From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -“War on Terror”: Marauding Abroad, Repression at Home

Workers Vanguard No. 980
13 May 2011

U.S. Murders Its Frankenstein’s Monster Bin Laden

“War on Terror”: Marauding Abroad, Repression at Home

Imperialists Out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya!

The May 1 assassination of Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was an act of imperialist arrogance typical of the U.S. “cops of the world.” The day before, the NATO imperialists had bombed the house of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son, missing Qaddafi, their intended target, but killing his son and three grandchildren. A few days later, a U.S. drone attack in Yemen killed two people in an unsuccessful attempt to take out Anwar al-Awlaki, one of at least four American citizens officially targeted for assassination by Washington.

The Obama administration did not even inform its Pakistani “allies” in advance of the incursion into their country by a military death squad. The raid was carried out by Navy SEAL commandos, a gang of specially selected and trained hitmen who shot and wounded bin Laden’s youngest wife and killed his son and three others. In murdering the Al Qaeda leader and dumping his body in the Arabian Sea, Washington destroyed its own Frankenstein’s monster. The U.S. had sponsored bin Laden and other Islamic reactionaries against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s as part of the decades-long imperialist drive to strangle the Soviet Union and foment capitalist counterrevolution.

Barack Obama, who came into office with broad support from the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy and the reformist left, is simply carrying out his duties as Commander-in-Chief. In escalating the bloody occupation of Afghanistan, he is doing what he promised to do if elected. Obama was more than willing to ignore other campaign promises in the interests of continuing the imperialist “war on terror.” His decision to maintain the U.S. concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as the system of kangaroo-court military commissions for accused terrorists, underlines the continuity of Obama’s policies with those of his Republican predecessor. Politicians and the bourgeois media are now engaged in a sick debate over how “effective” torture was in extracting information that helped track down bin Laden. Our position on those who have been tortured and brutalized—from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo—is simple: Free the detainees!

Seizing on the bin Laden kill, Obama appealed to “the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11,” waving yet again the bloody shirt of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Obama got a quick spike in the polls. But the “spontaneous” rallies of jubilation outside the White House and World Trade Center site, replete with bloodthirsty chauvinism, quickly dissipated and got little traction among working people. It is not so easy this time to whip up a spirit of shared “national interest” among workers, who have been thrown out of their jobs and homes by the millions and have seen their hard-won medical and pension benefits slashed by the capitalist class represented by the Democrats and Republicans. A common response even among workers who bought into the mission to “get” bin Laden was: OK, you got him, now when can we get out of Afghanistan? Obama made clear on May 1 that he had no intention of changing course in Afghanistan or relaxing the “anti-terror” crackdown on the home front.

The September 11 attack on the World Trade Center was a heinous crime, with nearly 3,000 people from all walks of life wantonly killed. Unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon was and is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military and, being a military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the territory. That fact did not make the attack an “anti-imperialist” act. In any case, terrorism almost always gets innocent people, including the passengers and crews on the hijacked airliners and the maintenance staff and secretaries at the Pentagon.

A Spartacist League/U.S. Political Bureau statement on the World Trade Center attack issued the day after (printed in WV No. 764, 14 September 2001) declared that those who perpetrated this act “embrace the same mentality as the racist rulers of America—identifying the working masses with their capitalist exploiters and oppressors!” The statement went on to warn:

“It’s an opportunity for the exploiters to peddle ‘one nation indivisible’ patriotism to try to direct the burgeoning anger at the bottom of this society away from themselves and toward an indefinable foreign ‘enemy,’ as well as immigrants in the U.S., and to reinforce their arsenal of domestic state repression against all the working people.”

This is precisely what happened. Beginning with rounding up immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries for imprisonment and deportation, the U.S. government has shredded civil liberties and vastly expanded police powers, a particular danger to black people and to the labor movement as well. In December 2001, striking teachers in Middletown, New Jersey, were compared to the Taliban by the school board after they defied a back-to-work order. The following year, as West Coast longshoremen organized by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) were engaged in tough contract talks, the head of Homeland Security warned that strike action could be treated as a threat to “national security.” The government later imposed the Transportation Workers Identification Credential, making longshoremen, rail workers and truckers undergo immigration review and criminal background checks—an invitation to purge blacks and other minorities as well as union militants. The FBI has also extended the “anti-terror” dragnet to include antiwar activists and reformist leftists, many of whom had supported Obama’s election.

When U.S. imperialism launched its wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003, we, as revolutionary Marxists, stood for the military defense of those neocolonial countries without giving an iota of political support to the reactionary Taliban or to Saddam Hussein’s blood-soaked capitalist regime. We stressed that every victory for the imperialists encourages more predatory wars, while every setback serves to assist the struggles of working people and oppressed the world over.

We called for class struggle against the imperialist rulers at home, in counterposition to the labor bureaucracy, which treacherously signed on to the “war on terror” while sometimes complaining about how it was applied. It is the historic task of the proletariat, led by a revolutionary party, to sweep away the system of capitalist imperialism. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained in a May 1917 speech titled “War and Revolution,” this will lay the basis for the “socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Bin Laden: Product of Anti-Soviet Cold War

The post-September 11 “global war on terror” is but one of the many facets of capitalist reaction that followed the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Proclaiming themselves the “world’s only superpower,” the U.S. rulers have launched one bloody military action after another. Even as it remains embroiled in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. is stepping up murderous drone attacks in Pakistan while NATO escalates its bombing campaign on behalf of the pro-imperialist opposition in Libya.

Pakistani military leaders are fuming over the brazen disregard for their country’s national sovereignty manifested in the raid against bin Laden. U.S. officials, in turn, are demanding to know how bin Laden could have resided for years in a garrison town dominated by military installations without the protection of powerful figures in the Pakistani military or security forces.

The fact is that bin Laden and his ilk were promoted not only by the Pakistani authorities but, in the first instance, by the U.S. For decades, the U.S. fostered the growth of Islamic fundamentalism as a bulwark against “godless Communism” and even secular nationalism. In 1950, John Foster Dulles, who would become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower presidency, wrote: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it.”

The origins of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda stem from the U.S.-backed war against the Soviet Union’s 1979 intervention in Afghanistan. In the biggest CIA covert operation in history, money and arms were funneled to the mujahedin (holy warriors) based in western Pakistan. The main conduit was Pakistan’s top intelligence agency, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate), led by fervent Islamist Hameed Gul. By the CIA’s own estimate, as many as 70,000 Islamic fundamentalists recruited from more than 50 countries by the CIA and ISI were trained at Islamist schools, which still flourish in Pakistan.

