From: New Worker Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 22:34:23 +0000 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [New-Worker-News] Once again the iron fist New Worker special feature article - 26/10/2001 by Steve Lawton RUSSIA and Peoples China form the flanking powers of an immense land mass around Afghanistan which, together with Pakistan and India, combine most of the world's population. The bombing and invasion of this ancient, unsettled country of impoverished Afghan peoples is the start of a major push, led by the United Stafes, to gain direct influence over all state relations within this vast region. This is the most significant and dangerous development to be unleashed since the demise of the Soviet Union over ten years ago. It signals the opening up of a potentially wide front of US interference, and yet another forward post in its quest to ensure global domination. As the air strikes and land incursions in Afghanistan continue, the Middle East again reaches the brink of all-out war: Israel, in a huge escalation, has begun to pit massive armour against the Palestinians, pressing further and further and more frequently into their already limited territories. Meanwhile, Nato-European Union expansion through Eastern Europe is closing in on Russia's backyard. Nato, barely under cover of the United Nations, had already driven through the Balkans by bombing and breaking up Yugoslavia. It now looks likely to begin a long-term occupation of Macedonia, right on the doorstep of Greece. Russia, which has so far courted the US with its own risky and doubtful agenda, has handed US leverage over the Central Asian states on a plate. The rewards of former Soviet republics falling over themselves to support US actions became tangible last week. President George Bush announced aid packages to several states, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan -- as he had paid-off Pakistan. What the US had previously failed to do to close in on Russia by other means -- destabilising Belarus, for instance, or using economic muscle in the Caspian oil basin -- is now swiftly unfolding. All of these pressures leading up to this process, of course, probed for openings in Russia's defence. The US, for over ten years, has been a persistent agent of division aiding the current course of action. Russia's acquiescence is based on the struggle with the US to reduce strategic arms and to prevent the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. But the US 'amendment' allowing 'Star Wars' threatens a new arms escalation in exchange for questionable stockpile reductions. Scientific and technological breakthroughs can never be underestimated. What failed yesterday, may work tomorrow. And the US aims to keep at least a 10-year technological global lead. But Russia's President Vladimir Putin also sees a stronger basis for checking Islamic militancy through US co-operation. But supping with the devil will have its price. America now has direct reach over vast mineral wealth. Extensive military bases could follow providing the US with new operational abilities. In particular, the US will have an uncomfortable proximity for those nations, especially Iran, that are involved in the Casplan oil and gas exploitation. In Japan, a Bill is being railroaded through the Diet (Parliament) to provide Self-Defence Force support to US-led operations. This may further its previous financial backing during the Gulf War on Iraq. Protest is growing in the country, aware that it raises yet more questions about pressure to extend Japan's Asia-Pacific military role in relation to China. Over the longer term, it amounts to another step in an attempt to contain China, even though anti-Chinese interests failed to divide the country over Hong Kong or prevent it from continuing to seek re-unification of Taiwan with China. The photo ops at last week's APEC economic forum in Shanghai where the presidents of America, China and Russia met, belies deep disquiet at the open-ended US thrust. US intervention in Afghanistan suggests that China's foreign relations are again being skirted by America with an undeclared, but careful effort to draw up boundaries of influence. This is clear from how this has affected Pakistan and India. China has already felt the hand of Washington: The bombing of their embassy during US raids on Belgrade, and the spy-flight incident which killed a Chinese pilot and forced down the US plane. The incident changed nothing, in the sense that the US continues its missions as though nothing had happened. Democratic Korea is receiving much the same treatment. International capital, taking an increasingly aggressive course, is looking beyond the global economic slowdown with a severe eye, and is throwing down the gauntlet to ensure there will be no decisive economic challenge to its supremacy. Just as many US reactionaries like to think of the 20th century as the 'American Century', progressives will be wondering whether that now means a thousand years, after Hitler. As Kabul is shattered again and again by the US-led coalition forces, Iraq's people go on bracing for the weekly British and American air strikes. This persistent undeclared war has been creating the impression (a dangerously brutalising one) that this is a 'normal' part of every day British and American foreign policy. The weekly bombing raids on Iraq still remain virtually unmentioned, and when they are it is as though they are entirely unrelated acts. The Ministry of Defence tried to assure everyone that the RAF's raid on Basra, seven days after the attack on the World Trade Ccntre and pentagon, "has absolutely no connection" with September 11. 