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| The Global British Empire was the greatest prison and charnel house in history. |
What is clear, is that with every War fought by Imperialism, the
basis of it is always covered by a superficial commitment to be
fighting to oppose some case of inhumanity of one kind or another,
even though it is clear that this is nothing but the most flagrant
hypocrisy, and that what actually lies behind it is a pursuit either
of the interests of the ruling class, as represented by its State, or
else of the interests of some political elite as represented through
the Political Power. In neither case is the real purpose of the war
to pursue some high moral purpose. There was no moral superiority of
either side in WWI. In WWII, it is hard to see how a British
Imperialism that oppressed, and murdered millions of Colonial Slaves
could claim any moral superiority over the Nazis and their oppression
and holocaust against the Jews, particularly given the warm welcome
that Hitler's rise to power had been given by the British ruling
class, and its mouthpieces such as the Daily Mail, and particularly
given that Churchill's anti-Semitism was not significantly different
from that of Hitler. Nor could the US claim any moral superiority in
that regard. The factories of Ford and General Motors, in Germany,
continued to produce tanks and other military hardware right up to
the US entry into the War in 1941! Both Britain and the US knew that
Jews in Germany were being persecuted by the Nazis from 1933 onwards,
yet not only did it not cause them to propose doing anything about
it, but when Germany intervened in the Spanish Civil War, it did not
lead them even to provide arms for the Republic to fight them.
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| Rumsfeld & Saddam when they were best buddies and the US was supplying him with WMD. |
In Iraq, it was the US which had provided Saddam with WMD in the
first place, and they had little objection to him using them for the
purpose of the war against Iran. In the first Gulf War, they left
the Marsh Arabs and Kurds at the mercy of Saddam, having encouraged
them to revolt. In reality what it did, was to weaken them. The US,
had no reason to strengthen the Shia or Kurds in Iraq. The latter
also threatened its NATO ally Turkey. The former were always likely
to link up with their Iranian brethren. The US State had an
incentive to seek Saddam's overthrow by a Palace Coup. But, the real
lesson of Iraq, is that the clerical-fascists appear to be more adept
than the western bourgeois-democratic politicians. The
representatives of the Shia clerical-fascists in Iraq, were able to
use the US and its entourage to remove Saddam, and his Sunni
dominated Bonapartist regime. All the time that Shia
clerical-fascists, such as Sistani, were issuing warm words to the
US, while they carried out this function, provided them with money
and weapons, and suppressed the Sunni insurgency, they were, at the
same time, liaising with their Iranian co-religionists, who provided
their own insurgency with the weapons to attack the US in the Shia
dominated areas. In fact, it is reminiscent of how Medieval Popes were able to set one European Prince against another in order all the time to advance the cause of Catholicism across the Continent.
Instead of removing Saddam and replacing him with a US friendly, and
more reliable, agent, as the neo-Cons had planned, instead Iraq
became, essentially, an adjunct of Iran, which is what those more
enlightened sections of the US State Power must have feared from the
beginning. The US has now to either cut its losses from that
venture, or to press on. In other words, it would now have to wage a
war against Iran, in order to destroy the influence of the Shia
majority in both Iran and Iraq, and the potential for them to lend
assistance to their brethren in the Gulf States where they are
oppressed by a Sunni ruling class. It is, of course, the Gulf
States, which control the majority of the oil, which is the main
concern of the US. Those Gulf States have only very small
populations, and a powerful Iran and Iraq, together with Syria would
be in a strong position to come to the support of their Shia
populations, as a means of overthrowing the existing feudal
monarchies. They do not do so openly because that would bring the US
into the conflict. But, if the US is seen to be intervening anyway,
then there would be no reason for Iran, Iraq, and Syria together with
other Shia forces in the region not to respond accordingly.
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| Large numbers of Special Forces troops were sent in to Libya by the West and Gulf Monarchies, and are now being sent in to Syria. |
The US backed war of Saddam's Iraq against Iran demonstrated that any
military attack on Iran would be extremely costly in human life.