Washington started funneling arms to the mujahedin soon after the Soviet-allied People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power in April 1978. As modernizing left nationalists, the PDPA attempted to implement a program for redistributing land, lowering the bride price, educating women and freeing them from the prison of the head-to-toe covering called the burqa. As the Islamic hierarchy launched a fierce insurgency, the Soviet Union intervened at the PDPA’s request to prevent the collapse of its client regime. Beginning with Democrat Jimmy Carter and continuing under Republican Ronald Reagan, the U.S. seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed anti-Soviet offensive across the globe, in particular waging a proxy war aimed at killing Soviet soldiers and officers in Afghanistan.

For Marxists, there was no question which side working people and the oppressed the world over had in this conflict. The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed pointblank the need for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state. Moreover, the Soviet intervention and the possibility of a prolonged integration of Afghanistan into the Soviet system opened the perspective of social liberation for the Afghan masses, particularly women. This was, as we wrote at the time, the first war in modern history in which a central issue was the rights of women. While most professed leftists around the world echoed the imperialists in condemning the Soviet intervention, the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League) uniquely raised the slogans: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!”

Among those who flocked to enlist in the jihad against Communism was Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, the son of a construction magnate who had been a close friend of the former Saudi king, Faisal. In Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000), bin Laden recounts that his “volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.”

The New York Times took note of this history in its obituary of bin Laden. But what really caught our eye was the following editorial gem from the International Socialist Organization (ISO):

“One inconvenient truth you won’t hear much about in the media’s celebration of bin Laden’s death is the fact that the U.S. government helped him form al-Qaeda.

“When the former USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. saw an opportunity to turn the country into a battlefield in the Cold War….

“The U.S. ignored progressive and secular forces in Afghanistan, instead funneling support to fundamentalist groups that were not only anticommunist, but notorious for their brutality…. These were the rebels who Ronald Reagan praised as ‘freedom fighters’.”

—Socialist Worker online, 3 May

An inconvenient truth that you are definitely unlikely to hear from the ISO is that these anti-communist social democrats were themselves firmly in the camp of Washington’s “freedom fighters,” howling along with the imperialists that the Soviets should get out of Afghanistan. When the Kremlin bureaucracy announced in 1988 that it was pulling out the Soviet troops, the ISO wrote that “we welcome the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. It will give heart to all those inside the USSR and in Eastern Europe who want to break the rule of Stalin’s heirs” (Socialist Worker, May 1988). For Trotskyists, the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan was a historic betrayal that paved the way to the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union itself, which the ISO, true to form, hailed as well.

As for bin Laden, after having joined hands with the U.S. in the “holy war” against Communism, he became incensed by the deployment of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 “Operation Desert Storm” against Iraq. Al Qaeda went on to launch a series of attacks on U.S. facilities overseas, setting the stage for 11 September 2001.

Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Socialist Revolution!

In a starry-eyed response to the killing of bin Laden, Phyllis Bennis of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies wrote in a May 2 article titled “Justice or Vengeance?”:

“The president’s speech last night could have aimed to put an end to the triumphalism of the ‘global war on terror’ that George W. Bush began and Barack Obama claimed as his own. It could have announced a new U.S. foreign policy based on justice, equality, and respect for other nations. But it did not….

“It’s ineffably sad that President Obama, in his claim that bin Laden’s death means justice, didn’t use the opportunity to announce the end of the deadly U.S. wars that answered the attacks of 9/11. This could have been a moment to replace vengeance with cooperation, replace war with justice.”

It is not surprising that the ISO reproduced this piece on its Web site without comment. For years, the ISO, the Workers World Party (WWP), the Party for Socialism and Liberation and others tried to build an “antiwar movement” whose basic premise was “Anybody but Bush” in the White House. The plain fact is that the Obama White House has, as promised, carried on and escalated the “war on terror” initiated under George W. Bush, causing some consternation among the ISO, WWP and other opportunist groups that had celebrated Obama’s election.

Writing in the New York Times (8 May), conservative columnist Ross Douthat observed that the killing of bin Laden “operationalized Bush’s famous ‘dead or alive’ dictum” and highlighted the continuity in foreign policy under both Republicans and Democrats. Citing the war in Libya, the escalating drone strikes in Pakistan and the “policy of targeted assassination” of U.S. citizens, Douthat wrote:

“Imagine, for a moment, that these were George W. Bush’s policies at work…. Imagine the outrage, the protests, the furious op-eds about right-wing tyranny and neoconservative overreach. Imagine all that, and then look at the reality. For most Democrats, what was considered creeping fascism under Bush is just good old-fashioned common sense when the president has a ‘D’ beside his name.”

In truth, Democratic politicians barely worked up a whimper in protest against the foreign adventures of the Bush gang, while the reformists’ “antiwar” movement dissipated more and more the closer it got to the 2008 elections. Sowing the illusion that the Democrats in office could be pressured to carry out a humanitarian foreign policy and to meet the needs of working people at home, the reformists serve, to the extent their forces allow, to reinforce the ties binding workers, minorities and youth to the other party of U.S. imperialism.

For the working class to take the offensive against the depredations of its rulers—at home and abroad—will require a new leadership, a workers party of the Bolshevik type that fights for a workers government. Our task is to build such a party in the “belly of the beast” of U.S. imperialism, to fight for the only answer to exploitation, repression and imperialist war: international socialist revolution.

Stand In Solidarity With The Egyptian People- Down With The Mubarak Government- Fight For A Workers Government!

Click on the headline to link to an Associated Press online article on a protest demonstration in Cambridge in solidarity with the Egyptian people.

Markin comment:

This is a swiftly moving story, and much is rather murky about what the forces in the street want beyond getting rid of Mubarak (a worthy goal in its own right). What does not look promising at the moment is the emergence of even a secular democratic movement much less a pro-socialist one. A lot of this looks an awful lot like Iran 1979 and we know where that led. But for now though-Stand In Solidarity With The Egyptian People- Down With The Mubarak Government- Fight For A Workers Government!

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Chauvinist Mania Over “Ground Zero Mosque"

Click on the headline to link to the Workers Vanguard website for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.


Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist program mentioned in this day's other posts.

*From The "International Marxist Tendency" Website- "Where Is The Iranian Revolution Going?"-A Guest Commentray

Click on the headline to link to the "International Marxist Tendency" Website- "Where Is The Iranian Revolution Going?"

Markin comment:

No sooner had I posted a resignation statement (posted from the "Workers' Press" blog), complete with a blow-by-blow international analysis of the failings of the organization, including the split in the Iran section and here is a polemic by IMT honcho Alan Wood directed at those "former" Iranian comrades. With a classic amorphous "ebb and flow of the class struggle" defense of why his analysis of last year's upheavals as the start of the Iranian revolution was a tad bit off. More later, as I have to start paying more attention to this organization.

*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog-Iran: On the character of the present lull and the tasks of the Marxists- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Renegade Eye" entry- "Iran: On the character of the present lull and the tasks of the Marxists"- A Guest Commentary From The IMT.

