Perspectives 2002

No 1118 January 8th 2002

PART 6.

After helping bourgeois hysteria set up the fascist-blitzkrieg on Afghanistan, the fake-'left' plumbs the depths of hypocrisy and stupidity by then chanting 'no to war' to 'condemn' sept 11 ts to accept the whole bourgeois-state 'morality' joke of 'punishment law', making any wish to see the warmongers defeated pointless. Lenin shows why middle-east 'terror' is the essence of anti-imperialist struggle, and all who 'condemn' it are pro-imperialist stooges. shameful revisionist contempt for palestinian degradation it helped to cause.

As events move on, this servile and treacherous "condemnation" 'morality', siding with stinking bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, will unavoidably become more and more obviously the measure of class-collaborating rottenness, petty-bourgeois stupidity, and total untrustworthiness as far as the working class is concerned.

Depending on how events develop, this filthy betrayal of the impoverished and tortured Third World's obvious incapacity or perspective-limitation to start fighting back against colonial-imperialist humiliation and totally repressive domination in any other way, could rank alongside the 1914 voting of war credits by the Second International as the greatest fake-'left' treachery in history.

Endless 'revolutionary'-sounding arguments were aggressively put forward in 1914 by the Second International leaders of the Revisionist retreat from Marxist-Leninist science then, just as now, — but in practice all were just a cover for class-collaborating chauvinism.

No different today. To condemn Sept 11 as only a "barbaric atrocity" by "fascist anti-imperialists" is to concede the field of argument completely to the bourgeois-reformist imbecility which thinks that the poverty causes of terrorism should be eradicated soon, but that the 'indiscriminate slaughter of innocents' cannot be tolerated, and has to be stopped immediately.

To agree with bourgeois hypocrisy that "something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", which helped put Bush and Blair in total charge of world opinion (superficially and temporarily),but to then protest the blitzkrieg outcome with pacifist 'No to war' objections, is the cynical absolute in self-delusion by the fake-'left'.

The Second International similarly pretended that each party voting for war credits within their 'own' parliament would only provide for each country's "own" defence, but not for any colonial-imperialist war aggrandisement, conquests, reparations, or other booty.

But warmongering chauvinism quickly won the propaganda battle in every country, as was bound to happen as soon as the fake-'left' conceded any justification whatever in voting war credits.

The same now. As soon as the phoney 'morality' of reformist imbecility is conceded that "something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", then blitzkrieg repression ad infinitum has been conceded.

As in the 1914–18 War and as in all warmongering, the only way for halting the butchering chauvinism henceforth (Iraq, Somalia, and the Palestinians are already being lined up for the next blitzkrieg slaughters) is by taking advantage of ANY defeat or setback whatsoever for the imperialists to wage war on the warmongers themselves. (See EPSR 1109 for the quotations from Leninist science which explained its epoch-making practical development of strategically setting up the October Revolution).

But having effectively abandoned the field to bourgeois propaganda's claimed right to "wage a war on terrorist atrocities", then there is no way possible for the fake-'left' to now encourage the world to look forward to imperialist defeats in these blood thirsty brutalities and triumphalism. It would make no sense for these Trots and Revisionists to do so.

And in practice in this case, "condemnation" is indeed the language of reformist punishment, the entire fraudulent basis of all bourgeois-imperialist "law" everywhere.

You may not wish to emulate a poor old lady stealing a pack of bacon from a supermarket, but as soon as you publicly condemn her, it is tantamount to accepting all the hypocrisy of bourgeois 'justice' including the crap that her 'punishment' will henceforth make society a better place, less crime, etc.

Publicly "condemn" Sept 11 and its 'punishment' will arrive inexorably. Pointless to say 'No to war' at that stage. Equally unbelievable to then hope for an imperialist defeat at the hands of what you have already publicly "condemned".

In other words, to have joined the hypocrisy of bourgeois-imperialist propaganda to "condemn" Sept 11 is effectively a social-chauvinist declaration of pro-imperialism (i.e. pro-'reformism' which in practice can never get rid of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and therefore amounts to a permanent acceptance of imperialism, and is thereby 'pro-imperialism'.)

Another bogus 'argument' by fake-'lefts' is that "ineffective terrorist desperation" has "strengthened imperialism".

Lenin wrote interestingly on whether inadequate terror-assaults disorganised or demoralised the working-class or not, — and what to do about it, in his Sept 1906 article "Guerilla Warfare":

Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.

