Nato’s power, the US’s hegemony and what remains of the British empire – all of which are bundled together – are in irreversible decline. The Multipolar World is coming into being and there is no room for imperialists in it. This is the context in which the World Youth Festival 2024 in Sochi took place and why it evoked an unbefitting response from Guy Adams of the fascist-loving Daily Mail.
Origins of the World Youth Festival
The festival was originally named the World Festival of Youth and Students. The WFYS was founded in 1947, just after the Second World War, at a time when it was becoming clear to anyone who was interested that the imperialists – ruling elites of the ‘Collective West’ – were eager to take the helm from Nazi Germany and continue to wage war against the USSR.
Many documents that have been declassified since then irrevocably prove this fact, notable examples being the British Operation Unthinkable or the US’s Operation Cartel – later known as Project Aerodynamic.
That the desires of the imperialists ultimately manifested themselves in a ‘cold war’ (covert war avoiding direct military confrontation) was a testament to the power of the Soviet Union – that it could win a war against Nazi Germany and most of Europe and still be strong enough to keep the Anglo-American imperialists at bay. Nothing proves this better than the developments since the liquidation of the Soviet Union.
It was clear that a ‘hot war’ could not be avoided by surrendering the Soviet Union. In fact, it was precisely the power of the Soviet Union that had prevented another war from engulfing Soviet territory. This correct understanding of imperialism had always been promoted by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the leadership of VI Lenin and Joseph Stalin, but was buried by the revisionists when Nikita Khrushchev came to power.
Indeed, Khrushchev was so sure there was a way to ‘get along with’ the West that he tried to join Nato in 1954 – the same year he transferred Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian SSR.
Whether he really believed peace was possible with imperialism or whether he was deliberately undermining the USSR by laying the foundations for its eventual demise – in collaboration with imperialism – is a question for future Russian historians to resolve.
What can be said with certainty is that the legacy of the revisionist Soviet leaders who followed Stalin, from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, was the stagnation of the late Soviet Union, the ideological infiltration of the ‘cold war’ enemy into all spheres of Soviet society, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and weakness of the crippled post-Soviet Russian state, the massive economic devastation of the 1990s which has been called an “economic genocide”, the Nato expansion to encircle Russia (including its war on Yugoslavia and creation of Kosovo), the stoking of fascistic and terroristic nationalisms surrounding and directed at Russia, the war in Georgia and of course the current war in Ukraine.
It is no wonder that the pundits of the ‘Collective West’ like to compare President Vladimir Putin to Joseph Stalin now that Russia has finally stood up to the imperialists.
From its inception the WFYS aimed to bring together young adults from all over the world to promote solidarity and democracy and to oppose war and imperialism. Popular mottos from different years included “For peace and friendship – against the aggressive imperialist pacts”, “For peace and friendship and peaceful coexistence” and “For anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship”.
The WFYS was held every few years in the following countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Poland, the USSR, Austria and Finland. It suffered a hiatus from 1962 to 1968 owing to political turmoil in the designated host countries, i.e., because Algeria and Ghana were fighting the French and the British respectively for their independence. After 1968 the previously biennial event was held roughly every 5 years in Bulgaria, East Germany, Cuba, the USSR and the DPRK.
The dissolution of the USSR at the hands of Gorbachev led to another hiatus until the mantle was taken up by Cuba in 1997. Since then it has been held in Algeria, Venezuela, South Africa, Ecuador and Russia. The last WFYS in Russia was hosted in Sochi in 2017 and was the largest iteration of the event in its history thus far with 30,000 participants from 185 countries taking part.
In March 2024 the latest iteration of the festival took place, hosted again in Sochi, and on this occasion it happened for the first time under a new name – the World Youth Festival.
The WYF hosted 20,000 participants from 190 countries. The organisation and funding for the event were handled by the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs – Rosmolodezh – as well as by the federal territory of Sirius. It also had the backing of numerous giant state enterprises such as Rosatom, Roscosmos, Rostelcom, Rosneft, Rostec, Gazprom, Aeroflot and Sberbank.
The significance of the World Youth Festival 2024
Economic
The economic warfare between the imperialist camp and Russia was initiated by the imperialists back in 2014. The measures were supposedly a punitive response to the decision by the Crimean people to return to Russia rather than remain subject to the fascist puppet proxy regime in Kiev after the Maidan coup. The EU ban on Russian iron and steel is one of several examples from that time (see EU Council Regulation no 833/2014 article 3g).
The WYF of 2024 happened at a time when Russia and the ‘Collective West’ had been embroiled in open warfare in Ukraine for two years. By this time the ‘Collective West’ had done everything it could to sanction, sabotage and economically isolate Russia.
