Six weeks after the "liberation' of Iraq, suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco prove only that war creates a more dangerous world. Even prowar commentators now argue that the war on Iraq has been a 'recruiting drive' for al-Quaeda, and 50 percent of the American public say they don't believe the war on Iraq was a turning point in Bush's war on terror'. The Bush Gang calculated that they had destroyed one third of the Al-Quaeda leadership since they began the bombing of Afghanistan, but they miscalculated the scale of reaction it would create. KAREN O'TOOLE reports
The press have concentrated heavily on the bombings in Casablanca and Riyadh, with security alerts in Britain and the US declaring further bombings and terrorist attacks a certainty. The bombings have to be put in context. The US and Britain has killed many thousands more, not to mention Israel's ongoing murderous campaign which kills more Palestinians every day. The press are attempting a witch hunt to deflect attention away from Bush and Blair.
In the past year, the bombings have occurred across extensive territory; the Middle East, the Maghreb and South East Asia, involving many nationalities, but united by two common features - imperialism and Islam. But a feature common to people, east and west, is the huge global movement against imperialism. We are united by a common enemy, brought together in struggle.
Western rulers have repeatedly used the question of religion to create false divisions between peoples fighting national oppres sion; in Ireland, in India and Israel/Palestine. In all of these examples, the divisions ended in the actual partition of countries.
Bush would still have us believe that the anti-American strikes and demonstrations in Iraq and the suicide bombers throughout the world are the product of religious fanaticism, of people wishing to retreat into a past society. This was the argument the Zionists used originally to carve out the state of Israel, against Arabs generally, and Islam and the Palestinians specifically.
The 20th Century began as the era of imperialist wars, national liberation movements and revolutionary struggle. The Russian Revolution, which spread its influence far and wide, was the most fundamental challenge to the imperialist designs of divide and conquer. Capitalist powers tried to set Jew against Muslim, Muslim against Christian.
The Hungarian revolutionary Bela workers seized power the ability of the imperialist powers to maintain divisions became all but impossible; "the French (capitalists) at once attempted to strangle our revolution, using the hand of Muslim colonial troops.
However, despite our difficulty in communicating with these soldiers owing to the difference of language, we nevertheless managed to find a way to their minds and hearts, and they threw down their arms when they were called upon to drown our revolution in blood."
The national liberation movement in India spanning many decades, went through many different stages; a movement deploying strikes and mass demonstrations at one stage, small conspiratorial terrorists cells another, then back to mass strikes.
A well-known French academic, Olivier Roy, argues that the recent generation of suicide bombers are comparable to western left radical groups of the 1970's such as the Red Brigade in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany. A more accurate analogy would be the provisional IRA in Northern Ireland; a nationalist movement deploying terrorist tactics. But Roy is clear what they are fighting; These guys are fighting American imperialism, they are not fighting Christianity:*
Roy believes that the US has underestimated the depth of nationalist feeling. Islam is a religion viewed with deep suspicion in the west, and in some countries such as France, racist practices are institutionalised, with Muslims prevented from wearing the hijab.
France and Britain are societies where racism is endemic, and fascism represents the biggest threat to democracy. The left has to insist on the right of everyone to practice their religion free of all oppression.
Because the west has used Islam historically to develop its interests in the middle east, without the need to address the question of democracy, authoritarian leaders such as those in Saudi Arabia, have stifled free speech. The main outlet for Arab nationalism in the last decade or so has been through Islam. It is a double edged sword, once used as a stabilising force in the employ of despotic leaders, it has now become the opposite; the main network available for opposition to grow.
Secular nationalism had its high point in the 1950's with the pan-Arabism of Abdel Nasser. Imperialist incursion in the region with the establishment of Israel proved a powerful weapon, and Nasser's model was seriously undermined in 1967 with the Six Day War, although the ideal of pan-Arabism always remained
Other models of resistance, including the first Palestinian Intifada, the expulsion of the Israelis from Beirut, and the Iranian Revolution, shifted the focus towards Islam as an alternative. (Finally the collapse of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against the west was a death blow to a 'socialist' model for the middle east. No nationalist movement since Nasser has reproduced the pan-Arab aspiration which he embodied. Any movement against national oppression has to be embraced by the left for what it is; a struggle of the oppressed to free themselves from imperialist tutelage.
The Russian revolutionaries at the beginning of the 20th century recognised that the key to undermining imperialism was the question of national liberation. Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, wrote of how the dash by western imperial powers to carve up the Balkans region after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the establishment of hundreds of socialist clubs among workers and peasants, not because the socialist ideal kindled them, but because the socialists embraced the question of land as a central demand.
The attitude of the established left in Britain today, to the new forces which have arisen in recent months around the Stop The War Coalition, and the future socialist society are bound up in the here and now. The coalition is extremely broad, but with a generalised agreement that the wars being France and societies where racism is endemic, The left has to insist on the right of everyone to practice their religion free of all oppression ... • .... waged today are a product of imperialism. That doesn't mean that it is a socialist movement which can automatically be translated into a new party.
Failures and mistakes, not just of the secular movements of the 1950's, but of previous generations of socialists, both reformist and revolutionary have to be addressed. If Asians and Arabs the world over view socialists with a fair degree of trepidation, it isn't entirely unjustified.
yestern imperialism is our common enemy. The military forces occupying Baghdad today are the same forces that the State has used against the firefighters in their recent strike, against the Irish working class, and against Asians protesting against racism in Bradford. The class nature of society, about why the State represses some, and protects others, comes out of these experiences
We have more in common than not. A world-wide movement against war can spill over into a movement against poverty, debt, privatisation and racism; in short a movement against capitalism which is capable of challenging the illegitimate rulers of the
This necessarily means we have to take up the question of an alternative, including an electoral challenge wherever we can, by enriching and enlarging the work already begun.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was dominated by one central slogan; a concrete demand for Bread, Land and Peace. We may not be in a revolutionary situation now, but the slogan combined the national question -land, with the question of class - bread.
We can reproduce the spirit, if not the letter of the 1917 slogan so long as we bear in mind a general rule; socialists are always the tribune of the oppressed, and we aim to inject independent working class demands into the movement.
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18 soclal .. Economic crisis ice June 2003