The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organisation.

The usual appraisal of the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Banquets, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers.

But are such examples convincing?

The fact that "guerrilla" warfare became widespread precisely after December, — and its connection with the accentuation not only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis is beyond dispute. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under, the circumstances of an uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness of such trite labels is only too obvious. The example of the Letts clearly demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye Vremya-ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism!

It is said that guerrilla acts disorganise our work.

It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control. Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.

What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation.
condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes: It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e., into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.

We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.

The argument that guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably "disorganises" organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation, Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all.

When I see Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring "we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla warfare", - I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black-Hundred government and the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of development of the revolution. The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way - and for that very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms - reacting to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world.

It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted and prostituted. Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become corrupted into "alliances" - agreements between the workers and the masters against the consumers. Parliament becomes corrupted into a brothel, where a gang of bourgeois politicians barter wholesale and retail "national freedom", "liberalism", "democracy", republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth. Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above or slightly below it.

That being so — and it is undoubtedly so — the Social-Democrats must absolutely make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the ,masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy's forces.

This is a difficult task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole people are being retrained and are learning to fight in the course of the civil war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task.

We have not the slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of particular guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching its' solution.

*The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye Izvestia, No. 2, and Lenin's report on the Congress) the section of the Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for their recognition: "expropriations" of private property were not to be permitted under any circumstances; "expropriations" of government property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended against brutal government officials and active members of the Black Hundreds, but on condition that 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away.

Proletary, No. 5, GUERRILLA WARFARE September 30, 1908

As the EPSR has explained from Sept 11 onwards, people will struggle like this anyway, whether bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, fascist-blitzkrieg retaliation, or petty-bourgeois 'left' denunciation has 'condemned' the suicide guerrillas or not. Lenin clearly explains here that the organised socialist revolution cannot stand back from such anti-imperialist war but should try to provide proper leadership and perspective to all such struggles.

The fake-'lefts' have shamefully tried to wriggle out of this Marxist-Leninist scientific exposure of their reactionary 'moralising' by pretending that these unbelievably heroic guerrilla-war sacrifices by the Palestinian suicide-bombers and their Sept 11 counterparts are "reactionaries trying to bring back feudalism" or new "fascism".

The Goebbels-like propaganda scabbiness of this disinformation by the CPGB and others, plus the essential pro-imperialism of their opportunist position on Third World terrorist fightbacks, is beginning to mark out these Socialist Alliance careerists as one of the most despicable sects in the whole rotten history of fake-'left' "Marxism".

And the other part of Lenin's message is equally relevant. If Sept 11 is indeed a "bad tactical move", then even greater is the guilt of the whole history of Revisionism (which spawned these new CPGB clones) for causing the international proletariat on merit to abandon any support for the old Third International traditions, which have now degenerated into complete counter-revolution in many countries.

If the clearly inadequate terrorist conspiracies are doing it wrong, or doing it at all when they should not be, then do more to clarify the appeal of Marxist-Leninist science, and win back the world proletarian leadership, Lenin is saying.

Nowhere is this stinging rebuke more appropriate than in Occupied Palestine where the fight against the Zionist colonisation of the Arab nation's homeland was sold out from the start by Stalinist Revisionism's United Nations agreement to let Zionist imperialism begin "legally" imposing genocide on the Palestinian people by stealing their land from 1947 onwards. Now the CPGB successors of that Revisionist treachery have the insane gall to charge as "racists" all who refuse to accept the colonisation of Palestine by the Zionists as a fait accompli. And once having got the 'politically correct' slander going, the related provocation is to sneer "racist" at the argument (see Lenin above) that depending on historical, cultural, or regional backwardness or unfavourable conditions, the blind rage of a terrorist outburst might well be accepted as unsurprising considering the wretched conditions of total degradation and humiliation that the hopelessly repressed refugee camps might breed in the persecuted Palestinian people.

'That is racist patronising' to paraphrase CPGB. 'Of course they could fight back with a Federal-Republican Constitution dedicated to socialist democracy: Saying that terrorism is all that the repressive conditions allow, or the best answer they can think of, is a racist slur on the Palestinians'.

Self-righteous moralising humbug of this extreme nastiness and barminess is undoubtedly stuck emotionally 100% in the camp of imperialism prevailing.