They blew up the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, they nationalised Russian state enterprise subsidiaries in Europe, they threatened third countries to stop them doing business with Russia, they tried to impose an international price cap on oil to reduce Russia’s revenues, they banned Russia from using the Swift banking system, and they froze $300bn worth of Russian state assets abroad.
But even after they had apparently exhausted all the economic tools at their disposal in the hope of bringing the Russian economy to its knees, the successful hosting of 2024’s WYF showcased their failure to a wide audience.
The festival showed the world that Russia has the money and resources to host such an event. None of the participants had to pay for accommodation or food during their stay, meaning that there was no need for them to spend any money in Russia. Furthermore, thousands of participants even had their flights paid for from all parts of the world.
The food was delicious, the catering was superb, the rooms were spacious and comfortable, and the city was clean and beautiful. The huge cost of this festival shows on the one hand how much Russia values the event and its noble aims, but on the other hand how well the Russian economy is doing despite the imperialists’ crazed onslaught.
A quantitative indicator of the state of the Russian economy is its GDP growth rate, which surpasses the growth rates of many ‘Collective West’ countries. It averaged 3.6% for the year 2023 according to the Central Bank of Russia and seems to be significantly higher in the first months of 2024.
In stark contrast to Western countries where real wages are falling rapidly owing to inflation, in Russia they are rising, and in 2023 they rose by over 7%. It is not difficult to understand President Putin’s landslide victory in the 2024 elections given such figures.
Military
The hosting of the festival on the shores of the Black Sea during the war in Ukraine demonstrated both that Russia is confident in its intelligence and defence capabilities and that the participants were confident in Russia. To boost this confidence even further high officials such as Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, Sergey Lavrov, Maria Zakharova, and Dmitry Peskov were all present at the festival.
During the last two years of war several incursions have taken place into Russian territory and several terrorist attacks have been carried out by Ukraine on Russian territory such as the Crimean Bridge attack and the assassinations of Daria Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky. It also transpired that during the WYF the Ukrainian army released a video directly threatening all foreign participants. Despite this the entire festival took place with no signs of tension or fear.
Diplomatic
Another objective of the imperialists was to isolate Russia diplomatically. The USA’s agents have long been pressuring the representatives of other countries to vote against Russia at the United Nations and to condemn ‘Russian aggression’. Nato countries have used all media dominance to create a synchronised echo chamber, drilling their Goebbelsian lies into every worker’s head, and injecting a default Russophobia into every sphere of political, economic and social life.
So many enterprises and institutions linked to Western monopoly capital have gone out of their way to condemn Russia since 2022, to silence any voice that questions the imperialist narrative, to plaster Ukrainian flags all over their marketing and products, to raise money for Ukraine through public collections, and to help create a general atmosphere of fear in which there has been no room for individuals to support Russia or even to put forward any view short of the extremist pro- Ukrainian fanaticism demanded by the lords of finance capital.
But the WYF proved that Russia is not isolated despite the relentless information war being waged by the ‘Collective West’. It showed that, on the contrary, the world is full of friends of Russia.
A competitive selection process chose 10,000 delegates from over 180 countries (that’s over 180 delegations with over 50 delegates each on average) but the number of applicants – i.e., young people who wanted to visit Russia – was vastly greater.
To give an example of the volume of applicants, out of 160 British applicants only 10 were selected. Extrapolating from this we can estimate that there were over 160,000 applicants to the WYF from outside Russia – quite a significant expression of interest.
It is worth noting that this estimate is conservative since in Britain, with its heightened Russophobia, many young people are likely to have been dissuaded from applying for fear of potential repercussions. The majority of countries, however, representing the vast majority of the global population, were not only happy to have their delegations attending the festival but in many cases encouraged their young leaders to attend it.
Ideological
In the current climate, the ‘Collective West’ is trying to rewrite history in order to hide its role in creating Nazi Germany, to hide the indispensable help their corporations gave to the Nazi Reich, and to hide the great sacrifice and glorious victories of the Soviet people who defeated them.
In the current climate Russian tennis players have their flags replaced by white rectangles at tournaments, Russian athletes, musicians, dancers and others are banned from participating in international events, Russia is excluded from Eurovision, Russian culture is being banned, statues of Russians are being torn down, streets named after Russians are being renamed – and in Ukraine even Russian books are being burned.
This global Russophobic campaign which has been orchestrated, nurtured and promoted by imperialist politicians, secret services and especially the corporate media, is reminiscent of the hair- raising practices of Nazi Germany.