Markin comment:

Very interesting to draw the analogy with Spain on the question of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. However, the two obvious weakness in the article are the lack of analysis of the relationship between the events today and those in 1979 by the left in Iran (and internationally) for and their responsibility for the "lull" (lack of revolutionary party and leadership). Nor do I see any serious criticism of the current movement's still rather heavy subservience to "moderate" Islamic fundamentalist forces. You have to make the break sometime. And that sometime is now if you want to coalesce a Marxist cadre. This Green (not the eco-green although the same proposition is true on both counts) and Red do not mix. As thousands of leftists in Iran have learned the hard way- with their lives.

*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- The (Continued) Israeli Settlement Expansion Into Palestine

Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanBlog" entry concerning the ever-continuing expansion of the Israeli settlements.

Markin comment:

I am, as I have mentioned before, always happy to link to this blog, especially when the subject is the intractable Palestinian situation, and the ever-expanding, provocative Israeli settlements. Every time that I even think about this situation it is clear that nothing short of socialism, and all that means about the changes in political consciousness on every side that would put that solution on the agenda in this situation, will settle this thing. But let us be clear, today the obligation of every leftist militant is encapsulated in this slogan- "Defend the Palestinian People"- and I would, add, the best way we can. More on this later.

*From The Struggle To End The Seige Of Gaza- A Guest Report

Click on the title to link to a "Boston Indymedia" article/photographs of a Boston First Night demonstration in support of ending the seize of Gaza. Defend the Palestinian People!

*On The Anniversary Of His Death-Leon Trotsky On Marxism And Terrorism- The View From The Revolutionary Left

Click On Title To Link To 1938 Leon Trotsky Article "For Grynszpan" Mentioned Below.

This year marks the 69th anniversary of the Stalin-directed assassination of the great Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky.

Book Review (of sorts)

Marxism &Terrorism, Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974

I have gone on endlessly in this space, as is only natural for a space ultimately dedicated to the struggle for revolutionary change, about the Russian October Revolution of 1917 led by the Bolsheviks and that created in its wake the first workers state in world history that held out for any length of time. (We always, and rightly so, pay homage to the Paris Commune of 1871 as the first experiment of a workers government but that, to our sorrow, lasted only a couple of months.) Needless to say, anyone who stands on the political grounds of that revolution as this writer does is anxious to distill the lessons to be drawn from that experience, for better or worst. Moreover, it is not just the immediate lessons of the Russian case about the necessity of overthrowing of the old Czarist order, of its replacement provisional government and of the need for a combat working class vanguard party to carry out those tasks but the whole pre-history of struggle against other tendencies fighting for leadership in the broader revolutionary movement. In Russia, a mainly peasant society in the 19th century, this included a long term fight against the strategy of exemplary individual acts of terror as a catalyst in order to remove the moribund Czarist regime.

Needless to say, if one is to learn anything at all from our long international revolutionary history, modern revolutions do not just fall from the sky but are prepared, and necessarily need to be well-prepared, by the creation of a cadre that has assimilated the experiences, good and bad, of the whole prior revolutionary movement. In this the year of the 69th anniversary of the Stalinist assassination of the great Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky down in his Mexican exile there is no more fitting way to pay tribute to his place in the revolutionary pantheon than to look at a couple of aspects of his work. Here, in a short review of a few of his previously published articles on the subject, it is the question of the use of terror in order achieve to one’s political goals. In an accompanying commentary also posted on this date I will turn the tables 180 degrees and discuss some of Trotsky’s contributions to Marxist literary theory and the struggle for socialist culture, subjects he spend some time on as well.

Excepting only Lenin, no other name is so closely identified with the high expectations that derived from the October Revolution of 1917 as Leon Trotsky. In a certain sense today to speak of the Russian Revolution is to evoke the specter of Trotsky’s ghost as he was the last widely known original fighter on the last barricade, pen in hand, in defense of the initial goals of that experience. Moreover, as a military leader, organizer of insurrection , high Soviet official, political pamphleteer and literary critic he was well placed to discuss the relative merits of the mass working class organizational methods of changing the world and of comparing that strategy to one of isolated heroic actions on behalf of such changes.

Without delving deeply in his biography here Leon Trotsky, whatever else his accomplishments, was a convinced revolutionary from his youth and spent the next forty years or so of his life in dogged pursuit of those youthful aims. Before the Russian Revolutions of 1905 (in which he played a big role as President Of The Petrograd Soviet), the February 1917 Revolution (which started during a period when he was in exile in America) and the victory in October which he organized and led he had many years experience fighting those tendencies in the Russian and international socialist movement that saw isolated “propaganda of the deed” actions as a viable strategy for social change. Thus, in one man (and there were others, to be sure, but Trotsky is the outstanding representative), we have encapsulated the experience of the whole Russian revolutionary movement from the last quarter of the 19th century. Trotsky knew, first hand, from personal polemical combat with the Russian Narodniks (People’s Will and various other organizations) and their political heirs in the then emerging Social Revolutionary Party that individual terrorist actions while, perhaps, morally satisfying were politically self-defeating, at best.

The above paragraphs can thus serve as something of a preface to this tiny little booklet of Trotsky articles put out by Pathfinder Press, “Marxism & Terrorism”, about the Marxist attitude toward individual terror, or for that matter mass terror, as a means for achieving progressive social goals. I place special emphasis on those last few words of the last sentence because most of the talk about terror and terrorists today centers on various actions of Islamic and other religious fundamentalists and their reactionary agendas. Those actions are generally beyond the pale of what Marxists understand as the use of terror as a political strategy. The actions that are of concern to Marxists , as noted by Trotsky in an article (Vienna “Pravda”, his newspaper at the time I believe, March 27, 1909) about the Social Revolutionary Party in early 20th century Russia. That party, based on the peasantry, but which had a strong bend toward a policy of individual assassination of governmental officials, reflected a long-time historic tendency in the Russian revolutionary movement.

As Trotsky acidly notes, such actions are futile, as witnessed by the ease that the various constituted governments had in replacing these officials at will. Furthermore, what really happens is that the political/combat organizations based on such strategies, of necessity, draw in on themselves and are very vulnerable to police infiltration or cadre attrition. The history of the progressive social movements of the 20th century, if not at present, only confirm those points.

To finish up though, I want make a point clear here, as Trotsky does in his short article from 1938 entitled “ For Grynszpan” in which he speaks of the question of Marxist solidarity with heroic individual actions on behalf of the oppressed, misguided as they might be. The Grynszpan case revolved around the assassination of a Nazi official in Paris by a frustrated Jewish youth shortly before World War II exploded on the Europeon scene. Trotsky, while noting the futility of the action in the grand scheme of things, expressed his moral solidarity with Grynzspan’s actions. And that is exactly the point. We, as Marxists, fight politically against the tendency toward isolated individual acts- that “propaganda of the deed” strategy mentioned above.

