FRFI 164 December 2001 / January 2002
No to Bush’s war – The military face of globalisation. A Socialist Worker’s Party pamphlet £1 (29pp)
This pamphlet contributes as much towards an understanding of the present war in Afghanistan as the Flat Earth Society does to the art of navigation. For instance pages 11-13 list 16 countries under the title, ‘Bush’s bloody allies’. The one country not listed is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)’s own – Britain. The country which is more bloody than any of them.
Since World War II, British imperialism has aided and abetted every US invasion, adventure and operation, no matter who is in power, Tory or Labour. That is what the special relationship is all about and the SWP is either ignorant of it or covering up for it. As for British imperialism’s own crimes, the map of the British empire stretched from South America to Hong Kong and was drenched in blood. Page 24 argues ‘…the capitalist system that has now brought us a new imperialism – bigger corporations, more obscene weapons, more wars and greater inequality across the globe’. [our emphasis].
How is it new? Marx and Engels predicted it in the Communist Manifesto in 1847. It is the same imperialism Lenin wrote about. It may have adapted its strategies, tactics and weapons but the beast is the same.
Is Mai Lai in Vietnam in 1965 different from the murder of Palestinian children today? Is Omdurman in 1898 qualitatively different from the road to Basra in 1991? At Omdurman British machine gunners massacred 10,000 Sudanese, with the loss of only 48 of their own men. If there had been 100,000 at Omdurman they would have kept firing as they did on the dirt road from Kuwait to Basra in 1991.
The SWP refuses to understand imperialism, so it invents a new imperialism, and as it refuses to understand the Labour Party, so it goes along with the myth of New Labour.
On page 5, it is correctly pointed out that Bin Laden was sent to Afghanistan 20 years ago by the CIA, the Saudi royal family and Pakistani secret service to fight the Soviet Union. What the pamphlet fails to mention is that the SWP acted as cheer leaders for Bin Laden and his cohorts in the mujahadeen in their counter-revolutionary war, against the Afghani revolution and the Soviet army.
On page 10, there is an historical chronology. No mention is made of the Afghani revolution on 27 April 1978. As usual with social democrats, the SWP will change and ignore historical facts which don’t fit their bankrupt theories.
There was a popular social revolution in 1978. It was sparked by the murder of trade union leader Ahbar Haybar. The funeral turned in to mass demonstrations and a revolt in the army. The government which came to power instituted land reform as 36% of the population were landless peasants, whilst 5% of the population owned 50% of the arable land. They began a programme of building hospitals, clinics and schools.
The revolutionary movement also tried to free women from their awful oppression allowing them to choose to go unveiled. Access to education and work was opened. They lowered the bride price to a token payment, so it became like the western wedding ring. This enraged the fundamentalist clerics who mobilised a counter-revolution. In December 1979 the Soviet army, at the request of the Afghani government came to its aid. The CIA had already been funding the mujahadeen for six months.
The SWP were on the wrong side, the side of backwardness and oppression. No wonder they have to lie and hide facts.
Jimmy German