Although, the laboratory experiments in the Balkans, and in Iraq and
in Libya, demonstrated that the new high-tech weaponry, at the
disposal of Imperialism, can have a devastating effect, it cannot win
wars. In the Balkans, it required a powerful ground offensive. In
both Gulf Wars that was also true. In Libya, despite over 20,000
bombing and Cruise Missile raids that devastated the small country,
not only was it not enough, but the rebel forces fighting under cover
of it, were still able to make no sustainable advance. Only when
Britain, France, Qatar and other countries sent in significant
numbers of Special Forces, using the latest weaponry was it possible
to begin to win ground and keep it. Even then despite two months of
intensive bombing and shelling, that caused what international
agencies described as a humanitarian catastrophe, they were kept at
bay by the people of Sirte. Those same powers appear to have also
sent in such Special Forces to Syria. The US and Gulf States are
also sending in the latest weapons. Recent footage of Syrian tanks
exploding from the inside suggest that they are using depleted
uranium munitions as happened in Libya.
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| While Clerical-Fascists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the more militant Salafists have come to political power, clerical-fascist militias and Al Qaeda related groups like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, have increasingly been obtaining control of the streets. |
As the uprisings erupted across the Middle East and North Africa,
appears to have caused both problems and opportunities for US
Imperialism and its allies and the planned attack on Iran, or at least on its nuclear installations With Islamist forces taking over the
Political Power in Tunisia and Egypt, any attack by Israel, which
looked the most likely, on Iran, would act to provoke a backlash. A
US attack might provoke a similar response. At the same time these
uprisings provided opportunities. The support for the rebels in
Libya came from the Sunni Gulf Monarchies. Al Qaeda, which is now
running rampant in Libya, in Mali, and in Sudan is indeed, a Sunni
Islamist grouping. On the one hand this is problematic for the US,
which has based its “War on Terror” around an Al Qaeda bogeyman,
but, of course, this bogeyman is one largely of its own making. Bin
Laden was created as part of the US support for these very Islamist
terrorists in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
They were funded by the US's Saudi backers, and supplied with weapons
by the US via, its Islamist supporters in Pakistan.
A whole complex web exists of funding, and weapons supplies, and the
supply of trained jihadists that are in turn funded, educated and
trained through the Madrassas across Europe and the Middle East,
Africa and Asia. They are funded by the US's Sunni Gulf backers,
particularly the Saudi Wahhabis, they are provided with weapons often
through CIA channels, which itself infiltrates these organisations,
and acts to raise further funds through the production and
distribution of drugs, in a similar way to that which operated with
the Iran-Contra scandal. The US strategy is clearly to utilise these uprisings to mobilise
Sunni clerical-fascism as a powerful force across the region to
isolate, and then destroy Iran, and its supporters in Iraq, and in
Syria. It is no wonder that the US and its entourage has kept quiet
about the atrocities being committed by the Sunni feudal regimes in
Bahrain, and the other Gulf States, or the use of Saudi troops to
suppress the people of Bahrain.
But the course of events demonstrates the danger of this strategy for
the US. Libya shows how easily control can be lost. Once again,
Imperialism used an existing and potential atrocity to justify its
intervention. As with the Falklands, with the Balkans, with Iraq,
with Afghanistan no stable, certainly no progressive, solution to the
problem was achieved. Instead, countries and economies were
destroyed, tens of thousands of people were killed, and the use of
depleted uranium munitions in each case is leaving a toxic legacy for
generations of the peoples of these countries to suffer. As could
have been predicted by any Marxist, and as indeed I did predict,
instead of the rule of Gaddafi being replaced by some nice European
type, or even Latin American style bourgeois democracy, Libya has
descended into a sectarian hell-hole. One half of the country, with
the oil, wants to secede from the other; tribes that have been at
odds for generations fight to settle scores, to win advantage etc.;
and clerical-fascist forces undertake jihad to secure domination.
The same was true of WWI and II, of course. The First World War, not
only caused massive destruction, but its resolution, through the
Versailles Treaty, created, as Trotsky points out, the conditions for
the rise of Hitler in Germany, and the inevitability of another war.