'normal' bombing So that's OK then, this must be 'normal' bombing. Iraq evidently counts for even less than Afghanistan. Certainly, judging by the literally genocidal economic sanctions against Iraq, this is the way it looks. A major oil power which bucks US diktat has come to know much the same treatment the Israeli Zionists mete out to Palestinians, but on a scale nearing extinction. But the MoD has betrayed itself by revealing its sensitiveness to how imperialism is working. The subsequent actions against Afghanistan -- and where this will lead -- are, in fact, very much related to Iraq. Again, the familiar pattern: Afghans are supposedly being saved from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban; Iraqis are supposed to be being saved from Saddam Hussein. But are the Palestinians being saved from Israel? The much overrated 'democracy' and Western 'civilised values', so earnestly professed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his aides, was given the elbow right at the outset: Parliament wasn't sitting when the bombing of Afghanistan began -- it was clearly an irrelevance -- and it now debates, with little purpose, after the fact. The whole approach to securing 'evidence' against Osama bin Laden, following the September 11 attack on the US, has proved, yet again, a means to disregard the legal norms in order to get on with the business of war. And that is always the point -- business. Capitalism wants a safe profiteering environment: repressive legislation and war are a last resort, but any threat to ruling class power -- real and imagined -- makes that acceptable. above the law So often we have been lectured to about the conduct and strengthening of law and order at home, supposedly for our benefit, in times of crisis. But it is in times like this that we find out how obvious this is: we obey the law in order for the ruling class itself to act above the law, to be an exception to it. We are told to obey the law as though those ruling class exceptions are the norm, the rule. It isn't debated. It is a state of affairs that is hidden behind the idea that, somehow, the relations that most people have with the British capitalist state in respect of the law are a product of natural justice. Take it or leave it, but expect the worst if you organise resistance to it. Ultimately, resistance is not a matter of choice, but of necessity as capitalist aggression deepens. We are expected to accept that there is a capitalist state law for the many, but an unwritten law for the few based on private property and minority industrial, commercial and technological control and ownership. That is what gives the ruling class its own prerogative to defend what it steals from workers. The ruling class has the power and manoeuvrability to execute its will over us while it remains unchallenged. But anti-war protests (and presently subdued anti-capitalist actions), if they reach the proportions that existed in the movements against the Vietnam War -here and in the US -- may well force Blair and his War Cabinet onto the defensive. So to conduct war in Afghanistan, what the state considers a trifling issue of legality was buried under a 'pull-together' preparation for war. Since we are all supposedly in this together, because we are all equally threatened, Blair has rationalised we must all agree. Again, the protests show that tens of thousands reject the war and its consequences in Britain. The way the 'evidence' against bin Laden was presented is a graphic example of public disinformation under the familiar guise of national security. It is obvious there only ever was the intention ofproviding apolitical 'intelligence' interpretation of the evidence. consequences of war We have now to adjust to an as yet unknown period of military, economic and political intervention on a scale and with carte blanche powers never seen before. Assessment of the consequences of war are what we have been left with. There is nothing new in this. We know it from the attack launched against the Falklands (Malvinas) islands in 1982 by Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to oust the Argentinian forces defending their sovereignty. As then, so today, the attack on Afghanistan perfectly reveals the real meaning of 'democracy' as a ruling class card played and removed at will. There is no surprise in this, but it is becoming all too apparent and more frequent as the iron fist emerges to pick and choose the 'enemy'. The warhawks argue that the attack on the US represents a unique threat to Western society, and ultimately, all societies. Yet the West -- the advanced capitalist states -- have been in massive blood deficit for decades and continue to shed more blood. In the balance of cumulative genocide over the decades, literally millions have died from the military and economic consequences of imperialism in Africa, the Americas, Middle East and the Balkans. The bombing directly affronts, not avenges, the tragic deaths of British, among many nations' lives lost in New York. It deliberately creates the dangerous idea that Iraqi, Yugoslavian