However, we have no truck with those, unfortunately too many, so-called leftists who wash their hands of defending those who, mistakenly, fight the battles against the oppressors in a different way than through mass working class organizing. Here I wish to note the abandonment of the Weatherman in America in the 1970’s and later of the militants who were known as the “Ohio Seven” by the “armchair” leftists of those times. Internationally, that was similarly the fate of the German Bader-Meinhof Group and of the Italian Red Brigades, among others. Trotsky had it just about right, fight against the strategy of individual acts of terror but also show appropriate scorn to those Social Democratic and “Communist” political cowards who run for cover when the state put the heat on. See, I told you the Russian Revolution and Comrade Trotsky had plenty of lessons to offer that apply today. Let's get to it.

*Defend The Iranian Demonstrators- Thirty Years Is Enough-Down With The Mullahs

Click On Title To Link To Associated Press Article, Dated June 20, 2009, Concerning The Continuing Demonstrations Against The Allegedly Fraudulent Recent Electoral Results In The Iranian Presidential Elections.

Commentary

From this distance it is hard to tell exactly what the aims of the demonstrators are other than to change the electoral results in favor of their candidate, Mousavi. The question of bringing down the Islamic Republic, at least by the main factions and certainly by Mousavi's actions, does not appear to be a goal today. However, the information coming out of Tehran is confusing at best and, moreover, coming from sources of unknown reliability (for us, not for the traditional world media).

One thing is clear though. We defend these demonstrators against the batons of the Iranian state, its religious hierarchy and its military and para-military agents. To the extend that these demonstrators, at least some of them, are calling for an end to the Islamic Republic we support that demand. Back in 1979 we called, at least those of us who were fighting against the Western leftist and progressive camp's illusions in the mullahs then, for "Down With The Shah and Down With The Mullahs!" Today's cry is "Down With The Mullahs!". For a Socialist Iran as part of a regional socialist federation! More, much more on this as events unfold.

*The Three Hands Of Barack Obama- The Cairo Speech

Click On Title To Link To Barack Obama's Speech At Egypt's Cairo University on June 4, 2009.

Commentary

What is this? Has Markin gone off the deep end and forgotten that humankind is only gifted, officially, with two hands (although even a child knows that every bourgeois politician has had a third grafted on- you know-on the one hand, and on the other and on the…., well, you know the rest)? Moreover, why is he spilling any ink on the subject of some lanky bourgeois politician’s, United State President or not, off-hand professorial speech on the hellish fate of the Muslim world to invited guests at Egypt’s Cairo University? Good questions.

In the normal course of events I would peruse such speeches and then move on, sometimes, as here, having felt that I had wasted precious time by even doing that much. Furthermore, being a newshound of sorts, I would have already had my fill of pundits, bloggers, and anyone with some half-baked opinion on the subject and been ready to go screaming into the night. This little Obama set speech, however, has set my teeth on edge. Frankly, I am irked (I am being polite, as this is a family-friendly site) at this bombastic little (okay, not so little) twerp going on and on about the problems of the Middle East, Islamic/Western tensions and the like without so much as raising one concrete proposition to “solve” the problems in that benighted region. Enough!

From some of the person-on- the- street interviews of Muslims in its aftermath I am not alone in seeing that “the emperor has no clothes”. You know, little things like getting the historically oppressed Palestinians out of the refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank and into their own state, getting the United States the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan (and as is becoming more apparent, Pakistan), stopping the drone attacks on civilians, Muslim civilians, everywhere in the region and stopping one, just one, concrete block headed toward building of yet another Israeli settlement in the Occupied Territories. I could go on and on, but you get my drift.

One thing about being the Commander-in-Chief of the American imperium is never having to really say you are sorry. Mr. Obama did his duty in Cairo and then to show his even-handedness (or rather three-handedness) he showed up at the Buchenwald concentration camps in order to shore up his Israeli/American Jewish flank. Get it. This is worth no more ink though, except this. U.S. Out Of Iraq And Afghanistan! Defend The Palestinian people!

*Does Anyone On The Left Want To Reconsider Their Opposition to Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan in 1979?

Click On Title To Link To The International Communist League's Theoretical Journal"Spartacist" (English Edition, Number 29, Summer 1980)For An Important Historical Article "Afghanistan And The Left". The tale told there for all unrepentant leftists is to watch what you wish for. While the word "blowback" was not in currency then it is an appropriate word to use to describe the Western Left's short-sighted anti-Sovietism and even more short-sighted link up with Western imperialism political and military aims, a link up that it still has not broken with. This hard secularist will nevertheless point a finger and say "you reap what you sow". Read on.


Commentary

Sometimes a news story stands by itself. That is the case with this Thursday April 16, 2009 story by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times entitled “Afghan women march to protest restrictions”. I have posted the article below. That, along with the recent news of a Taliban execution of a young Afghan couple for- ah, eloping- should give even the most brazen liberal cultural relativist cause for pause.

I also address all those leftists, feminists, socialist-feminists and pseudo-feminists who “howled with the wolves” along with all the Western imperial establishment, led by Jimmy Carter’s American imperial state, when the ex-Soviet Union in 1979, at the repeated request of the then Afghan government, intervened against the same kind of yahoos who are running the show in Afghanistan now. The question posed by the headline above stands as a challenge to those who are not totally ideologically wedded to adherence to American imperial policy in Afghanistan.

The Soviets, to be sure, may have had other additional more geo-political and ideological considerations for their support to the Afghan Peoples’ National Democratic government in 1979 but an important component of their support was to protect those gains for women that that Peoples’ government was trying to preserve in the face of the then savage pre-Taliban Islamic fundamentalist opposition. A photograph then of un-scarfed women students at Kabul University studying along with men compared with any photograph I have seen recently, including the one accompanying the article that I am posting below, from that benighted region tells the tale. In short, one need not be a flaming socialist, although it helps here, to question a policy that thirty years later empowers, in many cases, the very same Islamic fundamentalists the Soviets fought and who now enjoy American support and dollars. Let’s get this thing straight right now- Obama- U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!

*****

“Afghan women march to protest restrictions”.

By Dexter Filkins
New York Times / April 16, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan - The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

"Get out of here, you whores!" the men shouted. "Get out!"

The women scattered as the men moved in.

"We want our rights!" one of the women shouted, turning to face them. "We want equality!"

The women ran to the bus and dove inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

"Whores!"

But the march carried on anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital yesterday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.

With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked 2 miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law's repeal.

"Whenever a man wants sex, we cannot refuse," said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the marchers. "It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants."

The law, approved by both houses of Parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, applies to the Shi'ite minority only, essentially giving clerics authority over intimate matters between women and men. Women here and governments and rights groups abroad have protested three parts of the law especially.

One provision makes it illegal for a woman to resist her husband's sexual advances. A second provision requires a husband's permission for a woman to work outside the home or go to school. And a third makes it illegal for a woman to refuse to "make herself up" or "dress up" if that is what her husband wants.

