Beyond pacifism and unconditional non-interventionism
John Penney puts forward a critique of recent Left Unity positions on Palestine and Iraq
Until our November Left Unity Policy Conference, LU as a party has no agreed policy on a wide range of issues which can be captured under the general heading of “International/solidarity” issues. It is of course quite likely that we still won’t have an agreed policy “line” on a whole range of international issues after Policy Conference either – so vast and complex is the field of international politics. Given that we as a party can’t anticipate every eventuality in the area of international crisis and politics, what principles should guide and govern the “line” our public spokespersons issue on our behalf when events occur for which we have no specific policy line? “The principles of socialist internationalism, solidarity with the oppressed, opposition to tyranny, generally, and women and ethnic and other minorities, and opposition to imperialism and capitalism,” would no doubt be a key part of any “guidance list” of general principles most LU members would suggest.
Unfortunately, in my opinion recent events internationally, on which Left Unity has no agreed policy, eg, Israel/Palestine/Gaza, and the crisis in Syria/Iraq with the recent murderous rampage of the clerico-fascist Islamic State movement – have been responded to in press releases by Left Unity which have displayed a “knee-jerk” assumption of the “correct position” which is based entirely on a set of assumptions held to only by (some of) the tiny grouplets of the Far Left – and are a world away from the opinions of the huge target grouping of left-leaning working class Labour and ex-Labour voters and supporters Left Unity simply has to orient to if it is ever to become a mass party of radical, but not avowedly revolutionary, socialist mass action and electoral struggle. The current life and death struggle of the Kurdish people in defence of Kobane, and across Northern Iraq and Syria, against the ISIL/Islamic State onslaught has highlighted the political shortcoming of adopting blanket “No Intervention” positions in all situations.
For a start, are most of us in Left Unity, unconditional pacifists? Of course most of us aren’t. Most socialists recognise the right of oppressed peoples/nations to defend themselves against the various forms of Imperialism and oppressor violence in the world with armed struggle when appropriate (and it isn’t just US Imperialism – but includes more localised and regional imperialisms such as Russian Imperialism, Iranian Imperialism, Chinese Imperialism). This reality should knock on the head the naïve “war is always bad – no good outcome can EVER come from armed struggle” line that permeates the Left in relation particularly to the Middle East in recent years. In Left Unity I would hope we would be a bit more analytical and sophisticated in our analysis of each crisis as it occurs – and that we would always ask the question “what action can save/protect the most people in a given situation?” – rather than, as is all too common, immediately reaching for a over-simplistic “anti (US) Imperialism” mantra – quite independent of the realities of what is happening to masses of real people on the ground.
A good example of this over-dependence on generalised Far-Left sourced knee-jerk responses, is the recent press releases on behalf of Left Unity on the crisis caused by the murderously sectarian rampage of ISIL/Islamic State in northern Syria and Iraq. The “LU line” given out to the press accords completely with the narrow viewpoint held to by the Stop the War Coalition, sundry pacifist groups, and most, but not all, Far Left groups, but is of course no longer a homogenous view of Britain’s very now divided Muslim community – namely “the crisis is all the fault of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq” – and “bombing never ever does any good” – and actually that is pretty much it. Ask the awkward question as to what support should be offered to the Kurdish people, or other ethnic /religious minorities, to fend off the genocidal fury of Islamic State, and there is a complete silence on most of the left (and Left Unity). The only “response” is to return to the distracting statement about “US imperialism’s responsibility for the whole mess via the 2003 Iraq War”. But as to what support the Left thinks should be offered to the Kurdish people as they continue their life and death struggle with ISIL, NOW? Nothing is forthcoming from the radical Left – only empty “anti-imperialist” rhetoric.
