Back issues

No 1452 4th September 2014

Western “horror” over Islamic violence in Middle East is a gigantic posturing hypocrisy and diversion by a crisis wracked capitalism which has imposed far worse destruction and atrocities on the entire region for decades, continues to do so and is escalating its world warmongering blitzkrieging everywhere to escape its crisis collapse (due to resume its catastrophic financial meltdown at any moment). The real Western panic is that the manipulated insurgencies being used to contain the growing mass revolt against imperialism and destroy “rogue” states are themselves merging into the revolution against imperialism – turning the training and arms they have been given into a new level of sophisticated fight back. They are not Marxism which alone is a solution but not reaction either.

Capitalism’s warmongering skulduggery in the Middle East continues to pile up more and more unanswerable questions – unanswerable that is without a world revolutionary perspective and grasp of the intractable capitalist crisis now imminently ready to break into financial disaster once more.

Why is Washington-led imperialism now bombing in Iraq the very jihadist insurgency it has previously armed, trained and backed with a carefully orchestrated media deluge about bogus “people’s struggle” in Syria and Libya?

Or conversely, why is it not bombing more of it, (instead of only a few IS patrols and only around the Kurdish areas) if the Islamic State is such a “barbaric” threat to the world “worse than al-Qaeda” as David Cameron’s latest hysterical pronouncements declare?

But then why did the West support and even encourage and develop its ruthless violence in the first place, and still does, indirectly, in Syria, along with half a dozen other groups waging bloody civil war?

Why is it stirring up such a panic about Western recruits joining the Islamists when only yesterday these same groups were allegedly ‘freedom fighters’ against the allegedly equally “monstrous dictatorship” of Bashar Assad in Syria?

Why are those young recruits so attracted anyway, and in such numbers, to the Islamic State and its terrorising ruthlessness?

Etc,etc,etc.

Because for all its sectarian emergence in the CIA/Mossad provoked Syrian conflict, it has been spawned by an incipient revolutionary drive against capitalist domination, is surely the answer, constantly threatening the “blowback” which imperialism fears will turn to much more conscious and coherent anti-imperialism (and beyond that to the proletarian revolution the anti-Western hatred will eventually certainly be driven to develop into, by objective capitalist catastrophe and Slump-war).

Lurid propaganda over the “barbaric inhumanity” of movements like ISIS, and the many other “terrorist” rebellions from Boka Haram in Nigeria to Somalia’s Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda in the Yemen, which are now gathering pace everywhere, will not do anything either except underline the cynicism, hypocrisy and double dealing of capitalism, further building the hatred against it.

Again, just the opposite. Of course prisoner massacres and slaughter of non-Islam or non-Sunni communities are human tragedies, bloody and appalling, and not always targeting the real capitalist source of oppression and degeneracy in the world.

But firstly in what way do they differ from capitalism’s routine oppression and worldwide atrocities for “disciplining” billions of exploited masses, from the very beginnings of European colonialist expansionism wiping out entire peoples with casual brutality to take their lands and subjugate and enslave them; continuing into World War One and, since World War Two, with over 400 coups, fascist dictatorships, invasions, major wars, large-scale butchery (Indonesia’s 1965 anti-communism alone gruesomely slaughtering, at a minimum estimate, over one million suspected communists including thousands fingered by CIA and British supplied kill-lists); bogus populism (Chile, Solidarnosc in Poland, China’s Tian an Men, currently Venezuela and Bolivia) turning to violence to de-stabilise and overturn socialist regimes?

And in just in what way is the alleged “primitive savagery” of the ISIS so very “evil” compared to the daily escalating war reality of life in Middle East under capitalist domination as the imperialist system “educates” (or rather re-educates) the entire world into accepting the most grotesque torture and slaughter during a decade-long, “shock and awe” build-up to oncoming world war (the ultimate ruling class “escape plan” to get out of the unavoidable Slump disaster caused alone by capitalism’s endless profiteering)?

Or anywhere else in the Third World and into east Europe too?