It was in this climate that Russia opened its arms to the world – including to citizens of the imperialist heartlands – and showed them its generous hospitality. In doing so, it provided an example to the world of standing by its values and applying them in practice.
The imperialists like to pretend to hold such ‘universal’ and ‘humanitarian’ values, but in practice they have utter contempt for the masses of humanity. This is just one of the reasons why Russia is gaining so many fans in the West, where growing numbers of people are seeing through the lies of the mainstream media.
Evidence of this can be found in the comments section under the recent Daily Mail article by Guy Adams, about the WYF, entitled: ‘Putin’s BRITISH useful idiots: This week an adoring crowd of over 20,000 hand-picked young delegates hailed the Russian despot at Nuremberg-style rally.
‘Shockingly, several came from the UK. What are they thinking – and what poison might they spread?’
Interestingly among the 10 most popular comments made in response to this article, there were none in agreement with the Daily Mail’s narrative about Russia or the British delegates. To give an idea, the following are a sample of the most popular comments: “The vast majority of the worlds nations and populations are NOT against or boycotting Russia” – Luigi Peach from Brooklyn, UK, with 205 likes and 67 dislikes.
• “I’m more concerned about our politicians and billionaires conspiring at Davos” – Bootie bear from Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, with 122 likes and 20 dislikes.
• “What kind of poison will they spread? Probably the antidote to the poison you spread. Why are people not allowed to have a different point of view without being ridiculed and insulted?” – monimadness from No Limits City, South Korea, with 187 likes and 51 dislikes.
• “Because British society has been irreparably broken. Young people will look to stable cultures elsewhere where you can have an intelligent conversation without falling foul of Wokery!” – TheSport from Mayfield, UK, with 86 likes and 10 dislikes.
The gulf between what Guy Adams writes and what his readers think is revealing. When one of the delegates asked Mr Adams about this, he responded by branding his dissenting readers “anonymous trolls”.
Regardless of what Mr Adams thinks of his readers, their comments reveal that despite the efforts of ‘journalists’ like him, and despite the vast resources at the disposal of the mainstream media – all of which aim to keep workers’ minds safely trammelled by bourgeois newspeak – many Britons are beginning to wake up to the fact they are being lied to.
Ironically (given Zionism’s track record as the ideological inheritor of Nazism), the Times of Israel has chronicled how the Daily Mail and other mainstream media in Britain supported the growth of fascism in Europe in the years leading up to WW2. That being so, one might suppose that if Russia were holding Nuremberg-style rallies, the Daily Mail would be all in favour.
Meanwhile the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, over which the Daily Mail waxes lyrical, has declared WW2 genocide perpetrators and Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera to be national heroes and is bringing up its children to revere them as such.
It takes a very special kind of ‘useful idiot’ to praise the Kiev regime as a democracy while condemning Russia as fascist – and to do so in the pages of the Daily Mail of all places. We can only assume Mr Adams is as unaware of this irony as he is of European history generally.
We note in this context that the imperialist countries do everything possible to prevent their citizens from accessing Russian media and culture. A clear example being the banning of the popular Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik news outlets.
In fact Russian sources generally don’t appear in internet search results. This is due to an insidious weapon that the imperialists wield in their information war, an elephant in the room that is seldom talked about, that is, the US monopoly on search engines. As it turns out the information on the internet is brought to people through search engines – the real gatekeepers of information.
Currently there are two US companies that overwhelmingly dominate the world in this field, those being Google and Microsoft, with their search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Ask.com and others. Google, however, is the real monopoly gatekeeper with over 90% of the global market share.
Russia and China have their own search engines, Yandex and Baidu, which give their populations access to information that is not preselected by any US monopoly. These are the biggest alternatives to the US gatekeepers and a useful tool for accessing information that counters Western mainstream narratives. The global market share of Yandex and Baidu combined amount to less than 3%, however, which highlights that in the sphere of information the USA, and hence imperialism, has undisputed dominance.
This is one of the main reasons why it is so difficult for workers in the ‘Collective West’ to access the truth about the war in Ukraine, or to get any reliable information on any aspect of Russian contemporary or historical life. By contrast, Russia has imposed no censorship on Western media: Russian citizens have free access to both local and Western sources.
Despite this great imbalance in the information war, the truth is managing to get a foothold and impose itself. Working people will always seek the truth, and the worse their material conditions become, the more they are willing to go out of their way to find it. This is why President Putin’s popularity is growing in the West, especially among the working class, and why in Russia he has just won the elections with over 88% of the votes despite the concerted efforts of the imperialists to overthrow him.