Of course Left Unity has no influence on these international events, but we must make no mistake in understanding that when we spout empty slogans whilst real people are being massacred and oppressed by clerico-fascist militias (Islamic State and their Ba’athist cronies), we immediately repel large numbers of ordinary left-leaning working class citizens – who should be able to look to us to express, not empty slogans, but humanitarian-based analysis and demands – which seek to help and save the maximum number of people in the most effective way. So in the current Iraq/Syria catastrophe we, as a socialist grouping which is meant to support the legitimate right of oppressed nation and peoples to self determination and self defence, should understand and respect the tactically appropriate decision of the various Kurdish groupings currently involved in hand to hand fighting for their lives with ISIL, to seek arms and air support from ANY power prepared to offer it. The Kurds and other minorities are facing genocide and/or enslavement. It ill behoves us on the Left in our comfortable bourgeois democratic security to demand that the West provides no military help to defeat the poisonous sectarianism of ISIL, just because this would inevitably be provided by the dodgy, self-serving forces of the USA and its allies. Sometimes, as in WWII, those fighting for national liberation and against fascism simply have to “hold their noses” and accept help from very unsavoury temporary allies. So it is for the Kurds and others fighting the murderous sectarian madmen of ISIL today.
If Left Unity is to outgrow its Far Left origins, and establish deep roots in the wider sections of the left-leaning working class we will have to slough off our dependency on neat, over-simplistic, sloganized analysis, and start showing the wider public that we are an organisation, both at home and abroad, who place human liberation and the protection of and assistance to real people facing poverty, murder, displacement and oppression in the here and now above simplistic pre-digested political nostrums that actually require us to avert our eyes from the suffering happening today whilst we revel in the ideological comfort blanket of unchanging, inflexible, dogma.
18 comments
18 responses to “Beyond pacifism and unconditional non-interventionism”
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Hi John
I thought I should respond as LU media officer to the criticisms of the press releases you make (so leaving aside the wider political points for now).
Press releases are issued to correspond to LU policy and attempt to relate it to current events. LU’s current policy on war/imperialism/‘intervention’ is as follows:
(Founding statement one, point 10): “We stand against imperialist wars and military intervention, against the exploitation of other countries for economic gain, and for a drastic reduction of military expenditure for the benefit of social spending, and for a foreign policy based on peace and equality.”
See http://leftunity.org/founding-conference-decisions-1/
Tom
This is a useful response to the position you’re putting forward: http://www.leninology.co.uk/2014/10/arm-kurds.html
“Arm the Kurds” posted by Richard Seymour
The call to “arm the rebels” which I wearily dismissed the other day has some traction in elements of the far left. Specifically, we are now hearing calls to “arm the Kurds”.
I question this, not because it wouldn’t be a good thing if those Kurdish forces defending themselves against ISIS could get their hands on more and better arms, but because the slogan has nothing to do with achieving that situation. I do not claim to know how to extend solidarity to those progressive forces fighting ISIS or to help defend the liberated zone in Kobane. I am not even sure the British Left can do much of use, other than perhaps support UK-based Kurds in their protests and direct actions. I simply want to argue that to move from the belief that, eg, the Kurds in Kobane should have more and better arms, to the ‘demand’ to “arm the Kurds” is a dangerous, sentiment-driven and consolatory position. It makes us feel better about our weakness and isolation, but offers no practical way forward.
First, who are “the Kurds” in this slogan? If it is taken to refer to all Kurdish forces currently fighting ISIS, then one is effectively calling for the arming of the PUK and KDP forces whose policy of ‘Kurdification’ is part of the sectarian dynamic unfolding in Iraq since the inception of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The ethnic cleansing of over a hundred thousand Sunni Arabs, not to mention Assyrians and Turkmen, is part of the reason why today many Sunnis living in Mosul and surrounding areas find ISIS and its allies to be less of an immediate threat than their rivals.
Most charitably, it is intended specifically as a request for help for those Kurdish forces in Kobane, fending off an ISIS attack and defending an autonomous zone that is radically democratic by any standard. Of course, one could argue in favour of arming all the Syrian revolutionaries, holding up in liberated zones against Assad’s bombardment and the depredations of ISIS. But in practice this means arming forces such as the al-Nusra front who, talking down their sectarian politics and avoiding the gratuitous conduct of ISIS, have a leading role in the Syrian opposition. The bombing of al-Nusra fighters is one of the reasons why the Assad regime is happy with Washington’s bombing campaign, while there have been angry protests by revolutionaries against the bombing. And there is, let us say, an understandable reluctance to get involved in supporting al-Nusra. So, we are left with a call to arm “the Kurds” which means arming a group of Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.
