[September, 2001]
Watching the remarkable events of last Tuesday unfold on television, it was difficult not to be gripped by the feeling that what one was watching was not in fact real. Perhaps this explains the difficulty that the left had in coming up with a balanced and adequate assessment of what had actually happened. Now that the dust, in more senses than one, begins to settle, it is both possible and important to begin to take stock of events and how they have been interpreted.
First of all, it is necessary to ask the question as to why Tuesday’s events had such a profound and transfixing effect on so many people around the world: not in my lifetime at least can I recall a single series of events monopolising the international media like this. Clearly, the scale of the material destruction, and the manner in which it was brought about, could not have been more dramatic; moreover, the sequence of events was televised live, and then repeated on peak time television ad nauseum. Simple voyeurism surely played a role here. In addition, the particular targets of the attack—the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, one of the best known and most easily recognised buildings in the world, and the Pentagon itself, the seat of the United States war machine—themselves guaranteed maximum exposure and interest.
But these facts alone do not explain the way in which the events of last Tuesday gripped the world’s attention. No: two other factors have to be considered, the one political, the other humanitarian.
Politically, the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon has been interpreted and largely accepted as an attack on ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, that is to say, an attack on the fundamental values that underlie all that is good and worthy in western societies. The United States is presented, and presents itself, as a champion of such values, as a champion of all that is good in the world against all that is bad, in such a way that an attack on core United States institutions is understood as an attack on all freedom-loving, tolerant and forward-looking people.
This interpretation is, of course, tommyrot. Underlying it is a hefty dose of good old-fashioned racist imperial ideology—the conception of the civilising influence of the west on the backward and unenlightened peoples of the rest of the world. Socialists can have nothing to do with this, the justification for countless wars, untrammelled colonisation, slavery and the almost unimaginable suffering inflicted on peoples of a different colour skin. Moreover, the United States’ claim to be in the vanguard of the fight for liberty and democracy itself rings rather hollow if the rhetoric is compared with the reality of life in the United States, a country, let us remember, in which, in the recent presidential elections, aside from the fact that the vote itself was openly rigged, four million adults—two per cent of potential voters but fifteen per cent of African-American adult males—were disenfranchised due to the loss of their civil rights as a result of felony convictions; in which African-American men, who make up only seven per cent of the adult population account for fifty-five per cent of prison admissions; in which the mentally ill and children are routinely judicially murdered. Socialists, least of anybody, forget this at their peril.
Yet the empty rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and the racist ideology of civilising imperialism have had such a captivating effect that in good part the phenomenal international resonance of Tuesday’s events can be explained by the fact that the targets of the attack were Washington and New York, rather than Madrid, Bombay, Beijing, Johannesburg or Rio de Janeiro. The false assumptions that lie behind all this need to be challenged more effectively than they have been up till now.
Of course, additional to the pivotal symbolic role that the United States plays in the self-justification and self-preservation of western bourgeois democracy, also critical in explaining the impact of Tuesday’s events across the world was their humanitarian aspect: crudely put, what has appalled people is the body count.
Again, socialists have to resist being pulled on board this bandwagon. Although at the time of writing the number of dead is still unknown, estimates seem to be settling around a figure of 5,000. We need to be brutally honest here: how important is this really? Five thousand dead people in a single series of events is a tragedy—to say otherwise would be to distort the very meanings of words—but on the scale of things it is not a terribly big tragedy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is not. Nor the carpet-bombing of South Vietnam or Cambodia. Nor is it the road to Basra. Nor Rwanda. (And let us not forget that, coincidentally, 11 September was the anniversary of another event in which we saw buildings blow up: the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile, in which thirty thousand people ‘disappeared’ in the very first few days.) In human terms, tragic though it was, what happened on Tuesday does not compare with these events. It does not even come close. Of course, the victims of these other tragedies—the yellow-skinned Japanese and Vietnamese, the swarthy Iraqis, the black-skinned Africans—had already been blessed with a prior demonisation as the bulk (although not all) of the citizens of the USA have not. Another whiff of civilising imperialism with its undertones of uber- and untermenschen competes with the smell of smoke in our nostrils. It is incumbent on socialists to make comparisons such as these; to begin to blow away these webs of hypocrisy.
