An argument with a local anarchist comrade - part 2

I left off from yesterday's response to Dan without responding to his comments about 9/11 and the cartoons issue. Dan admits to not knowing much about our politics and whilst there is much on our website, maybe the actual articles explaining our position are not convenient to locate. Rather than try and link to what other comrades have written. I will run through the arguments again, at least on 9/11.

On the cartoons I don't think I could improve on the article on our website here.

Why there was nothing anti-imperialist in the 9/11 attack

Dan argues...'refusing to condemn 9/11 is more complicated,
some highly principled people have spoken of the world trade center as a legitimate target for attacks on US imperialism . i'm thinking ward churchill'

Well I’m not too familiar with all of Ward Churchill’s views, but in the Democracy Now article I think Dan refers to he says ‘Do I personally think it (the WTC -PR) was a legitimate target or should have been a legitimate target? Absolutely not. And that's said on the basis of all but absolute rejection of and opposition to U.S. policy.’

9/11 was not an attack against imperialism either in its aims or its methods, at least as socialists think of anti-imperialism. The people who conducted 9/11 were not impoverished Palestinians demanding the national rights of their people to a democratic state. It was an attack of wealthy fanatical primarily Saudi Islamists. It was not an attack in protest at Western’s imperialism’s denial of democracy throughout the Middle East, it was a clarion call for an international Jihad for the creation of a vast united Islamic fundamentalist and brutal state.

Furthermore the methods the Islamists used are unlike those either used or envisaged by any genuine national liberation movement in history. Most of these movements were motivated by at least some ideas of human liberty and democracy. Whilst influenced and sometimes poisoned by nationalist ideologies, few would have been characterised by such callous disregard for human life, which has generally in the past been only demonstrated by brutal imperialist organisations.

Dan again ...'is condemnation of 9/11 just acquiescence in the face of the establishment's sanctification of 9/11, privileging the lives lost in new york above all the victims of capitalism?'

For some critics of 9/11 maybe. But it is possible, and we should, condemn both such things as the mass murder of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila as well as the murder of office workers, cleaners, firefighters and bank workers in the Twin Towers.

It should be remembered that the death toll in the WTC could easily have been in excess of 10 or 20,000. At its peak there were often more than 50,000 people in the towers. Wouldn’t it make hypocrites of us if we condemn the US’s use of the term ‘collateral damage’ and yet use essentially the same argument to justify the loss of thousands of peoples’ lives who had comparatively little to do with the financial/ military exploitation that to some people on the left the WTC symbolised.

Dan again...'does it (condemnation of the bombings PR)give heroic status to the "little eichmanns" who were among the victims of the attack (or, at the least, civilian status)?

It is Ward Churchill who used this term 'little Eichmanns'that Dan refers to and he tries to argue that he meant technocrats of imperialism and not imperialisms direct murderers when he used that term. I can’t say I think Churchill is particularly principled or intelligent when he used that term.

Eichmann wasn’t an imperialist banker with responsibility for economic conditions that may lead to poverty and consequently death. No doubt some such people may have been in the Twin Towers and no doubt they rationalise their actions not in terms of their own personal greed and the greed of their class but think of their actions as economically inevitable and responsible. Such people are no doubt quite odious not only for their actions but also for their rationalisations. They are our class enemy and deserve our contempt but they don’t deserve extermination along with their secretaries, clerical and IT staff, switch board operators, office cleaners etc. who no doubt had as much contempt for them as we would.

The vast majority of those who died in the Towers probably were profiting less directly from Middle Eastern poverty than many of the bombers and their wealthy families, with the Saudi regime they support or the alternative more aggressively larger Islamic republic that Bin Laden calls for.

Sometimes there aren’t easy options as you say, in wars with people fighting for their democratic rights. But this isn’t such a case. Socialists or democrats should never excuse acts of violence that lead to mass murder of innocent civilians, whether it is the aerial bombing of German cities in World War 2, the underground bombings in London or of the WTC. I have seen some attempts to question the term 'innocent' when 'innocent civilians' is used. Whilst acknowledging that are degrees of innocence and that you don't have to carry a gun to be guilty of murder, I don't think that whatever the 'guilt' a data-entry clerk in the Twin Towers may have had, it was not the guilt of an Eichmann!

Eichmann knowingly and directly organised the mass murder operation of the Nazis. To refer, as Churchill does, to the dead of 9/11 collectively as 'little Eichmanns' is grotesque in my view. It reflects the fact that Churchill, who no doubt has an economic lifestyle as good as, if not better than, most of the clerical staff who died on 9/11, has the outlook of an enraged and embittered liberal rather than a working class socialist.

Dan again '...to see the resistance as either black or white is false. Whilst there are undoubtedly strong religious and Ba'athist elements who should be opposed, I would wager that the majority of people involved in resistance to the occupation are simply those who wish to oppose the occupation and terrorisation of their country. Does the AWL support them? ...

I think there is more than a little wishful thinking here. No doubt there are many Iraqis who hate the arrogant actions of the occupiers. But the resistance movement is not composed of kids picking up stones and lobbing them at the troops. It is composed of organisations, with intelligence networks, with weaponry, and more importantly with ideologies that are more than just being anti-US or anti-UK.