Why is a videoed beheading of a US journalist to be singled out for especially sanctimonious condemnation all around by imperialism’s leaders (and echoed by the entire liberal petty bourgeoisie) when the capitalist world exploitation system that this very same ruling class controls, has been rampaging through the world with far worse atrocities than this for the last twenty years of blitzkrieg and invasion on Serbia, Afghanistan and the Middle East, bombarding, and torturing and massacring ever since on a scale the Islamic State does not come near?

Do Obama (and Cameron) make special remarks about the endless atrocities by Western soldiers and “security” mercenaries, singling them out for horrified special speeches?

Terror drones are used constantly now for “taking out”, with high explosive bombs, alleged “insurgent terrorists” (meaning any desperate attempt to fight back by the exploited masses against Western tyranny), frequently killed along with whole groups of any innocents who happen to be around, families and neighbours gruesomely ripped into body part fragments by Hellfire missiles.

Does Obama denounce this?

No, he signs off weekly on the death warrants that sanction this world remote-control terrorising (with no judicial oversight).

Currently circulating on the Internet (and suppressed by the “tasteful” Western media), is a heart-wrenching and horrifying picture of a small child’s body in Palestine, sliced into top and bottom halves through her torso by the shrapnel shards from one of the hundreds of F16 Nazi-Zionist bombing runs deliberately targeting schools, housing, hospitals, infrastructure and streets in Gaza in the latest eruption of their non-stop genocidal tyrannising of the Arab population from whom they stole most of an entire country in 1947-8 and now are continuing to slowly and cynically seize the remainder of.

She is only one of multitudes of hapless innocents, already living desperately besieged and effectively concentration camp lives in Gaza, now butchered and blasted apart by imperialism’s Middle East attack dogs in Tel Aviv.

Another 2000 men, women and children have been horrifically blown to pieces from a population of 1.8 million Gazans, all deliberately and systematically targeted by the most deadly and inhuman weaponry and equipment for the last month and a half, not to mention tens of thousands more injured, crippled, disfigured and bereaved, terrified and psychologically scarred, with every kind of horrifying weapon being used on them such as the anti-personnel “flechette” bombs, full of hardened steel arrows which fly in all directions to cause maximum injury.

Suicide bombs do not come near such levels of arbitrary indiscriminate killing.

Did Obama make a special speech to condemn the “primitive colonialism” and unacceptable barbarity of “Israel” the false “state” which occupies Palestine, denouncing its white-phosphorus war-crime ethnic cleansing?

Obama did not – he sent more ammunition to keep the industrial scale genocidal terror going.

In Ukraine similar numbers are being slaughtered in the working class towns of the east, under attack by a completely illicit government in Kiev installed by a violent Swastika toting coup, using fascist baseball-bat and gun intimidation, backed, advised and funded by Western imperialism.

This illegal Ukraine army and its freelance Nazi thug death-gangs, have been ramping up atrocities and brutality on all the areas that have resisted this Western inspired and provoked coup, with indiscriminate bombing of civilian city centres and the foulest of siege starvation blockades on several major cities, with nary a word about the “barbarism” of these new overt Hitler-worshipers.

Not only has Obama said nothing about this, he calmly watches the humanitarian disaster this bloody siege has created threatening thousands, and supports the Kiev Nazis in blocking a vitally-needed aid convoy from Russia, while the Western media has pumped up every ludicrous Goebbels lie from Kiev, turning this aggression on its head and blaming it on alleged “Russian invasion” etc,. So far gone is the Goebbels lie propaganda in the world now.

But it was the fascist Kiev egg of the slickly organised and utterly bogus “Orange revolution” which came before the separatist resistance chicken, and any support Russian has given it.

Of course the rebellions which have tried to fight against the world oppression are turning out ruthless and violent themselves.

The mainly local young recruits into the movements in the Middle East have spent their entire lives knowing nothing but endless warfare and massacres, the bloodiest and most gruesome of sectarian death-squad slaughter (promulgated and trained by US covert specialists from similar horrors in Latin America), street massacres and car bombs, deprivation and alienation, ruined cities, refugee lives and the slow poisoning of depleted uranium residues, sanitation befouled by devastated drainage and water infrastructure and daily deprivation.