A large part of this cringing wail that "the terrorists are making imperialism stronger" is just the snivelling petty-bourgeois servility in the face of what 'lefts' think or fear is "super-imperialism" (Kautsky) invincibility.

Lenin's Guerrilla Warfare could almost have been wholly written to expose Lalkar's silly snivelling retreat from Marxism into pompous posturing in impotently 'denouncing' the Genoa Black Bloc anarchists for fighting back against police brutality at the globalisation summit.

Such Revisionist capitulationism is completely missing the historical context, as Lenin explains above. In fact it shows no awareness of dialectical historical development at all.

So, "now they will really give these terrorist sources what for" will they???

But Zionist colonisation has been promising and threatening exactly this same brutality, non-stop, every year for nearly 50 years.

And Zionist imperialism has virtually unchallenged power to precisely continue inflicting genocide 'punishment' with virtual impunity.

The result? The Intifada is wrecking the 'peace' of all the Zionist 'conquests' more devastatingly today than ever before.

And the guerrilla-war skills and ruthless determination are more awe-inspiring and more universally lionised by more young Palestinians than ever before.

And all of this came about predictably too (see EPSRs for 22 past years) because this most genocidal and brutal of all colonisations has taken place in basically the historical epoch when such direct colonisation was crumbling in every corner of the earth, the irresistible forces of national-liberation and Third World awakening driving out the no-longer-tenable humiliation of imperialist domination and exploitation.

And no nation has suffered more greatly or more brutally than Palestine, yet no major cultural tradition in human history has more catching-up to do, or a greater sense of grievance at having been wronged and scorned by the West, than the Arab Muslim civilisation which was at one stage so advanced that for centuries it made Europe look backward.

The stealing from them of their Palestinian homeland has made this 7-million strong most cultured and capable section of the mighty Arab nation an obvious historical explosion just waiting to happen.

It is inevitable that single nationhood must be restored to the entire land of Palestine, and all stolen properties returned to their rightful owners.

Consistent with the outcome of war crime/colonisation trials against the most rapacious Zionist-imperialist criminals, any Jewish-immigrant workers who want to live on (and have no property stealing crimes against them) will have to put up with living as a minority in a majority-Arab country.

The undoubted and criminal RACISM in this whole equation resides within the ignorant, arrogant, sentimental Western 'political correctness' (shared by Revisionism's rotten class-collaborationist tradition) which unthinkingly and unhistorically insists that "of course Israel is here to stay".

And out of this routine failure to apply an absolutely objective historical examination to the Palestinian question as Lenin recommended, routine non-Marxist fake-'left' posturing invents the ultimate prejudice against terrorist methods and declares the Palestinian guerrilla-war "condemnable" because they are deluded it is "doomed".

This standard petty-bourgeois undialectical prejudice that the 'sole super-power' imperialist 'New World Order' is bound to win any international political-military conflict whenever it wants to, only continues Revisionism's anti-communist thinking that a shattering crisis for the 'free-world system' such as produced the inter-imperialist catastrophes of World Wars I and II, is no longer possible.

The ignorant prejudice also continues, shared by bourgeois and Revisionist anti-Marxism alike, that 'fascism' is just violent aggressiveness attached to any backward beliefs. Hence the sneer from the pro-imperialist 'lefts', — who are opportunistically desperate to dissociate themselves from Sept 11 but who are embarrassed at the worldwide proletarian satisfaction at America's humiliation, — are so keen to dismiss the al-Quaeda guerrilla-war operation as 'fascism'.

But the only fascism around, of course, is the historically established aggressive imperialist warmongering as the chauvinist 'solution' to international capitalist economic crisis.

It is what US imperialist warmongering aggression is actually DOING now which could earn the additional description of 'fascism' (for what it is worth), whipping up chauvinist belligerence as hysterically as possible as the notion of a 'solution' to worldwide problems, 'pacifying' everything in sight as the only way forward.

The treacherous 'left' collapse into its "condemn terrorism" stupor is the other side of its anti-communist inability to accept that the whole imperialist international 'free-market system' is soon to crash in a worldwide revolutionary crisis which will even dwarf the turmoil of 1917 and its aftermath.

The Enron 'greatest bankruptcy in history' is signal enough, but the far more conclusive evidence still revolves around Japan's fate where the world's second most powerful imperialist economy ever has remained paralysed for 11 years in a classic 'surplus capital' crisis, and simply cannot get out of it despite the repeated massive use of every reflationary trick in the Keynesian book.