Second, who should “arm the Kurds”? Barring some decidedly clapped out Provos, no leftist group in the UK has arms to sell or donate. The demand to “arm the Kurds” could therefore only be aimed either at regional states, or imperialist states. Both have already been arming at least some Kurdish forces, inasmuch as first Iran and then much later the US started sending arms to Iraqi Kurds after the ISIS insurgency took Mosul. Realistically, this demand is aimed at ruling classes in imperialist democracies, since no Middle Eastern state has to listen to anything we, the British left, say. And whether these ruling classes send more arms to more Kurds, or less, is simply not something we have any control over. Our influence on the situation is in the highest degree negligible, and our leverage over the states bringing arms (or not) is similarly infinitesimal. It requires a mass movement to even restrain imperialist states, as the Stop the War movement did to a degree. The idea that we could attain such influence as to direct these states to revolutionary ends is so implausible, short of actually taking control of them, as to be laughable.
So if we have no way to make the slogan effective, what is it for? If it is genuinely intended to pressure imperialist states to “arm the Kurds”, then it is at best unthinking sentimentality. At its most sophisticated, though, the idea could be to ‘intervene’ in an argument taking place in imperialist countries around the region’s uprisings and military intervention, to attack the weak points in the dominant ideology and open a space in which a leftist argument can be made to a popular audience. In this view, Kobane represents both the most progressive front of struggle in the region at the moment, and the weakest point ideologically for imperialist ruling classes who have no desire to see the PYD/PKK prevail. In this sense, the demand to “arm the Kurds” is a sort of feint, akin to a ‘transitional demand’ in that it is both seemingly ‘reasonable’ in light of the dominant ideology and also impossible for the ruling class to deliver.
If this is the idea, though, it reads the ideological terrain very badly. The major issue of principle for imperialist ruling classes is not whether they should intervene here or there, but that they should have the unquestioned and implicit right to do so. They benefit far more from the moral rearmament of imperialism as a project driven by the sorts of considerations that matter to popular constituencies and at least potentially on the side of justice, than they lose from any potential embarrassment over Kobane (which I think will be slight). After all, what would a government minister have to say to brush off a leftist challenge about why they aren’t “arming the Kurds”? Apart from saying “we are arming some Kurds”, they might say specifically about Kobane that, “yes, it’s very unfortunate and we’re doing all we can to help by impeding ISIS, but it’s far more important to hit their ‘command and control centres’ etc etc”. That might not convince everyone, but it might even be a strategic gain if this sort of response is regarded as pusillanimous, because then the entire argument has been framed – by the Left – as one about why ‘our’ governments aren’t ‘doing more’. A short-term tactical loss, in other words, can also be a long-term strategic gain.
Third, any genuine and unfeigned demand that imperialist states “arm the Kurds” arises chiefly because of our weakness and incoherence. Those raising it hope to at least verbally short-cut through the mountain of work and struggle that is necessary to get to a stage where we are relevant to such situations. And this is the problem. The British Left has always tended to assume that what it says and does about what should happen Over There is of tremendous significance. Those former leftists who rallied behind Bush’s ‘war on terror’, on the assumption that it was their war fought in their interests, stood in this tradition. This is a kind of chauvinism, an ideological artefact of imperialism. In this situation, the role of a small, divided and weak Left is pedagogy. The role of any slogan should be to stake out the discursive space in which a leftist, anti-imperialist analysis can be popularised – not just now but ongoingly. The slogan, “arm the Kurds” is an own-goal.
Would agree with a lot of what you say. It is important to lay down our principles even though, as you point out, we have very little influence on events.the article is mainly middle class moralising and political expediency.
We’ll just leave the men and women Peshmerga Kurdish (and FSA and others) fighters to be outgunned and defeated by the clerico-fascist of Islamic State then ?
