7-13-05,8:23am
The London bombings have focused international attention on the issue of “terrorism” but there is much more heat then light being generated by mass media. In the United States the Bush administration is much more interested in using the “war against terrorism” to expand its global war to make the world safe for the country club Republicans of all countries led by U.S. corporations and the rich. This “war,” which Michael Moore captured beautifully in Fahrenheit 9/11, has increased the danger of real terrorists committing atrocities like the London bombings against civilians.
What can Marxists say about the issue of “terrorism?” Lenin said a lot in the early 20th century when the term was used widely to describe romantic Russian radicals who launched assassination plots against Czars and Czarist officials (Lenin’s brother was hanged earlier for participating in such a plot) in the hope of sparking a revolution. Such actions were not only destructive and counter-productive, Lenin argued, but an expression of petit bourgeois class arrogance, the belief that the working class will respond to those who commit individual acts of violence in their name.
Just as real terrorism is something that Marxist-Leninists have always rejected, as against supporting revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements, the present “war against terrorism” is largely a “phony war” used by the Bush administration to both expand massively its military budgets and its aggressive unilateralist foreign policy in a “post cold war,” post-Soviet world.
The rise of imperialism in the late 19th century which Lenin analyzed more cogently than any thinker created a world of escalating wars and revolutions where imperialist, revolutionary, and counter-revolutionary violence growth to unprecedented heights.
In an attempt to categorize the new world situation in policy and law, distinctions were made between guerilla fighters and terrorists, although there was always an important subjective aspect to these terms. Guerilla fighters were those attacking military, police, and state targets as part of a war to oust an existing government or defeat an occupying army in the aftermath of a war. Terrorists were those who attacked civilian targets, public transportation, theaters, and restaurants, to kill civilians in order to make political points. Those who sought to assassinate individuals were often in a gray area.
Imperialism greatly increased the number of both those engaged in guerilla wars and those engaged in terrorist acts out of frustration and rage at the crimes of imperialism who, as Lenin would not, lacked trust in the masses of people to fight back and eventually defeat imperialism.
Today, there are insurgents fighting a guerilla war in Iraq, mostly rightwing elements whom no one on the left can seriously back, but engaged in attacks against military and police targets of both the new U.S. established political authority and the U.S. occupation. These forces have to be dealt with by the Iraqi people through some mix of negotiations and military action. The Bush administration, which in effect created the problem through its invasion and occupation, can only make matters far worse for the Iraqi people, who want neither any restoration of the Baath regime nor the establishment of a stooge government of the kind that Bush’s father set up in Panama when the U.S. for its own reasons ousted the corrupt tyrant Manuel Noreiga.
The problem with conflating guerillas with terrorists, as the Bush administration does all the time, is that real terrorist groups like those who destroyed the World Trade Center and carried out the London bombings can’t be fought with armies and foreign invasions. Terrorism is and has always been a police matter. “International terrorism” calls for international cooperation between police and intelligence agencies which the Bush and Blair administrations have made much harder through their alienating France, Russia, China, and other nations by the Iraq war. Making life much more miserable for U.S. citizens at airports and in renewing drivers licenses while at the same time continuing to give preferential treatment to citizens of “allies” like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Jordan from which both the funding and the recruits for many of the right-wing terrorist organizations come from displays a sinister dialectic between groups like Al Qaeda and the Bush administration.
The more the administration pursues its militarist policies, the more Al Qaeda and similar groups are able to regroup, recruit, and carry out major terrorist attacks with funds that they gather from a global banking and investment system that permits the rich to hide their wealth much more extensively than in the past. The more groups like Al Qaeda carry out their attacks, the more the Bush administration uses the attacks to silence its critics and escalate its self-defeating militarism. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks the “Anthrax letters” fear highlighted this dialectic. The Bush administration through mass media expanded enormously popular fears, which it then used to implement its “security policies.” Even though no one today seriously believes the letters had anything to do with the Al Qaeda group, the fear they created was exactly what terrorist groups try to create.
In a sense, Lenin’s criticism of terrorists applies in this case to both Al Qaeda and the Bush administration. Both pursue policies out of arrogance and fanaticism which boomerang against them in regard to their ostensible purposes. Al Qaeda makes the Muslim countries it claims to represent more subject to military and other attacks and Muslim minorities through the world subject to heightened prejudice against them. The Bush administration make the United States and all of its of its allies more not less vulnerable to September 11 style attacks and drains hundreds of billions of dollars from the civilian economy for military spending in the name of fighting a “war against terrorism” which the military cannot seriously fight.
Any anti-terrorist policy must also be an anti-imperialist policy, and neither the Bush nor Blair administrations can enact such a policy. Regional economic and social cooperation and reconstruction in areas like the Middle East, the Balkans, India-Pakistan, the former Soviet central Asian Republics and areas of Africa and Latin America are necessary to remove the material conditions that produce the conflicts that both imperialists and terrorists manipulate for their own purposes.
A real global war against poverty with a global affirmative action program to provide health care, infrastructure and development for the Southern Hemisphere, not the IMF-World Bank “free trade” policies tempered by small change foreign aid from the rich countries, is necessary to produce a world in which the resources of 85% of the people of the earth will not be wasted to produce profit for their ruling classes, the ruling classes of the remaining 15%, and cheap imported consumer goods for the 15% who reside in the rich countries.
During World War II, African Americans in the U.S. called for a “two front” war against Fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home. A serious policy of fighting terrorism requires a “two front war” against imperialism, which in its most aggressive form today is led by the Bush administration, and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Only such a “two front war” can lead to both security and justice for the people of the world.