Iraq alone has suffered a ten-year grinding-slaughter trench war against Iran in the 1980s, instigated by the US pushing CIA stooge Saddam Hussein to target the new Ayatollahocracy in Iran in revenge for humiliating the US: a devastating US and allied blitzing in the first Gulf war when Saddam tried to claim Kuwait as a ‘reward’ for the Iran war, and got ‘disciplined’; ten years of savage subsequent sanctions siege, along with regular bombing runs, which together caused endless suffering, including the deaths of half million children and many adults; the barbarous bombing and massacring in the Iraq war and occupation immediately afterwards, including US white-phosphorus massacres in Fallujah; the deliberately inflamed sectarian death squad war of 2005-7 (trained by US “advisers” in the most depraved methods); and non-stop oppressive occupation until the disastrous US stooge Maliki was installed to impose a new corrupt dictatorship along Saddam lines.

The constant occupation war in Afghanistan, has continued the oppression and revealed new levels of torture and prisoner abuse; Somalia has suffered decades of blasted ruin agony, Libya is a wrecked and ruined mess of anarchic semi-warlordism still reeling from the NATO blitzkrieg which reduced a prosperous and relatively content civilised country to a hellhole.

The West now turns round and declares there to be a “new source of barbarism and evil in the world”!!!!!!!

And this hypocrisy is doubled and trebled by the fact that is Washington and its primitive backward feudal stooges in the Gulf which have fostered, encouraged and provoked the “jihadists” anyway, with non-stop arms, vast sums of money and covert training, mobilising the lapdog media into a demented campaign of support with hurricane levels of Goebbels unverified “atrocity” stories against Assad and black propaganda stunts (including the “Syria used poison gas” lies to parallel the “WMD” nonsense which set the Iraq war going).

It is quadrupled hypocrisy in fact since the Gulf regimes allied with the States are themselves about as primitive and backward as it is possible to be in the modern world, their grossly corrupt and indulgent feudal tribalism routinely beheading and amputating the limbs of “criminals” - including political prisoners.

But despite all that aid and help, the West now finds its plotting and skulduggery going badly wrong, because its own crisis is the overriding factor driving all history and its contradictions are driving millions into conflict that is far from being simply a Washington master-plan.

The conspiracy theorists, detecting the hand of imperialism to be in everything may not be wrong in the assumption that capitalist intrigue and subversions is constant in the world, attempting to undermine all resistance to its exploitation rule, pumping out anti-communism non-stop, and bringing down every “democratic” movement that starts to get somewhere, or even might open the door to advances for the working class and downtrodden masses, and certainly violently eliminating all revolutionary development when it can.

Of course there is non-stop subversion and intervention by the Western ruling class, and of course the intelligence agencies, police, special surveillance teams and other secret services receive billions in funds, with networks penetrating at all levels into opposition and labour movements throughout the world.

But they miss the point entirely that such intriguing and plotting by the ruling class goes wrong and the more badly so as its catastrophic crisis deepens, the tearing contradictions of the epochal failure of its system forcing the most unexpected transformations.

Events now unfolding at a dizzying pace of destructive turmoil, and apparent confusion, are not some sinisterly clever manipulation and backroom plotting by Machiavellian puppet masters sitting in Washington and other capitals and just moving helpless international chess pieces around to extend their already overwhelming power, as most of the “lefts” imply with their shallow “its all about oil” and “CIA runs everything” theories, or whatever else is the latest shallow-brained nonsense the fake-“left is punting to avoid talking about revolution. It is the very opposite, the weakness and panic of a system on the edge of an epochal disintegration and failure.

These chops and changes in Western policy, now allying with what was yesterday supposed to be the “world’s greatest threat”, be it Iran (supposedly the number one enemy for thirty years), or even now potentially Assad himself (another “dictator” of a “rogue state”) against an even more “demonic barbarism” which literally only yesterday was “fighting for freedom”, are proof of the point.