And until World War III destroys enough 'surplus capital' (and 'surplus labours, etc, etc ) worldwide, no economies will avoid the relentlessly oncoming slump any more successfully than Japan.

Hardly surprising, therefore, how noticeably quick Japan was to offer active-service military units for the anti-Afghanistan warmongering bonanza, again re-writing its 'peace' constitution in the process. Germany, where economic stagnation has now lasted two years, was equally quick to do likewise, and get in on the international warmongering 'solution' to problems as rapidly as possible. The self-deluding myth of 'super-imperialist invincibility' is just the rationalisation of the petty-bourgeois class-collaborative instinct, but it shallowly looks to these undoubted 'facts' of imperialist warmongering build-up to "prove" how this 'desperate terrorist atrocity' has only 'made imperialism stronger'.

In workers movement history, the periodic annihilation of all ability to think dialectically never ceases to astonish.

Firstly, when has a breaking-out of generalised imperialist warmongering ever led to anything but revolutionary disaster ultimately for the degenerate 'free-world' system??

Secondly, if cut-throat inter-imperialist trade-war is already virtually strangling to death such major economies as Japan, then how can the spread of inter-imperialist rivalry in warlike posturing and threatening (as around the Gulf War earlier, then around the Balkans emergencies, and now around the anti-Afghanistan blitzkrieg) not RAISE expectations that the degenerate warmongering system is heading yet again in the same catastrophic direction as marked the 'free-world's' two previous great economic crises by World Wars I and II.???

Thirdly, what does an initial run of easy US imperialist 'victories' (Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, etc) most resemble in modern history?? The 'triumphs' for imperialist aggression as a promised world-slump 'solution' which preceded the most disastrous inter-imperialist degeneracy so far in history, — namely, World War II. Prior to it, the world turned a satisfied 'peace in our time' blind eye to the 'justified' triumphs for self-righteous 'civilising' warmongering imperialist aggression against Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, etc, etc. And then when World War II's declaration was forced onto the bogus 'democratic' world by the shame of its own degenerate connivance in all the warmongering imperialist aggression, there was yet another run of seemingly unstoppable imperialist-war 'triumphs' across Europe, the Near East, and the Far East. But all the time these 'victories' were only dialectically building the imperialist system up for its most devastating fall yet in the aftermath of World War II when a whole string of new states ousted capitalism and imposed the dictatorship of the proletariat; and then the whole colonial world rose up in arms to wipe out one great 'invincible' Western empire after another.

History is clear. The imperialist system goes to war, and sooner or later, the imperialist system itself must also suffer some defeats.

Most of the revolutionary overthrows of the murderous and destructive capitalist system so far in history have come out of imperialist defeats in the warmongering aggression it inflicts so "unstoppably" onto. society.

And while heavyweight inter-imperialist war some way down the line will undoubtedly produce comparable defeats at some stage or other, revolutionary upheavals are not ruled out before that because a combination of circumstances can at any time create a humiliating defeat or setback for almost any imperialist power.

The greatest obstacle to understanding and preparing for this essentially revolutionary direction of history is the philistine influence of fake-'left' sects on the British workers movement, all pretending to be 'revolutionary' this, and 'Marxist' that, and 'real socialist' something else, but all in reality being nothing but the sterile clones of failed old Labour 'leftism', utterly deluded by the fraud of 'reformist pressure' eventually producing a 'socialist majority' in Parliament.

The snivelling impotent fake-'left' sentiment will be that like on Genoa's streets or in Gaza or on the West Bank, 'violent provocations' like Sept 11 will 'play into strengthening imperialism's hands', etc.

Social pacifism comes out of the same roots of "you can't fight against. impossible odds, so just stop the juggernaut with moral shaming".

But far from impossible, Leninism explains that the victims of the imperialist world order will never stop fighting in any way they can. It is the task of Marxist science to give the anti-imperialist struggle a convincing unifying world-revolutionary perspective.

The entire fake-'left' is held back from even starting the task by its sectarian backwardness of being crippled by unresolved theoretical skeletons in the cupboard.

A self-regarding petty-bourgeois small-minded inability to face up to past mistakes of a Trotskyite anti-communist anti-Soviet nature, or a museum-Stalinist Revisionist nature of "no mistakes here" in best cultist-monolith tradition (although grotesque errors clearly started creeping in from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, ending in total catastrophe by 1990), — — has paralysed all competence for genuine, open, all-round objective polemics.

