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on Sonntag, 15. November 2015 at 01:28, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote: > https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/11/15/kenan-malik-on-the-paris-attacks/ Kenan Malik writes in his first article > Many have inevitably looked to these two crises as explanations for > the Paris atrocities. Some have seen the terrorism as the > consequence of French foreign policy in Syria, others of lax > immigration controls that have allowed terrorists to enter Europe. > Both arguments seem superficially self-evident. But both are profoundly > untrue. > > Islamic State has officially claimed responsibility for the > attacks. One of the terrorists in the Bataclan theatre, where at > least 87 people were slaughtered, was said to have shouted ‘This is > for Syria’. Yet we should be wary of seeing these attacks as a > response, however perverted, to French, or Western, foreign policy. And this is really superficial. These attacks are the result of the "war on terror" which has eradicated terror as successfully as the "war on drugs" has done away with drug addiction and the dealers getting rich by that. In order to "eradicate terrorism", the US and her allies have invaded and occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, intervened militarily in Somalia, Mali, Libya, Syria -- and have spread terrorism more and more widely. At the beginning of the conquest of Iraq, the US bombing was declared by the warmakers aimed at creating "shock and awe", good english translations for the latin word "terror". French president Hollande, visibly shaken on Friday night, has declared war, and merciless eradication of all those terrorists. So -- brutal violence has not helped against "terrorism"? So let us use more violence. That has been their line for many years. And what has it helped? The problem which they try to eradicate is getting greater and greater. And the "war on terror" is more and more clothed in a clash between "western values" and "the barbarians", echoing the cries of "the Turks are standing before Vienna!" back to "Hanibal ante portas". While the "western" civilisation has produced such nice things as the Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz, Treblinka and others, and the mass murder of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Why France? There are two reasons, or even three: a) there are about 4 to 5 million people living in France which are of north-african descent and also quite a number from sub-saharan Africa (Mali especially). b) France has been in the forefront of the war on the countries of the Third world (Sarkozy announced bombing of Libya by French airforce in his opening speech to an international conference about the Libyan civil war) and among them former French colonies (France has intervened militarily in Mali and French military are still fighting in the country), following a long history of brutal clinging to its colonial possessions in Syria, Vietnam and Algeria. c) the French working class movement shows itself especially weak with the current extreme right wing government by the Parti Socialiste, and on the extreme left has weakened itself by the LCR liquidating itself into the NPA, with an ambiguous attitude towards the right of women to cover or unveil as much of their body as the women itself decides. The latter is only the special French expression of weakness of the working class movement on a world scale. And that needs to be changed, and the working class movement recovering itself is the only way out of this impasse. To do that, one of the important things to do is a campaign to defend the Palestinian Arabs against the colonial settler state of Israel, demanding "no more arms to Israel". Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt/Main, Germany http://www.mlwerke.de _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