The real story of the West’s astonishing and brutal tacking to and fro in the Middle East, one minute arming and funding ruthless “jihadists” to terrorise and destroy most of Syria, and the next bombing and blitzing the very same fighters as they “blowback” against imperialism and tear apart the century old World War One imperialist carve-up of the Ottoman Empire, is surely panicked indecision.

Use of the insurgencies to try and topple the anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist stubbornness which the bourgeois nationalist Syria regime has long been obliged to adopt, in order to keep its own masses pacified, was always a desperate and fraught exercise.

Experience from bolstering the Islamists in Afghanistan, tapping their rural backwardness to recruit them to try and topple the 1980s socialist government in Kabul, and entrap the Moscow support it was getting into becoming a “Soviet Vietnam”, already made Washington fearful of “blowback”, and especially after the unexpectedly devastating effect of the al-Qaeda 9/11 attack.

This same insurgency has turned into its opposite as a dogged 12 year national resistance to the 2002 US occupation showed, and spreading widely particularly into crucial Western stooge Pakistan, enough to make the West think twice about trying the same trick again.

The eruptions of the capitalist crisis are overriding everything.

Washington, already facing an ever spreading forest fire of Third World revolt and insurgency to its “blitz the world into submission” plans, and seeing the recruitment to this “terrorist” rebellion increased by every brutal measure it takes to try and suppress it, faced an even more profound shock when the Egyptian “Arab Spring” erupted in 2011.

This gigantic spontaneous upheaval, induced by the unrolling capitalist financial crash and its Pentagon “endless war” world oppression, was on a new scale, threatening to topple, by overwhelming popular mass revolt, the main regime in the Middle East, with a huge population far bigger than any other (80+million) and a long history of anti-imperialist sentiment.

Its new level of popular rebellion, beyond continuing “terrorism” and “insurgency”, pole-axed Washington with its potential to disrupt imperialism’s entire control of the Middle East and indicated a qualitative change in the world rebellion against imperialism.

Desperate measures have followed to contain this potentially devastating revolutionary upheaval, eventually managing to oust the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist but reformist anti-imperialist Morsi presidency which imperialism had been forced to concede to by the events.

The General Sisi military coup now has a tenuous grasp again, at the cost of overtly demonstrating the utter barbarity of its Washington funded dictatorship with street slaughter of thousands and a grotesque judicial repression that would be laughable if not so deadly.

But it sits on a powder keg of stirred up anti-westernism and anti-Zionism.

It is the stunned fear of the ruling class over Egypt which have now led to the eruptions in Iraq, and the new level of well- organised,funded and disciplined insurgency threatening to develop very fast towards a major anti-imperialist threat.

Of course these were set going by skulduggery and intrigue including the nazi-NATO war on Libya and the utter mayhem induced in Syria, to turn it into a scorched earth nightmare, both aimed at suppressing and containing any potential of the Arab Spring to infect the entire Middle East.

Long laid but speculative and unfinished plans to stir up stooge revolts against the anti-imperialists Gaddafi and Assad were hastily set in train, –their reactionary nature hidden behind the pretence they were “more Arab Spring”.

But these bogus affairs – which unlike the huge spontaneous Cairo revolt against an imperialist stooge dictatorship of Mubarak, were against anti- imperialists, – were desperate measures as the laughably thin racist-reactionary monarchist ‘revolt’ in Benghazi demonstrated by petering out almost immediately, requiring the massive NATO blitzing to sustain the pretence and destroy Gaddafi, and as Syria is now showing too.

That did not stop the Trotskyist swamp hailing the obvious counter revolutions early on, as an allegedly “popular peoples movement”, many so far gone in their anti-communism (now displaced and projected onto virtually any anti-imperialism – denounced as “totalitarian dictatorships”) that they swallow almost any shallow alleged “street movement” as “the revolution”.

More vigorous forces, based around Sunni sectarianism were tapped by the initial stunted-up demonstrations in Syria (again swallowed hook, line and sinker by the anti-communist Trotskyists) but are now backfiring badly.

The West was already nervous about what it had set going, trying within months to distance itself from the more extreme movements in the Free Syrian Army and set up yet another quisling leadership umbrella body.

