10.10.2001

Taliban apologetics

On the Socialist Alliance Press Group, Socialist Workers Party member Tim Nicholls of Lewisham attempted to justify his organisation?s refusal to condemn the September 11 terrorist outrages in the USA. This provoked a lively and enlightening exchange, including a rebuttal from Dave Osler

I work in and among the Bengali community of London?s East End and have done for the last 12 years. I am a civil service benefits advice worker, formerly a visiting officer, and union branch organiser. Around 40% of union members in my office (which is 88% unionised) are Bengali or, rather, Sylheti, male and female.

From this position, I can tell you that any anti-war movement - and the feeling for one is strong - that starts from the premise that al Qa'eda and Osama bin Laden are 'dehumanised' will get little audience in this community. Almost everyone regrets what has happened, knows that it was wrong and is deeply sorry for the victims and their families. Yet, as they see it (and it is a view that I can understand), the US has been dishing it out to muslim civilians, either directly or via its proxy Israel, for decades; now, for the first time, it is getting it back and not liking it. They ask where was the three-minute silence for the 500,000 dead children of Iraq, amongst others.

This matters because the lasting chance of an alternative is a socialist movement actually in the Middle East ('Middle' from where? Even the language betrays imperial bias). It will be harder to achieve this if the revolutionary left in Europe is seen to possess an anti-muslim prejudice. Because the average muslim understanding of imperialism is, unsurprisingly, superior to that of the average ?'christian'. Their attitude to women and gays is often, but by no means always, worse, but let us divide the Q'ran from the semi-feudal societies where it shows a worse face. Let us remember, for example, that the veil was not a muslim tradition, but was taken over from the (christian) Byzantine empire.

Let us look at why the societies with a stark and brutal interpretation of islam are brutal and semi-feudal. At the height of muslim Arab influence, Herat, the second city of Afghanistan, was one of the jewels of the muslim world. Herat University was a pre-eminent seat of learning in a fertile and relatively well off area. What happened? Decades of imperial intervention. First the British Raj and the tsarist empire fought over 'spheres of influence' like dogs over a bone. You can still find British guardsmen?s skeletons in the Himalayan passes. Then the baton passed to American imperialism and the Stalinist empire. In the process, Afghanistan has been reduced to a pile of rubble - a new Stone Age with a difference and the difference is a vast armoury of Russian (captured) and US (freely donated) weapons.

The same resistance is visible in Chechnya. Does the Alliance for Workers? Liberty call Chechens 'dehumanised' for trying to bomb Moscow apartment blocks? No, of course not, because western TV has shown the brutality of the Russian occupation and half-supported, for entirely political reasons, the Chechen guerrillas. Strangely, and equally politically, we do not have images of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi babies and children dying from 'our' sanctions. But the muslim world knows. ?We? created the Taliban and bin Laden to do the same job to the Russians that they appear to have done so efficiently to ?us?. I say ?appear?, as no evidence whatsoever has been shown to implicate the Taliban in the attack.

What gets me is the Eurocentrism of all this. The US has been responsible for massacres of, or including, civilians of many times the order of the World Trade Center; Churchill ordered the aerial poison gassing of thousands of Iraqi Kurds; the Serb militias slaughtered 17,000 Bosnian muslim civilians in Srbenica. Has anyone called the US or UK or Serb people 'dehumanised'? Has anyone 'condemned' the religion (christian) of the perpetrators?

The scent of hypocrisy lies strongly over this: the CIA tightly controls the sources of information and the release of evidence recedes into never-never land. It has been claimed by Pakistani diplomatic sources (admittedly, not always the most reliable) that plans for a US invasion of Afghanistan preceded the WTC slaughter. This is entirely plausible. A radio interview about the recession recently gave a possible reason. America is running out of domestic supplies of oil. Oil equals economic power. What is less than 200 miles from the borders of Afghanistan? The virtually untapped, and vast, reserves of oil and natural gas in Tajikistan. Is this just a coincidence? What has been the CIA role? We do not know. What we do know is that if you scratch a morally outraged US president, an oil executive appears. Since the war was announced, the stock market slide slowed: I?m with Billy Bragg on this - ?War, what is it good for - It?s good for business.?

