After the Paris attack: We are all Kenyans, Malians, Syrians and Afghans
The drone operators in air conditioned trailers in Missouri are killing civilians in Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria alike; therefore the Pentagon conception that so-called terror bombings constitute “asymmetrical warfare” is wrong; “limited war” the term used in the Eisenhower and Kennedy days leading up to Vietnam acknowledged that the U.S. military was fighting “irregular forces” overseas. For all the victims on all the continents these distinctions are meaningless, they are victims of imperialist war and this is true in the metropolis as well as in the semi-colonies. The bombings in Kenya and Mali are not different from the bombings of civilians in Paris and neither are they different from the victims of the U.S. drones or one ton French fragmentation bombs and Matra missiles. This is war, something imperialism makes continuously and non-stop and has done so since before the end of the Cold War, beginning with the Charlie Wilson/Brzezinski support policy for the anti-communist Mujahideen in 1979.
To end these wars that metastasize one into the next, pacifism will never work. A sentiment is no match for the powers of finance seeking resources and populations to exploit. Likewise the patriotic appeals of the Hollandes and Obamas to seriously make war and “finish terrorism off” are scams that only serve to keep the wars going.
The only way to put an end to “endless war” is socialist revolution. It is not just a question of disempowering those who always stand to benefit from murders and terror whether they be Wall St. banksters, members of the Paris Bourse or “radical” clerics seeking a piece of the oil profits. The great democratic aspirations of the masses must be met and exceeded for humanity to achieve a higher social level of development, and, in fact, in the global warming era species survival requires the same solution. Only socialism can deliver for the masses democratic aspirations and only the delivery of political power into the hands of a dictatorship of the international working class can put an end to the plunder and war policies of the capitalist dictatorship. The victims in Mali/Kenya have all the same social characteristics as the victims in the metropolis. The list grows and will grow. The empires must go!
In fact, U.S. imperialism is the world’s leading terrorist. For those of us who live here, they are the main enemy. Daesh exists because the U.S. drove al-Qaeda in Iraq out of Iraq and into collision with the al-Zawahiri leadership resulting in separate organization, ISIS, which claims to be the real center of a new Caliphate, a reactionary world system based on a zealot’s interpretation of Sharia law. Those who say that ISIS is the creation of the U.S are wrong in the literal sense, but ISIS could not exist except in the wake of a destroyed Iraq and a ruined Syria and these conditions must be laid squarely at the door of U.S. imperialism.
Social imperialists at home and abroad favor these wars. Bernie Sanders and François Hollande are not new phenomenon suddenly appearing on the historical stage. And it is important to know that the Max Schachtman brand of socialism supported the U.S. war in Vietnam just as the French Communist and Socialist parties supported France’s colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. They do so, and did so, because they represent the interests of the highest paid workers and the bureaucrats at the top of the labor federations who are beneficiaries of the little bit of real trickle down from imperialist super profits from the exploitation of our sisters and brothers in the semi-colonies. In this they identify with the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie and take their side against the workers of the world. Like the empires they support we must sweep them into the dust-bin of history.
Social imperialism starts at home under the guise of Bernie Sanders and is reflected in the moralistic pacifistic drivel when the left produces its obligatory “we oppose terroristic barbarism” qualifiers. Nowhere do we read in the reformist or pacifist press that passes for a left any call for an end to social imperialist misleadership, a social imperialist leadership that always favors wars against “terrorist barbarism” and in favor of “metropolitan civilization.” Nowhere do we see the phony left calling on the labor movement to form its own party and channel the mighty force of labor to smash the capitalist state most presently in the imperialist centers. A layer of social imperialists stand in the way. They are doing their best to keep the workers internationalist consciousness from emerging. When blow back against the imperialist center occurs it is an extension of the wars of subjugation of the semi-colonial peoples but the social imperialists don’t want you to understand this. The social imperialist’s legitimacy, such as it is, in the eyes of the big bourgeoisie consists of sustaining nationalist mythology, the benevolence of U.S. world leadership and the rewards of private enterprise.