But there is an even more serious catalogue of human suffering and tragedy with which what happened on Tuesday needs to be compared. For we live in a world, as the World Bank and the United Nations themselves inform us (and the World Bank and the United Nations have no interest in over-inflating the figures), in which in 1999 ten million (ten million!) children under the age of five died of preventable diseases, that is to say, of institutionalised poverty. (The five principle causes of preventable infant mortality being, according to the United Nations, ‘pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, malaria and malnutrition’.) In which an estimated 174 million under-five children in the so-called developing world are malnourished, and 230 million are what the UN starkly and shockingly calls ‘stunted’ as a result of a simple lack of food. In which over 800 million people still cannot meet basic needs for energy and protein. When socialists speak of ‘socialism and barbarism’, they often forget to point out that ‘barbarism’ is not the armageddon of tomorrow but the cruel daily reality of hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings. Yet this state of affairs is not just tolerated by the leaders of those states that are today lining up to inveigh themselves against the ‘barbarism’ of Islamic terrorism: they organise it, protect it, and deepen it. For these people, the effective annual cull of hundreds of millions of (largely non-white) people through systematically organised and institutionalised poverty and famine is OK. (When were the three minutes silence for these unsung victims of the barbarity of global capitalism?) What price therefore the tears that these leaders shed for the victims of last Tuesday?
None of this is to say of course that the five thousand or however many it turns out to be that died last Tuesday do not matter. There is no sin in being shocked and saddened by this human destruction—in the main of ordinary working people (although we do have to point out that a northern American life carries no more weight, feels no more pain, than an African or an Iraqi one). This is not the problem. The problem is that by falling in line behind Bush and Powell, behind Blair and (Lord!) Robertson and their crocodile tears for the victims a good part of the left have placed themselves in the same fake humanitarian camp of these people against those who carried out the attack. Is this really the side that we want to be on? Do we line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the apologists of imperialism against the oppressed of this world until the latter find methods of struggle that we western socialists with our Saturday morning paper sales in our colleges and shopping malls find more palatable to our more cultured and civilised tastes?
Neither can we allow ourselves to be blinded by the fact that there is a good chance that the attacks were carried out by those who are casually defined as ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ (and of course often defined this way by ‘Christian fundamentalists’). The ideology of the oppressed can take—has taken—many strange forms in the past. To abstain from a real critique of what has actually happened on the grounds that we do not like the political ideas of the perpetrators smacks of churlishness. If the attack turns out to have been committed by socialist revolutionaries would we change our oh-so humanitarian opinions? The attack on Islam visible in many of the commentaries of the left is nothing more than a smokescreen, an alibi for chauvinism. Of course, that so many of the oppressed of this world—in the Middle East and elsewhere—take their cue from radical forms of Islam rather than from socialism is a cause for deep concern for socialists; but in very good part the fact that this is the case is a consequence of the way in which socialism has let these people down, of the way in which socialism has discredited itself in the eyes of these people as an effective tool for their liberation. It is difficult to imagine that lining up with the spokespersons of imperialism will place in a good position to win a new hearing for our ideas among these people.
In case anyone suggests that I am overstating my case, let me now quote from the statement from the self-avowed revolutionary socialists of Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (admittedly the very worst example of the kind of thing I am talking about), on Tuesday’s events:
To use civilian planes, full of people, to attack buildings full of civilians, mostly ordinary workers, is a crime against humanity, whatever the supposed aims. What cause could the hijackers have been serving when they massacre thousands of workers in New York? Only on the basis of a dehumanised, backward-looking world-view could they have planned and carried out such a massacre. Such people are enemies for the working class and the labour movement as much as the US government is. In fact, more so. [...] We have no solidarity with Islamic fundamentalists, Palestinian or otherwise, who might carry out attacks like the one in New York [...] We must create social structures which nurture solidarity, democracy and equality [...].
And so on. The hijackers of last Tuesday a greater danger for the working class than the US government? Really? This racist (‘dehumanised, backward-looking’) rubbish is something that socialists can have nothing to do with.
What are the practical consequences of all this? Since there is likely to be a war—and remember that in the last day or so there has been open talk of the use of nuclear weapons—it is clear what the duty of socialists is to be. We have to say with the utmost clarity that the United States, that Nato, have absolutely no right whatsoever to take action to avenge this attack, to seek justice for this attack, to bring people to book for this attack. We can have absolutely no confidence whatsoever in these people to play a progressive role in the world in relation to this event as with any other. (It is for this reason incidentally that debate on who was really responsible for Tuesday’s events is not really our priority: that bin Laden was singled out as prime suspect number one just hours after the attack should be sufficient evidence that the ‘police-work’ element of the response of the United States is itself nothing more than a false alibi, a put-up job. But our priority is to hinder the room for manoeuvre of the ‘policeman’, not help him catch the ‘criminal’).
The next task for socialists is clear. An anti-war movement needs to be built. And this movement needs to be founded on the understanding that the biggest enemy to peace, the greatest enemy of justice, is not a man who lives in a tent in Afghanistan but the imperialist monster that counts its money in New York and plans its military operations in Washington. (That at least we held in common with last Tuesday’s ‘terrorists’.) And since this is the burningly necessary task for us in the present, I politely suggest that we move the discussion on to this very point.