Sure, the best solution would be a workers? uprising in Afghanistan against the Taliban. However, because of the bitter history there is little remaining working class left in the country - which is precisely why the Taliban can persecute and dispense with teachers (an irony, that; perhaps the final revenge - Taliban means ?students? in Pathan).

And so ? the war hysteria, which even seems to have affected the judgement of some of the left. ?Dehumanised? people are easier to kill (remember Untermensch?). Now, before some bigwig loses their trolley, what I am trying to illustrate is that careless use of language can have horribly complicated, unintentional outcomes.

In a national struggle between feudalism and capitalism, of course we would not support ?the reactionary classes?. But this is not the same - this is an imperialist adventure, seemingly planned before the outrage it is supposedly ?avenging?. If a convenient outrage had not been available, perhaps the CIA would have been forced to manufacture one: it certainly would not have been the first time?

There is no ?Afghan? national solution, just as there is no ?Macedonian? national solution. The only possible solution lies in the regeneration of a socialist current in the broad ?Middle East?. Condemning bin Laden would merely confirm to disillusioned militants in the area that the western left was merely part of the imperialist apparatus. Islamic fundamentalism has captured the tribunal of the oppressed because the secular left, under Stalinist influence, blew it in the 40s and 50s. Faced with real revolutionary prospects, they committed suicide, backing nationalist parties that turned on and massacred them.

The islam of the Taliban (the same, incidentally, as that of the Saudi royal family) is deeply reactionary, but in Afghanistan the alternative is US imperialism, war and warlordism. How many more times will Afghanistan be ravaged before we understand that muslim militants have had a gutful of intervention? Dismissing the elements of islamic fundamentalism that oppose imperialism and demand justice for the poor simply cuts us off from any chance of building the left current that is so sorely needed.

Anti-imperialism of fools

A strong and thought-provoking post from Tim. But still, I believe that socialists can only condemn the attack, and would nevertheless argue that the perpetrators were indeed dehumanised.

I?m a socialist of Jewish extraction, yet have always taken an anti-Zionist position, and have actively sort to build international solidarity with oppositional currents in the ?Middle East?, even to the extent of incurring some personal risk (without giving any details here, of course). In addition, I have worked in Britain with Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish exile comrades, even where I thought their politics incurably marred by Stalinism, and urged their greater integration into the British left.

Ever since I became a political activist 20 years ago, I have implacably opposed imperialist violence wherever it has been dished out across the globe. I have always considered a democratic secular state the only solution to the Palestine question.

The bulk of the British left has - on paper, at least - opposed US sanctions on Iraq. The turnout on the embassy picket lines at the relevant moments has been a few dozen at best. Not even the larger organisations properly mobilised for them. But that is a reflection of a wider lack of internationalism on the British left.

Much of Tim?s concern for the sensibilities of Sylheti workers is far too abstract. Let me offer a parallel. As revolutionary socialists, we realise that the frustrations that drive sections of the white proletariat towards the BNP are only too real. They really do get a shitty deal in housing and employment. Yet should we drop our socialist analysis in order to get an ?audience in this community?? Of course not. They are part of the working class. We seek to win them over to socialism. (And let?s not have the cheap jibe here that I simply equate muslims with fascist sympathisers. My point is that many (most?) members of both groups are proletarian victims of false consciousness.)

The SWP has long made the case against what it calls ?substitutionism?:  the substitution of self-appointed vanguards for the self-activity of the working class. What clearer case could one seek than the politics of al Qa?eda?

The perpetrators of the September 11 outrages were - as far as we are aware - Egyptian and Saudi rich kids from a bourgeois background, under the leadership of a billionaire. Greater hope for the future lies with stone-throwing 15-year-olds on the Gaza Strip. Theirs is a collective response of the oppressed to repression, not acts of individual terrorism.

Speaking personally, my socialism is fundamentally grounded in humanism. Socialists condemn the killing of Iraqi kids through UN sanctions. Socialists condemn the thousands of people that die as a result of malnutrition every day. And socialists condemn the killing of thousands of workers on September 11.

Not to condemn the massacre of innocents is a sorry kind of chop logic - the anti-imperialism of fools. The left really has to rise above this inconsistency.

Dave Osler