No war, no more carnage, Mike Gonzalez, Scottish Socialist Party, September 2001.
At the beginning of this pamphlet Mike Gonzalez, a longstanding SWP member, offers to ‘lead us to understand and explain what happened on that terrible 11 September and strike at the real causes of violence and terror across the world’. He fails completely.
He does nothing as a ‘socialist’ to explain to the thousands of people already in the anti-capitalist movement and those new people who have recently come into the growing anti-war movement anything about the origins of this war.
Incredibly there is only a single reference to socialism in the whole pamphlet. The words capitalism, class, imperialism and, significant for its complete absence, Labour government, do not appear at all. At a time when the violence and hypocrisy of imperialism is made visible to increasing numbers of people in Britain and the West, we are witness to this complete retreat from socialist politics.
Gonzalez cites some of the appalling detail of imperialist violence: the half a million communists slaughtered in Indonesia in 1964, the 200,000 dead in the Gulf War of 1992 and the 500,000 children in Iraq who died as a result of UN sanctions. But he refuses to explain that this horror is a direct result of imperialism and in particular British and US imperialism. It has long been a cheap trick of the British left to peddle the view that the US alone is responsible for instigating poverty, injustice and violence around the world. Knocking Uncle Sam always raises a righteous cheer at left rallies and events. Compare this with the silence and discomfort of that same left when Britain’s imperialist deeds in Ireland, South Africa and the Middle East are mentioned.
Where the growing anti-imperialist current requires clarity and precision in recognising its enemies we are offered liberal woolliness, which masks a bankrupt evasiveness about British imperialism:
‘Human rights and development have been sacrificed everywhere to the global interests of the United States and the great multinationals.’
Such a formula will not magic away the fact that British imperialism is second only to US imperialism. Indeed, Britain’s direct investment abroad in 1999 and 2000 was greater than that of any other country, including the USA! British engineering, arms and oil companies in Sudan, Nigeria and Colombia don’t just sacrifice ‘human rights and development’: they bribe, rob, despoil and murder – and they are traceable all the way back to Blair’s Labour cabinet.
This pamphlet absolves, through a deafening silence, British imperialism’s central role in the present war and studiously avoids attacking and calling for clear organisation against this Labour government’s imperialist agenda. Tony Blair has called this ‘reordering the world in Britain’s interests’.
This pamphlet disarms the emerging anti-war movement and obscures the central political issue of our times which is the battle against imperialism.
No coincidence then that Gonzalez is presently earning a reputation as a vicious and relentless critic of Cuban socialism. The Cubans have withstood and triumphed over 42 years of murderous US imperialism: against invasion, terrorism, assassination, germ warfare and a crippling economic blockade and now stand against the war in Afghanistan. Gonzalez judges socialism in Cuba to be a myth but shuts up about socialism when he discusses war. What credibility can his outrageous judgments against Cuba have when the murderous targeting of Afghanistan is not enough to make him clearly advance socialist politics and anti-imperialist struggle as the only alternative for humanity to imperialist war?
Michael MacGregor
FRFI 164 December 2001 / January 2002