As is already happening, the development of events themselves wi11 increasingly expose this reactionary theoretical backwardness of the fake-'left'.

This isn't just a question of a difference of opinion or feeling about violence, or just a tactical political mistake which will soon be forgotten.

The whole philosophy of whether the world is heading for a revolutionary future as the inevitable outcome of the insoluble contradictions of imperialist crisis, or whether rational reforms are going to find solutions to most of the world's problems largely peacefully, — is bound up in this issue.

And that is not a harmless choice to be made either. Choosing the essentially class-collaborative view of the future in which everyone is going to act fairly reasonably, it is assumed, and nothing too terrible is going to happen to the world, — is essentially threatening to totally disarm important sections of the population and make the direction of the inter-imperialist trade-war economic crisis towards World War III all the more certainly unstoppable before it starts, and in consequence all the. more genocidally destructive and devastating once it is allowed to get going.

Paradoxically, it is the "condemnation" of the Sept 11 terrorist violence which most ensures that the greatest brutalities and bloodshed will be inflicted on the world by the imperialist crisis.

If the whole planet had risen up to sympathise with the tragic victims of Sept 11 but to tell the world imperialist system (of economic exploitation, political domination, and military humiliation) that its foot on the neck of the Third World (to keep going the injustice and unfairness of the rewards on earth) was the real CAUSE of why young men from the Middle East were driven to such terrible fanaticism, — then the sick authors of the barbaric blitzkrieg slaughter now raining down on the world's poorest people, — and with much more threatened to come, — might have been restrained.

This is unrealisable fantasy, of course. But posing such a hypothesis brings home what has been achieved by confused petty-bourgeois idiocy in feeling obliged to go along with the bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy of "condemning" the Sept 11 violence.

It has massively reinforced the operational confidence of the monopoly-imperialist humbug (not an inevitable development), smugly congratulating itself that its propaganda blitzkrieg has fooled enough of world opinion into "condemning" Sept 11, implying "something must be done", to now be able to get away with murder (literally) in Afghanistan, and probably much further afield too, warming up early for US imperialism's planned World War III violence.

It is pointless the fake-'lefts' now saying that they condemned Sept 11 but that they instantly said also 'No to war'. Sept 11 was the time to tell US imperialism "serves you right. It is your system which makes the world a violent unjust tyranny. The tragic victims of Sept 11 are just a drop in the ocean of the vast numbers massacred, murdered, starved to death, diseased to death, or otherwise brutalised and blighted EVERY DAY all round the world by your system of domination and exploitation. And the violence and the bloodshed will only get worse for as long as your system rules on, — worse in all directions".

And what use is the 'left's "condemnation" anyway, since far more and far worse terrorist attempts by the Third World to fight back are bound to follow.

If it is argued that no, the NATO special forces will wipe out al-Quaeda and that this will be an end to all such terrorist 'outrages' for all time then this amounts to "condemning" Sept 11 in the spirit of effectively helping imperialism's retaliatory blitzkrieg.

And if it is argued as the Socialist Alliance CPGB sect does for example, that the defeat of the "Taleban counter-revolutionary fascists" is a good thing, and that Lenin supported the need to "combat pan-Islamism", — then such "condemnation" of Sept 11 effectively amounts to enthusiastic support for the imperialist blitzkrieg and massacres.

It is pointless just blaming Blair for such a de facto British imperialist role. In such matters, governments can be swayed by public opinion. The petty-bourgeois academic "communist" idiocy, — which turned the tormented Third World's attempt to fight back on Sept 11 into a moralising posture about ends and means, and irresponsibly falsified the historical record to pretend Leninist backing for this imperialist aggression (the real fascism) against Third World revolt, has provided just the self-absorbed confusion, blind to real world hatred of imperialism, which Blairism has needed to go down this sick warmongering holocaust road.

Imperialist warmongers now feel justified by all the anti-Marxist "condemners" of terrorist guerrilla-war; and the fascist massacre trick of "shot while escaping" is already rampant, reading between the lines of the uneasy capitalist press cover-up of the deliberate slaughter of prisoners-of-war at the Qala-i-Jhangi fort.

And Iraq is next, Bush warns. The fake-'left' imbeciles joining the bourgeois "condemn terrorism" hoax, will presumably cheer again.

 

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