If most of the current British Left had been around during WWII they would presumably have been campaigning for the British NOT to have dropped the weapons and explosives to the anti-fascist guerrilla fighters across Europe and Asia that they actually did do in vast quantities – to great effect – because this would have given a role to “British Imperialism”. In fact the many national liberation movements who received the arms, from Greece, to Yugoslavia to Malaya, Vietnam, etc, were perfectly willing to turn these guns on British and French colonialism once the Axis Powers had been defeated.
At the end of your long discourse all you have to offer the Kurds currently in hand to hand combat with women-enslaving, murderous, fascist aggression is empty expressions of “solidarity”.
John, – I am curious, because of various hints that you have given in other threads, how you would apply the general principles you outline, with which i generally agree, to Palestine.
You have half suggested a line which differs from the mainstream far left and of the PSC, so i would find it useful if you clarified your position.
I certainly agree that a detailed analysis of each and every world situation is not necessary fore a broad party like LU, and would simply lead to the usual left splits on points of detail masquerading as “red lines” of principle. However, i do think we should be able to respond to “ordinary working people” on crises like the recent attack on Gaza and the treatment of Palestinians in general.
On the Palestine/Israel issue, Ray, as a broad party of the Left ,aiming to speak to the views of a broad mass of left-leaning British public I would suggest LU should focus only on demanding the provision of humanitarian aid to the People of Gaza, backing the boycott campaign against Israel for as long as it continues its occupation of the post 1967 war territories , and continues its illegal settlement policy – in line with umpteen UN resolutions, and demanding an end to its disproportionate military response to the rocketing of Israel by Hamas .
All pretty much in line with what the Left does actually say. What I would steer well away from entirely is the Far Left demand (reproduced in our Lu press release – perhaps unwittingly – in that “Palestine” encompasses the whole of the current state of Israel) that Israel should cease to exist at all.
There is of course the “Two States” position , which some on the Left (the AWL at least) holds to – along with today’s PLO. But I simply wouldn’t , as a broad Left party like LU says it wants to be , get into that debate at all . It is a debate with no resonance amongst the wider Left-leaning public – particularly in the current context of ethnic/religious minorities being murderously pogrommed by Islamic State all over Northern Syria/Iraq. The typical left-leaning “man in the British street” will be in no doubt about the fate of Jews in Israel if their state is totally defeated.
This is NOT to say that Israel isn’t a tool of Western Imperialism. Yes it is. It doesn’t deny that political Zionism is a racist, reactionary philosophy. Yes it is. But today, the issue of the continuation of Israel as a state in some, much reduced form, or its utter destruction, is one I simply don’t think we need to have as a broad Left radical party seeking a mass membership centrally focussed on fighting the capitalist Austerity Offensive – including if possible , British Jews.
Thanks for the interesting response, John Penney.
I agree that discussing the favourite leftie issue of “how many states” is laughably irrelevant when the main question facing us at this time is the “no-state” solution – ie the obvious attempt by the Israeli state to finish the job of ethnic cleansing started in 1948 (and actually well before that) and seemingly to dominate by crushing military force, for ever, a population as large if not larger than the actual population of Israel.
I should say, however, that the two state solution is looking, even in the eyes of mainstream Western strategists (and some members of the Tory party) as a dead duck, but you are right to point out that most Palestinians in the West Bank, and even Gaza, see a separate Palestinian state as a main demand, however unlikely it looks at present.
I am glad that you agree with the call for boycott of Israel (rather than the much weaker position of just boycotting goods from the settlements) and it is useful to base it on UN resolutions, while having no illusions in that increasingly pointless organisation or being limited by its resolutions.
All I would add would be to flesh out the boycott campaign in line with the demands of the international Palestinian BDS movement for the right of return for the Palestinian refugees (in line with UN resolutions and however actually organised and implemented), an end to the blockade of Gaza and the destruction of the Wall in the West Bank, and the full equality for those Palestinians who find themselves inside the 1948-9 borders of the Israeli state. The latter demand DOES certainly imply that the state of Israel, even in a two-state solution scenario, could not be organised on the basis of systematic, state-sanctioned ethnic superiority for one group, as it is at present, as this is indeed racist and reactionary Zionism, as you say.