The passage of the law has amounted to something of a historical irony. Afghan Shi'ites, who make up about 10 percent of the population, suffered horrendously under the Taliban, who regarded them as apostates. Since 2001, the Shi'ites, particularly the Hazara minority, have been enjoying a renaissance.

Karzai, who relies on vast support from the United States and other Western governments to stay in power, has come under intense international criticism for signing the bill into law. Many people here suspect that he did so to gain the favor of the Shi'ite clergy; Karzai is up for reelection this year.

Responding to the outcry, Karzai has begun looking for a way to remove the most controversial parts of the law.

In an interview yesterday, his spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada, said that the legislation was not yet law because it had not been published in the government's official register. That, Hamidzada said, meant that it could still be changed. Karzai has asked his justice minister to look it over.

"We have no doubt that whatever comes out of this process will be consistent with the rights provided for in the constitution - equality and the protection of women," Hamidzada said.

The women who protested yesterday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrassa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country's most powerful Shi'ite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role in the drafting of the new law.

"We are here to campaign for our rights," one woman said into a loudspeaker. Then the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.

The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrassa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.

"Death to the enemies of Islam!" the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. "We want Islamic law!"

The women stared ahead and kept walking.

A phalanx of police, some of them women, held the crowds apart.

Afterward, when the demonstrators had left, one of the madrassa's senior clerics walked outside.

Asked about the dispute, he said it was between professionals and nonprofessionals; that is, between the clerics, who understood the Koran and Islamic law, and the women calling for the law's repeal who did not.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

EARLY BOLSHEVIK WORK IN THE SOVIET EAST

COMMENTARY

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

As I have recently written in a blog entitled Double No to the Veil the fight against religious obscurantism, in this case Islamic fundamentalism, has a long and honorable history in the communist movement. Here is historical documentation of the Bolshevik struggle against the veil and all it meant at the time of the revolution and shortly thereafter. We can learn a few lessons from that experience today.

Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East
From Women and Revolution issue No. 12, Summer 1976.

The triumph of the October Revolution in 1917, which dramatically, transformed the lives of Russian women, wrought even greater transformations in the lives of the women inhabiting the Central Asian regions which had been colonized by tsarist Russia. But in these feudal or pre-feudal generally Islamic cultures, where the lot of women was frequently inferior to that of the livestock, change came more slowly.

The status of women varied, of course, from culture to culture and within cultures, depending on social class and the nature of the, productive process. But from the mouth of the Volga through the Caucasus and Turkestan, from Iran and Afghanistan to Mongolia and northward to Siberia virtual enslavement was the rule, although restrictions were of necessity less strictly applied to women of the poorer classes—nomads and peasant women—whose labor was essential. A certain level of trade and industry and a settled way of life in the cities was a prerequisite for the luxury of strict enforcement of Islamic law.

It was not only the formal prescriptions of the Koran, but also local customs codified in the religious common law (the Shariaf) and the civil law (the Adats), which determined the situation of Islamic women. The few partial reforms expressed in the Koran-the forbidding of female infanticide, the restriction of polygamy, the recognition of limited property and inheritance rights for women-were generally nullified by local Shariats and Adats.

The practically universal institution of kalym or bride price in itself illustrates the Muslim conception of marriage as a purely commercial contract having nothing to do with emotional bonds or personal commitments. In some areas the bride's presence was not even required at the wedding. The purchase price of the female commodity had already been negotiated between the families of the bride and groom, and the wedding was merely a ceremony at which the transaction was notarized. The marriage contract was subject to dissolution by the husband at any time, and polygamy and child marriage were quite common. Children too physically immature for marital relations were subjected to the "horrible operation"—they were ripped open by a midwife to make consummation possible.

Kalym bound a woman, often from childhood, to the husband who satisfied her father's price. If she ran away, she could be pursued as a criminal and punished by her husband or his clan. A runaway wife might be punished by having her legs broken or by other barbaric tortures. For a woman so much as suspected of infidelity, the appropriate punishment was branding on the genitals with a hot iron.

For the poor, marriage by capture often replaced payment of kalym. Once she was seized, carried off and raped, the woman had no choice but to remain with her abductor, since she had been disgraced and no other man would have her. Even widowhood brought no freedom, because a wife for whom kalym had been paid was the property of the husband's family or clan and was bequeathed to his brother. Suicide by fire was the only alternative according to the laws of Islam. However, access to heaven was dependent on the will of the husband, and if cheated out of kalym by a wife's suicide, he was unlikely to invite her to enter into paradise.

Rules demanding the veiling and seclusion of women had been introduced into Islamic law with the conversion of the Persian aristocracy in 641 A.D. In many parts of Central Asia the veil required was not simply the yashmuk, covering the mouth, but the paranja, which covers the whole face and body without openings for sight or breath. For centuries many women have lived thus shrouded and imprisoned in their ichkaris (segregated living quarters). A Yakutsk legend depicts a model daughter of Islam. Her living body is set before guests who proceed to cutoff pieces to eat. The girl not only bears this torment in silence but tries to smile pleasingly.

The triumph of Russian imperialism in the 1880's brought few advances in social organization or technology in the Muslim East. The wretched Russian peasantry lived like royalty in comparison with the primitive peoples of this area.

The tsarist government forced the agricultural villages to switch at this time from food crops to cotton, and railroads were built to transport this product to Russian textile plants. Following the railroad workers were women who did not wear veils—Russian prostitutes. For a long time they were the only models available to the Muslim nomads and peasants of the "liberation" which Russian capitalism had bestowed upon women.

The October Revolution Transforms Central Asia

With the victory of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks turned toward Central Asia in the hope of developing its vast and desperately needed natural resources. The flow of these resources to the West was threatened, however, by the fact that Central Asia was from the beginning a haven for every sort of counterrevolutionary tendency and for the retreating White armies. Bourgeois consolidation anywhere in this area would have provided a base for the imperialist powers to launch an anti-Soviet attack.

The extension of the proletarian revolution to Central Asia, moreover, could become the example of socialist development in an economically backward area which would undermine the resistance of burgeoning nationalism in the East and inspire the toilers of other underdeveloped regions the world over.

But immense economic and cultural leaps were required to integrate Soviet Central Asia into a society revolutionized by the Bolsheviks in power. Trotsky called the area "the most backward of the backward," still living a "prehistoric existence." Indeed, the journey eastward from Moscow across Central Asia was a trip backward through the centuries of human development.

The Bolsheviks viewed the extreme oppression of women as an indicator of the primitive level of the whole society, but their approach was based on materialism, not moralism. They understood that the fact that women were veiled and caged, bought and sold, was but the surface of the problem. Kalym was not some sinister plot against womankind, but an institution which was central to the organization of production, integrally connected to land and water rights. Payment of kalyin, often by the whole clan over a long period of time, committed those involved to an elaborate system of debts, duties and loyalties which ultimately led to participation in the private army of the local beys (landowners and wholesale merchants). All commitments were thus backed up with the threat of feuds and blood vengeance.

