I sent this yesterday (6.52 pm Melbourne, Australia, time) and it came back into my inbox, but it is not showing up on the "latest 100 messages" list.
Chris Slee ________________________________ RKOB acknowledges that "Turkey is oppressing the Kurds", but downplays this by saying that the oppression of the Kurds is "an important issue but not the only one in this region". Of course it is not the "only" issue, but since it is "important" then we should express our solidarity with those fighting for Kurdish rights against the Turkish state - including the PKK and YPG/YPJ. But RKOB does not do so. He claims that the YPG is "circling around US imperialism". I assume he is referring to the cooperation between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the US in fighting against ISIS. But RKOB seems to have a double standard. In 2011 the Libyan rebels were allied with NATO in the campaign to overthrow Gaddafi. Yet RKOB does not denounce them as pro-imperialist. RKOB denies that the Libyan rebels were racist. They included a diverse mixture of political ideologies, so I will not generalise about the whole rebel movement. But certainly a powerful section of the rebel movement was extremely racist. The rebel militia from the city of Misrata ethnically cleansed the black population of the nearby town of Tawergha, destroying their homes and driving them away, causing them to flee to refugee camps in other cities. Even after the war against Gaddafi was over, the Misrata militia refused to allow the refugees to return for more than 6 years. In 2018 an agreement was reached that they would no longer be blocked from returning, but as far as I know few have done so, because of the devastated condition of the town, and because of continuing fear of the Misrata militia. In judging whether the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord is better than the Haftar forces, their attitude towards black people, including the refugees from Tawergha, would be one criterion (not the only one, of course). I have not studied this question sufficiently to form a definite opinion on this. Chris Slee ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of RKOB <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, 19 September 2020 4:38 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [marxmail] War Clouds in Eastern Mediterranean In my opinion, there are the following problems in your argument. 1) You say, rightly, that Turkey is oppressing the Kurds. This is surely true and has to be opposed by all socialists and democrats. But in contrast to the perception of you and other supporters of the YPG, politics in the Middle East does not circle around the Kurdish question. It is rather the YPG which is circling around U.S. imperialism (and sometimes other holders of power like Assad). You can not and should not judge all states and forces primarily by what they say on the Kurdish issue. It is an important issue but not the only one in this region. 2) You say: “Erdogan's desire to make Turkey more influential in the Middle East - to make it more like an imperialist power.” We can discuss about Erdoğan’s “desire”. But this is not decisive for Marxists. It is the objective role of different forces in a given conflict. There have been national liberation movements in history fighting under the banner of Islam which might have “desired” to create a “global caliphate”. However, objectively they were fighting the occupation by British, French or US imperialism. Apologists of imperialism took this ideological mantle as a pretext to denounce such struggles. Communists don’t do this. It is necessary to have not an impressionistic characterization of a state (“the desire of its head is …”) but an objective class analysis of its political and economic position. A brief summary of our analysis of Turkey can be read in chapter V of this book: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2018/ 3) The difference between the Libyan GNA government and General Haftar is similar to the difference between Morsi and General Sisi in Egypt. Or, to give another analogy, between the Erdoğan government and the Turkish military dictatorships from 1980 onwards. Yes, they are all bourgeois. Yes, they all collaborate in one way or another with this or that Great Power. But if you are blind to recognize the difference between a semi-democratic bourgeois parliamentary system and a full-blown dictatorship, you repeat the nonsense of the Stalinist “social-fascism” theory of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is because you are incapable to recognize this difference that you put the foreign intervention of Saudi Arabia/UAE on the same level as Turkey’s. One attempts to bloody crush a liberation struggle. The other tries to exploit and manipulate it (in order to finally liquidate it). “In the end” it is all the same. Likewise, “in the end” we will be all dead. But in the meantime we can do a few things if we are not instantly killed! Serious political people must not ignore this difference! 4) It is a well-known slander of pro-Gaddafi people to denounce the Libyan Revolution as “anti-Black racist”. Behind this is the claim that the Gaddafi dictatorship had been somehow better for Black people. There is no doubt, that there exist (and always existed) anti-Black chauvinist trends in the Arab world. But the Libyan Revolution did not centre around the issue of Black people and did not follow an agenda of “anti-Black racism”. This is Gaddafian slander of the revolutionary process and a cheap excuse for refusing to take sides in the civil war (see only this e.g. the second half of our essay: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/liberation-struggle-and-imperialism/). -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net<http://www.thecommunists.net>) www.rkob.net<http://www.rkob.net> [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 [https://ipmcdn.avast.com/images/icons/icon-envelope-tick-round-orange-animated-no-repeat-v1.gif]<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> Virenfrei. www.avast.com<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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