I would personally say that the eventual settlement, in some wonderful socialist future, once imperialism has been defeated, (it is good to dream!) could include a number of creative national solutions for the different nationalities of the region, including the Kurds and indeed the now-existing Hebrew-speaking community, but that all such schemes invented late at night in front of my lap-top may not actually come to pass!!
Solidarity with the victims of oppression and support for justice and equality everywhere should be our guiding principles, and I agree with you that support for victims of oppression should never be dependent on wider geo-political calculations with regard to the US or Russia or anyone else.
Is this anything to do with pacifism or unconditional non-intervention?
I don’t think so. I certainly am not a pacifist where there are people actually fighting against oppression, where the case is clear, such as with the Palestinians.
In the current war with IS, it is not so clear, as most of ISIS’ opponents also oppress others. The real question is whether we are a genuine left alternative or part of the imperialist-militarist camp. If we are the latter, then we have just another shipwreck to the right of the best elements of the Labour Left, even.
Whose intervention are we talking about? That by the Western powers, obviously. Therefore this argument is really about your view of the Western Powers. Are they a lesser evil to the various forces they repeatedly engage, particularly in the Middle East, or are they worse and even when they pretend to be benevolent, the ultimate source of that region’s problems? I take the latter view.
Support for their intervention means pouring petrol on the flames, which is so obvious in the case of ISIS as to be impossible to rationally argue against. In fact, the only way to undercut the so-called radicalism that makes ISIS attractive to alienated youth on the receiving end of racism and anti-Muslim bigotry is to develop our own strategy to defeat the West.
If Left Unity were to take the militarist view, then before long there would be nothing left. It would be absorbed into the camp of imperialism lock stock and barrel.
Personally I think it’s a rather dangerous position to take. It’s one thing to hypothesise about what would be the ideal British foreign policy under a non-imperialist government, and it’s another to establish what the position of the left should be under an imperialist government. As the previous commentor suggested, it is highly unlikely that the left adopting the slogan ‘arm the kurds’ would actually contribute to the arming of the Kurds unless it was otherwise deemed to be in the ‘national interests’ by the US and UK foreign policy establishments – and in the medium and the long term it would just make it easier for the UK governments to justify arguing for different types of military intervention, using the same old humanitarian imperialism that we (the left) would have effectively endorsed. In this case I agree it seems absolutely clear cut that the Kurds in northern Syria are more progressive, and embattled, deserving of military aid, etc etc, but in most cases it really isn’t that clear cut at all. For example a recent BBC documentary for example has convincingly laid out the argument that the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was far less clear cut than it seemed (or was presented) at the time. So to set a precedent for saying that the British government would have legitimacy in identifying the ‘good guys’ in any conflict and then make military interventions in their favour would be extremely dangerous in my opinion, it would almost certainly be manipulated by imperialist interests as has happened so many times in recent history.
Comrades
Given the foul record of the imperialists in invasions and mass murder across the world I think we can reasonably state that we should campaign to prevent the US and and its assorted lackeys from imposing any more on the world. IJust in Iraq we can list the catastrophic results of imperialist intervention ranging from the British/French carve up after the First World War to the imposition of Saddam Hussein on Iraq (a CIA man for most of his life) the Iraq/Iran War the invasions of Iraq etc. Even the garbage about ISIS in the media – it is well known that this outfit is financed and very probably has other assistance from Qatar and Saudi Arabia and has a substantial element of ex-Iraqi army and political police forces. Agree with Ian – the only possible position is to fight to get the imperialists out of the Middle East.
Turkey are preventing the reinforcement of kobane, by militarising the border to prevent pkk reinforcement. What had been liberated areas of kurdistan in northern syria, had been able to be free of assad control. Turkey is in alliance with isis in subduing kurdish independance.
Turkey did not prevent isis from bringing in arms and recruits through turkey, but it is preventing the reinforcement of kobane. Could turkey do this if western imperialism opposed this. I doubt it. So us planes are attacking isis, they say . . .