The Second World War only eventually established a new bourgeois
democracy on the bones of the working class in Germany, across
Central and Eastern Europe, and in Japan and other parts of Asia. In
West Germany, under the boot of the US and Allied powers, the workers
were crushed, and their labour movement incorporated into the State.
Whilst former Nazis were appointed as judges, and to other high
posts, and Nazi industrialists feted, the Berufsverbot laws banned
Communists and Leftists from holding positions, imposed censorship
etc., and led to the murder of
Rudi Dutschke.
In Japan too under the heel of the US Occupation the Labour Movement
was crushed, and resurrected in tamed fashion, once again
incorporated into the State, and a period of one party rule under the
LDP instituted that ran almost until today.
As Trotsky pointed out long ago, Imperialism does not fight wars for
moral purposes. So, despite all of our understandable feelings of
disgust at events in Syria, and feeling that something must be done,
we have to conclude that what must not be done is for us to call for
Imperialism to intervene in Syria. Indeed, as Trotsky pointed out in
relation to the Balkans,
“Therefore an uncompromising protest against atrocities serves
not only the purpose of moral self-defence on the personal and party
level but also the purpose of politically safeguarding the people
against adventurism concealed under the flag of ‘liberation’.”
We should do all in our power to support the workers of Syria, and
any truly revolutionary forces allied with them – which does not
include clerical-fascists, or forces acting as the agents of external
powers – and part of that includes opposing the intervention of our
own Imperialist states. But, the Left does not have a good record in
this regard.
It is perhaps not surprising that as revolutions do not come along
very often, when something that looks like a revolution erupts,
people on the Left seek to associate themselves with it. Of course,
Marxists should support genuine revolutionary movements, but as Lenin
points out above we are not just revolutionaries, we are proletarian
revolutionaries. Our goal is not bourgeois democracy, but Socialism.
Moreover, just because some group rises up against the current
Establishment does not make it in itself revolutionary.
Counter-revolutionary, and reactionary forces also rise up against
the status quo! As the Theses On The National & Colonial
Questions says,
“Petty-bourgeois nationalism proclaims as internationalism the
mere recognition of the equality of nations, and nothing more. Quite
apart from the fact that this recognition is purely verbal,
petty-bourgeois nationalism preserves national self-interest intact,
whereas proletarian internationalism demands, first, that the
interests of the proletarian struggle in any one country should be
subordinated to the interests of that struggle on a world-wide scale,
and, second, that a nation which is achieving victory over the
bourgeoisie should be able and willing to make the greatest national
sacrifices for the overthrow of international capital.
Thus, in countries that are already fully
capitalist and have workers’ parties that really act as the
vanguard of the proletariat, the struggle against opportunist and
petty-bourgeois pacifist distortions of the concept and policy of
internationalism is a primary and cardinal task...
With regard to the more backward states and
nations, in which feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal-peasant
relations predominate, it is particularly important to bear in
mind:..
...the need for a struggle against the clergy
and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward
countries;
third, the need to combat Pan-Islamism and
similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement
against European and American imperialism with an attempt to
strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.;..
fifth, the need for a determined struggle
against attempts to give a communist colouring to
bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the
Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national
movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that,
in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which
will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained
to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle
against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.
The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with
bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but
should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold
the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its
most embryonic form;”
Yet, on the one hand we
have seen those such as the SWP ,who have lost faith in the
working-class, and instead engaged in a Moralistic Quest against
Imperialism, align themselves with the most rancid and reactionary
forces, purely on the basis of their claims to be “Anti-Imperialist.”
Instead of maintaining a strict separation and hostility, to
these reactionary forces, the SWP have proclaimed, “We are all
Hezbollah now!” On the other hand, we have seen their mirror
image in the AWL, which, for the same reasons, has engaged in
its own Moralistic Quest, but this time lining up behind the forces
of “Democratic Imperialism”, and has in the process found
itself likewise lining up with similarly reactionary forces, be it
apologising for people like Sistani in Iraq, or the Qatari
Royal family in its intervention in Libya, or its support for the
Clerical-Fascist rebels in Libya.