and now Afghan peoples' blood is dispensable. By implication, they must therefore be inferior. What is said, cannot be unsaid, whatever regrets there are: Italy's leader Sergio Berlusconi was embarrassed, and embarrassing (he was sorry), because he voiced what he thought -- that Islam was second rate. The embarrassment led to a slap on the wrist, because the objective of a US-led coalition of overwhelming force amounts to exactly such an assumption. Muslims the world over have demonstrated their indignation at this underlying factor, and are enraged at the way the 'American Way' and its calculated brutality respects absolutely nothing outside its interests. The British and US governments had made some noises to appear differently to this, in order to stop anti-Islamic racist attacks. But their initial efforts to separate 'decent' or 'moderate' from 'militant' Islam, as though Osama bin Laden has no basis in any religion or society and is completely alien, is treated with suspicion. It is seen by many as a cynical justification for war for Western interests and is more revealing of the divide and rule strategy: With us or against us. It is too well known, after all, that it was the United States which originally supported and promoted his organisation. Like so many other agents for US influence around the world, they were useful so long as the Soviet Union existed. But not much has changed in that respect, as we can see from the role of the Dalai Lama in attempting to raise Western intervention in China's Tibet: new agents for new enemies? No sooner had the Soviet Union been broken up, than a virtually permanent war footing was established, led by the US. It has characterised an increasingly militarised period ever since. Britain has played its full part in this in its postcolonial attempts to retain world power status. The old adventurism in new guises: the gun and the Bible have struck again. A different, but profit-related war of a different kind is worsening here: Workers are increasingly being treated in a 'civilised' and 'ethical' fashion too: long working hours, stress, low pay, debt, high consumer prices, inaccessible housing, ill health and premature death. It needs no imagination to see who will gain from both forms of aggressive capitalist exploitation that are directed abroad and at home. This exploitation represents the primal forces of the ruling class: finance capital and imperialist aggression. An increasing focus of Western governments and big international companies, until very recently, had been on the actions of anti-capitalist protesters. By jabbing a placard in the ribs of the advanced industrialised states at every turn, they stole the important propaganda and media advantage from top level summits. Such events had routinely received a quiet, boring exposure. That, of course, had usually been the hallmark ofcapitalism creating the 'business-as-usual' public appearance ofstability whatever the economic and political climate. September 11 temporarily threw that up in the air. The point was that the capital/labour division and clash was being forcefully brought out into the open. But the roving anti-capitalist actions began to look as though they were settling in as a way of life. Too much public confidence -- not coincidentally --- was being eroded as the global economic crisis began to bite. So it was inevitably met by more forceful and, as it turned out, fatal responses. Two activists were shot and killed by riot police, one in Sweden (often lauded by liberals as a model of social democracy) and one in Italy: The first deaths, it can be said, directly in the name of anti-capitalism over recent years, inside the camp of Western interests, on home territory. As the pressure of demonstrations mounted -- unintimidated by the killings -- different sections of progressive opposition had by then firmly arrived at one basic position, whatever might be said about some of their methods: That capitalism is inherently unjust and they were not going to go away until it changed. But how. who would make it change, to become what? This is the issue at the centre of angry antagonisms. iron fist International capital, before pretence gave way to the iron fist, accepted a degree of containable radical reform: a restructuring of institutions here, new monitoring bodies there, ethical-environmental policies, more broadly-based forums of disadvantaged access, efforts at keeping minimum social protections, and so on. But even this, which conceded nothing fundamental of economic and political power, is only tolerated. If the pressure is so great that such concessions are made, it is only because the alternative of socialism, so hated by capitalism, has seized militant labour. Socialism was supposedly on its way out with the Soviet Union's demise, yet socialist states remain. Socialism championed the cause of national liberation and the global balance of power characterised as the Cold War gave some room for developing countries to manoeuvre. Peoples' China has today emerged centre-stage; while liberation armies maintain their battles to hasten the end of transnational exploitation. Capitalism has not been able to suppress socialism, its practise, its presence, or its example as a creative, developing basis for eliminating capitalist crisis and constructing societies in which human development consumes