractors.

True communists or socialists such as Raymond Williams, Isaac Deutscher, E. P. Thompson, and the Arab-American Edward Said always knew that Orwells socialism was a jerry-built, home-made, unsystematic, non-Marxist affair, a fact made particularly clear in Orwells own 1941 book The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius and in many of his best essays and reviews. One of the most revealing is his December 1940 review of Charlie Chaplins satirical-comic, anti-Hitler film The Great Dictator. In this review, he credits Chaplin with depicting a sort of concentrated essence of the common man [and] the ineradicable belief in the decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is everywhere in retreat . . . liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists. And everywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from Christian culture. Just as Orwell was to be banned in Soviet Russia and its satellites, Charlie Chaplin was banned in Nazi Germany (it is precisely the idea of human equalitythe Jewish or Judaeo-Christian idea of equalitythat Hitler came into the world to destroy, Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn).

But Chesterton understood something that Orwell would not steadily meditate: This set of allegedly normal beliefs is not ineradicable. Orwell wantedloved, in factthe fruits of centuries of Christian civilization, including manners and customs, and often said so, dreading their replacements. (Of a popular, depraved contemporary novelist he wrote in 1944: Emancipation is complete, Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.) But those fruits that Orwell loved came from Judeo-Christian roots. It was Chestertons long quest to recover and restore those roots, through popular and witty but also powerfully philosophical works such as The Everlasting Man and St. Thomas Aquinas. In A Knight of the Woeful Countenance, a brilliant retrospective 1971 essay on Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge praised his dogged devotion to the truth but warned that one of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only truth as enlightened expediency.

Orwell thought, or at least hoped, that common decency (ethics) and objective truth (epistemology) could survive without any metaphysical-philosophical basis or confessional-ecclesiastical structure, though he married in an Anglican church and requested burial in an Anglican service and grave (which was a bit tricky for his friends Muggeridge and David Astor to arrange). But he was also frightened at the erosion of this inheritance: the common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped . . . but . . . the doctrine of realism is gaining ground (Raffles and Miss Blandish, 1944). The ascendancy of fascist and communist propaganda in the 1930s and 40s is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943). Of course, this is the ultimate nightmare of 1984.

Orwell had gotten his essential currency of beliefs and valuations from traditional English culture, whose nineteenth-century and subsequent capitalist-imperialist developments he documented, despised, and critiqued with great eloquence in his novels and expository prose works. The culture he loved was represented by writers such as Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Chesterton, not by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalinor even by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. In 1936, when he tried to get a letter of recommendation to fight in Spain from Harry Pollitt, the leader of Great Britain's Communist Party, he was turned down. In Spain he fought the fascists (and was badly wounded) but was horrified by the communist purges of fellow Spanish Republicans, including the party of anarchists in whose ranks he was serving. Orwells documentary account of his experience in Homage to Catalonia was not initially popular, but Trillings 1952 introduction to an American edition did much to make Orwells modern reputation, and not only in America.

Orwell rather dangerously committed himself more than once to the phrase and idea that all art is propaganda (Charles Dickens, 1939). Every writer, especially every novelist, has a message. . . . Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. He means that all artevery work of artpropagates some worldview and scheme of valuations, however absurd, idiosyncratic, or irrational. But this is to recognize that philosophy, worldview, or ideology cannot be escaped; that analytical reason, inference, implication, and evaluation are inevitable in humans. Philosophy cannot be escaped.

Chesterton died too early (1936) to see the astounding historical tragedies that Orwell would see before his untimely death in 1950. But Chesterton was in crucial respects wiser and deeper. In 1906, the same year his first great book on Dickens was published, he wrote a brief introduction to a volume of selections from the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold. He praised Arnold and credited him with great insight. He discovered (for the modern English) the purely intellectual importance of humility, Chesterton wrote. He had none of that hot humility which is the fascination of saints and good men. But he had a cold humility which he discovered to be a mere essential of the intelligence. To see things clearly, he said, you must get yourself out of the way.

It is that cold humility, self-depreciating and honest, that so many of Orwells friends, admirers, and readers saw or see in him. Whatever his deficiencies, we are right to do so.

M. D. Aeschliman is the author ofThe Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism.

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What Orwell Learned From Chesterton | M. D. Aeschliman - First Things