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The events that have been going on for months at the heart of Europe – Crimea’s detachment from Ukraine and its fake-democratic joining to Russia, tension on the border between the two States with consequent deployment of armies, the political and media clamour from all sides surrounding these events – show that under the pressure of the economic crisis the bourgeoisie is more and more frequently resorting to a card it knows only too well: that of nationalism.

As the war massacres in Syria continue and millions of refugees flock to all corners of the Middle East, adding to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian, African and Asian proletarians fleeing by land and sea in an attempt to survive, the situation in Ukraine has blown up under pressure from the imperialist powers, with all the contradictions it has been dragging along with it since the explosion of Russia (1989-91), but which are mainly due to material factors linked to its history and geographical, economic and strategic position. Born old and decrepit, with the illusion of being able to gain stable independence at a political as well as an economic level, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie has “settled down” in a territory that reaches across the area of Eastern Europe bordering on Belarus, Poland, Hungary Slovakia, Romania, Moldavia and Russia.

“For a long time now, the lack of security measures in Turkish coal mines has been at the centre of polemics. Last year, 93 miners died in various mines across the Country. Last November, 300 miners shut themselves at the bottom of the Zonguldak mine, in the Black Sea region – where in 1992 an explosion had killed 263 men and in May 2010 30 more had died in the same way – in order to protest against the plant's insufficient security measures.Two weeks ago, the main opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu's Chp, asked in Parliament for an inquiry on security in the Soma mine itself. The proposal was turned down by the Akp, which has the absolute majority in Ankara's Great Assembly” (from the Italian daily “La Repubblica”, 5/14/2014).

Around mid-September, whilst a wave of Islamic-inspired demonstrations was arising more or less all over the Arab world (set off, so the “means of information” told us, by an obscure little satirical film on the Prophet), a notorious Italian opinion-leader was openly confessing to a well-known radio channel (and we quote from memory): “We got our analysis wrong.  What we called ‘revolutions’ were not revolutions but revolts stemming from social and demographic circumstances.”  A year and a half or so ago, the guilty ignorance of a gaggle of politicians, journalists, experts, commentators (to sum up, the dregs of the ruling ideology), were deafening us with hymns to the “Arab Springtimes”, the “Twitter revolutions”, “the final triumph of democracy”: today they mill around bewildered, wondering what on earth happened, what went wrong.  The mother of imbeciles is ever-pregnant.