peoples' labour, expertise and thinking. The threat of a good example has strengthened, not declined. over the last decade or so. Cuba has long been the most adversely affected proof of that. The US-led war drive is being used as a means to kill off the anti-capitalist actions through repressive legislation. This was in preparation, but after September 11 it was possible to move much quicker. Big business was beginning to react across the board, due to the increasingly co-ordinated backlash from victimised, formerly developing countries, at the hands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Criticism of both these institutions in particular, grew around the positions of reform or abolition. Neither approach has yet had any significant impact. The debt issue alone reveals that developing countries are banging their heads against a brick wall. hence their direct challenge to transnational corporations over drugs and patent law -- a significant attack on 'free trade'. The question of the alternative to capitalism continues to be formulated despite the September 11 attack on the United States. The war is bringing into sharper relief the link between the deepening global economic divisions and the genocidal aggression led by key Western powers in resource-rich nations. It raises more serious issues too about what constitutes the US idea -- mirrored by Prime Minister Tony Blair -- of compliance with 'democracy' in order not be considered a 'terrorist' state. As we know, the term 'rogue' had earlier been crudely directed at socialist states. But that impugning of other nations was officially dropped and a cumbersome phrase replaced it -- 'states deserving special concern'. That simply served to reinforce what the US Administration really thought the first time. In any case, it continues to be used by some political leaders. Now that, by implication, anyone not in support of the US action could be a potential 'terrorist', the net of imperialism's enemies is widening, whatever name it is given. It represents the same mentality that created the blunder over calling the attack on Afghanistan operation 'Infinite Justice'. It was hastily re-named 'Enduring Freedom' when the obvious 'God Almighty' sense of it was recognised. Despite all the initial public efforts of the United States' Administration, the most devastating attack at the heart of the world's most powerful state -- its financial citadel and military centre -- could not be separated from the reality of the conduct of Western governments around the world at large. Anti-capitalists had, if nothing else, brought this very dramatically to world, but especially Western, attention by September 11. That tragedy has reinforced it. The political trends were already set on a path, by increments, of deeper repressive controls in the chief capitalist states. That process has now been dramatically accelerated at a critical time in the economic slowdown. It is critical because the clash of anti-imperialist forces with US-led aggression is creating a recognition that war and exploitation directly bear on the fortunes and misfortunes of workers in Britain. Talk that everything has changed in America and elsewhere since is misleading. To the extent that it precipitated a 'fast track' to repression, that was a change; but the trends were already there. The economic slowdown is a key factor because it has, as some suggest, become 'synchronised' internationally. The stakes are, therefore, more global than ever before. War conducted by the world's most powerful state, with another major coalition of supportive, but also sceptical, nations has been established yet again. As a basis of so-called international community backing since the war on Iraq, and on through to Yugoslavia, it increasingly amounts to a permanent US-EU military front. The connection of opposition to capitalist exploitation could not be avoided by Tony Blair as war loomed. He referred, in his speech at the Labour Party conference, to "another dimension appearing" alongside war preparations. Yet now that war is underway, it is al most beyond comprehension to think that the 'humanitarian' card has been used to reveal how you can get fed if you dodge the bombs. Assuming not too many Red Cross warehouses are hit. There isn't a major war fought by the advanced capitalist powers that has not been about securing economic resources for their benefit. Setting up dependent, not independent, governments that can be undermined at will; hemming them in with the subsequent threats of economic or military intervention if there is stiff resistance; trading off simmering conflict that this all implies with threats against other nations -- this is the least Afghanistan can expect under a Western 'model'. The anti-war protests, combining anti-capitalist protests, have the potential to stop this. Governments can be influenced, and through them, corporations do have to listen. Workers, after all, are paying for this war. And many of them are being made unemployed week-by-week as September 11 has been used as a cover. The choices in resisting this for the future are getting narrower by the day. New Communist Party of Britain Homepage http://www.newcommunistparty.org.uk A news service for the Working Class! Workers of all countries Unite! _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. 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