As Trotsky once said,
it is our responsibility to tell the truth to the workers, even when
that truth is unpalatable. When a strike cannot be won, and a
tactical retreat will enable our forces to best survive, we have to
say so. When workers rush ahead of themselves as they were doing in
1870, when Marx advised the Parisian workers not to rise up, or as
they did in the July Days of 1917, we have to warn against
adventurism. When our forces are too weak, to be able to intervene
decisively, to achieve the ends we seek, we also have to say so. The
fact is that our forces are currently very, very weak. We have to
recognise that fact, and act accordingly to build them up on a
principled basis. As Trotsky warned the Palestinian Trotskyists
prior to WWII, who wanted to abandon the position of opposition to
Imperialism against the threat of fascism,
“That policy which attempts to place upon the
proletariat the unsolvable task of warding off all dangers engendered
by the bourgeoisie and its policy of war is vain, false, mortally
dangerous. “But fascism might be victorious!” “But the USSR is
menaced!” “But Hitler’s invasion would signify the slaughter of
workers!” And so on, without end. Of course, the dangers are many,
very many. It is impossible not only to ward them all off, but even
to foresee all of them. Should the proletariat attempt at the expense
of the clarity and irreconcilability of its fundamental policy to
chase after each episodic danger separately, it will unfailingly
prove itself a bankrupt. In time of war, the frontiers will be
altered, military victories and defeats will alternate with each
other, political regimes will shift. The workers will be able to
profit to the full from this monstrous chaos only if they occupy
themselves not with acting as supervisors of the historical process
but by engaging in the class struggle. Only the growth of their
international offensive will put an end not alone to episodic
“dangers” but also to their main source: the class society.”
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| Trotsky advised the Spanish workers to build their own organisations and maintain a strict political and organisational separation from their class enemies. |
Our task in Syria, as
elsewhere, is to support the Syrian workers to help them organise to
defend their interests against their class enemies be they within the
regime of Assad, or within the ranks of the clerical-fascists and
their Imperialist and feudalist backers. As Marxists, the most
important way we can fulfil that task is to carry out our role as set
out by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, by acting as the
memory of the class, conveying to the Syrian workers the lessons of
history, and the dangers they face from their class enemies under
whatever mask. The most significant weapon we have to assist the
Syrian workers is the scientific method of Marxism, and the ability
arising from it, to understand the situation of the workers, and the
means by which to advance it. That involves not only carrying such a
programme to the workers, but of doing whatever we can to assist them
in building their own organisations and structures in order to
advance their position, and transform the material conditions which
limit it. That involves the building of Workers Defence Squads and
Militia to physically defend the workers. It involves building
Factory Committees and Peasant Committees as alternative organs of
power to the institutions of bourgeois democracy. It involves the
occupation of workplaces, and the establishment of Co-ops where
possible to provide the workers with material means of support. It
involves the building of Neighbourhood Committees to co-ordinate the
Factory Committees, the Militia and so on, as a preparation for
building Workers Councils. It involves the building of a mass
Workers Party capable of quickly developing alongside the
consciousness of the workers, and establishing an ever more adequate,
ever more revolutionary programme.
But, we have to tell
the truth, and state openly that our resources for achieving this are
scant. The resources of the Syrian workers are small, and the forces
of their opponents are great. We do no favour to the Syrian workers
in hiding that fact and encouraging them towards adventures. But,
that does not imply defeatism either. It does not imply that the
Syrian workers should throw in their lot with one group of their
class enemies as opposed to another i.e. lesser evilism. It implies
that the Syrian workers should all the more keep their distance from
both these groups of its enemies, and focus instead on building up
its own resources and defence, ready for when it is in a position to
go on to the offensive. As Lenin advised, it requires the most
flexible of tactical approaches, playing off one group of its
opponents against the other, making tactical short term alliances
with one, and then the other, to gain whatever advantage it can to
build its own forces.
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