Hence from being used as a tool of imperialism to further its warmongering destruction of “rogue states” like Syria, the “jihadists” have transformed into a highly organised rebelliousness that is tearing to shreds the boundaries and divisions imposed 100 years ago by imperialism.

Some sections of the ruling class are already fearful of the results with Pentagon and British generals calling for the all-out bombing of the ISIS forces, as the bourgeois press reports:

An influential retired US general has called on Barack Obama to order the destruction the militant group responsible for murdering American journalist James Foley amid conflicting views in the administration on how to respond to the atrocity.

As Obama’s foreign policy team debates expanding its renewed air war in Iraq after the killing of Foley by the Islamic State (Isis), John Allen, a retired marine general who commanded the Afghanistan war from 2011 to 2013, urged Obama to “move quickly to pressure its entire ‘nervous system’, break it up, and destroy its pieces.”

Allen’s argument, presented in an op-ed for the DefenseOne website, echoes remarks by secretary of state John Kerry and comes amid internal dispute in the Obama administration over the future course of its two-week air war in Iraq. Much diplomatic effort is said to be spent broadening and hardening a region-wide effort against Isis, something Allen endorsed, with Turkey and Qatar being a particular near-term focus for Kerry.

The debate is said to be fluid. At present, a US official anticipated more continuity than change in future military operations against Isis, but said: “It may ultimately evolve.”

On Wednesday, six new airstrikes continued to hit Isis positions near the Mosul Dam,

For the moment however it looks as if yet Washington still hopes to manipulate the insurgents, by continuing to back their destructive rampaging in Syria (indirectly, by backing other Islamists from where the weaponry can leak though) – and the limited US airstrikes against it in Iraq have more the character of a warning shot to try and contain the Islamic State advances in Iraq from going too far towards threatening Baghdad’s US stooge regime or the oil-rich northern Kurdish areas.

But all this is a highly fraught strategy to continue the Middle East mayhem (part of imperialist warmongering crisis plans) and try to fragment any further revolt. It will almost certainly badly backfire even more on imperialism in some form – and already exposes even more sharply its raging duplicity and cynicism.

This is all the desperation of a ruling class which does not know which way to turn as its crisis relentlessly drags it towards the abyss and the devastating Slump collapse of 2008 teeters on the edge of even greater world credit meltdown catastrophe.

Even the bourgeois press is now panicking about another Crash as the Stock Markets bubble even more frenziedly than in 1929.

The fake-“left” too is at six and sevens over all this meanwhile because in both Trotskyist and revisionist forms they fail to appreciate the significance of the complete destructive revolutionary turmoil erupting which is threatening to tear apart all the fabric of capitalism colonialist domination and rule in the Middle East.

For all their posing and preening about ‘revolution’ when it actually comes to it, the “lefts” universally stand on the wrong side.

Their shallow impressionism and failure to see the underlying revolutionary crisis nature of the Muslim ideology (for all its shortcomings) has been aiding imperialist confusion.

In Egypt for example the brutal fascism Sisi government was helped into place by riding the back of a western stunted -up middle-class populism pretending to be a development of the 2011 Arab Spring but in reality completely different in class character.

This counter-revolution took advantage of petty bourgeois democracy illusions and western anti-Muslim demonisation aided by anarchist and fake-“left” inability to carry through, and hostility to, any Marxist philosophical understanding of the realities of the growing Third World struggle and its current expression very often in jihadist and “terrorist” form.

The “lefts” only tail-end capitalism, with denunciations of “jihadists” as “reactionary Islam” or simply as “backward scum” as they have been doing ever since the 9/11 attacks, condemning “terrorism” and leaving themselves effectively capitulating to the West’s “war on terror”, with all their “no to war” protest thereby rendered useless.

They punt out the same shallow idealist theories that capitalism offers about “ideological brainwashing” as if an enormous eruption of the most relentless fighting, often at great self-sacrificing cost, is to be explained away as the result of a few Svengali figures mysteriously “stirring up trouble”.