I can't say what the motives are of those who join those militias. I don't know whether the ideology of these militias are imposed on naïve desperate people who join it through simple hatred of western foreigners ruining their country. I don't know whether some join only after being convinced of the need for the resurrection of the Ba'ath regime and the putting down of those disloyal collaborators (the Shia population and the government they have put in power). I don't know whether others when they join the al Sadr and the SCIRI militias, who are avoiding direct attacks on the occupiers at present, have the explicit goal of a Shi'ite regime modelled on Iran.

I don't know how much narrow careerist ambition determines their joining... 'these people are going to be taking over, this could be my road to influence and power'.

But I do know that these militias are defined by their ideologies as well as their aims and that those aims are overwhelmingly sectarian, anti-Shia or anti-Sunni. And the actions conducted by them match those sectarian ideologies. There are anti-imperialist and anti-sectarian forces, probably, and necessarily, armed to defend their areas. The Iraqi Freedom Congress claims to be building such forces. But these forces are not engaging in offensive action. Why?

1. Because it would could cause confusion with the sectarian forces they detest, as much as and often more the occupiers, the opposing sectarian militias to the communities they operate in
2. Because guerilla action would take their people away from what needs to be done more importantly, organising mass civilian, and we would argue working class, resistance

Dan again...then there's the question of withdrawal of occupying forces:-

I'm also not a fan of the AWL's unwillingness to end the occupation by getting troops out.

Grrrr. We are against the occupation, we want to get the troops out. Our comrades, and me especially, get infuriated by the fact that despite the fact that you will never find in any publication, in any web conversation, at any meeting, any AWL member ever saying 'and that is why we call on the troops to stay and the occupation to continue'. Nevertheless the myths continue. I imagine they are perpetuated in conversations out of our earshot otherwise they would be emphatically denied. I guess that Dan is just picking up on those myths. If not it would be interesting where he is getting his impression that we call for support for the occupation or for the troops.

Trotsky once accused revolutionaries of playing as 'inspector generals of history', saying what history should or should not do. But we don’t control history, we don’t tell George Bush or Tony Blair what to do. We argue and organise against them and others. We build forces wherever we can, who know what they need to fight against. We want to get the troops out. We want to stop a civil war between competing communally-based, right wing semi-fascist forces. We argue to build forces within the working class communities that might do both of those things.

We oppose the troops presence in Iraq. I’m not sure whether Dan has read our publications on that or agrees with them or believe them. What we don’t do is call for ‘Troops Out NOW’ just as we don’t call for ‘Liquidate the Islamist/Ba’athist militias NOW’. Consider what ‘Liquidate the Islamist/Ba’athist militias NOW’ would mean. Who might bring it about? Iraqi popular anti-US democratic forces? No chance. Only the occupying forces in alliance with the government could even pretend to do it. And no-one could give support to a mass offensive led by the US military with that aim.

Just the same with ‘US/UK Troops out NOW’. It would mean positively arguing for what would then happen.
We don’t call for the occupation to continue, we never have …ever. But we don’t call for the victory of the communalist militias either. We are third camp socialists, like those who refuse in imperialist wars to support one side or another, or those in the Cold War who refused to back either the Warsaw Pact or NATO. All these third camp forces have been repeatedly denounced as covert supporters of the ‘other side’, after all, as the historically-repeated refrain goes ‘either one side or the other must win, you have to take sides’. We refuse, we fight for working class internationalism.

We argue that it is possible to oppose both the communalist military militias and the occupation forces by avoiding the childish rhetoric of ‘NOW’. We can organise in the real world against both.

Dan gets a little close to taking sides with the following…'Whilst it might be conceived that the withdrawal of US/UK troops would be a terrible thing for those opposing the religious fundamentalists who wish to take power, I would suggest that keeping the troops there is worse.'

Indeed it would it would lead to their extermination in the short term

You present the choices. Either:

1. On the one hand, the obliteration of democratic secularists under fundamentalist rule. You don’t mention the likelihood of civil war, which makes the present bloodbath mild, but I’m sure you accept that, as you also admit that it would be terrible for the opponents of political Islam. Which it would be, truly terrible.
2. On the other hand ‘western control of Iraq’, a ‘fuelled’ international military ‘crusade against Islam’, ‘bombings, tortures and other ongoing crimes of the occupation’.

For a moment following the logic of those who demand you to take sides, you say ‘I would suggest that keeping the troops there is worse.’

In terms of the extent of human suffering I really don’t know which is worse. I know both would be terrible. But again we utterly refuse to support either of those two options.

But then you associate us with some liberal commentators who support the occupation.

If the extent of the errors of the liberal commentators you refer to, was as you put it, that they think ‘that a republic is better for Iraqis than religious tyranny’, then I would not be critical of them. But their real error is to believe that the aim of the US-led occupation is a democratic republic, it isn’t and, if it ever was, it is incidental to their real goal. Again we oppose the occupation, WE DO NOT as you put it ‘view… the invading imperialists as the defenders of Iraq’.

I think one of the reasons that the argument crops up again about 'which side are you on, US or Islamists?' is because independent working class politics has been so eclipsed and Third Camp politics has been left behind by the SWP as well as the conventional left culture. One thing we perhaps should be grateful for is that this isn't 1914 and those who demand we take sides now didn't have effect on the socialists who refused to take sides in that conflict.