Pete, I agree Turkey’s actions are entirely cynical and it is Turkey that should be the target of calls for action. All they need to do is to allow Kurdish reinforcement from within Turkey or from Iraq via Turkey. Actually calling for arming of the Kurds is problematic as they are not (and don’t want to be) a state. American or Turkish intervention needs UN support or it would undermine international law. Turkey fears the secular democratic Kurds more than the Islamists as the Kurds have some political power in Turkey.
Well, well, John P says how important it is for LU to ditch “neat, over-simplistic, sloganized analysis” but, yet again, comes his oft-repeated depiction of IS as ‘clerico-fascist’.
The jargonised and War on Terror vocabulary used by the mainstream media to demonise IS, combined with Cameron’s banning order on 40 websites, means we cannot get our information on what is really going on from any souce apart from the ones that fee dinto the mainstream media or think ourselves out of the assumptions behind claims of ‘humanitarian war’, the most Orwellian bit of Newspeak to come out of the west since ‘collateral damage’. JohnP seems to be arguing that we don’t need to or shouldn’t try to theorise imperialism in its most contentious zone – the Middle East – for fear of placing oursleves beyond the comfort zone of the left-leaning working class.
Where would that have led Marx, grappling with Ireland, Poland and India in his day, while the patriotic English working class followed the government line? He didn’t bow to the manipulation of consent; why should we?
The point is what should we advocate that the Kurds in Kobane do right now? If a Kurdish fighter in Kobane saw an imperialist fighter jet in the sky, out to bomb ISIS positions what should s/he do? Aim his/her gun at the jet in order to shoot it out of the sky? Of course not! Western imperialism is just as much the enemy of the Syrian Kurds as ISIS, but at the moment at least as far as the Kurds in Kobane are concerned western imperialism is not out to physically liquidate them whereas ISIS is. Clearly ISIS exists as a response albeit a reactionary one to western and especially US imperialist domination of the Middle East, without that domination it would not exist. Therefore within the Middle East the struggles against imperialism, against zionism, and against the reactionary religious fundamentalisms that give rise to formations such as ISIS are intertwined. But whilst this is true at the level of generalities for the Kurds in Kobane ISIS is their main enemy at this point in time.
“If a Kurdish fighter in Kobane saw an imperialist fighter jet in the sky, out to bomb ISIS positions what should s/he do? Aim his/her gun at the jet in order to shoot it out of the sky?”
This is a straw man. It would be crazy for anyone to advocate such a course of action on anyone even if they were involved in a fire-fight with the Western powers directly. I take it for granted that they would know much more about the tactics needed for their struggle than I would. Those in that situation should do whatever they need to defend themselves against whoever threatens them.
The question rather is: should we in the West fail to advocate that our ruling class be defeated by whatever indigenous force it attacks in dependent areas of the world like Iraq, Syria, or the territory of this new Islamic State polity? Or should we go soft on our ruling class on the ground that ‘this time’ they are acting in the interests of the oppressed in some way?
The latter is a well-worn path, to be avoided at all costs.
JP
This whole situation is so complex and I am still thinking through the tangle of issues but on the face of it your amendment seems OK. I think you might need a clearer more decisive seconder though!! I certainly think your points need to be discussed.
Thanks Ray. From recent online discussions with many LU members over the weekend it looks like I will get a seconder, and other speakers in support too.
It looks likely that to secure support for the amendment I will have to delete all references to the “fascist” nature of IS. This is fine, as I don’t want to get bogged down in debating the exact political terminology to describe the nature of IS, other than recognising it as a totally reactionary, mass murdering, women enslaving, bunch of theocratic dictatorship lovers . At a time when the hard pressed Kurdish fighters deserve real solidarity action from internationalist socialists -in LU publicly backing their absolute right of self defence – and their consequent absolute right tactically to secure weapons and air support from whatever powers they see fit in these desperate times.
http://en.firatajans.com/news/news/european-left-going-to-kobane-border.htm
Party of European Left, including Syriza, apparently sending a delegation to the border area.