“In the absence of a popular secular leadership, including that of communists, both in the heartlands and the neo-colonies, leadership of resistance to imperialist oppression defaults to the radical clerics who mobilise their armies to negotiate with imperialism a share of the oil. In creating the history of colonial oppression, or benefiting from it, the Empire unites bosses and workers in a common fight to defend the basis of Empire, the extraction of wealth from the resources and labour of their client states”, – Dave Brownz, “Marx on Parisian Terror”
Under the combined thumb of intervention and state repression the imperialist’s historic interventions in the colonies and semi-colonies have severely stymied the emergence of a revolutionary and democratic workers movement, empowering every comprador bourgeoisie to crush the movements of the workers and peasants, making workers and peasant’s revolution less possible.
SMASH THE RACIST LIES! IMMEDIATE CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR ALL!
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938, revolutionary Marxists called for the abolition of the racist U.S. immigration quotas so as to accept Jewish refugees from the Holocaust anyone with two eyes could see was coming. The reformist New Deal kept the doors shut tight. Today Syrian refugees face a similar obstacle in the U.S. Congress with sectors of the Democratic Party in coalition with the Tea Partiers in installing a process that will keep Syrian refugees out of the U.S.A. for two years or more, even in the cases where these applicants would ultimately be accepted. This is a death sentence; this is only acceptable in the eyes of the suckers whose own Caliphate is the white Anglo-Saxon protestant Ku Klux Klan Caliphate. The anti-immigrant war, like the war on terror itself is a propaganda plan to reinforce the public impression of capitalism’s phony economic recovery. The anti-refugee and anti-immigrant causes serve as political distractions from the true picture of mass unemployment and exploit the anxiety of the precariously employed and underpaid.
The bourgeois media pound us with the ideas that workers are and should be outraged by the criminal attacks on civilians in France but they should know that these do not come about in abstraction from a series of similar suicide bombings committed across the Middle East and North Africa. And the bombings come about in direct connection to the brutal subjugation of non-believers in areas under ISIL/ISIS/Daesh control. Our homes, community and travel are no longer safe. During the recounting of the civilian dead in Paris and those killed in the downing of the Russian plane, the corporate media hide the facts that thousands of innocent civilians have been killed by 14 years of indiscriminate and targeted bombings by the U.S./UK/French and now Russian air forces. Of course even less is revealed about the theocratic state of Israel which only last year slaughtered thousands in Gaza. As we write here, the war of terror waged by Israeli settlers against the Palestinians has escalated with many new victims. While the U.S. points to a paper disapproval of the expansion of these settlements, the U.S. Obama administration arms the Israeli military to the teeth and the very public ostensible disagreement with the policies of the arch racist Netanyahu has vanished from the press. At the same moment that police terror directed at black and brown communities result in record numbers of police victims, the bourgeoisie sponsors black anti-immigrant voices and anti-refugee hysteria always to the tune that the “foreigners” will take your job. A black vanguard has seen through this and has made a profound alliance with the Palestinian cause and we hope they will see their own interests in defending Syrian refugees from “the man’s” wars.
Imperialism’s military aggression and dominance stymies the forces of Permanent Revolution, the only forces that can hold back theocratic reaction, and as a result has thus brought that terrorist reaction to every worker’s doorstep from Fallujah to Paris and beyond. The ruling class will make use of this fear to rally workers into nationalist mobilizations; the fascists and racist forces will extend this sentiment to anti-Muslim violence. The centrist and social-imperialist left, “progressives” and pacifists find their ways to rally to the flags of the imperialists. Revolutionary workers must show another road forward, a road and program built upon internationalist solidarity to defeat imperialism as a system. The imperialists have brought the war on terror down upon us; we must defeat the rule of the capitalist class whose self interests dictate that they choose between smaller and larger and world wars.
Revolutionary workers must oppose the rallying of nationalist and patriotic sentiment used to prepare for expanded and future military interventions. To defeat the terrorist threat imperialism must be taken out of the equation. This means that to defeat ISIS the capitalist system in the imperialist centers must be overthrown and replaced by internationalist workers governments.
Once again we are watching as the bourgeoisie gets away with fomenting racist hysteria, exactly and only because of the paucity and crisis of working class leadership. But revolutionaries are here to tell you that life does not have to be this way and that life must be another way for species survival. Forward to a new world party of socialist revolution! Forward to the world socialist revolution!
Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA) 11/21/2015