These kinship and tribal loyalties were obstacles to social progress because they obscured class relations and held back the expropriation and redistribution of land and other property. Poor peasants who stood to gain by the equalization of wealth, hid the property of their rich relatives threatened with expropriation. Blood vengeance enforced vows of silence, and Soviet authority was undermined by conspiracies that served only the old oppressors.

Civil War

The Bolsheviks hoped that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain, but this necessitated a great deal of preparation, for the Muslim institutions, oppressive as they were, served real social functions and could not be simply abolished. Like the bourgeois family, they had to be replaced.
Lenin warned against prematurely confronting respected native institutions, even when these clearly violated communist principle and Soviet law. Instead, he proposed to use Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine them while simultaneously demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions, a policy which had worked well against the powerful Russian Orthodox Church.

Extending this practice to Central Asia, the Soviet government waged a campaign to build the authority, of the Soviet legal system and civil courts as an alternative to the traditional Muslim kadi courts and legal codes. Although the kadi courts were permitted to function, their powers were circumscribed in that they were forbidden to handle political cases or any cases in which both parties to the dispute had not agreed to use the kadi rather than the parallel Soviet court system. As the Soviet courts became more accepted, criminal cases were eliminated from the kadis' sphere. Next, the government invited dissatisfied parties to appeal the kadis' decisions to a Soviet court. In this manner the Soviets earned the reputation of being partisans of the oppressed, while the kadis were exposed as defenders of the status quo. Eventually the kadis were forbidden to enforce any Muslim law which contradicted Soviet law. Two Soviet representatives, including one member of Zhenotdel—the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women—were assigned to witness all kadi proceedings and to approve their decisions. Finally, when the wafks (endowment properties), which had supported the kadis, were expropriated and redistributed among the peasantry, the kadis disappeared completely.

This non-confrontationist policy in no way implied capitulation to backward, repressive institutions. It was made clear that there could be no reconciliation between communism and the Koran. Although "Red Mullahs," attracted by the Bolshevik program of self-determination and land to the tiller, suggested to their followers that Islam was socialism and vice versa, the Bolsheviks insisted that Soviet and Muslim law could never be reconciled precisely on the grounds that the most basic rights of women would be sacrificed.

The bloody civil war that pitted the Bolshevik state against imperialist-supported counterrevolutionary forces devastated the young workers state and threatened its very survival. During this period, when the Bolsheviks' capacity to intervene in Central Asia was crippled, the crude tactics employed by their ostensibly socialist opponents fueled anti-Soviet sentiment.

In Tashkent, the railroad center of Central Asia, the governing Soviet was made up of Russian emigres, many of them railroad workers, led by Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. In an orgy of Russian chauvinism and self-indulgence foreshadowing the policies of Stalinism to come, they expropriated the holdings of the most respected Islamic institutions and stood the slogan "self-determination of the toiling masses" on its head to justify the exclusion from the soviet of native intellectuals and sympathetic mullahs, whom they labeled "non-proletarian elements." At the same time, they collaborated with former White officers. When the Tashkent Soviet began arbitrarily requisitioning food from the peasants during the worst grain shortages of the civil war, Lenin intervened to stop this. But the seeds of anti-Soviet rebellion had been sown.

The Basmachis, tribal and traditionalist elements (mainly Uzbek and Tadzhik), who were avowed enemies of the Bolsheviks, served as a pole of attraction for the most sordid conglomeration of forces dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. When Enver Pasha of Turkey, who came to the region as an emissary from Moscow, deserted to the Basmachis, supplying the leadership and authority necessary to unify the warring beys into a viable army of fanatical Muslim terrorists, civil war in Central Asia began in earnest. Soon thousands of Muslims joined these forces in the hills.

Few Central Asian women took the side of the Bolsheviks during the civil war and few of these survived. The heroism of those few who dared defy family, law and the word of the prophet was unsurpassed. One such woman was Tsainet Khesmitova, who ran away from her aged husband while still a child and served as a spy for the Red Army. Her husband's hired assassins eventually caught her, cut out her tongue and left her beaten body buried neck deep in the desert to die. She was rescued by a Red Army unit but was so mutilated that she was forced to live out her life in a Moscow institution for Bolsheviks incapable of work.

Another was Umu Kussum Amerkhanova, the first woman activist of Daghestan, who repeatedly escaped from the death sentences which the White Army and her own countrymen sought to impose on her. Wearing men's clothes, she led Red troops at the Daghestan front until the end of the war and survived to continue the work of transforming the role of women in Central Asia.

Lifting the Veil of Oppression

Bolshevik ability to intervene effectively in Central Asia began with the end of the civil war and the transition from the emergency policies of war communism to the stabilization carried out with the institution of the NEP (New Economic Policy). The Turkestan Commission was set up under the leadership of M. Frunze, a talented military commander, and G. Safarov, a leading Bolshevik of Central Asian origins.
The detested emigres were recalled to Russia, and the land they had confiscated was distributed to the Muslim toilers. With food requisitions replaced by the tax-in-kind, and government allocations of seed and food reserves, the Basmachi revolt came to an end. But the peasants' experience with chauvinist Menshevik policies was not forgotten. Resistance would continue to flare up in the future when agricultural tensions were again exacerbated.

The end of the war signaled the initiation of systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women. In the absence of native activists, it was the most dedicated and courageous members of Zhenotdel who donned the paranja in order to meet with Muslim women and explain the new Soviet laws and programs which were to change their lives. This was an extremely dangerous assignment, as any violation of a local taboo enraged husbands, fathers and brothers to murder. In fact, the discovery of numerous dismembered bodies of Zhenotdel organizers finally compelled the Soviet government to reinstate the death penalty for explicitly "anti-feminist" murder as a counterrevolutionary crime, although non-political murder (even murder committed in vengeance against wives) received a standard sentence of five to ten years' imprisonment.

Zhenotdel activists organized "Red Yertas" (tents), "Red Boats" and "Red Corners," depending on the terrain. They attracted local women by offering instruction in hygiene and crafts, by providing entertainment and a place to socialize and by distributing scarce consumer goods. Although the clubs were at first concerned primarily with publicizing and explaining the new laws, they later became centers for culture and education and waged a remarkably successful campaign to liquidate illiteracy.

At the 13th Party Congress in 1924 an offensive was launched in Central Asia which was designed to bring women into production and political life. Funds were allocated from central and local budgets for assemblies of women's delegates and for associations to combat kalym and polygamy. Plans were also made to form producers' and consumers' cooperatives and to establish literary and hygiene circles and medical dispensaries.