This is the eternal blame target of ruling class’s throughout history to explain revolts and rebellions, a purely idealist notion, built around the ruling class conceit that the world it as it is because of the genius of a few humans (themselves naturally) who push world historical and technological developments by sheer willpower (and are therefor “entitled“ to take as a reward all the wealth produced by the exploitation of others).

They cannot understand or see the great class movements as an objective reality of complex contradictions and unfolding material events, which are reflected in humanity’s consciousness (where the true genius lies in articulating and understanding the objective necessities – as Lenin did for example).

So rebellion against the crisis? It would go away if only a few “troublemaker preachers” were eliminated.

The fake-“lefts” suffer from exactly the same idealism in a petty bourgeois form and their denouncing of “jihadism” shows it, suggesting it is something different to the class struggle in the world, produced solely by Islamic “ideas”.

They separate off these movements as produced by some “other” ideology with no explanation of its basis in the objective world, reflecting (inadequately it may be) the growing mass necessity to fight the crisis and capitalism’s historic disaster.

Some of the “lefts” tangle themselves in ever more elaborate conspiracy theories declaring the jihadists everywhere to be “run by the CIA” or Mossad, part of some extraordinary complex and detailed plan of capitalism to foster gigantic revolutionary upheavals against itself, for some reason wanting to make life massively more difficult for its Third World domination seemingly.

This contemptuous nonsense, with its racist undertones writing off the Third World peoples as either incapable of originating such fights, or as total dupes, gets some of the fake- “lefts” off the hook of condemning the Third World struggles directly, by pretending they are opposing “Western agencies” instead of rebels.

But they still get tied in knots of contradictions.

Either way, none can explain why sometimes they too support Islamist “terrorists” as they do in Palestine for example (because they dare not ride against overwhelming world sympathy for the Gazans), backing the Hamas struggle, or as the Stalinist Lalkarites do supporting Iran and the Hezbollah, fighting against the IS and other Islamists on the side of Assad.

Total posturing confusion reigns in other words.

What they are all afraid of is the very destructiveness and violence now being manifest in the Middle East, Nigeria, Somalia, Egypt’s Sinai desert area, and more. In various ways they “condemn” all of it.

But destruction of the old order is precisely what revolution means, smashing the bourgeois control and ruling structures and state forces, the only way its tyrannical class rule will be ended and socialism can be built.

The “left” assorted denunciations reflect their essential petty bourgeois reformist souls which fear such upheaval and want only to see slow steady change, in which their own middle class existence continues unruffled while some “improvements” are achieved.

Of course these insurgencies are not Marxist movements and their methods are not those of Marxism, nor their solutions, far from it.

Their sectarian fighting and barmy religious ideas are a long way from a scientific socialist revolutionary view which alone can sort out the catastrophe that capitalism has brought on the world.

But they are the reality of a massively rising and spreading struggle which for all its flaws, bizarre ideological limitations and sectarian confusion, is rejecting all the old domination and control imposed by capitalism.

It is their ruthless fighting efficiency and deliberate terror-inducing methods which have increased the appeal to great numbers of alienated and despairing youths throughout the capitalist world and certainly to the local population in the Middle East, because they are seen as striking blows against increasingly barbarous imperialism.

No amount of Tory state “thought control” measures to “stamp out extremists and radicalising clerics” are going to prevent the attraction of movements like Islamic State in Iraq to some rebellious and discontented youth in Britain or anywhere else.

Such clamp downs can only underline the repressive and dictatorial nature of capitalist domination, and the fascist brainwashing reality of the “Western values” which are to be forcibly inculcated in schools and communities allegedly, increasing their hostility.

It will add to the growing hatred everywhere of the “Western values” repression, torture, war, slump poverty, and alienation which as already recruited tens of thousands in the Third World into these various insurgencies and anti-Western movements, precisely because they are so destructive of past “civilisation” control and tyrannising rule by arrogant Western colonialist exploitation, now dragging the entire world towards a Third World war to escape its Slump crisis.

But the only way out of such turmoil is a world revolution focussed on ending capitalism itself, made conscious by a Leninist leadership struggle.

Build Leninism

Don Hoskins

Back to the top