The WYF 2024 demonstrated, for the world to see, that the imperialists are failing against Russia on the economic, military, diplomatic and ideological fronts. Through the WYF Russia has reassured the world that it can play a leading role in the struggle against imperialism – a historical mission bestowed upon the Russian people that deserves the support of the workers of the world.
Naturally, the impotence with which the imperialists were forced to witness the spectacle – foreshadowing their own demise – imbued them with fear and rage.
The imperialists seek reprisal against those who seek the truth
On 15 February 2024, the US delegation to the WYF held a press conference at the United Nations building in New York City sponsored by the Russian Mission to the United Nations. The panel of speakers included Caleb Maupin of the Center for Political Innovation, Chris Helali of the Party of Communists USA, and Elizabeth Pekin of the American Student Union.
The speakers made a strong case in support of Russia’s just war in Ukraine, explaining why they felt it was important to attend the WYF and why there should be no reprisals against any young American for attending. This was particularly important in light of the prosecution already being pursued against members of the Uhuru movement in the USA for the ‘crime’ of having visited Russia and spoken in its defence.
Attacks against free speech, dissenting opinion and independent journalism that isn’t in line with the official narrative are now commonplace in the West. The case of Julian Assange is well known, but there are hundreds if not thousands of lesser known ones.
The Spanish journalist Pablo Gonzalez who was detained without trial in Poland for the ‘crime’ of reporting from the ground in Donbass, British journalist Graham Philips who was sanctioned for the same ‘crime’, and the US commentator Gonzalo Lira who died in Ukrainian custody after being detained for speaking out against the Kiev regime, are just a few of many examples.
The intertwining of the bourgeois state – what some call the ‘deep state’ – with the corporate media, makes it difficult to tell apart Western journalists from state agents. A recent case in Britain is that of Paul Mason, who embarked on a holy crusade with British ‘intelligence’ against anti-imperialist independent media The Grayzone. This type of collusion goes back a long time. The name George Orwell is well known, but few people know that he was a British intelligence asset working for Britain’s anti-communist ‘Information Research Department’.
When 2024’s WYF struck fear into the hearts of British elites, their loyal stenographer Guy Adams of the Daily Mail rose to the occasion. Whether Mr. Adams is an agent is not as important as noting the extent to which his Russophobic passion has overtaken him.
To give an example, after the start of the Russian special military operation in 2022 Guy Adams verbally attacked an American RT journalist by privately messaging him on Twitter. His anger arose because of the ‘pro-Russian’ narrative that the RT journalist was presenting in his coverage.
Dissenting opinions produce a visceral anger in Mr Adams, such is his journalistic ‘integrity’. In his article about the WYF he even gloated at getting one of the British delegates fired by directly contacting his boss.
The fact that such a petty ‘journalist’ has the power to get a talented young professional fired, not by exposing any crime that was committed but by exposing that he attended a festival in Russia, is a damning indictment of the state of Britain and a terrible omen of things to come.
Despite his demonstrated visceral hatred of everything that stands in the way of Anglo-American imperialism, Guy Adams was unable to find anything substantive to report against Russia, the WYF or its participants.
In his frustration and impotence, he dedicated two-thirds of his article simply to doxing the members of the British delegation one by one, exposing as much personal information about them as he could, with the goal of causing them as many problems as possible in their personal and professional lives.
This is an example of how repression operates via the corporate media, which have the power to ruin people’s lives not as a result of their quest to get at the truth, but because of their monopoly over the official narrative and the pressure they bring to bear over employers and institutions as a result.
When lies get so blatant they give the game away
It has been shown that despite the ceaseless propaganda, the comments under the Daily Mail article demonstrate that many readers sympathise with the delegates who, according to Mr Adams, are “useful idiots” who went to “goose-step” amongst “brainwashed masses“
One of the reasons for this discrepancy of opinion has to be the poor quality of Mr Adams’ work. Although his reporting is riddled with unsubstantiated slander and contains glaring contradictions, the best examples of what make his article so unconvincing are the many quotations he uses, which help to paint the opposite picture of what he intended.
The quotations are in fact the only thing of substance in the article since the rest is made up of the deranged opinions of a Russophobe and the irrelevant doxing of personal details. It’s as if Mr Adams wanted to paint something dark but was only given white paint.
For example, after calling Putin a despot and implicitly comparing him to Hitler he goes on to say “Putin waxed lyrical about his desire to overturn ‘the injustice in today’s world order’ and ‘make the world more transparent, just, democratic, sustainable, balanced and safe’”.
In his quoting of the “goose-stepping” British delegates the effect was the same, below are the quotes he used:
• “I’m having an amazing time! It’s been one of the best experiences of my life. I love Russia. I love the Russian people. It’s a beautiful country, especially here in Sochi.”