The implementation of these measures continued to depend on the initiative of a handful of Zhenotdel activists, for so deeply ingrained were the old values that often even Central Asian Communists could not conceive of substantial changes in the status of women, and the women themselves often failed to report crimes against them to the courts. The response of local party branches to the new measures ranged from open hostility and sabotage to passive incomprehension.

The party locals in Daghestan, for instance, interpreted the law abolishing kalym as an instruction to lower bride prices. In some areas the party instituted fair price regulations: a young, pretty girl from a well-to-do family might cost 300 rubles while a pockmarked widow was to be priced the same as a hornless cow.

By 1924 Zhenotdel organizations had entrenched themselves in many areas, and because of their influence and the changes in material conditions, Central Asian women began for the first time to vote. This advance was facilitated by the fact that the official summons each of them received from the party to appear at the polls was regarded as a valid reason for them to go out in public, thereby saving their husbands from ridicule.

Once at meetings, women were persuaded to run for office on the party platform. At the same time, legal reforms and land redistribution gave them rights under the law, and through producers' and consumers' cooperatives they were able to acquire seed, tools and training, making it possible for them to support themselves. These alternatives to economic dependency in marriage in conjunction with the publicizing of divorce laws resulted in a marked increase in divorce, initiated especially by child brides and second and third wives.

Stalinization

Had a balanced approach of training and education complemented this liberalizing agitation, these new divorcees could well have become enthusiastic pioneers of agricultural collectives and proletarian reinforcements for industrialization. Their example would have been followed by married women as well, with the incentive of increased family income working to neutralize the hostility of their husbands. But at the January 1924 Party Conference, which preceded the 13th Party Congress, the leadership, program and methods of the party changed decisively.

The degeneration of the revolution after 1923 expressed through the theory of "socialism in one country" and implemented through the strangling of workers democracy in the Soviet Union, permeated and deformed all sectors of the government.

In an ominous prelude to the policies of the "third period," such as the forced collectivization of agriculture, the legal offensive against traditional practices in Central Asia was stepped up until the divorce rate assumed epidemic proportions. Although local party branches protested the pace of the offensive and warned that it had become "demoralizing to all concerned and a threat to continued Soviet rule," Zhenotdel continued its one-sided agitation for women to initiate divorce, until the Red Yertas, clubs and hospitals were filled with far more divorcees than they could possibly handle. Under the impact of masses of women whom they could not support, these organizations in desperation simply dissolved. In some cases, they were transformed into brothels.

In 1927 the offensive was narrowed still further to a single-issue campaign against seclusion and the veil known as Khudshum. First, party meetings were held at which husbands unveiled their wives. Then on 8 March 1927, in celebration of International Woman's Day, mass meetings were held at which thousands of frenzied participants, chanting "Down with the paranja!" tore off their veils, which were drenched in paraffin and burned. Poems were recited and plays with names such as "Away with the Veil," and "Never Again Kalym" were performed. Zhenotdel agitators led marches of unveiled women through the streets, instigating the forced desegregation of public quarters and sanctified religious sites. Protected by soldiers, bands of poor women roamed the streets, tearing veils off wealthier women, hunting for hidden food and pointing out those who still clung to traditional practices which had now been declared crimes (such as conspiring to arrange a marriage for exchange of kalym).

The Khudshum appeared to be a success on March 8, but on March 9 hundreds of unveiled women were massacred by their kinsmen, and this reaction, fanned by Muslim clergy, who interpreted recent earthquakes as Allah's punishment for the unveilings, grew in strength. Remnants of the Basmachi rebels reorganized themselves into Tash Kuran (secret, counterrevolutionary organizations) which flourished as a result of their pledge to preserve Narkh (local customs and values).

Women suing for divorce became the targets of murderous vigilante squads, and lynchings of party cadre annihilated the ranks of the Zhenotdel. The massive terror unleashed against the recently unveiled women—which ranged from spitting and laughing at them to gang rape and murder—forced most of them to take up the veil again soon after repudiating it.

The party was forced to mobilize the militia, then the Komsomols and finally the general party membership and the Red Army to protect the women, but it refused to alter its suicidal policies. The debacle of international Woman's Day was repeated in 1928 and 1929 with the same disastrous consequences, exacting an extremely high toll on party cadre. Lacking Zhenotdel leadership those clubs which had survived the legal offensive now disappeared.

By 1929 Central Asia was caught up in the general resistance of peasant peoples throughout the Soviet Union to the forced collectivization of agriculture dictated by Moscow. Significant social advancement for most Muslim women in Central Asia was deferred. Not for another decade, when the productive capacity of the planned economy had developed sufficiently to provide jobs, education, medical care and social services on a scale wide enough to undercut primitive Islamic traditions, did they begin to make substantial gains.

The Russian Revolution created the objective preconditions for the liberation of women. But the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy was accompanied by a general reversal of significant gains for women throughout Soviet society. Thus the oppressive family structure which the Bolsheviks under Lenin had struggled to replace with the socialization of household labor was now renovated as an economic institution by the increasingly isolated regime which realized that the family provided services which the degenerated workers state could not. In defense of the family, abortions were illegalized, divorces were made much less accessible and women were encouraged through government subsidies and "Mother Heroine" medals to bear as many children as possible. In 1934, as if to sanction its physical liquidation in Central Asia at the hands of Tash Kuran terror, the Soviet government liquidated Zhenotdel organizationally as well.

DOUBLE NO TO THE ISLAMIC VEIL

COMMENTARY

NO TO STATE INTERFERENCE WITH RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION

NO TO RELIGIOUS OBSCURANTISM WITH AN IMPOSED VEIL

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

I have recently read a news article coming out of England where the Ministry of Education there is recommending that schools prohibit the wearing of the Islamic veil, obviously directed at Moslem women, if it distracts from the educational objective. This is the British version of the actions taken in France and elsewhere in order to prohibit the wearing of the veil in public places and governmental buildings. Of course it is no accident that this new policy has been effected at what is the height of the anti-Moslem backlash by the average non-Moslem British citizen and goes all the way up to the heights of the British Labor Party’s leadership, particularly Jack Straw. He has argued that the old class war of his youth has been replaced by the 'war of civilizations' and thus prohibition is a critical part of that fight. Naturally this is all argued in the name of better acculturation into the norms of British culture, a serious problem among second generation Moslem immigrants, especially the young, who rightly see no future in such a process as defined by the pro-capitalist British Labor Party.

