World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly red-baits the Workers World
Party
By David Walsh
24 January 2003
The witch-hunting attack by columnist Michael Kelly on the Workers World
Party in the Washington Post ("Marching with Stalinists," January 22,
2003) was entirely predictable. One right-wing hack or another was bound
to get around to the task.
Kelly, perpetually outraged and perpetually ignorant, takes the occasion
of last week's massive demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco
against the imminent war on Iraq to denounce one of the protests'
principal organizers, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), as "a
front group for the communist Workers World Party."
The columnist goes on to identify Workers World with the Chinese and
North Korean regimes, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, "the mullahs
of Iran, and the narco-gangsters of Colombia and the bus-bombers of
Hamas." The principal device employed here, one long favored by
witch-hunters, is the amalgam: throw everything together in the hope of
creating the maximum fear and disorientation.
Reflected in this vicious attack on Workers World is a great deal of
nervousness within the media and political elite about the mass
opposition that has emerged to war against Iraq, revealed in the recent
demonstrations and underscored by opinion polls. Kelly senses the
isolation of the political establishment and the growth of popular
discontent over the Bush administration's war-mongering abroad and its
assault on democratic rights and working class living standards at home.
Reflecting the intellectual and political degeneracy of his milieu, he
lashes out, resorting to the time-tested refuge of the distinctly
American scoundrel: red-baiting.
When a Marxist uses the term Stalinism it has a specific meaning. It
refers to the theory and practice of the national-opportunist
bureaucracy that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and usurped
political power from the workers and peasants who carried out the 1917
October Revolution. In the final analysis, this bureaucracy-which played
a counterrevolutionary role internationally-reflected the pressure of
world imperialism on the isolated and economically deprived workers'
state. Its strangling of the fledgling Soviet democracy expressed a
degeneration whose culmination was the dismantling of the historic
conquests of the October Revolution and the restoration of capitalism.
To establish its power fully, the Stalinist caste carried out a blood
purge in the 1930s, exterminating the generation of socialists that had
led the revolution, first and foremost the Marxists who took their lead
from Leon Trotsky.
The World Socialist Web Site criticizes Workers World for its
orientation to the trade union bureaucracy and sections of the
Democratic Party in the US, and to bureaucratic and bourgeois
nationalist regimes internationally. Our differences are deep and
principled and involve essential issues in the development of a
revolutionary strategy for the American and international working class.
There is a time and place to elaborate and explain these differences.
With Kelly and his ilk, however, we are dealing with political
scoundrels in the service of reaction. In opposition to Kelly's
red-baiting, our attitude is unconditional and unequivocal defense of
the Workers World Party.
In his article Kelly raises September 11, 2001 as a turning point in the
history of civilization. "In al Qaeda and in the Taliban and in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, liberal civilization faced an enemy that represented
nearly every evil that liberalism has ever stood against. What was the
left going to do? A pretty straightforward call, you might say. America
has its flaws. But war involves choosing sides, and the American
side-which was, after all, the side of liberalism, of progressivism, of
democracy, of freedom, of not chucking gays off rooftops and not stoning
adulterers and not whipping women in the town square, and not gassing
minority populations and not torturing advocates of free speech-was
surely preferable to the side of the 'Islamofascists,' to borrow a word
from the essayist and former man of the left, Christopher Hitchens."
More amalgams and more lies. By a crude sleight of hand Kelly identifies
al Qaeda and the Taliban with the Iraqi Ba'athist regime. The WSWS gives
no political support to this bourgeois nationalist regime. But no one
has produced any credible evidence linking it to the September 11
attacks. That which has been offered has been exposed as fraudulent.
If Islamic fundamentalism represents "nearly every evil that liberalism
has ever stood against," then perhaps Kelly can explain why it was the
policy of both Democratic and Republican administrations for much of the
past century, and especially from the late 1970s, to foment, finance and
arm these reactionary forces, including Osama bin Laden and his cohorts,
for the purpose of opposing secular nationalist forces in the Middle
East and destabilizing the Soviet Union.
As for Hussein, no less an authority then the aforementioned "former man
of the left" and now the far right, Hitchens, has acknowledged that "The
United States had at least a hand in the coup that brought Saddam to
power. It encouraged him in his attack on Iran. At the very time of his
worst conduct in Kurdistan, Washington was his best friend. When he
plotted to straighten the Kuwaiti frontier in his favour, he was given
the greenest of lights."
The US provided the Iraqi regime with the ingredients for its biological
weapons program and looked on approvingly when Hussein used chemical
weapons against Iranian forces and minority populations in the late
1980s.
Absent from Kelly's litany is the one word that goes to the heart of the
US drive to conquer and dominate Iraq-oil. To mention it would point to
the fact that the coming invasion is a war of imperialist plunder,
against a historically oppressed former colony.
"Liberalism," "progressivism," "democracy," "freedom"-the invasion of
Afghanistan embodied these noble principles? Who is kidding whom?
Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that conditions in Afghanistan today
are as wretched as they were under the Taliban-essentially one set of
warlords has replaced another-and that the Saudi regime, which practices
a form of Islamic fundamentalism as reactionary as the Taliban's, has
been kept afloat by the US for decades, there is the matter of American
imperialism's record around the globe.
Washington has been the principal pillar of support for police-state
regimes and their hired torturers and murderers for decades, from the
CIA-backed governments in South Korea and Taiwan to the monstrous Shah
of Iran, to the "death squads" of Central America and the military
butchers in Chile and Argentina.
It is the US government and military that introduced "napalm" and "Agent
Orange" and "We had to destroy the village to save it" into the modern
lexicon, in a war in Southeast Asia that cost some three million lives.
Not satisfied with the destruction caused by the 1991 Gulf War and the
death of 500,000 or more children as the result of economic sanctions,
Washington now proposes another war against a defenseless Iraq, which
will produce untold further misery. The predatory policies of American
imperialism-this is the reality behind Kelly's "democracy" and
"progressivism."
The columnist's smears against the "left" are an attack on all those who
express differences with the policies of the US government and an
instinctive response to the threat of a new popular radicalization. They
are an attempt to intimidate and silence all dissent. Kelly's method is
similar to that used by racists in the South during the Civil Rights
movement: blame all opposition on "outside agitators."
Kelly is one of many journalistic thugs in the service of the American
plutocracy. There are dozens of them-the Krauthammers, Coulters,
Sowells, Wills, etc., secreted out of the pores of an elite increasingly
insulated from the general population and hostile to democratic rights.
Their vocation, for which they are handsomely paid, is pumping out lies
and filth on a daily basis. They are incapable of principled or reasoned
discussion. There is no dialogue with them. They stand on the opposite
side of the political barricades.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jan2003/wp-j24_prn.shtml
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
Serbian News Network - SNN
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.antic.org/