• “We went tubing in the snow, it was great . . . Now I want to become an ambassador of hiking tourism in my homeland. I had no prejudices before visiting Russia. Cool place, friendly people. Russians are great guys!“
• “I’m from England. Obviously in the West there’s very much this antagonistic opinion [of Russia] but I think slowly, over time, young people have realised it’s not always true what state media are saying in the West. Everything here in Sochi proves the fact that not everything you see in the news in the West is true. I don’t think that if Russia was not a democracy, not free, not powerful and wealthy, that it would be able to do something this grand, this amazing. It’s been a pleasure to experience that and see for myself first-hand.”
• “Russia and China are not the enemy! The enemy is our ruling class that we must overthrow if we want a chance to have a future.”
Another doxed delegate was described as posing at the event “holding a flag bearing an image of Stalin”. As it turns out this flag had just been gifted to the delegate by a 56 year old Russian whose grandfather fought against the Nazis during WW2 under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. The flag bore the slogan “thank you grandfather for the victory”. Surely a self-identifying opponent of fascism like Guy Adams would not dare to criticise those who gave their lives to save the world from fascism!
The only time that Mr Adams seems to have found dark paint to work with, when the quotation could be said to reveal something bad about its author, is when quoting his Russophobic friend Alex Rennie, director of the UK Friends of Ukraine pressure group, who said:
“While a festival of 20,000 useful Kremlin idiots might seem harmless, these people coming back to the UK and spreading Putin’s lies are effectively foot soldiers of his disinformation campaign.”
This quote precisely describes the image Mr Adams was trying to paint with his article, but unfortunately for him it was cogently rebutted by his readers who commented as follows:
• “Disinformation – the sinister new term for information which deviates from the line our rulers want us to believe.”
• “What an ironic article. Condemning Russia for not being free while trying to frame ordinary people as some kind of Putin lovers simply for visiting. Apparently freedom is great, but not if people are free to visit places the establishment don’t like.”
Another own-goal came when Mr Adams proudly mentioned that his other ideological ally Mark Dixon of the ‘Moral’ Rating Agency campaigns for sanctions against Russia. For those who don’t know this means campaigning for waging economic war on a civilian population including elderly, women and children in the hope of weakening support for their government so that Western elites can overthrow it to colonise and plunder their country.
In a revealing slip of the tongue Mr Adams let out the phrase “he has also acquired a wife” as he was doxing Chris Emms, who recently got married.
All that Guy Adams achieved with his article was exposing the fascistic and morally reprehensible nature of his Russophobic counterparts as well as his own, including their fear, hatred and eagerness to suppress dissenting opinion and punish those who refuse to believe their lies.
Letter to the world from a British delegate
“Dear people of the world and dear Britons,
“A certain tabloid news outlet has decided to menacingly dox every member of the British delegation to the World Youth Festival 2024 in Russia.
“First of all I would like to apologise to my fellow British friends, whose reputations have been unfairly damaged, some of us have already experienced problems with work and study. So much for freedom of movement and speech, which were supposedly a core value of our country (as we can see – no longer).
“The World Youth Festival was by far the greatest event for young people in the world. I know no other country capable of unifying such different cultures, races and traditions into one big and friendly multicultural family. The amount of handshakes with people from different countries of the world, the sheer emotions these few days brought me – are priceless. But perhaps the most important point of the festival would be that it was absolutely non-political. We got together, nothing was forced upon us, no politicians forced their agenda on us, we were absolutely free to roam or go where we wanted to and enjoy our time in one of the safest, nicest places in Russia (and I dare say – the world).
“The aforementioned article describes the Festival as a ‘Nazi like parade in the style of Hitler’s Nuremberg festival’ but kindly omits the fact that their own news outlet was proudly supportive of Hitler in the 1930’s, as was the British royal family.
“Comparing the Russian people and festival to Nazis is not only a sign of total stupidity and ignorance, it also shows the shallow, disrespectful and primitively aggressive level that the official British narrative has fallen to.
“I feel shameful of my country and its way of dealing with its own young people, that dared challenge the official narrative.
“I pray that in Britain there are many people that will not trust this slimy evil propaganda reporting and I feel that it is important for them to know the truth: the British mainstream media lies to you and paints us in the worst possible colours. Their agenda is to pose Russia as our enemy, the Russian people – wild and uncivilised, the Britons coming to Russia – useful idiots.
“This is complete calumny: we stand against this agenda and will do everything in our power to ensure that the British people will know the truth and will not be fed this pile of lies daily.
“You do not deserve to be lied to.”
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.