The question of the Islamic veil is, however, one of those frequent two-edged swords that socialist militants run up against in daily political life. Let us be clear; militants do not support giving the capitalist state, in this case the British imperial state, the power to determine who wears what and where. However, once that issue is addressed and settled there is still the pressing issue of what the veil means in the fight for women’s liberation. No one, I hope, needs to be reminded that Islamic fundamentalists see the veil as an important physical symbol for the subjugation of women. One need only remember, for example, that the Taliban in Afghanistan had (and has)among its 'charms' the beating (and worse) of unveiled women.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the kind of world the Islamic fundamentalists want their women to live in. And it is not pretty. Seclusion in the home, the veil and other torturous dress in public, the bride price, no education for young women and the occasional 'honor' killing, to name a few. To draw a sharp contrast one need only look at pictures from the 1950’s in Iran, for example, with unveiled women defending the Mossadegh secular government and a recent 2006 picture of heavily veiled and bundled women demonstrating in front of a nuclear facility in defense of Iran’s nuclear power policy(a surreal sight to be sure, given that in their social and political program for Iran except, apparently, nuclear technology those fundamentalists have not seen any need to progress pass the 8th century).


It is hardly news that all types of religious fundamentalism, including Islamic fundamentalism, have grown exponentially over the last few decades. While the causes for such increases are varied they point, disturbingly, away from the general historically progressive trend of secularization that has occurred over the past few centuries. Thus the fight against religious obscurantism plays a more central role in the fight for the socialist program in the West and elsewhere than it has had to in the last 100 years or so. Marx once, correctly , remarked that religion was the ‘opium of the people’. That is the part of the quote (sound bite, if you will) that everyone, friend and foe, seems to have remembered. However, a look at the full content of the paragraph the quote derives from points out that Marx also recognized that religion was solace for those beaten down by the arbitrariness and unfairness of the world.

The task of socialism for him, and for us, was thus not to close the churches on day one after taking power (although that is not a bad idea) and be done with it but to eliminate the conditions that have led masses of people to need the solace of religion. Obviously, that is a long term process that would probably take a few generations to complete under conditions of socialist cooperation after millennia of religious indoctrination. Nonetheless, the fight against the prohibition of the veil by the state and the imposed veil by religious obscurantists is part of our fight today. It is too important an issue in the fight for women's liberation to be left to the whims of capitalist governments or their agents.

THESE ARE NOT SALAD DAYS FOR LIBERAL HAWKS

BOOK REVIEW

THE GOOD FIGHT: WHY LIBERALS-AND ONLY LIBERALS-CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, PETER BEINART, HARPERCOLLINS, NEWYORK, 2006

In the normal course of events these days the tasks of working class socialists, particularly during the electoral cycle, are to create and distribute propaganda in favor of socialist solutions to the crisis of humankind and to organize around a socialist program. Since we are not in an immediate struggle for political power that is more than enough work. Thus, usually the goings-on among capitalist propagandists and ideologues have no direct relation to working on those tasks. However every once in a while, as now during a electoral cycle, it is interesting to take note of what is going on in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Why? Make no mistake, while the relation of forces today is totally on their side, in the final analysis we will have to directly fight the liberal wing of that party for the political allegiance of the better elements of that party. Does any militant leftist believe that today in 2006 that our recruiting grounds are located anywhere in the vicinity of the Republican Party?

With that thought in mind Mr. Beinart’s book, the Good Fight, is an outline of a plan to undercut the so-called liberal-pacifist wing of the Democratic Party in order to draw back the allegiance of what at one time were the elements that made the Democratic Party a governing party during much of the 20th century. In short, Mr. Beinart is fighting for what appears to him to be the ‘soul’ of the Democratic Party. Mr. Beinart’s central argument is that while he and other liberal hawks were wrong, dead wrong, on support to the Bush Administrations war in Iraq those who did at least get that question right are nevertheless wrong on a strategy to either defeat or contain Islamic terrorism. Of course, in the process Mr. Beinart thus retroactively absolves himself of his ‘little error’ on Iraq in the interests of the greater war on terrorism. Nobody ever said democratic ideologues were incapable of the occasional sleight-of-hand.

The predicate for this thesis is that there is vast ‘conspiracy’ underfoot by those, apparently led by the filmmaker Michael Moore and kindred spirits, who want to take over the Democratic Party and emulate Neville Chamberlain's capitualtion to Hitler at Munich as a reaction to the current "war on terror". The result, according to Mr. Beinart, is that the centrist/ Lieberman wing will have no home and the Democratic Party will not rule again like in the good old days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In answer, this writer makes this observation-what planet does Mr. Beinart live on? If memory serves Mr. Moore supported one General Wesley Clark, the mad commander of NATO forces in Serbia who attempted to bomb that country back to Stone Age conditions, in the presidential primaries of 2004. Moreover, do any rational liberal politicians or activists take political counsel from Mr. Moore? Certainly he is a political gadfly and provocative filmmaker but, please, go after the big game. And spend less time on the Internet.

Moreover, and I do not need to rely on memory for this one, who in the Democratic Party opposed the now crumbling war in Afghanistan? There were very few of us in those days, even those who were allegedly opposed to all wars on pacifist grounds, out on the streets protesting that invasion in the aftermath of the hysteria over 9/11. I saw no Democratic Party opposition, hawk or dove, to that little adventure. No, overall, as we are painfully aware every day, the Democratic Party is nothing more than a somewhat loyal parliamentary opposition. They take no more risks than the Republicans. The real problem is that on foreign policy, either in its containment or confrontational stages, the Democratic Party is Republican-lite. That in a nutshell is their political malaise-the Republicans do better at and are perceived to be better at protecting the long term interests of the ruling classes-end of story.

Mr. Beinart’s book does bring up a serious political question about how to fight the war on terror for those who favor a workers government and we duck the issue at our peril. Be forewarned, Islamic fundamentalism is a present threat to not only democratic forms of government but ultimately also to socialist forms as well. Thus, without being forced to outline an abstract blueprint to a theoretical question- How would a workers government in power respond to the actions of the Islamic terrorists? Fair enough.

The obvious first answer is that a workers government would try to break the stranglehold of Islamic fundamentalism at the base by, yes, throwing lots of money and organizers at the problems which keep the Islamic masses in poverty. Beyond that the breaking up of the Islamic terrorist organizations appears to be much more of police problem than a military one. A workers government, like any responsible government, would mercilessly track down every one of these cells in the appropriate manner. Finally, a workers government under foreseeable conditions would not be a pacifist government, even though its long-term aim is a peaceful world. There is a long way to go before humankind gets to that stage.

Let me suggest the following as one possible scenario that a future workers government might follow. The Soviet Union’s intervention into Afghanistan in 1979 drove the West, including the American Democratic Party headed by one President Jimmy Carter, to support the Islamic fundamentalists of that time as a proxy against the Soviets. The Soviet Union, even if eventually only half-heartedly committed to the intervention, in retrospect, was then the vanguard of the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. Does anyone today want to rethink that Western opposition to Soviet intervention into Afghanistan? One should. A workers government today would follow the Soviet lead demonstrated in Afghanistan and in earlier fights in the 1920’s against counterrevolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia as it attempted to consolidate the Soviet state. That is a sketch of some aspects of a workers government policy to think about. As these thoughts suggest in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism the real options are fairly narrow.